When people notice something they don’t like, someone will often suggest that “something should be done” about it: a new law or regulation, a new committee or task force, new infrastructure, new education campaigns. If there are enough people who don’t like the thing, and some of them don’t like it strongly enough, they will organize or pester and ultimately they or their representatives will act.
Sometimes, this is the wrong thing to do. Some things that are bad are less bad than anything that could conceivably be done to fix them. The solutions may be directly expensive, draining funds that would be better used elsewhere. Sometimes they impose different costs elsewhere. Sometimes they just increase the attack surface of government, creating new offices or new spending powers that can be corrupted or flawed.
But people who believe this to be the case are at a political disadvantage. Most clearly, the nuanced position that “X is bad but nothing should be done about it” is just a political loser, not enough of the population understands that kind of argument, and even the ones who do are disposed to reject it in most specific cases.
But the disadvantage is also inherent in the asymmetry between doing nothing and doing something: when we do something, everyone that comes along and see the problem can be shown the something that is being done to solve it. That will tend to satisfy them that “something is being done”. Even if they may disagree with the specific course of action, they will take the doing-something-committee as the de facto means. Moreover, the something that is being done becomes entrenched, it has people who derive their power from it, it has people who are paid to do the something.
Doing nothing, by contrast, has no such inertia. On the outside chance that in the first round of discussion you manage to convince enough people to do nothing, no coalition is formed who benefit directly and obviously from that decision in the way that is formed when the decision is to do something. No one gets a fancy title, no one is paid to take the steps. And the next person who comes along and notices that they don’t like the thing can suggest that something needs to be done – the previous decision to do nothing has almost no weight on the next debate about what to do.
This is partly why governments tend to get larger, social programs expand, the state becomes more all-encompassing over time. The longer a state exists, the more likely it will decide to do things, and those things will become entrenched. If those things create new problems, they will be solved by doing more things, which will similarly become entrenched. You might get momentrary contractions as when many things are collapsed into One Big Thing, but the set of things done stays big, and continues to grow.
Founding documents should be written to take this dynamic into account, and should put some countervailing pressure on continuing to do things. The US Constitution’s limits on the domains in which the state is allowed to act partly fulfill this role, by stopping certain conversations about what to do before they get going. Provisions that make passing laws harder can have a similar effect, though in the US context that’s led to a larger administrative state, so that it’s not necessary to pass a law to do more and doing things actually accelerates in many domains. A more aggressive approach would be periodically sun-setting laws, so that keeping things going requires periodically reevaluating and reaffirming the decision to act.
In general, the state should do less. Law favors busy bodies to everyone’s detriment. Many things the state does are good, but the meddlesome and inefficient things it does decrease trust in the state, and encourage over-broad rejection of state power and initiative.
There should be a stronger presumption that not all problems can or should be solved.