If we are going to model our government on a form of business organization, it ought to be a partnership.

“And yea, how foolish were we all to toil at our ideological fortifications, as a young lad who raises parapets fashioned from the cushions a sofa!” is what we will say, when that day comes. We will all say that exact sentence.

Of course the hardcore anti-statists believe that government is the antithesis of society! For them, public-spiritedness demands unceasing criticism of the state, perhaps especially on the warm and fuzzy sounding stuff like the welfare state.

Actually, given the propensity for adulation of authority figures and the evolved psychological satisfaction derived from the “People's Romance,” I think that public-spiritedness probably does demand deference to the modern equivalent of tribal chiefs, “fairly” rationing out goods and services in the spirit of the hunter gatherer band.

Which renders libertarian individualists rather counter-cultural as well. Fellow Feeling? It's so conservative!

Emphasizing, truly, that the system can’t possibly work without some level of virtue and trust is a good way to reassure skeptics that you haven’t declared jihad on fellow feeling and are out to wring the inefficiency from our institutions by wringing out the humanity.
Shouldn't the most important criterion be whether or not that statement is true?

Is it?

Isn't the point to leave us better off?

And, doesn't that entail severely limiting the scope of what government promises us, because venturing out beyond that scope will hurt us (for all of the institutional reasons we've been discussing)?

I'm afraid that this Lakoffian framing will be counter-productive. I'm not enthusiastic about collectivist projects (if only they didn't require angels), and I don't think pretending that I am will lead to more human flourishing.

I really don't agree that romantic fantasies about hope and change and honest politicians, who could help us all if they just decided to honestly do something, lead to anything that's “better”. Just as I don't think religious faith will cure disease.

And, I don't think pretending that I do will do anything other than encourage dangerous mistakes.

Yes, some honesty is necessary, and good norms are necessary to keep government relatively honest and limited. But, let's not pretend that we're actually all believers in magical government, because that's a mistake that needs to be corrected.

I suspect that two things eliminated the balance of this institution (or norm, what have you). Civil Service Reform, for whatever its virtues, introduced the capitalist enterprise system into politics at perhaps the worst possible time; the Gilded Age. It is perhaps no great coincidence that directly following this governmental reform, most of the regulations were introduced that poisoned the market system as it existed and created the corporate-political web that we know today, in addition to establishing a new breed of government entity; the Career Politician. Political power was no longer a duty, it was an ambition.

Finally, that great libertarian bugbear, F … D … R. A member of the Protestant Establishment himself, he took the norms of civic duty and engagement, philanthropy, public welfare that the rich and privileged formerly took it upon themselves to dispense as largess … and enforced them upon the masses. People often seem to overlook the fact that the wealthy who resented FDR by and large were, at the time, considered “New Money” – Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc. were from rough backgrounds and in some cases had little to no education. Capitalism to the new Americans meant earning money and keeping it without apology. If the old Puritan guardians of virtue were going to die with the rise of “unfettered free marketers” they weren’t going without a fight. The intense power our politicians have, especially the president and our stifling federal apparatus in place since the New Deal are all largely the result of a system of virtues which, when impossible to ensure voluntarily, were imposed on us forcefully.

Or, on the other hand, do clearly defined punishment for transgressions tend to undermine norms by sending the message that cheating is rampant? I'm thinking, in particular, of the Italian laws that require buyers to ask for and retain receipts as a way of forcibly enlisting buyers in the fight against tax evasion via under-the-table sales. These laws do not seem to be turning Italians into Scandinavians — but do they tend to make norms stronger, weaker, or have no effect?

For Forms of Government let fools contest; whatever is best administered is best.

Banks could save a lot of money if they didn't have to buy safes or keep records of how much money people gave, but rather just trusted everyone not to steal the unguarded money and to be honest about how much they had deposited. But I'd argue with someone who wanted to start a bank based on that idea that it isn't going to work. The fact that most people are honest and trustworthy doesn't change my opinion that it's a really bad idea. My skepticism would not be diminished if the potential bank-owner told me he also had a plan to instill a greater sense throughout society that it's very wrong to steal from banks.

It's silly to say anything about “government” because there are so many different kinds, but you do have to mock the idea that government is a unique institution that doesn't have to take the honesty of people as a given, like any other corporation would have to.

Honesty is super important, but in a sense that doesn't matter because it's not something we can affect.