Planners A Threat To Liberty

What we’ve all witnessed, past months, has been nothing short of stunning. We have a radical at the helm with the single intent of ironing his agenda smack into the fabric of America.

Consider health. Most now understand that Obama’s health plan is only incidentally about health; he’s made little secret of it. And even if the plan or parts of the plan had merit, to force, gestapo-style, the whole thing on all of us, most find repelling (he called the democratic process "unfortunate" in a recent interview). This all reeks of something not quite right underfoot does it not?

But as citizens we may wish to consider a larger side, the implications beyond the auto industry, beyond education, health and the economy to that of government planning itself. This consideration eclipses all others, our view.

What can history tell us? What can great thinkers tell us? Are we worry warts with this blog, or is there is real threat from Obama and his kind - the far-left - to our actual liberty?

If we re-read the lessons of those who inspired our Founders, of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, of Francis Hutchinson and Edmund Burke, and of Jefferson himself, and finally more contemporaneously, von Mises, Hayek and Friedman then we become immediately alarmed. What they all saw was that every step away from a free market and toward government planning represented a compromise of human freedom.

One need only return to England after WWII. She embraced socialism. I was there in 1967. It was all malaise; all was gray, bleak, seemingly without hope. There was no individualism by the way of thought or action. In their planned society, Brits found life less liveable, less free, less prosperous and less hopeful, and most damning of all, devoid of dignity. They had shed capitalism in the search for the easy, less messy way out.

Yet Hayek tells us that capitalism is the only system of economics compatible with human dignity. And to the extent we move away from that system, we empower the worst people in society - Obama & Co in the present case - to manage what they do not understand.

Smith and Jefferson saw it. From Friedman’s Free To Choose, "Smith and Jefferson alike have seen concentrated gov’t power as a great danger to the ordinary man; they saw the protection of the citizen against the tyranny of gov’t as the perpetual need." Jefferson expressed this in his first inaugural address (1801), stating that his ideal was, "...a wise and frugal gov’t, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement." Political freedom and economic freedom went hand in hand.

Indeed, Adam Smith explained that a complex, organized, smoothly running system can develop and flourish without central direction; he demonstrated how coordination can be achieved without coercion.

The US followed Smith fairly closely coming into the 20th century. But then policy makers began to take our prosperity for granted. The great depression caused a flight to security in the US as intellectuals finally found traction; that is, they resurrected, in spite of past failures (and in personifying Einstein’s definition of a dunce) ideas which had never worked but sounded good every time. They, like Obama and Woodrow Wilson were the best and the brightest, having greater powers of insight and discernment than us mortals. Of course it all ended badly.

But perhaps all is not lost. As Friedman reminded us 30 years ago, private ingenuity can overcome the deadening effects of government control. True, but private ingenuity can only do so much. If we do not stop now that statist agenda, that poison in Washington then as Friedman warned, "Sooner or later - and perhaps sooner that any of us expect - an ever bigger gov’t will destroy both the prosperity that we owe to the free market and the human freedom proclaimed so eloquently in the Declaration of Independence."

(This blog is too confined to explore this topic thoroughly. Ponder it a tad further folks, on your own. For our lefty friends, the exercise may change your orientation, going forward.)

Robert Craven