Something to ponder as July turns to August and public policy makers begin to ramp up to do what they do:
The mission of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy “is to defend the interests of taxpayers, citizens and businesses against an increasingly burdensome and intrusive government.”
“To that end, we will formulate and advocate public policies that roll back the size and scope of local government as well as create a more accountable government. Our efforts will be guided by the principles of free enterprise, property rights, civil society and individual freedom that are the bedrock upon which this nation was founded.”
“But,” as late political essayist Ralph Raico asked in a spot-on essay recalling the Wilhelm von Humboldt book, “The Sphere and Duties of Government (1792)” (in the very first edition of “The New Individualist Review” in 1961), “what is the indispensable minimum of government activity?”
Many of you likely have never heard of Humboldt. He was an 18th– and 19th-century Prussian philosopher who, as Raico recalled, found “that the one good that society cannot provide for itself is security against those who aggress against the person and property of others.”
“[Humboldt’s] answer to the question that he posed at the beginning of his work – ‘What limits ought to be set to the activity of the state?’ — is ‘that the provision of security, against both external enemies and internal dissensions must constitute the purpose of the state and occupy the circle of its activity.’”
Continued Raico:
“As for the services that it is commonly held must fall within the scope of government action, as, for instance, charity, Humboldt believes that they need not be provided by political institutions but can safely be entrusted to social ones.
“’It is only requisite that freedom of association be given to individual parts of the nation or to the nation itself’ in order for charitable ends to be satisfactorily fulfilled.
“In this, as indeed throughout his whole book, Humboldt shows himself to be a thoughtful but passionate believer in the efficacy of truly social forces, in the possibility of great social ends being achieved without any necessity for direction on the part of the state.
“Humboldt thus allies himself with the thinkers who rejected the state in order to affirm society.”
Contemporary public policy makers likely will chide this At Large for recounting, if not embracing, such “old-think” philosophies from more than two-and-a-quarter centuries ago.
“It’s simply not the way the real world works anymore,” I can almost hear them saying.
Of course, these are the same people that contend the similarly aged U.S. Constitution is “old-think,” too, and violate it ad nauseam.
More’s the pity, some will say. But public policy officials who, by rote, dismiss the citizenry’s objection to increasingly burdensome and intrusive government — and are so hell-bent on transferring wealth instead of fostering its creation –deserve no pity.
Instead, they deserve the public’s increasing wrath and dismissal.
Sixty-two years ago, in 1961, when Ralph Raico was recounting Wilhelm von Humboldt’s wise pronouncements, he noted that the ideas set forth by Humboldt “should be proving so relevant to contemporary research into man and society, [that it] is a sign of the clearly discernible trend toward individualism in present-day thought at the highest levels.”
At the highest levels of liberty- and freedom-loving people that is.
Sadly, then as now, government types who perennially believe they know best still haven’t gotten the message. The Founders surely are spinning in their graves.
It’s long past time that We the People stop being conscripted soldiers in the government’s perverse war for dependence.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
