Change In the Wind Blog

We are constantly under a barrage of calls for government intervention on a whole host of fronts that have to do with our safety and even convenience. Here is an excellent point from Hayek:

… there is little question that almost every one of the technical ideals of our experts could be realized within a comparatively short time if to achieve them were made the sole aim of humanity. There is an infinite number of good things, which we all agree are highly desirable as well as possible, but of which we cannot hope to achieve more than a few within our lifetime, or which we can hope to achieve only very imperfectly. It is the frustration of his ambitions in his own field which makes the specialist revolt against the existing order. We all find it difficult to bear to see things left undone which everybody must admit are both desirable and possible. That these things cannot all be done at the same time, that any one of them can be achieved only at the sacrifice of others, can be seen only by taking into account factors which fall outside any specialism, which can be appreciated only by a painful intellectual effort – the more painful as it forces us to see against a wider background the objects to which most of our labors are directed and to balance them against others which lie outside our immediate interest and for which, for that reason, we care less.  (Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: The Definitive Edition, ed by Bruce Caldwell, p. 98)

All of the above is another way of saying that we live in a world of scarcity (on this, read especially Thomas Sowell’s magisterial Basic Economics). As difficult as it is, there will be no utopia in this life, and every effort to create one will end in totalitarianism sooner rather than later.

This is not at all to say that we should not seek to alleviate injustice. But in order to alleviate injustice, we must first identify precisely what we mean by the term, and we must also prioritize, since no human agency (or all human agencies collectively, for that matter) has the power to rid the world of all injustice.

Suffering is an evil that has resulted from the fall of man. God addresses suffering in the ministry of Jesus – a ministry of healing. But that does not mean that all suffering must be addressed by any and every means. The obliteration of suffering is a function of the final inbreaking of heaven and earth. When men attempt to impose that divine act by human means (usually governmental), they of necessity must cripple and destroy all human liberty; and even then they cannot succeed in their stated intentions.

Nowhere is this better seen than with the failed communisms and socialisms of the twentieth century. Despite the obvious fact that the lessons have not been learned, these socialisms, while intending to eradicate poverty, instead virtually universalized it. The State is not God, and when the State plays God, it can only do so as a very failed deity.