A Russian was nominated to head Interpol — he ultimately lost out to South Korean Kim Jong Yang, but let’s still talk about why it was a bad idea. As Bill Browder says, and he has more than enough personal experience in this area, it’s like “the mafia taking over global law enforcement.” That’s perhaps a little strong, as honesty and respect for the law do exist among Russian nationals. It’s the background of this specific Russian in Putin’s law enforcement agencies that worries me.
But what is it that we shouldn’t be doing? Allowing this specific person to take over this specific job? Or having a good look at the manner in which we allow state and governmental power to both grow and concentrate?
Think about what is worrying here. Interpol is an intergovernmental organization. We all think that international cooperation against the bad guys is a pretty good idea. But that does, obviously enough, mean we’ve got to have an organization to do that, an organization that has certain powers. Here, we’re worried about such powers falling into the wrong hands. And that’s the very thing we need to be worried about too.
It’s trivially easy to build a government system based upon the assumption that those doing the governing are the good guys. We just let them do whatever because, well, they’re the good guys, right? But, as here, we then find out that at times the people we don’t want to have such power over us look set to gain it. So, what do we do, what can we do, to set up a governmental system that can constrain those bad guys?
One answer is just to hope that they won’t — only nice people will ever get elected or appointed. Human history is full of examples of the naivety of this view, as it is littered with the corpses of the victims of it. The only other answer is never to give that state, that government, that ruling intergovernmental body, the power that can be used against us. Yes, of course, that means weak government. It means certain problems won’t be solved because we never do grant the powers necessary to coerce the action to deal with them. It also means we don’t have to worry very much about who holds office or position — they don’t have the power to oppress us either.
We can see much the same thing writ small in domestic politics. Former President Barack Obama made certain rules by executive action; President Trump is undoing some of those. Much of the argument is over whether we like either set of actions — the true answer is that no one should have that power to unilateral action in the first place.
Which is the true lesson here. Yes, obviously, we’d like to deal with the bad guys. But we still have that argument for monarchist government. We’ve already agreed that the bad guys exist, so we don’t actually want any concentration of power that they can co-opt. That means that we don’t create any such concentrations in the first place. Don’t let government have much power simply because people who will misuse it exist. In time, such people will end up with that power to misuse.
Or as it has been put, never, ever, create a state or governmental power that you don’t want your opponents to ever be able to wield. For as sure as eggs is eggs, the other people will gain office at some point and be able to wield it. That’s why government should be small and limited — not because you won’t do good things if only you could, but because they most certainly won’t.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
