The Government You Wished For

Everybody in America who ever wanted a powerful government to do good should now be happy, for he got his wish. Too bad for half the voters who have different conceptions of the good—their personal good or the “social good”!

A government powerful enough to do good is also powerful enough to do bad. A government powerful enough to decide under what conditions its subjects may trade is powerful enough to seriously disturb or ban their trading, internationally or domestically. A government powerful enough to financially support universities is also powerful enough to threaten them with penalties if they don’t repress opinions it does not like. A ruler powerful enough to define emergencies is powerful enough to increase his power with fabricated emergencies. A government powerful enough to require conformity to an ideology, say DEI, is powerful enough to forbid private institutions to embrace it or parts of it. A government powerful enough to ship non-citizens to a barbaric prison in El Salvador without due process is probably powerful enough to do the same to its own citizens. And so forth.

On the last point, note what Donald Trump said (“El Salvador’s Bukele Says He Doesn’t Have Power to Return Mistakenly Deported Man,” Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2025):

Trump also said he would be open to deporting U.S. citizens to the [El Savador Cecot] prison “if they’re criminals,” which legal experts say would be unconstitutional. Trump said he asked [Attorney General Pam] Bondi to look into the legal implications of such a move.

“Homegrowns are next,” he told [El Salvador president Nayib] Bukele, referring to American criminals. “You gotta build about five more places.” Bukele replied “We’ve got space.”

Limits to government as conceived by James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and the school of Constitutional Political Economy are precisely meant to prevent the state from growing into Leviathan. Friedrich Hayek’s more tradition-based theory also proposes strict limits. In fact, constraining the state represents the thrust of the whole classical liberal and libertarian tradition. The numerous congressmen, presidents, and (yes) judges who have forgotten that tradition should now realize how important it is.

The game is not over, and we can still entertain some hope. But in the current circumstances, when personal loyalty and fealty replace respect for constitutional rules in the highest reaches of government, we can probably count only on judges, independent institutions, and state governments, not on federal politicians nor rationally ignorant voters. Public opinion can move quickly, though, and the midterms, which usually go against the incumbent party, could help. Many individual Americans retain a sense of individual liberty, many government employees show personal integrity, and a free press can counterbalance official propaganda. Yet, in modern societies, despotism often happens gradually: most people realize that they are living under an elected despot once he is already entrenched. (See “You Didn’t See It Coming,” my review of Cass Sunstein (Ed.), Can It Happen Here? in the Winter 2018-2019 issue of Regulation, pp. 54-57.)

In the Sunstein book just cited, Tyler Cowen argues that dictatorship is unlikely in America because its federal government is too “large and unwieldy.” It is too big to be controlled by anyone: “Big government is useful precisely for (among other reasons) helping to keep government relatively small” (Cowen’s emphasis). This apparent paradox may be deflated by the experiment that is currently going on in America: it may show that such a government can be taken over by a bully with no ideology, no respect for prevalent rules, and no compunction about using and threatening to use the brute force of government. We should soon see if what remains of classical-liberal institutions can stop Leviathan. (Distressingly, Anthony de Jasay believed, contrary to Buchanan or Hayek, that limited government is impossible.)

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