Published in the Western Standard, May 30, 2005, p. 17. (Also available in a pdf scan.)
Can We Trust the Conservatives?
by
Pierre Lemieux
With an election in sight, the party spirit runs high, together with the rightly deserved hatred for the Liberals. My apologies to the tyrant for this bit of hate literature. In fact, I want to suggest that we should keep cool heads. For the danger is that, once in power, the Conservative party enjoys it.
Power was bad when exerted by the wrong men, but if the good ones have (temporarily) grabbed it, there can’t be too much power to enforce good policies, right? Wrong.
Economic and legal theorist Friedrich A. Hayek, winner of the economics Nobel Prize in 1974, spent his life defending the moral values of the West and our tradition of constitutional (that is, limited) government. Although Hayek was widely perceived as a conservative, his book The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University Press, 1960), includes a postscript titled, “Why I Am Not a Conservative.”
In this postscript, Hayek complained that “. . . the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes . . . like the socialist, he regards himself as entitled to force the value he holds on other people.” Hayek preferred to call himself a liberal, in the classical English (and Continental) sense. “[T]he most conspicuous attribute of liberalism that distinguishes it as much from conservatism as from socialism,” he explains, “is the view that moral beliefs concerning matters of conduct which do not directly interfere with the protected sphere of other persons do not justify coercion.”
This book and its postcript should be compulsory reading for all Conservative candidates.
The consequence of the phenomenon described by Hayek is that every government, whether “liberal” or conservative, has contributed to the sedimentation of government powers up to the monstrous Leviathan under which we now live. Conservatives never roll back the tyranny inherited from “liberals.”
The state now controls us from the cradle to the grave through its tax and transfer system, and the ID surveillance that goes with it (now, we even need some form of interior passport to travel in our own country). With subsidies and regulations, the state controls education and culture and health care services; dictates what is good for individuals; floods us with paternalistic propaganda; and attacks some lifestyles while promoting others. It monitors cash transactions over $10,000 and the money we carry out or into the country. It requires permits and licences to exercise a host of professions and trades, to drive motorboats, to own guns and to hunt, even on one’s own land. It strangles contractual relations and private property under an iron collar of labour, financial, environmental, public health and other regulations. In many ways, it has grabbed the power to control speech and political competition (through gag laws, among others).
Whatever the colour of the politicians in power, the state’s means of surveillance of control are continuously strengthened, under a multitude of excuses, from tax mongering to public “security.”
This future was already written in Alexis de Tocqueville’s midnineteenth century predictions. The future democratic tyrannies, Tocqueville forecasted, will maintain people “in perpetual childhood”: the state “provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry.” As Tocqueville envisioned its future, the state “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform . . . it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
I will keep for another occasion an analysis of what sort of policies are required to push back Leviathan in its cage. Suspense. For now, I would just like to propose an election slogan for the Conservative party: “F--- the state!” I concede that this slogan is more radical than Hayek’s or Tocqueville’s thought. It may even not be politically astute (whatever that means). But it would sure be consistent with the long overdue revolution.
At any rate, the first maxim must be: reduce the powers of the state.