In his latest book, Political Order and Political Decay, he writes,

Though no one will ever find a smoking gun linking bank campaign contributions to the votes of specific congressmen, it defies belief that the banking industry’s legions of lobbyists did not have a major impact in preventing the simpler solution of simply breaking up the big banks or subjecting them to stringent capital requirements.

It is taking me a long time to finish Fukuyama’s book. It is long and repetitive. I think that every time I read something from him, my temptation is to condense it to something much shorter. If I post a review, I will let you know, and my guess is that if you read my review you will not need to read the book.

He favors a combination of state capacity, rule of law, and democracy. In terms of our three branches of government, the executive branch is responsible for state capacity, the courts are responsible for the rule of law, and legislatures are to respond to democracy.

(Bryan Caplan is not happy with the concept of state capacity. He suspects that it is a meaningless yay-word. If nothing else, Fukuyama seems to me to endow the word with meaning. It means that bureaucrats are effective and ethical, as in Singapore, rather than ineffective and corrupt, as in India.)

Many on the right consider the administrative state, meaning government agencies operating independently, to be a bug. For Fukuyama, it is a feature. In his view, one main reason that these agencies function poorly in this country is that they face too much interference from Congress and from the courts. In my view, agencies are as easily captured by special interests as are legislators.

If David Brooks ever gets around to reading this book, he will heart it. Like Brooks, Fukuyama longs for a political system in which an autonomous elite governs on behalf of the public good. In Fukuyama’s view, the libertarian efforts to constrain government, including checks and balances as well as federalism, end up backfiring. They make government less effective while not constraining its growth.

The ideas are worth chewing on. Do I believe that the elites would, for example, fix the unsustainable entitlements promises if we had a parliamentary system? Or do I believe that a stronger government would be worse rather than better? It’s a tough call.