Statists trust the state more than I do.

Purple Elephant UK
Freedom, Geopolitics, Health, and more


By:  Graham Gambier
Date: 13 August 2014

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Statists trust the state more than I do.

Adapted from: Roger also trusts the state more than I do

Whenever statists see anything not going the way he’d like it to go, they calls for state action to “put it right.”  This applies to big things, such as instances of what they calls “market failure,” and it applies to little things such as people consuming foods or drinks they disapprove of.  In both cases they want the state to stop it.

Where I part company with statists is that they seems to think of politicians and civil servants as dispassionate guardians of the public good.  I see them as being rather like other people in pursuing their own advantage where they can.  Politicians want to be re-elected, and bureaucrats want to be promoted.  Both will, at times, act in their own interests, just as others do, even in some cases where this is against the public good.

When statists talks of “society,” they doesn’t use it to refer to communities working together for common purposes, they uses it to mean the state, the political body that has monopoly control of the laws and of the powers to enforce them.  The problem is that when those powers are concentrated, people try to use them to impose their agenda on others.  Because some people drink unwisely, statists support minimum alcohol pricing.  Because some people become obese, statists want ‘fat taxes’ on sugars and fats.  In these cases they claim to be acting in people’s best interests, but when they vote to ban fox-hunting, it’s simply that they don’t want them doing it.

Statists are happy to give the state more power, confident it will be used appropriately, whereas I rather suspect that whenever the state gains extra powers, it will use them for whatever purpose it wants.  Surveillance powers granted to thwart terrorists will probably end up being used to prosecute people for not sorting their garbage into the right bins.  In short, statists see the state as a means of making people live as they think they should, whereas I see it as a source of power waiting to be abused by anyone who can grab control of its levers.