On Destroying Great Empires

Alex Tabarrok, the sage of GMU, considers the current cl*sterf*ck in the Middle East and concludes—surprise—it is all the fault of big government. Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber says that’s no excuse.

[Update: Alex responds here.]

Advantage Henry on points, but there are more basic issues here that they both miss,. First: the relative inevitability of this kind of screwup is one very good reason for treading lightly in the first place. I’m still immured in David Fromkin’s wonderful "Peace to End All Peace," about the Middle East in World War I. Today’s lesson is the Gallipoli campaign. And it is hard to imagine an endeavor more blighted with incompetence and mismanagement (on both sides). Churchill normally carries the can for the failure at Gallipoli. Fromkin makes it clear that there is plenty of blame to go around and that Churchill’s shortcomings may have been fairly small beer by comparison with others. If Churchill is culpable, it may be that his real vice was his can-do spirit: his willingness to try anything, even at risk to himself, but not least at risk to others.

The root problem here is a familiar kind of blindness among libertarians: government can’t work, except when you come to some favored project (usually involving high explosives); then all the critical sensors go mute, and we assume that government works just fine. Tabarrok (whose blog is an always-interesting must-read) kicks it up a notch: government can’t get it right, but since it’s a war, we shouldn’t care.

But Farrell sidesteps in another direction. Face it, through all of human history, most people, most of the time, have suffered under governments that range from mediocre to awful. The surprise is not that government works badly—the surprise is that it ever works well. We need to know a whole lot more about why and how the miracle of good government ever occurs at all.

Meantime, this is as good an opportunity as any to recall the story of how Croesus asked the oracle if he should go to war. He who crosses the Halys, said the oracle, will destroy a great empire. And he did, and he did. His own.