Statism

As discussed previously, most of today’s so-called liberals are really statists. Maybe we should discuss statism, the idea of strong government control. What are its advantages and disadvantages?

The statists point out that true liberalism allows inequalities. Those who have more ability and work harder will have more, as will their descendants (until they become wasteful or lazy and lose it). In fact some will have more simply due to luck. They also point out that in a liberal society the poor often lack good medical care and similar benefits. While those accusations are true, we must be careful about the proposed solution. It is easy to find problems and nearly as easy to propose solutions. The difficulty comes in making those proposed solutions effective without causing more serious problems.

Indeed one of history's most colossal failures was the result of well-intentioned solutions to the problems mentioned above. Communism, the ultimate form of statism, was supposed to fix inequality, poverty, lack of medical care and the other problems allowed in a liberal society. The results were the exact opposite of the intentions. Poverty was rampant, the government class was "more equal than others," medical care was abysmal for most of the people. Why? Why was statism such a failure?

The problems with statism start with the assumptions one must accept in order to believe in it. Implicit in statism is a belief that government is somehow wiser and more moral than the average citizen. Unless it possesses that wisdom and integrity there is no reason to trust government instead of average citizens.

Communism demonstrated that, contrary to statist assumptions, government has no special wisdom, nor is it less subject to temptation to abuse of power than is the average person. Good intentions may be comforting but they make a poor supper.

The communist state attempted to be all things to all people. It gave quotas to farms and factories, telling them what to produce and how much of it. It even assigned people jobs.

The result was one of the most spectacular failures in human history. The five year plans failed. The factories and farms did not their quotas and what they did produce was often shoddy. The people were held captive in an unworkable system. Communism produced shortages of nearly everything except misery.

We must now ask, where would government get the wisdom and integrity statists think it has? It must come from one of two sources:

1. Divine wisdom. Monarchists claimed that the king was God's anointed. If one accepts that, he could also accept that the king has some special, God-given wisdom. However most statists in the U.S. today seem to deny that God should have any voice in government. With few exceptions, U.S. citizens will reject the divine right of kings, and with it any divine wisdom or integrity for government officials.

2. The second possible source of special governmental wisdom is the wisdom of the majority. If we believe that the majority is always right or at least right more often than the average person, then we can believe that leaders elected by the majority are wiser than that average person. However, the beliefs of the majority will inevitably be the beliefs of the average person. Majority rule is, after all, essentially an averaging process.

Integrity is even worse. Majority integrity suffers from a mob effect. People will do as a group things they would not think of doing as individuals. People who agree theft is wrong may think it is somehow just fine to vote themselves benefits at the expense of others.
(cf http://hallillywhite.blogspot.com/2009/07/mob-rule-part-1.html)

One of the more pernicious aspects of statism is its tendency to turn social theory and personal preference into law. Be it the old official state church or modern political correctness, this tendency leads to silliness at best and institutionalized idiocy at worst. For example, the mayor of Portland, Oregon once proposed outlawing "snout houses," houses on which the garage projects out in front. What business did she have forcing her architectural preferences on everybody else? If people want to avoid those houses they can buy a different style. They can even live in neighborhoods where voluntary covenants prohibit them. However it is a serious infringement on liberal freedom for government to decide what kind of house everybody should live in.

Clearly there are problems with classic liberalism and freedom. However those problems are not nearly as serious as those we cause when we allow a statist government to rule our lives, whether we call that government "progressive," "positive," "modern" or anything else. Freedom leads to more production and more goods for everyone. Statism leads to less for everyone except the ruling class.

The goal should not be elimination of inequality but enhancing life for everyone, even if the rich still have more than the poor

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I Am a Liberal

If you've been reading my blog for a while here's some surprising information for you. I am a liberal. Yes it's true. Have been for years, not even realizing it for many of those years.

Now before you faint you might ask just what kind of liberal I am. After all, I have criticized many today who call themselves liberal. The answer is that I am a classic liberal which is almost the polar opposite of what passes for a liberal today.

I believe in liberty and individual responsibility. Furthermore I believe our liberty is a God-given right, not something government doles out to us. I believe strongly in the principles set out in the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...”

Now if each of us has inalienable rights it follows that government should not take away those rights. That is true if government is a monarchy, a democracy, or a republic. Even if 99% of the people want to restrict the rights of the other 1%, they have no justification to do so.

That is liberalism in its true sense. It is the historic meaning of the term. Any political philosophy that unduly restricts liberty is not liberal, it is statist. The appropriation of the word by today's statists is Orwellian newspeak, a triumph of public relations but a detriment to our supposedly free society. Some call themselves “modern liberals,” “positive liberals,” “progressives,” etc. but the fact remains that they want increased government and less individual freedom. They are statists.

Sadly, the real liberals did not step up and point out the fact that "positive liberalism" is in many ways the opposite of true liberalism. Rather than being "progressive," it is in fact a regression to the days when government was regarded as having divine wisdom to which the people should defer.

One example happened recently in Oregon. A farm in the eastern part of the state hosted a wedding. I confess that I fail to see who was harmed by that event. My liberal attitude says that we should allow them to use their property as they see fit. It is their property after all. However the statists who call themselves liberals have created a law that governs how people use property. Farmland must be used for farming until the government blesses some other use. The owners of that farm had to pay a fine for their horrible crime.

The whole thing is reminiscent of the children's game, “Mother May I” in which each child must do exactly as instructed by the child playing the part of the mother. However in this case I would call it “Big Brother May I.” The statist attitude is that Big Brother, that is government, knows best and we all better obey. If we want to do something out of the ordinary we darn well better ask permission first. That is the opposite of the liberal attitude that allows us freedom to do whatever does not infringe on the rights of others.

This newspeak also creates confusion when we read literature written before it came about. I've recently read Hayek's book, “The Road to Serfdom” written during World War II. He continually talks about liberal ideas as opposed to various forms of socialism. What he means by liberal is freedom and individualism. However today's “liberals” tend towards exactly the socialism he was opposing.

We should not fall for the linguistic tricks of the statists. Instead any discussion of the topic should focus on the ideas themselves and how effective they are in benefiting humanity. A start is to use correct language which means we must insist that they are properly called statists. Webster defines statism as, "The principle or policy of concentrating extensive economic, political and related controls in the state at the cost of individual liberty." That obviously fits today's "liberals." In fact it fits many politicians of either party in the U.S., though the parties differ in how they apply their statist ideas.

Today's “liberals” are illiberal statists, not liberals. Our “progressives” are regressive statists, not progressives. They believe in big government, not freedom and individual responsibility. Let's call them what they are.

Next time I plan to discuss some of the problems statism creates.

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Keeping the Tigers Away

It's an old joke but it can make a sharp point:

“Why do you always wear that ugly chain around your neck?”

“To keep the tigers away.”

“What do you mean, there are no tigers anywhere near this place.”

“Of course not, my chain scares them away!”

We would regard anyone who thought a chain around his neck kept tigers away as eccentric or worse. Yet we have similar thinking in many of the measures now in force to try to stop terrorists in this country. The attempted airline bombing on Christmas Day provides a case in point. That event has triggered more restrictions on airline passengers and those restrictions have “succeeded” insofar as no other attempts are known. However there is no evidence that any more bombing attempts would have been made with or without the changes.

Let's be honest, some security measures undoubtedly have been effective. Checking for explosives with the proper equipment is quite a reasonable precaution, as is keeping a list of people we cannot trust on airplanes. However other restrictions amount to placebos. The requirement that passengers remain in their seats with nothing on their laps for the last hour of the flight is as useless as wearing a chain to keep tigers away. Any terrorist equipped to blow up a plane will simply take action when that restriction is not in effect. Meanwhile passengers will be unable to use the restrooms – and that will surely not improve dispositions aboard.

Also in the useless category are many of the restrictions on what passengers can carry. Can anybody really believe that someone is going to hijack a plane with the nail file on a fingernail clipper? I don't know who came up with that restriction but I have to wonder what he was smoking.

In fact the prohibition on pocketknives is also useless and probably counterproductive. After 9-11 passengers are not going to sit by while someone with Swiss army knives hijacks their airplane. Anyone trying that will be lucky to survive to face a judge, more likely he will be beaten to death. After all, there will be only a few terrorists and many passengers to resist them. If a few passengers have pocketknives they will be better able to resist the terrorists.

Some of the measures taken to protect airline travelers do make sense. High tech “sniffers” can find many explosives and obviously we do not want passengers to carry firearms. That is fine but much of the current security system seems to be built on the assumption that citizens are incapable of taking care of themselves and that government should become Big Brother and treat the people like sheep. We now have a government that refuses to trust the citizens, a truly sad state of affairs in representative republic. That is especially true in light of the effective actions of the passengers on Flight 93 (cf my blog of 11 Sep 2009, http://hallillywhite.blogspot.com/search?q=flight+93, skip down to the 11 Sep article).

We need a change in the whole attitude of many government officials. We as citizens must insist that they stop regarding themselves as aristocratic repositories of all wisdom and start to think of themselves as servants of citizens. And they must realize that those citizens are likely to be as smart as they are. That will be difficult, changing ingrained attitudes takes time. As a start we should insist that congress overturn the ineffective regulations and allow only those likely to be effective. Of course congress is part of the problem so the only way we can get them to act is for enough citizens to write that they know their re-election is in danger if they do not listen to us.

We should all write our representatives and demand that they change the way security is managed in the airline industry.

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Health Care – Something's Missing, Part 3

My last two postings have discussed how we need citizens who can dig down deep and come up with the heart, the guts, the tenacity to do the seemingly impossible. We need men and women who won’t quit, who will overcome the obstacles to preserving and improving our way of life.

However there is another important aspect of this, only briefly mentioned in those posts. We need people who can not only deal with adversity but who can intelligently avoid problems. We face plenty of problems no matter what we do. There is no need to create more, either carelessly or deliberately. A good survivor needs wisdom in addition to guts. That is true whether he is climbing a mountain, running a business or family, or making decisions for an entire country.

Joe Simpson’s survival on Siula Grande was due not only to the extreme guts he showed there but also to making wise decisions under extreme pressure. When he was climbing out of that crevasse he could have easily lost concentration and fallen. Every step upward required decisions on where to place his ice axe and the foot of his one good leg. One mistake and he would have been back at the bottom of the crevasse, with more injuries if he was even still alive.

The ability to make such decisions does not come suddenly when needed. Simpson had long practice in making critical decisions every time he climbed a mountain. He had rich experience deciding if it was safer to wait out a storm or try to outrun it and get to safer terrain, if he should risk a quick descent or go more slowly and carefully at the risk that the sun would make the snow unstable. He had faced literally thousands of such questions during his climbing career. Almost all had potentially serious consequences.

People of the caliber of Joe Simpson do not grow in sheltered lives. They grow as they take responsibility for their own lives. That applies not only to world-class mountaineers but to business owners, employees, parents, and those engaged in every other human endeavor. For most it starts in late childhood when they are allowed to make decisions and live with the results of those decisions. It continues through the teen years as their decisions become more substantial. Finally in their adulthood they become mature and fully human, standing on their own two feet. They recognize what they can and cannot change or control and concentrate their energies on what they can do. That is the type of person we need as citizens.

Of course part of the development of such individuals comes from living with the results of their actions. Such people grow in an atmosphere of self-reliance, a place where there are rewards and consequences for how they decide. The nanny state militates against such growth. People who get rescued from all consequences of their bad decisions learn dependence and bad decision-making. They will need and expect that someone else protect them so they will never grow to fully developed human beings. Nor are they likely to become the productive and wise citizens we need.

“Wait a minute Lillywhite,” you say. “You are in search and rescue. You protect people from the consequences of their actions by rescuing them. Why do you do that?”

Actually it is only partly true that we protect people from the consequences of their actions. In wilderness rescues nobody can completely do that. Some subjects of our missions are seriously injured or even die. Sadly, others are found deceased or not found at all. Even those rescued uninjured have usually spent a miserable time before we arrive. The most we can do is provide an imperfect safety net to help avoid the worst consequences of their mistakes or bad luck.

There is a difference between a safety net and a nanny state that takes over people’s lives. The health care “reforms” seem to be aimed at a complete takeover of one aspect of our lives. That will develop dependence and militate against independent thought and good decision-making.

The fact is that most of us are faced with important decisions that we must make under pressure, even in non-emergency situations. Learning to make those decisions wisely will prepare us for more urgent decisions we may face later. This can start quite early; the teen who refuses to give in to peer pressure to cheat in school or to drive dangerously will be better prepared if he later faces the pressure of a wilderness accident or managing a company threatened by poor business conditions. Should he become a successful politician he will be more able to resist pressure from special interests or other politicians.

We need to encourage people to face the consequences of their decisions. That means allowing them to suffer those consequences except in the worst cases.

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Health Care – Something's Missing, Part 2

Last time I wrote about the need to develop guts, heart, or whatever we chose to call it. It is the inner strength that we can use to overcome obstacles, sometimes when it appears that all hope is lost. I make no pretense of being able to give you that strength; you have to develop it yourself. However it is useful to study those who had such guts and how they used that tenacity. Gonzales' book, Deep Survival gives us many examples and describes the actions of those people.

(I should mention one difference in recommendations between Gonzales and myself. He seems to advocate that those lost or injured in the backcountry try to get out on their own. That is appropriate for those cases where rescue is unlikely. However in most of the contiguous 48 states I believe it is usually better for a lost or seriously injured person to wait for rescue if someone knows approximately where you are. However in my book, Bringing Yourself Back Alive I also advocate positive action on the part of the lost or injured person. He should take action to protect himself, and to help searchers. However if he is not seriously injured or lost he should try to get himself out.)

The survivors Gonzales describes do not waste much time feeling sorry for themselves. Feeling abused is a natural human reaction but is not helpful in such situations. Survivors work through that stage quickly, then get on to something productive. Neither do they panic, instead they think carefully about what they should do. Then they set about doing it, no matter how long it takes or how difficult it is.

Joe Simpson broke his leg descending Siula Grande in Peru. With great difficulty he and his partner started working their way back to camp, with Simpson hopping on one leg or being lowered with a rope by his partner. Things were starting to look manageable – until Simpson fell over a cliff, landing on a snow bridge in a crevasse. His partner could not see him and was forced to cut the rope. Simpson knew his partner would think he was dead and would have to go on alone. He was on his own, in a crevasse with a broken leg. It was impossible to climb out of the crevasse from that snow bridge. Yet he got himself out of that crevasse, broken leg and all and finally managed to get back to camp in time to meet the donkeys that carried their gear (and Simpson) out of the mountains. Had he not gotten himself to camp he would have died where was and his body probably would never have been found.*

Simpson's struggle is instructive. He could have quit after determining that he could not climb up from the snow bridge. However he refused to either give up or panic. Instead he used his brain, noticing a snow pyramid in another part of the crevasse. He lowered himself to the bottom, drug his body to that pyramid, and climbed it to escape. His ordeal was not over, he was still a long way from camp but he didn't give up. He passed his gut check and lived.

Simpson's actions are a good example of reasoned planning, intelligent seeking for a solution, and dogged determination when all seemed lost. That is the kind of backbone we need in our citizens.

Joe Simpson did not develop his tenacity by having someone else meet his needs. Like all survivors he had overcome difficulties before. What will happen when U.S. citizens start looking to government for our needs? We will become a nation of sheeple. We will lose the independence and tenacity that have stood us so well in the past. We will fail the “gut check.” We will not have that extra something inside that is so necessary in any stressful situation, not only in survival cases. Employees and managers will give up easily, harming our economy. Parents will give up easily, harming the coming generation. Spouses will give up easily, leading to broken homes, female poverty and problem children. Whistle blowers will give in to fear and allow corruption to continue.

If we turn our health care over to the “Big Brother” of government it will be one more step towards removing our self-reliance and becoming sheeple instead of the fully developed human beings we should be. We will continue to have human bodies, but we will have sheep-like characters.

*Simpson describes this in his book, Touching the Void. It is also briefly described in Gonzales' book.

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Health Care – Something's Missing (Part 1)

In all the discussion about health care reform we've left out something important. The major discussion has been about cost and affordability. Less attention has been paid to the question of exactly what should be covered. Those are important of course. However there is one aspect of those plans that has been ignored: it's effect on the character of our citizens. If the reform becomes law, what will the citizen of tomorrow be like?

Let's consider the type of person who made this country what it is today. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Thomas Edison, Martin Luther King, Jr. All those and more had one thing in common: they took thoughtful action. They did not sit around moaning that “somebody should do something.” They did not depend on government, charity, or their neighbors for their needs. Instead they invested their own time, energy, and resources in causes they believed in. That was often done at the risk of wealth, health, or even life. Where would we be without the country they created for us? More importantly, where will we be in 20 or 100 years if we fail to develop more such people today? And I am convinced that nanny state measures like the proposed “reforms” will militate against developing such heroes.

Our history is one of people who overcame obstacles, whether those obstacles were the British army, winters of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, Jim Crow laws, or scientific challenges. Sam Walter Foss expressed the poetic wish, “Bring me men to match my mountains, Bring me men to match my plains, Men with empires in their purpose, And new eras in their brains"* His wish has been granted by men and women who matched the mountains of war, bigotry, many diseases, science and technology, and other challenges our citizens have tackled. Many of those mountains remain challenging but those people gave us a good start. They did that by relying on themselves, not waiting for others to solve the problem.

Where will we get the Edisons, the Bartons, the Washingtons of the future? I fear that our developing nanny state will produce sheep-like excuses for humans (often called sheeple) who wait to be cared for when we should be producing men and women who stand up on their hind legs and take action.

That is one of the biggest problems with government-provided health care and other largesse. We cannot grow independence by fostering dependence. We cannot develop men and women of action by molly-coddling our citizens. No, the independent thinker, the person willing and able to advance both himself and his fellowman must be grown in the crucible of self-reliance and difficulty.

I recently read the book, Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales. That book describes traits of survivors, people who overcame great odds to stay alive. Those are the same characteristics we need to meet other problems we face. Those same characteristics are required for people who would make a difference in our family, public, or business life. Those are people who act for themselves. If trapped in a mountain accident they take action to rescue themselves. If shipwrecked they take the lead in solving the problem. If stranded by aircraft or automotive problems they do all that is possible (and often more that we would think possible) to get themselves out of the problem.

Gonzales indicates that the main determinant of who lives and who dies is not what's in his pack. It's not even what's in his head. It is what is in his heart. This is what athletes often call guts. A team behind as time is running out is said to be facing a gut check, a chance to see if they can dig down and find that extra something that will pull out a victory. Those who survive near death experiences face a similar gut check. They have to dig down inside themselves and produce that extra effort to win against the Grim Reaper.

We face similar needs in every aspect of our lives. For example, consider the remaining bigotry in our country. The easy part of that battle was eliminating legal barriers. That is done. Now we face the task of changing minds and hearts, something we cannot legislate. We can sit back and wish, or we can say “somebody should do something,” but if that’s all we do we will make no further progress. However if we have the courage to confront the bigots, to befriend those others regard as inferior, we will continue to make progress. That may require that we risk alienation from friends, family, even employers when we speak up. We may even risk having our property vandalized or our persons harmed. It will take courage, and that courage must be developed by courageous action.

That is the same kind of courage that will allow a soldier to dig down inside for what he needs to fight a terrorist a little harder. It is the same kind of courage that will allow a government or business official to risk his job and expose corruption. It is the same kind of courage a parent needs to care for a disabled child or to discipline a child who is starting to engage in antisocial behavior. It is the courage, the guts, this country needs to preserve our freedom and continue to improve our lives. It is a courage that cannot be developed by asking government to meet all our needs.

(To be continued)

*Perhaps another danger sign is the fact that the beginning of that poem was once displayed on a granite wall at our Air Force Academy. It was removed in 2003 for fear of offending women, and that in spite of some female Air Force officers asking that the words remain in place. Can we really build on the foundation our fathers gave us if we are diverted by such trivialities? It is sad, even dangerous, that some prefer political correctness to such inspiring words.

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