Right Wing Nut House

There has been a lot of criticism directed against conservatives for their seeming heartlessness when it comes to subsidizing health insurance for children in America regardless of whether their parents can afford paying for a private plan or not.

Leaving aside the obvious political framework in which the criticism is given, perhaps it’s time to have a debate about what kind of government we have, what kind we want, and most importantly, what kind of government we need to insure that liberty is not just something our grandchildren read about in history books. This is a debate conservatives should win every time because at bottom, a majority of people will choose freedom over dependence, liberty over the tyranny of the state every time.

The problem is, the left refuses to debate the question of tyranny or dependence and frames the question of what kind of government we should have in emotional terms instead. “Dependency” becomes “compassion.” “Want” becomes “need.” “Personal responsibility” becomes “selfishness.”

If the left were to debate whether their programs actually serve the cause of liberty or dependency, they would lose. It would be a no contest, slam dunk defeat every time. So we don’t debate the nature of government in a free society but instead argue over whether this government program or that one is good for the children, or old people, or any other group du jour the left seeks to ensnare in their dependency trap.

The left doesn’t want to discuss what we lose when government steps in where the citizen is capable of taking care of themselves. They refuse to acknowledge that every step toward establishing a government giving the people what they want rather than what is needed or desirable is a step back from human liberty and into the trough of virtual slavery.

You can hardly blame liberals in the end. It is extremely seductive (not to mention conducive to winning elections) to promise people that government will relieve the citizen of their burdens and make their lives easier. It is also convenient to then tar your opponents as unfeeling, uncaring monsters. Playing Santa Claus while painting the opposition as Scrooge has been part and parcel of the Democratic electoral game plan since the 1960’s.

But little, if any attention is paid to the idea that every time the government shoulders its way forward to assume part of the responsibility for our own well being, our choices about the direction our lives can take are limited in the process. Sometimes a small wrench thrown into the machinery while other times, an impassable roadblock is the result. Our own preferences are subsumed in favor of the ease or convenience the state can supply.

Is it wrong to oppose this creeping servitude offered by the left? After all, not only do the people want programs such as S-CHIP and like the idea of the government taking these decisions off their hands, but it takes a monumental sort of hubris to believe that you know what is best for everyone else with regards to their own personal freedom. And it takes an equal dollop of chutzpah to argue that people should actually wish for the burden of responsibility to fall upon them and their families when government is sitting out there perfectly capable of doing it for them.

Even if the left gets their way and the people are weighted down with the burgeoning largess government offers them, we will still have the Constitution. American will still be here albeit with a people who are a lot less free than their fathers and grandfathers. What we may lose in freedom of action, we will gain in security and ease.

This is the “perfectibility” of society that progressives have been striving for since the turn of the 20th century. The progressive movement itself was founded on the principle that government could be perfected via the application of scientific principles to the problems in society. By turning social scientists into gurus and Shamans, it was believed that America could become a place free from want.

Recall that at the time the Progressive movement was kindled, much of its impetus was supplied by the horrific conditions of the urban poor and the excesses of capitalism on display in the working conditions for labor as well as the power of the corporate trusts who literally owned Congress. Such conditions cried out for reform and progressives began to apply what they considered sound ideas grounded in the science of observation to these inequities.

From Teddy Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter almost every politician had to pay homage to the idea of government’s “perfectibility.” This was the great consensus that held America together through a depression, a world war, and much of the long, twilight struggle against communism. It was based on that most American of beliefs; that all problems have a solution and if we only tinker long enough with it, an answer will be forthcoming.

The father of modern conservatism (although he eschewed the conservative label for himself) Frederic Hayek rejected the notion that “science” could be applied to something so vague and random as human behavior. He believed that complex phenomena where humans interact cannot be scientifically predicted or even explained except in the grossest, most general way. Any attempts to do so was little better than “cooking the books” because social scientists would use the observational data they collected to formulate solutions based on a false understanding of science.

If Hayek was the father of modern conservatism, John F. Kennedy was the mother of “progressive perfectibility” adherents. Kennedy, himself no liberal, nevertheless brought hundreds of social scientists to Washington to address problems from poverty to nuclear policy. It was perfectibility with a vengeance. If anything, his successor gave the newcomers more power and influence. Originally charged with solving the problems associated with poverty, the perfectibility crowd has branched out since the 1960’s to dominate the agencies and departments of government while finding a comfortable home in the Democratic party. In fact, despite a quarter century of conservatives rising to power and prominence, the progressive notion of society’s “perfectibility” is now so firmly ensconced as writ in government that it’s stranglehold on the minds and souls of our politicians will prove very difficult to break.

Society and indeed government are not “perfectible.” There is no such place as Utopia nor would it even be desirable for free men to achieve creating it. Even those who proclaim that their goal is simply to “make things better” bely that notion by proposing solutions that invariably don’t solve anything or just as likely, create more problems needing to be “made better.”

If this sounds like I have an animus toward government, I would say that this is simply untrue. It is very hard to dislike something that should be seen as a utility. You may hate your cell phone every once and a while but it is a distant, impersonal kind of hate and not directed toward anything specific. My beef is with those who would use government to undermine the foundations of personal liberty by expanding its reach to ensnare those in dependency who are perfectly capable to taking care of themselves. The fact that they use government in this way for the purpose of winning votes is equally reprehensible.

And I include so called conservatives in this criticism as well. For ten years, Republicans in Congress pumped the spigot of government to spend their way to re-election. Paying off constituencies be they lobbyists, campaign contributors, or corporate special interests is as bad as anything the left has done. Earmarks have made thousands of American companies dependent on government for their survival - an intolerable excess in a free market society. Reform requires a cleaning of the house on both sides of the debate.

Today, we are far beyond the point where government programs are designed to only help the needy in society and are now busy establishing new parameters of government beneficence for the middle class and even the wealthy. We’ve had corporate welfare for 3 decades now as the government designs tax policies that restrict competition, incentivize production, or simply fill the coffers of some well heeled companies who happen to have connected lobbyists inside the Beltway.

Lost in all of this has been the belief that freedom is preferable to dependency and that walking away from a society based on self-reliant, rational men and women by infantilizing their lives threatens to change the United States into a far different place than that which was bequeathed to us by our fathers and their fathers before them going back to the beginning.