It has been said that we’d all be a good deal better off if we governed less. This is wrong, for the simple reason that it isn’t possible. Governing less is a form of government as available to overuse and overreach as any other. Inactivity is a choice, and an active one at that. Nero never governed Rome with so hot a passion as when he fiddled while it burned.
No one would argue that the mother that parents the best is the one that parents the least. A non-interventionist, laissez-faire system of government, when applied to the dinner table, does not produce a society of flourishing individuals. It merely destroys the dining room. And I have yet to see a local political candidate run on the slogan: “Elect me, I will do less than the other guy!” It is the prototypical complaint of the small-town voter that his elected officials do nothing, and offer lame excuses when prodded on the point. Only the distance and obscurity of “national politics” allows one of those excuses to wax philosophical — that one does little because one is enacting an ideal form of government.
Imagine if some poor sucker of a Mayor, a victim of watching national news, were to suggest that he could not possibly work to attract a business to the area, as it would represent government intervention into the operations of the free market. His electorate could only conclude that the Mayor was stoned — or that he was going to be. The thing is laughable when it is small, but we forget to laugh when the thing goes national, and presidents and CEOs hold up their hands and say we simply can’t have good jobs in America, as the market favors all production remaining in China, or some such nonsense organized to conceal a drive for private gain at the expense of the whole country.
As a mood, the call to “govern less” drives on the fumes of bad government. A child with a bad father is rather prone to rebel against fatherhood as such. We might not like the fact that the world is filled with people who think having “no rules” is a good, but we can understand it better when we consider that our class of rebels were raised in and through bad and stupid rules, given unfairly and unequally, and enforced without sincerity on the one hand and without love on the other. Bad parenting tends toward the production of the permanent teenager. Why should we be shocked to find that bad government tends towards the production of libertarians?
Every time a particular man, acting in the name of the government, enrages human custom and sensibility by trampling on the peace of a local community — whether by propagandizing their children, building highways through their neighborhoods, or limiting their peaceful activity with some inane and senseless law — he commits two sins. The first is a sin against the peaceful order of the society he disrupts. The second is the production of a temptation towards libertarianism, or even anarchism. For it seems a good deal more reasonable that the best government governs less when the current government governs badly; a good deal more plausible that no one should sit in judgment for the whole society, when those who are supposed to do so spend the majority of their time destroying the integrity of those smaller societies that make it up. It does very little good to chide a conservative for his libertarianism, if it is the most convenient weapon he finds lying around to defend his family against, say, a propaganda regime aimed at turning his children into moral monsters or a national plan to turn his house into a strip-mine.
I, for instance, think it ridiculous that Mr. Biden, against all reason, will punish those who have already suffered covid if they do not get a vaccine. But the greater evil of such a moronic mandate is the libertarianism it has, and will continue, to inspire. Already it has produced, like a spreading plague, a people infected by the notion that no one could ever mandate a vaccination, that governance for the sake of the health of the whole society is itself nefarious; that, in short, the problem is not one of bad governance, but of governance at all.
One must return to the root of the problem. The decision to govern less is a positive act of governance, just as a sin of omission is still a sin. Man was condemned to govern when he was created to fill the earth and subdue it. He is a creature that can never ask “shall I govern?” for he only thinks and acts on the condition that he governs himself; only eats and drinks on the condition that he governs the world; only grows on the condition that he is governed, and that he is given an increased world over which to exercise a governance of his own. Behold, the universe’s best joke, a governed and governing creature, a baby and a father, his dignity and his absurdity, his nobility and his whole nature.
And because man must govern, he must also give up on deciding whether he shall govern more or less, and instead admit that he is either governing well or poorly, and that where more government is bad, it is not bad because it is “too much” any more than because it is “too little,” but because it is unjust. Raising children in state-sponsored orphanages is not bad because of some hidden quantity of proper governance that such an activity misses. It is bad because it bars other men from the dignity of government, namely, the government of their own families. To obsess over quantity when the question is one of quality is simply to avoid an accurate description of the qualitative world, so obviously given over to various, distributed, changing, and different acts of governance.
And it is the great lie of this weakening branch of conservatism that less governance will lead to a small government. There are many arguments to prove the opposite. A government hell-bent on doing nothing must wage war against all those who would govern positively. The do-nothings must do something against the do-something party. The logical consequence of a regime of doing nothing is a large, active police force, judiciary, and prison system, which manages all those who would govern positively, afflicting individuals, against their will, with various orders, dictates, commands, and laws given for the sake of the common good. Historically, this is simply true: the expansion of liberal capitalism across the globe did not shrink the government, the size of its bureaucracies, the activity of its courts, the population of its prisons, or the number of its laws, but bloated those centralized powers conceived of as “only” protecting the rights of the atomized individual from their infringement by his neighbor.
And this is a veritable bee-hive of activity, a frenzy of limitation, a passion of reduced government. It is not the libertarian, but the older, feudal authority who is able to relax in the knowledge that, after all, fathers will give commands to their sons, abbots to the monks, bishops to priests, masters to their apprentices, lords to the tenants, and so on. He may very well hope to govern as little as possible on any given Wednesday. But this hope would not be the fulfillment of an ideal of less governance, but of maximized governance, distributed throughout the society rather than concentrated in his person or government. If such a large power governs less, it is only because smaller powers are governing more, and governing well, rendering intervention unnecessary, and because they are unnecessary, unjust. The libertarian impulse, which yearns for a reduction of the power of the centralized state, is a good one. The libertarian strategy, that the centralized state limits itself to protecting rights, is not a good one. One cannot both demand that the government be small and call any neighborly attempt at self-government tyrannical infringement upon one’s rights — which are to be protected by the government. It is an oddity of liberal societies that the man who most desires a shrunken centralized government is the man most likely to sue to you for walking on his lawn; that the man who cries against the bloated size of the federal government also cries against you telling him to turn down talk radio while you’re trying to sleep, calling it a violation of his rights. In both cases he awakens and demands growth of precisely the same entity that he otherwise says should slumber and shrink.
This is the moral truth that the Catholic Church is ceaselessly teaching: that the only way to attain a small government is to govern more. That is, the act of governing must be recognized as an act which already occurs at every level of society. This includes a government that governs the whole society, necessarily, but never excludes those acts of governance which constitute the society in the first place — the governance of fathers, mothers, neighbors and friends.
It is simply a fact that the just and loving governance of sons by their fathers renders unjust and unnecessary the subsequent, coercive interventions of larger bodies, up to and including the centralized state. Thomas Aquinas said as much when he argues that laws and their enforcement are are necessary to bring people into virtue insofar as smaller, distributed acts of government, like fatherly teaching and local custom, have failed: “as to those young people who are inclined to acts of virtue, by their good natural disposition, or by custom, or rather by the gift of God, paternal training suffices, which is by admonitions. But since some are found to be depraved, and prone to vice, and not easily amenable to words, it was necessary for such to be restrained from evil by force and fear, in order that, at least, they might desist from evil-doing, and leave others in peace, and that they themselves, by being habituated in this way, might be brought to do willingly what hitherto they did from fear, and thus become virtuous. Now this kind of training, which compels through fear of punishment, is the discipline of laws.” The inference is one we are all reasonably acquainted with, that if one wants less of the movement into virtue to come from the discipline of the laws, then one must strive for more, and not less, governance from everyone else.