Do As You’re Told! – The Case For Social Engineering
Wherever we turn we are confronted with politicians, political pundits, television talking heads, and editorial page commentators, all of whom offer an array of plans, programs, and projects that will solve the problems of the world – if only government is given the power and authority to remake society in the design proposed.
Even many of those who claim to be suspicious of “big government” and the Washington beltway powers-that-be, invariably offer their own versions of plans, programs, and projects they assert are compatible with or complementary to a free society.
The differences too often boil down simply to matters of how the proposer wants to use government to remake or modify people and society. The idea that people should or could be left alone to design, undertake and manage their own plans and interactions with others is sometimes given lip service, but never entirely advocated or proposed in practice.
In this sense, all those participating in contemporary politics are advocates of social engineering, that is, the modifying or remaking of part or all of society according to an imposed plan or set of plans.
The idea that such an approach to social matters is inconsistent with both individual liberty and any proper functioning of a free society is beyond the pale of political and policy discourse. We live in a time of piecemeal planning and incremental interventionism.
The Reasonableness of Individual Planning
It is worthwhile, perhaps, to question this “spirit of the times,” and to do so in the context of marking an anniversary. Slightly over 70 years ago, on December 17, 1945, the Austrian economist (and much later economics Nobel Prize winner), Friedrich A. Hayek, delivered a lecture at University College in Dublin, Ireland on, “Individualism: True and False.”
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