Ed Glaeser has an interesting post on what he terms “the case for small-government egalitarianism” which goes off into a stimulus detour, but which is more interesting on more enduring issues. He observes that “Political divisions have not always pitted big-government egalitarians against small-government conservatives” but today things are different, and not necessarily for good reasons:

Current American political discourse labels people as either anti-government or pro-equality, but wanting to help the poor should not require the abandonment of sensible skepticism about expanding the size of the state. Many of my favorite causes, like fighting land use regulations that make it hard to build affordable housing, aid the poor by reducing the size of government. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I also argued that it would be far better to give generous checks to the poor hurt by the storm than to spend billions rebuilding the city, because those rebuilding efforts would inevitably help connected contractors more than ordinary people.

These are well-taken points. And I think it’s both true that people who think of themselves as progressives (the kind of people who think industry shouldn’t just be allowed to pollute willy-nilly, the kind of people who think it would be smart to have a universal health care system) should give more emphasis to these issues and also true that people who think of themselves as conservatives (the kind of people who think income tax rates are too high) should give more emphasis to these issues.

Still, the idea of “small-government egalitarianism” strikes me as a slightly confused concept. The argument seems to go something like this:

1. Egalitarians often favor government programs that boost equality and regulations to reduce harmful externalities.
2. Some government programs and regulations are actually just the rich and powerful further enriching themselves.
3. Underpants gnomes.
4. Egalitarians should really be libertarians!

There’s something fishy happening in step three. Contrast “small-government egalitarianism” with ordinary modern American liberalism. When a modern American liberal thinks a government regulation or public spending endeavor would accomplish an important public purpose, he’s for it. But not otherwise! Dean Baker, for example, is one of our foremost defenders of Social Security but also the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer which you both can and should read for free online.

Baker’s book is full of ideas that a “small-government egalitarian” ought to be able to embrace—it’s all about policy proposals to eliminate or reform government interventions in the economy undertaken on behalf of the rich and powerful. He doesn’t happen to tackle the pet issue I share with Glaeser—land use regulations—but it’s very much in that spirit. At the same time, Baker’s just a regular-old liberal. Nothing about his egalitarian dislike of bad government programs forces him into dislike for good government programs. Modern American liberalism isn’t a mirror-image of modern libertarianism and it doesn’t have an a priori commitment to government intervention in the economy on a particular scale. I think it’s completely fair to charge that people who call themselves liberals are sometimes mistaken about the desirability of particular programs or regulations, but that’s a different issue—lots of people are mistaken about all kinds of things.

All that said, with the Cold War over and the conservative movement tending to take most of its emotional succor from a blend of militarism and homophobia these days, I hope that modern liberals and libertarians can find ways to cooperate on some of these economic issues where our interests may overlap.

Some observations from Switzerland that may be relevant to the ongoing talking point from some libertarian institutions that a lack of fealty to small government orthodoxy somehow did the GOP in. They have over here a party of the populist right called the Swiss People’s Party that takes a Euroskeptic, immigration restrictionist line that on economics generally favors low taxes, deregulation and stingier social services. At the same time, their main electoral base of support is among Switzerland’s highly subsidized agricultural communities. So they strongly support those subsidies. This doesn’t really “make sense” as a matter of philosophical consistency, but the political logic is clear enough — it’s a mix of issue positions designed to appeal to the interests and attitudes of rural Switzerland.

At the same time, there’s a party called the Free Democrats who follow the standard European liberal line of being pro-Europe, welcoming to immigrants, and favoring low taxes and deregulation. These guys have strong support from the Swiss business community. As a result, it has been known to “abandon its liberal values at times, e.g. by its support of import protection for medicine or of the expensive 2002 government bailout of the failing national airline, Swissair.”

Again, the philosophical logic is lacking but the political logic is very clear. A party has a basic orientation, that orientation gives it a constituency, and then a successful party is going to need to stand up for the interests of its constituency.

In the US, we have only two political parties and a much larger and more diverse country. Consequently, you don’t see as much of the systemic sectoral biases like that. Instead, what you get is that Democrats and Republicans compete vigorously across the country on a fairly consistent left-right axis, but in the states that benefit from farm subsidies everyone’s for farm subsidies while in Michigan everyone’s for auto bailouts and in Delaware everyone shills for credit card companies and so forth. But the basic principle is the same — politicians have ideologies, but they also have constituents and their constituents have interests, and to succeed in politics you’re going to have to serve those interests and that means you can’t be a really rigid ideologue. You’re never going to have a pure free market politics getting anywhere.

If you hop over to the Cato blog, you can find a bunch of posts stating that the reason Republicans have lost ground in 2006 and 2008 is that they’ve permitted too much spending. What you don’t see is much evidence to support this argument, or any serious consideration of the possibility that the GOP became more spending-tolerant (approving, e.g., the 2003 Medicare bill) and the Democratic Party won elections for the same underlying cause — public opinion that demands more government services.

I see exit poll data showing that 60 percent of the public was worried about rising health care costs and that 66 percent of those people backed Barack Obama. Presumably not because they thought the Republicans had been insufficiently vigilant about blocking pork barrel spending (it was John McCain after all) but because they thought Obama’s big government health plan spoke to their concerns while McCain’s small government alternative didn’t. I see that 50 percent of voters said they’re “very worried” about economic conditions and 59 percent of them voted for Obama. I don’t see in there any data whatsoever to back up the idea that there was an anti-spending backlash against Republicans that provoked people to vote Democratic, nor do I see evidence of a Libertarian Party surge or any such thing. I see people worried about economic conditions and rising health care costs who felt that McCain’s campaign — which made a spending freeze and a porkbusting crusade the center of its efforts — wasn’t speaking to those problems.