You Can't Have Democratic Decision-Making If You Governmentalize Citizens' Activities

Thoughtless political action has costs particularly since it is so very difficult to undo political actions such as creating a government program. Political actions have consequences not always directly part of their expressed goals. Therefore, it is important to think through just when political action is properly justified.

If we (what group or exactly who?) decide to take the free exercise of certain activities of citizens out of the private sphere and place them under government control or have government wholly take over the production of activities, even under the justification of solving a problem such as health care, retirement security, education, or some other that appears unsolvable by private, voluntary activity, that decision to governmentalize those previously free activities means we intend on giving up our right to any longer make individual choices in that sphere or to allow people to be free to conduct activities in any way they decide is best for them. A political process almost always results in transferring decisions from formerly free activity by citizens to government controlled decisions; seldom does political activity decrease government control and increase citizens’ freedom to choose and decide how to carry out their activities.

Once decisions are governmentalized through political means, they then must be implemented by some form of a government bureaucracy which insures their compliance. Every requirement enacted by political means requires an agency, that is, a bureaucracy, by which to carry out the requirement. It is this bureaucracy that is now implementing the decisions that no longer are under the discretion of citizens. A bureaucracy charged with implementation certain requirements always has a certain degree of discretion regarding the choices it must make since no law can exactly detail the specific actions that must be carried out. Thus, a bureaucracy has some freedom in carrying out a law and making decisions on behalf of citizens but it cannot change the legal framework that controls its actions even though better actions may be possible. It does not have “free” funding that is not within its legal mandates; it can only act to implement, not create, political decisions, and it is allowed no creative powers to experiment or develop new products. It is locked in to the legal requirements until political actions changes those requirements. Thus, the process of governmentalization creates legal and fixed control over citizens’ activity, it creates legal stasis that by design prevents development and change regardless of the merits.

To governmentalize then means first of all to carry out a political process to convert some sphere of individual decisions, either large or small, into government decisions, and, second, once a single politically decision is achieved, these decision then are carried out by a government bureaucracy it means to conduct the decisions through some government channels, that is, a government bureaucracy. Any attempt to solve problems (except in the case in which preventing force or fraud constitute the “problem”) by politics and government always means moving in the direction of decreasing the free activities of citizens and subordinating more activity to centralized government control. Whether the government actually delivers a service or whether it controls a non-governmental agent in order to have it deliver the service does not matter. Politics is the means and the expansion of government control over human activity is the end.

Thus, to politicize a problem such as health care, global warming, urban sprawl, means we are governmentalizing our previously free activities, that is, we intend on giving up our free activity and choices and intend to now subordinate our activities to government control. Politics is the means by which this process works. It is not the government program itself. Once the political process gives government the power to plan and manage a sphere of our activities, the administration of that power is no longer political, it is bureaucratic.

As an example, public education operates largely as planning and decisions carried out by a bureaucracy, not as a political process of democracy. It is true we have school boards but they do little in the way of actually planning and deciding. They mostly hire and fire the superintendent or make trivial decisions with little consequence to learning. Most of the rest of the time the significant decisions are carried out by the bureaucracy. The law controls much of school board actions such that it can’t in any real sense get rid of fundamental controlling rules accumulated over the years either in law or in the collective bargaining agreement. Collective bargaining itself is largely governmentalized by political decisions that have enacted into law the establishment of union representation, employment conditions, and bargaining procedures. Boards must turn over to district bureaucrats the conduct of negotiations and implementation. But even if boards are considered a democratic institution, by state law they are highly constrained in the way they deliver public education. They cannot use some arrangement other than having the district own and operate the public schools.

Politics converted the public’s education system into a government function. As a result of the political decision by state politicians (e.g., Horace Mann) made many years ago to governmentalize the citizens’ activities of educating their children, the school board functions only as an oversight agent for bureaucratic processes. It cannot decide whether to continue or not continue the government control of education. Once all the fundamental decisions were made through the political process, the implementation must be turned over to an educational bureaucracy that manages and controls public funding. Neither can the board change this bureaucratic design for the creation and administration of public schools, or the establishment and enforcement of standards, or hiring and firing, or the government requirement for mandatory attendance of students, etc. In effect, the political process governmentalized citizens’ educational activities as both providers and consumers such that now citizens have no practical right to provide educational services or choose what educational services to consume. Having done so, there is little left for boards in the way of democratic decisions. By law, public school decisions are no longer democratically controlled, they are standardized and bureaucratically controlled.

Therefore, to assert a problem is a political problem that requires government action carries with it the attempt to use political power to governmentalize some sphere of citizens’ activities, that is, to take over the citizens’ decisions and then establish some government bureaucracy by which those decisions are no longer subject to citizens’ decisions or a democratic process. It is the government bureaucracy that becomes the agent that gives meaning to the law and carries it out. To governmentalize means to use politics to create and give power to a government bureaucracy such that it can centrally plan and control citizens’ activities either by mandate (land use, product standards, consumer or producer rights) or by government practices of competition (public schools, the Post Office, tax breaks, eminent domain).

Within a sphere that is governmentalized, citizens’ activities and inter-individual exchanges can no longer be freely chosen nor voluntary and self-regulated by the relative values each citizen determines among the various choices the citizen has. They are not decisions subordinated to the collective will or common good; they are decisions subordinated to those with political power and then to the government; citizens’ activities become activities required by government and enforced by government power, and citizens’ values and choices no longer exist on their original free form. One particulary damaging consequence of the replacement of citizens’ free activity with government control is that it shuts down constructive activity by citizens which creates new and different choices since those activities are no longer rewarded or sometimes even allowed. Bureaucracies are not learning organizations; they only implementers what is set in law.

Now it seems important to clarify what democratic decision making is. Nothing about public schools is particularly democratic since to have democratic decision making process would means all citizens or at least everyone connected with schools would come together and vote as a body on each decision. When a group democratically decides to have a smaller group make the decisions, then it is a representative democracy already removed from pure democracy. If instead of deciding each decision anew when it repeatedly arises, political action creates laws that make and enforce decisions that are permanent, then that sphere of decision making is locked up and no subject to the processes of democracy. To be democratic, each new group of citizens should be able to make their own decision and not be subject to some earlier group’s decision. When the area of human activity controlled by democracy becomes at all larger than direct democracy can handle, it increasingly loses its ability to be subject to democratic processes. The decision making must be transferred to elected and non-elected officials. The only alternative to losing the citizens’ democratic voice is to prevent the political process from turning the decision into a decision of government and to prevent moving decisions from moving up in scale. If citizens’ decision are free from the process of governmentalizing that takes their direct voice in the decision away from them, then citizens can organize for collective action and make decisions about those collective actions democratically. It would seem that it is only when citizens’ activities are governmentalized that citizens lose their participatory freedom to make choices democratically. But with size comes the loss of that possibility.

The difficulty of keeping citizens free so that democratic decisions with others remains possible means the decisions must be protect from the process of converting individual choices into political ones. Even if this process is often described as the “democratic process of solving societal problems” or as the work of the “collective will” for the common good, very few if any of these decisions to governmentalize something come about through anything close to a democratic process of decision-making by the people, certainly not at the national level. They come about because a small class of politically powerful leaders manage to push the decisions through the political process. Citizens do not vote on issues or whether to governmentalize things. They only vote for a politician who will have decision powers over many issues. Giving politicians the power to governmentalize things removes the power of citizens to use a free, democratic and non-governmental process to make those decisions. Politics and government removes decisions from citizens’ direct choices, needs, and preferences. Whereas citizens might have qualms about raising taxes, forcing parents to send their children to government schools, starting a war, giving large tax breaks and bailouts to corporations, politicians may have no such qualms. Their interest is in getting elected so as to have the power to participate in these political decisions. Once elected, they can use the political power they have to get re-elected and stay in power, and they have an interest in governmentalizing things. Thus, one of the most fundamental principles in setting up a government is to provide some means whereby the power to governmentalize is limited and regulated by rights established to protect the free activity of citizens.

When the attempt to solve some societal problem through political means, politicians must decide how to governmentalize and homogenize the vast array and number of choices and values of citizens so as to force the choice on them and have them operate under one government bureaucracy or set of regulations designed by politicians and the bureaucracy to be implemented and imposed on all. This governmentalizing of citizens’ activities seems to appears justified, even necessary, when we think the personal choices and actions by some appear to us as lacking (parents won’t or can’t educate their children), dangerous (people smoke or don’t wear helmets), foolish (pay high rates for payday loans), or disadvantaged (work for minimum wages, take non-unionized jobs, go without some health care services), and therefore in need of correction and control by the group consensus. Or there is some large societal need that cannot be fulfilled unless government provides it (building railroads, highways, energy, national and local defense).

But the political process used to governmentalize decisions has no basis in democracy, group consensus, or a common good accepted by all. And since there is no democratic participatory decision by citizens to governmentalize the decision, they can only elect certain politicians they believe might make the proper decision. But if politicians are given decision making the power it is difficult to know how the politician acted much less the analysis used. Even if politicians governmentalize a problem that a majority of the citizens’ want, there is still a significant groups of citizen’s opposed and there are many other issues. And even within the majority many differences arise concerning the details.

As a result, even when politicians governmentalize something popular (e.g., health care) that many citizens seem to want, no one can get exactly what he or she wants or believes is best; government programs must be standardized. Everyone must accept the massive compromise for the design. Worse, the political decision makers are not technical experts and must either push significant decision-making down to the government bureaucracy or they must attempt to put in place a fixed design that will be less than optimal and difficult to change. Converting private decisions into political ones means everyone must loses their freedom to make decisions since they must subordinate their activity to a decision designed and controlled by those with political power. Worse, politicians don’t necessarily have any expertise in an area except a general political skill to win people’s approval. Political decision by a small group of politicians removes huge reservoir of constructive intelligence of citizens’ as they work on problems.

Thus, without a thoughtful understanding of a theory of government, people may easily find appeal in the idea that “democracy is the way we as a society come together to solve our problems.” Unless such a notion implying unlimited governmentalization can somehow be proven to be a valid theory of long term government, such thinking seems to inexorably lead to removing the free activity of citizens to democratically make their own collective decisions in any kind of voluntary groups they wish. Having politicians make decision for us is not only undemocratic by leading to unlimited government, it encourages thoughtless, rash and emotional decisions of citizens in wishing society would achiever some ideal goals. But the effect is to turn citizens’ voluntary decisions over to whomever is the most politically powerful, even if not elected, and to eliminate the rights of the minorities. Less obvious is the danger of the stasis governmentalizing decisions imposes on society by preventing intelligent, constructive activity and problem-solving by citizens.

Given the need to have at least some kind of government, how then could a thoughtful theory of government arrive at a design of the political processes a society uses so as to prevent these processes of governmentalizing from constantly taking over more and more of citizens’ activities? At least one theory if not the most successful theory is the American form of a constitutional republic in which the process of governmentalizing the free activities of citizens was expressly limited by constitutional rules within which political processes were constrained and regulated. For perhaps many reasons, the system have eroded but its principles remain clear.

First, in order to limit government so that democratic processes don’t takeover activities that should be left to citizens choices, American governance originally limited government to only those powers the people expressly gave it in the Constitution.

Second, the decision making process of American governance was removed from direct democracy and placed with elected representatives so as to create a deliberative, wise process free from the impulses and emotions of popular democracy.

Third, the rights of political minorities were set above the law so as to protect them from any laws the political majorities might enact.

Governmentalizing makes it difficult and even prevents the dynamic creation of more choices, the increase of efficiency of production, or the investigation and experimentation of large varieties of constantly emerging alternatives. Neither politicians nor government bureaucracies can predict the future; they have no omniscience that can correspond to the diversity of citizens’ values and needs, and so they cannot serve all citizens. Nor can they cannot freely conduct research and development into the possibilities, and even if it were possible government programs still would have no feedback as to value from citizens. Government bureaucracies simply cannot make choices and create huge varieties of choice by which to match consumers. It has no truly democratic process such as the market in which its products can be compared and evaluated by citizens. Since the government produces a single program funded by taxation it can and must disregard consumers, and it does not and cannot use the market to provide it with information as to the relative values of various products.

On the other hand, in the free sector of society those private and social decisions protected from government and hence from any democratic political processes take place in huge numbers and dizzying varieties. In a free society, everyone can vote as to the relative value of every product by placing a monetary value on the product in its purchase. Markets work amazingly well to create and allow a variety of choices. Democracy and politics works to reduce a variety of choices to a single one for all. Governmentalizing decisions so as to homogenize and subordinate citizens’ choices to one politically messy and compromised decision would seem to operate in opposition to citizens’ most general over arching values of respect for diversity and individual differences.

To prevent things from growing out of control, the challenge of how to design government must address at least how to delimit government action so as to prevent government from gradually extending and expanding its power and spheres of activity, forcing activities to be subordinated to a single program, and enforcing a rigid system of stasis that is difficult to change. And lest decisions ignore the views and rights of the minority, the challenge of a theory of government is to show how it will remove the decision making process from the lack of deliberation and emotion driven populism and democratic rule by the majority that tramples the rights of the minority. Those who would make political decisions must be confronted with the need to conduct due deliberation and compromise that are regulated by some definition and limitation of the sphere of government action.