Our Mixed Economy at Work

Those of us who advocate laissez-faire capitalism regard the proper function of the government as the protection of individual rights from abridgement by means of force. In a republic, whether this is what the government is all about is heavily dependent upon what the general public regards (rightly or not) as the proper role of the government, hence the importance of fighting the battle of ideas, and hence the famous saying, "A republic, if you can keep it."

A republic whose citizenry does not regard the protection of its inalienable rights as the purpose of its government is doomed to get a government that violates those rights in some way. And, incidentally, the battle of ideas is inescapable for all who wish to be able to protect their own freedom in some way. For all non-republican forms of government place the protection of our rights at the whims of either unrestrained masses or small groups of men who cannot be held accountable.

So what happens when a society forgets (or starts forgetting) about individual rights?

Shortly after hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Robert Tracinski wrote an outstanding editorial about this very subject that gained wide circulation via the internet. In his editorial, he focused on the man-made disaster that primed New Orleans for the chaos that followed Katrina: the crippling of the poor residents of New Orleans by the welfare state.

Hurricane Katrina exposed ... the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them--this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting. [bold addded]

Tracinksi's focus was on the consequences of the theory of government that holds that it is okay to take money from some who do support themselves and give it to others who do not. Those consequences were, for the poor: a complete decoupling of one's actions and the judgement of one's mind from one's ability to survive. When one can, apparently, survive causelessly, one doesn't quibble about apparent trifles such as rights.

In one sense, this story is old. Wide knowledge of the mechanism of the welfare state led to popular resentment at the taxation required to support the welfare state. This in turn led to the Reagan Revolution of 1980 and rollbacks of welfare programs since then. What was new about Tracinski's editorial is that it showed how the welfare state is arguably even more detrimental to those it is supposed to help. While the "rich" are merely robbed of their money, the poor are robbed of the incentive to learn how to make money, and thus are crippled psychologically. The one group at least still appreciates on some level that its rights are being violated; to the other, the concept of rights is, if anything, regarded as a threat: It's what might stop the government money from flowing in!

This Sunday, I read a story in the Houston Chronicle that sheds light on yet another way in which the welfare state inexoribly leads to corruption. In a society where government officials are expected to protect individual rights, their actions will be guided by how well they protect those rights, or at least by how well they are regarded as protecting those rights. But what guides politicians in the welfare state? Anyone who has read Atlas Shrugged will have some ideas on this matter, but what of a society not so far gone? What of our society?

Katrina, it turns out, has not only showed the psychoepistemological consequences of the welfare state for the poor, but for government officials, including those who, relatively speaking anyway, are not strong advocates of the welfare state! The news story I point to above shows that in the aftermath of Katrina, Texas government officials were nowhere near making a bold stand against the government assuming a huge role in disaster relief.

Instead, knowing that their voters accepted the premise that somebody should be taxed for disaster relief, our government officials were concerned with striking some murky compromise between being not sacrificing enough for the refugees and sacrificing too much.

[B]ehind the scenes, Perry's administration quickly began discussing how to quell the flood of humanity pouring into the state while protecting the governor's image, according to e-mail released to the Houston Chronicle under the state's Public Information Act.

"Question between you and I," Perry's communications director, Eric Bearse, wrote Sept. 1, "at what point do we go from being compassionate to being taken advantage of (meaning, are they sending us folks they don't want?). Please erase when done reading."

"Excelent point," Texas Homeland Security Director Steve McCraw responded. "We will soon hit that mark and will (be) able to push off to other states without appearing dispassionate. We just need to make sure the Feds fund all of the short term and long term costs consider it erased." [all bold added]

In a more rational society where the proper function of the government is better understood, the "governor's image" would be damaged beyond repair if he raided the public coffers to do what private charity and personal foresight should have taken care of. In a rational society, government officials would not sit idly by, only quietly expressing alarm among themselves that another state might be sending its criminal element over. They would demand some proof that this was not happening and turn criminals back at the border, if possible. And they would give ample warning to their citizens about the problem! In a rational society, there would be no passing of the buck to the next higher level of the government because the constiuents would realize that they would still be subject to some of that taxation.

The article is a fascinating read, but if there is one common strand that unites it, it is this: The government officials, all concerned that they could fall from power if they appeared to be insufficiently altruistic or too altruistic, placed their image as altruists above all other considerations, at the expense of the rights of their constituents.

Consider an issue I raised here and here not too long ago.

People's lives were in danger and no one would warn us (publicly anyway). So do the alleged sensibilities of a minority group supercede the safety of a city's citizens (about a third of whom belong to that same minority)?

We were not warned. Why?

It would be little exaggeration to say that our nation's state religion is multiculturalism, and that our public officials, far from being free of its grip, are offering us citizens up as sacrifices to its deities.

I think I see why we Houstonians were not warned about the criminal element among the Katrina refugees (nor were law-abiding New Orleanians warned about some of the seedier parts of Houston). It is because in our republic, people do not appreciate the importance of their individual rights enough to demand that their public officials protect them. Many people do not fully accept the idea that they own the fruits of their labors. And many people accept the absurd notion that it is somehow a symptom of bigotry to point out that some members of a demographic are, in fact, dangerous. Their elected officials are acting not wholly unreasonably and are giving the public what they deserve in the process.

So long as most Americans continue to have little or no intellectual grasp of individual rights, our leaders will continue to regard other considerations as more important and, as I said about the Tsunami disaster some time ago:

So this is what Taranto is advocating: a government that can confiscate what you need to survive (and is rightfully yours because you produced it) and hand it over to someone else. This compounds the tsunami tragedy abroad with the atrocity of tyranny at home.

And so we have our own parallel here in Houston, in which the tragedy of Katrina was compounded by the atrocity of a preventable crime wave here.

-- CAV