OP-ED: The bureaucrats' fatal conceit

Recently, a comedian posted on social media a satirical video portraying himself as a Black Lives Matter protester, compelling a white woman to bow down before him. It is symbolic of what we have witnessed across the nation these last few weeks.

This philosophy does not promote equality or justice for anyone. Nor does it inspire justice for all. It only shows how far we have strayed from the ideals of our founding documents: that "all men," meaning all human beings, "are created equal."

That some would acquiesce to such debasement of their fellow citizens, or even demand such preferment from them, is the result of decades of indoctrination. Generations have been taught to prefer the power-seeking arrogance of human respect rather than the love, justice, and mercy of God, before whom we had previously taken a knee.

During his recent questioning of Dr. Anthony Fauci, Sen. Rand Paul cited Frederick Hayek's The Fatal Conceit. That tome identifies as the great flaw of socialism the basic human tendency to believe that human individuals or collectives are truly in control. No one and no group, Hayek argued, and that also means no government and certainly no bureaucrat, can successfully control a system as complex as the free market.

The fatal conceit manifests whenever government goes beyond the sensible bounds that the framers established. By enumerating the federal government's powers and duties, they limited them to the basics — for example, foreign policy, immigration, relations between states, and protection of individual liberty from government encroachment.

No single unelected bureaucrat — and that includes Fauci — has the wisdom, vision, or authority to issue edicts that control and constrain the 330 million people who comprise our society. The media are giving an inordinately great weight to Fauci's careless, casual statements about everything from mask-wearing to keeping schools closed this fall. And his apparent expectation is that everyone will simply bow in obedience to whatever he says. All these opinions from a man who has repeatedly admitted that he didn't focus on the broad impact his policies would have on the public.

This same sense of self-importance drives government's often-arbitrary decision to close one type of business while permitting another to stay open. This hubris randomly permits politically approved protests, riots, and violence while condemning groups who wish to gather and worship God together.

In the end, this seemingly inexorable march toward leftist authoritarianism, typified by glorifying the humiliation of some by compelling them to kneel before another person, is just another example of the fatal conceit.

The expansion of government power over virtually every aspect of our lives by bureaucrats and government officials is just another way to make people bow before power and authority.

The fatality in Hayek's fatal conceit is simply that no society that attempts to regulate an economy through some dimwitted central authority can survive. The bureaucrats interposing their ideas in every aspect of our lives are simply replacing each person's individual choices and will with that of the bureaucrats. And the government employees who are supposed to be working for the people do not know what the individual wants or needs, or even how to get what the person wants or needs, more or better than the individual.

Similarly, the imposition of regulations over even noneconomic decisions by government kills our free society. The responses throughout the nation on the COVID outbreak typify the folly of reliance on government. Fauci and others have demonstrated their ignorance over how to preserve our health by the breathtaking speed with which they issue contradictory and even knowingly false mandates.

Their conceit, which requires us to bow to them, is producing what centralization of government power always produces: loss of freedom. And that loss of freedom in our constitutional republic leaves a vacuum of power that Marxist authoritarians are now trying to fill.

And, in the end, that conceit esteems the feelings of people over their faith in God. It is fatal to economies and societies alike.