A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on August 7th, 2009 in General

Over at GSP, I linked to a NYT blog where Ross Douthat admits that Chris Christie will do nothing about corruption in New Jersey. I agree – the only thing electing Christie will do is change a few names. The game will remain the same, and we’ll all get ripped off for it.

But it isn’t intended as a slap at Christie, specifically. If you read Douthat’s complete statement he’s making a larger point that corruption is simply part of government. The more government you have, the more corruption you have. The answer, of course, is to cut back on government.

It’s a simple argument, and compelling. To eliminate corruption, we simply have to eliminate government. The problem with that, however, is that eliminating government doesn’t eliminate the problems we have developed government to deal with. We could, for example, eliminate the corruption in the Food and Drug Administration by eliminating all food and drug regulation. But it isn’t like the FDA was dreamed up because someone thought the food industry had it too easy. It was created because the food and drug industries were taking advantage of people – and causing great harm in doing so.

This is a bit like people arguing that we could reduce crime by making drugs legal. Well, yeah, it would result in a big one-time reduction in crime because all of those people busted for having or dealing drugs would no longer be busted. But all of the associated problems would remain – prostitution and violent crimes would still be the final resort of the desperately addicted.

I’m not arguing that all government is necessary. For the most part, government is not a centrally planned entity. A problem arises, and someone grafts a piece onto existing government to deal with it. Look at the Medicare drug plan as an example. Boom – we just crammed something on the end of another program and hoped it would work well enough to keep people quiet.

In fact, this is the preferred method for handling things. In the current debate on healthcare, no one is advocating the creation of an entirely new wing of government. No, if there is a “public option” then we’ll just graft it on somewhere and figure out how to make it work.

Every so often, we try to do something different. Remember Al Gore “reinventing government?” Remember the huge snafu in organizing the Homeland Security Department? Look back at the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Energy.

We might be able to eliminate corruption in New Jersey permitting by simply doing away with the permitting process. But how will the public be protected? How will we ensure that builders actually build to code or provide environmental remediation?

The inconvenient truth for folks like Douthat is that government doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s there because people demanded it be there. For a reason. I agree that there will always be some level of corruption because people will always be tempted and some will turn up a bit on the weak side. Pervasive and systemic corruption like New Jersey has will only be wiped out by pervasive and system reform – including badly needed public oversight. But throwing out the baby with the bathwater just can’t always be the first option.

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