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The Insolubility of Politics
 The
late Henry Hazlitt, a disciple of the great
Ludwig von Mises, was a classical liberal (or libertarian, as we’d now
say) and an incisive critic of the modern centralized state. His little classic,
Economics in One Lesson, is a model
of  showing
the simple principles at the heart of complex issues.
Hazlitt died at age 99 in 1993. But
he has reappeared in a new book, left unfinished at his death. Edited by Felix
R. Livingston and published by the Foundation for Economic Education,
it’s titled Is Politics Insoluble? Hazlitt’s answer
to that question is pessimistic: Yes.
Why? Because of the very nature
of politics. In a democracy, where all sorts of groups demand legislation
favoring themselves, laws are easy to pass and nearly impossible to repeal.
“Since its beginning,”
Hazlitt observes, “Congress has enacted more than 40,000 laws. It is
a fair assumption that most of these are still operative in some
form.” He cites a 1968 study by a congressional staff that concluded
that “no one, anywhere, knows exactly how many federal programs
there are.”
The rate of legislation and
spending is always accelerating to meet the demand for special favors.
Hazlitt quotes Frédéric Bastiat’s dictum: “The
State is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of
everybody else.”
The logic of the situation dooms
us to constantly encroaching tyranny, not Stalin-style, but (I paraphrase
Hazlitt loosely here) pain-in-the-butt style. The piling up of petty laws and
regulations is bound to continue indefinitely, gradually choking off freedom of
action — and eventually even freedom of speech and thought.
Hazlitt’s love of principle
and distilled expression show both in what he says and in what he quotes.
Many of his best citations concern the perversion of democracy into a
system of what Bastiat called “organized plunder,” and of
perverting voting into larceny by other means; while the good citizen who
dutifully obeys the law and pays his taxes, asking no favors for himself,
becomes the victim of venal politics.
The British historian Alexander
Tytler observed, “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of
government. It can exist only until the voters discover that they can vote
themselves largesse out of the public treasury.”
The British economic philosopher
Herbert Spencer warned that in a pure democracy, people who don’t
pay taxes would be free to vote themselves a generous share of other
people’s money: “During the days when extensions of the
franchise were in agitation, a maxim perpetually repeated was ŒTaxation
without representation is robbery.’ Experience has since made it clear
that, on the other hand, representation without taxation entails
robbery.” Spencer noted that the “increase of freedom in
form” has been followed by “decrease of freedom in
fact.”
Spencer again: “All
socialism involves slavery.... That which fundamentally distinguishes the
slave is that he labors under coercion to satisfy another’s
desires.” When some citizens use the franchise to enrich themselves
at others’ expense, involuntary servitude has merely taken a new
form; chattel slavery may be gone, but the state can become the instrument
of the same general purpose of enabling some to live by the labor of others.
As Spencer puts it, “The essential question is: How much is [the
individual] compelled to labor for other benefit than his own, and how much
can he labor for his own benefit?”
Spencer formulated the operative
principle of modern democracy: “that no man has any claim to his
property, not even to that which he has earned by the sweat of his brow,
save by the permission of the community; and that the community may
cancel the claim to any extent it sees fit.” Hazlitt himself amplifies
this point: “The government may pass and enforce any law it sees fit,
guided only by what it regards as the merit of the individual case; and no part
of any citizen’s freedom or property shall be respected if a majority
of 51 percent or more decide otherwise.”
Let Spencer provide the coda:
“The function of Liberalism in the past was that of putting a limit to
the power of kings. The function of true Liberalism in the future will be that
of putting a limit to the power of Parliaments.” Unfortunately, even
the word liberalism has now become a synonym for statism.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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