A Manageable People

Great essay by Sultan Knish:

Obama's stated logic behind compelling all Americans to buy health insurance was that the system wouldn't work, unless everyone was compelled to be part of it. Conformity is of course is a major requirement for big government solutions, they don't work unless everyone is forced to take part in them. And they don't work unless everyone lives mostly the same. Without individual choices that might take them off the graph. (They still don't work even then, but the numbers look better up front.) And this is how big government solutions lead to the pursuit of a "More Manageable People".

What enlightened Europeans used to admire about America was its world of possibilities, free from the old burdens of feudalism, of people who were expected to knuckle to their betters and know their place. Americans instead made their own place. The open "New World" gave birth to a staggering explosion of wealth, technology and culture, precisely because it was much less regimented. If you wanted to live in a tightly managed society with repressive laws where your options were limited and your social mobility minuscule, you could just stay home. On the other hand if you wanted a decent life or a shot at being the urchin who becomes a Carnegie, you could go to America instead.

Or at least that's the way it used to be. Until with the best of intentions, we began replacing a government of the people, with a government that saw the people as ants who needed to be brought into line. The late 19th and 20th century saw the rise of a new idea of American government, no longer representative, but transformative. Government no longer existed to listen to the people, but to take them by the hand and reform them. Teach them to wash behind the ears, save money or spend it (as the situation called for), drink less and be obedient. All in order to make their lives better and teach them to be a better people.

Soon everything from stopping alcoholism to disease prevention to ending poverty and fighting racism became the purview of government. And the results were not only disastrous over and over again, but also grimly totalitarian. We sterilized people we considered inferior in order to fight poverty. A view upheld, promoted and enforced by luminaries such as Oliver Wendell Holmes and Margaret Sanger. We created a national crime syndicate in order to fight alcoholism. We caused massive social disruption, first through aggressive segregation efforts and then aggressive desegregation efforts, both led by Democrats. We bankrupted the economy to save the economy. We created an entire culture of poverty in order to fight poverty.

The progressive idea of government was broken. Badly broken. And in the process Americans had traded their birthright of freedom, for the promise of government solutions that made the social problems they were trying to solve that much worse. But rather than admit defeat and pull back, the big government reformers decided that there was nothing wrong with their ideas-- there was something wrong with the American people.

Their grand failures inspired them not to an attitude of humility, but hostility. Their analysis of their own failures blamed not so much their policy, as the people. The American people were willful. They behaved and thought in ways the social scientists did not expect. They did not do what was "good for them". They needed nannies and regimentation. They had to be made more manageable and brought into line.

But since "manageable" is not a terribly democratic or appealing world, "equality" was instead repurposed to mean the same thing. Where equality had once meant equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it instead became the euphemism for creating an average society, one in which people would be forced to live like everyone else, to think like everyone else, to have the same jobs, the same wages and the same lives. Only then would the big government plans finally work, because the people they were meant to work on would be interchangeable, cogs in a machine, even numbers without fractions that add up very nicely.

Read the rest here.