Taylor wrote:there is also pure ideological desire as well. I see it as a paranoia towards the government, a position that can easily be embraced by any individual.
I’ve been pondering the emotional psychological attraction of laissez-faire capitalism. There is an exhilarating thrill associated with individual freedom, and a sense of moral toughness associated with relying on your personal skill and talent to succeed in the world. On the other side, relying on others seems like an admission of failure, a dull conformity, a trap that lets us fall into the anonymous crowd.
This reminds me of the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger that I studied for my Masters thesis. Heidegger defined authenticity in terms of the existential individual having resolute anticipation of the future in the moment of freedom, while he condemned inauthentic life as involving surrender to collective thinking, accepting gossip, shallow curiosity and ambiguity as moral values.
This existential mentality focused on personal achievement against the inertia of the world creates an image of the Ayn Rand hero John Galt as an inspiring figure, the entrepreneurial inventor who can save the world. That obviously has a lot of merit to inspire startup companies whose products and services can transform the world.
But laissez-faire thinking also has a dark side, an emotional fantasy, more Walter Mitty than John Galt, that sees the crushing of public services as morally purgative, harsh medicine that forces people to become self-reliant for their own good.
Such moral political reasoning has a resonance far beyond the wealthy elite who benefit from it by cutting taxes on the rich. Many people just see the moral compass as requiring a shift toward responsibilities and away from rights, toward what we do as individuals and away from what we do as a collective, which is seen to justify the perverse results of the Trump Presidency and similar authoritarian populist demagogues around the world.
Looking back at
Ronald Reagan’s 1964 speech in support of Barry Goldwater, it has so many points that chime with these deceptive sentimental arguments.
Ronald Reagan wrote:This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
But if we compare this with Abraham Lincoln’s argument cited by Woodard that there are in fact many things that government can do that are fully worthwhile and necessary, it is clear the US pendulum has swung too far away from the ability to constructively cooperate through government systems.