Progressives today say people should come before profits. Now in a privilege-ridden corporate state, that’s a worthy goal, though Progressives have no clue how to achieve it. How nice it would be if they were equally committed to putting people before bureaucracy. Here they fall down rather badly because their signature ideas would subordinate regular people to the dictates of the power structure.
Take MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Maddow is intelligent, serious, and well-meaning – which makes her vision all the more unsettling: It has ominous implications not only for individual liberty, but also for its concomitant: authentic spontaneous social cooperation.
In disparaging profit as impotent to produce big things for the general good (with no evidence proffered), she moves bureaucracy — by nature self-serving, inflexible, conservative – center stage. She shows her unfamiliarity with how competition and entrepreneurship would function in a freed market (as opposed to the corporatist economy she conflates it with). Entrepreneurial profit, as both a motive and a reward, helps human beings cope with pervasive ignorance about how best to use scarce resources in addressing our endless wants. Rhapsodizing about the wisdom and efficiency of bureaucracy shows an obliviousness to the most basic social problem: How can a multitude of people with different values, preferences, and tastes, as well as diverse and incomplete information about the world around them, coordinate their activities for maximum mutual benefit?
Two basic approaches to the problem are available: 1) Let individuals, guided by the price system, strive for what they want by cooperating freely (no privileges, no restraints on peaceful action) under rules that respect all persons as equals, or 2) let bureaucracy – that is, the coercive State — decide for them, perhaps periodically administering the opium of democracy to lessen the pain of their essential powerlessness. Big things must crowd out small things. The latter approach assumes (or pretends) that politicians and bureaucrats possess the knowledge and commitment to the public weal to make the optimal tradeoffs. The freed market would provide a check on waste while respecting free choice. Bureaucracy does neither.
Bureaucratic dominance does not merely lower material living standards or reduce profit opportunities. It crushes lives and dreams. Government’s grand projects – the interstate highway system and urban renewal, for instance – steal homes, shops, and communities through eminent domain and other interventions, while well-connected corporate interests reap benefits. They also harm people by damaging the environment and fostering big “private” firms over those of human-scale.
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