Paternalism as Government Policy
An old wet nurse; symbolising France as nanny-state and public health provider. Colour photomechanical reproduction of a lithograph by N. Dorville, 1901. Photo: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The federal government does not exist to take care of us. Why would you think it does? The social contract! The what now? The thing invented by socialists/progressives/communists/other groups that basically all mean the same thing? How dare you!?!
I am not a fan of an all-powerful centralized government. Like the Framers, from the teachings of John Locke, I believe in a separation of powers. I also believe the old Milton Friedman adage that local is better than state which is better than federal. The direct election of senators greatly reduced the average voter’s interest in local and state politics. The House of Representatives is the people’s house, while the Senate is the states’ house. Yes, you can argue there was a lot of corruption with the state legislature election of senators, but directly electing senators didn’t fix the corruption problem. It just gave the process a different type of corruption. Which is incredibly rampant in all facets of politics, corruption. The Framers neglected to add term limits to the Constitution because they didn’t want to believe that career politicians would become a thing. How, exactly, they lacked the imagination after just breaking away from an empire with a monarchy, I’ll never know. It did take until FDR for us to have a president who didn’t follow Washington’s two terms only rule, so maybe they were right at the time.
As free market capitalism melded with a natural rights structure enshrined in our Constitution developed prosperity unlike anything humanity had ever seen before, with the positive effects of longer lifespans, less misery, less poverty, and less extreme poverty along with an insane abundance in basic needs, people started getting fat. Pursuits of the mind started to take up more and more of people’s time as they didn’t need to worry as much about being killed on their front doorstep or succumbing to thirst or buying food. And, as a physical labor-heavy economy flourished into a mental intellect-powered economy for the average worker within it.
Marxism was one of the many things the elites of society began to cling to as a means of enshrining their power and keeping “their people” in the elite while keeping out those they did not like. I mostly attribute this to a search for meaning. If anyone is unhappy, none of the rest of us should be happy. This exact invidious mindset is what eventually led to the communist uprisings in many countries. These were bloody and horrendous. No communist regime that existed has come anywhere close to a utopia.
Marxism wasn’t the only thing these same people, I will call progressives as this is what they called themselves, latched onto in the early years of the 20th century. These same progressives, elites of society at the time, such as Margaret Sanger (whose organization became Planned Parenthood) and President Woodrow Wilson were also major advocates of eugenics. Whatever your view of the basic logic of eugenics (Down Syndrome comes up often,) eugenics to these progressives was a fig leaf for “undesirables,” which frequently meant the poor but invariably targeted black people. Margaret Sanger saw abortion as a way to genocide black people. Because she was not just “of her time,” but a massive, massive racist. Wilson was very similar. We as a country have the dishonor of having the only president with a PhD screening the first movie in the White House, Birth of a Nation. The KKK propaganda film that brought back that horrendous organization from its deathbed. Not only did Wilson show it in the White House, he said he agreed with it. His support for the KKK is almost entirely credited with its resurgence. He also vetoed the Republican Congress-passed bill that would have desegregated the military. That didn’t pass again until late in Truman’s last term, enforced and implemented by Eisenhower, the same president who had to use the military to enforce the desegregation of public education. A good thing to everyone but racists and Libertarians, apparently.
What does this have to do with the title? Background, mostly.
The idea that the federal government should take care of all its citizens’ (and even non-citizens and illegal immigrants) base needs is an idea that is largely what Marxism is about. The government should take from the greedy and give to the needy. Taxes already accomplish this in a fundamental way. But the core elements of this ideology starting under Wilson and further internalized inside the ever-growing federal bureaucracy by figures such as FDR with the New Deal (which didn’t get us out of the Great Depression and likely entrenched it if not made it worse) and LBJ with the War on Poverty (a massive failure by any definition) have not accomplished directly any of the goals of Marxism.
I have argued many times before on Twitter and elsewhere that human nature is why Marxism fails. Marxism is built on foundational beliefs that wildly misunderstand and misconstrue human nature. Humans are by our evolutionary nature incredibly tribalistic. To a degree, all beings on Earth are. Trust as a concept is by its nature earned and not conferred. We see this in dogs and elephants and basically any animal species that can be observed without interfering directly in their habitat. The Expert Fallacy I have written about before covers most of this. Marx thought the workers would inevitably rebel against the rich (whoever Marx or his followers would claim to be the rich) eventually and bring about a workers’ paradise. But, this is the problem: Most people think free market capitalism works better in practice than Marxism or communism or monarchy or Philosopher Kingdom or rent-seeking corporatism. That last one is important. The government picking winners and losers through regulation and lobbyist corruption and favor trading is not free market capitalism. Free market capitalism is letting the chips of innovation and creative destruction land where they may. A spontaneous order will develop eventually, as F. A. Hayek and many others have argued.
The government does not have the capacity to make everyone in America happy at all times. Short of putting lithium in the water supply or continuing the beatings until morale improves, I don’t know how exactly the Marxists could even hope to achieve this. “If justice is denied to any of us, it is denied to all of us” is a fun adage with a lot of applause generated when said. In practice, it makes no sense. There will always be homeless, even in the most prosperous societies. There will always be some form of corruption in the halls of power, from Presidents to cops on down. There will always be poor people. Because everyone with a sound mind has agency. Everyone, even crazy people, has free will. Humanity is a stubborn creature. They will forgo assistance from people willing to help them for foolish reasons (and sometimes rational reasons, but let’s forget about that for now.)
People are responsible for their own choices in life. You signed a bad contract? Held up a liquor store with an illegally purchased handgun? Got addicted to heroin? Ate yourself into a landmass so large you can’t fit in an airplane seat? Pulled a knife or a gun on a cop? Other examples that will have people shouting at me in the comments? It’s your fault. And, on measure, majority yours alone. Sure, there might be some things that happened to you in life that made you becoming a criminal a more likely outcome. But no one made you pull that gun on the 7/11 clerk. Or forced you to put your knee on the back of a prone man’s neck/back for almost ten minutes. Just like founding a business that changes the world for the better is also your fault. You reap the whirlwind of your own choices, whether good or ill.
I strive to have as much logical consistency with my political beliefs, my ideology, and my moral compass as I can. I have family members that like Trump. And ones that voted for Hillary. As I have mentioned before, in the four presidential elections I was eligible to vote for, I have never voted for the winner, writing in someone (not the same person) for the last two. I will defend myself from all arguments but concede if I think I am wrong. I want to be proven wrong. See Pinned Tweet. If I disagree with you on something, I have a very good reason usually. But ignorance could also be the reason. And a discussion or debate or even an argument is how I would figure that out. Defend your cherished beliefs as I do mine and maybe the world will become a slightly better place for it.
Just don’t ask the government to do it for you.
Hi. I’m a liberal. Screw marx. Conservatives talk about marx as much, if not more, then actual f’n marxist’s. There are no marxists with any power in the US. The D’s and liberals are not marxists. Cause the opposition to conservatives is from D’ and liberals who are believers in markets and strong social services. Not looking to have gov take care of every need.
So you can beat marx? woo hoo. So can i. Lets talk about making markets work well and what kind of social services we should have.Report
Collectivist ideologies all seem to stem from Marx or Hobbes in some way.Report
Plato?Report
I am not a purist on these things in any form. Some people make bad choices. Some people are dealt bad hands. Some people have poor circumstances and that encourages them to make bad decisions. Some people have the best of opportunities and fritter them away.
There is a random factor in all these outcomes. I am very good at what I do. I was born with some intellectual advantages. I worked to develop them. AND, I was very lucky to be in the right place at the right time, which had a major impact on my wealth – in a positive way. That wealth then, does not purely reflect either my skill, my work ethic, or my luck. It’s a mix.
And so, I view the government policy as a mix. I feel we should seek to pull back extremes, as those extremes are very likely the result, at least in part to luck.
So yeah, tax rich people and pay for medical care and Social Security. I’m good with that.Report
Social Security and Medicare are at least over a hundred trillion in unfunded liabilities in net present value.
How do you fix that without tripling the payroll tax and cutting current benefits?Report
For starters, make it illegal for Congress to use it as a tide me over budget gimmick slush fund. Then, abolish the income tax level cap that keeps high earners from paying more.
There are dozens of proposals to deal with this, but none of them would likely align with your preferred political philosophy.Report
And that’s billions if not trillions they have raided from it.
That doesn’t solve the immediate problem.
Which is that the worker to retiree ratio has gone from 30 to 1 to less than 3 to 1. It will probably get below one eventually.
That’s the key problem.Report
1979 called, wants its strawman back.
Seriously, railing about “all powerful central government” and Marxism? In 2023?Report
Thanks for reading my piece.Report
You want to know why most people in Mississippi don’t vote? Because they are represented at all levels by politicians whose greatest accomplishment is keeping conservative white men in power. That protects a majority of voters, and the liberal minority won’t make headway until the majority decides to change that. And that situation is the same in dozens of other states.
Now, given how badly you wiffed that easy slow ball right down the middle, why in the world would we engage on the rest?Report
When did I ever mention Mississippi?
Enjoy your straw man.Report
Happiness is not an end goal; it is a means to an end.Report
It’s a by-product.Report
During the pandemic, I noted that the debate around freedom more or less ends up being about how free should people be to make bad decisions. The answers varies between no freedom to make bad decision or total freedom to make bad decisions. Most people aren’t extremists and see some sort of state paternalism as healthy and necessary to keep society going. They don’t want total government censorship that only makes us read worthy novels but they don’t want the wild west where there is no guidance either.Report
Libertarians arguments don’t make much sense to people who live in countries where the philosophical ideas underlying libertarianism were made. I always wondered how the more doctrinaire libertarians would argue for their ideas in places where they would be completely alien and without context like Middle Eastern countries or East Asian countries.Report
In Singapore, I would emphasise pluralism. In much of east asia like China, Japan and South Korea, Confucius is a good resource.
https://cdn.mises.org/17_3_3.pdfReport
Or to put things differently, the degree to which the philosophical ideas underlying classical liberalism or libertarianism is alien to the middle east or east asian countries is often overstated. I know little about Islamic philosophy, but it would indeed surprise me if there were no liberal strands of thought in there. If, like me, you think that libertarianism is just the consistent application of liberal principles, then those liberal strands are sufficient to justify libertarianism.
If you think that certain liberal principles are just universal moral principles, then we can expect that it would have been discovered by different peoples in different contexts. I’m not sure how you can, on the one hand, think that some version of liberalism is correct, but also think that your culture alone has special access to this particular truth.Report
Social contract theory is nor marxist. The contract tradition, instead, is the inheritance of classical liberalism. Locke and Hobbes were proto-liberals. Kant, also a contract theorist, is considered a classical liberal. The big outlier for contract theorists is Rousseau who is a classical republican theorist rather than a classical liberal. While both liberals and republicans ask the question of how one person can legitimately tell another what to do and have the latter obey the former through coercive power, they come up with different kinds of answers. The liberal tends to focus on substantive constraints (we can coerce others only for some purposes but not others) while the republican focuses on procedural constraints (we can coerce others only if the right kind of procedure is followed) Socialism is more a descendant of the republican theorists than the liberal theorists, whereas libertarianism or classical liberalism is more obviously liberal.
Moreover, marxism is not a normative theory (at least not in the way we commonly understand it). So, for anybody who knows anything about Marxism, it is definitely not about the idea that government should take care of its citizens base needs.
Marxism is a theory about how societies will evolve over time. In this way, it is much like Hegel’s account of dialectics. The key difference is that for Marx how society evolves does not depends on the ideas that people have, but on the modes of production. All other aspects of society are epiphenomenal to this. The marxist claim is that societies will transition from feudalism to capitalism (where the means of production are privately owned) to state socialism (where the means are owned by the state) to communism (where the state withers away and the means of production are held in common). If there is any normativity in marxist theory it is this final end-state where the state has withered away which is good. All other in-between transitional states are still sub-optimal. The marxist critique of capitalism insofar as there is one, is that private ownership of the means of production makes workers unfree in an important sense and correspondingly private profit from the ownership of the means of production is possible only because of wage-theft from workers. None of these have anything to do with governments should take care of citizens.
I’m neither a marxist nor any kind of socialist but dude, have at least some rudimentary grip on the view you are criticising before talking about it.Report
Also, paternalism is not the view that governments should take care of its citizens. Even libertarians who believe that governments should protect citizen’s basic rights thereby believe that governments should take care of its citizens. After all, one way of taking care of citizens is protecting their rights. Rather paternalism is the view that the state may coerce citizens for their own good. Food stamps are paternalistic but a universal basic income is not.Report
This is a great example, and also, I think, a way in which you sometimes end up as a paternalistic result due to a compromise between other, less paternalistic impulses.
Some people who politically support food stamps would definitely prefer UBI, and an objection to paternalism is a big part of why.
Other people who politically support food stamps would prefer not spending on welfare at all, but if their taxes are going to the poor, they want to be sure the poor “really need” it.
The resulting compromise is more paternalistic than either faction’s preferred approach.
(That said, there are doubtless sincerely paternalistic food stamp supporters who think it’s the right policy instead of the least bad policy they can eke out.)Report
Pillsy, I thought you were gone.
You deactivated your Twitter or something.
Nice to see you back!Report
As a Marxist (or at least, something close to it) and some kind of socialist, I would note you have to read this dude’s posts as some sort of unintentional self-parody, and not actually spend time trying to explain things (’cause he isn’t listening, as he regularly lets commenters know).Report
I read the comments, man.Report