A CONCERN FOR GOVERNANCE

The Federalist Papers is a collection of essays written for the purpose of “selling” the new proposed constitution of 1787. They were initially written anonymously but we do know who wrote them: James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay. In the one entitled, Number 51, Madison writes of the challenge of setting up a new government: “[T]he great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” We Americans, according to Samuel P. Huntington,¹ seem to under-appreciate the first of these challenges and over- emphasize the second. We tend to forget that we inherited from mostly the British a sense for established governance, yet we also inherited from them the need to react to over-governance. And so it has become part of our folklore to romanticize our rebellious spirit, our sense of independence from any foreign force and from our own government. Unfortunately, this bias gets easily translated as an anti-government language we bandy about. It also lends to the rhetoric of opposition aimed at those governmental programs with which we disagree. Not only do we not want the programs, but fighting them gets elevated to an inordinate and unwarranted crusade against big government.

A prime example today is how we see universal health care. Is providing health care a legitimate government responsibility? Here is an argument for it: disease is no more a danger to our citizenry than a foreign enemy. We set up governments for mutual protection. The difference is that no private entity can afford individual protection against a foreign national force. It takes a national government to do that. But in the case of health, some citizens can afford private medical care and some can't. Our ability to pay should not stand in the way of any of us getting a reasonable level of care relative to the national economy's ability to pay for such care. Well, I don't expect this argument to change anyone's view, but I provide it to demonstrate a point of view that does not threaten our liberty, at least not any more so than a government providing for national defense.

As a matter of fact, it points to a need for governance. We should be about forming a more perfect union, a goal our constitution identifies. How can one argue a more perfect union is achieved when tens of millions of citizens cannot receive viable health care? Such a position is not reasonable. And an approach to governance that sets out to provide health care for all citizens cannot be seen as a failure of our government “to control itself.”

1Huntington, S. P. (1968). Political order in changing societies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.