The Challenge for Liberals—Defending the Use of Government Force & Its Corruption

The challenge for liberals (or anyone who believes in government as the means to social engineering) is to explain how changing private decisions into government decisions won't result in politics in which the politically powerful take over the decisions.

If one believes in good through government, then one might be able to point to some good things government seems to have done but to be consistent one also has to account for the bad even when the intentions seemed good. One then is in the awkward position of having to defend government actions such as the massive bail outs, tax breaks, and regulatory protections of big corporations and businesses since they too are always justified by good intentions.

The only possible method for justifying government action is to focus exclusively on the ends and ignore the means. The good intentions that justify government action only work as justification if the means of government force and its use by the politically powerful can remain unquestioned and perhaps even repressed.

As soon as government as the means to various ends is questioned as an immoral political method by which one group uses force to take away from another group, then the impossibility of government working as hoped for to produce the lofty goals that are intended collapses into hopes not attainable by government. The problems of the politics of the powerful will always haunt liberals. See this George Will column.