Big Government Benevolence

Socialism

• The two fundamental pillars of socialism are the abolition of private property and equalization of wealth
• We owe the term "socialism" to some followers of Robert Owen, the 19th-century British industrialist who founded New Harmony, a short-lived utopian community on the banks of the Wabash in Indiana
• Owen's initial reception in America was impressive
• In an 1825 address to Congress, Owen's audience included not only congressmen but also Supreme Court justices, cabinet members, President James Monroe, and President-elect John Quincy Adams
• Let's leave the latest incarnation of really-existing-socialism-the country of Venezuela-to one side

What is the emotional motor of socialism?

• In a word, benevolence
• Benevolence is a curious mental or characterological attribute. It is, as the philosopher David Stove observed, less a virtue than an emotion. To be benevolent means-what? To be disposed to relieve the misery and increase the happiness of others.
• Whether your benevolent attitude or action actually has that effect is beside the point. You feel kindly towards others. That is what matters: your feelings. The effects of your benevolent feelings in the real world are secondary, or rather totally irrelevant.

Perhaps these folks mean well.

• Perhaps inequality really does outrage their sense of justice.
• Perhaps, like John Stuart Mill, they regard conventional habits of behavior as obstacles to be overcome on the path to perfection.
• Regardless, they see tradition as the enemy of innovation, which they embrace as a lifeline to moral progress.

The Rise of Political Correctness

• For centuries, prudent political philosophers have understood that the lust for equality is the enemy of freedom.
• The rise of political correctness, identity politics, and "woke" ideology have redistributed that lust over a new roster of issues: not the proletariat, but the environment, not the struggling masses, but "reproductive freedom," gay rights, the wonders of "trans" culture, not to mention the welfare state, the Third World, diversity training, and an end to racism and xenophobia

The modern welfare state is one result of the triumph of abstract benevolence

• Its chief effects are to institutionalize dependence on the state while also assuring the steady growth of the bureaucracy charged with managing government largess.
• The governments that support the welfare state are elected by universal adult franchise, but an electorally decisive proportion of the voters-in some countries, approaching a quarter-either is employed by government or is dependent to a significant extent on some welfare programme.

Is there an alternative?

• Stove quotes Thomas Malthus' observation, from his famous Essay on the Principle of Population, that "we are indebted for all the noblest exertions of human genius, for everything that distinguishes the civilised from the savage state," to "the laws of property and marriage, and to the apparently narrow principle of self-interest which prompts each individual to exert himself in bettering his condition."
• Contrast that robust, realistic observation with Robert Owen's blather about replacing the "individual selfish system" with a "united social" system that, he promised, would bring forth a "new man." 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/23/big-government-benevolence/