Gov: Wrong Tool for the Right Job--Cold Nanny

By their very nature, bureaucracies are often distant, cumbersome, lumbering, unresponsive, and the list of negative adjectives goes on.

However, what strikes me as incredibly odd is that leftist causes are typically matters of deep compassion and love, and yet those loving causes are being turned over to one of the most cold, unloving, faceless entities on the planet--i.e. the government. Big-hearted issues are being shifted to relatively heartless and faceless bureaucracies.

Metaphorically, it is like attempting to nurture and love using machines.

The movement to embrace the cold nanny of government has spiked of late in response to the increasingly popular notion of "nudge," which Mark Tapson described as: "a seemingly innocuous form of social engineering designed to steer us lazy, infantile Americans subtly toward making the 'correct' choices in our personal and social lives. He [David Brooks] calls it 'social paternalism'; think of it as a kinder, gentler totalitarianism." (See HERE)

Mark goes on to say: "Brooks looks to saviors he calls 'public spirited people' to design ways to rescue us from our incompetence and sloth. These betters of ours are designing 'choice architectures' that guide us, like cattle, in the direction of what the left deems to be the proper moral and societal choices." (ibid.)

This underscores what I said about the Left in my post on Elitism and Specialization.

Mark continues: "In the one paragraph in his piece that will resonate with everyone who isn’t a utopian academic, Brooks then plays devil’s advocate. 'Do we want government stepping in to protect us from our own mistakes?… This kind of soft paternalism will inevitably slide into a hard paternalism, with government elites manipulating us into doing the sorts of things they want us to do.' (Of course, that is precisely what nudging is.) And Brooks acknowledges that policy makers are human too, and could 'design imperfect interventions even if they mean well.' And there you have it: for all the well-meaning intentions of the left to perfect human nature and design an earthly paradise, they live in denial that their supposedly benign experiments constrain freedom and end in totalitarianism." (See HERE)

Is it any wonder, then, that leftist causes often fail and turn out just the opposite from what was intended? (See the Leftist LUNCs on Obamacare, Environmentalism, and Government Welfare. More examples will be listed once they are posted.)

In short, governments are good tools for some things, but bad tools for worthy big-hearted liberal projects.

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