Can There be Peace?(shortened)
I am going to explain the problems with democratic politics and what the only reasonable solution is. For the purpose of this writing, a democracy is any system in which the people involved with it believe they have some say in how it operates, and therefore see value in expressing their opinion on that matter. If there were a state ruled absolutely by a council of ten people, then what I write here would apply to those ten people. If there were a state with elections which are only for show and the government acts without regard to what people vote for, then what I write here would still apply. Many love pointing out that the United States is a representative republic, not a democracy, but it is a democracy for my purposes.
In a democracy, various factions attempt to gain public support in order to put certain people in power so that they may use government to pursue various ends. The kinds of ends which are pursued by democratic governments can generally be described as matters of justice and the common good, while the ends pursued by private actors are matters of personal preference. Private security exists, but government police and courts are needed to enact justice against wrongdoers. Private charity exists, but government welfare is needed to ensure that the poor have enough. At least, this is how such things are justified. It is possible to imagine a society with no government in which private actors do everything a government would. All moral objections to this idea are essentially the same; there would be no singular institution which guarantees justice and the common good. Once it is understood that this is the presumed purpose of government, it becomes possible to understand why governments fail to achieve this purpose and to understand political disagreements. When someone states his opinion of what his government ought to do, he is stating what he believes to be just and vice versa. All political conflicts among honest people are disagreements over what ends are most just and good and disagreements over the means by which they are best achieved.
The Question of Means
Much of the division and fruitlessness in political debates results from a conflation of these two kinds of disagreements. Very often people agree on what ends should be achieved, but disagree on what means should be used to achieve them. As an example, people generally agree that it is bad when people get addicted to harmful drugs, but prohibitions have been ineffective, costly, and destructive. Someone who says the prohibitions should be ended is not necessarily saying that stopping drug use is not an end which should be pursued; he is saying that the particular means being employed are wrong. The problem is that, unless those opposing the prohibition propose an alternative means of discouraging people from using drugs, they end up being seen as being on the same side of the debate as those who believe there is nothing wrong with using drugs. If the majority of people believe that drugs are bad, then the prohibitionist faction will win because they will be seen as the ones who are serious about solving the problem, no matter how much their opponents say that the solution being used is wrong.
This is the problem with any political movement which argues that the role of government should be limited to a few specific areas. Such an idea will always be unpopular because people’s beliefs of justice and the common good are not limited to a few specific areas, meaning the institution whose purpose is to achieve these ends should not be so limited. To say that a government should only protect people from violence and prosecute those who are guilty of such crimes is to say that other problems such as drug addiction are not matters of the common good. To say that these kinds of problems should be solved by people outside the government is to say that wanting these problems solved is nothing more than a matter of personal preference. The only way to successfully promote the idea of limited government is to change people’s idea of what government is and its purpose, but that is not my purpose in writing this. I want to explain why governments fail to achieve this purpose. If this were not the case, then so many people would not be so dissatisfied by the government and so invested in politics. I will try to explain what the only solution might be.
When a government decides to pursue a certain end, that end does not simply become reality. Drug prohibitions do not simply eliminate drugs. Government actions are not abstractions. They involve real people’s actions which make use of scarce resources and have both benefits, costs, and unintended consequences. There are innumerable ways to attempt to solve any particular problem, each with different benefits and costs. Choosing one solution means not choosing any of the many different ones. One solution may work well under one set of conditions, but not under others. The solutions governments attempt to employ can be extremely costly and ineffective. If this were not true, no one would believe that government should be limited. Far more absurd than believing government should be limited is being deeply ideologically committed to a certain government policy. The best solution may be one which no one has thought of, just as the technologies of today were unknown to those who lived in the past. Discovering the most effective and least costly solution requires more work than just deciding that the problem should be solved; deciding the best government policy for accomplishing a particular end is an engineering question not fundamentally different from any other. As such, it requires expertise which the average person does not have. If two opposing candidates propose different ideas for stopping people from using addictive drugs, the average voter does not know which proposal is better. Few people are willing and able to put forth the effort needed to discover the best solution to this kind of problem. It is not that people are stupid, it is that most specialize in fields other than those which are relevant to deciding the best means for a government to use in order to reach a particular end. Being able to design cars does not make someone a good surgeon. A surgeon should not be consulted when designing cars, nor should the average person necessarily be consulted when designing government policy. The question of how the government should solve a problem should not be decided by vote nor subject to public debate any more than the best way to design a car or the best way to perform a surgery. The problem, then, is ensuring that those, who do know the most effective and least costly way for a government to achieve a particular end, are the ones put in the position of making these decisions and then ensuring that they do the best job possible. I am not sure what the answer to this problem is, except that it may be worth examining why competent people are usually chosen for important tasks outside government, and that this problem will be easier to deal with if the much greater problem presented by the other kind of political disagreement can be overcome.
The Question of Ends
People also disagree over the ends a government should seek to achieve. Most people think it is bad to use harmful and addictive drugs, but some might think it is not such a bad thing. Moreover, there drugs which are not physically harmful, but many believe have effects which are bad for society, while others do not and believe that no actions should be taken to discourage their use. If all political debates were about what ends are most just and good instead of the best means to achieve them, then we would probably find that most people agree on many things, but not everything. People have different ideas of what is just and good. Unlike the questions of what means are most effective and least costly, the question of what ends are most just and good is not a matter of objective fact. No one can be an expert in the field of knowing what is good. Even if one could, people would still disagree with him. It seems rather absurd to think that everyone will eventually discover what is most good and just and agree on that after having enough debates. If this were possible, why has it not happened yet? Nearly everyone in the United States believes racism is bad when they did not in the past, but people have since found other things to disagree over, such as the question of what racism is. If it is not possible to discover what is definitively most right and then get everyone to agree, then there needs to be a way to deal with the fact that people will always have different ideas of what is just and good.
The members of any political faction believe their particular view of what is good and just to be right and other views to be wrong, or else they would not hold that view and reject the others. They necessarily believe that their opponents do not just have different personal preferences but are evil. With such beliefs, it might not be unreasonable for them to just kill everyone who opposes their efforts to achieve justice and the common good. This has certainly happened throughout history, but it usually does not happen in western democracies. People with different beliefs are not at war with each other. They are instead able to engage in argumentation and honest debate. The only reason anyone would do this is if he does not believe he should conquer and kill those who believe differently, but is instead able to tolerate other people having different beliefs of the way things should be. Everything I have written here has been under the assumption that anyone reading it is among those who believe in peaceful and honest argumentation and, therefore, presuppose that it is wrong to act violently toward each other. If people have honest debates, that means they are willing to treat their differences in political opinion as differences in personal preference to an extent and believe that only peaceful means should be used to persuade others to accept their beliefs.
If differences of political opinion can be treated as differences in personal preferences, then it should be possible for people to satisfy these different preferences without conflict just as they do in all other areas. If one person wants to have a blue car and another person wants a red car, they can both seek these different ends. There is only conflict when people seek incompatible ends, such as two or more people wanting exclusive ownership of the same car. In matters of politics, the same thing is true. There is only conflict when people seek to control the same government. The way people with different political goals to all get what they want is for them to have different governments, so that those under one government are neither harmed by nor benefit from the actions of other governments. Most people in the United States are not worried about the policies of the government of Canada.
In democratic states, people do not just tolerate other people having different beliefs of what is just and good; they tolerate them trying to take control of the government and impose those beliefs on them. If someone believes his preferred policies absolutely must be imposed on every person currently living a particular state, then he should be asked two questions. How can he tolerate foreign states having different policies? Why isn’t he planning to kill all his political opponents? For those who can tolerate different places and people being governed differently and do not want to destroy their opposition, surely it would be preferable if those who find their government intolerable and their differences with their opponents irreconcilable could instead peacefully separate from them and form their own government and society which pursues those people’s vision of what is good and just in a way which neither interferes with nor is interfered with by the people and government they separated from?