The rise of the plantation state

The rise of populist politicians is a global phenomenon. An interesting article from the bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal in Germany analyzes the phenomenon in light of the electoral advance of two populist parties last weekend, one extreme right and the other extreme left, in two German states (Bertrand Benoit, “The populist wave in Europe is not just about immigration, but also about declining confidence,” Wall Street JournalAugust 2, 2024).

The portrait that Benoit and his sources draw is roughly the following. A crisis arises that the government cannot solve because of the checks and balances of liberal democracy. This fuels dissatisfaction among the population and distrust of the government. As a result, voters are turning to populist politicians.

This analysis raises many questions. Why are current democratic governments less able to find solutions than before? How can voters distrust the government while electing populist rulers who promise to do so? more government? Populism is and has always been interventionist. And how can voters believe that populist governments will be able to solve all problems, given for example (as Benoit mentions) the level of the national debt – a problem caused by governments intending to solve all problems?

I propose there is a better explanation, inspired by the work of an economist and political philosopher Anthony of Jasay. The growing dissatisfaction with the state stems from its inherent inability to simultaneously satisfy non-identical individuals. Otherwise, his growing power for more than a century would have already done this. What happens is that democratic governments and their politicians compete to respond to the demands of a majority of voters and thus buy their support (as well as the support of outspoken special interests). This leads to dissatisfaction among those who finance the purchase or are handicapped by the new government interventions. Consider those who find themselves on the wrong side of official discrimination. These angry voters stake their own claims on government largesse and call this “social justice.” A new vague feeling of dissatisfaction arises that the government will try to defuse, at the expense of other citizens.

The more interventionist the state, the more people will complain. Like the Red Queen and Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the mirrorthe state must run faster to stay in place and even more to move forward.

We cannot dismiss the legitimate complaints of ordinary people about the harassment they have been subjected to by the political establishment in recent decades, from licensing laws to galloping criminalization and coercive discrimination. Think of the legal apartheid imposed against smokers, who were mostly from the lower classes, and the private places that wanted to welcome them – bars, fast food restaurants or even open-air places. (I would add and change a few things in my Econlib article from a quarter of a century ago on ‘The Economics of Smoking’, but my private property argument against the so-called ‘externalities’ of smoking was correct.) The most important The cause of the dissatisfaction lies in the pretensions and power of interventionist democratic governments. But it is a mistake to believe that a populist government can stem the flow of discontent. Populism is nothing other than a totalitarian democracy with a human face: that of a strong man. It leads to even more dirigism, polarization and dissatisfaction.

How will the Red Queen race end? Not good, says De Jasay (see the last chapter of his groundbreaking book The state(the interpretation that follows differs only slightly from that of De Jasay). Constantly asked to give and not take, to intervene and not harm, state leaders will use all their discretionary power just to stay in charge. They must promise more to outbid their political competitors. The state will therefore need more and more economic power. It will merge political and economic power into ‘state capitalism’. It will nationalize the economy covertly, through regulation and cronyism rather than the Marxist route. Ultimately, the country will have no choice but to abolish electoral competition and other checks and balances in order to effectively pursue the happiness of the people – and the power of the rulers. The state will have acquired unlimited power. In this brave new world, former citizens will have effectively become the property of the state, just as slaves belonged to their masters on the plantations of old. The state will have become the plantation state.

We don’t have to be as pessimistic as De Jasay to understand that this is the path our democratic leviathans are following around the world.

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Sometimes one must give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to DALL-E what is DALL-E’s. The featured image of this post was produced by DALL-E after just one prompt: “Create an image of the Red Queen and Alice (in Lewis Carroll’s *Through the Looking-Glass*) running faster and faster to stay in place.”