Machan's Musings - Welfare Statism and Evil
by Tibor R. Machan
For a long time I have been reading works in political and social theory and most of the well published ones—by major commercial and university presses—agree with this passage that is quoted in The Status Syndrome (2005), a recent book advocating various government measures to save us from anything and everything that ails us:
The success of an economy and of a society cannot be separated from the lives that members of the society are able to lead…. We not only value living well and satisfactorily, but also appreciate having control over our own lives.
The author of the passage is Amartya Sen, and the statement comes from his own very prominent book, Development as Freedom(1999). Both he and the author of the book to which the passage serves as the epigram believe that the problems of most societies need more vigorous government involvement and that those who champion the unfettered and admittedly non-utopian free society are very mistaken.
Given that for innumerable decades the major Western powers have been vigorous welfare states and that the claim that free markets have reigned—say under Margaret Thatcher in England and Ronald Reagan in the USA—is an out-and-out lie, it is a valid question to pose why all this transfer of wealth to the people organized by governments simply hasn’t done the job of fixing things for those at the lower rungs of the economic system. There are probably several reasons but a few stand out.
Most generally, the “lives that members of the society are able to lead” just aren't available for even the most energetic welfare statist to guarantee. There is always something that undermines the grand project of remedying everything via coercive means, including (a) bureaucratic rip-offs, (b) lack of the requisite knowledge of what would actually help people most, and, yes, (c) the bad choices of the very people who are to be helped out.
There has enough been said about (a) and (b) by well-known social theorists to fill a library but (c) is something else. In our era it is simply too surly to suggest that many, many people are personally responsible for much of what happens to them in life. No, it’s got to be something else, always. (This is also why many intellectuals cannot let go of the idea that terrorists may really be vicious people, not victims of, say, globalization or American imperialism.)
But there is a bit of good news now, which may finally enlighten our decently motivated statists and their academic defenders, people who think every problem has a solution if only you throw enough money at it and use sufficient force to get it fixed. Professor Michael Stone of Columbia University, a psychiatrist to boot, has chimed in with a surprising (though largely old-fashioned) piece of news. As reported in the English magazine The Week, “He found that while some [of 500 serial killers in both the US and Britain he studied] suffered from mental illness or had been damaged by some event in their history, others were perfectly sane. They simply enjoyed killing.” As the professor put it, “Such people make a rational choice to commit terrible crimes over and over again. They are evil and we should be able to say that formally.”
Which pretty much opens the door that other people may not be quite so evil as serial killers but could perpetrate bits and pieces of evil themselves, including refusing to do much good for their own lives. So when Sen states that “we [i.e., all of us] appreciate having control over our own lives,” he is wrong—some people simply do not appreciate this and choose, instead, to float about, aimlessly, no matter how much effort is put into helping them out of their misery.
Of course, most of us who pay any attention to the world, beginning with our family and neighbors and friends, know this well enough and have always. There are ne’er-do-wells about everywhere, people who are lazy, irresponsible, and hopelessly incorrigible on that score, apart from the really vile ones the professor was studying. And in large societies there are very many of them and they will always be there. With the welfare statists’ refusal to acknowledge their existence, however, the fruitless effort to fix these people’s lives by sacrificing the lives and labors of others for their sake continues, despite the evidence that they will not be helped.
Perhaps these people need to learn a thing or two from Professor Stone and start admitting that some people ask for their own misery, and public policy and political theory need to take this into account.
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