Microgovernment and Economic Liberty
“That government is best which governs least.” Jefferson, Paine, Thoreau – it doesn’t really matter who coined it. The principle is sound. If I may coin my own term here, microgovernment seems to me an attractive idea. No, I do not mean that a powerful central government should oversee microscopic aspects of our lives. Rather, the scope of a given aspect of life should drive the scale of appropriate government. National defense calls for the national government. Individual freedoms and matters of daily life fall to individuals to manage for themselves. Microscopic issues call for microgovernment, not macrogovernment.
The United States Constitution begins with certain clear rights of individual humans. It is the individual humans who are natural, free entities. Governments, in their various forms, are the inventions of individuals and therefore are artificial. The Bill of Rights goes on to explicitly limit the scope and authority of the Federal government. It closes by deferring matters to states and ultimately individuals if they are not explicitly given to the Federal government. States follow suit with unique constitutions that define their own governments’ roles very specifically. Authority flows along to smaller entities as matters become more community or individual-oriented.
Associates of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University have examined some aspects of these principles in detail. Among the more enlightening and contrasting pieces of work on this are the recent report on regulatory budget trends and some missives on sublocal government. The former is alarming, but the latter in some ways offers a glimmer of hope. Despite the trend of the last several decades of increasing federal regulation, creative individuals and the general soft matter of society keep finding ways to squeeze between the fingers of a growing government’s often-tightening grip.
While few would deny the potential pitfalls, the idea of voluntary community-based quasi-self-regulation more closely honors individual autonomy and liberty than any formal regulatory program ever could. It also runs parallel in some ways to the growing trend of local innovation incubators, small business investment groups and voluntary economic development associations. These smaller scale entities may hold far more promise of driving economic recovery and sustaining long-term growth than any massive federal or even state programs. This is the case in part because a central government is more effective at influencing very large businesses (e.g. AIG and GM) than a multitude of small associations and businesses, and also because these small groups inherently can maintain a superior grasp of opportunities, resources and challenges specific to their own local areas.
