The rise of the busy bodies
In his, as always wonderful, column George Will suggests that declaring the polar bear as threatened species is a symptom for much bigger phenomena:
Now that polar bears are wards of the government, and now that it is a legal doctrine that humans are responsible for global warming, the Endangered Species Act has acquired unlimited application. Anything that can be said to increase global warming can - must - be said to threaten bears already designated as threatened.
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What Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit” - the idea that government can know the future’s possibilities and can and should control the future’s unfolding — is the left’s agenda. The left exists to enlarge the state’s supervision of life, narrowing individual choices in the name of collective goods. Hence the left’s hostility to markets. And to automobiles - people going wherever they want whenever they want.
Today’s “green left” is the old “red left” revised. Marx, a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist, prophesied deepening class conflict but thought that history’s violent dialectic would culminate in a revolution that would usher in material abundance and such spontaneous cooperation that the state would wither away.
The green left preaches pessimism: Ineluctable scarcities (of energy, food, animal habitat, humans’ living space) will require a perpetual regime of comprehensive rationing. The green left understands that the direct route to government control of almost everything is to stigmatize, as a planetary menace, something involved in almost everything — carbon.
While I agree with Will’s observation I don’t see any real alternatives - the right is no less intrusive. Given the choices one might eve see the left intrusiveness - “protection” of the environment, forced health measure and economic measure that remove risk - as the leaser evil compare to the “values” policing by the modern conservatives.
We should abandon the old division of left and right, socialist and conservative. The frontline is between those who yearn for the dignity of being free and those who don’t, between those who don’t want to be coerced to those who believe in regulations, databases and coercion.
We are leaving in the era of the busy bodies - those who think that the mere fact that they think that something is right justify coercing others to follow. It is completely acceptable, it our times, to tell people that they can’t get marry because of your personal religious believes. It is perfectly acceptable to regulate what people will watch on TV or what they eat, and how much. And it is perfectly OK to collect every e-mail, every phone call and every web page you visited, so the busy bodies can protect you from the risks of life. We have long and tedious fight, so maybe our children will be free again.
Tags: Big Government, Busy Bodies, Freedom, Global Warming, Polar BearsRelated posts