After America - Mark Steyn [21]
The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way... it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own... it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way: it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
Welcome to the twenty-first century.
The all-pervasive state “does not tyrannize, it gets in the way.” It “enervates,” but nicely, gradually, so that after a while you don’t even notice ...
But once in a while even the mellowest hippie emerges from the stupor. In 1969, George Harrison of the Beatles, in the course of a wide-ranging ramble, briefly detoured out of the Hare Krishna chants into some remarks about the Monopolies Commission (the British equivalent of the U.S. government’s Antitrust Division):
You know, this is the thing I don’t like. It’s the Monopolies Commission. Now if anybody, you know, Kodak, or somebody is cleaning up the market with film, the Monopolies Commission, the government send them in there, and say you know, you’re not allowed to monopolize. Yet, when the government’s monopolizing, who’s gonna send in, you know, this Commission to sort that one out?1
Good question. There was an old joke in Britain: “Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?” In fact, it’s an incisive observation on the nature of government. We wouldn’t like it if there were only one automobile company or only one breakfast cereal, but by definition there can be only one government—which is why, “when the government’s monopolizing,” it should do so only in very limited areas. That’s particularly true for national governments when the nation they govern has more than 300 million people dispersed over a continent and halfway across the Pacific.
These days America’s government is doing a lot of monopolizing. If it were a private company such as Kodak (to use George Harrison’s quaint example), it would be attracting anti-trust suits. By 2008, the governmentsponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had a piece of over half the mortgages issued in the United States.2 As a result, a government-mandated form of pseudo-ownership came close to collapsing the world economy. Which the politicians then, naturally, blamed on capitalist greed. Fresh from their success in undermining the property market, the government went on to seek a monopoly in college loans, plus control of the automobile industry and health care.
In his dissenting opinion on United States vs. Columbia Steel Co. (1948), Justice William Douglas wrote:
We have here the problem of bigness.... The Curse Of Bigness [Justice Louis Brandeis’ essay] shows how size can become a menace—both industrial and social. It can be an industrial menace because it creates gross inequalities against existing or putative competitors. It can be a social menace—because of its control of prices....
Now who does that sound like? No, not Kodak. The fact that George Harrison’s selection of an all-powerful monopoly rings so sweetly nostalgic just a few decades later is testament to the self-correcting mechanisms of a functioning market. Kodak, which actually invented some of the first digital camera technology in 1975, failed to foresee how fast things were changing, and eventually wound up laying off 60 percent of its workforce.3