Who Guards the Guardians; K. McDonald

It is only fitting, therefore, that among all the words whose meaning they have debased, reform should be accorded a place of its own. The amendment of conditions which are judged against a standard of instinctive moral values has been reshaped, in an age when those val ues are under attack, to signal amendments which serve only the aims of the attackers. By destroying a society's criteria, and putting nothing in their place save the social Kenneth McDonald is a Toronto writer on economic and political subjects. This article is reprinted by permission from the September 1977 issue of Executive, Canada's man agement magazine of information, opinion, and analysis. 32 theories of the moment, the reform ers further the achievement of those aims. By setting up straw men for their attacks, they weaken the real men whose independence they fear. Thus the excesses of limited pri vate monopolies are invoked to jus tify their replacement by the total monopolies of the state. Public own ership is advanced in all seriousness as the best and wisest means to supply the public with everything from soup to nuts. The soup may lack variety, but it is no longer con taminated by profit. The nuts may be scarce and of one kind, but they are grown on state farms under the supervision of inspectors imbued with the best of intentions.

The whole thrust of the state's ex pansion is toward uniformity. The purpose of the state, after all, is to WHO GUARDS THE GUARDIANS? 33 enforce laws which impose certain restraints upon individual liberty. The purpose of the restraints is to prevent one individual from tres passing upon the liberty of another. The good fences which make good neighbors are policed by the state. Keeping the peace is its one ac knowledged duty. But as the Latin tag attests, the role of guardian is the most danger ous of all. Who, indeed, guards the guardians? The Urge to Reform It is that temptation to butt in which is at the root of the matter. We are prone to it as individuals. In our pride we can see how things might be better ordered, especially as they affect our neIghbors. By prod igies of self-control we may refrain from telling them, but the urge is there nevertheless. What holds us back is partly the fear that our ad vice will be resented but more that it will be ignored.

With maturity we learn to sup press these urges, to take people as they come, even to recognize in them shortcomings of our own. The state, however, is subject to no such impediments. The secret of its power lies in its very remoteness. It is one thing to refrain from advising the man next door, whom we know. It is another thing altogether to compose a set of regulations for peo ple collectively. They' are as diverse as the regulations are uniform. Their diversity constitutes a per petual challenge. If only people would respond to the forecasts, if only the behavior which is predicta ble in general terms would conform in particular ones to the trend of the graph. That is the challenge which the state feels called upon to meet. It has, its servants have come to realize, immense, even limitless power; the power to create money. Not wealth, but the illusion of wealth. Dealers in illusion, the state's servants are its first victims.

Unaware of its futility, they apply themselves to th'~ task with a will. Each fresh set of regulations exposes gaps that must be filled. The estab lishment of one board reveals the need for a second. Unless it sows the seeds for continuance in another form, no commission of inquiry is complete. As the regulations mount, as the boards and commissions proliferate, the law itself is crushed under the weight of them. Relationships which were simple are made complex. Rules which everyone could under stand are multiplied into abstrac tions and interpretations and foot notes to sub-sub-paragraphs until they are incomprehensible to every body, not least the authors, least of all the lawyers and judges whose lives are consumed in deciphering them.

34 THE FREEMAN January How Bureaucracy Grows One result is to bring the civil law into contempt. Another is to· estab lish, outside the courts, a court where there are neither lawyers nor judges, where arbitrary rulings are the prerogative of inspectors, reg ulators and commissioners, and where mountains of precedent are built upon molehills of law. When the growth of a bureaucracy passes beyond control, it becomes a law unto itself. The process is self fulfilling. The failure .of each new intrusion compels it to intrude again. More people are hired, more programs devised. to occupy them, until the bureaucracy's, original purpose is obscured. No longer is it there to administer the law, for the law has been buried. It is there to minister to itself. The contempt which this process heaps upon the civil law is con scripted to bring the criminal law into disrepute. Here, however, the attack is mounted from the safety of that other bastion of liberalism permissi veness.

The doctrine that instinct de ceives, that behavior is conditioned by circumstances, and that the fail ure of individuals to conform to soci ety's rules is not their fault but society's, is applied enthusiastically to the treatment of criminals. Does he steal? He has been de prived by society. Does he commit crimes of violence? He is the victim of a society which, in its disregard for his needs, was violent to him. Does he commit murder? The pres sures that society exerted upon him were too great to be borne. It is in this that liberalism's fun damental hypocrisy is fulfilled. A New Class The attitude which dictates a con cern for people in general while de nying the legitimate aspirations of indi viduals in particular is reversed when some of those individuals break the 'law. Then they are transformed from a condition of individuality to one of membership in a class. Not a crimi nal class, as our forefathers held before the enlightenment, but an underprivileged class, a class which has somehow escaped the welfare net, a class, in consequence, which it is society's duty to rescue.

If members of the class are not responsible for their condition, how can they be blamed, much less punished, for actions which derive from it? Innocent unless proved guilty, they must be freed without delay until the crowded calendar can admit their reappearance. In the meantime society will muster its so cial workers, its psychiatrists, its publicly appointed counsel and its special pleaders to excuse, to ex plain, by all possible endeavors to exculpate the accused.

1978 WHO GUARDS THE GUARDIANS? 35 The police, whose duty to catch the transgressor was discharged upon his arrest, are witnesses to a process which puts them, who de fend the law, upon the defensive. By a curious twist of reasoning, the police are the enemy, not the crimi nal. As the tangible representatives of the society which wronged him, they are clearly in the wrong. The hypocrisy culminates in the treatment of premeditated murder. Whether he be a domestic bandit, who kills for money, or an interna tional one who kills for a cause, he must be preserved from the fate he dealt without hesitation to his vic tims. Flight from Reality The principle of an eye for an eye, which served from Moses' day until recently, has been abrogated by those to whom principles are an en cumbrance. That the victims were innocent, were in fact strangers until the gun introduced a fleeting intimacy, is ignored. Conveniently, they are dead, members of the larg est class of all, and the state has no responsibility for them. It is free to turn its attention to the well-being of their murderer.

Predictably, the word murderer is the first casualty. The domestic murderer is never referred to by that term. It is too precise. It admits of no doubt that he did, with the premedi tation which is inseparable from taking a weapon to the scene of his crime, kill someone on purpose. After the event the word is too harsh a reminder of the harshness of his crime. The welfare state, whose aim is to cushion its wards from the inescap able realities of life and death, must itself escape reality. In court, the domestic murderer becomes ((the ac cused." When guilt has been estab lished he is thenceforward referred to by name, as befits his notoriety. If, after the passage of time, he is referred to again, the public's recol lection is prompted by reference to the crime he was ((involved in." When, in due course, he is released, if the crime was sufficiently news worthy his earlier notoriety will be revived. The name of his victim may even be mentioned, though not in a reproachful way, because he has now paid his debt to society. The murder he committed has been ex punged. It is as if it had never been.

By imputing to the abstraction of society the qualities which can be identified only with the individuals who comprise it, the state, which is itself an abstraction, subverts the truth. Society, which cannot be punished, is blamed for the crime which only a person can commit. The theory that no one, because of upbringing or environment or de privation or whatever, is responsible for anything, requires the creation of a substitute. Since reason and 36 THE FREEMAN January instinct tell us that there can be no substitute, the state must confound us by indirection. Like a magician's audience we are led to believe that things are not what they seem. Society which was to blame in the first place has be come the victim of the murderer it bred. When he has paid to it the debt of his crime his unfortunate lapse will be forgotten, swallowed up by abstractions as woolly as the think ing which gave rise to them.

The International Bandit The international bandit can be disguised in more fanciful terms. He is at worst a terrorist, more often a freedom fighter, a nationalist, an urban guerilla, or simply a member of the Hmovement" of the hour. Never is he a murderer. The people he kills are not the victims of his guns or his grenades or his dyna mite, but of the circumstances which drew them to that particular airplane, or embassy or public place. They are hostages against the ful fillment of demands in which they have no concern. Secure until that moment in the possession of identity and occupation, they surrender both to the cause of their assailants. As hostages they will suffer, as hos tages they may die, but there is nothing personal about it. The abstractions which serve the domes tic scene are applied the more easily to the international. For if the public sector at home is out of control, the super-sector that sprouts from the United Nations abroad is out of all reason.

Compounding the Folly If it is foolish to blame a national society, from which traditional val ues have been banished, for crimes committed by persons, then trans ferring that blame to international society, which has neither tradition nor values, merely compounds the folly. To suppose that, by seconding them to the United Nations, na tional bureaucrats acquire qualities superior to those of their fellows at home, is only the first in a chain of assumptions. If experience leads us to doubt the validity of the domestic assumption-that all wisdom re sides in the state and, by implica tion, in its servants-the sheer im pertinence of the international as sumption may well leave us breath less. Applying to an international court the same social theories which have brought domestic courts into disrepute is to confuse issues al ready confounded. The effect is to dissipate responsibility to such an extent that it disappears.

The dictator who conspires, on grounds of national security, to murder thousands of his fellow citi zens is quick to appeal to the Secu rity Council if his personal security 1978 WHO GUARDS THE GUARDIANS? 37 is threatened. He is blameless at home but he still feels the need for a higher authority to appeal to. That the Security Council should be as powerless as the United Na tions of which it is part is wholly consistent with the theories which gave birth to them both. That na tions which are manifestly unable to govern themselves individually many having acquired nationhood since the day before yesterday should be credited with the ability to govern all nations collectively, in cluding those with centuries of tra dition and cohesion behind them, is the final absurdity. Yet it persists. The motive force can be ascribed to two distinct impulses. First is the natural tendency of the state to dis solve its responsibility in commit tees. The drive to escape responsibil ity, to seek the shelter of a consen sus, at all costs to be fireproof, is the inevitable corollary of social theories which hold that no one is to blame for anything.

The ready assumption of personal responsibility, attributed to George Washington in the matter of the tree and his little hatchet, may be apoc ryphal but its survival springs from Liberty Abused more than Americans' veneration of their first president. It marks a rare quality. How rare may be judged when we try to recall examples of public figures, whose prompt accep tance of responsibility for deemed successes is a daily occurrence, ac cepting responsibility for evident failures. ~~It was my fault"-that, to borrow an American idiom, will be the day. The second motive is more sinis ter. The drive to transfer power from the individual to the state-indeed to render the individual power less-finds its natural extension in the transfer of power from in dividual nations to the interna tional body which foreshadows the world state. If the best is the enemy of the good there is little doubt that, for West ern civilization, the enemy is a creeping mediocrity which substi tutes envy for excellence. The inde pendencewhich drives men to seek the best is attacked by those who would make all dependent on the state.

Western civilization faces a crisis of the spirit. It is the West's belief in its own beliefs which is at issue. @ IDEAS ON LIBERTY THERE is a natural and necessary progression, from the extreme of anarchy to the extreme of tyranny; and arbitrary power is most easily established on the ··ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness. GEORGE WASHINGTON Wlrld L intho grfR9fan Iae~ Clarence B. Carson 13. World War II: The SocialistConflagration WAR is filled with incongruities. On or about May 1, 1945, I watched a command. performance of the Dres den Symphony Orchestra in a small town located along the border of Germany and Czechoslovakia. The command was probably issued by the commanding general of the First Infantry Division-the ~~Bloody Red One"-of the United States Army. The most obvious incongruity was that the United States and Germany In this series, Dr. Carson examines the connection between ideology and the revolutions of our time and traces the impact on several major countries and the spread of the ideas and practices around the world.