Father government: Liberals have failed to devise an alternative to the parental role of the state
Nobel Laureate James M Buchanan was the driving force behind the public choice school of economics, which showed that market failure alone wasn’t a justification for state intervention. You had to consider the consequences of state failure as well.
One of his best papers, to my mind, was also perhaps one of his shortest, showing that great things can come in small packages. Afraid To Be Free: Dependency as Desideratum is a warning for the twenty-first century that, although collectivist ideas have fallen into disrepair, interventionist statist policies could survive and thrive in the coming decades, because people are afraid to be free.
Buchanan distinguishes between four sources of state intervention: managerial socialism, paternalistic socialism, distributionist socialism, and parental socialism. Managerial socialism focuses on controlling the commanding heights of the economy and has clearly fallen into disrepute. Paternalistic socialism is the philosophy of “elites know better” and, while this motivation will never go away completely, it is a comparatively weak force. Distributionist socialism is all about the equalisation of post-tax incomes and remains constrained by the electoral reality that turkeys won’t vote for Christmas – that people won’t support an ever-higher tax burden. But one motivation remains strong: parental socialism.
Buchanan argues that, when classical liberalism emerged from the Enlightenment, it failed to offer psychological security and that this shortcoming is still a powerful motivation for state intervention in the twenty-first century. He sees a failure in classical liberalism to provide an alternative to the socialist parental role for the state.
Buchanan wrote: “If we loosely describe socialism in terms of the range and scope of collectivised controls over individual liberty of actions, then ‘socialism’ will survive and be extended. This result will emerge not because collectivisation is judged to be more efficient, in some meaningful economic sense, or even because collectivisation more adequately meets agreed upon criteria for distributive justice, but rather because only under the aegis of collective control, under ‘the state’, can individuals escape, evade and even deny personal responsibilities. In short, persons are afraid to be free…
Socialism, as a coherent ideology, has lost most of its appeal. But in a broader and more comprehensive historical perspective, during the course of two centuries, the state has replaced God as the father-mother of last resort, and persons will demand that this protectorate role be satisfied and amplified.”
The implications are stark. In a secularised world lacking the transcendental influence and replete with family breakdown, there is still a need to fill the parental role. This parental role is manifested in the welfare state. People are afraid of a survival of the fittest in the economic realm. Consequently, Buchanan argues that people will seek order rather than uncertainty, and the order that the state provides will be seen as worth the sacrifice in liberty.
The key feature of parentalism is that people seek to have values imposed on them, by parents or a transcendental force. State intervention from parentalism is not therefore confined to the material realm alone (the welfare state) but extends to the non-material world as well (subjective well-being), in the form of political correctness.
In a postscript to his article, Buchanan speculated as to the impact of terrorist attacks on the parental role for the state. He argued that, faced with this fear, even the most classical liberal person will struggle to oppose collectivised controls. In the wake of the terrible events in Paris, he has a point.