John Stuart Mill's classic essay "On
Liberty" gives reasons why some people should not be taking over other people's
decisions about their own lives. But Professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard has
given reasons to the contrary. He cites research showing "that people make a lot
of mistakes, and that those mistakes can prove extremely damaging."
Professor Sunstein is undoubtedly correct that "people make a lot of
mistakes." Most of us can look back over our own lives and see many mistakes,
including some that were very damaging.
What Cass Sunstein does not tell us is what sort of creatures, other than
people, are going to override our mistaken decisions for us. That is the key
flaw in the theory and agenda of the left.
Implicit in the wide range of efforts on the left to get government to take
over more of our decisions for us is the assumption that there is some superior
class of people who are either wiser or nobler than the rest of us.
Yes, we all make mistakes. But do governments not make bigger and more
catastrophic mistakes? [....]
One of the key differences between mistakes that we make in our own lives and
mistakes made by governments is that bad consequences force us to correct our
own mistakes. But government officials cannot admit to making a mistake without
jeopardizing their whole careers. [....]
What is even more relevant to Professor Sunstein's desire to have our betters
tell us how to live our lives, is that so many oppressive and even catastrophic
government policies were cheered on by the intelligentsia.
Back in the 1930s, for example, totalitarianism was considered to be "the
wave of the future" by much of the intelligentsia, not only in the totalitarian
countries themselves but in democratic nations as well.
The Soviet Union was being praised to the skies by such literary luminaries
as George Bernard Shaw in Britain and Edmund Wilson in America, while literally
millions of people were being systematically starved to death by Stalin and
masses of others were being shipped off to slave labor camps.
Even Hitler and Mussolini had their supporters or apologists among
intellectuals in the Western democracies, including at one time Lincoln Steffens
and W.E.B. Du Bois.
An even larger array of the intellectual elite in the 1930s opposed the
efforts of Western democracies to respond to Hitler's massive military buildup
with offsetting military defense buildups to deter Hitler or to defend
themselves if deterrence failed.
"Disarmament" was the mantra of the day among the intelligentsia, often
garnished with the suggestion that the Western democracies should "set an
example" for other nations — as if Nazi Germany or imperial Japan was likely to
follow their example.
Too many among today's intellectual elite see themselves as our shepherds and
us as their sheep. Tragically, too many of us are apparently willing to be
sheep, in exchange for being taken care of, being relieved of the burdens of
adult responsibility and being supplied with "free" stuff paid for by others.
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