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| Murphy and Biden -- United Press International |
"It profits me
but little, after all, that a vigilant authority... averts all dangers from my
path... if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my
life” -- Alexis de Tocqueville
U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, up for re-election in 2024, has turned his attention to the moral
superiority of the regulatory state and “loneliness.”
His ruminations on both appear in a recent story published
in The
New Republic.
“When I” -- Grace
Segers, a staff writer at The New Republic – “asked Murphy whether he connected the
failures of deregulation to a rise in loneliness, he said that ‘the exercise of
regulating the market is the way in which we look out for the common good. When
you outsource all morality to the market, and you deregulate every industry,
you’re removing an opportunity for us to have a connected conversation about our
morals [and] our values,’ Murphy argued.”
It is a pale argument to suppose 1) the U.S. government has
been wary of regulation since the publication of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, 2) that regulating
the market is the way in which we look out for “the common good,” 3) that
morality in the United Sates is “outsourced to a free market,” or 4) that the
deregulation of industry “removes any opportunity” we as free citizens may have
to discuss among ourselves topics of morality and values.
No one, least of all in the pages The New Republic, has removed Murphy’s opportunity to ostentatiously
display his morals and values, and there certainly is no shortage of regulation
in the United States.
“Across the U.S.,” U.S. News reports, “state
regulations contain 416 million words – more than 23,000 hours' worth of
reading – and more than 6 million of those words are regulatory restrictions,
or instances of such things as ‘must,’ ‘may not,’ ‘prohibited,’ ‘required’ and
‘shall.’ These rules that make up how states and their industries function
aren't equally distributed; some states are home to far more of those
regulations than others, according to a recent report from
the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.”
Forbes reports: “The bottom line is
that in today's America, most binding rules come from agencies
(unelected) rather than elected lawmakers (emphasis mine).”
“Let's look at year-end 2016 for starters. Federal
departments, agencies, and commissions issued 3,853 rules in 2016, while
Congress passed and the president signed 214 bills into law—a ratio of 18 rules for every law.”
Such a surfeit of regulation has led some to wonder whether liberty
itself is a social good that should not be subject, except under stringent
conditions, to the vagaries of unelected regulators. Murphy is among the
unconcerned.
One way not to be lonely is to court a woman, get married, have
children and stay married -- preferably in that order. Is it legitimate to ask
whether the breakdown of the family – Mom, Dad and 2.5 children, the number of offspring
necessary to replace the current population – has anything remotely to do with
America’s sense of loneliness and social alienation?
Senator Murphy was not asked by the New Republic’s reporter,
what he has done while in office to strengthen any of the “little platoons of
democracy,” Edmund Burke’s expression for social institutions that should
remain, both de Tocqueville and Burke thought, in a freedom zone safe from
ambitious regulators and social reformists with knives in their brains.
There is no such thing as an organic structure imposed by
government regulators on a society that radical reformists suppose is in need
of fundamental, systemic change. To change liberty’s bloom by attacking its
roots is the ambition of every post-French Revolution autocrat in history,
particularly fascist and socialist autocrats. All non-organic cultural social
structures imposed by central authorities are easily and quickly corrupted. And
eventually the corruptors turn to totalitarian measures in order to effect
fundamental social change. Neither Tocqueville nor Edmund Burke were advocates
of social control through central, government regulation.
National Public Radio tells us that
President Joe Biden, chiefly through government regulation, plans
“to eliminate fossil fuels as a form of energy generation in the U.S. by 2035.
The White House set out a target of 80% renewable energy generation by 2030 and
100% carbon-free electricity five years later. With 79% of total U.S. energy
production still coming from fossil fuel sources as of 2021, achieving
this goal will require billions of dollars in investments.” Experts, swelling
with hubris, tell us the plan is workable.
Murphy is in the service of a President apparently suffering
from extreme hubris, which the ancient Greeks, not to mention Shakespeare,
denounced as the bitter root of all tragedies. Aristotle tells us “Hubris consists in doing and saying things
that cause shame to the victim…simply for the pleasure of it. Retaliation is
not hubris, but revenge…Young men and the rich are hubristic because they think
they are better than other people.”
Biden is rich,
thanks in part to the questionable activities of his son Hunter, and Murphy is
young – an explosively hubristic combination.
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