As Louis XV is said to have predicted, “Après moi, le deluge” — which seems as incisive an observation as any on a world in which freeborn citizens of the wealthiest societies in human history are content to rise from their beds every half-hour every night and traipse to the toilet for yet another flush simply because a government bureaucracy orders them to do so. “Health” is potentially a big-ticket item, but so’s a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System — or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America.
More important, there is a cost to governmentalizing every responsibility of adulthood — and it is, in Lord Whitelaw’s phrase, the stirring up of apathy. If you wander round Liverpool or Antwerp, Hamburg or Lyons, the fatalism is palpable. In Britain, once the crucible of freedom, civic life is all but dead: In Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, some three-quarters of the economy is government spending; a malign alliance between state bureaucrats and state dependents has corroded democracy, perhaps irreparably. In England, the ground ceded to the worst sociopathic pathologies advances every day — and the latest report on “the seven evils” afflicting an ever more unlovely land blames “poverty” and “individualism,” failing to understand that if you remove the burdens of individual responsibility while loosening all restraint on individual hedonism the vaporization of the public space is all but inevitable. In Ontario, Christine Elliott, a candidate for the leadership of the so-called Conservative party, is praised by the media for offering a more emollient conservatism predicated on “the need to take care of vulnerable people.”
Look, by historical standards, we’re loaded: We have TVs and iPods and machines to wash our clothes and our dishes. We’re the first society in which a symptom of poverty is obesity: Every man his own William Howard Taft. Of course we’re “vulnerable”: By definition, we always are. But to demand a government organized on the principle of preemptively “taking care” of potential “vulnerabilities” is to make all of us, in the long run, far more vulnerable. A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny.
And it’s an awfully hard process to reverse, once it “progresses” far enough.
Well, that’s the whole idea, is to reduce free-born citizens to children, then to chattel.
Except, of course, for the <> who know best how to care for all these vulnerable, agency-less chattel.
Orwell, among others, wrote about this.
It’s reversed when the government goes bankrupt.
Western classical liberals should be closely studying the collapse of the Soviet Union where “corruption”, in the form of moving financial transactions “off the books” bought down the ultimate nanny state.
Attack the tax.
hmm. I intended the to be “bien pensant”, but in the French style quotes.
My ex-wife tells me she’s already lived through this once… she’s Russian (and a government employee at times of both countries.)
K Wrote:
“It’s reversed when the government goes bankrupt.”
Here’s hoping that works. The state government of California is expected to run out of money next month, after years of borrowing to make ends meet. Some counties in the state aren’t much better off. The federal government is spending well beyond tax revenues, and quite possibly more than it can borrow. I’d call that bankrupt government.
Going to be a rough next couple years as the dependent class is hit by the reality that their demands can’t be sustained.
I have never been to England but how can Mr. Steyn make such a gross over genereraliztion and say that civic life is dead in the UK abd still have much credibility? What do they do in their spare time, riot at soccer games or attend torchlight Labour rallies at the local sportzpalast?
That’s why the Republicans should not campaign on “stopping” Obama’s growth of governments. Go for rollbacks. Cut taxes and spending to under 20% of GDP. Cut the unnecessary regulation. Tabula rasa.