Daniel Klein, a good friend of mine, has written a very interesting essay on The People’s Romance: Why People Love Government (as much as they do). Klein writes from a libertarian point of view, asking why people are so attached to government, even when the record of government in an area is a poor one. He suggests that the desire to be part of a collective movement motivates much support for government, that the state is uniquely suited to satisfy such collectivist urges, and that we should resist our psychological tendencies in this direction. This essay is part of Klein’s broader research program of developing a sociology and psychology of why libertarian ideas have not met with greater success. Indeed for any libertarian this should be a central question. I find Klein and Jeffrey Friedman (of Critical Review) to be the two most important thinkers on this topic.
While I consider myself a “small l” libertarian, my perspective differs from Klein’s in a number of ways. For instance I tend to take “The People’s Romance” as a constraint to a greater extent than does Klein. I see politics as a question of trading in one “mythology” for another, but a mythology of some kind is always necessary. This will constrain our ability to attain superior solutions, yet it is a constraint that typically receives little attention from economists. On net, I suspect that our American version of The People’s Romance does more to support liberty than damage it. I wonder whether bad policies are often not the price of our highly valuable macro-myths. Klein and I discuss these topics frequently, read his whole essay to see his take on what has gone wrong in Western societies.
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