"How did things ever get so far?" One answer is that politicians have been enormously successful at convincing people that they cannot live a satisfying and productive life without government. Where once people looked to themselves and to their families to solve their problems, they now look to government. Exploiting the all-too-common qualitites of greed and envy, politicians have convinced people that if they want something, they have a right to it. The old-fashioned virtues of self-reliance and self-sufficiency are no longer much heard of. Even something as basic as raising children has been turned over to government, with many parents abdicating their parental authority by permitting government to set curfews and keep their children from smoking.

Wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people.

Be it noted that even "temporary" dictatorships are achieved by the direct and emphatic promise to the people that their liberties eventually will be restored...A sobering commentary upon the processes of mass psychology is the idea in all of these countries that Liberty may be achieved and secured only by sacrifice of liberties to the efficiency of tyranny.

Shall we ignore the fact that when we speak of government planning we presuppose the existence in government of someone with superhuman wisdom to do the planning? Shall we ignore the fact that when government does the planning, the coercive powers of government will be used to carry the plans into effect at an enormous sacrifice of individual freedom? Apparently some of our present-day leaders, both in government and out, believe we should.

HUSTED, RALPH, The Moral Foundation of Freedom, The Freeman, March 1966

But it may be asked where we are to go for relief from the misuses of social power, if not to the State...One may put it in a word that while government is by its nature concerned with the administration of justice, the State is by its nature concerned with the administration of law - law, which the State itself manufactures for the service of its own primary ends. Therefore an appeal to the State, based on the ground of justice, is futile in any circumstances, for whatever action the State might take in response to it would be conditioned by the State's own paramount interest, and would hence be bound to result, as we see such action invariably resulting, in as great injustice as that which it pretends to correct, or as a rule, greater. The question thus presumes, in short, that the State may on occasion be persuaded to act out of character; and this is levity...It will be clear to anyone who takes the trouble to think the matter through, that under a regime of natural order, that is to say under government, which makes no positive interventions whatever on the individual, but only negative interventions in behalf of simple justice - not law, but justice - misuses of social power would be effectively corrected.

Thus we see how ignorance and delusion concerning the nature of the State combine with extreme moral debility and myopic self-interest - what Ernest Renan so well calls la bassesse de l'homme intéressé - to enable the steadily accelerated conversion of social power into State power that has gone on from the beginning of our political independence.

Every intervention by the State enables another, and this in turn another, and so on indefinitely; and the State stands ever ready and eager to make them, often on its own motion, often again wangling plausibility for them through the specious suggestion of interested persons. Sometimes the matter at issue is in its nature simple, socially necessary, and devoid of any character that would bring it into the purview of politics. For convenience, however, complications are erected on it; then presently someone sees that these complications are exploitable, and proceeds to exploit them; then another, and another, until the rivalries and collisions of interest thus generated issue in a more or less general disorder. When this takes place, the logical thing, obviously, is to recede, and let the disorder be settled in the slower and more troublesome way, but the only effective way, through the operation of natural laws. But in such circumstances recession is never for a moment thought of; the suggestion would be put down as sheer lunacy. Instead, the interests unfavourably affected - little aware, perhaps, how much worse the cure is than the disease, or at any rate little caring - immediately call on the State to cut in arbitrarily between cause and effect, and clear up the disorder out of hand. The State then intervenes by imposing another set of complications upon the first; these in turn are found exploitable, another demand arises, another set of complications, still more intricate, is erected upon the first two; and the same sequence is gone through again and again until the recurrent disorder becomes acute enough to open the way for a sharking political adventurer to come forward and, always alleging necessity, the tyrant's plea, to organize a coup d'État.

[The individual] has always the expectation that the State will learn by its mistakes, and do better. Granting that its technique with social purposes is blundering, wasteful and vicious - even admitting,... that wherever the State is, there is villainy - he sees no reason why, with an increase of experience and responsibility, the State should not improve. Something like this appears to be the basic assumption of collectivism. Let but the State confiscate all social power, and its interests will become identical with those of society. Granting that the State is of anti-social origin, and that it has borne a uniformly anti-social character throughout its history, let it but extinguish social power completely, and its character will change; it will merge with society, and thereby become society's efficient and disinterested organ.

We need not consider the various instruments that the State employs in building up its prestige; most of them are well known, and their uses well understood. There is one, however, which is in a sense peculiar to the republican State. Republicanism permits the individual to persuade himself that the State is his creation, that State action is his action, that when it expresses itself it expresses him, and when it is glorified he is glorified. The republican State encourages this persuasion with all its power, aware that it is the most efficient instrument for enhancing its own prestige.

[T]he mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem, presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources. . . . When the mass suffers any ill-fortune, or simply feels some strong appetite, its great temptation is that permanent sure possibility of obtaining everything, without effort, struggle, doubt, or risk, merely by touching a button and setting the mighty machine in motion...The result of this tendency...will be fatal. Spontaneous social action will be broken up over and over again by State intervention; no new seed will be able to fructify. Society will have to live for the State, man for the governmental machine. And as after all it is only a machine, whose existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports around it, the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of machinery, more gruesome than the death of a living organism. Such was the lamentable fate of ancient civilization.

If Big Brother comes to America, he will not be a fearsome, foreboding figure with a heart-chilling, omnipresent glare as in 1984. He will come with a smile on his face, a quip on his lips, a wave to the crowd, and a press that (a) dutifully reports the suppressive measures he is taking to save the nation from internal chaos and foreign threat; and (b) gingerly questions whether he will be able to succeed.

It is easy to foresee that the time is drawing near when man will be less and less able to produce, of himself alone, the commonest necessaries of life. The task of the governing power will therefore perpetually increase, and its very efforts will extend it every day. The more it stands in the place of associations, the more will individuals, losing the notion of combining together, require its assistance: these are causes and effects which unceasingly engender each other.

Good intentions will always be pleaded for any assumption of power. The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.