Naive Faith in Statist Solutions to Social Problems Has Devastating Consequences for Citizens' Lives
This essay is an adaptation of a section of my book in progress, A Polycentric Republic: A Theory of Civil Order for Free and Diverse Societies.
Anyone who has paid close attention to the history of modern States, and the spectacular failures of their social engineering experiments, would be rather puzzled by the naive faith that so many people seem to have in the power of the State to fix incredibly complex social problems from the top down, from Islamic terrorism and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to climate change and infectious disease control.
To trust the State to fix the most intricate and complex of social problems through highly centralised, technocratic solutions is to fundamentally misunderstand how complex social problems are effectively tackled in real societies, and to vastly overestimate the power of centralised State institutions to master the knowledge required to solve problems like climate change, international terrorism, and disease control.
This raises the question, why do so many of us trust the State to solve the most thorny and complex of social problems? Why do we tolerate a small army of government agents, acting in the name of “the people” and under the authority of the State, intervening on a regular basis in the activities of citizens, regulating the most intricate details of our lives, be it our professional tasks, the education of our children, health and safety standards in the workplace, fair employment practices, healthcare, pensions, the production and distribution of cultural artefacts, philanthropic activity, the regulation of industry and science, or the design of sex education programmes for our children?