Harsanyi: Enlightened tyrants
Is freedom getting in the way of "progress"?
By David Harsanyi
Posted: 05/19/2010 01:00:00 AM MDT
In a recent interview with a Spanish newspaper, famed director Woody Allen reportedly declared himself "pleased" with President Barack Obama's presidency.
"I think he's brilliant. The Republican Party should get out of his way and stop trying to hurt him," Allen explained. Then he waded into thorny terrain by saying, "It would be good ... if he could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly."
Allen, who one hopes was joking, doesn't speak for anyone but himself (and perhaps Soon Yi Previn-Farrow-Allen) yet makes a good point.
Aside from the occasional genocide, oppression, evil and torture, etc., it is inarguable that public policy could be implemented more rapidly in an autocracy. Think of how many uninsured Americans we could have helped. Think of the environmental benefits. Democratic institutions are imperfect and chaotic, and man's selfish behavior is constantly gumming up progress.
Just ask widely read liberal New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who pointed out (twice in recent months) that despotism can be advantageous if "enlightened" tyrants (in this case, environmentalists) would run the show.
"One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks," according to Friedman. "But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages."
Of course, some form or another of Friedman's rationale has been used in nearly every embryonic dictatorship. Now, if only Venezuela and Sudan funded more solar farms, Friedman could embrace their progressive forms of governance, as well.
Friedman isn't alone. The lure of enlightened autocracy is why MSNBC's Chris Matthews can casually ask, as he did on his show this week, why the oil industry hasn't been nationalized yet. It is why Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan can stand in front of the Supreme Court, as she did last year, and defend book banning (for the administration, via bipartisan legislation).
The idea drives people like Donald Berwick, a professor at both the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health and Obama's pick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Berwick will be charged with managing government health care programs.
It is true that Berwick is smarter than you or I. He can prove it with a hat trick of Harvard degrees. But his advocacy for state monopolies and top-down control borders on religious zealotry.
As The American Spectator reported in 2008, in a speech celebrating the anniversary of National Health Service of Britain, Berwick not only asserted that the socialized systems were excellent but — and you might have believed he was talking about Gandhi or, at least, Angelina Jolie — that they were also "generous, hopeful, confident, joyous, and just."
Britain's rationing probably doesn't seem exceptionally "joyous" for many of that nation's elderly (the evidence is not pretty) or "generous" to those who pay a disproportionate amount of the tab. Yet, Berwick's most revealing assertion was that he did not "believe that the individual health care consumer can enforce through choice the proper configurations of a system as massive and complex as health care. That is for leaders to do."
Health care choice is too complicated for you. When you're buying your kid medicine, for instance, you're woefully oblivious to the "proper configurations of the system" as a whole. This is a problem. You're not thinking about the group, my friend.
And since Americans wrestle with an array of intricate societal systems — from energy, education, technology, food, farming, communications, financial and so forth — we're going to need strong leadership in a number of areas, apparently.
It seems that the negative externalities of our freewheeeling ways have become too much for some of the enlightened to bear. Progressivism is the belief that we have too much freedom with which to make too many stupid choices.
But rarely do we see it this bluntly articulated.
denverpost.com
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Keep All Hombres Neutered
by Don Boudreaux on May 19, 2010
in Civil Society, Hubris and humility, Politics
Woody Allen thinks that “It would be good … if he [Barack Obama] could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly.”
Contrast Mr. Allen’s fetish for political strongmen with Milton Friedman’s attitude. When asked by an interviewer what he (Friedman) would do if he (Friedman) were dictator for a day, this great and good man answered “I don’t like dictators…. If we can’t persuade the public that it’s desirable to do these things, we have no right to impose them even if we had the power to do it.” (Friedman gives this response starting at about the 24:20 mark in this taped interview. [HT Reuvain Borchardt])
Correct or incorrect, right or wrong, wise or foolish, informed or ignorant, smart or stupid, insightful or benighted – classical liberals and libertarians have none of the fetish for power that infects the minds and souls of so many people on the political left. And this fact alone goes a very long way to recommending classical liberalism (or libertarianism) over alternative ideologies. Indeed, fear of concentrated power – and the recognition that power is never remotely as concentrated or as dangerous as when it is in the hands of the state – might well be the single most important reason why persons become classical liberals or libertarians.
(Arnold Kling has this recent, related post.)
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