An excellent passage from Josef Joffe’s review of Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land:
The central problem with “Ill Fares the Land” is a classic fallacy of the liberal-left intelligentsia, more in Europe than in the United States. Call it the “Doctor State Syndrome.” The individual is greedy, misguided or blind. The state is the Hegelian embodiment of the right and the good that floats above the fray. But the state does not. It is a party to the conflict over “who gets what, when and how,” to recall Harold Lasswell’s definition of politics. It makes its own pitch for power; it creates privileges, franchises and clienteles. This is why it is so hard to rein in, let alone cut back. The modern welfare state creates a new vested interest with each new entitlement. It corrupts as it does good.
It also invites corruption of itself because the more the state distributes and regulates, the more it tempts its citizens to outflank the market and manipulate public power for private gain. The founding fathers grasped this hard truth, and hence they hemmed in government. Even the most moderate of social democrats tend to ignore this insight, and so does Tony Judt.
Which puts me in mind of this comment on epistemic closure from Scott Sumner (scroll down to item 4):
If you want to talk about epistemic closure, consider how few left-of-center intellectuals realize that the standard model of economics, even as presented in textbooks written by economists who are left of center, gives very little support for the great mass of government programs that are cherished by liberals.
Here are the key market failures:
1. Inequality—The solution is redistributive taxes.
2. Externalities (and second-hand smoke is not an externality)—The solution is Pigou taxes.
3. Monopoly—The solution is antitrust laws. And with free entry the only plausible problem is price-fixing cartels. Even anti-merger laws are of dubious value.
4. Public goods—only a few goods such as lighthouses and medical research meet the criteria, and even lighthouses are a dubious example.
But that’s about it. The SEC? The FDA? OSHA? I have no idea how these or 90% of other government activities can be justified.
Does imperfect information call for regulation? I doubt it, but if so then provide the information. The free-rider problem with medical insurance? OK, but Singapore has shown that this problem can be solved with the government spending 1% to 2% of GDP (plus forced saving), not the 8% contemplated by Obama. There really is no justification for big government in the sort of model provided in economic textbooks written by liberals. Most left-leaning intellectuals don’t realize this; indeed they find my views to be slightly nutty. That’s epistemic closure.
I think that relatively closed-minded people are somewhat more likely to prefer conservative over liberal ideologies (the political psychology lit I think bears this out.) But among intellectuals liberals are far more likely to live in an ideological cocoon in which their blithe assumptions are reinforced daily simply because most other intellectuals are liberals of a similar sort. Sumner’s views are more than slightly nutty because, really, who thinks this way? If these were smart things to think, wouldn’t at least some our smart friends already think them? It is incredibly easy for the Judts of the world, and for the second, third, and nth-rate Judts who occupy the cluttered offices of our colleges and universities, to casually shrug off Sumner’s conclusion that “[t]here really is no justification for big government in the sort of model provided in economic textbooks written by liberals” because (in the unlikely event they were ever to hear such a thing uttered) liberals like the ones who wrote the textbooks will tell them confidently, smugly even, that of course there is a justification provided there. The insularity of the academy is cozy, much as the cultural insularity of the United States is cozy. Both breed an ignorant sense of self-satisfied superiority. Maybe, if we could, Scott Sumner and I would only read each other and others like us who would explain to us why we are entitled to ignore benighted ignoramuses like Tony Judt. Instead, almost monthly I am aggravated anew by an only semi-willing confrontation with yet another Tony Judt essay, and I am pleasantly surprised to find a review like Joffe’s in the Times.