There is an old, comforting superstition among friends of liberty that the best Congress is an incapacitated one. When the two chambers are split between warring tribes, lawmakers are generally reduced to posturing before television cameras, bickering over procedural minutiae, and occasionally shutting down the government for a long weekend. It is not statesmanship, heaven knows, but it is wonderfully sterile. While they are busy throwing rhetorical staples at one another, they are entirely unable to draft fresh, thousand-page intrusions into our daily commerce. Alas, that blessed armistice has officially expired. With Democrats taking decisive control of both the House and the Senate, Washington has traded the sweet repose of gridlock for the terrifying efficiency of unified government.
To witness Washington when one party holds both gavels is like watching an embarrassing relative stumble into Thanksgiving dinner with a freshly minted notary stamp and an unquenchable desire to manage everyone else’s affairs. Uncle Sam has burst through the front door, kicked off his boots, and immediately demanded to know whether your kitchen appliances comply with the latest federal efficiency directives. He does not care that his own finances are an unspeakable ruin, characterized by a debt burden that would make an eighteenth-century monarch blush. He has arrived with plans, you see, and those plans invariably require an army of newly hired compliance officers and an incomprehensible stack of paperwork.
The incoming legislative majority will naturally describe their triumph as a mandate for bold, transformative action. But as Friedrich Hayek famously observed in The Fatal Conceit, the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. Washington, regrettably, has never been burdened by humility. The town operates on the boundless faith that three hundred million distinct human beings, engaging in billions of spontaneous daily transactions, can be neatly steered toward enlightenment by a handful of Ivy League graduates working inside an architectural monstrosity along the Potomac.
We already know what this transformative action looks like in practice. It means a renewed enthusiasm for industrial policy, that beloved euphemism for showering favored corporate donors with taxpayer subsidies while penalizing their competitors with targeted tariffs. It means resurrecting the sort of sweeping, omnibus spending bills whose sheer tonnage could crush a pack mule, passed under the cover of night before anyone outside of K Street has had time to read past the preamble. It means expanding the administrative state’s discretionary power until the Federal Register resembles a medieval guild roll, dictating who may produce what, at what price, and under whose union-negotiated supervision.
The breathless wire dispatches this morning are thoroughly preoccupied with who made history last night, meticulously cataloging the demographic milestones of the newly elected delegation. It is a charming distraction, but Washington’s machinery remains stubbornly indifferent to the personal narratives of its operators. A subpoena signed by an historic freshman retains precisely the same coercive menace as one signed by a septuagenarian committee baron. The bureaucracy does not become leaner, kinder, or more observant of property rights simply because the person presiding over the committee room represents a statistical first. The Leviathan does not change its nature; it merely updates its press releases.
The fiscal consequences of this legislative consolidation are equally grim to contemplate. For the past few years, divided government occasionally forced lawmakers to pantomime an interest in budget caps, however half-heartedly. Now, the dam has broken. We are poised to see the return of boundless federal largesse, financed not by genuine economic productivity, but by the relentless printing press and an ever-deepening hole of sovereign debt. When prices inevitably climb in response to this monetary flood, we can safely anticipate the usual round of congressional hearings where central planners solemnly accuse private grocery store managers of hoarding, greed, and general lack of patriotic vigor.
For those of us who believe that human prosperity flourishes precisely where political power recedes, the coming congressional term will offer little comfort. The federal apparatus is revving its engines, eager to fix every perceived market imperfection with three new layers of statutory cement. The only silver lining, if one can call it that, is the grimly comic certainty that these grand designs will fail in precisely the manners that free-market economists have predicted for a century. The state will overpromise, overspend, and create an entirely new constellation of crises, at which point its champions will return to the microphones to explain that the only viable solution is yet another agency, yet another mandate, and just a little more of your money.