The president’s State of the Union address was little more than a litany of proposals to expand the size and scope of government. The extent of detail was mind-numbing, designed to give the impression that government possesses unlimited abilities to improve our lives.
He called for more government credit programs; tax measures to stimulate spending; additional guarantees, insurance, and grants-in-aid; stronger old-age and unemployment insurance programs; more subsidies for agriculture; public-works programs; more spending on education; spending designed to prop up failing social insurance programs; more programs to help the environment and conserve land; better enforcement of anti-discrimination law; more communications infrastructure to equalize access; and enlarged programs for promoting international trade and investment.
But the year of which I speak was 1954, and the president was Dwight Eisenhower.
The only difference between Bill Clinton’s speech last week and the same night 46 years ago is that people actually took what Eisenhower said seriously. Back then, politics was closely intertwined with life itself, and the president was seen as some sort of wise autocrat, deserving of all our loyalty. Today, politics is seen as little more than theater, so when Clinton delivered his State of the Union talk, the assumption was that he doesn’t mean a word. For any lover of freedom, this is all to the good.
Whatever happened to the five dozen proposals Clinton made last year? Not much. Thank goodness gridlock and various distractions from governing like Monica largely prevented Congress and the president from conspiring against the public. In fact, I wish every year could be like 1999: the president is impeached, two house speakers resign, the Senate loses its traditional leadership. A few more heads of regulatory agencies could also have been indicted, but you can’t have everything.
The parallels between the 2000 State of the Union address and the 1954 speech is proof of this much: Washington is a living anachronism. There are no new ideas worth listening to coming out of government. Its denizens continue to act and live as if it were still the Cold War era, when it was widely believed that only government stood between us and social and economic calamity. For four decades and more, presidents have repeated the same nonsense every year about how the government is wise, beneficial, and indispensable. But these claims grow less plausible every day.
The great mistake of government leaders for the last decade has been to assume that the regime’s present configuration will last forever. In this respect, Clinton is no different from Gorbachev, both of them spokesmen for the old order who made the mistake of believing it can survive in a world in which people understand that government management of society and economy is not only unworkable but wholly destructive.
The political management of society requires extenuating circumstances like war, depression, and perceived external threats. In their absence, consensus begins to break down. One sign pointed to by Frank Rich is that only 6 percent of Americans are closely following the presidential race. As Rich says, that is less than the number who work for government and the media, the two groups who have a self-interest in following national politics. This is surely a sign that the political system no longer commands respect, much less interest.
Never forget that the state as we know it is not a permanent feature of American life, because despotism is fundamentally incompatible with morality, human nature, and the history of American liberty. The details of day-to-day political decline can cloud our vision of the broad experience of human liberty, the sweep of the centuries that brought it into being, an intellectual and historical heritage that has brought us all the blessings of prosperity and security we experience today.
Recall, for example, that the State of the Union address only began with Woodrow Wilson. The Union as we know it — internally despotic and internationally belligerent — came into existence only in the late 19th century. The Constitution itself came much later than America’s independence, after 11 glorious years of living under the Articles of Confederation.
In the 150 years before the Declaration, the real period in which the American political impulse was shaped, there was no central government at all. Our ancestors lived and thrived in what the left today denounces as a virtual state of anarchy, a situation that is better described as liberty and self government.
But even before that, the history of liberty and the free economy trace their roots back to the rise of commercial society in Spain and the intellectual support given to such a society by the followers of St. Thomas Aquinas, and even before that to the small feudal states all over Europe that proved society needs no central organizing force to thrive. The intellectual roots take us back to the origins of the Christian religion, and, before that, to the writings of the ancients on the merits of private property and exchange.
And yet this heritage is hardly ever taught in classrooms today. If parents are looking for ways to supplant the diseducation their children are getting in school, why not direct their attention to the intellectual and historical roots of American liberty? A great place to start is Murray Rothbard’s four-volume set, Conceived in Liberty, the most wonderful history of Colonial America.
As these volumes underscore, we have become absurdly tolerant of tyrants and would-be tyrants. In Colonial times, any politician who purported to regulate our lives as Clinton and Gore attempt to do today would be dismissed, tossed out, or, if he gained power, quickly tarred and feathered. Even the claim that any president — holed up in a palace in Washington, surrounded by sychophants, isolated from normal economic and social pressures — can know anything about the real Sate of the Union is ridiculous. American life is too multidimensional, international, and complex for any leader to comprehend.
I’ll start liking the next president the day he cancels this silly lecture about our lives.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute editor of a daily news site, LewRockwell.com.
