Dismantling Leviathan: Cutting Government Down to Size

Peter Babiak teaches English at the University of British Columbia.

debt, they sometimes make dark prophecies about the future. This is what
Don Waterfall does in Dismantling Leviathan, where he warns us that, if
we don’t get our fiscal house in order and

down-size government, “our children ... shall go on for their
lifetimes paying the price of our profligacy.”

The examples he includes in his bleak scenario are all too familiar to
most Canadians: we have a debt that is almost equal to our gross
domestic product; our unemployment insurance deficit is running into the
billions; our taxation level by all levels of government has reached 40
percent. Few people would argue that expenditures in these and other
areas must be reduced. Nor

would many dispute Waterfall’s criticism of the “organizational
blockages” (excessive hierarchy and inflexible management) and
“bureaucratic psychology” (overcaution, indecision, buck-

passing) that afflicts government departments. Having spent 30 years in
what he calls “the abscess of middle management in the federal
bureaucracy,” Waterfall speaks with some

authority on these matters.

Be that as it may, at times his number-crunching pragmatism drifts into
the kind of antigovernment invective we usually associate with American
neoconservatism. Thus he criticizes agencies that fund academic
research, such as the Canada Council and the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council, not because they are costly but because
they are symptomatic of “intrusive” government. Likewise, his
complaint about the Canada Pension Plan is that it has been mismanaged,
but instead of calling on government to rectify the problem he says the
plan should be “phased out” and replaced by private-sector options.
The same goes for public education, which he thinks is too expensive
(approximately 6 percent of GDP) and should be entrusted to “private
educational entrepreneurs.” It is one thing to argue (quite rightly)
that we need to pay down the debt, but it is an entirely different
matter to use this unhappy economic fact as a pretext for making the
dogmatic political assumption that government intervention, beyond the
scope of providing for public security, must in all circumstances do
harm.

Though at times it sounds like a manifesto, Dismantling Leviathan is
indeed an eloquent book—especially the final four chapters, where
Waterfall elaborates his philosophy of small government by invoking
classical liberal thinkers from Hobbes and Locke to Hayek and Friedman.
It will certainly prove a worthy read to all those people trying to
understand the unprecedented fascination with neoconservatism among
Canadian policymakers.