Leviathan Fail

[Valin]

NRO:

The State faces humiliation and bankruptcy, and thats the good news.

Jonah Goldberg

5/31/13

 

In Our Enemy, the State, Albert Jay Nock distinguished between the government and the State. Sadly, these terms have become interchangeable in everyday parlance: Statism is simply a more euphonious and serviceable word for governmentism. But until the New Deal, while virtually everyone would have recognized that the United States had a government, whether it had a state would have been a much more complicated question. For Nock, the government is the machinery created by the Founders to protect our individual rights, our shores from foreign enemies, and, well, thats about it. Even a police force was an iffy proposition for Nock. When Sir Robert Peel proposed to organize the police force of London, Englishmen said openly that half a dozen throats cut in Whitechapel every year would be a cheap price to pay for keeping such an instrument of tyranny out of the States hands, Nock wrote. We are all beginning to realize now that there is a great deal to be said for that view of the matter.

 

The State properly capitalized is a different creature altogether from mere government. It is an instrument of will. It seeks to tell people how to live. Worse still, it uses force to do so. Worst of all, its paramount purpose is not answering the question Whats best for the people? that is at most a secondary consideration but What is good for the State?

 

Kevin Williamsons new book is quite possibly the best indictment of the State since Our Enemy, the State appeared some eight decades ago. It is a lovely, brilliant, humane, and remarkably entertaining work.

 

(Snip)

 

Where I think Williamson is entirely right is that politics or the State is being utterly humiliated by the accomplishments of the private sector. For millennia, politics and technology evolved at about the same rate, which is to say very slowly. Since the Enlight­enment, to pick a serviceable benchmark, the rate of change and progress (not the same thing, after all) outside the realm of politics has increased geometrically while the rate of change within politics has rarely achieved even arithmetic advance. Indeed, politics is often prone to regression. Thats be­cause politics is governed by the Deweyan fallacy that planners are smart enough to run other peoples lives and businesses. Mean­while, the realm of Nockian social power is fueled by the Hayekian insight that freedom fuels problem-solving. Indi­vidual liberty yields the iPhone. Politics protects the post office.

 

My disagreements, while philosophically serious, are ultimately minor when rendered as judgments on this book. Indeed, one of the things that make it so wonderful and so reminiscent of Nock is that it invites the reader to question first principles and come to his own conclusions. If you want to keep the government the way it is, Wil­liamson is essentially saying, fine. But you should have no illusions about what youre keeping.