"Your Papers Please"

I'm back in Missouri after two weeks in California. Apparently I forgot to turn off the grass before I left.

I have no horrifying stories of abuse at the hands of TSA ("Thousands Standing Around") airport security. But then, maybe that's a horrifying statement in itself. I am always captivated by the technology involved in lifting a couple of hundred people and their baggage into the air, and this awe and wonder always outweighs my disgust at government security. But perhaps I should be more horrified at what millions of people are subjected to every day.

When I was young I heard about how people in the Soviet Bloc were subjected to border checks and searches. The phrase "Your papers, please" summed up the inability of soviet serfs to travel freely. We now live in a situation that resembles East Germany or the Soviet Union. But most Americans really don't care. Most Americans don't remember freedom. This is horrifying. America's Founding Fathers did not tolerate much smaller infringements on our God-given right to travel. They would not have put up with TSA bullying.

No rational free person would do what the government does. No private company would subject its customers to hours of senseless waiting, force them to take their shoes off, probe them, interrogate them, and require them to carry papers or ID cards which can be checked and re-checked several times. Nobody seriously expects to find anything by doing all this, except a few nail clippers. There is no rational basis for doing all this. Millions of man-hours are wasted every day. No profit-making company would work this way.

So why does the government work this way? In his book Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises explained that government bureaucracy has no monetary way of measuring success, only a regulatory way.

Bureaucratic management is the method applied in the conduct of administrative affairs the result of which has no cash value on the market.

Government cannot make a profit, it only exercises force over others. Bureaucratic success is measured by its increasing regulation of others. Sheldon Richman writes:

In the marketplace, owners of businesses could essentially give their managers one simple directive: “Make as much profit as possible.” Under these circumstances, managers can be granted great discretion, because the profit imperative determines the details of day-to-day administration and the profit-and-loss sheet is an unimpeachable scorecard.

This is inapplicable for a bureaucracy. A bureaucracy does not sell its “services” to consenting customers, so there are no prices for what it does. It obtains its revenues and finances its operations through taxation — fiscal force — not through sales. Without the possibility of sales — and the possibility of rejection — there is no prospect of profit and loss. Thus it would make no sense to tell a bureaucrat to maximize profits. There can be no profits.

Since that is so, Mises writes, bureaucrats cannot be given discretion in the manner of profit-oriented managers. Rather, they must be “bound to comply with detailed rules and regulations,” whether a government is accountable to a despot or to the people.

Mises sums up the government:

Every half-wit can use a whip and force other people to obey. But it requires brains and diligence to serve the public. Only a few people succeed in producing shoes better and cheaper than their competitors. The inefficient expert will always aim at bureaucratic supremacy. He is fully aware of the fact that he cannot succeed within a competitive system. For him all-round bureaucratization is a refuge. Equipped with the power of an office he will enforce his rulings with the aid of the police.

In our day vastly more people believe in bureaucracy than in freedom. Everybody talks about America as the "land of the free," but with freedom comes responsibility; with profit comes the possibility of loss. Americans today want security more than freedom, and therefore want bureaucracy more than the free market.

When I'm on "the campaign trail" I have to remember this, because I'm more of a defender of the free market even than Mises. In the 1962 preface to Bureaucracy, Mises wrote:

There are areas of man’s activities in which there cannot be any question of profit management and where bureaucratic management must prevail. A police department cannot be operated according to the methods resorted to in the conduct of a gainful enterprise. A bakery serves a definite number of people—its customers—in selling them piecemeal what it has produced; it is the patronage of its customers that provides the social legitimacy—the profitability—of the bakery’s business. A police department cannot sell its “products”; its achievements, however valuable, even indispensable as they may be, have no price on the market and therefore cannot be contrasted with the total expenditure made in the endeavors to bring them about.

This essay does not condemn or blame bureaucracy. It tries to point out what bureaucratic management of affairs means and in what it differs from profit management. It further shows in which field bureaucratic management is the only possible method for the conduct of affairs.

With all due respect to Mises, I believe there is no field in which bureaucracy (socialism) works better than capitalism. I believe even the police should be privatized, and should operate in a competitive market. "Anarcho-capitalism" is hard to sell to lines of sheeple silently complying with the irrational demands of airport security.

For further reading:

Up against the wall! And thanks for cooperating. - Institute for Liberal Values