The Task Confronting Libertarians
By Tyler Durden
Authored by Henry Hazlitt via The Mises Institute,
From time to time over the last thirty years, after I have talked or written about some new restriction on human liberty in the economic field, some new attack on private enterprise, I have been asked in person or received a letter asking, “What can I do” — to fight the inflationist or socialist trend? Other writers or lecturers, I find, are often asked the same question.
The answer is seldom an easy one. For it depends on the circumstances and ability of the questioner — who may be a businessman, a housewife, a student, informed or not, intelligent or not, articulate or not. And the answer must vary with these presumed circumstances.
The general answer is easier than the particular answer. So here I want to write about the task now confronting all libertarians considered collectively.
This task has become tremendous, and seems to grow greater every day. A few nations that have already gone completely communist, like Soviet Russia and its satellites, try, as a result of sad experience, to draw back a little from complete centralization, and experiment with one or two quasi-capitalistic techniques; but the world's prevailing drift — in more than 100 out of the 107 nations and mini-nations that are now members of the International Monetary Fund — is in the direction of increasing socialism and controls.
The task of the tiny minority that is trying to combat this socialistic drift seems nearly hopeless. The war must be fought on a thousand fronts, and the true libertarians are grossly outnumbered on practically all these fronts.
In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty; and the libertarians must combat them. But few of us individually have the time, energy, and special knowledge to be able to do this in more than a handful of subjects.
One of our gravest problems is that we find ourselves confronting armies of bureaucrats already controlling us, and with a vested interest in keeping and expanding the controls they were hired to enforce.
A Growing Bureaucracy
Let me try to give you some idea of the size and extent of this bureaucracy in the United States. The Hoover Commission found in 1954 that the Federal government embraced no fewer than 2,133 different functioning agencies, bureaus, departments, and divisions. I do not know what the exact count would be today, but the known multiplicity of Great Society agencies would justify our rounding out that figure at least to 2,200.
We do know [in 1968] that the full-time permanent employees in the Federal government now number about 2,615,000.
And we know, to take a few specific examples, that of these bureaucrats 15,400 administer the programs of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 100,000 the programs (including Social Security) of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and 154,000 the programs of the Veterans Administration.
If we want to look at the rate at which parts of this bureaucracy have been growing, let …read more
Source: The Task Confronting Libertarians
