About the Role of the State

Discussions about the role of the state are invariably contaminated by data misrepresentation and political demagogy.

The Portuguese Government in 2013, called a four billion Euros cut in public spending agreed with the IMF a re-foundation of the state. Like in many similar examples of faux liberalism, it was simply a matter of "get out so that I can sit there". Indeed, the government simultaneously borrowed an equivalent amount to create a new development bank. In a country where the state already controls more than 50% of the banking sector, to create one more state-owned bank, in a model that has already failed in the past in Portugal and the rest of the world, can only be deceit or irresponsibility.

In short, the Portuguese government's proposal for a debate on the role of government is not serious and would not deserve commenting. But a real debate about the role of the state is important and should be always present in political discussions.

As Martin Wolf wrote in a recent article on the topic "this is the most important issue of political economy" and has been debated since antiquity by Plato and other philosophers. As he points out, one of the first questions to ask is about the limits and extent of the protective function of the state. The theme is handled brilliantly by the author so I strongly recommend you read his article.

However, to have an intelligent discussion about such limits it is important to know more or less in detail the current role of the state in terms of function, cost and contribution to national wealth.

For example, public spending is usually broken down into ten categories, as shown in the following table with data for Portugal:



However, this breakdown is not the most appropriate to understand the functions of the state. The functions of the state should be divided into five major activities: sovereignty, regulatory, insurance, production and distribution.

The importance (for good and for bad) of each of these activities has an impact on the various categories of public expenditure listed in the table above but are not necessarily fully reflected in budgetary terms. For instance, regulation may have little or no budgetary costs but can have huge economic costs. Moreover, they may be budgeted or not (e.g. in Portugal the electricity rates paid to regulators are not fully budgeted). Equally, the redistribution function of the state can be undertaken on the revenue or the expenditure side.

We can also question whether insurance, production and distributive activities must be carried out by public or private entities subcontracted by the administration. For example, why contract construction services in public works and not education services. That is, the debate on state production and state provision must be clearly separate from the debate on the functions of the state.

Most importantly, the insurance function must be clearly separated from the redistribution function. For example, whether we are talking of health, unemployment or weather insurance, one must make a clear distinction between a component of compulsory insurance (subsidized or not by the state) and a discretionary component funded by taxes to deal with exceptional situations (epidemics, natural disasters, etc.).

Finally, with regard to life insurance and pensions, in addition to its subsidization, the fundamental debate should be on the minimum and maximum levels. For example, does it makes sense that the State offers pension insurance to millionaires? Given the weight that pensions have in public spending this is perhaps the most critical aspect in any debate about the role of the state.

In summary, a deep and thoughtful debate about the limits to the role of the state needs a breakdown of public expenditure and its financing by each of the five categories of state activity. The creation of an accounting system that allows this analysis should be the first step of any government that wants to make a serious debate about the functions of the state.

Only after agreeing the limits in each state activity should we discuss separately the issues related to the relative effectiveness of direct or delegated administration, as well as how to solve the free-riding, theft and nepotism inherent in any political system.

Sharing the burden of government

The old fear that democracy would allow the poor to expropriate the property of the rich has never materialized. If anything, the opposite may be happening in America.

Explaining this fact is one of the greatest puzzles of American politics. An interesting attempt to solve the puzzle can be found on this post by Christopher Jencks.

However, in our view, the author misses two of the most important reasons, namely the decreasing returns to scale in the field of taxation and the policy of “bribing of the poorer among the poor”.

The first relates to the well known fact that the rich can afford to buy more tax planning/avoidance protection, and that when faced with higher taxes they have a greater incentive to take their income and wealth away from the taxman.

The second is largely unknown or considered something that happens only in less developed economies. For instance, Chavez and other populist dictators often secure their political power base by providing some income distribution among the poorest members of society to provide them with a base of popular support. This technique is also used by criminals when setting up their own system of social security in the neighborhoods they control.

What is not recognized is that the American situation, where the bottom 50% of the population hardly pays any income tax, corresponds to a similar policy. This policy has been at the expense of the remaining 45% of the non-rich population (mostly middle and upper middle classes).

This raises two interesting questions that we will revisit later. First, why representative democracy did protect the rich but failed to develop a better tax system based on expenditure and wealth rather than income? Second, are the bottom earners really benefiting from income tax exemptions?

Hayek vs. Keynes: The role of government and the dangers of totalitarianism and economic decadence

There is currently a generalized view of Keynes as the paragon of state intervention and of Hayek as the quintessential laissez-faire economist. Both views are wrong.

Keynes basic philosophy, as stated in his General Theory, is that governments should be entrusted with “the task of adjusting to one another the propensity to consume and the inducement to invest” to prevent effective demand deficiency. For him, the state should decide how much to produce (to achieve full-employment) while individuals should decide what to produce, with which resources (labor and capital) and to whom it should accrue.

For Hayek popular terms like “full employment”, “planning”, “social security”, and “freedom from want” were the fool’s-gold words, often invoked with catastrophic consequences, as in Germany where the full-employment between 1935 and 1939 was achieved at the expense of expropriating, deporting or killing 600 thousand Jews. For him monetary policy cannot provide a real cure except by a general and considerable inflation. Moreover, for him the rising monopolization of the economy was not inherent to capitalism (economies of scale) or justified by technological necessities but was instead the result of collusive agreements promoted by public policies.

Given the circumstances when they were writing, we can understand Keynes’ fear of recurrent massive unemployment destroying capitalism as well as Hayek’s alarm about the danger that rising government control would inevitably lead to a totalitarian state. However, after more than 70 years, and with the benefit of hindsight, we may now question if such fears were warranted.

After all, some of the totalitarian regimes were military defeated (e.g. the German Nazis and Italian Fascists), some imploded through inefficiency (e.g. communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe) or have postponed their demise by embracing authoritarian mercantilist capitalism (e.g. the Chinese communists).

Equally, the subsequent recessions and accompanying massive unemployment were overcome without major social unrest, partly due to the generalization of unemployment insurance.

Nevertheless, we should not forget the tremendous losses caused by such collectivist experiments. The more than 60 million of casualties during the World War II started by Hitler, the 15 million victims of Stalin's reign of terror in the 1930s and Mao’s more than 20 million victims in the 1950s and 1960s during the so-called Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Also pointless has been the waste of manpower as result of involuntary unemployment experienced in many countries ruled by collectivist (mostly socialist) regimes in 2009, namely: Zimbabwe (95%), Turkmenistan (60%), South Africa (24%), Spain (19%) or Tunisia (16%).

Given this grim past, the question is: could it have been avoided if the policy advice of Keynes and Hayek were more widespread and better understood? If not avoided it could at least be minimized. In particular this would be so, if the “prophets’ followers” shared their common care for capitalism.

Instead, most followers continued to ignore them on this, as well as the failure of all past predictions by both friends and foes of capitalism that it was doomed to fail. All such theories, from Karl Marx surplus value theory of capital accumulation, to Schumpeter’s claim that that the success of capitalism would lead to a form of corporatism and a fostering of values hostile to capitalism, especially among intellectuals, Milton Friedman’s theory on the suicidal nature of capitalists to Solzhenitsyn's attack on the commercialized nature of Western culture have been proved wrong.

Even more importantly, all attempts to create a pragmatic so-called “third-way”, from the recent British experience by Tony Blair’s New Labor, the Czech and Hungarian attempts to create a democratic socialism in 1968 and 1956, to the more distant Fascist “third way” of the 1930s, aimed at keeping the best of socialism and capitalism ended up dramatically retaining the worst of both systems, creating more collectivism, corruption and inequality.

For Keynes or Hayek there was no alternative to capitalism or “third-way”, simply a choice about the degree of government intervention in the economy. While assessing the supply of goods and services not provided by the private sector or the regulation aimed at promoting a level playing field, Keynes, the politician, was obviously more compromising about accepting a substantial role for the government while Hayek, the theorist, was more puritan.

Some types of state capitalism (notably the Scandinavian type) have now shown that fears about the rise of authoritarianism as a result of greater state involvement in the economy, as feared by Hayek, do not materialize until a high level of public spending as a percentage of GDP is reached (about 50%). Equally, the rising share of government in the economy has some smoothing effect on the business cycle as advocated by Keynes, but after a certain level (again, about 50%) it triggers a slowdown in productivity and consequent economic decadence. Thus, Keynes and Hayek’s views are correct within a given range of state intervention, but its limits are imprecise and poorly understood.