September 23, 2012
EVER MORE DEPENDENT ON WE THE PEOPLE:
Romney and Obama: Separately But Equally Elitist? (Peter Lawler, September 22, 2012, Big Think)
The Republican rich guy often thinks that American is on "the road to serfdom" of burgeoning dependency. And that the progressive logic of the welfare state is close to giving the Democrats a permanent majority in favor of big and bigger government paternalism.The more bookish of those Republicans cite as their theorist the great Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville at one point wrote that he feared that democracy would culminate in a "soft despotism" of schoolmarmish and endlessly meddlesome administrators who would take control of all the details of ordinary people's lives. People would be allowed to surrender all control over and so all responsibility for their personal futures. Tocqueville, in his bleakest moment, even worried that they might lapse into a kind of subhumanity.I could bore you with my opinion that Tocqueville didn't intend those worries to be a serious prediction about the American future.Or, I could just let you know that we now know enough to know that the road to serfdom never gets to serfdom.
In point of fact, the progressive logic of the fiscally responsible welfare state has created an Anglosphere wide majority in favor of bigger paternalism with less government. Successful parties are those that favor strengthening the social safety net by using capitalist mechanisms. The required mandates are paternal, the resulting personal accounts and independent making wealth reduce government. Mandates, after all, are just defined contributions.
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 23, 2012 6:12 PM
Tweet