Anticipating The Devolution Of Big Government

With the US elections approaching next week, as well as the threat of another fiscal cliff showdown looming, we asked contributing editor Charles Hugh Smith to revisit his earlier work [12] on how the expansive Central State has come to dominate both private society (i.e., the community) and the marketplace, to the detriment of the nation’s social and economic stability. In this updated installment, we will examine six critical dynamics that will lead to the devolution of Peak Government. Massive Borrowing In a misguided attempt to maintain an unsustainable Status Quo, the Federal government is borrowing unprecedented amounts of money that then must be serviced. And the Federal Reserve is expanding its balance sheet by trillions of dollars (“printing money”) and intervening in stock, bond, and other markets for the purposes of managing perception (“the recovery is here!”) These government funds are not just paying the government’s bills – they are being used to guarantee loans and mortgages that subsequently enter default, transferring what was private debt to the public and subsidizing politically powerful special interests. Guarantees and subsidies both incentivize what is known as moral hazard: the separation of risk from consequence. This can be summarized very simply. People who are not exposed to risk act completely differently than those who are exposed to risk. When risk has been transferred to the taxpayers by guarantees, give-aways, and subsidies, then speculation and mal-investment are incentivized. If the bet pays off, I get to keep the gain, but if it loses, then I personally lose nothing, as the loss is transferred to the taxpayers. Institutionalized Mal-Investment The net result of these policies – borrowing immense sums to prop up an unsustainable Status Quo and institutionalizing moral hazard – leads to misallocation of scarce capital on a grand scale. In effect, the money borrowed by the federal government and electronically printed by the Federal Reserve is mal-invested, because those receiving the funding are personally not at risk and face no consequence if the money is squandered on speculation or unproductive programs. Once moral hazard has been institutionalized, it becomes a positive feedback loop. Since everyone in the system faces little personal consequence from mal-investment, the institution loses the ability to police itself. Even worse, concentrations of private wealth readily influence public institutions via lobbying and political contributions, exacerbating moral hazard and mal-investment of the publicly borrowed money. Erosion of Trust in Government Mal-investment inevitably yields poor results, and just as inevitably, the government seeks to mask the dismal results of moral-hazard riddled policies and agencies. This “perception management” is driven by political expediency, as public outrage at failed policies and unproductive spending would eventually lead to a political price being paid by the leadership. So failed policies are declared great successes, negative data is massaged into positive data, and unflattering frauds involving public funds are buried or transformed into pseudo-realities. More