There are many, many forces underlying the phenomenon we see only as a single continuing growth of government. Perhaps it’s best to think of government as a great living thing along Hobbes’s lines when he dubbed it the “Leviathan.” Hobbes was thinking of the state as a whole, so we shouldn’t use his term. Let’s rather call government the “Behemoth.” Since the Behemoth is a living thing, we can treat its continuing expansion as a natural part of its development and ignore for the moment any serious effort to disentangle the underlying growth forces at play. We can pretend, if pretense it is, that the Behemoth has been naturally designed to continually become larger and more powerful through the play of evolutionary forces. Nature has dictated that it grow until … what? Until, let’s say, it is simply too large to fail. Evolution is a system that chooses for survival, and anything that has become “too large to fail” has achieved evolution’s ultimate prized objective.
While evolution is quite good at encouraging the characteristics that support survival, it does not at all have a mandate for the happiness of the parts of the Behemoth and those that live around it, namely us. The Behemoth can become huge and invulnerable, while we, on the other hand, become desperate and depressed. What I will be arguing is that Marx was right, there is indeed law like machinery in history, that that machinery does lead inexorably to socialism, but it is not for the reasons he gave. The reason it leads to socialism lies in the ways in which it is compelled to reach for growth.
On that assumption, let’s focus on some characteristic ways in which this creature, the Behemoth, expresses this part of its nature. We’ll ask this simple question:
How does the Behemoth grow?
There are really only two basic ways for it to do this: increase the number of agencies or increase the staff and budget of an existing agency.
The Behemoth has gone about increasing the number of its agencies throughout history with a ferocious determination. There are again only two ways in which this can be done: the first is to simply invent something for a new agency to do that no private entities have ever done. I suppose that NASA might qualify as an agency of this kind, since, as far as I know, there were no private companies attempting to explore high space and beyond, before the Behemoth got into the business. The second is to appropriate a function that had always belonged to the private sector. THIS has been an extremely fecund area of Behemoth growth. The most recent example, of course, is the current attempted Behemoth take-over of the healthcare industry. Whatever the health and cost consequences to American citizens, by far the greater consequence is that the Behemoth will be enormously enlarged; it will be enlarged in the number of people working for it, in the number of agencies it hosts, and it will be enlarged in the size of its budget.
This kind of take-over has, of course, occurred before. Social security is a prime example. What was previously done by means of private insurance and individual family effort, was from that time forward to be done by the Behemoth, which, of course, was simply forced to create appropriate agencies and hire appropriate staff for this new task. Arguably, this creation of the FDR era had the unanticipated consequence of undermining the nuclear family by taking away the responsibility of a family for its elders. Is it by coincidence that socialism is actually quite hostile to family? We can only speculate, but family ties are an impediment to centralized power and authority. Hitler and Mao and all their ilk all sought to undermine family loyalties, and modern socialism is no different.
In education, we found the Behemoth growing an ever more visible presence at every stage. While the
But the take-over that seems to me to be the very best exemplar of the type is the Behemoth function we have come to know and love as Welfare.
As Orwell saw so clearly, things are not what they are, they are what we call them. That, at least, is the understanding that the Behemoth has of metaphysics and of language. When the Behemoth wants to change the nature of a thing, it simply changes the name of that thing.
I mention this because before welfare was welfare, welfare was … charity.
And, lest we forget, charity is personal money freely given by private individuals out of their generosity to agencies or individuals of their choice. AND, lest further we forget: the recipients of charity have no RIGHT or ENTITLEMENT of any kind whatsoever to charity. A person who fails to receive charity has no cause for complaint, since he never had, not in nature and not in law, a right to money not his own. The owner of money has exclusively the rights of ownership over his own money and can choose to give or not give it to whomever he chooses. Similar remarks apply, by the way, to the custom of “tipping.”
When the Behemoth took over the burden of charitable giving from the private citizens of the state, however, it decided that charity would no longer be charity and, since the name defines the thing, it decided that henceforth charity would be known as “welfare.” Once charity had a new name, it also became possible to give it new properties.
Most notable among the changes in charity were these: 1) while charity had been dependent on the good will and generosity of a person who actually owned the money, welfare was not dependent on any human attitudes whatsoever. There was no generosity involved; 2) The recipient of welfare now had a right to this money, it was a Behemoth entitlement; and 3), the original owner of the money had had it forcibly appropriated from him, stolen, in effect, and had no say whatsoever in to whom it would be given.
Welfare increased the size of the Behemoth, to be sure, but it had other political advantages as well. It increased the Behemoth’s client population in two ways: it had a huge new and additional set of salaried dependents (the bureaucrats and social workers who manned the new machine), and it had the entire welfare class who was now an officially sanctioned population of parasites for whom living on welfare and breeding on welfare was a permanent way of life.
Welfare transformed charity from the private sector to the public by stealing money from those who earned it and distributing it among those who did not.
You can see now why it is that I think of the exemplar of welfare as the most instructive case of state appropriation of a private citizen action.
The transformation of charity into welfare is a perfect model of the transformation of a free-enterprise limited government state into a centrally controlled socialist one. Examine this transformation and shudder for the future.
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