Agency, Agency Costs, and the Nature of Government Part 3

Parts 1 and 2 of my ramblings on this topic can be found here and here. I began by noting the contrast between Indian and American views of their civil governments. Indians by and large, or so it seems to me, like and respect their governments and the political actors that represent them despite levels of corruption and incompetence that would shock most Americans. American conservatives, notwithstanding living under relatively clean governments and relatively competent actors, deeply resent both.

I then considered and put aside the possibility an account for this difference that stressed the differing religious milieus of the two nations.

I next considered the economic concept of agency costs, those costs humans incur due to our limited natures. In other words, we need others to satisfy our own needs but even under the best of circumstances "information asymmetry" means we won't always get exactly what we desired. Agency costs increase when we take into account self-regarding dealing, situations when those to whom we grant discretionary power exercise that discretion to enrich themselves at our expense. The latter particularly gets at American conservative accounts of concerns about the growing extent of governmental power.

But now I will shift my analysis to what I think is the root of the Indian and American attitudinal dichotomy: the place of community. Here I'll quote from D.G. Hart's excellent blog post We Need a Declaration of Institutional Independence: "The appeal to fundamental natural rights [such as the American Declaration of Independence] — as in all men are created equal — has been the way to run rough shod over all sorts of lesser human authorities and institutions." In other words, appeals "to the rights of individuals is hardly conservative. It is the way to liberate individuals from parental, ecclesial, academic, and community authorities." American conservatives who extol the power and place of the individual are thus fundamentally anti-conservative:

Pitting individual liberty against governmental regulation is not a conservative argument. In fact, the rise of big government goes hand in hand with the liberation of individuals. The authorities to suffer in all of this power shifting are the mediating structures, those institutions closest to persons which have a much greater stake (than judges in Washington, D.C.) in the well-being of their members. (Emphasis added.)

The corrosive effects of individualism have eroded the heart of what makes society civil, its mediating institutions like families, churches, social organizations, etc. Into this vacuum thus proceeds government power. Ironically, by sacralizing the individual, first social structures but then individuals are ultimately weakened and, irony of ironies, the scope of the only non-individual entity left standing is increased. (Reminds me of one of my arguments in The Puritan Revolution and the Law of Contracts, abstract here, where I considered the thesis that an unintended side-effect of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation was to increase state power.)

While certainly moving in the direction of Western individualism, the cohesive forces of Indian society remain much stronger than their American counterparts. And it is the powerful presence of such mediating structures, particularly the (extended) family, that fosters the insouciant attitude of Indian citizens toward their government's foibles. Would that American conservatives turn their near-eschatological hope in the vindication of individual rights to the practice of social communitarian living.