My favorite living writer, John Varley, is a candid man. He’s also a proud hippie. So when he says something about politics, it’s candid hippiness, and thus a good opportunity to see how weird that sort of thinking (obviously in the ascendant now) really is. Here he is with a brief essay on economics, in which he posits “Varley’s First And Second Laws.” The first is, “Economists don’t know anything!” and the second is “Everybody is greedy!”
Let’s grant him that. I certainly would grant him the second, and I would come very close to granting him the first. But what conclusions do you draw from these two propositions? One would think that the conclusion would be: “Keep people who claim to know how to run your economic life far away from the levers of power!” Or perhaps, “If everybody is greedy, you can’t trust them with the legal authority to control other people’s lives!”
That is to say, you would think the natural conclusion is, the power of government to control your life ought to be as limited as possible, so that bureaucrats who run government (or the nefarious private interests who run the bureaucrats) will have less power to screw with your life and to put their greed and ignorance into harmful effect.
In fact, that is just what Thomas Jefferson argued in his First Inaugural Address:
Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
If people are greedy and ignorant—which they are—then isn’t that all the more reason to prevent them from controlling other people’s lives and choices? Shouldn’t those who are not so nasty and dumb be kept free from those who are? Why should the innocent be forced to pay the bills of the ignorant and greedy? In other words, shouldn’t a person who believes that people are greedy and ignorant conclude that freedom is the least bad option, and that the regulatory welfare state, which seeks to subject every aspect of life to the supervision of allegedly expert bureaucrats is just an awful idea? Should we not conclude that, bad as things might be in a free society, it is only going to be worse in a society where greedy and ignorant people are given political control over their neighbors?
And yet Varley doesn’t come to that conclusion. Instead, he rails against free markets as being “idiotic” and so forth—apparently thinking that somehow Barack Obama, whose very name makes Varley smile, is not infected with the same ignorance and greed as everybody else. Perhaps I misunderstand: he says about the Obama administration that “[m]y sphincter squeezes tight and I break out in a cold sweat when I hear those figures. I sure hope somebody knows what they’re doing … but I have my doubts.” As we all should. But why do those doubts not translate into the principle that government bureaucrats should be restrained from acting on their greed and ignorance (or that of their constituents) in ways that violate the rights of others? That is to say, that individuals should be free to order their own economic choices (and responsible for the consequences) as much as possible without being controlled by government, which is, need we repeat, All Too Human?
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