The Curse Of Compulsion

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Road to the Middle Class

Saturday May 19, 2012

by Christopher Chantrill

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You are walking one afternoon with a liberal friend and the conversation turns to adult education. What a wonderful job the local community college is doing with its adult literacy programs, your friend contributes, referring to a recent report on NPR. Those folks are really making a difference.

But are they? The program is funded from general taxation; it employs numerous people with permanent tenure, beginning with the bureaucrats that run it from Washington, DC, down through the schools that actually deliver it; it issues regulations about the use of its appropriated funds. But it does not live or die on the effectiveness of its operations, on the number of people that it effectively rescues from illiteracy. It lives and dies upon the strength of its political support. Its customers are not the adult students seeking to better their lives, but the political players in the adult education community.

And the program is a policy of force. That is why it is necessary to promote soft-focus interviews on NPR. The program exists because some people decided that the national provision of adult education was deficient, and the only way to improve it was by government force. The program is renewed every year by a decision to continue the policy of force. Every year the government continues to take money by force from consumers or businesses, and then uses the money to fund an administrative bureaucracy to deliver the government program to improve adult literacy.

There is nothing surprising here. Government is force, an armed force that occupies territory and defends that territory for itself and the people it governs. But this is the law of the jungle, the struggle for survival, where life thrives only so far as it projects power and force or can hide from the reach of force. It is the war of all against all, civil war by other means, contained within the walls of the legislature and the smoke-filled room. Is the policy of force really the best we can do where adult education is concerned?

Of course, adult education is but the smallest part of a vast global project of compulsion. In national health schemes, the entire provision of health care is put under a compulsory administration in which the political sector controls by legislative and administrative diktat every detail of health care provision and consumption. In national education programs the political sectors constructs a system in which children are confined to government child custodial facilities according to mandatory regulations. In other words, the great horizon of social life, the care of the sick and the leading forth of children, are now achieved in a program of rigid coercion. This is one step short of outright violence.

How did the modern project, born in freedom over two hundred years ago, turn into a culture of compulsion, in which the dominant institution is the administrative bureaucracy, the characteristic organizing principle of the army and the orthodox church?

It all began so well. In their adventure of freedom and their suspicion of monarchical power the Anglo-Saxons attempted a balance of powers that tried to compromise between the monarchical power, the landed power, and the emerging commercial power, and set the different power centers against each other. Observing this arrangement in the 18th century, Montesquieu wrote of a separation of powers between executive, legislative, and judicial powers. But then things started to go wrong. Under the influence of later thinkers the French attempted to erect an empire of Reason instead of a contest of powers, and the project led directly to the guillotine and the Terror and the invasion of the German lands. The Germans responded by mobilizing every institution to promote national strength, transforming a nation of poets and thinkers into an army that was also a nation.

This nationalist squabbling between French and Germans was nothing to the new big thing that appeared in the 1840s, when the new industrial economy first appeared on the European radar combined with a series of bad harvests and a nasty financial crisis. The new technologies of textile production and steam power seemed to the young and idealistic as a mythical monster, a Cyclops that seemed to crush and consume the new tribe of industrial workers for sport. And as for the cynical bankers that financed reactionary governments and the reckless railway mania with evenhanded greed! This was an existential threat that transcended mere squabblings over the millennial fight over the empire of the Franks. Obviously government should be bulked up and the people mobilized to fight this Bull of Heaven tearing up the city streets of Europe. Force must be met with force.

In the second decade of the 21st century we have the advantage of experiencing the upshot of the political movement of the 1840s. Big government turned out to be worse than the disease it promised to heal. When it was merely clumsy it merely stunted the civil society of voluntary social cooperation that grew up vigorously in the 19th century. But where it gained strategic concentration it wreaking unimaginable horrors on millions of people. The Marxian version of the force doctrine condemned the peasants of the Ukraine to unimaginable hardships in the government-ordered famine of the early 1930s, and that under the demonic dictatorship of Mao Tse-Tung the Chinese suffered famine and horrors even worse than the Russian experience. What was the point, a visitor from Mars might ask of the Soviet and Maoist leaders, of applying a remedy to curb the power of capitalist magnates in the new industrial cities to something completely different: the subsistence agriculture in the breadbasket of Russia and the rice paddies of China? What indeed was the point of using such enormous force at all? In retrospect we can see that the troubles of the 1840s were a hiccup in the huge upwards sweep of prosperity from a $1 per person per day of the agricultural economy to the present $100 per person per day of the advanced information economy. Unfortunately the educated class of the 19th century was convinced that the injustices of the 1840s were no hiccup but a raging fever that must be fought with all the powers of society if the patient was not to die.

Terrified by the clumping industrial Cyclops all right-thinking people agreed by the 1880s that a vast increase in government force was needed to mediate the economic explosion of the textile and the steam revolution. The man that showed everyone how to do it was the reactionary Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of the new German Empire. He hoped to bind the workers to the Hohenzollern dynasty and his project for a Greater Germany. He came up with a cunning plan to adopt the social insurance agenda of the opposition Social Democratic Party. With compulsory health and accident insurance in 1883 and 1884, and a system of disability and old-age pensions in 1889 Bismarck moved Germany’s workers away from union and church-based social insurance programs and put the state in the center of social security.

The British began adopting the Bismarck plan with the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908, providing a non-contributory pension to indigents over 70. Parliament enacted with the National Insurance Act in 1911, nationalizing the sickness insurance plans of the ubiquitous friendly societies and benefit clubs into a government plan.

In the United States the government did not legislate a state pension until the Social Security Act of 1935. Repeatedly expanded over the years, it continues the Bismarckian goal of putting the government at the center of citizen’s lives.

And now the wonderful edifice is about to crumble into dust.

We have built up huge government pension programs wonderful in their mechanical completeness but utterly unconnected to underlying economic reality. That is to say, we have decreed by law what is to be paid to older people in benefits and what is to be paid by younger workers in taxes and contributions, but we have no way of balancing the two. In all western nations, the government pension program is breaking down.

We have built up huge government health care programs. The British National Health Service is the largest administrative organization in the world after the Indian railways. Each administrative system reflects an accretion of ideas from the politicians, from the health producer interests, and political interest groups. But it cannot respond to the day-by-day needs of ordinary people and adjust itself to their priorities, for it is cast in administrative concrete. It is subsidized at the point of delivery but ruinously expensive overall. In the United States the projected cost of subsidized health care for senior citizens is expected to destroy the government finances.

We have built up huge government education systems. These systems require that children be sent upon compulsion for most of their childhood and youth to government custodial facilities to learn, well, not very much. The education system was designed by the educated professional class, and then applied to the children of the poor and the functionally illiterate. Thus it decrees that every child should prepare for a college education, ignoring the fact that most people learn by doing. The system responds, as any government program, to political winds and desperate attempts by politicians to respond to the latest disaster. But it cannot respond to the individual needs of parents and children. It pits parents against each other as the logic of its centralized administrative structure forces it towards one-size-fits-all solution for all problems. That is what administrative systems are designed to do: in armies they bend the will of everyone to the strategic aim of the warlord; in churches they bend the minds of all the faithful to conform to the faith. In government they bend the whole of society under the yoke of the ruling class.

We have built up huge government welfare systems. These systems treat the poor as passive objects of compassion that either qualify or do not qualify for benefits. But humans are not passive objects. They are resourceful creatures, descendants of a species that has hacked a habitat out of a nature that only rains down its blessings upon the adaptable. Thus the poor and the not-so-poor develop a cunning knowledge of the system and learn how to adjust their lives to qualify for benefits. They become world experts in qualifying for government pensions when youthful twenty-somethings; they expose the lie of an intelligent elite assisting helpless victims as they daily prove themselves intelligent exploiters of a mechanical monster.

These vast administrative structures marginalize ordinary people. They make them into cogs in a vast machine. The administrative state turns people from free citizens responsibly serving their fellows in voluntary cooperation into dependent drones anxiously searching for the right shaped benefit outlet in which to plug in for a battery charge. This is the moral objection to the administrative state. But there is another objection. The culture of compulsion does not work at an economic level. It does not provide a flexible, responsive system for delivering its social services of pensions, health care, education, and welfare. Instead it forces these vital social activities into a contest of political power. Every government program becomes not a response to human need but a totem of political machismo. To inaugurate or expand a government program is a measure of political virility. To lose a program or to suffer a reduction is nothing less than the political equivalent of defeat in battle, the beginning of a retreat that might end in nothing short of annihilation.

There must be a better way. There must be a way of building a society in which the ordinary person has a social and responsible role, something with more dignity than an insecure dependence on a government program, the power of the bureaucratic rulebook and the primitive ethos of the patron-client relationship. After all, even the hunter gatherers, who suffered mightily in constant warfare with their neighbors for the right to occupy food-bearing land, maintained an egalitarian community within which overt force and compulsion were minimized by a culture of blood solidarity and a religion that dissolved quarrels in ritual music and dance.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.americanmanifesto.org.

print view

The Crisis of the Administrative State
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Beyond Mere Blame
What led our liberal friends into the blind alley of the administrative welfare state?

Government and the Technology of Power
If you scratch a social reformer, you will likely discover a plan for more government.

Business and the Web of Trust
Business is all about trust and relationship.

The Bonds of Faith
No society known to anthropology or history lacked religion.

All of the Above
Society is differentiated into three sectors.

Springtime for Freeloaders
The modern welfare state encourages freeloaders.

The Curse of Compulsion
The larger the government, the smaller the society.

The Real Meaning of Society
Broadening the horizon of cooperation in the “last best hope of man on earth.”

The Greater Separation of Powers
If you want to limit power then you must limit power.

The Curse of Compulsion

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