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The eerie thing about the elections now looming in the US and
Canada is the profile of the voter. The folks who head for the polls in both
nations have more in common than not, as are they in lockstep on the issues with
voters in Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Overwhelmingly, Medicare
and other entitlement programs are the deciding issues. Why then have
entitlement programs become the salient feature of elections in Western
democracies? Where is the debate, for instance, over foreign policy and the need
to replace interventionism with peaceful unbounded free trade?
In After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State,
scholar Paul Edward Gottfried offers a profound analysis as to why
"democratic citizenship has come to mean eligibility for social services
and welfare benefits," and why "being administered and socialized by a
custodial class is now the defining aspect of democracy." As in any
voluntary trade, what you give up you value less than what you gain. Citizens,
says Gottfried, have willingly abnegated the responsibility of self-government
for the guarantee of entitlements.
In tandem with an
exploration of how 20th century social planners have gained leverage
over citizens by dangling economic entitlements, Gottfried advances the thesis
that there is no coherent liberal tradition to which the managerial state can
lay claim. Based on meticulous exegesis of intellectual history, Gottfried
proves that the liberal democracy that serves as the impetus for the managerial
state's social engineering has no connection to 19th century
liberalism.
"19th
century liberals did not believe that public administrators should work to
change social classes or social values," writes Gottfried. The liberalism
of the 19th century, from which today's faux liberals depart, stood
for private property and constitutional liberty. The removal of tariff barriers
and the ushering in of free trade was seen as a means to bring people together.
Life, liberty and property were the natural rights governments were to uphold,
no more. Social equality, which compels coerced distribution of wealth, was
considered incompatible with liberty.
Absent its 19th
century heritage, "liberalism now survives as a series of social programs
informed by a vague egalitarian spirit," its power maintained by wagging
fingers accusingly at antiliberals. The public administrator turned into a
social reformer wielding political power with the advent of the welfare state.
Along the way, these 20th century social planners, who spoke of
"control of production, prices and consumption"--essential
socialism--began to call their social planning "liberal". This
continuity is contrived, explains Prof. Gottfried. Notwithstanding the
surreptitious "semantic theft", "punishing homophobes and sexists
and trying to rearrange the income curve" doesn't jibe with liberalism
proper.
The present
managerial state certainly is not an instantiation of the liberalism of the
American Founding Fathers. The post-revolution federal government was not to
levy any taxes, and an expansion of its power required the consent of every
sovereign state. "The American Revolution," writes economist Murray
Rothbard, "was against empire, taxation, trade monopoly, regulations,
militarism and executive power," all now implicitly embraced by the US and
its Western allies.
Undergirding our
public administration is an unyielding ideology bolstered by a monolith of
toadying journalists and intellectuals. The dubious precepts of social
psychology and the enforced "public philosophy" of pluralism have
become means through which bureaucrats, educators and state-anointed experts
embark on crusades against "prejudice". Together with official
multiculturalism they form an instrument of control, designed to privilege a
certain position and to stigmatize those who think differently. By extension,
speech codes, human rights legislation, employment quotas and other
infringements, contradict the classical liberal espousal of rights to property
and freedom of association.
"Unlike the
communist garrison state or the Italian fascist "total state," the
managerial state succeeds by denying that it exercises power. It conceals its
operation in the language of caring. But "behind the mission to sensitize
and teach "human rights" lies the largely unacknowledged right to
shape and reshape people's lives. Any serious appraisal of the managerial
regime," cautions Gottfried, "must consider first and foremost the
extent of its control---and the relative powerless of its critics."
Come elections, look
for vestiges, however faint, of equality under the law (flat tax)--but not
equality of outcome (affirmative action), reject government expansion
(entitlement programs) and intrusion into people’s lives and livings, and look
to the affirmation of private property rights as the mother of all liberties.
The purists among you may shun most candidates. But we don't live in the arid
arena of pure thought. Prof. Gottfried's thesis must at the very least assist us
to exclude such arch-managers as Al Gore and his party, and the Canadian
Liberals and New Democratic Party.
©2000 By Ilana
Mercer
The
Calgary Herald
November
2
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