The Political Hat

     One of the fundamental differences in political philosophy is the extent and scope of government.  It is not so much the size of the budget or the number of civil servants, though there is an obvious correlation, but the scope of what the government can do and what private citizens may do.  One of the oldest definitions of liberty was the freedom to do anything that was not prohibited, and what was prohibited was limited to what was necessary; contrarily, some view freedom as being a gift from the state, be it a god-king or a popular assembly, and everything is within the states purview with citizens being allowed to decide for themselves what the state gives them leeway to choose.

Pictured: The government respecting the private affairs of others.

     Mike Konczal, at the Washington Post, speaks about the need for the state to have wide ranging powers because economic effects are a public issue:

“‘[E]conomics has become a matter of public policy, not individual action…Let us bear in mind that unemployment is a public problem’… because ‘the individual firm, the individual himself, is powerless to cope with the complexities in times of stress.'”

     That the state is run by individuals, who are prone to the same limits as any other individuals.  However, the left considers the state to be but the avatar for the volonté générale (i.e. the General Will), which is to say the will of the public, but somehow if from the people but not of them.  For them, people submit to the volonté générale and are guided by it; in other words, everything is a public issue, as Konczal seems to believe:

“One can spend an entire lifetime debating the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private,’ but for this post let’s use an approach from John Dewey. In ‘The Public and Its Problems’ (1927), Dewey argued that the public is involved wherever an action between two people has consequences ‘that extend beyond the two directly concerned.’ Given ‘that they affect the welfare of many others, the act acquires a public capacity.’ And as such needs a public response. And conservatives reject this.”

     The underlying problem with this view is that it assumes that “public” = “government.”  With the attitude that a democratically elected leader is just the expression of the will of the people, and thus can do no wrong since said leader is just exercising the will of the people, the state takes on totalitarian dimensions under this expansive view of the state’s “public capacity.”

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