The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.
This memorable epigram by Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) is so appropriate today, in view of the imminent leadership conventions of both the left and the right in Alberta. Here come the promises that society’s desire for decent health care, high standards of education and a livable environment will be granted by the omnipotent power of the government, which only has to enact the right laws to make these wishes come true.
Of course these ideals are desirable — who would disagree with them? But a desire implies an individual responsibility to obtain these values, not an acquired ‘right’ to have them provided (somehow) by fiat. That somehow always winds up violating someone else’s rights, including property rights. What’s worse is that we wind up with the spectacle of shaky health care for everyone, dolts coming out of our public schools and, in the future, men living in mud huts so as not to disturb the environment.
If you have trouble with principles, let me entertain you with this (fictional, I hope) scenario where a politician is elected on his promise that since it is desirable for women to look like a young Katherine Hepburn, and men to look like George Clooney, then the government will pay for the procedures necessary to make this happen. At first, the plastic surgeons are making a fortune, some people make the cover of People, and then the inevitable happens.
The surgeons can’t keep up, women and men want to look like someone else, the system is going broke, rules and regulatory boards have to be established, etc., and in the end, everything boils down to the lowest common denominator, and a lot of people look like Ralph Klein.
Bastiat, and a number of other champions of individual rights, said that the only rational purpose of a government is an extension of the right of a citizen to self-defence, and he agrees to allow a government to organize that right.
As to everything else, in the words of another Frenchman: laissez-nous faire.
Eric Joly, St. Albert