What's really wrong with our way of thinking about government and politics?

I was lecturing my Con Law class the other day when we got to an amusing little case of the government over stretching itself a bit. Shocking, I know. We would never expect it to do that, it being so respectful of the boundaries and limits of it's own authority (For part one of this rant, click here).

This case is particularly interesting when you check out the historical context. It's 1927, late in the "Roaring 20s", when everyone thought science and technology were on the cusp of bringing about a "Brave New World". In reality we were just on the brink of dropping into the sink hole of the Great Depression. Of course, the "Great Depression" didn't become "Great" till it hit the cities in 1929. Farmers had been broke and strugglin' since the end of WW1, but city folk never pay attention to rural poverty, do they?

We'd see everyones illusions from the 1920s dashed, and then a whole new set of fantasies hatched in the heady days of the New Deal era, which saw a huge expansion of the national governments authority over everything. The Supreme Court that ruled against Carrie Buck in 1927 would within' a decade be bludgeoned by the other two branches of government into rubber stamping those sweeping changes that still reverberate in all of our lives today.

In 1927, the state of Virginia was in court defending it's decision to start sterilizing women in mental hospitals so they couldn't produce any more crazy kids (no talk of sterilizing the men I guess). People thought it worked that way back then. Looneys got together and produced more generations of looneys. It was all very scientific. The theory was called Eugenics. We came up with it, but the Nazis will later take it to another level. We'll talk.

The case I'm talkin' about in 1927 is Buck v. Bell. It's famous for, among other things, an impassioned statement made by one eminent Supreme Court justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Speaking for the 8 to 1 majority siding with the state of Virginia, he said...

"We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence."

Usually, at about this point in class, I start to feel the positive vibe, as many students begin to laugh and quietly voice approval for the sentiment. Holmes described Buck as "a feeble minded white woman," "daughter of a feeble minded mother," and herself "the mother of and illegitimate feeble minded child." She'd actually been raped by a family member and then institutionalized by her family to hide the shame of it all, but that's nether here nor there (at least it wasn't to the court) He went on in the statement to say...

"It is better for all the world if, in stead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Does it shock you at all that a government originally set up by the founding fathers with only limited powers to do a limited number of things would find itself wise enough to decide who in society is "feeble minded" and who isn't, and who should have the right to reproduce and who shouldn't? You know, they're still out there decidin' all sorts of things for us, in our own name, for our own good. And most of you go along with it because you think it's the natural way of things, or you think so long as they put up the money for your retirement and your health care, you can put up with all the other annoying little laws and rules they set up. It's the price we pay for a "modern government" that "cares for people".

Less than a decade after Buck v. Bell , the Nazi government in Germany was promoting a similar policy to the one so powerfully defended in Virginia. In the interest of spreading the thin resources of the government to the benefit of all, the Nazis wanted to start "euthanizing" people who were languishing in insane asylums. They came up with posters like this one, designed to appeal to the economic sense and humanity of the civilized German people.

How should those 60,000 Reich's Marks be best spent? Should it go to maintain crazy people who will never get better, or should it go to educate and care for children? You might ask yourself, what business is it of theirs how someones poor sick uncle lives out the rest of his life, or how it's paid for? Well, Imperial Germany had amazed the world in the 1870s when it became the first industrialized nation to establish a "welfare state". All Germans would pay taxes to support it, and all of them would get "free" education and health care and retirement in return. The Prussians set up a whole welfare infrastructure designed to buy off the middle class and enlist them as allies against the radical fringe (Karl Marx, etc.), and it worked brilliantly

So, a generation later it was seen as a collective decision, how your poor sick uncle was going to be taken care of. Everyone is going to help pay the bill, so everyone will help make the decision. Of course, the public hated the idea, and the churches protested it, but guess what? The Nazis had the power, so they did it anyway. They did it in secret for years, and experimented with all the technology that would one day be used to liquidate 12 million people in the death camps.

So, in retrospect, handing the Prussian government the power of life and death over everyone in the nation, sanctioned by law, in the interest of creating a more humane, fair society, may have just been the thin end of the wedge. There was no way to know that a nut like Hitler and his folks would later inherit that power and use it to build a state based on murder. During the Second World War, an ex pat Austrian economist named F. A. Hayek wrote a book trying to explain what the hell had happened to Germany.

How did the German people go from having the best technology, most sophisticated philosophy, best music, most thrilling counter culture, etc, in all of Europe, to having Hitler and death camps? In The Road To Serfdom, he said it was setting up that welfare state that got it going. Abandoning individuality, going for the collective good and launching the "Nanny State". By handing all the power in your life to the government to take care of you, you're making a deal with the devil. It's like going back to the days of Monarchy. If you end up with a good, well meaning king, all is well. But usually you get an inbred idiot who just wants to fight wars and extract as much money from you as he can to pay for it all.

Now, you're saying "come on FHB, that could never happen here. The Germans are just freaky, hooked on uniforms and following orders." Well, have you noticed the way all the candidates now are trying to show how much they love us all, and how much they want to do for us all, by promoting programs that ultimately take choices away from all of us? Hillary actually said that if you didn't want to be part of her national health care program, she'd garner your wages. Don't even ask her about maybe investing some of your own Social Security money.

She doesn't want you to have the choice, because you might make a choice she doesn't like. You might make a choice that goes against what she and her ilk have decided is in the collective interest. It'd be easy to blame Democrats for all of this, but Republicans don't really want you making choices they disprove of ether. In stead of raising people to be in control of their own lives and to live with the consequences of their actions, we've gone for a collective care giver who'll pat us all on the top of the head and give us laws that are the equivalent of "Stop that or you'll put someone's eye out!"

Look at the case of that poor bastard who drove his motorcycle into the back of that truck (see earlier post). In a better world, that guy would be free to decide how he wants to live his life. Take your risks and live or die with the consequences. But chances are, being young, he doesn't have any insurance. So if he lived, and has to spend the rest of his life in a home, supported by all of us, we feel compelled to make all sorts of laws limiting what he's able to do with his freedom. We're back to that Nazi policy, or Justice Holmes and his notions of the collective interest trumping the individual right to procreate. I tell ya, give those bastards and inch and you'll find all your freedoms subject to some collective scrutiny by the nanny. That means there'll be no freedom at all.

We're like the sad generations of poor blacks, born into cycles of racism and violence, who were told by older, wiser survivors "Find you some nice white folks and you'll be OK." When it all gets paired down, when we chose our modern leaders we're all really just lookin' for a benevolent patron. Someone to take care of us. That's NOT the kind of leaders were supposed to be looking for, but that's how things have evolved. It's a sad, dehumanizing thing when you come to that realization, and then you see the lame choices your given at election time.

Next, we'll talk about how we got this way. Cheers.