Minimal State Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The idea of the minimal state is associated with right wing political ideology and libertarian political theory. Its functions are limited to the protection of individual security and property rights along with external defense. Its ideal is the “night watchman” state. In a minimal state, the free market is the principal means of social organization and resource allocation. Supporters of the minimal state are generally most critical of the socialized elements and redistributive functions of the modern welfare state. However, the ideal of the minimal state is also without many of the regulatory functions of the modern state, such as modern environmental policies. And of course, any whiff of paternalism is noxious to supporters of the minimal state—seat-belt laws, for example.

It is useful to make a distinction between two types of defenses of the minimal state, call them contingent and principled arguments. It is important to note that the two types are usually presented together in a more general case for the minimal state. Contingent arguments make empirical claims and appeal to the consequences of different types of institutions in defense of the minimal state/free market system. To follow contingent arguments all the way to the minimal state entails a consistent belief in (1) the allocative efficiency of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market in the organization of the production and distribution of virtually all goods and services and (2) the related allocative inefficiency of government, despite the apparent belief that it can successfully provide security for persons and property (thus distinguishing it from anarchism). The welfare state is criticized for creating dependency amongst recipients (as opposed to the independence that is thought to characterize satisfying needs and wants through market exchanges).The welfare state is thus argued to create the “moral hazard” of a diminished work ethic among its recipients, which has the effect of dragging down overall productivity.

Principled arguments for the minimal state, on the other hand, do not appeal to the consequences of institutions and come in prior to them. They do not appeal so much to the allocative efficiency of markets and the inefficiency of government as to the nature of legitimate political authority—the minimal state is the extent of justifiable public power. For libertarians, state control of different aspects of the economy, and other elements of social life, is political tyranny. It is this idea, the undermining of individual liberty through the creeping power of the state, that, according to F. A. Hayek, paves “the road to serfdom.”

The political theory of John Locke provides the intellectual foundation for the minimal state as the extent of legitimate political authority. According to Locke, the ends of the state are the protection of life, liberty, and property. These limits correspond to the natural rights of individuals, which in the words of Robert Nozick constitute “side constraints” on political authority. By positing the notion of natural rights, Locke contends that individuals can acquire rights to goods and resources in the “state of nature”—that is, the situation preceding political society. The alternative to natural rights is viewing them as “conventional,” created by the state and so imposing no prior limits on its authority. One of the primary purposes of Locke’s Second Treatise of Government is to argue against the conventional view of rights. For Locke, individuals own themselves (the principle of self-ownership), and by mixing the right over themselves with the external world, they acquire rights to it as well. Over time, in the absence of central authority, individual natural rights become less secure, as the dispossessed increasingly violate them. As a result, individuals come together and consent to create a central authority in order to protect their natural rights. Any type of political authority that violates individual natural rights is considered illegitimate. It is the limitation to protecting prior individual natural rights that constitutes the minimalist nature of the minimal state.

Not all defenses of the minimal state, however, appeal to the natural rights of individuals. David Gauthier, for example, defends the minimal state from individual interests and the principle of mutual advantage amongst producers, thus leaving the nonproductive outside the scope of justice.

Conclusion

The proposal of the minimalist state owes its revival in the twentieth century in part to the backdrop of totalitarianism (as in the case of Hayek) as well as to the big government legacy of the 1960s (in the cases of Nozick and Charles Murray). It had a substantial impact on the 1980s conservative “revolutions” headlined by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in England and President Ronald Reagan in the United States. While both of those countries’ policies are far from the minimalist state ideal, their states are noticeably less extended than the welfare states of continental Europe.

Bibliography:

Gauthier, David. Morals by Agreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Hayek, F. A. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944.
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Murray, Charles. Losing Ground, New York: Basic Books, 1984.
Narveson, Jan. The Libertarian Ideal. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988.
Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State and Utopia, New York: Basic Books, 1974.

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