As outlined in the first part of this essay, the political institutions established by our constitution were the natural consequence of the framers’ classical liberalism. For them, the purpose of government was essentially, in Nozick’s words, “protecting all its citizens against violence, theft, fraud and the enforcement of contracts.” (ASU, 26). Sadly, as our society has become ever more aware of the dignity and equality of all human beings, we less and less respect the autonomy that gives rise to our special moral status.
As described in detail in my Libertarian Philosophy in the Real World, the state now impermissibly intrudes into every aspect of our lives:
it grossly abuses its powers, afflicting us from cradle to grave with its coercive system of public education, suffocating regulations, pervasive corporate welfare and rent-seeing, mandatory entitlement programs, irrational and redistributive tax code, paternalism; and so on ad nauseam (p.6).
Without going into depth here[1], the transformation of our polity began in the Progressive Era with the (progressive, naturally) personal income tax and the establishment of the Federal Reserve System.
This trend accelerated with the New Deal, in which our leaders, aided and abetted by the Supreme Court, discarded what they regarded as quaint notions of freedom of contract and a rigorous federalism in order to usher in Social Security and a variety of new economic laws and regulations. These alarming cracks in our rights-based political foundation widened further in the 1960s and 1970s, which witnessed not only the enactment of Medicare, but the ill-starred “war on poverty” (including Medicaid), and the massive growth of the regulatory state.
More recent developments are not hopeful. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 constitutes an even deeper commitment to coercive, centrally planned health care, with its myriad of new taxes, subsidies and mandates. When this program fails to achieve its stated goals, we may presume that single payer will be the next step down the road to serfdom.
There are no doubt multiple causes for our slide away from classical liberalism towards the nanny/regulatory/welfare state. One obvious candidate is our natural impatience in the face of vexing social problems, coupled with the inherent difficulty of understanding the full impact of our “solutions,” which will play out over many generations.
For example, the Fed was created in 1913 to address the perceived problem of an “inelastic currency.” According to Milton and Rose Friedman, it was widely understood at that time that this institution “would operate within a world gold standard, reacting to external events but not shaping them.”[2] However, we abandoned the domestic gold standard in 1933, and suspended the international link in 1968, terminating it for good in 1976. The following year, Congress entrusted the Fed with the dual mandate of promoting both full employment and stable prices. The upshot of the Fed’s evolution is that it now functions with virtually unlimited discretion.
Comparable observations could easily be made about the negative, unexpected consequences of our anti-poverty programs, and all the other ambitious social engineering projects that looked good on paper. Our central planners would have done well to have heeded Hayek’s warning in The Fatal Conceit that, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
Furthermore, once the franchise ceased to be conditioned on property ownership and other impediments to populism were removed (such as the appointment of senators by state governors), it became (as feared by the founders) apparent to the majority that it could enrich itself at the expense of the more affluent minority, or by robbing future generations. Obviously, politicians with an progressive agenda were more than willing to exploit this selfishness.
Thus, everyone benefits from national defense, but some 43% of households pay nothing to support it. By the same token, social security has proved to be tremendously popular because the first three generations of retirees have taken many trillions more dollars out of the system than they contributed. And our preference for current consumption at others’ expense explains how we have come to add $8.7 trillion to the national debt in just the last seven and a half years.
There is, I fear, something of a vicious cycle at work in our polity. As the state arrogates to itself the power to plan our retirements, provide health care and schooling, relieve poverty, determine what medicines we may take, and so on, people develop “habits of mind” that predispose them to a greater acceptance of further state interference in our private spheres. As Tocqueville wrote more than 175 years ago, paternalism:
does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.[3]
So, we have now reached the tragic point in our politics where one of the two major party candidates promises to magically “make America great again,” apparently without the need to involve Congress or to observe constitutional strictures, while the other offers the grim prospect of a continuing slide towards modern-day socialism, in which the state does not formally own the means of production, but acts as if it did. Both candidates are auditioning for the role of Santa Claus-in-Chief, whether we want these “gifts” or not. I see no exit ramp from this madness.
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[1] The history of the programs identified in this post, their unintended consequences, and the rights-based case against them, are all discussed in my book. Accordingly, here I merely reference these milestones, without further analysis.
[2] Free to Choose: A Personal Statement, p.76.
[3] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II [1840], Henry Reeve translation (1899), section 4, chapter 6, posted by the Univ. of Virginia, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/toc_indx.html.
Hayek made essentially the same point in his classic Constitution of Liberty (pp. 231-2):
Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily re-created in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.
Great essay.
Thank you!