Waiting for a Platonist Reform Plan

A philosopher understands public choice dynamics but thinks no one should do anything until Godot arrives with the Theory for Shrinking the State.

Source: Gage Skidmore

How do I know that my narrative is better than yours?

[A]nyone who after the 20th century still thinks that thoroughgoing socialism, nationalism, imperialism, mobilization, central planning, regulation, zoning, price controls, tax policy, labor unions, business cartels, government spending, intrusive policing, adventurism in foreign policy, faith in entangling religion and politics, or most of the other 19th-century proposals for governmental action are still neat, harmless ideas for improving our lives is not paying attention.
—Deirdre McCloskey

I remember when classical-liberal thinking was strong and sure-footed. The epigraph above was published as part of a magnificent post. Some commenters insisted it was the best post ever written. McCloskey had that Jeffersonian zeal, the kind that could animate a new Declaration as a list of grievances. Even though the passage was written in a publication called “Bleeding-Heart Libertarians,” it was at least a rousing indictment of the status quo.

But that publication is defunct.

The name and brand likeness have been resumed by philosopher

Matt Zwolinski

, who writes:

Suppose you think the state should be much smaller than it is. It doesn’t follow that any cut is good, or that we should just start hacking away with a chainsaw at a stack of programs. The details matter — and they’ve rarely been thought through. Libertarians, classical liberals, and conservatives have all made the case for a smaller state. But what we still lack is a theory of how to shrink it.

This paragraph captures much of what’s wrong with academic classical liberalism.

First, consider the case of Javier Milei, whose *plan* was almost literally to cut away a stack of programs with a chainsaw. According to Niall Ferguson, Milei’s *plan* has been nothing short of miraculous for Argentines.

Niall Ferguson: Milei’s Man-made Miracle

Apart from the crocodile tears of its parasite class, Argentina has ended multiple decades of malaise—thanks to that *plan* of Milei’s. Zwolinski thus underestimates the potential for human self-organization amid radical reform.

¡Afuera!

As to the idea that “the details matter,” the phrase rings as calm and reflective, as one would expect from a comfortable academic who probably has little to lose from maintaining the status quo indefinitely. Yet the status quo’s slow-grind expansion is precisely what minding the details amounts to. The world, filled as it is with its political predators and parasites, does not sit and wait for calm, reflective theorists to make their pilgrimage to Washington with a Platonist Plan.

Buchanan and Tullock would seem to have wounded such notions. Apart from an example or two, such as Rogernomics in the 80s, which depended on no-choice-but-austerity and denationalization, Milei is the only viable comparison. The Milei Strategy is not just some theory to shrink government, it is a successful approach.

Still, Zwolinski imagines a world in which philosophers, equipped with a rationalist theory of social change, will be summoned to the Oval Office or the hallowed halls of Congress to deliver a detailed five-year Plan for shrinking this unjust and bloated state. Speaking of being light on details, Zwolinski doesn’t hint at even the contours of such a Plan; His argument amounts to, if *we* don’t have one, we should let the state continue to steamroll over the delicate shoots of possibility. That such a Plan might be written sometime in the future—published, say, in the Journal of Nobody Gives a Shit—does not confer it efficacy or guarantee the right timing.

Zwolinski seems to fall for what

Michael C. Munger

calls Unicorn Governance. He imagines “the details” will fall like manna into the right hands of the right people at the right time. We need only to wait patiently as the debt clock goes tick-tock.

But let’s give Zwolinski the benefit of the doubt. He continues:

The most obvious task for such a theory will be to distinguish between those government programs that should be eliminated from those that shouldn’t. Of course, this is also where we will find the most well-trodden divisions between established political theories. Those on the political left will want to keep or expand most existing welfare programs and environmental regulations, for instance, but maybe to cut corporate welfare and military spending. Moderate libertarians like me will want to cut or eliminate some but not all of the above. And anarchists are happy to put the whole turkey on the chopping block.

As one who would be happy to spread the American Empire out like a Thanksgiving feast, I’ll assume that Zwolinski’s preference “to cut or eliminate some but not all of the above” is informed by some articulable theory that is entirely different from mine but has the feature of being rationally justified, perhaps in some state of idealized Rawlsian gnosis. Yet, such competing theories about what stays/what goes are not as interesting to Zwolinski. At least not here.

He writes:

Because even if we could all agree in theory what an ideal government would look like, the fact that we need to transition there from where we are makes the whole process much more difficult and morally fraught.

Zwolinski is partially correct about this, but probably not in the way he thinks.

Does the need to transition imply a transitional moment? Does the transition attempt apply within or outside the exigencies of politics? Regarding morality: Any such transition is going to fail to improve the lot of some constituency group or other. And that sucks, as reality often does. But it doesn’t mean an unjust system’s failure to improve the lot of some group—whether bureaucrats, civil servants, defense contractors, or welfare recipients—is morally fraught.

A vampire has hooked you up to an IV against your will to draw your blood for him and his bat-children’s benefit. That ennervates you. He justifies doing so in the name of the “greater good,” “the social contract,” or some other statist shibboleth. Are you entitled to disconnect from the vampire at the time of your choosing, especially if you think you see an opportunity?

Apparently not, according to Zwolinski,

[S]uppose you thought that there’s no principled reason why government should be in the business of regulating food and drugs. Or caring for the poor and elderly. Or whatever. Maybe the market or civil society could do those things just as well if not better.

Let’s pass over the hypostatization here. “Government” doesn’t care for the poor or elderly. People do. Neither the “market” nor “civil society” does. People do. The morally fraught issue has more to do with the mode and manner of the care, as opposed to the means of reform. That’s why people matter.

Even still, it doesn’t follow that if you could push a button and eliminate those functions today that you should do so.

Doesn’t it? If we stipulated that the only feasible way to transition at all was to do so at the “push of a button,” might one reasonably think that the pain of such a transition was necessary? History shows that opportunities for reform are rare and rarely ideal, much less equipped with some compassionate runway to carry them out—especially when the reforms’ adversaries are hostile and looking for a thousand ways to frustrate one’s Platonic Plan.

Zwolinski finishes clearing his throat and wants to set out not a Plan, but reasons why forming a Plan is hard. It’s not that he’s entirely wrong; it’s that his case has the features of an ouroboros, and not in a good way.

Consider the following (incomplete) list of the problems with which a theory of shrinking the state would need to grapple.

(1) The Expectations Problem - Even if you think a particular government program shouldn’t exist, the fact that it does exist arguably creates a reasonable expectation among people that it will continue. That reasonable expectation, in turn, arguably creates both moral and pragmatic reasons for a gradual transition, rather than an immediate one. The most obvious example here is something like Social Security, where immediate abolition would seem to be both unfair and disastrous in its effects. That said, there’s a lot more to say about this issue. What makes an expectation “reasonable” rather than “unreasonable”? My sense is that there is a moral dimension to reasonableness, not merely an epistemic one.

I don’t entirely disagree with (1), but I think Zwolinski both overstates and understates his case in different places.

First, it’s interesting that Zwolinski uses the example of Social Security (SS), because it comes across as a sleight of hand. The context matters in that A) with SS, people are compelled to submit a portion of their earnings against their wills but have a reasonable expectation that those resources will be stewarded such that they will receive at least some support back in retirement, and B) it is feasible to phase the system out over a decade, say, to give those dependent on the system time to adjust. In any case, I suspect Zwolinski agrees that even a less “morally fraught” proposal for phasing out Social Security is rather a political dead end—mainly because people had to pay into it, but also because the AARP protects senior goodies with gusto, despite a $37 trillion debt that is sinking fast.

Yet, recalling the vampire example, we might argue that the coming insolvency of the entitlement state means that either sovereign default or hyperinflation could create a window for people to extricate themselves from that sorry system. But is that the Plan? People will experience the pain, anyway, because the federal government ain’t likely to issue many checks after such a collapse. Indeed, the predicability of such a system collapse ought to prompt other reasonable expectations—namely, that people will have to find more local and communitarian ways to save themselves and their families amid the disaster. Philosophers would rather think about the morality of entitlement reform in the context of blue skies, rainbows, and monetary manna from the Fed.

But this is unsustainable.

In terms of reforming most other things the government does, and considering whether doing so is morally fraught, I still have trouble imagining that any such vampirism should not be shut down whenever it seems possible to do so. After all, vampires don’t usually reflect with calm. Vampires drink, as takers take. So, I argue we need to use Chesterton’s Fence posts as stakes whenever we get the chance—though I admit that opportunity may only appear after the fiscal collapse. (And by *we,* I mean anyone who sees a viable opening.)

Back to Zwolinski’s case.

(2) The Distributional Problem - Suppose the state has a bunch of policies which, in theory, ought to be abolished. These policies impose costs and benefits on different groups, with some policies conferring net benefits on one group, other policies benefiting some other group. Now suppose that a reformer arrives and starts eliminating some, but not all, of these policies. But the policies he cuts are all ones that benefit group X, while the policies he keeps are ones that benefit group Y. Even if, like me, you’re skeptical about most claims of distributive justice, you’ll probably think there’s something objectionable about this situation. It seems to run afoul of the idea of equal treatment that is central to the rule of law.

Let’s emphasize seems in that last sentence and rewrite the passage a little:

So the country’s split between two gangs, the X Crew and the Y Mob, each running part of the protection racket. The X Crew’s schemes put cash in their pockets while bleeding others dry, and the Y Mob hustles do the same for their crew. A reformer rolls in, vowing to shut down the rackets. But here’s the catch: he only dismantles the X Crew’s operations, leaving their crew broke, while the Y Mob keeps raking it in. It’s not a reform so much as an expansion of the Y Mob’s power.

So what are we supposed to take away from this?

To mix metaphors (sorry vampires and mobs), I suppose it’s that if we reduce parasitism down to leeches feasting on the body politic, we ought—in the interests of bizarre egalitarian, yada yada, “rule of law”—to invite the ticks back to feast, too. Why? Because “equal treatment” implies equal mistreatment? Zwolinski is right to assume his reader thinks there is something objectionable about the situation in his framing. The issue is that there are still parasites that need to be eliminated, not that all parasites must be fed equally.

I should add that Zwolinski’s conception of the rule of law is vague if not mistaken. Zwolinski seems to think that the rule of law means that if one gang of partisans gets what it wants, the other gang of partisans should too—exactly how politics has never worked. Still, equal treatment under law is not about doling out favors to constituency groups so everyone feels they got theirs. Equal treatment means that any given law, as well as fundamental rights, should apply to all citizens equally, that there should not be one set of laws for any separate citizen group and another set for another citizen group, and that no one should be above the law. (And that ship has sailed in America.)

But never mind.

Zwolinski reminds us that politics abhors a vacuum.

(3) The Vacuum Problem - It’s tempting to think that when we abolish government programs or agencies that we are destroying power. The reality, however, is that power is never really created or destroyed. It is merely redistributed. Sometimes, to be sure, that redistribution can be enormously beneficial. Taking power from the state and putting it into the hands of ordinary people is almost always good, both in terms of giving people more control over their lives and in terms of avoiding the dangers inherent in concentrated, centralized authority.

Up to this point, I mostly agree. Sure, we can imagine scenarios where power is destroyed utterly—say, by an economic or ecological catastrophe affecting the powerful and the people alike. Granting people power to shoplift with impunity under $X is no good. But let’s grant Zwolinski the general point.

[E]nding a government program doesn’t always mean that power goes back to the people. Sometimes, the vacuum created is filled by powerful private interests (think Russian oligarchs after “privatization”). And sometimes it is filled by other elements of the state, as when the weakening of independent federal agencies is used to concentrate power in the hands of the unitary executive.

Here’s where theory’s vagueness masks reality’s specificity.

Zwolinski is right in the sense that when Republicans promise to reduce government and cut spending only to pass a Big Beautiful Boondoggle (BBB), the powerful partisans expend to expand their power in other areas. In that case, the powerful have replaced ticks with bigger, more numerous leeches. I hope Zwolinski realizes this happens routinely after most any transfer of power. Call that bothsidesism, or call it the expectation that a reasonable person consistently applies his principles to all parties. (I find nary a critique of the Democratic Party or President Biden on his BHL substack. I’m sure it’s just an oversight.)

Now, when Zwolinski expresses his concern that a power vacuum can be filled by “other elements of the state,” namely, “when the weakening of independent federal agencies is used to concentrate power in the hands of the unitary executive,” he lets his mask slip.

First, there is nothing in the US Constitution about independent federal agencies. There is only “The executive Power shall be vested in a President.” Now, Zwolinski might not like or agree with the Constitution, and instead, prefers pages from the progressive playbook designed to create a permanent fourth branch of government.

Still, Zwolinski can surely agree that when the President seizes unconstitutional powers, such as war powers, it is illegal. He might also agree that features of the Constitutional order are unjust, as I do. But he will have a hard time arguing that “independent federal agencies” an unaccountable administrative regime is somehow more just or morally upright than Article II. Even if, like me, you think the presidency is absurd, and Spooner was right, one can at least try to vote out the president. You can’t vote out the administrative state, as is painfully apparent.

(4) The Politics Problem - As an effort to dramatically cut back on wasteful government spending, DOGE was a failure. Some of my libertarian friends were surprised that Musk wasn’t able to do more. But they shouldn’t have been. DOGE was never about reducing government spending in the most effective way possible. DOGE was a political operation, and everything it did was shaped and constrained by the political needs of the administration it served. “Condoms for Gaza” had nothing to do with shrinking the state. But it sent exactly the right signals to the president’s MAGA base — and that was the point.

With all due respect, this passage has an iota of truth wrapped in a just-so story.

First, DOGE persists, so it continues to find drops to take out of the bucket. However, it is still likely to fail, as its goal was to remove $1- or $2 trillion in waste this term. Indeed, DOGE’s inability to find so little waste at the DoD lends credibility to Zwolenski’s case. Still, its failure to reduce more waste was not because its principals didn’t think their Milei-style tack would be the most effective way to do so. They were simply wrong. Musk thought he would be able to identify waste or redundancy and prune in the manner he does with his enterprises. Due to the power of “independent federal agencies,” activist judges, supplicant states, and useless eaters, resistance to DOGE-driven cuts is vast and multi-layered, encompassing federal, state, and local lawsuits, as well as paid activists with firebombs for Teslas.

To point out that DOGE’s approach was or is political is like saying that sharks’ approach to locomotion is swimming. So we can’t blame Zwolinski for pointing out the obvious. But to argue that “everything it did was shaped by the administration it served” is evident from one angle, wrong from another.

It’s evident that if DOGE serves at the pleasure of the president (Article II), and the president is a politician and a partisan, then DOGE activities will be political and partisan. (Of course, if there were more non-political means of underthrowing power, our readers would want to know about it.) When partisans engage in political warfare against each other, their incentives are to do so to gain an advantage against the other side, which has similar incentives.

That sucks, but it’s reality.

Now, what is inaccurate about Zwolinski’s claim is that DOGE, while working generally at the behest of the President, discovered a lot of things that Trump never knew about and didn’t know to look for. Indeed, apart from trantifa firebombing Teslas, Musk had set out to cut a lot and was significantly frustrated by the machinations of the left and the deep state. Despite the failure, DOGE discovered a vast empire of graft—much of which was partisan money laundering. After Musk departed from DOGE in disappointment, he quite rightly broke ties with the president after learning that the BBB would add so significantly to the very debt that DOGE was trying so hard to roll back. To argue that DOGE was designed only to throw red meat to MAGA is not just uncharitable, it’s untrue.

Now, here’s where things get weird (for me anyway):

Most readers of this Substack will be familiar with the ways that public choice theory explains the growth of government programs. Public choice theory teaches us that government programs grow because they invite rent-seeking — and rent-seeking shapes policy to benefit insiders rather than the public. But here’s the problem: the same forces operate in reverse. Just as the growth of government is determined by political factors that have little to do with the public welfare, so too will any effort to shrink government be shaped by those same factors. There is no magic button that allows us to avoid the political problem.

Sure. Public choice dynamics will shape efforts to shrink government, but mainly to hamper those efforts.

But I think this makes Zwolinski’s original premises debatable (unless one were to strike a couple of words). Consider:

• Claim: “[T}he fact that we need to transition there from where we are makes the whole process much more difficult and morally fraught.”

• Should read: “[T}he fact that we need to transition there from where we are makes the whole process much more difficult and morally fraught.”

Indeed, the frustrating dynamics of public choice make me question my instinctive desire to ease the transition, as weaning the people off entitlements, for example, gives parasites and predators too much time to mount a defense. I certainly thought the only way to transition would be to flood the zone. Musk thought so, too, likely inspired by Milei, who, miraculously, has managed to liberalize so many aspects of the Argentine socio-economy with a chainsaw. I’m not persuaded that Milei’s doing so has been “morally fraught”—even if his measures have antagonized the *rule of law* in Argentina.

If *the rule of law* indefinitely protects the authorities from prosocial and pro-justice reforms, then *the rule-of-law* and partisan equality objections strike me as so much “Selective Pedantic Proceduralism.” While I wish the rule of law meant more to the powerful, John Hasnas has persuaded me it’s essentially a myth, because:

• Laws cannot provide clear, unambiguous guidance in all situations. Legal language is inherently open to interpretation, meaning judges inevitably exercise discretion rather than mechanically applying predetermined rules.

• All legal systems reflect particular values and political choices. There's no such thing as neutral, objective law that stands above human preferences and biases. It’s simply impossible to eliminate arbitrariness.

Technocratic elites agree and have taken advantage of this fact with soaring rhetoric like the “Living Constitution”.

Academic libertarians who buy into such mythology will tut-tut you for supporting pragmatic measures, even as your illiberal enemies are planning fun new ways to remove bits of the Constitution (like Amendments 9 and 10), subvert the constitutional order, and gobble up any freedoms we have left. Noble allegiance to Selective Pedantic Proceduralism is just a libertarian luxury belief.

Unilateral disarmament. Political pacifism.

As an asymptotic anarchist, I recognize that moving toward the goal of rules without rulers might mean having today to choose between an imperfect autocrat like Lee Kuan Yew and independent federal agencies an authoritarian politburo like the EU or CCP. Of course, despite the bluster and bombast of another Trump term, what we have here in the US is still mutating rapidly into a Sino-European administrative regime. So I won’t always clutch my pearls about moralistic or legalistic administrivia as this ship of state approaches the icebergs. My kids need lifeboats. Perhaps my critics would retort that by accepting compromises against the *rule of law,* I prime the coercive apparatus for future authoritarians to seize. Perhaps. But so does twiddling one’s thumbs while waiting for Godot’s Platonist Plans.

As if to remove the mask entirely, Zwolinski closes thus:

What DOGE showed us is that it’s possible to cut government in ways that are shallow, partisan, and ultimately counterproductive.

Meh. Anyway, it doesn’t follow that DOGE could have cut government in ways that were deep, principled, and ultimately productive if it possessed the Plan. One can argue that DOGE managed to do more than be shallow, partisan, and counterproductive, even if it failed to reach its audacious goals.

Apart from a sprinkle of partisan talking points and Monday morning quarterbacking, Zwolinski leaves readers with the real sense that no force yet conceived is capable of rolling back the American Empire, its functionaries, and its supplecants. Nested in that sense is the idea that any such effort would be “vandalism,” instead of just an imperfect, thwarted effort. If nothing else, DOGE has left many with a change in mindset, i.e., that there is a lot more waste, fraud, or abuse than we ever imagined, and we probably ought to find a way to cut it lest the ship go down—public choice dynamics notwithstanding.

That doesn’t mean that there is some Platonist Reform Plan out there waiting for the philosophers to whisper into the ears of the powerful. There are only ever brief windows to attempt to attenuate Washington’s political stranglehold and curb its grotesque spending. And those moments don’t come around often.

We probably won’t see another initiative like DOGE for some time. But when it comes, we should be ready with something more than slogans, stunts, or ideological purity tests. Shrinking the state without a plan is just vandalism; doing it right is the harder, but ultimately much more important work.

Ideological purity tests? Wasn’t that what Zwolinski was driving at with his *rule of law* objection? Sigh.

Leave it to an academic philosopher to conclude that a serious attempt to cut the budgets, power, and positions of functionaries and money-laundering NGOs during a time of unprecedented red ink is “vandalism,” but leaving more than $105,970 per capita debt time bomb to our children is the responsible thing.

I shall grow a very long beard, waiting for the Plan.