[Originally published in the Front Range Voluntaryist, article by Steven Clyde]
Those that favor State power don’t care about the well-being of the population. They do however care about the type of person they want to see evolve through their Utopian planning while rejecting all other forms of human development.
Even John Maynard Keynes, a harsh critic of the unregulated economy, understood this to some extent:
"But apart from this contemporary mood, the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." [1]
He then goes on to say:
". . .for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest." [2]
Individuals, each with idiosyncratic perspectives, are harnessed as objects rather than humans; objects that need to conform to egalitarian ideals if to be treated fairly at that. But to account for the differences in man (in effort alone), and to suggest that the world is naturally unequal, is to go against what the bureaucracy of State education holds to so dearly.
Take for example the mission statement of the Department of Education:
ED's mission is to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access. ED was created in 1980 by combining offices from several federal agencies. ED's 4,400 employees and $68 billion budget are dedicated to:
• Establishing policies on federal financial aid for education, and distributing as well as monitoring those funds.
• Collecting data on America's schools and disseminating research.
• Focusing national attention on key educational issues.
• Prohibiting discrimination and ensuring equal access to education. [3]
Though they seduce the public (and quite successfully) into thinking they have strong altruistic convictions, the true costs are hidden in plain sight: “4,400 employees” and a “$68 billion budget.” What they also fail to mention is that their “established policies” and “monitoring of funds” have been in the hands of incompetent imbeciles, most of whom couldn’t be trusted to handle their own financial affairs if not for their guaranteed pensions backed up by tax revenue.
For example, Andrew Coulson in a 2014 study looked at the increased costs of public schooling versus the SAT performance, per state, between 1972 and 2012. The results should alarm anyone that is truly concerned:
"The performance of 17-year-olds has been essentially stagnant across all subjects since the federal government began collecting trend data around 1970, despite a near tripling of the inflation-adjusted cost of putting a child through the K–12 system." [4]
How have the costs changed you might ask? Coulson notes:
“Total cost” is the full amount spent on the K-12 education of a student graduating in the given year, adjusted for inflation. In 1970, the amount was $56,903; in 2010, the amount was $164,426.” [5]
Not only have costs of schooling more than doubled (and often nearly tripled) in 39 of the states, but the study concluded that:
“Adjusted state SAT scores have declined by an average of 3 percent. . .
. . . Not only have dramatic spending increases been unaccompanied by improvements in performance, the same is true of the occasional spending declines experienced by some states. At one time or another over the past four decades, Alaska, California, Florida, and New York all experienced multi-year periods over which real spending fell substantially (20 percent or more of their 1972 expenditure levels). And yet, none of these states experienced noticeable declines in adjusted SAT scores—either contemporaneously or lagged by a few years. Indeed, their score trends seem entirely disconnected from their rising and falling levels of spending.” [6]
It cannot be ignored by any measurable degree, that individuals need to be free to reach their full potentials, and that at the least some freedom must exist to reach any potential at all.
What we instead hear is that "people are too stupid to control their own lives" and "we need regulations to keep people in check.” Furthermore, the idea that people are naturally fallible is conflated with the notion that "people are hopeless and must be controlled.”
Murray Rothbard pointed out brilliantly in his famous assessment of the State that the public is easily seduced, and it’s because we’re constantly reminded that “things just are the way they are!” He explains:
“It is also important for the State to make its rule seem inevitable; even if its reign is disliked, it will then be met with passive resignation, as witness the familiar coupling of “death and taxes.” One method is to induce historiographical determinism, as opposed to individual freedom of will. If the X Dynasty rules us, this is because the Inexorable Laws of History (or the Divine Will, or the Absolute, or the Material Productive Forces) have so decreed and nothing any puny individuals may do can change this inevitable decree. It is also important for the State to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any “conspiracy theory of history;” for a search for “conspiracies” means a search for motives and an attribution of responsibility for historical misdeeds.” [7]
Reality is often times the exact opposite of what we’ve been “inculcated” to believe, as Rothbard put it. People are fallible not because we lack a set of wise overlords, but because we are born naked into the world and need to form our own values and judgments for ourselves, and those values vary across a whole spectrum.
But to attempt to embed values into people is to forget that each individual is different, and it's also why millions were killed across various regimes for expressing individuality; being unable to fully conform was a crime in the most menacing regimes.
During the 1970’s the Khmer Rouge (which stands for “Cambodian Communists”) forced nearly 3 million people away from their homes to work on collective farms; men, women, and children were worked to death, dissenters and those without a “revolutionary” mindset were disposed of, and clothes were dyed black as to erase any trace of individuality. This example of tyrannical despotism, among the countless other examples, cannot be forgotten.
A private citizen would be scorned if they wanted to be deemed a hero for cleaning up the messes they created, while the State operates specifically in this fashion. And thus lies the biggest fallacy of the State: that the improvements we see over time are a result of their interference into our lives, rather than improvements being embarked on by free people long before their presence.
[1] John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Unemployment, Interest, and Money (New York: First Harvest, Harcourt, 1964), p. 383.; [2] Ibid. pp. 383-384. (Italics were used for emphasis; the sourced quote is written without italics.); [3] See; [4] Andrew Coulson, State Education Trends: Academic Performance and Spending over the Past 40 Years, 2014, p. 2.; [5] Ibid. p. 2; [6] Ibid p. 57; [7] Murray Rothbard, Anatomy of the State, (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009), pp. 26-27.; [8] The death toll was so horrendous, death estimates varied between averages of 1.5 to 3 million Cambodians killed during 1975-1979 alone. Also see this account of the Cambodian Genocide by R.J. Rummel for more precise estimates:
