Alex Masters’s article in Islander VI, “Politics Is a Complex System,” has much to recommend it in the way of recognizing reality; where it fails is in its vision of the final outcome, a flaw which echoes backwards into its recommendations for immediate action. Nevertheless, as I’ll lay out in this article, Masters’s piece recommends much which deserves recommendation. We should receive and incorporate these worthwhile parts while identifying and remedying the errors by reference to Scripture.

The Good

The central idea of the piece’s reality-view is mentioned in the title: “Politics Is a Complex System.” Masters recognizes and states the mammoth complexity of our modern governments, Leviathans which swallow every part of our society (including the church), albeit he states this in much more neutral terms than I have. The modern state administers a dominating swathe of society, and as such it has taken on the complexity of society, including all the complexity of industry and all the complexity which allows technology and is allowed thereby. Attempting to deal with modernity without integrating this reality into our worldview would be hideously foolish and counter-productive.The more influence such an attempt attained, the worse the damage.

Moreover, Masters is bang on the money in several points on how we ought to integrate this reality into our action. No matter how good our ideas are in the long run, if they set the country off in a panic towards the foe, we will fail (pg 31). Electoral realities must be recognized; if you wish to change something in a monumentally unpopular way, change the people’s mind first. Then you can do it and have it stick.

(See the abolitionism argument; consider that the most effective way to end abortion is to make it a stench to the people, at which point laws will follow eventually, laws that last more than a single term in office.)

He calls out also the intellectual stagnation of the Right wing, writing, “Meanwhile, the Right is stuck in 1987 economically and 2016 socially. This needs to change” (pg. 33). I may be in disagreement on how it needs to change, but anybody with eyes who watches politics knows that the current crop of politicians, mainstream pundits, and conservative intelligentsia are fatally out of touch with reality, with the people they pretend to stand for, and with the real challenges of modernity. Far and few are the exceptions- Rupert Lowe, Thomas Massie, imperfect though they be- and they are the subject of constant assault.

Finally, he calls for an organizational competence which Martin’s article also called for, with similar correctness.

The Problems

Masters’s central problem is evidenced most blatantly in his dismissal of decentralized remedies: “The last 40 years have discredited the free market as a mechanism for delivering national projects” (pg. 33). Masters is unapologetically contemptuous of the free market’s potential, actually, indicating that, “Anyone who cannot see the difference between producing sandwiches and delivering a stable energy grid should be removed from serious conversation” (pg 33, following previous quote). Instead, we must have “central planning” (pg 33), Masters thinks, planning that touches everything necessary to develop a re-industrialized country (Britain, in this case), including government concern for “the National Grid, gas and electricity providers, the Department for Environment, and even the Church” (pg. 33).

Two concessions I must make here. First, whatever enmity I may bear towards governmental interference in the economy, the government acts as the people’s agent of national self-defense (kind of, but that’s for another day’s debate), and so it has a duty to establish robust access to certain important resources, such as gas, food, and water, albeit with the absolute minimum of meddling that will effect the proper end. Similarly, the government has a duty to protect the corporate property rights against foreign intrusion, without intruding on familial or personal property rights.

Second, our current society has adapted to government-run utilities. We are dependent on them, hooked and addicted. Weaning away will be difficult, complicated, and probably slow, unless we take the quick route of just collapsing outright. Trying to switch our society over to the free market cold turkey is like taking a twenty-year addict and making him go full Simon the Stylite until he is no longer attracted to his chemical vices. It could work, but it will hurt like the dickens and might well kill. “Delivering a stable energy grid” really does require government action at this time, though not forever.

As such, we ought to heed Masters’s injunction to develop thorough plans for how to do this, for how to fix the problems the government has a hand in or jurisdiction over, and to be careful that our plans do not forget the problems’ complexity. We really ought to consider the million interlocking parts and prepare to use each one in its place in bettering the world, making it more holy (my goal, not his). But we should set aside his dismissal of the free market and such decentralized solutions; they are not an immediate answer, but they are a large part of the eventual answer, a goal we ought to be moving towards if we do not want to end up back where we are now, or worse.

Reformation’s Pitfall

One principle of reformation is that reformation must be true and rightly directed if it does not want to herald greater evils than it turned upon. The French Revolution brought the Reign of Terror because its goal was vile or lacking; the American War for Independence brought the freest country in the world (2nd to Moses’s Israel and just a bit better than the mother country, England) because they turned their reformation towards defined and more-righteous-than-before goals, imperfect but worthwhile. A reformation which changes the mechanics and the directives but retains the principles of its predecessor will ultimately not so much fail as recoil. Christ puts it bluntly:

“When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So also will it be with this evil generation” (Matt. 12:43-45).

Such will be the state of England, America, and the West if we do not reform in the principle as well as in the policy. The lack of recognition for this reflects also in Masters’s listing of “the country’s chief problems” (pg. 31). There he names “the demographic crisis, the energy crisis, the collapse of manufacturing, the tax and regulatory systems, and the national debt” (pg. 31). Indeed, these are issues, but he omits two more, one of which swallows the rest: first, the horrendous injustice of the West’s judicial systems, fraught with unjust punishment and immoral leniency (Deut. 19:13,21); and second (most importantly), the West’s widespread personal apostasy, our consequent (and much loved by the ‘church’) hatred for His law, our swelling hatred of God (Ps. 14:1-3; Matt. 12:30; Rom. 1:18-25). Without reformation that addresses that God-hatred, all our changes amount only to sweeping out the dust that the eight spirits may return and make their home amidst our bones.

Masters’s article finds its central failure in not recognizing and acting upon this central part of reformation.

In Example

In coherence with Masters’s method, then, let us look at what this principle would imply for our action towards the free market. Ought we to sideline it, as Masters suggests, leaving only the small-scale to the private market, implementing thorough governmental interference if not actual nationalization in order to fix our problems? Or ought we to move towards a freer market, de-centralizing the vast majority of society away from the civil government and into the sphere of family government, albeit always restrained by the civil government’s punishment of violence?

You perhaps anticipate which direction I turn.

Masters writes that, “The last 40 years have discredited the free market as a mechanism for delivering national projects,” as already quoted. But two points should need clarity here: first, the scope of ‘national projects’; and second, the history of the past 40 years.

In terms of scope, Masters seems to mean by ‘national project’ something potentially as large as the nation’s entire economy, or at least a major genre thereof (the industrial sector, which stands equalled only by the agricultural sector, real estate, and such-like). Now, we can all recognize the benefits of governmental management for the ‘commons,’ for infrastructure like water piping and dams which do not practically admit of wholescale competition (see this article on that), but Masters’s definition essentially encompasses everything in the potential command economy.

As for the history, saying that “The last 40 years have discredited the free market” implies that the free market was tried and failed. The history of the past 40 years, however, has been ever-increasing government interference leading to ever-increasing failure. When it comes to industry, the current system is decisively a command economy, albeit with certain free market elements. If we want to determine whether the mixture is flawed by reason of free market or command economy elements (the second of which ever more predominate as the system fails), we need only to contrast what happens when you increase one element or the other outside the single example Masters appeals to. An extreme command economy gets you Soviet Russia; a freer (if not perfectly free by any means) economy gets you Victorian England, 1800s America, and 1600s Holland. Industry thrived far more in freer markets.

Now, going straight from an economy so heavily regulated as ours to one fully free is not possible in all areas; the shock alone would debilitate, producing an economic disruption that might lose the reformer political position for decades. But our societies can be weaned from centralization.

Success in such an endeavor requires us to confront the problem in all its complexity. The regulative system through which much of the command is accomplished does serve a role in our society, at least ostensibly: protecting those who would be harmed by economic advancement’s more unscrupulous side. It does so with hysterical poverty of success, hysterical particularly for those abused and for those whose livelihoods it prevents, but it does stand in that role. Every industrial accident is a reason for more regulation because regulation is theoretically meant to stop such accidents.

The regulative system, however, prevents competition, prevents innovation, increases overhead, and fails to provide anything nearing full justice, being a system thoroughly compromised by those it is meant to restrain and singularly unresponsive to those it ought to protect. A much better alternative would be mandatory full disclosure combined with extensive, personal liability for harm done, as well as readily available torts by which persons harmed by environmental damage could gain reparation. Such would establish strong incentives for the companies to self-regulate, without the cost of government and without making the government arbiter of what is and isn’t proper in an area the decision makers are typically either babes-in-the-woods (non-expert legislators) or compromised (industry experts, industry magnates, legislators) (compromised both by direct bribes and by promises of employment).

Here, however, I must return to an earlier point. Such a system would work only if the judicial system it ran through were not intensely corrupt, uncaring of justice, hostile to God’s law, predicated on a melange of labyrinthine statutes and judicial excuses, and immensely expensive to engage with. In other words, while partial de-regulation would be good on its own, in order to avoid a slow creep back to more regulation, meant to counter more and more edge cases and bits of dishonesty, in order to avoid perpetuating a system inherently vulnerable to capture by its ostensible subjects, you must reform the judicial system according to God’s law. Only in concurrence with such reform can we institute complete de-regulation and reinstate true responsibility.

Complexity, Simplicity

Ultimately, the government ought not to be so complex. The government’s duty is to enforce a specific set of law (Gen. 9:5-6) given by God, to punish murder and that which partakes of murder’s character: murder, theft, assault, theft, adultery, rape, blasphemy, and others. To that end, the government really only needs to be a judiciary (to decide cases), a small executive (to investigate and enforce cases), a minimal legislature (to recognize customs and establish procedures), and a small military (designed for defense). Indeed, it need not have much in the way of laws; likely a constitution defining the government’s form and certain procedural laws having to do with border interactions (including the military) would be enough.

We do not currently have such a government; even the American model as found in 1787, while several orders of magnitude smaller than America’s current behemoth, was much larger than what I propose. Even utilities would be omitted from this model. But we cannot have this government unless we work towards it.

Working towards this goal of obedience to His model requires a recognition of the current complexity of government. That complexity we should seek to begin off-loading into the free market, letting men organize themselves as God meant us to, letting men fulfil their vocations and provide for their families. In the process of doing their work as best as they can, men will develop a better design for the economy, more responsive to change and more stable in the long-term (if the society cares about the long-term natively; note that a society which does not care about the long term will not abide its government caring, so this proviso applies to command economies too). They did it for centuries, as Western history shows; it took a century and a half or so of ever-growing government disruption to bring us to the brink we’re at. But those complexities will be there at the start, and if we want to off-load them, we need to be able to work them for as long as is necessary to prepare their place outside the central grasp.

Be prudent in the transition, and plan ahead. But transition. Move towards virtue and righteousness, by which kings prosper (Prov. 20:28) and peoples become fruitful (Ex. 20:12). Do not reform only the periphery of the problem; go towards the heart. And have strength only in Him (Is. 26:12).

God bless.