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The Public Policy
Shepherds and Sheep
Cass Sunstein needs to reread John Stuart Mill.
John Stuart Mill’s classic essay “On Liberty” gives reasons why some people should not be taking over other people’s decisions about their own lives. But Professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard has given reasons to the contrary. He cites research showing “that people make a lot of mistakes, and that those mistakes can prove extremely damaging.”
Professor Sunstein is undoubtedly correct that “people make a lot of mistakes.” Most of us can look back over our own lives and see many mistakes, including some that were very damaging.
What Cass Sunstein does not tell us is what sort of creatures, other than people, are going to override our mistaken decisions for us. That is the key flaw in the theory and agenda of the left.
Implicit in the wide range of efforts on the left to get government to take over more of our decisions for us is the assumption that there is some superior class of people who are either wiser or nobler than the rest of us.
Yes, we all make mistakes. But do governments not make bigger and more catastrophic mistakes?
Think about the First World War, from which nations on both sides ended up worse off than before, after an unprecedented carnage that killed substantial fractions of whole younger generations and left millions starving amid the rubble of war.
Think about the Holocaust, and about other government slaughters of even more millions of innocent men, women and children under Communist governments in the Soviet Union and China.
Even in the United States, government policies in the 1930s led to crops being plowed under, thousands of little pigs being slaughtered and buried, and milk being poured down sewers, at a time when many Americans were suffering from hunger and diseases caused by malnutrition.
The Great Depression of the 1930s, in which millions of people were plunged into poverty in even the most prosperous nations, was needlessly prolonged by government policies now recognized in retrospect as foolish and irresponsible.
One of the key differences between mistakes that we make in our own lives and mistakes made by governments is that bad consequences force us to correct our own mistakes. But government officials cannot admit to making a mistake without jeopardizing their whole careers.
Can you imagine a President of the United States saying to the mothers of America, “I am sorry your sons were killed in a war I never should have gotten us into”?
What is even more relevant to Professor Sunstein’s desire to have our betters tell us how to live our lives, is that so many oppressive and even catastrophic government policies were cheered on by the intelligentsia.
Back in the 1930s, for example, totalitarianism was considered to be “the wave of the future” by much of the intelligentsia, not only in the totalitarian countries themselves but in democratic nations as well.
The Soviet Union was being praised to the skies by such literary luminaries as George Bernard Shaw in Britain and Edmund Wilson in America, while literally millions of people were being systematically starved to death by Stalin and masses of others were being shipped off to slave labor camps.
Even Hitler and Mussolini had their supporters or apologists among intellectuals in the Western democracies, including at one time Lincoln Steffens and W.E.B. Du Bois.
About the Author
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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spike59| 2.26.13 @ 6:20AM
prof. Sunstein (Mrs. Samantha Powers, and formerly ObaMao's regulatory czar) is a living example of why 'ProgLibs' should never be entrusted with power
Appleby| 2.26.13 @ 7:11AM
The people who support this kind of holocaust always assume that they will be in the group that is In Charge and has an inside track to the goodies. I am still puzzled and amused by the number of militant women and homosexuals who are firmly on the side of Islamists whose first order of business, should they take command, will be to kill militant women and homosexuals.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 2.26.13 @ 8:25AM
" I am still puzzled and amused by the number of militant women and homosexuals who are firmly on the side of Islamists whose first order of business, should they take command, will be to rape and kill militant women and homosexuals."
I believe your last sentence is largely correct and insightful, but perhaps a bit incomplete, so I added what might be another item on the agenda at the Change of Command ceremony.
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Nancy in NC| 2.26.13 @ 8:52AM
When individuals make mistakes often they learn and correct their behaviors. (Even if they don't, the range of influence is rather limited.)
When government make mistakes thousands die or suffer some kind of terrible consequence. We can look at the ills of the world and we find at the root decisions by government to do what THEY think is better for the rest of us. And WE suffer the consequences.
C.S. Lewis said it right as I paraphrase: God save me from the do gooders.
Those who think they know better are scary beyond words and usually only want to control the rest of us. Unfortunately we have quite a few people in this country that now take liberty for granted and fail to see how tenous our future is. When you sacrifice freedom for security, you end up with neither.
Anthony| 2.26.13 @ 9:20AM
Sunstein is indeed correct, mankind does do some incredibly stupid things; afterall, mankind is responsible for the creation of the United Nations and the Ivy League, for starters.
Peppermint Tea | 2.26.13 @ 9:26AM
Mistakes are made by people like me
But only Government can make anarchy.
markenoff| 2.26.13 @ 10:05AM
Government bureacrats are is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human beings I've ever known in my life.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 2.26.13 @ 10:07AM
This is two days in a row you've said this. Everyone knows if you say it three times, it has to be true.
Burke| 2.26.13 @ 10:41AM
One of the biggest mistakes in human history is mans' attempt to rule his fellow man.
Von Mises Jr| 2.26.13 @ 11:06AM
Rousseau in "The social Contract" wrote that "if one does not bend to the General Will, he must be forced to be Free."
Hegel's statism resulted in his praise for Alexander the Great and Napoleon (his contemporary) while they annihilated peoples of Europe, North Africa and India since these had been great men that changed history.
Comte believed his "Enlightenment" Age of Reason peers had destroyed theology along with the dark ages resulting in his "Positivism" that meant that people such as him were to reconstruct a new paradigm on positive laws to replace all that had preceded it.
Today we have the UN Agenda21, the bankrupt EU and the collapsing Omerican Dear Leader telling us pretty much the same crap. I ain’t buying it.
Burke| 2.26.13 @ 4:17PM
You point out the important fact that it is man's love of himself that drives him to such immorality. In the words of St. Augustine:
"This is prescribed by the order of nature: it is thus that God has created man. For “let them,” He says, “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every creeping thing which creepeth on the earth.” He did not intend that His rational creature, who was made in His image, should have dominion over anything but the irrational creation — not man over man, but man over the beasts."
Albertus Magnus| 2.26.13 @ 11:29AM
"Implicit in the wide range of efforts on the left to get government to take over more of our decisions for us is the assumption that there is some superior class of people who are either wiser or nobler than the rest of us."
Yes. And Cass Sunstein fancies himself one of these "superior" people. "Noblesse oblige" is the mantra of such people. Without the "inferior" people to manange and control, the entire professional lives of these "superiors" become moot. Absent their "obligation" they really have nothing to live for professionally or psychologically. "Noblesse oblige" is perhaps the most arrogantly condescending, self-congratulatory load of manure ever concocted by the Human Race. The tell here is that even when there is prosperity and peace, the egotists like Sunstein are psychologically compelled to screw things up for other people and thus MANUFACTURE the "inferiors" that give their worthless lives meaning. Boobs like Sunstein fail to understand the damage they inflict. They only see themselves, their egos, and their professional careers of being "in charge."
Jim Adcox| 2.26.13 @ 11:46AM
How much of the sheep's tax dollars is going to pay for the shepherds' mint jelly? And what is that sound I hear, of knives being sharpened, as the sheep are herded toward the slaughterhouse?
markenoff| 2.26.13 @ 12:53PM
Fleeced now, slaughtered later.
Petronius| 2.26.13 @ 12:07PM
We have an Intellectual problem. Intellectuals are professional buttinskis who believe they alone are fit to rule. Sunstein has the classic trope of this lot in believing his mission is to protect the roobs from themselves whether they want it or not. This, after Secretary of State Kerry said Americans have the "right to be stupid." So which is it? H.L. Mencken would have had a field day with this one. So what of them? At the core, both are closet Weenies. They want life to be palatable for the clueless, useless, senseless twits who can't get out of their own way. To do this, the requirement that people grow up to be competent Adults must be, and has been nullified; for now. This too shall pass: But not until they have. Intellectuals: There ought to be a bounty on them.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 2.26.13 @ 12:18PM
"At the core, both are closet Weenies"
I'm afraid I must disagree. I think both have been out of the closet for some time.
Petronius| 2.26.13 @ 1:25PM
If we ever meet, the first Kraftigs are on me.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 2.26.13 @ 4:33PM
Danke shoen.
Ronsch| 2.26.13 @ 12:30PM
"It's sad that governments are chiefed by the double tongues." ...from the movie "The Outlaw Josey Wales."
Never have truer words been spoken...
markenoff| 2.26.13 @ 12:56PM
I came here to die with you. Or to live with you. Dyin's not hard for men like you and me it's livin' that's hard when everything you care about's been butchered or raped. With governments you don't always get a fair word or a fair fight. I came here to give you either one or get either one from you.......I'm not promisin' anything extra. I'm just sayin' that men can live together without butcherin' one another.
markenoff| 2.26.13 @ 12:57PM
I came here like this so you would know that my word of death is true and that my word of life is also true.
markenoff| 2.26.13 @ 12:59PM
There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see. And there is iron in your wordfs of life. The tongue of Ten Bears speaks with the same iron. No signed paper can hold the iron, it must come from men. It is good that wariors such as we meet in the struggle between life and death. It shall be life.
markenoff| 2.26.13 @ 12:59PM
Reckon so.
spike59| 2.26.13 @ 4:48PM
a fitting epitaph for liberalism:
"to hell with them fellers; buzzards gotta eat, same as worms"
C'mon Man!| 2.26.13 @ 9:00PM
Clint had it right... Heck, he still does! Make my day!
My favorite is, "A man's gotta know his limitations."
Anthony| 2.26.13 @ 2:11PM
Ain't we gonna bury these boys? worms gotta eat, same as buzzards.
Job| 2.26.13 @ 3:52PM
I didn't surrender, but they took my horse and made him surrender. I think THEY have him pulling a wagon up in Kansas.
(it always the damn theys)