In this wonderful Town Hall column John Stossel takes issue with the “Hamiltonian” David Brooks who is enamored of the use of governmental power to achieve good ends, specifically improved education. Stossel is appropriately skeptical about the prospect that government education could ever deliver good results. It’s rather like hoping that the next big economic plan under communism would be the one that finally gets everything right.
Stossel concludes with this excellent line of Jefferson’s: “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending to too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”
Exactly right. Society under a minimal government that seeks only to protect our rights to life, liberty and property won’t give us utopia, but creating a powerful state that can issue all manner of prohibitions and mandates is sure to be far worse.
