A Compassion for Control
Compassion is a rhetorical container. Its irrefutable hypothesis is the perfect vehicle for monotonic growth in bureaucratic programs, especially in government.
Barry Goldwater framed it as follows in his book, The Conscience of a Conservative:
“”Have you no sense of social obligation? The Liberals ask. Have you no concern for people who are out of work? For sick people who lack medical care? For children in overcrowded schools? Are you unmoved by the problems of the aged and disabled? Are you against human welfare?”
In essence, have you no compassion? What kind of evil monster are you?
The subjective view of any decent person is obviously not to be opposed to improving human welfare.
There are three lazy assumptions that derive from the persistence of these social problems: our elites are smart enough to fix them, we have to do something, and government agencies are the only logical respondents.
Don’t just stand there. Do something.
This syllogism can be boiled down to the following sequence: a) generally, there exists human suffering, b) specifically, some government agencies led by members of the Western elite have reduced some suffering in the past, and, so, c) generalizing, therefore, we can eliminate human suffering with massive elite-driven government intervention.
The problem with this sophistry is that it doesn’t ask the right questions.
Is bureaucratic action the best way to alleviate human agony, at scale? What is the cost of government intercession compared to the alternatives? Does the funding of this activity reduce overall welfare by taking resources away from more productive uses? How will different actors respond to the changes in incentives these policies manifest? How confident can we be in the predictions we make given the complexity of the system?
If we were starting with a fresh sheet of paper, in the absence of existing policy, what would we do, cognizant of all the other challenges we face?
Compassion permits no acknowledgement of tradeoffs.
It is as if we can just assume a supply of goods and services that is inelastic to shifts in policy. The advocate for more activity lives in a partial equilibrium world, having assumed away the complexity of modern life. She is an expert who sells certainty. The only assurance we have is that she will be gone by the time we know the full effect of her policy recommendations.
There is a deeper problem with the compassion argument, still.
Bureaucracies deal with the quantifiable. They put in place systems. They expend funds. They deliver programs. They collect data. They generate reports.
All of which means the individual is reduced to a number.
When Goldwater is asked “Are you against human welfare?,” his interlocutors, in advocating for something, anything, must reduce the dimension of that term to what can be measured. It is a cliché of Robert McNamara proportions to say that what gets measured can be managed.
Just as Boy Wonder failed so dismally in ignoring qualitative factors and complexity during the Vietnam War, so does our quantification of welfare because it reduces the individual to their patterns of consumption.
How much medical treatment does the individual receive in a year? How much do we spend on education? How much income do those who do not work have available to them to spend on goods and services? How much money have we spent on the aged and the disabled?
Wouldn’t it be better to ask, have we improved the quality of education our children receive? Are we healthier and happier? Have we increased the conditions of the aged and the disabled?
Shouldn’t we focus on outcomes, however difficult they are to assess?
Not only do we fail to understand different scenarios qualitatively, we ignore an entire dimension of what it means to be human. There is no spiritual property in this calculus, no sense of the meaning policy creates or destroys in the lives of men.
Mike Shellenberger, independent writer and erstwhile California gubernatorial candidate, tells us:
“California spends more on homelessness than any other state and has the worst outcomes in all of America. The number of homeless has increased 31% since 2010 as the number of homeless in the rest of the U.S. has declined 18%. The reason? Governor Gavin Newsom invited them to come here.”
In a compassionate world, nobody is to be stigmatized but the enemies of progress.
For the ultra-sympathetic, it is more important to see suffering without judgment, even as we dehumanize these victims in doing so. They are just statistics on a government chart who happen to be homeless or mentally ill or drug addicted.
“And they’re not ‘homeless encampments.’ They are open drug scenes. In 2020 and 2021 Newsom invited addicts from around the country to California to live in them. The result? Skyrocketing crime, violence, and drug overdoses. Desperate addicts break laws to support their drug habits. As a result, our cities are increasingly dangerous and unlivable.”
What could be more emblematic of the crisis of meaninglessness in the modern age than drug abuse and mental illness?
Even as we congratulate ourselves on expending massive resources (the “doing something” bit), what impact have we had on human misery?
Have we made it worse?
When will it be permissible to say that materialism is insufficient to describe the human condition?
From an administrative perspective, theory tells us that society tends to under-provide pure public goods without government participation. A pure public good is non-rivalrous (my enjoyment of the benefits of national defense in no way reduces yours) and non-exclusive (I cannot stop you from enjoying the benefits of national defense as I enjoy mine). The logic here is that if we ask a group of people to contribute to the provision of a pure public good, they will put in as a group less than the amount that would maximize the group’s overall welfare. This makes plenty of assumptions including that the overhead expenses are trivial for the government. We lose nothing, by assumption, in having government supply things.
How many of the things that government provides in the name of compassion can we say qualify as being a public good? National defense and law enforcement are the two most obvious examples of those that do.
Does a government program to give homeless drug addicts an apartment benefit anyone other than the real estate developer and his political sponsor? Do we see an overall reduction in crime? We don’t even see a drop in homelessness according to Shellenberger, for having failed to address the root cause, i.e., the drug addiction and mental health issues. Putting someone up in a one-bedroom apartment where not-in-my-backyard regulations restrict housing development for those willing to pay certainly calls into question its exclusivity.
The final point on these government programs is the dependency they create. Extensive government intervention, it is argued, makes the beneficiaries dependent on the government. The persistence of such reliance on the government, we are told, has negative implications for the individual. It weakens their character. It makes them less likely to stand on their own. They become addicted to the largesse of the Leviathan.
I would argue that there is a flipside of that coin we fail to discuss. It is control. It is not that the programs enslave the individual in a contract of indenture, though that is true. Once dependent, it can be impossible to extract oneself from such reliance. The corollary issue is that the government agency is in a position to control (or, at least, influence) the beneficiary’s decisions. The bureaucracy or their sponsors garner control over political blocs in a quid pro quo for the continued (or expanded) aid they supply. People with jobs and community who have to stand without such fealty may still make the same decisions as someone receiving benefits, but in a real sense those who are self-supporting make their own choices and those who are dependent cannot.
The expansion of the bureaucratic arm of government can reach a tipping point where it drives decision-making, having subrogated practically the dependent individual. At some point, the administrative state reigns supreme, propagating for the sake of propagating.
At some point, as they say, “resistance is futile.”
Compassion as a driving force for bureaucratic expansion develops its own accelerating momentum and explains much of the growth in the administrative state in the past fifty years. As the bureaucratic state pushes new limits, we should anticipate new, flexible interpretations of compassion that bear little resemblance to traditional viewpoints as interest groups lobby for their own agendas.
What is better when it comes to solving real problems, doing things or creating conditions? Is it ultimately more successful to assume that human nature is fluid or fixed?