Saturday, January 30, 2016

Limiting Government is Like Converting a Hyena to Vegetarianism



A Properly Limited Government 
Seems as Likely as 
Converting a Hyena to Vegetarianism 


by

Eric Paul Nolte



I am coming to believe that effectively and permanently limiting a government to its legitimate powers, namely, to the protection of individual rights, may be as likely as converting hyenas to vegetarianism.

But I am not prepared to give up this ideal of a proper government altogether! 

I agree that a proper government is required to sort out our disagreements and to restrain the predators and invaders, so long as its purpose is nailed down to the protection of every peaceful individual's right to life, liberty, and property.  And yet, in the blood red miasma of history, how can one not grow more pessimistic about the very possibility of restraining the government to such limits?  

In fact, history shows that in every attempt to create this vision of a properly limited government, this benevolent night watchman has always turned out to have hobnail boots and a swastika up his sleeve.  Well, sometimes it's a hammer and sickle in his pocket.

The specter of communism looms over the world's discussion of the social fabric--in spirit anyway, if not so much in this very term these days (outside of Italian and French politics, of course, where outright communist parties still exist in name.)  But few recognize this spirit in so many words, not as such anymore.  Even fewer people understand the moral problems inherent in socialism, in the way that Ayn Rand makes clear. 1.)  Few people even begin to understand the hopeless economics of socialism, as Ludwig von Mises so clearly analyzed it. 2.)  Fewer still know any antidotes to this ubiquitous socialist ethos.  

Moreover, even if one knows Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises down to the marrow, one should read the books of our most influential enemies, namely Marx, Kant, Plato, and perhaps their lesser acolytes... and throw in both the Jewish and the Christian Bibles, and the Koran too ... all in an effort to combat our own inevitable confirmation bias, to prevent us from being deafened by the echo chambers of our own minds.  If we don't read the work of those with whom we know we will disagree, we put ourselves in danger of remaining deaf and blind to any ideas we don't already know and approve of.

But we don't know Rand and Mises down to the marrow.  The common public discussion of Rand tends to be as sophomoric and ignorant as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's opinions of her.  Both Obama and Clinton have, in effect, dismissed any serious acceptance of Rand's ideas because, they say, while she may appeal to youthful naifs, one then grows up and gets over it.

Liberals tend to believe that there are no facts of human nature that might in any way limit their grandiose idealism in creating heaven on earth (hope and change for a fundamental transformation of the American system, as one of those recent presidential candidates put it...) with the result that when their uber-liberal soul mates, the socialists, get their hands on all the levers of power and completely substitute socialist central planning for capitalist markets, they create not a heaven on earth, but a stinking, slaughterhouse hell on earth.

And here is Bernie Sanders, avowed socialist supporter of communist causes from the time he was a wet young pup--Sanders does invoke a moral vision, but his vision is of the imposition of top down, holier-than-thou policies based on how government knows better than you how to run your life.  Sanders' socialism is a breast-beating policy of coercive, eat-the-rich collectivism and statism.  In a word, Marxism.  Righteous Marxism.  Morality as self-sacrifice for the lives of others, at least for those others who are smiled upon by the official, statist powers.  This is government by those who are eager to collect self-sacrifices from the polity, enforced at gunpoint by the police power.  Not to mention that this vision of government is run by people who have not the first clue about what material wealth is or how it is created--or even that it is indeed created, and not merely plucked from trees, like fruit, and that market freedom is a necessary precondition for the creation of wealth, or that menacing government edicts can never be the engine of creating real wealth. 

Republicans are no better, with respect to championing a secular, rights-respecting, life-serving morality for living on earth.  For example, take the comments of Ed Hudgins on the last Republican debate, in which he observes how none of the debaters argued for any of the foundational, crucial moral principles that should steer the ship of state on a proper course. 3.)

Conservatives tend to believe that there was some Halcyon past to which we should appeal, and all we need to do is to re-create this glorious past and model ourselves on that.  But the American founders' model was flawed from the start, as we can see in retrospect, in that it failed to recognize the rights of blacks or women, or the evil of slavery (not to mention the little Indian problem.)  And also not to mention that the founders' vision particularly failed to restrain the tyrannical growth of government.  Conservatives believe that wisdom and knowledge, including knowledge of right and wrong, come from God as revealed knowledge, and not as a consequence of secular, objective reason and observation of the facts of reality.  

Some libertarians understand that a proper defense of liberty must be based on foundational philosophy, but many others do not.  Ayn Rand despised libertarians because she mistakenly conflated all of them with anarcho-capitalists.  But you should read the luminous prose of Murray Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty, and then tell me how we should address this withering problem of limiting the government to its proper functions—to the protection of these rights to our own life, liberty, and property.  We are endowed with these rights by our nature, we are entitled to protect ourselves, and we are thereby entitled to delegate the defense of these rights to others, which delegation is the moral source of legitimate government.  

Alas, governments have always grown like Topsy.  

So how do we nail government down to size? —put it a short leash, chained to a thick wall based on objective principles that go all the way down to objectivist metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics?

I believe Rand was right in her belief that a proper government is necessary to secure our legitimate rights. I agree with her that without such a government, anarchy prevails, which must result in gang warfare, such as what they have recently enjoyed in Somalia.  Of course, Rand also rightly observed that having no government would be preferable to a totalitarian government, with its inevitable death camps for dissenters and its other perceived enemies.

So where does this leave us?

I believe the better day is yet to come, and must depend on the elevation of consciousness--on our coming explicitly and better to understand our situation in the universe.  The state of this global elevation of consciousness will be greatly enhanced when more people have come by their own lights to understand the life-serving and crucial work of Aristotle, Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, and their extended circles.



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1.) See, for example, Ayn Rand, "The Objectivist Ethics" https://campus.aynrand.org/works/1961/01/01/the-objectivist-ethics/page6 

2.) See, for starters, Ludwig von Mises, Socialism,
http://www.amazon.com/Socialism-Sociological-Ludwig-von-Mises/dp/0913966630/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1454210210&sr=8-1&keywords=Ludwig+von+Mises%2C+Socialism

3.) Edward Hudgins,  http://atlassociety.org/commentary/commentary-blog/5934-trump-less-gop-debate-still-missing-moral-principles


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