Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
And what is the lesson of this little rhyme,
A lesson with meaning for us in our time?
The lesson is this and its meaning is true:
There are certain things that the state cannot do.
If all the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Cannot put an egg together again,
Is it not a false hope, an illusion, a sin
To ask civil servants to reconstruct men?
The difficulties being experienced by the British government in addressing, let alone remedying, the root causes of that country’s riots ought to remind us that governments, like everything else in the universe, are subject to limits.
In the physical world, science advises that we can’t travel faster than the speed of light, that we can’t reduce temperatures below absolute zero, and that certain physical processes once initiated – like scrambling an egg or altering the germ line of an organism – can’t be reversed.
Likewise in the political world, despite the conventional wisdom of the past half a century that virtually every problem can somehow be remedied by government action, governments, too, are subject to absolute limits that need to be more explicitly recognized and respected.
They can’t, for example, continuously spend more money than they collect in revenue, or continuously increase their borrowing and taxation levels without hitting a financial and political brick wall. This is a reality with which most governments in Canada had to come to grips in the 1990s and which is now at the heart of the debt crises in the United States and Europe.
There are also distinct limits to what can be achieved by the public services and programs of the modern welfare state – from education and health care to pensions and welfare. Important as these are, as administered by governments, they are limited in their capacity to alleviate ignorance, illness, poverty, racial tensions, spiritual bankruptcy, personal irresponsibility, family breakdown and whatever other factors contribute to criminal violence and social unrest.
Does acknowledging the financial or social development limits of governments mean abandoning such goals as economic, environmental and social security or denying that governments have a key role in achieving them? Of course not. It means seeking a new division of labour between governments and other components of society – families, communities, businesses, religious and educational institutions, NGOs and the volunteer sector – to achieve these goals.
It means enlisting the creativity, abilities and resources of what British statesman Edmund Burke once referred to as “the little platoons” in putting Humpty Dumpty together again, rather than relying exclusively on “all the King’s horses and all the King’s men” to do the job. It means adopting a more modest role for government as a facilitator of economic and social actions by other stakeholders, rather than looking to government as the prime mover without whose initiative or concurrence nothing gets done.
To be fair to the British, who invented the modern welfare state, both Tony Blair (through his New Labour program) and David Cameron (through his Big Society emphasis) were groping in this direction. Let’s hope that the British succeed, and that we can learn from both their mistakes and their successes.
Let’s also be encouraged that Canada is well-positioned to make a major contribution toward this new division of labour between its governments and civil society. We’re in better fiscal shape than both the British and U.S. governments, and recent polling shows most Canadians increasingly supportive of the concept of government as facilitator, enabler and partner.
The challenge for our political leadership is to apply this concept in concrete situations, to improving Canadian productivity through innovation, reforming health care and other aspects of social security, and achieving a better division of labour between the public and private sectors with respect to environmental conservation.
