By KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
November 19, 2019 6:30 AM
Sen. Marco Rubio (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
They want to take your property for the benefit of ‘the common good,’ which will happen to coincide with their political interests. Hard pass.
This is a time of great forgetting, and one of the things that has been forgotten is why we have a federal government and what it is there to do.
From Senator Marco Rubio and his “common-good capitalism” to Senator Elizabeth Warren and her “accountable capitalism,” politicians right and left who want politicians to have more power over private economic decisions assume a dilemma in which something called “capitalism” must be balanced against or made subordinate to something called the “common good.” This is the great forgetful stupidity of our time.
Capitalism is not a rival to the common good. Capitalism, meaning security in one’s own property and in the right to work and to trade, is the common good that governments exist to secure.
The U.S. government exists to see to the liberty of the American people. That is it. That is its only reason for being. It is an instrument and a convenience, the purpose of which is to ensure that Americans are able to enjoy their liberty and property — liberty and property being overlapping concepts.
What is contemplated by Senator Rubio and Senator Warren — along with a few batty adherents of the primitive nonidea known in Catholic circles as “integralism” and everywhere else more forthrightly as “totalitarianism” — is to invert the purpose of the U.S. government. Protecting Americans against those who would use force to curtail their liberty and take control of their property for their own ends is the duty of government; Rubio, Warren, et al. would have the government become the party that curtails Americans’ liberty and takes control of their property for its own ends. Which is to say, in the name of the “common good,” they would organize an assault on the actual common good the U.S. government was in fact constituted to protect. This account isn’t fringe libertarianism — it’s right there in the founding documents.
Being the nightwatchman is a difficult and generally thankless job, one that tends to receive attention only for its failures. But that is the job Senator Rubio and Senator Warren asked for and campaigned for. But there is a lot more political juice in being the bandit, taking control of other people’s property for your own purposes. And let’s have no more high-minded talk about the national interest from Senator Rubio, whose idea of the national interest is broad enough to encompass shilling for billionaire sugar barons, or from Senator Warren, who has never met a tax increase on rich people she didn’t like except for the one on medical-device manufacturers, who are (surprise!) clustered around Boston.
They want to take your property for the benefit of ‘the common good,’ which will happen to coincide with their political interests. Hard pass.
This is a time of great forgetting, and one of the things that has been forgotten is why we have a federal government and what it is there to do.
From Senator Marco Rubio and his “common-good capitalism” to Senator Elizabeth Warren and her “accountable capitalism,” politicians right and left who want politicians to have more power over private economic decisions assume a dilemma in which something called “capitalism” must be balanced against or made subordinate to something called the “common good.” This is the great forgetful stupidity of our time.
Capitalism is not a rival to the common good. Capitalism, meaning security in one’s own property and in the right to work and to trade, is the common good that governments exist to secure.
The U.S. government exists to see to the liberty of the American people. That is it. That is its only reason for being. It is an instrument and a convenience, the purpose of which is to ensure that Americans are able to enjoy their liberty and property — liberty and property being overlapping concepts.
What is contemplated by Senator Rubio and Senator Warren — along with a few batty adherents of the primitive nonidea known in Catholic circles as “integralism” and everywhere else more forthrightly as “totalitarianism” — is to invert the purpose of the U.S. government. Protecting Americans against those who would use force to curtail their liberty and take control of their property for their own ends is the duty of government; Rubio, Warren, et al. would have the government become the party that curtails Americans’ liberty and takes control of their property for its own ends. Which is to say, in the name of the “common good,” they would organize an assault on the actual common good the U.S. government was in fact constituted to protect. This account isn’t fringe libertarianism — it’s right there in the founding documents.
Being the nightwatchman is a difficult and generally thankless job, one that tends to receive attention only for its failures. But that is the job Senator Rubio and Senator Warren asked for and campaigned for. But there is a lot more political juice in being the bandit, taking control of other people’s property for your own purposes. And let’s have no more high-minded talk about the national interest from Senator Rubio, whose idea of the national interest is broad enough to encompass shilling for billionaire sugar barons, or from Senator Warren, who has never met a tax increase on rich people she didn’t like except for the one on medical-device manufacturers, who are (surprise!) clustered around Boston.
