What's happening with Iraq?

It's interesting to see how pessimistic people are capable of being about Iraq, especially given this week's developments. Lee Harris has a pessimistic take on humankind, and it spills over into Iraq:

It matters little who gets elected to the upcoming parliament; nothing can work in Iraq unless a single man is given dictatorial powers until the current crisis is over. Iraq is in the midst of an emergency, and in any natural political system, a dictatorship would almost certainly have been achieved by someone or other in the time since the removal of Saddam Hussein. Iraq today, however, is not a natural political system, but a completely artificial one. This is not meant as a disparagement of what is called, out of courtesy, the Iraqi government, but only a recognition of the fact that it is a fabrication that could not last two days without the continuous support of American and allied arms.

I have to wonder, though, what Mr. Harris would take as evidence that democracy in Iraq was not a fabrication.

That the current political system is not natural, and is "completely artificial" seems to me to miss the point. Just about any political system other than rule by force of arms is un-natural. A political system that offers any sort of guarantee of individual rights and liberties is artificial in both senses of the word. It is a profound deviation from the natural state of affiars, and it can be achieved only by significant amounts of artistry.

Lee Harris shares his pessimism with Thomas Hobbes, famous for describing the natural life of human beings as "nasty, brutish, and short". According to Hobbes (or according to Hobbes according to Harris):

...continued in full post...

once a legitimate authority had been liquidated, for whatever reason, it was impossible to resurrect it, and thus he confronted the same problem in England as the Iraqis are confronting in their land. Saddam Hussein’s regime had possessed the most brutal kind of legitimacy, but it was legitimacy nonetheless: people obeyed and did what they were told to do by those in authority. But with the complete removal of both Saddam and his entire governmental apparatus, American policy in Iraq pushed the country into a crisis of legitimacy. If Saddam Hussein did not rule them, who did? Our answer was that the Iraqi people could rule themselves. That’s what we think happens in a democracy, though of course a moment’s thought shows that no democracy is so absurd as to really allow the people more power than is absolutely necessary. But the Iraqi people could not rule themselves, and are not ruling themselves. This, however, is no reflection on the Iraqi people, since we have it on the authority of Thomas Hobbes himself that it is impossible for a people to rule themselves.

Oh. That's too bad. I guess the USA doesn't exist, then. (I have a problem, by the way, with his use of the phrase "than is absolutely necessary". This phrase is meaningless unless someone defines "absolutely necessary for what?")

The basis for this pessimism? Well...

The reason he gives to justify this assertion is pure common sense. In any collective task, each person will invariably think that he has labored harder or played a more important role than everyone else. He will naturally think he deserves a larger piece of the pie – or the oil wealth – than his associates. Of course, he doesn’t – he is simply the victim of an illusion to which all human beings are prone. We all think we deserve far more than we do, and from this elementary observation, Hobbes concluded that no people could ever really govern themselves, since there will be a constant and continual dispute about how to divide up the honors or the pay check or the spoils....all human associations will be infected with the virus of self will, and this will doom them to centrifugal disintegration.

At this point, I'm reminded of the phrase: "Common sense is what tells you the Earth is flat." Just as the Flat Earth Theory is tenable to anyone who doesn't see enough of the big picture, this "pure common sense" objection to a people being able to rule themselves is tenable only because Hobbes misses the big picture.

I happen to belong to a number of groups that manage to govern themselves quite well. At the very least, an insignificant fraction of these groups have undergone "centrifugal disintegration". Is my experience atypical?

I don't believe that for a moment. I think groups are perfectly capable of governing themselves without Harris' solution of a dictator wielding the power of life and death over them.

I think the key lies in the marketplace. More precisely, I think the key lies in the spontaneous order that arises when many individuals, seeking their own self interest, spontaneously breathe life into Adam Smith's "invisible hand".

People stop short of insisting on a larger share of the pie than they deserve, not because they become angels or saints, nor because an all-powerful dictator pushes them away from the pie, but because the invisible hand is ready to slap their hands when they over-reach.

Remember, any group will be made up of people who are out to get as much of the pie for themselves as possible, but these same people will be paying attention to how much of the pie everyone else is getting. A person who consistently takes more than the consensus opinion of how much he deserves will be slapped down.

When an incentive structure is crafted – by art – that makes this form of accounting easy, the tendency to over-reach is reined in almost automatically. The "invisible hand" does its job.

Harris advocates a Roman-style "dictator" – a single individual given absolute power for a strictly limited period of time, to deal with emergency situations. I'm not sure where I read it, but I seem to recall reading that for every month a dictator was in charge, the Roman Senate had to spend two or three months cleaning up the mess. A single individual in a position of command-and-control authority simply cannot run things as efficiently as a larger number of people closer to the situation. And the most efficient system of all is the marketplace, peopled by masses individually pursuing their own self-interest.

Common sense tells you the earth is flat, if you're too close to see the curvature.