America’s Theme: How Much Should the Government Intervene in the Lives of Its Citizens?
When a government officially backs away from regulating the lives of its citizens and businesses, the term that is used is laissez faire. Another irony is that those who are most favor a system of laissez faire today would be the last Americans alive who would wanted to follow a system based on a French term. Laissez faire essentially is French for let it be. In other words, if left well enough alone, the people will do the right thing and the government won’t need to interfere. Laissez faire was essentially business as usual in America until really the 20th century. For most of America’s history it worked pretty well, but then again for most of America’s history we had an agriculture-based economy where people were forced to do the right thing because they themselves owned the means of production.
The industrial revolution brought about what is known as the Gilded Age in America. It was a time of unrestrained immigration due to the overwhelming need for laborers to stoke the fires of the economic revolution taking place. These new laborers no longer owned the means of production, had no say in how business was run, and had no recourse when the owners exploited them. It was the moment when American government was most called upon to intervene. Instead, they sat back and did nothing, giving rise to robber barons and corruption. The idea was that continuing the hands-off approach to business in America would free up any obstacles to success. The strongest business would survive. It was a case of Social Darwinism run amok and it resulted in the worst excesses of capitalism the country had ever seen. (Though an argument could be made that it wasn’t nearly as bad as the excesses of businesses like Enron, WorldCom and Halliburton today.) The end result of the Gilded Age was the widest divide between the rich and poor in America until recent years.
The coming of the 20th century brought some attempts at progressive reform and antitrust legislation. (Legislation that is sorely needed today, alas.) This rise in both demand and supply of government intervention to deal with the rampant corruption was a direct result of the laissez faire policy. The progressive era of the first President Roosevelt began a move toward increasing regulation of business, while the second Pres. Roosevelt, faced with the Great Depression, met the need to supply even more government intervention to create jobs and care for the healthy and welfare of its people. Pres. Roosevelt’s New Deal, in fact, went so far as to recreate almost from scratch the whole concept of what the US government should do to help its citizens. The country had always been willing to ask its citizens for their life, but was rather stingy in providing means to improve their health.
In the decades since Pres. Roosevelt’s attempt to overhaul the relationship between the government and its citizens, there has been an ideological tug of war between those looking for the government to promote the general welfare and those who fear it places obstacles to their pursuit of liberty. LBJ’s Great Society represents the last gasp of true liberal government oversight. Government interest in the welfare of its citizens has since been receding at an alarming rate. Which is why it is so ironic that politics in America today appears to have undergone some bizarro world type 180 degree spin. It is the liberals of today who protest Pres. Bush’s unceasing restriction of civil liberties who are complaining the loudest about governmental intrusion, while American conservatives are oddly unconcerned about the federal government’s increasingly active role in overseeing their everyday decisions.
Could it be that liberals are the only ones who realize we somehow got tossed into one of those Donnie Darko tangent universes? Whenever I tell a conservative to look more deeply into the investigation of the NSA spying programs, I often feel like I’m Noah Wyle giving Donnie Darko that book about time travel. I’m not aware that I’m trying to get him to do something to get us back to the real universe, but somehow I know I have to. The view of the role of the federal government in the lives of Americans has arced like a diver and it now rests underwater, with everything somehow distorted and unreal. Whereas liberals used to rally the drumbeat for increased government intervention, today conservatives are the defenders of encroaching government intrusion.
