Tim Kane and Glenn Hubbard warn us against this sentiment. Centralizing power so that the government (or its executive) can act with more alacrity may be one way to jumpstart the stalled economy we’re living in, but it’s also a formula for disaster—and a proximate cause for the end of the great empires and civilizations throughout history. A government that can move quickly can—and eventually will—drive us into a ditch.
The authors know a little something about government. Kane was an Air Force officer and later worked for Congress, while Hubbard was head of the Council of Economic Advisers and rumored to have been Mitt Romney’s choice for treasury secretary had Romney won the 2012 election. To be in the belly of the beast is frustrating, as I can readily attest. In my time as a congressional staffer, the one change I can point to with any pride-in-ownership was when the Senate Cafeteria began offering barbecue sauce as a condiment. But it is hard to be surrounded by well-meaning, ambitious, and confident lawmakers and staffers on both sides of the aisle and not come away a bit frightened as to what they would do if left to their own devices.
Checks and balances | Balance offers an interesting juxtaposition to Kane’s previous book, the well-regarded Bleeding Talent. That book looked critically at the U.S military’s officer class and asked whether we are fully taking advantage of its prodigious talents. To that question Kane answered an unambiguous “no”: the sclerotic bureaucracy and hidebound promotion procedures ultimately frustrate nearly everyone hoping to make a career in the military. As a result, we’re left with a promotion system that can’t assure us that we have the best people in the most important jobs. While the two books seem on the surface to be almost completely unconnected, they share a common thread: too much centralized decisionmaking can be hazardous to a country, whether it occurs in the military or in the rest of government.
Kane and Hubbard argue in Balance that a key to a long and prosperous society is the ability to survive bad leaders. No country can ensure that only the wisest people will ascend to be president, prime minister, or dear leader, so there needs to be a check on their ability to ruin things.
These checks and balances can take many forms. An independent bureaucracy, a parliament or Congress invested with real powers, and a system of local governments with the ability to make their own laws are some examples of this. Our Founding Fathers believed this in their bones and strove mightily to design a system that would invest our government with such checks. Unfortunately, we’ve been slowly unraveling it ever since.
Andrew O’Shaughnessy, in his magisterial book The Men who Lost America, argues that it was the gradual rise of parliamentary power in the 18th century at the expense of the monarchy that allowed Britain and its empire to withstand a monarch like King George III in his latter days, when he took leave of his senses. The monarchy survived only because of its diminution of powers; had it been any other way, the country might not have withstood future wars intact or a parliament irritated by his eccentricities might have bothered to depose him.
The United States doesn’t score so well on the centralized power metric of late, with both Democratic and Republican administrations doing their best to invest more power in the executive, and congressional leaders of all stripes barely paying lip service to the now-quaint notion of federalism.
Replacing democracy | While we may lament this state of affairs, some of these checks can go too far, Kane and Hubbard argue—especially the non-democratic kind. The Eunuchs in China, originally conceived to provide sage advice untainted by rent-seeking or avarice, eventually gained enough leverage to steer the government to their advantage, as did the Janissaries in Turkey. Ditto the imperial bureaucracy in England and the legislative staff in California, who do much of the heavy lifting in a legislature where term limits force neophyte legislators to assume the chairmanships of important committees. Eventually, they argue, the entitled class of government overseers in each case turned their societies away from an open, expansionary purview—the time-worn path to economic prosperity—and toward an inward-looking, restrictive orientation. Whether it involved burning all ocean-going vessels, forbidding interactions with foreigners, building a Hadrian’s Wall and pulling back the Roman Legion, or raising the state income tax over 13 percent, the retrenchment of economic activity sounded a death-knell for these empires, argue Kane and Hubbard.
Peter Orszag, soon after he left his position as head of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote a much-discussed essay lamenting the inability of the government to implement policies that he believes are appropriate and important. His solution is to do with a bit less democracy and invest more power in the unelected bureaucracy. Balance is replete with examples as to how such a maneuver would eventually end: badly.
That brings us to the one positive message of Bleeding Talent, at least in the context of Balance: for better or worse, the officer class in the United States has relatively little sway over military expenditures. While they might have welcomed the post 9/11 build-up, the two-front war in Afghanistan and Iraq was not the military’s idea and they were appropriately wary of the venture (although perhaps not wary enough). And while they fought the drastic reductions in the defense budget that came with the rescission earlier this year, their protests were for naught: the military budget had shrunk remarkably in the last four years and there has been little that the military could do to prevent it, short of fomenting another war in the Middle East. But that’s one success amidst a cacophony of failures.
It should be noted that the military’s lack of sway does have a downside: our government spends tens of billions of dollars on dubious weapons systems because they happen to be produced in the congressional district of a member of the House Armed Services Committee.
Return to federalism | If Kane and Hubbard don’t want to give the executive branch more power, how would they solve the United States’ current malaise, with our stagnant economy, overdue entitlement reforms, and a woefully outdated tax code?
Balance is by-and-large bullish on America; the authors do not see any signs that we are going down the fateful roads taken by Rome or Imperial Japan or the British Empire (although California should watch it). They would point out that none of America’s very real problems represent an existential threat, at least not at the moment. The U.S. economy is still experiencing solid productivity gains and is still bigger and more productive than any other nation’s. Our military remains far stronger than any other nation’s, even after the sequestration budget cuts.
A government where the states did more (such as financing and building their own roads, rather than waiting for the federal government to send them money and tell them what to do with it) would mean we’d need less intervention from the federal government and it could reduce its impact on the economy. The states would presumably be more responsive to local needs and more sensitive to the cost of new roads or bridges and be more judicious in how they spend that money, we would hope.
A more circumscribed federal government would ultimately be a fiscally healthier one, which would allow it to finance the military might necessary to protect American interests. While no one elected to Congress or the White House would ever willfully surrender power to any other entity, perhaps we have just enough gridlock in place for that to happen. To that the authors would offer a loud “Amen.”
