2021 may have seen the greatest proliferation in American government command and control, with its corresponding constriction in liberty, in my lifetime. Power has become dramatically more centralized in the federal government--at the expense of individuals and their voluntary arrangements--with trillions of dollars of new programs and proposals (promoted as costless to Americans), expanded regulatory abuses, and breathtaking efforts at income redistribution nowhere authorized in the Constitution.
While the engorgement of our federal government already implemented or proposed is unprecedented, in part it follows much the same path as earlier episodes, such as FDR’s New Deal. That is why there is wisdom to be found from those who understood and opposed that accumulation of power into the hands of the government which took it out of individuals’ hands. Perhaps no one offers us more insight in this regard than Felix Morley, in his The Power in the People (1949).
Morley was a Rhodes Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Ph.D. from the Brookings Institution, a Pulitzer Prize winning editor of the Washington Post, President of Haverford College, and founder of Human Events, who has a journalism award named for him. James Person pointed out that he was “respected for his acumen and fairness by his peers across the political spectrum,” and reviewer Edith Hamilton termed The Power in the People “a remarkable book, nobly written and profoundly thought out.”
Morley’s key distinction there was between self-government and coercive government. As Leonard Liggio summarized it,
Morley based his distinction between Society and State on the origins of the words. Society is derived from the Latin socius, a companion. Society and association are rooted in the voluntarism of companionship…Morley continues on to the word State, which is rooted in involuntary or forced association. He sees the absence of free choice and free contract as the basis of the word status, from which state is derived.
When a new edition of The Power in the People was produced in 1972, 23 years after its first publication, it was reprinted without change. A dozen years later still, Sydney Mayers concluded, “Nor is any change required currently.” Consider how much the same is true today, at a time when self-government is certainly in rapid decline.
Self-government and voluntary cooperation are the keys to America’s success
This Republic is grounded on the belief that the individual can govern himself. ...
The founders…frequently asserted that the primary purpose of government is to secure private property. ...
The American Republic was specifically designed to safeguard individual enterprise against the state.
The Constitution of the United States sets specific limits to the power of government so that the latter may not repress the individual.
The dominant emphasis was on self-government rather than on imposed government; on the development of Society, not on the aggrandizement of the State.
The individual…fulfills himself through voluntary co-operation in a free society. This… implies an instinctive hostility to the State…with a…tendency to assume the direction of all social functions.
In America the individual, retaining sovereignty, intended to fulfill his destiny through a free Society, holding the State in leash.
Any system of government cherishing the individual…should not impede their voluntary adjustment.
What we had is not what we have now
A government designed to encourage people to govern themselves is increasingly distorted in order to subject them to remote administrative dictation.
Americans have…largely ceased to reflect upon the implications of the unconditional surrender of power to political government…wholly contrary to the principles of the Republic.
The survival of the Republic is not endangered by weakness in the central government, but by popular pressure for its aggrandizement.
The development of the State has been that of constant aggrandizement…at the expense of Society and of the individuals who create Society.
State, in short, subjects people; whereas Society associates them voluntarily.
A government established to secure the blessings of liberty has actually produced… tyranny…[with] government in the hands of men willing to exploit ignorance in order to further the centralization of power.
Man…is now exchanging membership in Society for servitude to the State.
The issue stands out clearly. Shall man be subject to the authoritarian State or shall he restrain State powers to the minimum necessary for an orderly Society?
What we need to remember
The American tradition is…completely opposed to authoritarian government...the ‘Safety and Happiness’ of the governed takes precedence over every governmental prerogative and…deference is not necessarily owing to those temporarily in a position of political command.
State power, no matter how well disguised by seductive words, is in the last analysis always coercive physical power…and by its nature works ceaselessly to enlarge that power.
The distinguishing characteristic of American civilization is the subordination of centralized power on behalf of individual liberty.
Only one form of government can nurture liberty, and that is personal self-government.
The American theory is that every man has within him the potential to make a significant contribution of some kind to human welfare. Therefore every minority…must be protected against the ever-possible tyranny of mass opinion.
Enlargement of the area of State authority…contracts the condition of economic freedom …this false god over every form of social organism is enormous and devastating.
Social strength can be diminished by a constant centralization and enlargement of governmental functions, the great majority of which are unproductive and…weaken the economic basis by the cumulative effects of regulation and taxation.
Social legislation is a sign of retrogression, not progress.
That the State should solve, by necessarily coercive methods, any problem that individuals are capable of solving voluntarily, is…the essence of tyranny.
To transfer power to the State…serves only to monopolize power in wholly irresponsible hands.
The one enduring political folly is to concentrate in the hands of ambitious men power that they do not have the restraint to exercise wisely.
The most that any government can do is set people “at liberty.” The State can stabilize the condition of freedom, and that is its sole excuse for being…[but] men must develop their liberty from within. It cannot be doled out by government agencies.
Over 7 decades ago, Felix Morley said that “American political principles are now being aggressively challenged by the philosophy of government planning.” That challenge is vastly greater today. According to Joseph Stromberg, “Felix Morley…understood the old republic, the constitution, peace, and free markets, as well as their opposites, empire, lawless rule, war and generalized statism.” That is the understanding Americans need to rediscover to defend our liberty. And reading The Power in the People brings with it what Sydney Mayers called “an unusual privilege, the rare experience of enjoying brilliant literary style whilst absorbing education thanks to the author’s keen mind and dexterous pen.”
