When Government Competes, America Loses

In recent years, it has become an unfortunate bipartisan article of faith that the government — and not individuals, nor the businesses or institutions of civil society those into which those individuals voluntarily assemble themselves — ought to operate to accomplish any good dreamt up by politicians and the pundit class. But this fatal conceit, which seeks to subvert the competitive processes of the market and subordinate the will of the free American citizen to the bureaucrat’s, fails not only theoretically but empirically, because state action cannot compete with human action. To document this, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance has inaugurated a series of policy briefs, chronicling the manifest and myriad failures of central planning and government-run economic endeavors.

But first, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, it ought to be understood “where we are, and whither we are tending.”

The movement of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) values ubiquitous and affordable medicine; so, its followers say, government ought to socialize the healthcare industry. Even so-called Abundance Democrats, in revolt against the stultifying excesses of the far left, betray a narrow view that associates economic development too closely with the deeds of the government, albeit a government freed of the worst strictures of such laws as the National Environmental Protection Act. Republicans, too, have begun to echo the socialist senator from Vermont. Encapsulating this thinking, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it thus: “We believe home ownership is good, so therefore the government wants to be involved.” Proficiency in this language — that of progressives and socialists — has been gained by purported conservatives, who seem to have forgotten their mother tongue. Indeed, although hardly a radical in temperament, Bessent makes explicit the radical premise from which many Republicans and nearly every Democrat now reason: I approve of X; the government must ensure that X occurs, perhaps even by effecting X directly.

Journeying from its source in principle to its destination in a policy proposal, any idea is refracted, colored, sometimes distorted, as it passes through myriad ideological lenses and filters. And, accordingly, the central planner’s premise shared by the left and right takes shape differently in the hands of each, touched by differing philosophical convictions and directed toward different ends.

Joe Biden fretted about carbon emissions and sought to make the composition of energy production, the construction of infrastructure, and even the technologies found in the cars Americans drive and the appliances in American homes a question to be decided by politicians and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. — efforts which concluded in failure.

President Trump desires more domestic manufacturing; ergo, protectionism. He desires more high-tech, cutting-edge domestic manufacturing; ergo, the federal government acquired a 10-percent stake in Intel, becoming the company’s largest shareholder. He has been persuaded that organized labor is his friend; ergo, he conjured up a “golden share” in U.S. Steel, in no small part to enable his administration to protect the firm’s unionized employees.

In state capitals and city halls, similar assumptions obtain, and similar plans are propounded. For example, in the effort to make access to broadband internet ubiquitous, government-owned networks — which almost invariably founder — have been constructed in cities nationwide. Penetrating the national news cycle, Zohran Mamdani (New York City’s mayor-presumptive) advocated city-run grocery stores, opening their doors in competition with the private sector. No matter that such proposals have, in practice, proved themselves quixotic.

The ideologies of central planning rarely succeed — even by the metrics of the planners themselves. So long as people remain people — both in their shortcomings as technocrats and in their independence and interest as entrepreneurs and workers — socialism and its softer, nicer, more palatable progeny will remain a scheme practicable only in Utopia, the land that never was and cannot be. If men had the psychology and habits of the white ant, perhaps, things would be different; but, as Winston Churchill noted, “human nature is more intractable than ant-nature.”

To their chagrin, politicians are left to contend with the world as it is, and with people as they are. Russell Kirk once wrote: “ignore the fact, and that fact will be your master.” Trumpian protectionism, single-payer medicine, or Mamdani’s petty socialism — none will succeed. No matter how powerful the force of the will or of the passions that propel them to completion, these projects cannot — and, therefore, will not — overcome the laws of economics, founded in human nature. Finding failure, the central planners will run to and fro, searching vainly for some new policy remedy with which to save the patient, ignorant of the fact that the disease was, in the first place, brought on by an unnatural and imprudent course of treatment.

In the words of a popular online meme: “Reject modernity; embrace tradition.” Indeed, both left and right ought to reject the modern innovation of economies directed and micromanaged by the state and return to America’s heritage: liberty, property rights inviolable, and free markets.

READ MORE from David B. McGarry:

Why Free Speech Needs Congressional Action

Republicans Should Reject European-Style Tech Policy

David B. McGarry is the research director at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.

By mfnnews