Authors: William Voegeli
Leave aside the interpretation of poverty statistics. For the better part of a century the political reality has been that the more the government spends on social welfare programs, the more liberals insist it needs to spend. If their agenda is succeeding, liberals are the last people to know or admit that fact. People who care about caring demand more government spending but eschew rigorous interrogations about the efficacy of past and present spending. Their expansive souls desire their own well-being in whatever suffering situations where they feel their existence, and the best, most direct way to feel better is to demand more ameliorative government spending. Complacency about whether social welfare spending is doing any good for the people it is supposed to be helping is completely consistent with liberal compassion, as such questions would only complicate the main focus, the empathizer's capacity to feel like a good person. Whether we can achieve a more beneficial, admirable configuration of empathizer, empathizee, and government is the subject of the next and final chapter.
L
iberals believe compassion is the quality that defines liberalism, certifying its moral excellence. This belief corresponds to their conviction that a shocking lack of compassion, manifested in callous indifference to human suffering, is the quality that defines conservatism, certifying its moral depravity. In reply, conservatives complain constantly, to little avail, that the liberal project vitiates the qualities that make compassion admirable by practicing generosity with other people's money, made available to the government through the exertions of tax collectors and regulators, who operate at the front of a phalanx of police officers, judges, and prison guards. The American social scientist William Graham Sumner made this case in an 1883 essay, “The Forgotten Man.”
As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X or, in the better case, what A, B and C shall do for X. As for A and B, who get a law to make themselves do for X what they are willing to do for him, we have nothing to say except that they might better have done it without any law. . . . [C] is the man who never is thought of. He is the victim of the reformer, social speculator and philanthropist, and . . . he deserves your notice both for his character and for the many burdens which are laid upon him.
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Forty-nine years later, Franklin Roosevelt took a step toward the White House with a speech endorsing policies “that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”
2
FDR's forgotten man, thus, was Sumner's X, who is suffering from some wrong, which liberals propose to alleviate by enacting laws and creating government programs. He was
not
Sumner's C, who will foot the bill run up by the reformers and humanitarians determined to relieve X's suffering.
3
In 2011 performer and commentator Penn Jillette expressed Sumner's argument in the idiom of modern libertarianism:
It's amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.
People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered, and if we're compassionate we'll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint.
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The dominant mode of Jillette's politics is neither liberalism nor conservatism but skepticism. (His article was titled “I Don't Know, So I'm an Atheist Libertarian.”) His disposition regarding political compassion conforms to that of another famous American skeptic, H. L. Mencken, who wrote, “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.”
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With the rise of the Tea Party, conservatives have recommitted to their master narrative: preserving freedom requires eternal resistance to liberalism's relentless, reckless expansion of the state. In this view, liberals' good intentions are at best subordinate to, and at worst a spurious pretext for pursuing, their bad ones: the endless expansion of government's power and scope, corresponding to an inexorable reduction of human liberty. On this point they line up with Sumner, Mencken, and Jillette, who mentions government force once and its guns twice in brusquely dismissing liberal compassion. The 1936 Republican platform, for example, charged that the New Deal's purpose was to extinguish the liberties the people had known under the Constitution: “We dedicate ourselves to the preservation of [Americans'] political liberty, their individual opportunity and their character as free citizens, which today for the first time are threatened by Government itself.”
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A decade later an Austrian economist teaching at the London School of Economics wrote an improbable American bestseller,
The Road to Serfdom
. Friedrich Hayek's title admirably distilled his thesis: totalitarianism, both fascist and communist, was the inevitable consequence when government supplanted markets. “We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past,” Hayek wrote. Abandoning laissez-faire economics is a grave mistake, but the lesser part of the menace. Hayek believed that collectivism and central planning imperiled “one of the salient characteristics of Western civilization as it has grown from the foundations laid by Christianity and the Greeks and Romans. Not merely nineteenth- and eighteenth-century liberalism, but the basic individualism inherited by us from Erasmus and Montaigne, from Cicero and Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides is progressively relinquished.”
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Conservatism's leading polemicist and its leading politician of the past half century each affirmed that attenuating freedom is liberalism's ultimate purpose, and fortifying it conservatism's. In 1959's
Up from Liberalism
William Buckley wrote:
I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the [Congress of Industrial Organizations]. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.
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And in his farewell address in 1989, summarizing not just an eight-year presidency but an entire public career, Ronald Reagan said, “I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”
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“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that . . . Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” Barack Obama said during his 2008 campaign for president.
10
That is, Nixon (“I am now a Keynesian in economics”) and Clinton (“The era of Big Government is over”) merely acceded to the political realities they inherited. Reagan, by contrast, altered them, and for Obama to alter them in the opposite direction requires, above all, refuting the allegations of liberal statism. Obama attempted to do so most directly in a commencement address at Ohio State University in 2013. “Unfortunately,” he told the graduates, most of whom were born after Reagan left office, “you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems. . . .
They'll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted.
We have never been a people who place all of our faith in government to solve our problems; we shouldn't want to. But we don't think the government is the source of all our problems either. Because we understand that this democracy is ours. And as citizens, we understand that it's not about what America can do for us, it's about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating, but absolutely necessary work of self-government.
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In Obama's telling, the American experiment was conceived less to prevent government from doing harmful things than to enable it to do splendid ones. “The Founders trusted us” with “awesome authority,” by leaving Americans with “the keys to a system of self-government, the tools to do big things and important things together that we could not possibly do alone. . . .” Therefore, “We should trust ourselves with it too.”
Conservative rhetoric about the fragility of liberty, and the determination of social reformers to diminish it, is notable for its high level of abstraction. There are concrete examples, howeverânot of free citizens reduced to serfdom by tyrannical government, but of officials who believe wielding power in the public interest entitles them to harass a private citizen as they see fit. In Chapter One we met Marty Hahne, the magician preparing disaster plans, to be filed with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for the rabbit in his show. His predicament resembles that of Chantell and Michael Sackett, who bought a 0.63-acre parcel of land in Priest Lake, Idaho, and started to build a vacation home. “In May 2007, three days after workers started clearing the property,” according to the
Wall Street Journal
, “officials from the [Environmental Protection Agency] and the Army Corps of Engineers showed up to ask if the Sacketts had a permit to fill in wetlands. . . . Nearly seven months later, the agency sent the couple a compliance order directing them to restore the property to its original condition,” despite the Sacketts' protest that the “wetlands” were located in a residential subdivision. The EPA contended that the Clean Water Act gave it the authority to “issue an administrative compliance order directing a property owner to stop discharging pollutants or restore a damaged wetland” on the basis of “any information,” including “a newspaper article or an anonymous tip.”
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The Sacketts took the EPA to federal court, where they were initially told they had no right to file such a lawsuit. Both the district court and the Ninth Circuit appellate court, that is, upheld the EPA's position that a dispute between it and a private citizen about whether a parcel of land qualified as wetlands, making it subject to EPA enforcement, was a question the property owner could pursue in an EPA administrative hearing, but not in the court system. Had that opinion prevailed, the sole recourse for a citizen who believed the EPA had wrongly designated his property as wetlands subject to its jurisdiction would be to beseech one part of the EPA to rebuke another part of the EPA. James Madison's fearsâthat the “accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny”âare more pertinent to the Sacketts' dilemma than Obama's confidence about a government equipped to do big, important things.
Only if the agency sued the Sacketts for failing to satisfy the terms of its compliance order would a member of the judicial branch, as opposed to a referee on the EPA payroll, be in a position to hear their side of the story. And the risks they ran by defying the EPA could do nothing but increase, since the costs of losing a lawsuit filed by the agency could do nothing but grow. While the EPA was attempting to get the Sacketts to comply with its orders, it could assess them a fine. Every day the dispute was unresolved was a day the Sacketts were out of compliance, so the meter would stop running only if they settled or ultimately won a lawsuit the agency brought against them.
How big could the fine become? When the case went before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012 the justices initially believed that the maximum was $37,500 per day, a sum designed to get the attention of corporate polluters. The EPA's sense of restraint in using its discretion, however, was all that guaranteed smaller fines against homeowners. The solicitor general, defending the EPA, helpfully informed the Court that the maximum was actually $75,000 per dayâ$37,500 for violating federal environmental law, and another $37,500 for violating the compliance order. Justice Samuel Alito asked the solicitor general whether an “ordinary homeowner,” presented with the facts of
Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency
, wouldn't say, “this kind of thing can't happen in the United States?”
You buy property to build a house. You think maybe there is a little drainage problem in part of your lot, so you start to build the house and then you get an order from the EPA which says: You have filled in wetlands, so you can't build your house; remove the fill, put in all kinds of plants; and now you have to let us on your premises whenever we want to. You have to turn over to us all sorts of documents, and for every day that you don't do all this you are accumulating a potential fine of $75,000. And by the way, there is no way you can go to court to challenge our determination that this is a wetlands until such time as we choose to sue you.
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