Without the massive amount of public investment behind the
computer and Internet revolutions, such attributes might have led only to the
invention of a new toy – not to cutting-edge revolutionary products like the
iPad and iPhone which have changed the way that people work and communicate. …
The genius and 'foolishness' of Steve Jobs led to massive profits and success,
largely because Apple was able to ride the wave of massive state investments in
the 'revolutionary' technologies that underpinned the iPhone and iPad: the
Internet, GPS, touch-screen displays and communication technologies. Without
these publicly funded technologies, there would have been no wave to foolishly
surf. (Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs.
Private Sector Myths)
I will not attempt to review The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths
by Mariana Mazzucato; I have not read it. I have read only enough to be
confident that I understand the main thesis: entrepreneurship by the State (the
word is capitalized throughout the excerpts I have read) is morally legitimate
because many if not all of the innovations that make life possible, from the
green revolution to the iPad, though attributed by most people to private
enterprise, were actually the work of the State. This is an updated version of
an argument passed on to me in 1974 by my conservative college roommate to the
effect that NASA was a good deal because it gave us Tang and microwave ovens.
Nor, tempted though I am, will I accuse her of post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. For
her to claim that there would be no Internet today had there been no ARPA in
the 1960s seems strange to me: one of the first things I ever wanted to do with
my first computer was to get it to talk directly to another computer, and the
Internet seems like the result of many people smarter and more knowledgeable
than I fulfilling that same desire; they may in fact have been government
employees, but it seems to me that they would eventually have done the same
thing had they been hobbyists or businessmen. But I could be wrong.
Nor will I make much of the fact that the green revolution
and the Internet have been mixed blessings at best. The pesticides and fertilizers
that have increased the production of commercial crops have been accompanied by
environmental degradation, displacement of lower-income farmers, and mass
starvation on scales unknown before it. The Internet has increased our ability
to communicate with the masses, but it has also increased the social isolation
of the people who use it.
I would simply like to point out that her thesis is based on
the presupposition that the end justifies the means: in this case, such things
as the green revolution and the Internet are good, they were brought about by
State entrepreneurship, and this is evidence that State entrepreneurship is
good.
Without questioning her evidence, let’s see where this leads
us. The State she propounds as a proper entrepreneur—indeed society’s most
important entrepreneur—is one group of people who achieve their goals by expropriating
their neighbors: that is, whether a social anarchy, a monarchy, an oligarchy, a
plutocracy, a republic, a democracy, or something else, the State depends on
taxation for its very existence. In this sense “private citizens” who, for
example, win a school levy election are also part of the state, entitled by
right of conquest (i.e., electoral majority) to the tax money of those who lost
the election, who are ipso facto their subjects.
It follows from Mazzucato’s thesis that expropriation of
their neighbors is not only the privilege but the moral duty of the conquerors.
Perhaps the book places limits on State expropriation, but if the end justifies
the means, it would seem that the morality of any means can be judged only
after the end has been achieved; therefore, any means can be justified if the
stated end is noble enough, and if the stated end is not achieved, or if the
end is achieved but “getting what ya want doesn’t get ya where ya wanna go,”
the fault lies either with those who set the wrong end or with those who failed
to achieve the end despite the means being implemented. That is, the means and those who enact them can never
be faulted.
In the case of public education, then, the expropriation
that pays for public schools can never be faulted. If the schools teach well,
then school taxes are moral because the schools are good and they could not
exist without taxation. If they teach poorly or not at all, the fault lies with
the teachers or the administrators, but the
taxation that makes even a bad system possible is legitimate because it would
have been legitimized by the good schools had the system been good.
Put another way, if we concede that the end justifies the
means, then we must also concede that the stated end also justifies the means. If
the goal stated by those in power differs from their real goal, then they alone
are at fault if the means are morally questionable; those who carry out the
means sincerely believing in the stated goal are blameless. Again: the means,
and thus those who carry them out, can never be faulted.
I said a moment ago that in an end-justifies-the-means moral
system any means can be justified if the stated end is noble enough. Let’s put
the Holocaust through that grid: if the end indeed can ever justify the means,
some conceivable end that would justify the killing of six million beings
created in God’s image must exist. My inability to conceive of such an end does
not preclude its existence; therefore, we cannot say that the Holocaust itself
was evil; at best we can only say that those who perpetrated it were evil
because they did not set a noble enough end to be achieved by killing those
people. Had they achieved a noble enough goal, the killing would have been
justified; if the goal had not been attained, the fault would have lain with
those who were in charge of attaining the goal after the Jews were all dead;
and if attaining the goal had had an unanticipated and overall negative result,
the fault would have been lack of imagination on the part of those who set the
goal to begin with. In no case could those who actually did the killing be
accused of immorality: the killing was not per se immoral.
This of course opens another line of questions: if some but not
every end can justify a given means, how can we know that a given end does in
fact justify a given means?
Given the stated goals of restoring prosperity to people who
had known literal starvation, liberating the arguably oppressed German speakers
in Poland and Czechoslovakia, fighting a Communism that had killed dozens of
millions of innocent people less than a day’s airplane flight to the east, acquiring
Lebensraum, and completing the
mission of Christianity, would killing only six hundred thousand, or six
thousand, or six innocent people have been OK?
I don’t know how a postmodern would answer that question,
but I do know how a strict, exclusive reading of these Bible passages does: any
end stated by the State is for our benefit and therefore justifies whatever
means the State enacts to bring that end about.
The King is mighty, he [not sometimes, not usually, but
apparently always] loves justice. (Ps 99:4)
By [wisdom] kings reign and rulers make laws that are [not
sometimes, not usually, but apparently always] just. (Prov 8:15)
Kings [not sometimes, not usually, but apparently always] detest
wrongdoing, for a throne is established through righteousness. Kings take
pleasure in honest lips; they value a man who speaks the truth. (Prov
16:12–13)
He who loves a pure heart and whose speech is gracious will have
the king for his friend. (Prov 22:11)
As the heavens are high and the earth is deep, so the hearts
of kings are unsearchable. (Prov 25:3)
Obey the government, for God is the one who put it there. All
governments have been placed in power by God. So those who refuse to obey the
laws of the land are refusing to obey God, and punishment will follow. For the authorities do not frighten people who are doing right, but
they frighten those who do wrong. So do what they say, and you will get
along well. The authorities are sent by God to help you. But if you are doing
something wrong, of course you should be afraid, for you will be punished. The
authorities are established by God for that very purpose, to punish those who
do wrong. So you must obey the government for two reasons: to keep from being
punished and to keep a clear conscience. Pay your taxes, too, for these same
reasons. For government workers need to be paid so they can keep on doing the
work God intended them to do. Give to everyone what you owe them: Pay your
taxes and import duties, and give respect and honor to
all to whom it is due. (Rom 13:1–7)
For the Lord's sake, accept all authority—the king as head of
state, and the officials he has appointed. For the king has
sent them to punish all who do wrong and to honor those who do right. (1
Pet 2:13–14)
I see no refutation in those passages of
end-justifies-the-means morality. Every State I know of was established by some
form of might makes right (excepting the kingdom of Saul son of Kish; pace David and Solomon; see 2 Sam 2 and
1 Kgs 2:13–25, respectively), so I can only infer that we know whom God has
chosen to rule after the battle is over, at which point we can know that God
chose the winner (Rom 13:1). Because God endows rulers with wisdom, the ends
they set will be just (Prov 8:15), and the means they establish to meet those
ends will be just also.
(This puts quislings in an interesting position. The Third
Reich conquers Belgium, so a Christian cites Rom 13 and takes a job with the
Reich harassing Belgians and sending Jews to their deaths. The Allies come, and
the Christian cites Rom 13 and fights against the Allies. The Allies win, and
where does that leave the quisling?)
I can square might-makes-right morality with contemporary US
conservatism, but I’m not sure how to square it with the Great Commission.
Conservatives, even confessing Christians, happily vote my money away
indirectly for the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, public transportation, and you
name it, and directly for public school levies, and consider me somewhere
between curmudgeonly and apostate for calling them immoral for doing so. Their argument
can rest only on the presupposition that what the State ordains is right
because God has allowed those in power to attain that power, and their stated
ends are God’s true ends.
The War on Terror involves only God knows how much
“collateral damage,” the killing of innocent people, but what might otherwise
be classed as murder is somehow OK now because the stated end is to kill off
all the terrorists. Because this stated end is so noble, not only the taxation
but also the killing is legitimate. Best of all, from the Christian
conservative’s point of view, we don’t have to worry that the killing might
alienate people from the gospel message or that the money we give in taxes
might better have gone to supporting missionaries: ours is only to submit and
obey.
Similarly, the War on Drugs puts what we grow in our gardens
and trade with our neighbors, to say nothing of what we put in our bodies,
within the purview of those who have won the struggle for power, giving them
the right not only to tax us but to spy on us, lie to us in sting operations,
break into our houses, sell or give weapons to murderous gangs in other
countries, put us in cages, and even kill us, all because of the stated goal of
keeping some substances out of circulation. Again, because we are to consider those
who rule us as God’s vicars, to ask how effective their actions are at
achieving the stated goal or in bringing people to Jesus, or even how their
actions accord with biblical ethics, is to impugn the holiness of God.
Mariana Mazzucato is no conservative, but The Entrepreneurial State accords very
well with contemporary conservative might-makes-right, end-justifies-the-means
ethics. And so if they are all correct, Christians need to learn the lessons to
be drawn from her work:
There are at least three lessons vital for effective
institutionalization of innovation that stem from Mariana Mazzucato’s analysis.
There is a need to strengthen the funding source of public R&D; a need to
increase public commitment to ‘green’ technology innovation and direction
setting; and a need to update the Keynesian responses to modern economic
crises. (From the forward by Carlota Perez)
In short, we need to give more of our resources to the State
so it can do more for us. Christians can then trust that God will fulfill the
Great Commission through the State he has ordained, and out of gratitude we
need to fly the State’s flag literally and figuratively.
The alternative is to begin with the Bible, which states
that we will be judged on the basis of all
our works, which in turn will be judged on their own merits.
For we must all stand
before Christ to be judged. We will each receive whatever we deserve for the
good or evil we have done in our bodies. (2 Cor 5:10)
Learn to do good. Seek justice. Help
the oppressed. Defend the orphan. Fight for the rights of widows. (Isa 1:17)
Seeking justice and helping the oppressed by definition
involve opposing the State, since injustice and oppression are by definition
State malfeasance: even a common assault or theft in an isolated area of a
state is evidence that the State is not doing its job adequately and will
usually be followed by calls for the State to change a putative deficient policy.
If God through Isaiah calls his people to question State actions, it follows
that injustice and oppression are what they are irrespective of the stated ends
of the unjust and the oppressors, and not least those who act as their agents: Christians
cannot use State policy to defend their own unjust actions.
If we really want to take the Great Commission seriously, we
need to get beyond the supposed difference between liberals and conservatives
and make the kingdom of God, not some mythological America of yore, the object
of our labors. Justice is just, not because it will “restore America” or bring
prosperity, but because it is just. It is God’s nature, and we are to partake
of it as deeply as we can; whether we end up with iPads or even an improved food
supply is secondary. We can expect, however, that if the process is what God
calls just, the result will be what he calls good—and his is the only opinion
that really matters.
