History Commands Thee

It's not Nicholas Kristof saying it -- it's history saying it: "The long trajectory of history has been for governments to take on more responsibilities, and for citizens to pay more taxes. Now we’re at a turning point, with Republicans arguing that we need to reverse course."

Bigger government is just historically inevitable progress, the movement of time falling in step with the ineluctable march of institutional development. In the old days, people made there be less government, but now we have more government, because now is more gooder. That's why 13th-century Hangzhou was such a loosely organized shambles, but China had good stable central government in the 1920s. That's why if you were a 19th-century Javanese peasant, serving a local regent who was a client of the Dutch, your life was hopelessly burdened with all that goddamn laissez-faire that they had back then. You'd be all, like, Here, take some of my grain, and let me build some roads for you, and they'd be all, like, No, man, for reals, we're into just leaving you alone and stuff. Fortunately, though, the Japanese eventually showed up, and they took more responsibility. History's trajectory!

And of course, everyone can see how nations now have good, effective economic and financial regulation, unlike the old days. Tudor England, for example, was infamous for its total absence of economic rules. The past = less government responsibility. The future = more government responsibility. You can check with history, as soon as he comes back from doing his errands.

Meanwhile, at the Huffington Post, Robert Reich explains the historical roots of our contemporary crisis. What crisis is that? Why, the one in which government "slashed public goods and investments" and "shredded safety nets -- reducing aid to jobless families with children, tightening eligibility for food stamps, and cutting unemployment insurance so much that by 2007 only 40 percent of the unemployed were covered." This slashing and shredding is why the federal budget has plummeted to a terrifyingly parsimonious $3.8 trillion, and just 44.6 million Americans meet the dangerously tightened eligibility requirements for food stamps. It's, like, Dickensian -- there's hardly any government left!

So then, having reliably sketched the problems of our own moment, Reich lays out the historical path that we took to get here. First, America moved into the Garden of Eden in precisely 1947, and oh my goodness look at all the big ripe apples:

"During three decades from 1947 to 1977, the nation implemented what might be called a basic bargain with American workers. Employers paid them enough to buy what they produced. Mass production and mass consumption proved perfect complements. Almost everyone who wanted a job could find one with good wages, or at least wages that were trending upward."

Why 1947? Not mentioned. Just, you know, suddenly in the mid-to-late 1940s, somewhere right in there, Asians and Europeans suddenly wanted to import a bunch of building materials and stuff, and so we got to do a lot of manufacturing. Big mystery! Historians are still trying to figure out what happened in the years right before then -- maybe something dramatic?

Anyway, so leaving aside the question of timing, how about the wholly unrelated question of cause? Reich is happy to explain: "Government enforced the basic bargain in several ways. It used Keynesian policy to achieve nearly full employment. It gave ordinary workers more bargaining power. It provided social insurance. And it expanded public investment."

Government used Keynesian policy; therefore, full employment occurred. And then what happened? Amazingly enough, the cause of the ejection from Eden is unrelated to any of the stuff that caused it to exist: "It's easy to blame 'globalization' for the stagnation of middle incomes, but technological advances have played as much if not a greater role. Factories remaining in the United States have shed workers as they automated. So has the service sector."

Keynesian policy caused full employment; automation destroyed it. This is an iron rule of governmental explanatory schemes: if it's good, we caused it; if it's bad, we had nothing to do with it. This need for causal vagueness is why Robert Reich suddenly switches on history in 1947, but doesn't say why.

What we have on our hands is a regime crisis. Our elites can't explain what's gone wrong, and they don't know why their medicine isn't healing the wounded body. So they chant the ritual incantations a little louder.

They are deranged, and it shows.