It would have been interesting to have had Bill Buckley’s
reaction to the implosion of Eliot Spitzer, prosecutorial
bully, patronizer of expensive prostitutes, and former
governor of New York.
We suspect that he would have agreed with a recent article
on the website TechCentralStation by the economist Arnold
Kling. “It is a shame,” observed Mr. Kling, “that we only laugh
at a Spitzer when his secret sex life is revealed to us.
Instead of mocking Spitzers for their private foibles, we
should be contemptuous of their public pronouncements.
Whether it is ‘cleaning up Wall Street’ or ‘giving everyone
health care,’ the Spitzers are making extravagant promises
that only result in expanded government power.”
Short of dire national emergency, Bill Buckley knew,
“expanded government power” is nearly always synonymous
with “diminished individual liberty.” Elevated into a
consistent policy, it is allied to the kind of collectivism
that underwrote the tyranny of Communism. At the center of
the totalitarian impulse is the belief that, at bottom,
freedom belongs only to the state, that the individual
should not be treated as a free actor but rather, as Lenin
put it, as “‘a cog and a screw’ of one single great
Social-Democratic mechanism.” The Spitzers
of the world are, as someone said about the critic Philip
Rahv, born-again Leninists. “What socialism implies above
all,” said Lenin, “is keeping account of everything.” That
is the goal, so prevalent among our most ambitious
politicians these days, that requires checking. Keeping track
of your health care, disposing of your money, regulating
your food and drink and ration of tobacco: there they all
are, ready, able, and willing to run your life for you.
The spectacle of Eliot Spitzer’s fall has provided a
good deal of tawdry tabloid entertainment. But really, what
matters about Spitzer were
his actions as a public figure. He recklessly employed the power
of the state partly to aggrandize himself, but more
dangerously to insinuate state power into areas where it has
no business intruding. Probably, few politicians are paid-up
members of The Emperors’ Club. But how many patronize that
other, more amorphous club of emperors, the one staffed by
democratic despots whose overwhelming imperative is to relieve
individuals of responsibility for themselves, transforming
them from free citizens into clients of an increasingly
bureaucratized, and increasingly insatiable, state
apparatus?
