About the Site

[Author's note: This was written on Constitution Day 2010 (September 17) when this blog was hosted by another service. All the content is identical, but a permanent link to the original post no longer exists.]

James Madison, 4th President of the United States of America

James Madison, chief architect of the United States Constitution, made the following reflection in Federalist No. 51:

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

What did Madison mean?

Madison understood quite well, long before the United States of America had been created by the Constitution, that even the most well-intentioned of men were, at their very best, habitually misguided and frequently wrong. Because of this – because of man’s innate propensity to suddenly disregard his responsibility to agreements which he makes with other men, without reasonable cause or advanced warning, either inadvertently or deliberately through force or fraud – government becomes necessary to compel man to keep up his end of the bargains he makes with other men. This is especially true in the ways in which the exchange of property takes place in a market. Thus, man enters into civil society and institutes a government, to protect his rights to property, which he appropriates by putting work into common land in a theoretical framework that John Locke and Thomas Hobbes called the “State of Nature.”

"I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." (credit: Lucasfilm, Ltd.)

So if men were angels, and not like Darth Vader, who could Force Choke you just by making a pinching motion with his gloved hand, there would be no need for government. If men were angels, my neighbor would keep his trees properly pruned so the branches don’t fall into my yard during a storm. Alas, men are not angels, and I have to rely upon the law to protect my property after a storm – I have to rely on the law to compel the man to clean up my yard because he didn’t hold up his end of the bargain (not that I’m bitter or anything), and I have to rely upon government to enforce the law. So in a very real sense, government and law can be very useful.

Given that men are not angels, and acknowledging both that a) they are the only pool from which we can draw candidates for government – because seriously, who wants hamsters ruling the world? – and b) that they will, by their very nature, eventually fail to keep their agreements with us once we elect them to govern, either inadvertently or by force or fraud, then government itself must somehow be constrained. And this is precisely what Madison meant by the second part of his answer to his own question – that if angels were to govern men, if men somehow ceased to be flawed once they had been elected to government, pursuant to the terms of the social contract, then there would be no need for checks against the mistakes that government eventually and indubitably makes.

So government, then, is the “greatest of all reflections on human nature” – well-intentioned, and basically good in its essence, but wholly flawed and capable of taking action that can have very dire consequences on those whom it affects, regardless of whether or not those flaws and actions were deliberate. And people – the principals in the principal-agent relationship of representative government – have to deal, in very real ways and on very real terms they did not necessarily set and/or to which they did not necessarily agree, with the consequences of government failures, whether any nefariousness drove the failure or not. Just as man needs government to protect him from the harms that can come to him by other men who fail to keep agreements with him, so man needs protection from the harms that can – and will – come to him when government fails to keep its agreements with him.

And therein lay the rub for Madison, which is why he characterized the challenge of creating a constrained government capable of protecting men’s property rights, while at the same time precluding it from having the power to trample or otherwise arbitrarily redefine those property rights, as having “great difficulty.” The U.S. Constitution would eventually provide the legal framework for a federal republic – a weak, decentralized federal government that, only when necessary, would help coordinate the States in response to the need for solutions to collective action problems.

So, why “The Dangerous Servant?”

In the masthead of this blog, you’ll notice in the subtitle that the quote about government is attributed to George Washington. University of California at Los Angeles constitutional law Professor Eugene Volokh, principal author of The Volokh Conspiracy blog, did a bit of digging around on the origins of the quote, and why it has, over time, become attributed to General Washington:

The only sources I’ve seen mentioned for the quote are Washington’s Farewell Address (rarely) and the Jan. 14, 1790 Boston Independent Chronicle (more often). It’s not in either. I’ve checked the Independent Chronicle issue in an online database to which UCLA has a subscription, but the Washington speech printed there is this speech, which does not include the quote. (The citations I’ve seen generally say that the Independent Chronicle issue reprinted a Jan. 7, 1790 speech; the speech in the Jan. 14, 1790 Boston Independent Chronicle is a Jan. 8, 1790 speech, but the first item in that article bears a Jan. 7, 1790 reference.)

What’s more, there was indeed a fire/servant/master phrase in common use in the 1700s, but it was “fire is a good servant but a bad master.” Our lawyers readers might be amused to know that Sir William Blackstone used that phrase in some commentaries on Shakespeare (who knew?), describing it as a proverb. (The same construction was also used about love, money, wine, imagination, and other things.)

Despite the fact that the quote is, as Volokh says “apocryphal,” its wisdom, based upon Madison’s reflections on government-as-reflection-of-human-nature, and swaths of anecdotal evidence throughout the anthropological, political, and economic stories of mankind, seems to me to be axiomatic. Of course, there is always the possibility that James Madison and I are wrong – but for the time being, I accept as a relatively immutable truth that, no matter how much of my well-being government has in mind when taking some sort of action, there will inevitably always be some sort of agency loss; that whether the United States government actively and deliberately turns on me or not, it will fail me. Thus, I do not depend upon it for my health, my sustenance, my livelihood, my retirement, etc., etc. The extent to which agency loss occurs between government and me determines the lengths to which I will go to advocate for the constraining of the federal government’s power.

A quick note about government today: The federal government does things for me every day that I couldn’t possibly do efficiently or effectively by myself – national defense, for example. I have no idea how to build a rifle or a bullet, and if any nation’s army ever invaded the United States, I couldn’t possibly build a tank quick enough to protect myself and shell my foes (for the record, I couldn’t build a tank if nobody invaded the United States, either).

And really - where would we be without Tank Girl?

There is an inherent utility in civil society and civil government; the agents of government serve at the pleasure of the principals. But over time, the federal government’s capacity and (I would argue self-appointed) responsibilities have grown in these United States. This growth in the size and scope of government can be attributed to economic factors, like an increase in population (and thus an increase in aggregate demand for public goods, like national defense) or the development of technology and its increasing capacity to produce goods, to managerial factors, like the professionalization of Congressional committee staff, or to simple changes in the physical plant of government, like the installation of air conditioning in the U.S. Capitol, permitting Congress to meet during the sweltering and musty summer heat in Washington, DC. Equally, the discovery by politicians of new constituencies, through the creation of communities of interest by policy opportunists (and their activities, which Madison dubbed the “mischiefs of faction” in Federalist No. 10) – that is, the discovery of new principals in the principal-agent relationship of representative government, and their respective issues with various breaches of agreements – have also propelled the growth of the federal government over time.

Whatever the root causes of the growth of the federal government, some observations about the U.S. government should give pause to any political theorist, policy wonk, or other casual political observer:

• Since the U.S. began the business of government in the late 18th century, right up to the time of this writing, the legislature and the executive have been at constant and unrelenting odds with the Supreme Court – the Third Branch, the institution deliberately built into the Constitution as a check against the power exercised by the other two branches – and these struggles are never initiated by the Court; they are always initiated by citizens or factions (public and private). This means that principals have had lots of complaints since the birth of the U.S. about whatever it is the federal government has undertaken. This is not a coincidence. In this respect, let us all thank our lucky stars for Marbury v. Madison, which gave the Court the power to overturn statutes crafted out of legislation it deemed unconstitutional.
• You can call it Chaos Theory or Murphy’s Law, or a combination of the two: with the federal government’s capacity and scope expanding at the rate it is expanding, along with the number of citizens and factions interacting with government in either the creation of policy or the consumption of public goods, something will go wrong, and left unchecked, government poses an inherent danger to man’s well-being, whether it intends to do so or not. Again, anecdotal and quantitative evidence for this abounds throughout the anthropological, political, and economic stories of mankind.

To these ends, it will be the purpose and function of this blog to chronicle instances in which government has exceeded its purpose – either deliberately, or inadvertently – and to give a voice to people and institutions who have come into harm’s way because government failed to keep up its end of the agreement.

Market failures occur when forces outside the control of either the consumer or the firm alter the market equilibrium, and the economy suffers a deadweight loss. To the extent that loss occurs, government institutions must sometimes intervene in order to protect rights to life, liberty, and property when market failures occur.

It is equally important to chronicle those instances in which men fail to keep agreements with each other. These are called market failures, and they too can result in inefficient allocations of resources (harms) – and to that end, you may occasionally come across content at this site about various market failures. But private actors in society do not have the de jure authority to do the things that men and women in government can do, so the main purpose of this site will be to keep a watchful and vigilant eye on government – to point out its faults and errors, and to suggest how things might be done better.

Government failure, on the other hand, occurs when government oversteps its proper bounds, and interventions in private markets result in deadweight loss to the economy. Government failures also always result in some loss of life, liberty, and/or property.

Some of what you find here will be, of course, opinion. Please trust that it will always be, to the extent possible, informed opinion – I usually try to save myself the embarrassment of writing about things about which I am uninformed (this is NOT your hub for curling during the Winter Olympics – sorry). As a policy wonk with real working experience in the concrete jungle of Washington, DC, an amateur economist, political scientist and theorist, and an amateur philosopher, I promise to do my best to substantiate the things I say with evidence, citations, or, if need be, (gulp) calculations. I’m just that nerdy, in addition to being passionate about liberty – freedom from the dangerous servant.

I suspect readership at this blog will likely consist of my family, friends, colleagues, present and former professors, fellow and future students, and other bloggers and/or new media flacks. It is for this very reason I purchased the domain GeorgeScoville.com – so people I know can find me easily. But I would encourage anyone who stumbles across this site to read it – and to challenge or disagree with me in the comments, or via the contact form (see the tab at the top), or to ask questions, or to suggest topics. I will, of course, continue to blog at The Next Right, where I write about political strategy and new media tactics, and Liberty Pundits, where I reflect and comment upon political news. I will probably occasionally cross-post content from this blog at Liberty Pundits, as I imagine there will be some overlap.

Again, thank you for stopping by – I hope you’ll come back often, or use the RSS subscription tool at the top of the right-hand column. For now, though, if you haven’t already, celebrate Constitution Day by reading, downloading, printing, or sharing with friends this copy of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights from my friends over at the Bill of Rights Institute!

See you again soon!

Post-script: I would also like to quickly thank Dr. Nathan Griffith, PhD whose wisdom, counsel, and – at times – patience, has also had a profound impact on the ways in which I think about the world around me.