Happy Monday everyone! As always, Monday’s post is by Stephen Hall. Thank you!!! Hope everyone has a great week!
Last week’s article was about the extremes of the Hobbesean view of government as either all or nothing, totalitarian or anarchy. I had not intended to follow up that article, but to be honest, I forgot about what I was actually intending to write. So, a cheap and easy follow-up article it is.
Now some people might be tempted to imagine that between these extremes of a totalitarian government and complete lawlessness lies a continuum of various levels of limited government. A rather foolish notion indeed it is, and not a trap into which I might fall.
Rather one must recognize that the ideal of a limited government is an entirely different animal, and that the nature of limited government itself has two extremes. It is those two extremes of limited government which are worthy topics for this follow-up. The distinction of the limited government concept is the purpose for which that limited government is empowered and created.
Typically, most governments are limited in some way or another, very seldom are they actually fully authoritarian. Even monarchies traditionally are often limited by some contingent of lesser lords which eventually lead to some form of parliamentary system or another.
Generally speaking the purpose of the limited government has been to preserve and promote the interests of certain classes of people within the state. The aforementioned lords were a military class of land owners, and such states worked to preserve the status of the lords. In fact, the first employment laws came about after the devastation of the plagues to preserve their labor force from being stolen away by competitive demand for workers.
In such societies the state serves to keep people divided into groups, but also to define their privileges as a group to exclusivity of their work and occupation. There must be rules to keep the untrained from setting up shop as a blacksmith, carpenter, mason, doctor, lawyer, tinker or other occupation.
Serfs must be kept on tilling the land, and the state employed sheriffs to make certain they paid their taxes, reeves to make sure they planted and harvested on time, and so forth. Exclusive licenses granted for the import of this good, the production of that commodity, the provision of certain services.
There is seldom a purely authoritarian state because there are so often divisions of class within the society usually along the lines of occupation, sometimes along ethnicity where one people conquer another, the examples of which are numerous. These competing interests seek to collectively control and influence the government to favor their profession.
While some of the examples I have stated harken back to feudal times, they show the early influence of a mercantile approach to the limitations of state power by outlining what the state may not do with regard to certain groups and how the government must keep other citizens from invading a group’s privileges and license.
Various forms of such governments have been promoted as superior from time to time depending on the relative power of one group or another. Such governments are limited by the power of the factions or special interests within that society.
It is with interest that one reads the history of the Peloponnesian Wars which started as a contest between Sparta and Athens and their respective allies, but changed with shifting alliances as a contest between democracies versus oligarchies.
For those unfamiliar, a democracy is simply a rule by the majority whereas an oligarchy is defined as a rule by a minority. But both are very similar in that they are just different factions and fractions of a city vying for power, two sides of the same coin as it were.
There were and remain those who have argued for a plutocracy, rule by the wealthy; theocracy, rule by a religious faction; even Plato in his “Republic” argued for a society ruled by philosophers. It really makes little difference precisely which faction you choose to rule society, they are essentially all the same, or will quickly become so.
Identity politics of group privileges and special treatment based upon membership of this or that group always turns out the same pitting a divided society against the other divisions of the society, no matter how you slice up the society.
This is the politics of identity we see all around us, these factions insisting on creating special rules for their group because of “reasons” which when examined closely boil down to no more cogent an argument than “you should because we want”.
All of this ought to be contrasted with the alternative purpose of establishing a limited government which is a limitation of government not based on the identity of groups but by reason and law based upon the nature of the individual person.
This is the type of limited government aimed to be established by the Founding Fathers, that government is limited to a set of prescribed functions, and specifically prohibited from favoring one group over another or one man over another based upon status or position.
These are called enumerated powers and the rule of law respectively, but they set the limits of the state that was to serve a specific purpose and not to choose winners and losers in society but allow an individual to stand or fall upon their own merit.
It is this understanding which conservatives express when they state that our nation was founded as a republic, and not the oligopoly of philosophers which Plato described in his “The Republic”. The idea that no group, not one, could be trusted with the power to favor some over others without abusing that authority forms the basis for the ideal of a limited government in such form upon a rule of law which recognizes the existence of the rights of the individual.
As I have discussed before, a proper understanding of the meaning of the word “right” entails a limitation on the power of the government by the individual. Only individuals can have rights, which is why that other form of limited government, the one for the purpose of dividing society into competing groups, can no more have rights than the totalitarian government or an anarchy.
Every instance where someone refers to women’s rights, gay rights, minority rights, <fill-in-the-identity-de-jour> rights makes me cringe because it denotes a philosophical subscription to the oligarchy, an affront to the very type of limitation upon our government created by the Founding Fathers.
Identity rights beget the notion that government is there to divide the spoils of society between the various groups of people, that the very purpose of the state is to juggle competing interests and the job of your representative is to bring home the bacon, as the saying goes.
If you want to know why we have such trouble coming together as a nation, you need look no further than the divisive philosophy of oligarchy, the economics of mercantilism, or cronyism as they like to label in in this “modern” era.
Call people by voting blocks: the black vote, the Hispanic vote, the women’s vote, and so forth. What you create is identity driven factions. It is a type of limited government, but an unhealthy version of the limitation of government. The Founding Fathers warned repeatedly of the dangers of factions which would divide and weaken the nation. They warned of identity politics nearly two and a half centuries ago.
We want limited government, but only if it is limited in the proper way.
