Two engrossing articles on political philosophy came our way today. They are not strictly on the same theme but they do reinforce each other. Bold typeface is our emphasis .
First up is John Hayward writing at RedState who reflects on current society as a Big Government Skeptic. The article would be oversimplified to “government is best that governs least, is closest to the people and is smallest in size.” More than a lament it suggests a strategy in spite of being fearful if not a bit despondent at the lateness of the hour.
The federal government is made up of people, by the nature of people, it inevitably devolves into a self aggrandizing leviathan with its own purposes. Because government is inevitable, the best way to handle the need, is to spread the risk to freedom and create diversification and localization of authority. Of course there should be limitations to its scope at every level, but those seem to be abandoned so readily the back-up maneuver is a jurisdictional spread allowing people to vote with their feet. At least that is our takeaway from reading Hayward’s article. We are probably more hopeful than the author, so here are some excerpts we found piercing and effectual:
Modern American government is an almost perfect example of how the Left describes evil corporate enterprises. Among other things, both the government and sinister corporations really love setting up anti-competitive environments, but the power of the former is indispensable to the task . . .
. . . The only reasonable way to reconcile the need for stability with the demands of individual liberty is to devolve power to state and local governments, making it possible for citizens to withdraw their consent in a peaceable, orderly fashion.
Another reason I’m skeptical of Big Government is that it has a built-in appetite for power, and it satisfies that appetite not by winning and maintaining high levels of approval, but by suppressing dissent. You’ve got to be highly motivated, and organize with a good number of like-minded citizens, to get Uncle Sam’s attention. Aggressive political organisms have the advantage, and the methods they use to stay aggressive have a tendency to turn ugly. Hatred, envy, contempt, entitlement… these are the tendons and ligaments that hold political muscle together. Fellow citizens become enemies, rather than competitors. . . .
The best way to defeat these enemies is to make them feel guilty and ashamed . . . You can win a political battle handily with a highly motivated 30 percent of the electorate, if you can keep the other 70 percent from getting organized . . .
It’s not fair to characterize libertarians, fiscal conservatives, or Tea Party activists as “haters” of the government. On the contrary, they revere the lawful functions of the State, whose power is absolutely necessary for the protection of individual rights and the preservation of orderly, productive society. There is no trace of vibrant, healthy liberty to be found in a state of anarchy; you keep only what the local warlord doesn’t feel like taking from you . . .
. . . I’m not confident of the people’s ability to win defensive battles against the Leviathan State, not with a growing number of their fellow citizens riding on its back and egging it on. I see no happy ending in a system designed to obscure its costs from a sedated populace that has no idea what it’s taking from them. I’m nervous about how the alternative to government action is almost always portrayed as inaction rather than liberty. And I’m not really surprised by any of it.
Article two has the theme that the welfare state does not create prosperity, only dependence and its economic effect is perverse. Nothing new there for conservatives but Daniel Greenfield’s sobering sociological treatment of the topic, writing in Sultan Knish, is timely as we become inundated with guilt mongering regarding income inequality.
The most prominent guilt mongers for us to be concerned about today, either self satisfied or oblivious to their economic ignorance, are Barack Obama and Pope Francis. The former is willful in pursuit of political power. The later, whose job we concede arguably is guilt mongering, is tragically unfocused in what he should be doing, and irresponsible in his public statements heretofore, failing to take due care to make important moral distinctions.
Pope Francis, in failing to make distinctions on economic matters and the purview of his pronouncements, results in vilification of honest capitalists and relatively free market economies even if his intended admonishment is toward uber-wealthy crony capitalists associated with tin pot dictators. It is a rhetorically and morally uncareful approach that is unfair, and will lead to policies and governments that inhibit real progress against poverty.
Excerpts from Greenfield’s, You Can’t Save the World, with thanks to TN for drawing our attention to it.
So why can’t we end world hunger for only the price of a cup of coffee every six seconds or forty percent of the national debt or some other appealing figure that looks good on an infographic?
Hunger isn’t a resource shortage problem . . .
The USSR had plenty of land, labor and experts. It went from exporting wheat to importing wheat despite throwing everything it had into agriculture because there was a disconnect at every level in the process of planning and production . . .
The only solution to the USSR’s agriculture problems came with the collapse of Soviet feudalism whose central planning had created the meat shortages and bread shortages . . .
Every “free” item sent to another country is one item that isn’t going to be sold or manufactured there. An aid economy works a lot like a regular economy except that it can’t sustain domestic production or domestic experts . . .
An aid economy is planned, instead of responsive, and so it depresses local production without fully satisfying local demand leaving the population in a state of semi-deprivation. And the aid never properly reaches the people who need it because of the monopolies and corruption that caused the deprivation that made the aid necessary. This cycle of corruption feeds an aid economy by knocking out the middle class who might otherwise step into the roles of merchants and professionals and rewards anyone with enough guns to hijack the aid and shake down the charities that distribute it . . .
Buying a homeless man a sandwich for two dollars is a direct investment of resources. Appropriating twenty billion dollars to feed a sandwich to every homeless man in America will feed sandwiches to a small percentage of the homeless at a cost of four thousand dollars a sandwich . . .
It’s easy to buy a homeless man a sandwich, but once you try to buy sandwiches for millions of homeless men, the sandwich money is eaten up by the expenses of planning how to identify the homeless men, what kind of sandwiches they would like, studies on marketing sandwiches to homeless men over social media, the costs of diversity training for the sandwich makers and a million other things . . .
You can buy a homeless man a sandwich, but you can’t buy them all sandwiches because once you do that, you are no longer engaging in a personal interaction, but building an organization and the organization perpetuates itself. You don’t need a homeless man to exist so that you can buy him a sandwich, but once an agency exists that is tasked with buying homeless men sandwiches, it needs the homeless men to exist as ‘clients’ so that it can buy them sandwiches and buy itself steak dinners . . .
No one can save Africa except Africans. No one can fix Detroit except the majority of the people who live there. Social problems aren’t solved by nationalizing them or internationalizing them. They aren’t solved by engaging and guilt tripping those who have already solved those problems and live thousands of miles away but by engaging the people who live right there and are part of the problem . . .
If a man is drowning, you can toss him a rope. But if a man jumps into the water, tossing him a rope doesn’t accomplish anything. A physical problem can be solved by applying the right resources, but a human problem can’t be solved except when the affected humans change their attitudes or behaviors…
We do not find this as an indictment of all types of foreign aid, all charities, or disaster assistance, only bad policy and bad policy rhetoric leading to more of the same bad results. It is an indictment of insufficient attention to underlying causes, especially lack of economic freedom. R Mall
