The Substitution Effect

Perhaps the most overdue, yet bone-headedly obvious statement that David Cameron has yet made was, “There is such a thing as society. It just isn’t the same thing as the state”. And it would have been nice if he meant it. For decades we have lived in an odd dichotomy between two daft concepts of society. On the Left, we have those who think that the state is an infallible, all-powerful miniature of society, and the responsibilities of that society must be delegated to its wise, benevolent functionaries. In the past fifty years, the Right has swung violently between agreeing with the Left, and denying that there is any sort of collective identity beyond the clan, the village and the Dunkirk spirit.

In a strictly practical sense, the Left now accepts that many things can be done well outside the state, and even that some functions of the state are better delegated to private organisations. Yet it instinctively thinks that the state is there to direct society in every way necessary. This causes some schizophrenia in government, when NHS operations, defence research and inner-city schools are outsourced to private contractors, but citizens may not independently make up their minds over whether to hunt, smoke, leave taps running or choose the number of driven wheels on one’s car.

The Right is no better at figuring out the relationship between society and state. It instinctively believes that the only things the state is good for are building grammar schools and holding Fleet reviews, and yet its sense of pragmatism, or intellectual cowardice, has led it to run the state in essentially the same way that the Left would. It has failed to recognise, or at least to argue for, the idea that society exists and that it cannot exist alongside the ‘social’ state.

A state that forcibly takes away people’s property to fund services creates the expectation that these services will materialise, and that in exchange for their cash, citizens will not also have to help provide these services. A state dedicated to passing laws that try to think on behalf of its citizens can hardly complain when those citizens stop thinking for themselves. The ‘partnership’ between the state and citizens, charities, businesses, faiths or whatever, much beloved of politicians, is a fiction. People, quite reasonably, think it rather cheeky for the state to dip into your pocket to provide a service, then expect citizens to do the job themselves. If one's cash and liberties are taken by the state, then responsibility goes with it.

The existence of a civil society relies on there not being state provision to crowd it out. The volunteer fire services in rural Europe and the States survive and prosper because there is no state rival. Who would waste time and risk their lives if they were already being taxed to the same end? Likewise, the RNLI, the last of the great voluntary services, is only able to thrive because the state makes no attempt to muscle in on its territory. If HM Coastguard expanded into lifeboats, and we all had to pay for its new services, why would anyone give again to a superfluous private charity?

Every time a politician declares that a social problem is his responsibility, rather than a problem for society to fix, he is undermining the ability of civil society to function, and encouraging his clients to throw their problems at him. The nineteenth-century friendly societies, which provided the working class with social and medical insurance against unemployment and sickness, were killed by the introduction of national insurance in the early twentieth. A few romantic lefties like to lament the fall of these honourable, effective organisations, yet forget the fact that it was the lack of a state rival that enabled them to form in the first place.

This substitution effect has long-term consequences. Once a particular sort of self-reliance has been killed off, it is very difficult to resurrect. If the government agency that replaced the social one fails, the clamour is for the government to do more and better, rather than to retreat. People lose the ability and drive to do things for themselves, and fear the consequences of the government withdrawing.

It is obvious to most people - those who are neither hardened ideologues nor paid lackeys - that state education is failing. I left school only in 2000, and I know perfectly well that the tales of senior history students being blissfully unaware that anything much happened in 1066 are not some sort of reactionary myth. My school - now a decent comprehensive, so far as they exist - was set up a hundred and fifty years ago by an ex-India service officer, who was so impressed with the way children were taught in madrassas that he took the initiative to filch the idea and build a similar school in his home town. A century and a half on, we are far richer and education is, supposedly, one of our top political priorities. And when the government now suggests that we should do a bit more to help set up and run schools, we greet them with hoots of derision, calling it an abdication of responsibility: do-it-yourself IKEA education. ‘Do it for us!’ we wail. ‘That’s what you’re there for!’

On the contrary, it is us who have abdicated responsibility. It is tempting and easy to blame society or the state for one’s own failures. When legions of officials, legislators and commentators line up to take responsibility on behalf of society for someone’s problems or failings, it takes real strength of character to say ‘No. It’s my fault, and I won’t blame anyone else or demand that other people fix it.’

As we rely increasingly on the state to solve people’s problems and provide services for them, we implicitly expect people to fail without help, to be unable to live successfully without state intervention. Is it a coincidence that the standard of parenting has decreased in a period that saw the state increasingly nationalise and subsidise child-rearing? As anyone who has ever been a boss, a teacher, a parent or even a child will tell you, the more someone in authority expects you to screw up, skive off or laze around, the more likely you are to live down to those expectations. Funnily enough, as our expectations of citizens drop, they become increasingly incapable, commit more crime, and behave ever more badly.

In a sense, this is a problem of democracy. If seems acceptable to vote for a promised easy life rather than to achieve it, and for politicians to offer to solve everyone’s problems for them, we will always have a government that tries to take over the responsibilities of society. It is not easy to try to solve problems yourself, and it carries the risk of failing and looking a fool.

Instead, we pay the state to be caring on our behalf. We have done the very modern thing of outsourcing our compassionate duty to a superficially attractive bidder, and not giving too much of a toss whether the resulting service is any good. Handing the job over to the state is appealing. We can always sit back and throw brickbats at them, say how useless they are and how we could all do better, safe in the knowledge that we’ll never be put to the test.

It is appalling that we think this is a ‘caring society’, when we simply sub-contract our compassionate duty to state functionaries. State takeovers leave society unable to function effectively. We end up like Russia is today, desperate for someone to lead us, to do things for us, terrified of what will happen if the state takes away its expensive, destructive benevolence. We do not like being dependent on our bosses, our children, our parents, or anyone else. Why make such a vast, dreadful exception for the state?