Monday, April 12, 2010
Pinko Versailles
Believers in aristocracy and socialism share a faith in centralized rule, in rule by command rather than by voluntary cooperation. They differ in who should rule: whether an elite determined by birth or experts supposedly chosen on merit. Both proclaim, no doubt sincerely, that they wish to promote the well-being of the “general public,” that they know what is in the “public interest” and how to obtain it better than the ordinary person. Both, therefore, profess a paternalistic philosophy.
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But in offering their political support to sympathetic candidates in exchange for lucrative compensation packages, a number of the public-sector organizations have engaged in a politics that savors of corruption. Their allegiance, like that of the Praetorian Guard in Gibbon’s Rome, can be purchased only by those contenders for power who are willing to bestow what Gibbon called a “liberal donative” out of the public purse.
Liberal the donatives certainly are. The average salary of federal workers rose in 2009 to $71,206, a figure that does not include bonuses, overtime, fringe benefits, pension accruals, and the priceless gift of all-but-absolute job security. Some 19 percent of the civil service received salaries of more than $100,000. (The average private-sector wage in the same year was $40,331.)
In The Human Condition (1958) Hannah Arendt contended that the idolatry of nature and necessity that is characteristic of the social dispensation might yet, if unchecked, “reduce man as a whole, in all his activities, to the level of a conditioned and behaving animal.” In sacrificing the classical imagination of liberty on the altar of social necessity, liberals have brought us a little closer to the realization of that dark prophecy.
Sit, Rot, sit!
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