Joseph W.H. Lough
In less than an hour, the President will issue a sequestration order that over time will draw $85B out of the U.S. economy and while experts debate the economic consequences that will likely follow for various sectors and average Americans – debates largely focused on the multiplier – such debates have diverted our attention away from the in many ways far more significant political importance of sequestration.
Just to be clear what we talking about, the Republican leadership is arguing that we are spending more than we have and so we must pair back or eliminate federal government programs so that they match our appropriations. Their argument is based on the model of private enterprise, where the CFO, CBO report to a Board of Directors, pull out the charts and point out that average total costs are exceeding average total revenue and so, eventually, the enterprise will fail.
And were the U.S. government a private enterprise, this would be a reasonable argument.
Yet, as the followers of this blog will already know, the U.S. is not a private enterprise. Quite the opposite. The United States is a Republic, a res publica, which means that, unlike a private enterprise, whose aim it is to make a profit and which therefore is obligated to fit its objectives to its resources, the United States first establishes its public aims and then appropriates resources to match those aims. Now, to be sure, legislators may have a moral obligation to lay out for voters the costs that will accrue from specific public aims. They should make clear that roads, transportation, safety, education, defense must be paid for. But, once the voters have expressed their wishes, once the public has established its aims – which they do every two to four to six years by electing representatives – it is then these representatives’ obligation to appropriate sufficient resources to achieve these public aims. That, in a nutshell, is what it means to be a res publica, a Republic.
What the Republican leadership wants is to run the U.S. government not like a Republic, but like a private business. But what does this really mean? At a time when all Americans were classically trained, when, at the very least, all graduating high school seniors had read the relevant excerpts from Plato’s Gorgias and his Republic and from Aristotle’s Politics, all Americans would have already known precisely what this means. They would have known the difference between a politeia and an oikonomia, a republican political community and a private enterprise, and so they would have known that while a politeia functions democratically, an oikonomia never does because it can’t. That is because the oikonomia – from the Greek word oikos – is by its very nature functionally differentiated and hierarchical. As anyone who has read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations will appreciate, this makes complete sense.
To the extent that all wealth creation is founded on the division of labor and to the extent that all entrepreneurship is at least in part based on a private owner’s willingness to place his or her private property in jeopardy, at least for a time, in hopes of realizing a return greater than his or her investment, it only makes sense that she or he would make business decisions based not on the principle of equal representation of all workers, but based on the specific skill sets of those individuals she or he has employed. We have names for individuals who manage or run a business. They are CFOs, CBOs, or CEOs.
The Greeks also had a name for such individuals. They were called despotes or despots. But, functionally, despots played the exact same role as our CFOs, CBOs and CEOs. That is to say, despots managed the activities of individuals whose collective activities needed to be focused around the common private project of making wealth for the investor.
The important point to note here is that there is nothing either democratic or republican about private enterprise, oikonomia, or, more commonly, economics. Only the shareholders get a vote. There is an equality among equal shares not among equal private owners or private employees. Nor is there any interest in protecting or promoting the wealth we hold in common, which is what res publica literally means.
So, what does this have to do with the impending sequestration? Just this: when the Republican leadership refuses to implement legislation the elected representatives of the people have elected them to enact; when they hold this legislation hostage to principles and reasoning that govern the private market economy, oikonomia, they are staging nothing less than a coup d’etat. They are refusing to honor the process whereby elected representatives pass and are supposed to enact legislation and are instead subjecting the public political process (politeia) to the private economic process of despotic rule.
Now, to be sure, publically elected representatives are fully within their right to overturn prior legislation, to pare back programs that their predecessors have enacted into law. And they are fully within their rights to take an alternative legislative agenda to the voters – every two or for or six years. But what they are not permitted to do – what they can only do by subverting or overturning the republican principles they have sworn to uphold – is to deprive those legislative agendas enacted by their predecessors the appropriations they require in order to be enacted into law; especially if the rationale upon which they are basing their coup d’etat is despotic in nature.
And let there be no doubt. The Republican leadership’s coup d’etat is despotic in nature. It is based upon the principle that the rules governing the oikos, the rules that hold for the private household economy, for private enterprise, need to be the same as those that govern a res publica, a republic, where not private, but rather public wealth is at issue. When the Republican leadership compels the institutions of the Republic to subordinate themselves to the principles that govern private enterprise, however, the result is nothing less than the complete abdication of republican government to private economic despotism.
Of course, were the Republican leadership classically trained, were they in the least familiar with or interested in the classical republican foundations of our form of law and constitution, or had they simply read my brief treatment of the classical origins of republicanism, they would already know this. But since I suspect that they are neither familiar with nor interested in these foundations, I leave them with the following opening salvo from Aristotle’s lectures on Politics:
It is an error to suppose, as some do, that the roles of a statesman, of a king (politikon), of a household-manager (oikonomikon) and of a master of slaves (despotikon) are the same, on the ground that they differ not in kind but only in point of number of persons – that a master of slaves (despoten), for example, has to do with a few people, a household-manager (oikonomen) with more, and a statesman (politikon) or king with more still, as if there were no differences between a large household and a small state. They also reckon that when one person is in personal control over the rest he has the role of a king, whereas when he takes his turn at ruling and at being ruled according to the principles of the science concerned, he is a statesman. But these assertions are false. (1252a7-1252a16)
What is at stake here is not merely a difference in opinion over how large or small the government should be or whether we should raise or lower taxes. What is at stake is whether we are going to be a Republic. Ironically, but tragically, the Republican leadership has loudly and unequivocally said “No.” And they may be right.