Because they believe that THEY have the smarts to tell everyone else how they will live their lives. The perfect Administrative State tool – you can’t succeed unless we “order” your lives:
Hayek was trying to show his readers that planning, everyone’s favorite remedy for the ills of the world, might sound good in theory, but would not work out in practice (or, at least, not unless the western democracies were prepared to accept severe constraints on personal liberty of the sort on display in the systems against which they currently [in 1944] were fighting).
-F.A. Hayek ( The Road to Serfdom )
And it doesn’t matter if that “ordering” doesn’t match up with what you think is right. After all, you can’t vote for them, you can’t vote them out of office – they’re bureaucrats. And here in NH, we have “Regional Planning Commissions pretty much doing that. And most have gone FAR beyond their original mandates of “coordinating” street building between the towns to “order” traffic patterns, at least one has rebranded itself to be a “regional purchasing manger” for bulk buying.
And no one outside of those Commissions has any idea of what this “fourth” level of Government here in NH gives it a thought.
Because every time someone makes a decision, we should be realizing that OUR Liberty to make our own self-governing decisions are taken away.
Live Free or Die! – but only within the more and more tightly proscribed smaller areas in which they deign to allow us to be.
(H/T: Cafe Hayek)