Leftist Untruth #1

"More Government is Good - More Freedom is Bad"

The lie that underlies the lies:

“More government control is good for you!”

Why is there an "Untruth #1"? We all know the truth of "O what a tangled web we weave..." When you tell a lie, you will usually have to tell more lies to support the original lie. For Leftists, the original lie is 'Control is better than freedom for how our systems of human interaction should work.' Most of the rest of the 'beliefs' of Leftism are a patchwork of lies told to support Untruth #1.

More government Control is always or usually better? That isn't true. More freedom is almost always better. That's the truth. But Leftists claim that Americans need more government control and less freedom. They tell us that more government control is necessary for us to have better lives, and even that more power for the government regulators doesn’t mean less freedom for you. It’s a lie.

America Needs More Government, Not Less?

... It’s hard for contemporary Americans to recognize bureaucrats in the descriptions of “men actuated by public spirit” in the official reports of Theodore Roosevelt’s administration. Yet... In this rancorous era, Americans might well reconsider the advantages of bureaucracy.

Bruce J. Schulman, "The United States Needs More Bureaucracy, Not Less" Washington Post (2017)

...it is simply mistaken to automatically equate more government with less freedom. The minimal-government crowd uses this “more government = less freedom” formula to make all sorts of alarmist claims. For example, some suggest that every increase in government power is a step down the road to totalitarianism and repression.

Douglas J. Amy, "Government is Good” governmentisgood.com (2017)

 "That government is best which governs least" is an American truism (the quotation is often attributed to Thomas Jefferson but it actually first appeared in the American essayist Henry David Thoreau’s work “Civil Disobedience”). But is that idea false, and is more government really good? Was Thomas Paine wrong or lying by saying in Common Sense that, “Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil”? That more government is good may be a popular idea in Europe, and it certainly is a doctrine in communism, fascism, monarchism, and every other more-government-is-goodism, but is it an American idea? If “increase in government power” is not “a step down the road to totalitarianism and repression” then what would be?

Anyway, it is the undeniable reality that in the 21st century that more government control is what we are getting, and have been getting, for a long, long time.

The American Bar Association said that there were more than 3,300 separate criminal offenses on the books in 1998. Over 40 percent of these laws have been enacted just in the previous 30 years. These crimes were, as of 2010, scattered in the over 27,000 pages of the 50 titles of the United States Code.

One Nation Under Arrest: How Crazy Laws, Rogue Prosecutors, and Activist Judges Threaten Your Liberty edited by Paul Rosenzweig and Brian Walsh (2010)

There are several useful methods for evaluating the extent of U.S. regulations... This includes the number of pages in the Federal Register and in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR)... In 2016, there were approximately 45,000 more pages in the Federal Register than 40 years prior, an increase of about 90 percent...

“The Growth Potential of Deregulation”, issued by the Office of the President of the United States, October 2, 2017

Liberty is under siege. More than 440 departments and agencies at the federal level publish more than 60,000 pages of existing and proposed legislation every year and 599 new units of state and local government were created in just the last decade.

Scott Bullock, Institute for Justice (2020)

27,000 pages of federal crimes by 2010. A 90% increase in the number of pages of federal regulations in the four decades prior to 2017. 440 federal agencies publish over 60,000 pages of existing and proposed legislation per year as of 2020. Is that massive deluge of government regulators and government regulation a “good” thing? Leftists think so. And they want more and more and more.

Almost every American institution is either controlled by Leftist government regulators or is coming under their control. Don’t believe it? It can be proved beyond any reasonable doubt. Leftists can say that it is false. But it is not false, and it is not just an opinion; it is our reality. (See the bibliography.) Leftists can say that it is not true that almost all of our systems have come or are coming under the control of government regulators, but that is just another lie.

The Control-is-Good-Freedom-is-Bad Lie is the basis for the Command Economy Lie, and lots of others too, as we will see as we counter-attack the Leftists, and one by one give the lie to their armory of weaponized untruths.

Freedom is NOT Bad for You

‘Control is good; freedom is bad’. If you think about it, every Leftist policy is an instantiation of this claim. More government, more Control — it is the Leftist solution to all the problems, including the problems that the Leftist cause, which there are many.

‘Freedom will lead to chaos,’ Leftists love to claim. ‘Look at Somalia!’ Just give government regulators more control over you and they will make everything better. They will relieve you of all that harmful freedom that has been making your life so chaotic. You wouldn’t want to live in Somalia, with all those Somalian Libertarians, would you?

To Sum Up…

When the Leftists say that the government should have more control over us because ‘Control is good and Self-organization and Freedom are bad’, they aren’t telling the truth. This untruth is the #1 mother of Leftist lies. It is the lie that most of the other lies were created to support. Because Leftists always want more control over the rest of us. That’s the truth.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Administrative Threat, by Philip Hamburger (2017)

Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silverglate and Alan Dershowitz (2009)

The Criminalization of Almost Everything, Harvey Silverglate (2010)

OverRegulated (2021)

How to Become a Federal Criminal: An Illustrated Handbook for the Aspiring Offender by Mike Chase (2019)