Short-term Thinking and Unbridled Government
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris recently announced that she would favor eliminating the Senate’s filibuster rule to codify the former rule of Roe v. Wade (1973) that treated abortion as a civil right. Roe was overruled by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), returning the issue to the state governments to decide. Eliminating the filibuster for ordinary legislation, as Harris proposes, is enormously dangerous, as it would further transform the U.S. political system into a purely majoritarian one that would empower temporary, bare majorities in the national government to impose their will on a deeply divided country. Currently, the filibuster rule in the Senate means that ordinary legislation requires sixty votes for a cloture vote, which forces an end to a filibuster. Without the filibuster, any measure that can obtain fifty-one votes can be passed and imposed on the American people if the House of Representatives and President agree. One party rule could be very dangerous indeed to liberty and prosperity, and it could be used for and against both “sides” in American politics, depending on which is in power at a given moment. Harris, like any other politician in “our democracy,” is not thinking about the future. Instead, she is thinking solely of the November 2024 election. This underscores an important point, not about Harris in particular, but about the politics of “democracy” in general.
In democratic politics, the time horizon that concerns political elites is limited to the next election cycle, so the system is systematically biased against long-term rational decision making. Indeed, as Hans Hoppe has cogently argued, the incentives of politicians in democracies are to focus on the present and discount the future very heavily. Politicians in democracies seek to present themselves as holding and acting upon grand political and moral principles, but whether they hold such principles is not relevant to their behavior, which is instead motivated principally by short-term advantage. Thus, whatever they may say about the bases for their decisions, the true reason is their conviction that it will help set them up for victory in the next election cycle. This is why their actions so often seem puzzlingly irrational. They do things that have a great and damaging long-term cost, whether it is excessive
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