"So far as liberty is concerned, my own thoughts always start from the opening page of A.J.P. Taylor’s
English History, 1914-1945 (one of the volumes in the
Oxford History of England). I’m going to give you the whole page, I can’t bear to précis or cut it. Here you go (with British spellings left unchanged):
'Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent. of the national income. The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.'"
At a first reading, this sounds idyllic -- a libertarian’s dream. Now look a little closer. As it happens, I grew up among English people, the oldest of whom were working and raising families at the time Taylor is writing about, the years just before World War I (or, as they always said, "The Great War". these oldsters were all socialists. On matters of public policy, you couldn’t give them enough government. Nationalization of the mines? State-provided old age pensions? National disability insurance? Public housing? Free education? The National Health Service? Bring it on.
If you probed for the origins of their socialistic inclinations,
the horror stories would come out. There was that poor widow down the lane, eight kids to feed and not a pair of shoes between them. There was old Sam Matthews, who died in agony because he couldn’t afford an operation. There was cousin Alfred, the cleverest and best-read man you every met, who had to leave school at 14 and go “down the pit” (i.e. into coal-mining work) because there was no money in the family. There were the hazards of work, pit fires for example ... Worst of all, there was the workhouse -- a word spoken with such horror and dread that I can still feel its chill myself. The workhouse was the only form of welfare in Victorian and (though, as Taylor points out, to a lessening degree) Edwardian England -- a communal house, run by the parish, where the destitute got minimal shelter and food in return for menial work.
The historians -- including Taylor, by the way, who was himself a socialist -- confirm that the libertarian idyll was in fact seething with discontent and injustice. The best book on this is George Dangerfield’s classic The Strange Death of Liberal England, still in print today after 66 years. Dangerfield shows the dark underside of the Edwardian endless summer. Labor unions, beginning to flex their muscles, were pushing for widespread strikes and nationalization of industry. Women’ssuffragecampaigners were burning down country houses, chaining themselves to public railings, throwing themselves under racehorses. Ireland was a festering sore, one mass of her people demanding Home Rule, another mass resisting, the British Army in mutiny when ordered to fire on loyal Ulstermen. The constitution itself -- yes, Britain has a constitution, they have just never bothered to write it down -- had become unstable, with the constitutional monarch being obliged to exercise his powers for reform. ...
Liberty is a wonderful thing, but like every other good, it has a price, and the price for many people was too high. They traded in their liberty for some security, creating the America and the Britain we have today. ...
Hence the America of today, with its stupendous levels of taxation, vast government bureaucracies of breathtaking arrogance and -- as we have seen all too clearly these past few months -- incompetence, industry-killing tort lawyers and property-snatching regulators, Saudi-Arabianization of the workforce (God forbid any American-born American should wash cars, clean toilets, shine shoes or pick fruit -- we have 13 million illegal immigrants to take care of that stuff) and thought-choking government-patrolled codes of “diversity,” “sensitivity,” and “correctness.”
We have reached the stage foreseen by De Tocqueville, in which 'the supreme power... covers the surface of society with a net-work of small complicated rules, minute and uniform... it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.' And aside from a few grumblers like Fred Reed and G. Gordon Liddy, we are fine with it. ...
What about the future, though? Ours is not the kind of society that can stand still. Will liberty go on diminishing, till bio-technology and neuroscience land us in the state-controlled infantile hedonism of Brave New World? ...
Or is there a road back to a re-birth of liberty?
And if there is such a road, do we want to take it?"
Links are mine -- ed.
Big government
(This is a copy of a one-time Wikipedia entry.
I have added my own links.)
" 'Big government' is a pejorative term used mostly by
political conservatives or advocates of
laissez-faire to describe the central government of their country. The term is mainly used to evoke criticism of a government which is believed to be excessively large and costly, with too many programs that interfere on too many areas of
public life.
Some, more populist,
observers combine criticism of "big government" with
big business", seeing them as almost always in alliance against the population. Yet others add "big labor," to form an unholy trinity, though this seems difficult in many countries,
such as the United States in the twenty-first century,
where organized labor has greatly weakened."
Big government
-- Wikipedia
(Note that Wikipedia entries are frequently re-edited and changed)
"Big government is a pejorative term used mostly by political conservatives or advocates of laissez-faire to describe the government of their country as excessively large and inefficient, with too many public-support programs that interfere with the desires of elite-driven capitalism.
Critics of "big government" are usually critical of
civil rights and social equity laws, welfare, high taxes, and government-funded or subsidized industries. Interestingly, they also may tacitly approve of a larger elite-driven executive and correctional powers -- military, police, and prisons.
Some populist observers combine criticism of "big government" with "big business," seeing them as a an alliance against the public. Others add "big labor," though this seems difficult in many countries, such as the United States, where organized labor often has distinctly populist goals."
"In civics, minarchism, sometimes called minimal statism, is the view that the size, role and influence of government in a free society should be minimal -- only large enough to protect the liberty of each and every individual, without violating the liberty of any individuals itself. Many minarchists consider themselves part of the libertarian tradition, and claim that what they call minarchy continues the traditions of classical liberal philosophy. The term is perhaps most often used to differentiate libertarians that believe it is possible to have a state that protects individual liberty without violating it itself, from the anarchists who believe that any state is inherently a violation of individual liberty. Minarchists believe some minimal government is necessary to preserve liberty (from invading non-minarchy based armies, if nothing else). ...
Prominent minarchists include Benjamin Constant, Herbert Spencer, Leonard Read, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, James M. Buchanan, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, John Hospers, Robert Nozick, George Reisman.
Minarchist organizations include Reason Foundation, International Society for Individual Liberty, Foundation for Revolutionary Enlightened Emancipation, and BureauCrash."
"A night watchman state, or a minimal state, is a form of government in political philosophy where the government's responsibilities are so minimal they cannot be reduced much further without becoming a form of anarchy. The responsibilities in a hypothetical night watchman state would include the
police, judicial systems,
prisons and the
military, the minimum allegedly required to uphold the law, which is limited to protect individuals from coercion and theft, to remove criminals from society, and to defend the country from foreign aggression. The term night watchman state was coined in 19th century liberalism, and is a metaphor for a state that "sleeps" (i.e., refrains from getting involved in citizens' lives) until someone's civil liberties are infringed.
The view proposing a minimal state is known as minarchism, and is a core part of the libertarian ideology. Minarchists propose to enforce a night watchman state with a clearly-defined constitution on the government's powers, and may also see it necessary to ensure the constitution cannot be amended after adoption."
"In Victorian Literature and the Victorian State, Lauren Goodlad reminds us that it is
'a commonplace of many social histories that British government differed from that of most Continental countries. Britain's centralized state was smaller, less intrusive, and more reliant on local and voluntary supports, but -- for all that -- highly effective in maintaining social stability at home, and exploiting colonial interests abroad' (3). Summarizing David Robert's
Victorian Origins of the Modern Welfare State (1960),
she points out that compared to France, the British government during the Victorian period was "'absurdly small.' In 1832 the entire British civil service numbered 21,300, while in 1846 its French counterpart numbered just under a million. Even in 1914, by which point the British nation was -- to the mind of one die-hard liberal -- 'in danger of being governed to death,' the civil service had only grown about tenfold, numbering some 280,000" (6).
One result of this liberal insistence upon the smallest and most decentralized government possible appears in nearly universal dislike of any centralizing measures, such as the 1834 Poor Law and the 1848 Public Health Act.
"The majority of Britons' were deeply committed
'to local control, civic voluntarism, personalized philanthropy, and individual self help' (4)."
Roman Virtues
by Michael Christian
Liberty, OCT 2006, vol 20, number 10
libertyunbound.com
"Good government is the smallest government you can get away with."
I agree with this, and I'll bet that many others do too.
The devil is in defining exactly what constitutes
"the smallest that you can get away with."
The Minarchist's Dilemma
by Anthony Gregory
at strike-the-root.com -- "a daily journal of current events and commentary from a libertarian/market anarchist perspective. The mission of STR is to advance the cause of liberty, primarily by de-mystifying and de-legitimizing the State. STR seeks a world where people are free to live their lives as they see fit, as long as they don't use force or fraud against peaceful people."
"I comprehended that the state, properly defined, possessed a monopoly on force. This always puzzled me. It obviously should not have a monopoly on defensive force (I totally understood the arguments against gun control). So what kind of force does it monopolize?
The initiation of force. The precise disease (that) I envisioned the ideal state to combat.
I knew that government created monopolies in utilities, education, and other services. I understood that cartels, protected from competition, ended up controlling much more of the economy than they would in a free market.
And yet, I trusted the minimal, libertarian state to restrain itself, and to refrain from using its own powers to expand its “market share” over coercion beyond what the free market would provide.
I realized, on a subliminal level, that any “state” that obeyed within the confines of non-aggression, barred from the powers of taxation and incapable of forbidding others from competing with it, would cease to be an actual state at all. (Hmm. Is this true?)
So my philosophical dilemma with minarchism, which I defended, and anarchism, which I opposed yet better understood, was with me for several years. But I put up with it because I thought it was impractical to believe in anarchy, which would never exist. I might as well shoot for the smallest, least oppressive government possible.
My pragmatic reasons for giving the state its perfunctory respect ended shortly after 9/11. I thought to myself, 'Okay, Anthony, here’s your chance to see if your principles can withstand today’s terrible events. It’s wartime (sic), and you believe that the government has only one function -- to protect its citizens from force and fraud.' ...
It wasn’t very long until I realized that the government’s response to 9/11 had no hope in improving anything. In Afghanistan, it immediately embarked on the same kind of policy that incited 9/11 in the first place. At home, it violated all sorts of civil liberties that I considered indispensable in a free country, and unnecessary sacrifices for a genuine battle against terrorism.
A few months after 9/11, it all came together for me. Of course an institution that forcefully extracts two trillion dollars from Americans every year, systematically imprisons peaceful people, and kills countless human beings in other countries for no good reason is going to have difficulty correctly addressing the crises that result from its killing. Of course a government that kills more than ten thousand people a year by prohibiting them from obtaining life-saving medicines (sic -- I would argue that the U.S. federal state and local governments also save some unknown thousands of luves per year by regulating medicine, water, drinking water, etc.) is going to have problems accounting for innocent lives in its wartime calculations.
Not all statists or state agents are “evil” -- far from it. But it is a very dangerous idea that certain select people -- whether through elections or inheritance -- should monopolize the power to use preemptive force against innocent people, and should ultimately only be accountable to itself"
