Knowledge And Decisions

The government as a decision maker is often regarded as simply the institutional personification of “society.” But the diversities, conflicts, and disparate incentives and constraints which make “society” a meaningless abstraction as a decision-making unit also make government a fragmentary aggregation of decision makers. An experienced Washington insider refers to “the warring principalities that are sometimes known as the Federal government.”¹ This is not the classic “separation of powers” into legislative, judicial, and executive branches. These “warring principalities” are all part of the same executive branch. Executive agencies of the U.S. government have not only followed policies at cross purposes with one another; they have even sued each other in court. Theoretically, they are all under the control and the direction of the President, but the fact that these internecine disputes can persist and be publicly aired not only in the press but in the courts suggests that Presidents often find it politically prudent to stay out of these power struggles. Moreover, the areas of autonomous decision making within government can be even smaller than a given agency or bureau. Supervisors may “have little control over their nominal subordinates, who enjoy de facto tenure,”² even when they are not civil servants, because of those subordinates’ links to particular Congressmen and their staffs or to the press or to outside constituencies.³

Governmental decision-making units must be analyzed like other social or economic units which choose courses of action designed to maximize their own well-being, under the particular incentives and constraints of their respective situations. This obvious point must be emphasized because of a large literature which recognizes nongovernmental activities as self-interested but arbitrarily treats any governmental activity as axiomatic proof of an objective social need for such activity.⁴ Despite the existence of some self-sacrificing public officials, to postulate that such officials generally control governmental decision making seems less realistic than the opposite view that “parties formulate policy in order to win elections, rather than win elections in order to formulate policy.”⁵ For nonelected governments, the postulate that government activity is solely a response to social needs seems even less reasonable as a basis for analysis.

As noted earlier (Chapter 2), political surrogates are a way of economizing on knowledge in government decision making, since each citizen cannot become fully informed on every issue. However, this arrangement also means a built-in advantage for political surrogates over their constituents in the use of knowledge. No small part of the political art consists of the exploitation of that advantage — whether by misstating the costs and benefits of particular programs, by ominously referring to the weighty considerations “known only to the President” in his conduct of foreign policy, or the intricate rules of “the bureaucratic maze,” known only to insiders and therefore insulating much governmental activity from outside scrutiny. All kinds of political systems (democracy, monarchy, feudalism, etc.) put enormous emphasis on the personal “loyalty” of subordinates — not loyalty to the public, or even to the government, but to their immediate superiors — thereby sealing off a source of leaks of knowledge to outsiders.

Although “society” is far from being a decision-making unit, even in governmental decisions, it is of course the most important unit on whom the impact of political decisions is to be considered. Therefore the trade-offs to be considered here are those political trade-offs of enduring social significance, rather than the “horse trading” that goes on among politicians. Among the major political trade-offs to be considered here for any political system are those involving (1) freedom, (2) rights, and (3) time.

FREEDOM AND FORCE

One of the most important political trade-offs is between the amount of freedom and the amount of other characteristics desired in a society. The problem is made more difficult by intellectual ambiguities and philosophical disagreements that have long surrounded the very meaning of freedom: “We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word, we do not mean the same thing.”⁶ This is at least as true today as when Abraham Lincoln said it.