In the comments section to James Joyner's post Health Care Reform: How Bad Is It?, commenter anjin-san responds to James' arguments in favor of limited government with the following:
Hopefully you and you wife will enjoy smooth career paths, and never suffer an unanticipated layoff. The fall from being a well paid professional to being unemployed is a long one indeed, and I don't know too many people in today's economy who don't have to worry about it.
If you read the comments in toto, those that favor Obamacare tend to focus a lot on security. They want to be protected from risk. And who can blame them?
The problem is that, as Ben Franklin observed, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Unlike the liberal, the conservative recognizes that one cannot have government-provided security without risk to personal liberty and economic prosperity.
The point is well-captured in an essay by John Attarian on the economic thought of conservative icon Russell Kirk:
Like his defense of the free economy, Dr. Kirk’s rejection of statism combined philosophical and economic considerations. Keenly aware of human imperfectibility and reality’s constraints, he categorically rejected all utopian economic schemes. Utopia, he reiterated, means Nowhere. Only incremental improvements in the human condition are possible—and the only real progress is within individual characters and consciences.[17]
Prudence, too, argues powerfully against statism. “Society is not a machine,” Kirk saw, but rather “a delicate growth or essence,”[18] with causality running between economy, society, and culture in complex ways. Prosperity makes a flourishing culture possible; but Rome’s decline shows that government economic mismanagement “may undo a high culture.”[19] Also, “our industrial economy, of all systems man ever created, is that most delicately dependent upon public energy, private virtue, and fertility of imagination.”[20] Hence the need for caution, lest government disrupt the economy and exact unforeseen forfeits. For example, while government cannot create ability, statism can extirpate it. “The thing has been done before.”[21] Better that we not meddle with things we don’t understand.
Furthermore, imperfect people cannot be trusted with much power. Kirk exploded both statists’ moral pretensions and democratic ideologues’ crass error of confusing democracy with liberty:
To say that the “democratic” state would not deprive anyone of liberty is to play upon words. The democratic state, like any other, is directed by individuals, with all the failings to which humanity is heir, especially . . . the lust for power. To suppose that the mass-state would be always just and generous toward its slaves is to suppose that there would exist, upon all its levels, a class of philosopher-kings superior to human frailty, purged of lust and envy and petty ambition. But in modern America we have no such class to draw upon; indeed, often we seem to be doing what we can to abolish that sense of inherent responsibility and high honor which compensates a patriarchal or feudal society for its lack of private liberty.[22]
A command economy is not only unfree, it stifles individual growth: providing for people’s wants and making their choices for them keeps them in “perpetual childhood,” thus discouraging “full development of mind and character.”[23]
Desire for security inspired much of modernity’s drive to statism, but Kirk warned that swapping freedom for security is “a devil’s bargain.” Political freedom, individual rights, and economic freedom stand or fall together. And once the free market’s ordinary rewards for ordinary integrity disappear, economic performance inevitably declines. “In the modern industrial world, it really is not possible to buy economic security at the price of liberty.”[24]
...Dr. Kirk was a scathing critic of Social Security. Centralized, compulsory, wielding ever-expanding arbitrary power, it “bears nearly all the marks of a remorseless collectivism.”[27] While acknowledging that some people wouldn’t save on their own, he maintained that it would be better “morally and economically” to let them make their own mistakes and to provide voluntary charity, than to embrace forced saving. He argued that Social Security’s stated motive, provision for the poor elderly, is disingenuous; the real reason for Social Security’s expansion is that it gives the government access to “a vast reserve of money and credit,” and is “disguised taxation,” evading opposition to new taxes.[28] Kirk’s robust moral denunciation of Social Security, as tyrannical and mendacious, towers over today’s conservatives’ ingratiating endorsement and proposals to “save” it.
17. See, e.g., Kirk, Intelligent Woman’s Guide, pp. 16-17; Reclaiming a Patrimony (Washington, D.C.: The Heritage Foundation, 1982), p. 9.
18. Kirk, A Program for Conservatives, p. 181.
19. Russell Kirk, The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things Are Written on the Sky (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, Inc., 1987), p. 17.
20. Kirk, A Program for Conservatives, p. 210.
22. Kirk, Intelligent Woman’s Guide, p. 107.
23. Kirk, The American Cause, pp. 106-107.
