Like any monster, government feeds on fear

April 14, 12:09 PMCivil Liberties ExaminerJ.D. Tuccille

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Economist Robert Higgs specializes in
studying the role crises and our fears play
in fueling the growth of government.

Wasn't there an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which a demon fed on fear? That's a common enough conceit in fiction. People understand that fear weakens them and empowers all the "monsters" that may torment them. But despite this awareness, the greatest monster of all -- government -- continues to gorge itself, thriving and growing on our fear.

The feeding frenzy is easy enough to understand. When people are frightened and feel vulnerable, they look for protection. For better or worse, government is explicitly tasked with defending our borders and maintaining law and order, and is increasingly seen as a first responder against woes arising from economic hardship, disease, cultural change and just about anything else you can imagine. If people once turned to their gods for succor, now they go to their legislators.

That increasing reliance on government provides a powerful opening for ambitious and unprincipled politicians to point to crises, real and imagined, and promise to cure what ails us -- in return for more power and a larger role in our lives. Just look at the events of the past six months, during which two U.S. administrations from different parties have demanded extraordinary power to interfere in private business decisions and spend money that doesn't exist, all, we're told, to save us from a financial "crisis."

As usual, we rushed to give up whatever was demanded. We never seem to get it back.

The journalist H. L. Mencken once described the process with a touch of cynicism, saying, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

More academically, economist Robert Higgs has made a career of studying the way government grows on the back of our fears, notably in his book, Crisis and Leviathan. He uses the term "ratchet effect" to describe the phenomenon by which the state expands in size and power in response to popular fears, never again to quite shrink back to its old size. Recently, in the pages of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, he wrote:

How do once-free people lose their liberty? The formula may be stated succinctly: crisis and leviathan. The procedure for government officials and their supporters who hope to gain by quashing the people’s liberties is, first, cause a serious crisis, thereby heightening the public’s fears, and, second, blame others for the crisis, pose as the people’s savior, and thereby justify the seizure of new powers allegedly necessary to remedy the crisis and to prevent the recurrence of such crises in the future.

Recent news reports bring us a perfect illustration—one of many during the past year of financial debacles and worsening economic recession. According to an Associated Press article, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner asked Congress on March 24 for “broad new powers to regulate non-bank financial companies.” Geithner, of course, earnestly expressed the finest motives: “We must ensure that our country never faces this situation again.” Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke joined him in “calling for greater governmental authority over complicated and troubled financial companies.” These men want the legal power “to seize control of institutions, take over their bad loans and other illiquid assets and sell good ones to competitors.”

Government has been granted almost every power it has demanded in recent months -- awesome power to effectively nationalize banks, fire corporate heads and dictate economic decisions. The term "socialism" flies around freely these days as a description for rapidly adopted policies, though Robert Scheer has, perhaps more accurately, termed the elevation of government decision-making over private enterprise as "fascism." Either way, it's a massive expansion of government undertaken in response to a perceived crisis situation that was, arguably, created by government itself by misusing powers it acquired in the past.

Higgs doesn't believe that these new powers are actually necessary or helpful, just as he doesn't believe that the powers adopted by the Bush administration in response to 9/11 necessarily made us safer. In 2007, he pointed out:

[J]ust six weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the government enacted the USA PATRIOT Act, which greatly trenched on civil liberties and long-established rights, effectively demolished the Fourth Amendment, and gave a mighty boost to the US police state. Other measures moving in the same direction followed soon afterward, including nationalization of the airline-security industry and creation of the bureaucratic monstrosity known as the Department of Homeland Security, an organization as menacing in its ideological underpinnings as it is feckless and absurd in its day-to-day operations.

Higgs is an equal-opportunity critic of expansive government power, and a skeptic toward claims that we need politicians to save us from the bogeymen of the moment.

That's important, because among the participants in government, there's no one party that's exclusively guilty of building power over our lives, and no clear alternative that has defended our liberty when it's held Congress or the White House. If you're looking to find shelter with the Republicans or the Democrats, you're wasting your time. They both feed on fear; more accurately, they take advantage of the degree to which government feeds on fear.

Fear. Few things frighten us more than failing health and the thought that we won't have access to proper care. look for government to expand itself next with promises to soothe all our concerns by "reforming" health care.

We know that fear feeds monsters, but we never seem to learn our lesson. Like teenagers in any slasher movie, we keep making the same mistake and letting the monster get us time and again. In the end, the problem lies not just in the monster itself -- government -- but also in the people who let their fear drive them to surrender a little more of their (and our) freedom in the hope that a ritual sacrifice of liberty will solve every problem.

email J.D.: civilliberties (at) tuccille.com