The Will of the People Versus Freedom

Inverted Trees

We were grimly amused to read of a debate taking place in the Auckland "Super City" elections. Some mayoral candidates were confirming their intent, if elected, to get the council involved in providing housing for the poor and indigent.

No! No! No! said some. This is unconscionable. It is not the job of a local body to provide housing. That is the job of central government. It is entirely wrong to duplicate what central government is already doing.

Here we are confronted with a big fat question-begging elephant in the room. Granted that central government does have a ministry of housing and spends millions upon millions of dollars upon housing for the poor and indigent. The question is why this ought to be central government's job or responsibility or preserve or bailiwick in the first place.

Now the people sounding the objection to local council involvement in housing were limited government, free-marketers--of the worst kind. We mean by this that their free-market principles are not based upon any rigorous philosophical or religious principles. They are, go-with-the-flow free marketers. Government has taken upon itself the responsibility to heal, educate, house, clothe, feed, and brush the teeth of everyone. Great, say our fair weather free marketers. Just don't go any further. Don't do any more. Their concept of freedom is the ever diminishing and shrinking "freedom of the gaps", of what's left, of what government has not yet encroached upon.  This kind of  freedom is that which is sibilantly hissed by Wormtongue. 

These are wolves-in-sheep's-clothing free marketers. They espouse freedom and limited government, but gladly accept any extension of government power (once it has become established and institutionalised). They are conservative free marketers. They espouse the abstract ideal of limited government and protection of property and individual rights, but want to conserve any extension of state power just so long as it has become conventional and accepted by the population at large.

Liberty, freedom, and self-responsibility are not mere abstractions to be conjured with. Unless, of course you are a humanist, and you really do believe that all government, all law, all civil rules and regulations come from the hearts of men and possess no higher authority than the "will of the people". If so, then no extension of government power is intrinsically or implicitly or absolutely wrong, provided the people want it. If the people want the government to be involved in providing houses for the poor and indigent, then freedom rights, private property rights, and free-market principles must be restricted to what's left over. There is no limit to the extension of the powers of government once justified and authorised by the consent of the governed. This means that liberty, freedom and self-responsibility are meaningless and vacuous concepts.

The "will of the people" can neither establish nor protect freedom. The will of the people must never be sovereign, if freedom is to be established maintained in society. This is so self-evident that only the confused would stumble over it. Take, for example, any civil dispute between us and our neighbours--say, over something like boundary pegs or broken contracts. If our freedoms and rights are to be subject to the "will of the people" all it would take is for sufficient numbers of people to side with our contentious neighbour for our freedoms and rights to evaporate more quickly than raw alcohol upon the skin.

The sovereign will of the people is but one fruit of freedom, not the root, trunk, and branch of it. Inverted trees are the Devil's parody on all true and good living things.