Avoiding a Return to Paternalism

These are difficult times. People feel insecure about their future, and indeed their present, and are clamoring for a reassuring, if not a helping hand. This is all well and good, and understandable. However, satisfying this desire through a return to paternalistic policies would have disastrous long-term consequences. Read this from Michael Beran:

"Particular emergencies require energetic government, and there are times when people need a helping hand. President-elect Obama’s challenge will be to find ways to give people that helping hand without raising up massive and all but ineradicable bureaucracies that degrade the human spirit by taking away from citizens decisions they must make for themselves, and by insulating them from the consequences of their actions.It won’t be easy. When times are hard it is tempting to imagine that supervisory agencies with wide discretionary powers can solve our problems for us and deliver, deus ex machina, the prosperity we seek. In the long run, however, it is the initiative of free people that solves problems and improves the quality of life. Exaggerated rhetoric about the failure of free markets should not be permitted to obscure that basic truth. Freedom works because it liberates the human spirit and removes barriers to achievement. Paternalism doesn’t work because over time it turns too many citizens into helpless wards of the state — a sub-caste permanently unequal to the challenge of life — and puts obstacles in the way of other citizens whose productive energies are taxed in order to pay for the chandala class’s upkeep.If he is to succeed in the White House, President-Elect Obama needs to promote, through his policies, the principle of equality his own election so signally confirmed. He must find a way to address the current discontents without returning to paternalist policies that will jeopardize an ideal of which he himself is one of history’s most striking embodiments."