In his op-ed column Monday, Brooks imagines how Bentham and Hume would each approach global warming and health care. Bentham, he says, would display a policy wonk’s command of the nuts and bolts and come up with detailed government programs for imposing solutions to the problems.

“Mr. Hume, I’m afraid, wouldn’t be so impressive,” Brooks writes. He imagines that Hume — whining, head in hands, or weeping while in the fetal position — would confess his ignorance about solving the problems and then would propose just enough government intervention, such as a carbon tax and health-insurance exchanges, to “set off a decentralized cascade of reform, instead of putting all the responsibility on us here.”

Brooks then gets to his point:

This country is about to have a big debate on the role of government. The polarizers on cable TV think it’s going to be a debate between socialism and free-market purism. But it’s really going to be a debate about how to promote innovation.

The people on Mr. Bentham’s side believe that government can get actively involved in organizing innovation….

The people on Mr. Hume’s side believe government should actively tilt the playing field to promote social goods and set off decentralized networks of reform, but they don’t think government knows enough to intimately organize dynamic innovation.

Brooks predicts that Bentham will win because he serves the lobbyists interests.

Leaving aside Brooks’s defamation of Hume as a pathetic, sniveling character — David Hume? — we can take issue with his picture of Hume on a couple of other counts. I am no Hume expert (and I disagree with him on many issues), but I know enough to point out some important things Brooks missed in his effort to be cute.

Note that Brooks presents the debate over the role of government in fairly narrow terms. It’s between a government that actively organizes innovation and a government that actively sets social goals then arranges the carrots and sticks in order to induce people to achieve those goals.

In either case, government is the active party. Hume would not be comfortable with either team.

Stability of Possession

For one thing, Hume thought that society depends on, more than anything else, secure property. But how secure can property be if politicians of limited knowledge and perspective (not the impliedly lofty government) have the power to set goals for the rest of us and to impose incentives and penalties in the service of those goals?

Let there be no mistake about where Hume stood on the matter of property. In A Treatise of Human Nature (Book III, 1740) he writes of “the three fundamental laws of nature, that of the stability of possession, of its transference by consent, and of the performance of promises” and adds:

’Tis on the strict observance of those three laws, that the peace and security of human society entirely depend; nor is there any possibility of establishing a good correspondence among men, where these are neglected. Society is absolutely necessary for the well-being of men; and these are as necessary to the support of society.

“Stability of possession” is a favorite phase of Hume’s. Indeed, he emphasized that property should be respected even when in particular cases we do not like the outcome:

Property must be stable, and must be fix’d by general rules. Tho’ in one instance the public be a sufferer, this momentary ill is amply compensated by the steady prosecution of the rule, and by the peace and order, which it establishes in society. And even every individual person must find himself a gainer, on ballancing the account; since, without justice, society must immediately dissolve, and every one must fall into that savage and solitary condition, which is infinitely worse than the worse situation that can possibly be suppos’d in society.

These “three fundamental laws of nature” were not the conscious inventions of some Benthamite social engineer, but rather elements of an undesigned social order that produces benefits for the general population. Indeed, Hume along with Adam Smith, was a leading philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment.  Its defining characteristic was the historic liberal appreciation that society was not constructed consciously but rather emerged spontaneously from the peaceful pursuit of self-interest and the social cooperation it generates. “[T]he rule concerning the stability of possession,” he wrote, “… arises gradually, and acquires force by a slow progression, and by our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it.”

He goes on to draw a parallel that will be familiar to students of Menger, Mises, and Hayek: “In like manner are languages gradually established by human conventions without any promise. In like manner do gold and silver become the common measures of exchange….”

Thus law, language, and money are institutions that are, in the words of Hume’s friend Adam Ferguson, “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.“

Public Good as Byproduct

Hume emphasized that, as spontaneously emergent institutions, the laws of justice and property were not intended to promote the good of the public, having grown out of “self-love,” but they nevertheless do so. This process is what Adam Smith would liken to an “invisible hand.” In fact, Hume wrote, the public good wouldn’t have been achieved had it been aimed at directly and consciously. He writes,

[I]f men had been endow’d with such a strong regard for public good, they wou’d never have restrain’d themselves by these rules; so that the laws of justice arise from natural principles in a manner still more oblique and artificial. ’Tis self-love which is their real origin; and as the self-love of one person is naturally contrary to that of another, these several interested passions are oblig’d to adjust themselves after such a manner as to concur in some system of conduct and behaviour. This system, therefore, comprehending the interest of each individual, is of course advantageous to the public; tho’ it be not intended for that purpose by the inventors.

Is belief in spontaneous social order and stable property consistent with the two forms of rationalistic discretionary government Brooks gives us? I think not.

One final word from Hume in light of today’s fiscal affairs: “The source of degeneracy, which may be remarked in free governments, consists in the practice of contracting debt, and mortgaging the public revenues, by which taxes may, in time, become altogether intolerable…” (Of Civil Liberty).

It happened again. On page 31 I came across this:

Socialists look upon people as raw material to be formed into social combinations. This is so true that, if by chance, the socialists have any doubts about the success of these combinations, they will demand that a small portion of mankind be set aside to experiment upon. . . . And one socialist leader has been known seriously to demand that the Constituent Assembly give him a small district with all its inhabitants, to try his experiments upon.

Two things occurred to me as I read this. First, you don’t have to be socialist to believe that people are raw material to be experimented upon. And second, in modern America, doubts or no doubts about success, experiments can be run on the entire country at once. No need to first try things out on a small district. When Americans appreciated the virtue of decentralizing power — “federalism” — grand experiments at worst could be done only in individual states because according to the consensus, the national government was supposed to be limited by the Constitution. (As I’ve written before, such a reading of the Constitution, a political document full of compromises and deliberate ambiguities, is at best a loose construction. However, I’m glad it was the dominant interpretation for some years after Thomas Jefferson’s election in 1800, and I would love to see it become dominant again.) That consensus essentially died in the War Between the States, and Alexander Hamilton’s revived vision of a consolidated nation has endured fairly continuously ever since.

As for point one, I have in mind the current administration. The word “socialist” (as well as “fascist”) is thrown around too glibly today, and everyone ought to be more careful. Lots of bad things are being proposed that would interfere with the market process, but no one in power is calling for replacement of the market with central planning. Ludwig von Mises called the philosophy behind the mixed economy “interventionism, and we ought to be working to make that word the pejorative we know it deserves to be.

Point two, of course, refers to the Obama administration’s experiments for the health-insurance, financial, and energy industries. Without getting into details here, I want to emphasize the sheer presumptuousness of those experiments. Those are our lives they are fooling with.

Bastiat brimmed with controlled outrage at the French politicians and writers who so blithely presumed that other people’s lives were theirs to dispose of in grand experiment. He dissected the classical notion, popular among the pundits of his day and ours, that individuals are inert until a wise leader comes along invests them with a principle of motion.

[T]hese writers on public affairs begin by supposing that people have within themselves no means of discernment; no motivation to action. The writers assume that people are inert matter, passive particles, motionless atoms, at best a kind of vegetation indifferent to its own manner of existence. They assume that people are susceptible to being shaped — by the will and hand of another person — into an infinite variety of forms, more or less symmetrical, artistic, and perfected….

These socialist writers look upon people in the same manner that the gardener views his trees. Just as the gardener capriciously shapes the trees into pyramids, parasols, cubes, vases, fans, and other forms, just so does the socialist writer whimsically shape human beings into groups, series, centers, sub-centers, honeycombs, labor-corps, and other variations. And just as the gardener needs axes, pruning hooks, saws, and shears to shape his trees, just so does the socialist writer need the force that he can find only in law to shape human beings. For this purpose, he devises tariff laws, tax laws, relief laws, and school laws.

This superior attitude is palpable throughout the Obama administration. One sees it in the words and tone of the president, Geithner, Summers, Emanuel, Sebelius, Clinton, and their allies in Congress. In a profound way, they are the anti-egalitarians. They know better than we. They exercise powers that we mere individuals out of government can never possess. They dictate to us, but we can’t dictate to them. They get to determine our lives in important ways — which means that in those respects we don’t.

Yes, they claim they are our representatives. It’s a baseless claim! They are not our representatives. They don’t know us, and they can’t really care about us. They are our rulers, gratifying their ambitions to “make a difference” — whether we want it made on our lives or not. If we don’t comply, they can take our liberty, our property, even our lives.

Depriving them of that power is a long and arduous intellectual process, requiring a philosophical sea change. In the meantime, those of us who know that we, and not they, own our lives, need a battle cry. In dedication to Bastiat, I propose this:

We shall not be experimented upon!