It's the Scope not the Scale; or "The Rest is Just Scribbling and Bibbling"

Returning to the sheer awfulness of the Bush presidency, I wanted to address an argument "liberty" raises in the comments.  She argues that Bush wasn't so bad because of all the things he didn't actually do that FDR did.  No doubt, FDR is up there on the "awful" list, but I want to make the case for Bush's total awfulness by invoking a distinction Bob Higgs makes in Crisis and Leviathan.

Bob points out that the real problem with big government is Big Government.  What he means by that is that it's one thing for government to grow in scale, but when government grows in scope is when the real trouble starts.  The key to Bob's ratchet effect argument is that crises lead not just to government "scaling up" but to it acquiring powers that it didn't have before, i.e., a change in the scope of its powers. The other part of the ratchet effect argument is that when the crisis passes, the government might reduce its exercise of these new powers, but not all the way back to the pre-crisis level.  What people often miss is that this also means that those new powers lay dormant waiting for the next feasible situation in which they can quickly be activated. The long-run damage comes from the acquisition of those powers in the first place, not just their exercise in the specific crisis in which they are acquired.

Over the last few months (and I'm going to ignore the previous 7.5 years worth of similar points with respect to the "war on terror" and the Iraq mess), the Bush Administration has given the state a whole new bunch of powers that it did not have before in any real way. 

The Fed has given itself new responsibilities and powers that are nowhere to be found in any of its mandate, and it did so with the complete blessing of Bush.  Those powers have led to a doubling of its balance sheet in under a year.

The US government is now a part-owner of financial institutions (if not auto companies), and the power to do so is more or less new and represents a significant expansion of the scope of government power.

Third, the auto bailout represents an arrogant use of executive power (yet another in a long line of many by the Bush crew) in his unilaterally allocating TARP money to Chrysler and GM.  Exercising unilateral executive power that way within the economy represents a change in scope as well.  (And for our friend Sean:  can you point me to folks on the left who are objecting as loudly to this use of executive power as they were to those related to the war?  I'm not being sarcastic - I'd like to see it if it's out there.)

Many of the truly awful things Obama might do that "liberty" is concerned with will be things he will be able to do because of the precedent of the expansion of the scope of government power that the Bush Administration has engaged in over the last 8 years. And the blame for that expansion of scope belongs right at the feet of George W. Bush and arguably makes him the worst president of the last <insert large number here> years. Obama may well expand the scale, but it was Bush who ratcheted up the scope so that any Obama expansion will happen much more easily. 

Once the principles of government ownership, bailouts for everyone, Fed funding for non-banks, and unlimited executive power to intervene in the economy are granted, as the Bushies have done, anything Obama does will be just, in the immortal words of Mozart, "scribbling and bibbling."

Comments

[liberty]

Very well said. I have been thinking a lot about Bush's expansion of executive power recently, and I fear you are correct. Hoover also laid the groundwork for FDR, and I consider him to be among the worst presidents too. My only point, really, was that I fear sometimes that libertarians lack imagination when they say that the next president couldn't possibly be worse than Bush. Maybe Bush is "worse" in some sense for making possible the subsequent president, but that president may actually put into action the policies of demise. When free market proponents don't seem to see the difference between two candidates because nobody could be worse than Bush, I worry.

But, you are basically correct, I think, in everything you say above.

[liberty]

Also, I wonder whether Bush needed to lay the groundwork. The economic "crisis" on its own could have been stage-setting enough for Obama. We dont really know what FDR's presidency would have been like if he took over right after Coolidge but somehow the Depression had begun anyway. And we don't know how an Obama presidency would differ if Bush had not expanded government scope-- a real FDR-like Obama presidency might take all the powers that Bush took and many more without any precedent. FDR took many powers that Hoover never would have considered taking. Hoover was a pretty considerate constitutionalist despite wanting to expand government's scale.

[Rafe Champion]

There is a story that the Russian serfs and peasants used to say "Long live the Tsar" regardless of the badness of the current incumbent because the next one could be worse.
There is a more modern saying along the lines "'Cheer up" they said, 'Things could be worse!', so we cheered up, and sure enough, things did get worse!".

The distinction between scale and scope is important and it also helps to make a distinction between big and strong government. The government does not need to be big, but it does needs to be strong enough to stick with the minimal set of things that it needs to do and resist the efforts of rent seekers and factions to broaden its scale and scope. Of course that is a bit much to ask at present because the factions and rent seekers are firmly in the saddle, like the lunatics in charge of the asylum.

An irritating by-product of the scope of government is the incredible range of detail on every topic under the sun that political leaders need to have at their fingertips. So "gotcha" journalists will ask the PM or a PM contender the price of a pint of milk or the precise size of the national debt and a conservative politician will be lampooned if they slip up on any detail.

[dmfdmf]

As far as economic powers I think the recent crisis has only made explicit what was always implicit in our FRB system with fiat money. In a sense this is more *honest* and thus better in so far as people will see who to blame.

As far as police powers, I am afraid that Bush has shredded the constitution and laid the ground work for a future dictator.

[libertyfirst]

I agree with the assessment of Bush's presidency and I think "Crisis and Leviathan" is a wonderful book.

However, I'm not very sure that there is a difference in the scale (and scope) of awfulness between FDR and Bush.

Bush expanded the scope of government and probably opened the way for more Big Government to come: also FDR did. The problem with the New Deal was not a problem of scale, was a problem of scope, too.

Besides, probably Roosevelt's New Deal was more innovative from the point of view of the expansion of state power than Bush's presidency. Bush already had all the powers he needed, he only needed the chance to put them in practice.

[Steve Horwitz]

The only real competition Bush has for worst of the last 100 years are Wilson and FDR. All three dramatically expanded the scope of gov't power during their administrations

I didn't mean to suggest FDR was only "scale" - quite the contrary. My point was only to suggest that whatever fears we might have about Obama, the blame for opening the door he's going to walk through lies with Bush (and yes, FDR and Wilson and others before that).

[libertyfirst]

Ok. I completely agree.