The Great Society: A Libertarian Critique

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:44:10 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

Murray N. Rothbard at LewRockwell.com - great essay on the welfare-warfare state, which has taken over America from the inside, leaving the forms of the dead republic intact while replacing their function with raw totalitarian empire.

The symbiosis between liberal intellectuals and despotic statism at home and abroad is, furthermore, no accident; for at the heart of the welfarist mentality is an enormous desire to "do good to" the mass of other people, and since people don't usually wish to be done good to, since they have their own ideas of what they wish to do, the liberal welfarist inevitably ends by reaching for the big stick with which to push the ungrateful masses around. Hence, the liberal ethos itself provides a powerful stimulant for the intellectuals to seek state power and ally themselves with the other rulers of the corporate state. The liberals thus become what Harry EImer Barnes has aptly termed "totalitarian liberals." Or, as Isabel Paterson put it a generation ago:

The humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves. The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God.

But he is confronted by two awkward facts; first, that the competent do not need his assistance; and second, that the majority of people. . . positively do not want to be 'done good' by the humanitarian. . . . Of course, what the humanitarian actually proposes is that he shall do what he thinks is good for everybody. It is at this point that the humanitarian sets up the guillotine.


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