Friday, August 21, 2009

Countering Statism

It bothers me that a very fine word "liberal" (which has an etymology connecting back to the concepts of freedom) has been hijacked as a label by those who are really statists. A statist is a person whose fundamental worldview is that a more powerful state -- run by the right people of course -- is the best means to improve the world.

The historic strengths of the American experience are the family unit (with marriage), the influence of the Church, and innovation coupled with a strong sense of responsibility. Statism works against all of these, because all authority and responsibility is vested in the state.

The 2 fundamental answers to any problem for a post-modern statist are:

(a) we need to educate people better
(b) we need more government controls to prevent X or promote Y

Statists, unsurprisingly, push for government-mandated, government certified education systems.

Statists have been growing in power in the US for many decades now. This is not just a problem with which political party controls what branches of government. Statists exist in both parties, driven by completely sincere motivations and by justifications that the ends justify the means.

There is considerable overlap between Progressivism and Statism. Adherents to both are remarkably patience and persevering.

Statism as a practical working system in politics is a powerful self-sustaining, self-perpetuating, expanding epiphenomenon. There are many reinforcing agents at work, each with something significant to gain by continuing the path, and more to lose if it changed.

Consider what the author of Brave New World wrote:

"Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism.... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers." --English writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

One of the ways we assess the power of expanding statism is to evaluate what would be required to stop it, or even to slow it down. The decisions to check statist approaches would cause significant short-term dislocation of economic and political power. It's doubtful that federal and state elected leaders could make those decisions and be elected again.

Economic privation alone will not be sufficient to check statism, though it can be a practical limitation on growth. (See many examples in Western Europe, post-WWII.)

Revolution could occur. It is difficult to imagine how this could happen peacefully, apart from the grace of God. The legacy of history is these kinds of political changes cost blood and treasure. It's telling that about a third of the colonists supported the revolution against England, and more were neutral.

Like most observers before me, I do better at outlining the problems and trends than I do at recommending solutions. But we certainly need a critical number of well-educated, well-charactered people who refuse to exchange liberties for a paper-thin shell of security.

Dads, we need to lead the way.

P.S. If you want evidence this is not a new phenomenom, consider this cartoon that was published in the Chicago Tribune...in 1934:



2 comments:

Kevin N/GeoChristian said...

I struggle a bit with this in an area that is important to me, and that is environmental protection.

I view environmental regulation as a restraint on human sin, and therefore a legitimate expression of government. That sin is expressed in ways such as the air and water pollution, improper disposal of toxic wastes, soil degradation, and overfishing. But environmental regulation (or health and safety regulation, e.g. OSHA) leads to what some would see as an overbearing, ever-present bureaucracy.

I see the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act as very good things, and believe it would be foolish to take a laissez-faire approach to protecting our environment or conserving natural resources.

What is the non-statist way of ensuring that businesses (or governments, communities, etc.) do not pollute air and water, overfish the oceans, clearcut entire forests, or leave unreclaimed scars where they extracted minerals?

(I do see that statism doesn't necessarily accomplish what the liberals in our society would want. The environmental devastation of communism was far greater than anything done by industries in the West.)

Glenn said...

Kevin, thanks for your comment.

I agree that government plays an important role in constraining sin. It's also reasonable that distributed localized government bodies (community-based) are not collectively going to produce interstate road systems, satellite-based weather forecasts, and consistent environmental protection standards. Nor do I think private corporations would have produced them, because it is hard to see how profit-driven forces would have been helped by them.)

Planet-wide, one of the problems with statism is that there are multiple competing states. The many failures of the League of Nations, NATO, and the UN are in part because of the tendencies of statism to corrupt efforts towards cooperation.

The problem you describe is compounded by the much larger human population. I'm not talking in Malthusian terms, just that there are more sinful people expressing sin in, as you say, air and water pollution.

At an individual and family level, stewardship of the environment should be thought of in terms of putting others first.

Short of Jesus coming again, technical options + governing constraints (hopefully not all from a central government that tends towards statism) + healthy/humble system dynamics understanding are key.