WASHINGTON, D.C.: SO FAR FROM GOD, SO CLOSE TO THE UNITED STATES… Is it the heat, or the humidity?

Something about DC seems to provoke weirdly illiberal statements from bloggers who should know better. Recently InstaPundit and Matthew Yglesias have decided to defend the District’s bizarre crypto-colonial status (you know, the whole taxation-without-representation thing). There’s one interesting argument and a bunch of non-interesting ones here. Taking the interesting one first, here we go:

IF WE GAVE ‘EM THE VOTE, THEY’D ONLY SCREW IT UP. Matt Yglesias goes to bat for the notion of “instrumental democracy” as vs. “constitutive democracy.” CD is what people in cities like San Francisco and states like Florida have: You get to vote on lots of fun stuff, and unless you overstep the boundaries of the state and federal Constitutions (or, uh, whatever your local judicial oligarchs have determined said boundaries to be, but leave that question aside for the moment) those votes get results. The presumption is that you “deserve” a vote, even though in particular cases the outcome of that vote might be unconstitutional and thus thrown out.

ID is very different. ID begins with the true-enough statement that ends are more important than means. Some countries, lacking the rule of law, might be best advised to institute liberal reforms before democracy. Democracy itself is just a tool; it can lead to lousy decisions, even evil decisions. America is by no means purely democratic; some degree of ID is built into our constitutional-republican system.

But Yglesias, in applying the instrumental democracy concept to DC, turns into a classic paternalistic manager. (Actually, his post is kind of cagey, so he may not be subscribing to the position he presents; because it makes referring to his post easier, though, I’ll assume for the moment that he at least sympathizes with the instrumentalist stance against DC self-government.)

The first and most obvious fallacy of the instrumentalist case against DC self-government is that in the particular case of DC, Congressional oversight has screwed up all kinds of wacky things, so it’s not as if we’d be trading incompetent-but-democratic government for rule by philosopher kings. Think about it: Would you like to live in a city in which every budgetary decision (and thus every governmental decision) had to be vetted by Congress? Would you expect that city to be well-governed? Or would you expect every local decision to be held hostage by various posturing Congressmen? An example of the sort of thing that makes DC residents skeptical about managerial rule: Did the District vote to legalize medical marijuana in 1998? We’ll never know! Congress refused to allocate money to let the votes be counted. Blatant, no?

You might reply, Yeah, OK, but the parts of DC that local people are allowed to run have screwed up much more important things than medical marijuana. Like the entire police force, say. I agree. But I think the current lack of home rule, the heavy-handed Congressional intervention, exacerbates these problems. When you treat people like subjects rather than citizens, they tend to respond with irresponsibility and resentment. Marion “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World” Barry is a perfect example. He kept getting elected, even after dragging the city into an abyss of mismanagement and crime, because he played expertly on local resentment of Congress. A vote for Barry was a big middle finger to the Man. You may find that stance stupid and self-defeating (I do), but please don’t pretend it’s unusual or symptomatic of some peculiar DC-native pathology. People who are treated like children (in a country that exalts the ideals of representative government and the ability to “have a say” in what happens to you) often tend to react childishly. People voted for Barry because they wanted Congress to know just how much we hated them–even this crackhead is OK as long as he yells about our white overseers!

Self-government is fundamentally about responsibility. It’s about having a sense of ownership of one’s own life. One of the reasons DC is so screwed up–one of the reasons we fell so hard for the same racialist and leftist toxins that other cities also adored in the 1980s–is that since the 1970s, we’ve been in this one-foot-in, one-foot-out position where we have just enough home rule to get the blame but not enough home rule to get real responsibility and self-control. To say, “We won’t let you have the rights of citizens until you show you can use them wisely!” is to misunderstand a) how people learn responsibility, and b) what citizenship in the USA means. People don’t learn responsibility by being treated with contempt, by being playthings for other people’s political agendas, or by being told that they can have a say in things except when it matters. And US citizens shouldn’t be treated as subjects because they, or their neighbors, have made asinine political decisions in the past. (If we did yank self-government from every city that screwed up, gevalt, the whole country would be a federally-managed protectorate! DC is, at its worst, different only in degree of lousiness, not in kind. Other cities have been and will be worse than us.)

DIFFERENCES THAT MAKE A DIFFERENCE?: But the District is different from all other cities, supporters of the status quo argue. True enough, but are these differences relevant? Status-quo supporters argue that the District should have sharply limited self-government because:

A) DC is really small. Uh, so what? Does the fact that we’re only larger than one state (Wyoming) have anything to do with anything, really? This might make sense (sort of) as an objection to DC statehood (more on this in a moment), but as an argument against being able to vote for Congressional representatives and/or being able to actually control our own city’s budget, it’s pretty weak.

B) There are lots of transients in DC. I suspect this point only seems compelling because it’s easier for most bloggers to imagine themselves as Capitol Hill staffers in town for the summer than as people who, you know, have lived here our whole lives. Such people do exist. (Hi!) The fact that an area has a large transient population should really not be relevant in assessing whether everyone who lives there should be managed by the Feds. Think of college towns, many of which almost certainly have an even higher proportion of transients in the population than DC does. Would anyone suggest that the citizens of those towns–undergrads and townies alike–should submit all their local decisions to the U.S. Congress? It may be irresponsible for someone who won’t be living here in the long-term to vote on policies that won’t affect him much. (That’s why I never voted in New Haven elections–I knew I’d be leaving soon, and wouldn’t have to suffer the consequences of any bad policies I supported.) But that’s no reason to withhold self-government from an entire city. If you think Capitol Hill staffers who plan to leave soon (and many people who come here for politics do stay; I’d guess that much of the District’s transient population is actually immigrants gathering the cash to move to the suburbs, rather than specifically federal-city newcomers, so again, DC is not this freakish anomaly among cities) shouldn’t vote, you need to persuade them of that; why penalize people who do live here and do accept the consequences of their votes?

C) DC residents could move. Um, OK. So if we withdrew home rule from New York City, or the city of your choice, that’d be OK since hey, you could move to the suburbs? Would it be OK if NYC hadn’t had home rule before, so anyone who moved there (or their parents; or their grandparents…) knew beforehand what they were getting into? If a law is lousy, I’m not sure why “they don’t have that law next door!” is a good reason for people who live there to stop trying to overturn the law.

This argument at first appears to be localist, since it’s modeled after the localist argument that if you don’t like local mores and laws, you can always move. But when applied to DC in this context, the argument is actually anti-localist; it’s saying that Congress can impose a lousy law from above, and if you don’t like it, don’t live there. Look at it this way: When Mike Bloomberg institutes ridiculous anti-smoking regulations in New York City, Glenn Reynolds doesn’t say, “Whatever, folks, you can always live in Westchester!” If the US Congress were to institute such regulations, again only in NYC, I can only imagine the torrent of invective that would pour from Reynolds. So why is “you could move!” a good argument against DC self-government?

Now, we come to the really hard part: What should happen to this little chunk of swampland? And here’s where my certainty dissolves. I have no real problem with people who make the argument that the status quo should stay because it’s better than the alternatives; I disagree, but that stance is much more reasonable than the stance that the status quo is actually a good thing because the District doesn’t deserve democracy.

DC statehood, that muddlebrained fantasy, isn’t gonna happen in the foreseeable future for two basic reasons. The first: two more Dem senators. Uh-uh. The GOP will fight that to the death, and the Dems will have an impossible task presenting a statehood push as anything more than a blatant political power grab. As many people have noted, the GOP might accept (if forced) an extra Dem representative, but senators are an absolute no-go.

The second reason: finances. An independent DC state would collapse almost immediately. Cities are revenue sinkholes; real states pay for the government jobs and welfare-state entitlements of their cities by taxing the revenue-producing suburbs and exurbs. DC’s budget already sways under the weight of pension liabilities, Medicare, and all the other ills that modern urban flesh is heir to; without regular cash infusions from the feds, we can’t make it on our own. Not even close.

Radley Balko has brought up a much better idea (and I think Ben Domenech did too, but I can’t find the link): Instead of representation and taxation, why not give DC neither? The “tax-free zone” idea has a lot of cool features–I think it would revive the District’s zombie economy, and it might also provide an incentive to do all kinds of necessary pro-business reforms (like cutting regulation). I would prefer both to neither, but because having enough money really does enhance one’s ability to control one’s own life and exercise responsibility it’s a pretty close call. My own preferred solution (which is pretty pie-in-the-sky, I know) is for the District (perhaps excepting a tiny federal district) to be re-absorbed into Maryland. We should be a city like any other. Now, there’s no way this will happen soon, because Maryland wants another broken city to pay for about as much as you want a tarantula in your Jockeys. It is possible that if a tax-free zone revived the District’s economy sufficiently, we’d become an asset (after all, we’ve got tourist attractions that ain’t goin’ nowhere) rather than a liability. Thus, in an annoying twist, the tax-free zone might make absorption into Maryland possible–but if we were then absorbed, the whole justification for the tax-free zone would disappear (since we’d be represented).

Really, either option–tax haven or Just Another Maryland City–would do a lot to diminish the resentment and helplessness that DC residents feel toward the federal government. Either rule us right, or don’t rule us at all, basically–either help us become a jewel in the federal crown, or let us become just like everybody else. But don’t treat us like vassals, grade-schoolers, or Enemies of the People. Most people who live “inside the Beltway” are as much “Beltway insiders” as your dog.

None of the above vitriol toward Congress should be taken to let DC residents off the hook. We’ve seriously screwed up, again and again. But you know that already. I don’t think continuing to pit DC against Congress–thus giving both groups someone else to blame (Barry: “Blame the white man!”; Congress: “Blame the crackhead!”; nobody actually has to take responsibility)–will spur DC residents to do any better than we have in the past. We can improve on our own, for sure–and we need to. But if people outside the city are going to pontificate about what should happen to us, at least try not to argue that we’re so uniquely stupid/evil that Jesse Helms could run our city better than we can.