Note a contradiction in progressivism that has become steadily more severe in the century since [Woodrow] Wilson wrote. Progressivism has no objection to steady enlargement of the “conceptions of state duty.”
Quite the contrary, such enlargement is the progressive agenda – the expansion of the central government’s supervision of society’s complexities. But as solicitous government permeates society with its superintending, society responds in an inconvenient way. As government’s interests multiply, so do interest groups.
As government seeks to supplement and even supplant market forces in the allocation of wealth and opportunity, there is a corresponding and commensurate multiplication of factions determined to influence the action of activist government.
-George Will ( The Conservative Sensibility)
And those factions are what we call “Special Interests”. If everything trends to having Government, instead of We the People, make all of the decisions in our lives, of COURSE there will be people who will strive to grasp at the levers of Power (at least get audiences and influence with who do have their hands on those levers) to force / nudge Government to use its force on the rest of us.
And each time, it ends up like the Bank of Plastic Bags – forcing something down our throats for some product or behavior (or both) that we otherwise would not choose for ourselves. This is why the Founders wanted and described in detail the limited government they designed – to allow for maximal individual liberty to choose for ourselves the path to Happiness (and not someone else’s dystopian vision).
(H/T: Cafe Hayek)
