Are governments anti-social?

For some time I’ve been toying with the idea that politics doesn’t work because there is a crucial test we don't apply. There are missing tests in political theory just as there are in psychology, but in politics we don't seem to acknowledge it.

I’ll use the word social for now, as it’s a familiar word without an alarming amount of baggage. Oddly enough, the term anti-social is more familiar, so let's just say for current purposes that social is the opposite of anti-social. Any political activity may be social or anti-social.

To my mind, the crucial aspect of any political theory or activity is whether or not it is self-correcting once launched on an unsuspecting public. Maybe this gives us two equivalences.

Anti-social = not self-correcting.

Social = self-correcting.

There is an obvious connection here with wasteful and less wasteful activity. We correct wasteful activity unless we happen to be government-funded, when we wait for it to be corrected.

We all know how governments fund wasteful, anti-social activities, that is to say activities where there is no correction mechanism, something that kicks in automatically when things go wrong. Obviously we can soon lose ourselves in a sea of words here, but that’s surely the point isn’t it? We do lose ourselves in a sea of political words – frequently.

In other words, we need a political metric or test of some kind, some way of understanding why so much political activity is essentially anti-social. We need to understand that self-correcting mechanisms such as the free market are essentially social, not so much because of what they deliver, but because they are self-correcting. 

 Government activity tends not to be self-correcting and so is essentially and inevitably anti-social.

Wind turbines are a good example of an anti-social government activity. They don’t generate power efficiently and there is no automatic mechanism to correct the problem. In a free market they would never have been used at all, or if they had, their disutility would soon finish them off.

In general, environmental politics tends to be anti-social. Policies are invented and enacted where there is  quite obviously no element of self-correction. Pesticides are banned, they disappear from the market and the environment and new pesticides come on the market to replace them. But until new regulations come in, we test for the old pesticides in the environment and ignore the new ones - often for years. Why? Government, or more often EU regulations. Anti-social regulations.

I’m not that this way of viewing politics is particularly insightful, but as with many aspects of complex issues, we tend to forget the basics. It's really no more than a reminder - productive activity is self-correcting activity. So that rules out the UK government, the EU and the UN, doesn't it?