"Soft Tyranny" & "Straight Capitalism"

This piece has a number of fascinating points of great value, and a number of flaws. Among the excellent points:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. —C. S. Lewis, 1953 ...The late Irving Kristol, who died last year at 89, was exquisitely sensitive to the role of intellectuals in the metabolism of this debate, and I’d like to start by quoting from a speech he gave to the American Enterprise Institute in 1973. “For two centuries,” Mr. Kristol noted,

the very important people who managed the affairs of this society could not believe in the importance of ideas—until one day they were shocked to discover that their children, having been captured and shaped by certain ideas, were either rebelling against their authority or seceding from their society. The truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society—the economic institutions, the political institutions, the religious institutions—are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions. The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can and will—perhaps slowly but nevertheless inexorably—twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape...

Democratic despotism, Tocqueville points out, is unlike despotisms of old. It pre- fers the carrot to the stick. The goal of the operation is the same—the achievement of conformity and the consolidation of power—but the means of choice is not terror but dependence. Accordingly, Tocqueville writes, democratic despotism is despotic at one remove. It does not, unless stymied, terrorize. Rather, it “hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.” ...One of the most rebarbative features of the Obama administration’s effort to bring government-control to a life near you is its combination of the antiseptic rhetoric of utilitarian social science with old-fashioned central planning. Consider Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of President Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who is a top White House advisor on health care reform. Dr. Emanuel has famously argued that doctors “take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously.” He wants to concentrate medical services not on those who need it most—the elderly, seriously impaired children, etc.—but on those who are likely to contribute to “the continuation of the polity,” “ensure healthy future generations,” and so on. Forget about “first do no harm.” “Services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens,” quoth Dr. Emanuel, “are not basic and should not be guaranteed.” Got a loopy grandparent or a kid who is playing with half-a-deck? What can they contribute to “the continuation of the polity” or “healthy future generations”? The internet blogger Glenn Reynolds made the observation, amusing and scary in equal measure, that what we’re dealing with here bears an awful similarity to the troubled “cash for clunkers” program: “First Grandma’s Caprice then Grandma.”

We live in interesting times. The problem with the piece excerpted above is the inclination of the author to espouse a pure libertarian capitalist type vision of what a good future would be. He praises the glories of a "mercenary" mentality and hails the rule of the market as the path to freedom. Unfortunately, though, such a view inevitably mandates that the consumerist society will rise again. So long as the libertarian right mistakes license for liberty, they shall never understand the perils of the market unchained. Marx did not rise up in a vacuum--the industrialists did screw the workers. Profit does not necessarily reward virtue--it can be gained by vile practices and can reward shoddy quality products. A truly Darwinian economic environment would lead to the same serfdom and tyranny offered by the state. Neither government nor business writ large offers a human future unless captained by virtuous humanity, and even then we need the two ever dwelling in tension to ensure a human future for all.