Posted by
Andrews on Tuesday, February 12, 2008 10:49:23 AM
Think for a moment about government intervention, and what it really means.
I will assume that you believe, as most of us do, that you know what you want, and you know that better than anyone else. I will also assume that you believe that you know what makes you happy better than anyone else. So, in terms of making decisions about your life, you are best qualified to make those decisions. You may, from time to time, need the input of experts (doctors, accountants, auto mechanics, etc.) on certain matters, but you are still best qualified to take that advice and decide what to do with it.
In other words, I assume that you believe you can best make decisions about your own life.
So, what would government intervention mean for your life?
In the best case, government rules and regulations allow you to do what you would choose to do anyway. Or to put it another way, at best, government rules don't get in your way and you can make the decision you already would have made. At worst, government intervention cuts off all the top choices and leaves you will much less satisfying choices. (I will ignore cases where the government provides you with money or goods you would not have, as that involves first taking that money form another. The ethics and inefficiency of redistribution is a topic for another essay and that will be covered at another time. Here we consider only government prohibitions and commands.)
So, at best government rules do nothing, and at worst they leave you with fewer choices and prevent you from doing what you know would be your best choice.
If that is the case, why do so many clamor for government to intervene in every aspect of our lives?
The answer is simple and it shows the heart of the liberal philosophy. At his core, every liberal is an elitist. Every liberal thinks he is just a little bit smarter than his fellow man and knows better than the rest what everyone else should be doing. If only the world would recognize his genius, thinks the liberal, things would be so much better*.
And that is why liberals can admit government intervention would not make their own lives better, but can still argue for intervention. They don't see the rules changing their lives, just everyone else's. They don't worry about intervention, because in their minds, intervention would exist to force the less enlightened to behave just as they do. It would not change their lives, as they would become the template by which everyone else would make their decisions.
To a liberal, government intervention is just a means to impose his value judgments on everyone else. If only the unenlightened masses would just listen to the enlightened few, then all problems would just vanish. And it is that arrogant belief in one's own infallibility that has led, not only to the economic and social costs of liberalism and socialism, but to the horrors of Cambodia's killing fields, China's Cultural Revolution, the famine in the Ukraine, and Stalin's purges**. All were based on nothing more than the thought "we know better than you".
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* I was arguing with my liberal mother and realized that this is absolutely true. She was arguing the feminist line that somehow men start wars, and then drifted into some argument about how wars would be impossible if "we" just agreed not to fight. It was when I heard that "we" that I realized she meant "we" to mean "smart people who know better". And that is the core of liberal thought, the idea that "we" know better than the rest, so they should just listen to "us" for their own good.
** Originally, I included Hitler's evils in this list as well. But, as so many have bought into the lie that Nazi philosophy is "on the right", I left it off for now. However, I would point out that NSDAP is "National Socialist German Worker's Party". If someone adopted that name today, no one would doubt it was a left-leaning group. Nor did many of Hitler's followers doubt they were part of a socialist movement. So how did it become conventional wisdom that an authoritarian, socialist party is somehow an outcome of conservative philosophy?