Cass Sunstein, with Richard Thaler, launched “libertarian paternalism". I have much to say about LP and Thaler in “‘Libertarian Paternalism’ Revisited”. This post and the several to follow it will focus on other aspects of Sunstein’s infamous career as a “public intellectual”.
Way back in 2004, when CS was guest-blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy, his maiden effort was “The Greatest Generation“. Here are some relevant passages:
On January 11, 1944, the United States was involved in its longest conflict since the Civil War. The war effort was going well. Victory was no longer in serious doubt. The real question was the nature of the peace. At noon, Roosevelt sent the text of his most ambitious State of the Union address to Congress. Ill with a cold, Roosevelt did not make the customary trip to Capitol Hill to appear in person. Instead he spoke to the nation via radio - the first and only time a State of the Union address was also a Fireside Chat….
Roosevelt began by emphasizing that the "supreme objective for the future" -- the objective for all nations -- was captured "in one word: Security." Roosevelt argued that the term "means not only physical security which provides safety from attacks by aggressors," but includes as well "economic security, social security, moral security." Roosevelt insisted that "essential to peace is a decent standard of living for all individual men and women and children in all nations. Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want."
Roosevelt looked back, and not entirely approvingly, to the framing of the Constitution. At its inception, the nation had grown "under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures."
But over time, these rights had proved inadequate. Unlike the Constitution's framers, "we have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence." As Roosevelt saw it, "necessitous men are not free men," not least because those who are hungry and jobless "are the stuff out of which dictatorships are made." Recalling the New Deal, he cut to the chase: The nation had "accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed."…
Having catalogued … eight rights [expansions of the welfare state], Roosevelt said that "we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights." Roosevelt asked "the Congress to explore the means for implementing this economic bill of rights—for it is definitely the responsibility of the Congress to do so."
… The leader of the Greatest Generation had a distinctive project, running directly from the New Deal to the war on Fascism -- a project that he believed to be radically incomplete. We don't honor him, and we don't honor those who elected him, if we forget what that project was all about.
I know quite well what that project was all about. It was about turning Americans into wards of the welfare state -- not intentionally, but in effect. And there were plenty of contemporary critics who knew what it was all about and tried in vain to warn their countrymen.
I know as much as anyone my age can know about the Great Depression and the fears that it spawned in Americans. My parents and their many siblings were young adults during the Depression, and all of them had to go to work at an early age (when they could find work) because their families were poor. Knowing the members of my parents' generation as well as I did, I reject the notion that "true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence". Economic security and independence are always relative matters. I had little economic security when I was 21, but I had plenty of freedom, as did my parents when they were 21. Freedom (in a society that has free political institutions) doesn't depend on economic security, it depends on inner security (self-reliance) -- a trait that many Americans of later generations lack because they have developed the habit of looking to government, instead of themselves, for the solutions to their problems. You are not free if you have sold your soul to the devil in exchange for a bit of gold.
It is fatuous to say that those who are hungry and jobless "are the stuff out of which dictatorships are made." The United States didn't become a dictatorship (despite what many Republicans said about FDR). Britain didn't become a dictatorship, and on, and on. The notable exceptions (Germany, Russia, Italy, and Japan) arose from other, pre-Depression causes. Nevertheless, FDR finally got his way -- posthumously -- as Truman, Johnson, and others completed most of the work of the New Deal.
The New Deal was born of fear. FDR succumbed to that fear. Ironically, FDR said it best: "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." It was fear that caused FDR to do exactly the wrong thing. Instead of letting the economy work its way out of the Depression, as it would have sooner than it did under FDR's "stewardship," he began the long descent into American socialism by turning the tinkerers loose on the economy. (Most of them were -- and still are -- lawyers and academics with no real idea about the business of business.) At the same time, he seduced most of the masses into dependence on government. The cycle of power and dependence begun by FDR has only gained strength over the years.
I have owned and managed businesses in the regulatory-welfare state of "economic freedom" that is FDR's legacy. I'm here to tell you that Americans were made worse off by the New Deal and are being made even worse off by its progeny. That's FDR's legacy, and I most decidedly do not want to honor it.
To be continued.