"The first problem is that the virtue of
benevolence can attach itself, like a parasite, merely to the having of
good intentions. The crimes of communist regimes often avoided censure
by virtue of the supposed good intentions of those committing them.
Again, people lacking integrity (in, for example, exploiting claims for
expenses) commonly defend themselves by the claim that they had broken
no rules. Further, the term “interest,” even in the moral context of
“self-interest,” invokes politics, understood as an arena in which
interests conflict with each other. Hence at its least sophisticated,
one form of self-ascribed good intentions may be the mere fact of
supporting welfarist political policies. Such a view, not uncommon in
leftish parties, takes the illusion of costless good intentions to its
limit.
And this leads us to a second defect of this version of the moral life:
That altruism and benevolence, as the essence of goodness, cast into
the shade such more elusive and subtle virtues as integrity and courage.
One notable collapse of integrity consists in the happy belief that the
costs of one’s policies will be borne by others, and particularly in
politics, by the more heavily taxed rich. Just such a belief is a
popular recourse in the more demagogic versions of current politics.
Such a view corresponds precisely to the corruption that Greek
philosophers diagnosed in democracy as a political system, understanding
it as an instrument by which the poor might plunder the rich."
"Even the device of off-loading the costs of one’s public altruism on the
taxable rich, however, is merely a political solution to the problem,
and what politics gives, politics can also take away. The ideal solution
to such a problem is—an ideal! The public altruism of welfare must be
entrenched in the ideals of justice and of rights. A real solution to
the conflict between self and others must transcend this distinction
itself, for in a real community, cooperation transcends conflicts of
interest between individuals. Such, I think, is the logic behind our
admiration for “social justice,” however difficult we may find it to
define. And it seems to me that in the concept of justice, in its
contrast with self-interest, we have one clue to the destiny of our free
society: That we shall never quite be free of the illusion that our
psychological foundation in self-interest is the imperfection, the vice,
that stands in the way of the social and human perfections that would
create a better world."
Some people take the view that we in the
West are fortunate to enjoy freedom, because it is a universal human
aspiration that has been commonly frustrated in most societies. This is
one of the more pernicious illusions we entertain about human kind. Most
people have never lived in free societies, nor exhibited any desire or
capacity for freedom. Totalitarian movements reveal even the danger that
many who have enjoyed freedom can be happy to abandon it in the name of
some passionate cause. The illusion that everyone wants to be free
means only, perhaps, that people don’t much like being frustrated, but
that is quite different from the self-discipline involved in an
association of individualists managing their own lives. This illusion
has been happily indulged by many commentators on the “Arab Spring” of
recent times, in which the instability of authoritarian regimes might
suggest a whiff of libertarian feeling. What most people seem to want,
however, is to know exactly where they stand and to be secure in their
understanding of their situation.
"Rules and processes are risky because they will produce unexpected and
sometimes unwelcome outcomes, and it is this contrast which makes
freedom constantly vulnerable to those who try to seduce us with dreams
of perfection. My argument has been that even perfectly valid ways of
explaining ourselves can easily slide into pejorative accounts of
freedom. When that happens, it can seem obvious that governments should
not merely regulate the economy (as they must as part of the rule of law
in modern societies) but that they should also intervene to manage its
outcomes by the use of subsidy redistribution and welfarism. These
policies are suggested by the slide from a descriptive account of human
psychology (the pursuit of self-interest) to a corrupt identification of
the description with the vice of selfishness, ruthlessness, greed, and
similar evils. The reality of pursuing self-interest in a free modern
society is no doubt better described by invoking some such virtue as
self-reliance, but that is the demand which a free society makes on
everyone, and it is that demand which is often found burdensome by those
who find security in a structure of welfare from which they may
benefit"
"In politics, every policy has some advantages and also some
disadvantages. But notable about the disadvantages of this range of
welfarist reforms is that they have led most rich Western states into a
condition of chronic bankruptcy. The crisis of the early twenty-first
century is no doubt attributable to bankers and to other public actors,
but unmistakably central to the problem is a level of both personal and
public debt, which is unsustainable, and will get worse for more than
demographic reasons. And when governments become indebted, they have
virtually no solutions to the problem except to deceive their
populations with inflation and other monetary forms of smoke and
mirrors."
"It is not merely governments that act corruptly. It is also the
democratic voter. As we have seen, the demos is also corrupted. A great
deal of political sentimentalism floats on the illusion that rising
public expenditure would not affect most of the population because the
rich can be taxed more heavily. Much indignation is often expended about
large firms that “avoid” taxation, as if taxation were a form of
charity one should offer to governments, rather than known rates to be
paid by specific and well-defined classes of taxpayer. The problem is in
part that the rules of taxation have become so complicated that skilled
professionals are needed to reveal what must be paid and what may be
kept. Politicians however are keen to talk of the rich “paying their
share” of taxation; it is a cry advanced under the popular rubric of
“fairness.” It is only as it dawns upon voters that the costs of welfare
cannot forever be loaded onto the rich without serious economic
consequences that public opinion turns against welfare spending."
"It seems to me that our preoccupation with the defects of our
civilization is a standing temptation, and a dangerous one, to have
recourse to civil authority in order to deal with what we may be
persuaded to understand as social imperfections. And that preoccupation
with our imperfections is most commonly grounded in the corrupt sense of
explaining freedom in terms of self-interest."
"To recap, such an assumption about the motivation of moderns invokes the
moral criterion of justice or fairness as condemning many of the
consequences of our economic life (in terms of the supposed distribution
of benefits). Such a view in turn generates a succession of vulnerable
classes of people each with claims on the state for redress. Welfare
programs responding to this process have no determinate end in sight.
There is no viable conception of a society without vulnerable classes
demanding special treatment as victims of one or other kind of injustice
or unfairness. We begin to conceive of modern societies as associations
of incompetents and cripples, which is absurd. The human condition is
not like that. We entertain many foolish ideas, and no doubt will
continue to do so. But this is a piece of nonsense that we can no longer
afford."
