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.
An even larger array of the intellectual elite in the 1930s
opposed the efforts of Western democracies to respond to Hitler’s
massive military buildup with offsetting military defense buildups
to deter Hitler or to defend themselves if deterrence failed.
“Disarmament” was the mantra of the day among the
intelligentsia, often garnished with the suggestion that the
Western democracies should “set an example” for other nations — as
if Nazi Germany or imperial Japan was likely to follow their
example.
Too many among today’s intellectual elite see themselves as our
shepherds and us as their sheep. Tragically, too many of us are
apparently willing to be sheep, in exchange for being taken care
of, being relieved of the burdens of adult responsibility and being
supplied with “free” stuff paid for by others.
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