Higgs sees government, as usual, vastly expanding during the crisis, and he’s sure that it will not shrink back to its former scale once the crisis is over. It never does, as he famously documented in his 1987 book, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government, and in later works exploring this “ratchet effect.”
By surveying the effect of wars, financial panics, and other crises over the course of a century, Higgs showed that most government growth occurs in sporadic bursts during emergencies, when politicians enact “temporary” programs and regulations that never get fully abolished. New Deal bureaucracies and subsidies persisted long after the Great Depression, for example, and the U.S. military didn’t revert to its prewar size after either of the world wars.
Besides charting the growth of government, Higgs identified the fundamental psychological cause. He recognized the political significance of the negativity effect, also called the negativity bias—the universal tendency of negative events and emotions to affect us more strongly than positive ones.
In our recent book on this bias, The Power of Bad, social psychologist Roy Baumeister and I drew on Higgs’s work to argue that the greatest problem in politics is what we call the Crisis Crisis—the never-ending series of crises, real or imagined, that are hyped by the media and lead to cures too often worse than the disease. It’s a perpetual problem because it’s so deeply rooted in human psychology, as Higgs explained in a 2005 essay, “The Political Economy of Fear.”
“To tell people not to be afraid is to give them advice that they cannot take,” Higgs wrote. “Our evolved physiological makeup disposes us to fear all sorts of actual and potential threats, even those that exist only in our imagination. The people who have the effrontery to rule us, who call themselves our government, understand this basic fact of human nature. They exploit it, and they cultivate it.” Rulers instinctively heed Machiavelli’s advice: “It is much safer to be feared than loved”—a sixteenth-century formulation of the negativity effect.
-John Tierney (The Politics of Fear)
We are seeing this now with the Wu Flu being the impetus around which many Progressives are showing their micro-totalitarians by seizing the Wu Flu key and letting their true selves out. Having taken advantage of “emergency” statutes within their State’s lawbooks, they have grabbed ahold of them and screamed “GIDDY’UP!!!”. Governors Murphy “no guns for you!” (NJ), Newsom “don’t use the beaches” (CA), “Half” Whitmer (No paint for you! MI), and Cuomo “Got COVID? Back to the nursing homes!” (NY) come to mind easily and quickly.
Very few Governors went the other way, namely Noem of SD, Hutchinson of Arkansas, and DeSantis of Florida come to mind.
Which group trusts their citizens of their State? Which group recognized that their citizens are adults and RESISTED the temptation to RULE over their lives? Who trusted in Freedom – knowing that not only good can come from it but that making bad decisions is also part and parcel of Freedom as well?
That last bit is crucial to freedom and yet those that would rule either don’t understand it, or worse, do but don’t care. They have decided that they know best for everyone and have decided that they should exercise, via their emergency totalitarianism, the Powers of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches that formerly made up our Separation of Powers.
And no, I’m not just picking on the Progressive Democrat Governors because there are some Progressive / Populist Republican governors doing the same thing.
And sorrowfully, our own governor summed up it quite pithily: Public Safety Trumps Everything.
No, it doesn’t but it does seem, if I am reading the polling right, it has trumped what many of us still believe in: Live Free or Die.
Freedom. So costly to have gained and yet so fleetingly lost in this time by one emergency order after another.
Here in NH, will we see that ratchet effect or will the aftereffects be with us from decades to come?
I know that I do not know the answer to that question. I fear what the real answer will be.
(H/T: Cafe Hayek)
