Be it or be it not true that Man is shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that Government is begotten of aggression, and by aggression.
Spencer goes on to the make the point that there are certain types of behavior, which elicit demands for punishment from the public if they are committed by ordinary citizens, but which seem to be happily tolerated if they are committed by legislators. Imagine if someone took millions, or even billions, of dollars, with the promise that they would be used to reduce poverty, or reduce the use of illegal drugs, or create world peace. After using - shall we say, squandering - that enormous amount of money, no measurable progress has been made toward the stated goal. This is routinely the case with legislators.
If I pay someone a sum of money to paint my house, or fix my car, or mow my lawn, and he fails to do the job, I demand my money back - with the threat of small claims court, if need be. But when the legislature has spent a far greater sum of money, and failed to improve healthcare or education, the voters seemingly accept this as inevitable and just, and listen as the legislators explain how they now need even more money for this cause or for some other cause. Spencer notes:
We measure the responsibilities of legislators for mischiefs they may do, in a much more lenient fashion. In most cases, so far from thinking of them as deserving punishment for causing disasters by laws ignorantly enacted, we scarcely think of them as deserving reprobation.
The only significant qualification required to become a member of the legislature is that one have persuaded or cajoled a sufficient number of voters. There is no educational requirement, and no required amount of experience of any kind. Thus it is possible, and thus it has happened, that individuals with no particular knowledge and no particular experience have found themselves drafting legislation dealing with the most complex technical sciences, with the most intricate diplomatic treaties, and with the most multifaceted economic principles. Where the decisions are the most crucial, we allow the least qualified to make them. Consider which qualifications we seek in a surgeon, in a lawyer, in an engineer. Yet we seek no such discriminator among our legislators. We pay the price, in both money and in misery, with their bad decisions.
And yet the mischiefs wrought by uninstructed lawmaking, enormous in their amount as compared with those caused by uninstructed medical treatment, are conspicuous to all who do but glance over its history.
Going back at least to Plato and Socrates, the pattern of paternal thinking has shaped considerations of government. If one accepts the analogy of government as parent - the essence of paternalistic politics - then it is a logical next step to view the combination of citizens and government as a family; from this point, the ethical principles which govern families are applied to governments. Such folly and madness, however, requires that the voters ignore the many obvious and significant differences which distinguish the family from the government. Given that large numbers of them have, in fact, been content to ignore those differences, the familial discourse which has invaded political rhetoric has bent the thinking of many. A child expects, rightly so, his parents to clothe and feed him; by extension, should he expect the government to clothe and feed him? Common sense tells us that parents love children and are committed to them; a government does not, and cannot, love its citizens - to be sure, there are at least four different types of love, as the philosophers have analyzed them with Greek vocabulary - a government is capable of no type of love. If a government is capable of "being committed to" a person, it is only so in an utterly different sense of the phrase than in the case of parents. Parental commitment is unconditional and self-sacrificing; a government's relation to the individual is conditional and the government will not, and should not, sacrifice for the interests of an individual.
The intrusion of family-ethics into the ethics of the State, instead of being regarded as socially injurious, is more and more demanded as the only efficient means to social benefit. So far has this delusion now gone, that it vitiates the beliefs of those who might, more than all others, be thought safe from it.
Herbert Spencer has clearly stated the major flaws in much of modern legislation. Although he wrote in England in the second half of the nineteenth century, his texts are useful for understanding America at the start of the twenty-first century.
