The statists, and they’re ready to flex their muscles.
As we prepare for a new legislative regime, we would do well to remember the words of Albert Jay Nock in Our Enemy, The State (as quoted in the anthology Conservatism in America Since 1930):
[T]he State “turns every contingency into a resource” [here Nock quotes James Madison] for accumulating power in itself, always at the expense of social power; and with this it develops a habit of acquiescence in the people. New generations appear, each temperamentally adjusted — or as I believe our American glossary now has it, “conditioned” — to new increments of State power, and they tend to take the process of continuous accumulation as quite in order. All the State’s institutional voices unite in confirming this tendency; they unite in exhibiting the progressive conversion of social power into State power as something not only quite in order, but even as wholesome and necessary for the public good.
