Liberty & the State

A Time for Truth.
by William E. Simon.
Reader’s Digest Press. 248 pp. $12.50.

Former “energy czar” and Secretary of the Treasury William E. Simon has written a book that is part memoir and part manifesto. The memoir recounts how this financier-turned-Cabinet-officer came to conclude that government was the cause and not the cure of America’s economic difficulties. The manifesto, rejecting the possibility of checking the transgressions of the state through conventional political strategies, calls for a long-range educational campaign to persuade the American people that their salvation lies in a return to strictly limited government and to free-enterprise economics.

As the portentous title of his book suggests, Mr. Simon regards himself as a voice crying out in the wilderness. Yet in the year and a half since this work was written, many of its themes have become commonplaces of public discussion: government in the United States has grown too big, too bureaucratic, too wasteful, and too expensive; taxes are too high; enormous budget deficits are fueling inflation; excessive and unreasonable regulation is stifling productivity; and more generally, our economic and social policies are inadvertently impairing the creation of the wealth that must ultimately finance them. The new public receptivity to such views no doubt has helped to gain A Time for Truth a rather unexpected place on the best-seller lists.

It is still too early to tell whether the change in public opinion symbolized by the passage of Proposition 13 and reflected in President Carter’s announced intention to cut back on domestic spending will persist. Even if Carter’s commitment to this course is genuine, and not based merely on a reading of the latest polls, there is always the chance that a successful Teddy Kennedy candidacy in 1980 could reverse the present trend. Nonetheless, given the evidence at hand, it seems likely that the emerging consensus against high taxes and growing government expenditure and regulation will dominate the political landscape for some time to come.

This prospect cannot help but influence one’s reaction to Mr. Simon’s book. Those who believe that the widespread resentment of “big government” and high taxes reflects the influence of the corporations or a new “politics of selfishness” will clearly find nothing but reprehensible falsehoods in A Time for Truth. Others who regard themselves as liberals but believe that government inefficiency and intrusiveness are genuine problems may find themselves reluctantly agreeing with many of Mr. Simon’s criticisms. Yet precisely to the extent that opposition to “big government” looks as if it is attaining the status of conventional wisdom, it becomes increasingly necessary to distinguish among the differing policy implications that may be derived from this view. In this context, it is more important to identify the errors in Mr. Simon’s own gospel than the truths that may be found in his indictment of recent public policy.

For while his critique draws most of its force from an attack on widely recognized abuses of overgrown government—the fiscal irresponsibility of New York City, absurd and contradictory federal regulations, poverty programs that wind up delivering very little benefit to the poor—Mr. Simon’s proposed remedy calls for nothing less than the wholesale dismantling of the welfare state. In his view, the root of our present troubles lies in FDR and the New Deal, by whose agency “statism and collectivism were brought into this country by the back door.” Similarly, he holds that the “mixed economy” by its very nature is a fatal and irrational attempt to combine capitalism and Communism that must lead to a drastic erosion of both wealth and liberty.

Mr. Simon does not deign to explain how the impressive economic growth of the United States in the quarter-century following World War II or the current superior performance of the West German economy under a social-democratic government is compatible with his analysis. But then his analysis ultimately is based not on empirical observation but on “moral principles.” His first principle “sets individual liberty as the highest political value”; the second opposes “any intervention by the state into our lives, for by definition such intervention abridges liberty.” From these two principles it follows that any state intervention in the economic sphere automatically leads to a loss of political liberty. Furthermore, when joined with the premise that “freedom is a precondition for economic creativity and wealth,” they lead to the conclusion that a nation that tolerates any increase in state intervention in its economy “must grow poorer.”

Mr. Simon’s simple syllogisms are utterly unconvincing. It is one thing to argue that individual liberty cannot survive in a society that does not have a large and robust private sector. But unless one is merely playing with words, it is absurd to contend that political liberty (or economic growth) cannot be found in a welfare state or a mixed economy. To be fair to Mr. Simon, however, he does sometimes seem to be groping toward a slightly more sophisticated argument—namely, that once a nation begins heading down the road of government intervention in the economy, a political and psychological dynamic takes hold that leads to ever greater encroachments on the private sector.

Yet it is not hard to see why he declines to rest his case for a return to totally unfettered “free enterprise” on this kind of argument. For if he were to assert that state intervention inevitably culminates in the demise of the private sector and of political liberty, this “truth,” far from being timely, would come at least a half-century too late. In that case, a lament for freedom would have been more appropriate than the spirited call to arms that Mr. Simon has actually written.

Suppose, though, that the tendency of state intervention eventually to smother political freedom were held to be powerful but not irresistible, so that even at this late date it would remain possible to stem the tide. But then why would it be necessary to tear down the entire fabric of the welfare state? Why not instead seek to reform the welfare state, so that its genuine accomplishments may be preserved, the abuses that it has spawned may be minimized or eliminated, and the threat it poses to liberty may be held in check? It is Mr. Simon’s inability or unwillingness to deal with this question that leads him to retreat into the misplaced moral principles of the libertarian creed, according to which state intervention is by definition a deplorable abridgement of liberty.

_____________

 

Our greatest need at the present juncture is for careful and undogmatic thinking about how to shape the future of the welfare state—about what government can and cannot accomplish successfully, and about the costs and benefits, both economic and political, not only of specific government programs, but also of the growth of government as a whole. While A Time for Truth may have some value as an antidote to the delusions of those who have learned nothing from the experience of the last ten years, it provides very little useful guidance for grappling with the problems of the decade ahead.

+ A A -
You may also like
Share via
Copy link