• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 261 0

them.…” (I, 271) He observed that if such decrees were ordered, the federal government “must entrust the execution of its will to agents over whom it frequently has no control and who it cannot perpetually direct. The townships, municipal bodies, and counties form so many concealed breakwaters.…” (I, 272) Yet he foretold democracy’s vulnerability to administrative despotism, although he had hoped America would avoid its infliction because of its unique history and circumstances. “Above this race of men stands an intense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood … it every day renders the exercise of free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all his uses of himself.… It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.…” “Such a power … compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people” who are “reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd” (I, 318–19).

America has become a society in which the people are wise enough to select their own leaders, but too incompetent to choose the right lightbulb.

“ENTITLEMENTS” AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE

Another aspect of the administrative state involves so-called entitlements. In the United States, the concept of “social insurance” can be traced back to the work of Columbia University professor Henry Rogers Seager. In his 1910 work, Social Insurance: A Program of Social Reform,41 Seager provided a framework for Social Security, among other government social programs. In turn, Seager was heavily influenced by European models of socialism.42

Seager constantly attacked the American “absorption” with individualism as he promoted Europe’s “cooperative movement.”43 “As though it were not enough that heredity and environment combined to make us individualists, our forefathers wrote their individualistic creed into our federal and state constitutions. All these instruments give special sanctity to the rights to liberty and property.… Thus it is not too much to say that Americans are born individualists in a country peculiarly favorable to the realization of individual ambitions and under a legal system which discourages and opposes resort to any but individualistic remedies for social evils.”44 He added that in those areas of the nation involved in manufacturing and trade “we need not freedom from government interference, but clear appreciation of the conditions that make for the common welfare, as contrasted with individual success, and an aggressive program of governmental control and regulation to maintain these conditions.”45

Seager proceeded to lay out the general terms of what would become the Social Security program. He argued, “The proper method of safeguarding old age is clearly through some plan of insurance.… The intelligent course is for [the wage earner] to combine with other wage earners to accumulate a common fund out of which old-age annuities may be paid to those who live long enough to need them.”46 Seager praised the insurance programs of certain large corporations and foreign countries, particularly in the United Kingdom and Germany. He believed that the best aspects of these systems should be adopted by the federal government and turned into compulsory old-age insurance. This would require “vigorous government action.”47 But given the resistance to this and other social programs in the United States at the time, because of the history of individualism and its federal form of government, there must be “political reform” and “industrial education”48