The Limiting Virtues

D avid Bahnsen asks an important question, and it deserves an answer. In the context of debates about the common good, he asks people who would propose intervention in the market to show their limiting principle. This is especially understandable given the political context of our time. Certain advocates like myself have encouraged the use of the tariff power, citing Hamilton’s rationale of securing our political independence “from the combinations, of foreign policy.” Hamilton’s name tends to inspire at least some trust. But Donald Trump is enacting broad tariffs against friend and foe alike and not limiting himself to goods that could even plausibly be connected to our security or geopolitical independence.

It seems to me that Trump’s choices are shaped by whatever existing legal authority he can use to enact tariffs. The ones he has cited tend to allow tariffs aimed broadly at nations rather than categories of goods. Where tariffs most resemble normal tax policy, they obviously belong to Congress, but Congress has tended to send tariff power to the executive when it is more likely to be a tool of foreign policy. Over time, it’s become evident Trump is setting them up in a way that is deliberately indefensible as policy but meant to be used more as leverage to bring other heads of state to negotiation.

As Iran hawks have recently found when it comes to Trump, the announced aims of the policy and its implementation are two different things. That gap understandably introduces a great deal of static into our debates about policy.

But if we can bracket the interference for a moment, I think I can give Bahnsen the answer he deserves: There often isn’t a limiting principle. But that’s not because advocates seek unlimited power to impose rank statism; it’s because, in certain cases, the limits we get in government are provided by the practice of limiting virtues: moderation, contentment, humility, loyalty, and neighborliness.

I’ve found David McPherson’s book, The Virtues of Limits, a helpful guide here. We can see this confusion in our rhetoric sometimes. When a law is proposed, some people, mindful of the principles at work, have a habit of pointing out that, ultimately, the law is backed by the barrel of a gun. “The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning,” wrote Ludwig von Mises. When Eric Garner was killed while a policeman tried to enforce a law against the selling of loose cigarettes, Stephen Carter wrote, “Behind every exercise of law stands the sheriff — or the SWAT team — or if necessary the National Guard.”

This sentiment isn’t just expressed on the right but among political theorists of the left too. Robert Cover, in his book Violence and the World, writes that “between the idea and the reality of common meaning falls the shadow of the violence of law.”

Paleolibertarian Murray Rothbard, writing on taxation, was more extreme: “Like the robber, the State demands money at the equivalent of gunpoint; if the taxpayer refuses to pay, his assets are seized by force, and if he should resist such depredation, he will be arrested or shot if he should continue to resist.”

But in fact, our state doesn’t act like a robber. The IRS estimates that about 15 percent of taxpayers at any given time are out of compliance. That’s tens of millions of individuals and many thousands of corporate taxpayers. Yet our streets are not running with blood, and tax scofflaws aren’t filling our prisons.

Ideological thinking, or thinking that appears principled, bids us toward theoretical neatness and perfectionism at the cost of the true art of governing. I don’t love the IRS either. But what is the limiting principle on tax enforcement? There isn’t one. But the government doesn’t immediately resort to extreme action. Notices and letters are sent. Fines are applied. Offers in compromise are accepted. Tax professionals are empowered to mediate and negotiate plans for bringing people back into lawful compliance. These regulations and practical efforts are shaped by those limiting virtues. A tax authority that has no firmness leads to the dysfunction and culture of fraud Germans discovered in Greece during the financial crisis. One with too much invasiveness, as ours had in the 1980s and 1990s, inspires revulsion, fear, revolt, and resentment. That led to formal legal reform in 1997 and internal changes initiated by the IRS, reflecting more prudence about how much face-to-face confrontation the public would bear.

Our Founders were able to design a system of enumerated and separated government powers, as a check on predictable forms of tyranny and the exercise of arbitrary power. Those can take much of the load, but they still need the virtues of officeholders to know when to check, when to veto, and what to propose.

And we need limiting virtues because governments cannot predict all conditions and circumstances ahead of time that require living human judgment and aren’t easily captured by abstract principles. In our society, we use the law to encourage adults to insure against foreseeable disasters. That’s absolutely an interference in the market. We do this not because we hate freedom but because such disasters have a knowable mathematical probability over a large population, and the cost to the individual and common good (and freedom) associated with citizens’ becoming dependents in these circumstances is worse than the alternative. In Florida, a very free state, the circumstances require hurricane insurance that people find onerous. There are some scofflaws. There is no exact limiting principle on how much insurance to require, but the regulations and market realities and patterns of law enforcement reflect the prudence about truly foreseeable events, rather than exotic outliers like meteor strikes.

Recently, a friend trying to decipher my limiting principle on tariffs was treated again to my Hamilton quotation about rendering us “least dependent on the combinations, right or wrong, of foreign policy.” Hamilton was talking about nurturing the skills and industries necessary, in extremis, to support the state’s political independence. But my interlocutor, seeing the word “dependence,” noted that bananas aren’t grown in America, so asked if I am demanding tariffs to encourage people to find a way to grow them economically here. Of course not. A banana shortage would annoy people during a global crisis, but it seems unreasonable to think that bananas would constitute a major external political constraint on our sovereignty.

Can I define, exhaustively, in advance for all time — by principle — what set of policies would make America’s sovereignty and independence not just a post-Westphalian legal formality, but truly practical and effectual in a world of changing threats? No. For that we require living statesmen of wisdom and virtue. Men like Hamilton, practicing not just courage but moderation, humility, contentment with what’s “enough,” and, yes, neighborliness. I hope we find some soon.