Robert Higgs on CSPANMike Rappaport

The CSPAN program, In Depth, in which they focus on one author's works for 3 hours, is one of my favorite programs -- when it is on someone I like.  And since CSPAN is nonpartisan, they often have someone I like.  This week it was Robert Higgs, who is really very good.  I haven't really kept up with his works over the years, which is my mistake.  After watching the program, I will surely make amends by reading more of his recent stuff.  For a recent one hour podcast on Higgs, which is also excellent, see here. 

I love people who cut through the complexity to the simple truths underlying matters.  Higgs does a great job of that.  During the program he makes the following point: (1) Politician's expertise is getting elected.  They are not generally experts about other subjects.  (2) Their primary incentive is to maintain and expand their power.  Thus, they are very good at portraying their actions as promoting the public good, even though they often are not.  (3) Politicians do get the advice of genuine experts, but they choose which experts to conform to their other goals.

I think this is exactly right.  Of course, things are more complicated, but it does not change the basic story.  This both explains why policy is as bad as it is and also why it is not worse than it is. 

It is true that politicians usually hold political ideologies and other commitments -- some to a greater extant than others.  And thus we can explain Ronald Reagan's Presidency by a combination of the fact that he held a good ideology and the country was in poor shape when we was elected.  But Obama's ideology and the poor shape of the country now also explain the bad things he is doing.  Most importantly, even though politicians hold ideologies, they regularly bias their policies in favor of their two main commitments: getting reelected and maintaining power.   

Higgs, of course, is most known for his claim that government grows during emergencies, like the Great Depression and World War II.  The evidence for these claims strike me as undeniable, even though the mechanisms are not always so clear.  One might say that the government did not grow much under Bill Clinton and grew more under George Bush, because Clinton faced no emergencies and Bush faced several.  But that is only part of the story, since government growth was blocked under Clinton due to other factors, such as divided government, and government growth happened under Bush in other areas, such as nondefense domestic spending.

Higgs is quite a bit more extreme than I am, since he sees almost no role for government.  But some (not all) of this disagreement is the result of focusing on different things: Higgs tends to focus on the ideal arrangement while I tend to focus on what makes sense in our world.  Thus, Higgs would say we should eliminate Social Security, even though he recognizes that you cannot really do that for people under the existing system.  I would say that we should move towards a mandatory private system, even though I recognize that after a considerable period under that system, we might be able to move to an entirely voluntary system.