Wednesday, October 6, 2010

A tyranny of good intentions?


Writing in the The Globe & Mail of Canada, Neil Reynolds asks if this is what lies in store for us. He quotes Professor Kenneth Minogue on the issue.

“I am of two minds about democracy,” he writes, “and so is everyone else. We all agree that it is the sovereign remedy for corruption, war and poverty in the Third World. We would certainly tolerate no other system in our own country. Yet most people are disenchanted with the way it works. One reason is that our rulers now manage so much of our lives that they cannot help but do it badly. They have overreached. Blunder follows blunder.”

Far worse, traditional democratic theory has been flipped upside down: “Our rulers now make us accountable to them.”

Count the ways.

“Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes or drinking too much. Most of these governments think we borrow too much money for our personal pleasures and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading bedtime stories to our children.

“Many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us.

“Debt, intemperance and incompetence in rearing our children are no doubt regrettable – but they are vices, and – left alone – they will soon lead to the pain that corrects. Life is a better teacher of virtue than politicians and most sensible governments in the past have left moral faults to the churches.

“The point is that governments have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in the exercise of authority. They are intolerable when they mount the pulpit. Nor should we be in any doubt that nationalizing the moral life of the people is the first step toward totalitarianism.”

Actions are no longer morally wrong. The state determines what is “acceptable” and what is “unacceptable” – thereby constructing a new “language of authority” that enforces political morality even as it rescinds everyday moral inhibitions. People are encouraged to be “collectively dutiful and individually hedonistic.”

Prof. Minogue writes from Britain, where the Labour government (2007) began seizing “unacceptable” families and holding them, without consent, for extended periods of behaviour-modification training by cadres of civil servants from eight government departments. These families had a record of drug addiction, child violence and poor mental attitudes. Where, he asks, will this cleansing end?


There's more at the link.

All Professor Minogue's fears can be summed up in one word - statism. President Obama's administration epitomizes the statist approach, dictating to individuals what they must do in terms of health care, ramming through vastly expensive 'bail-outs' (which are carefully crafted to benefit certain sectors of society and political interest groups while disadvantaging others), and generally seeing 'big government' and 'big brother' as a Good Thing.

Needless to say, that's the diametric opposite of what I believe in: and, please God, in November the US electorate will deliver a resounding vote of no confidence in statist policies during the mid-term elections. They'd better . . . or all Professor Minogue's fears will come true in this country as well.

Peter

3 comments:

  1. John Peddie (Toronto)October 7, 2010 at 4:58 AM

    Especially good to

    -see this written in the country Tam calls "The Place Where Great Britain Used to Be"

    -see it picked up in my hometown newspaper from a columnist I would not have expected to notice.

    If a columnist like Reynolds is leaning this way, you can bet what he senses is in the wind.

    To quote a tag line from a firearms blog I frequent, "They're going to legislate us to heaven whether we like it or not."

    Let's make sure we don't get to that particlar version of Heaven, which, I suspect, is more akin to Some Other Place.

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  2. Do you really think that things will be any different under the GOP? The Terri Schiavo matter was a fine example of the GOP trying to use the power of both the state of Florida and the Federal government to meddle in the medical affairs of a single family.

    Both parties are more than willing to use the government to control our lives. The differences lie in which areas each party seeks to control.

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  3. Comrade Misfit, you're absolutely right, of course. That's why I won't vote for either party - I vote for the individual. Both the Democratic and Republican Party 'establishments' have drunk too deeply of the statist Kool-Aid. Let's rather elect individuals who can be trusted to remember that they are public servants, not public masters. I frankly don't care which party they belong to, as long as they're worthy people. Finding them is the problem . . .

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