Let me say at the outset that in my view, there is no
absolute yes or no answer to the question posed in the title. I am convinced
that different societies require the sort of government that will do the best
possible job managing their affairs at the stage of development they have
attained, and the circumstances of their current situation.
What this means is that we cannot formulate a philosophical
construct that will show what an ideal government should look like to suit all
societies all the time. We simply cannot come up with a single size that will
fit all, or fit them at every moment. What we can do, however, is think up as
much as we can of the elements that will go into the construct, and discuss how
they might be used to formulate it. This will be like saying here are the
ingredients that may go into the cake but every chef will have to judge for
themselves which of them to use and by how much so as to bake the cake that
will best suit their society at the time they are asked to do the work.
The one thing we cannot escape is that economics is now the
most powerful shaper of our behavior, that it will so remain for a long time and
perhaps forever. What we must understand is that economics is not something
that is new to the modern age or that it is unique to the human species. In
fact, economics has always meant the same thing to all the species since the
formation of the first cell on this planet. It meant food security, physical
security and the right to procreate. Thus, economics is the stuff we are made
of at the level of the cell.
If the members of a species do not fight to death for a
piece of the economic pie, it is because a prior protocol would have been
established as to the pecking order that sets who has priority in many of the
things that are necessary to maintain life. Among these are the questions: Who
gets what of the available food, who occupies the highest point in the
territory, who has mating rights and so on? Working out such a protocol is called
the culture of the species; something that applies as well to bees as to human
beings. In fact, all this has been worked out and written into our genetic code
over half a billion years of organic evolution on Earth.
What happened in the past few thousand years, however, are
developments that were purely the product of the human brain for which no
workable protocol has yet been perfected. Economics still dominates our motives
but we do not have an artificial system that is as predictable as the protocols
that nature wrote into our genetic code. Thus, the most base of our instincts
have returned, and they are shaping the decisions we now take when plotting our
economic well being. Sometimes we refer to our behavior as that of dog eat dog,
but because the species do not normally eat each other, we should refer to that
behavior as cat eat mouse.
This in mind, we must recognize that any form of government
we have today is but an improvisation representing the early stages of an
experiment that may someday lead to an artificial system as useful as the one
that nature wrote into our genes. We're not there yet but while getting there,
we must remain conscious of the fact that the same brain which is trying to
formulate an artificial economic system is also changing the premise upon which
that system is to be formulated. That is, we are trying to bake a cake while
some of the ingredients are disappearing from the table, and new ones are made
to appear out of nowhere.
This is happening because the relentless progression of
science and technology is constantly changing the way that we farm the land,
manufacture the goods, deliver them and deliver the services we produce. It is
also changing the way that we communicate with each other and do our economic
exchanges. In fact, we have gone from a system of bartering the goods or the
services we produce to the creation of fiat money, a development that is at the
center of our current economic debate.
This is happening because unlike the past when we bartered
what we produced – were thus able to assess what we made and what we got in
return – we now produce goods or services not knowing what we shall receive in
return because the assessment of our effort is done by a collection of hands we
never get to see or influence, much less get to control.
Whether we work on a plantation, in a mine shaft, a factory,
a construction site, a store or an office, we get paid with a promissory note
called money. We then use this money to buy goods or services produced by
someone else. We may at times buy some of what we produce ourselves, which is a
distant echo of the days when we consumed much of what we produced in a system
we now call subsistence level; one that is still practiced by societies we call
primitive.
We too were primitive at one time but we lived in a system
where no one received more than two or three times what someone else did
because we recognized that it was impossible for someone to physically produce
that much more than someone else. Thus, the primitive system represented the
true essence of meritocracy. But now that fiat money is here, and it is
filtered to us through the many hands that run the financial institutions, we
find that the filters make as much as a thousand times what an ordinary person
usually makes. This happens because the filters retain the money, and they use
it to buy not only the goods and services we produce and they consume, but also
the plantation, the mine, the factory, the building, the store, the office and
all the premises where the goods are produced and the services are delivered.
Thus, the people of the financial services can be thought of
as the new feudal lords who no longer need killer armies to loot the peasants
or impose taxes on them. Instead, they have the central bank which hands them
the money it prints – most of which they retain – and give the rest to the
producers of goods and services who live from hand to mouth at the modern
version of a subsistence level.
But if they have no armies equipped with swords or bayonets,
the new feudal lords have armies equipped with pens, microphones and television
cameras. These people get paid as much as ten times those who produce the real
wealth of the nation – and they sit in studios where they spew complaints all
day long about the people who produce the wealth, and sometimes ask for wages
that would raise them just a little above subsistence level.
This is where the concept of the distribution of wealth
comes into play, and where the role of big government versus that of small
government becomes important. The crucial questions are these: Is fiat money
used to redistribute wealth by taking it from those who create it in the
plantations, mine shafts, factories, construction sites, stores and offices –
and give it to those in the financial institutions who filter it, retaining it
and pay the armies of men and women they employ to sit in the studios and bitch
all day long about the people who work for a living.
And never forget that these are the people who feed the
modern feudal lords as well as their armies even though neither of these two
could produce a grain of wheat, an ounce of meat or regulate the heart beat of
a patient. They are the whiners who would starve to death in a system of
meritocracy, but here they are, living the good life by the sweat of those they
denigrate at every moment of their waking hours.