There are many "visions" out there for how society should be organized. Under an authoritarian regime, one person or small group imposes a vision on the rest of society. In a democratic country, "the people" decide who will get to impose which vision. Should "we" repair the roads or build more mass transit? Accept more immigrants or drive away those who are here? Beef up the army or train more doctors? Give welfare to single moms or to sclerotic corporations? Cast your vote, then live with the results.
Here's another vision for how to organize society: Respect people's freedom to make their own individual decisions about what to do with their time and how to spend their money. Let us exchange with each other and enter into contracts as we please. Have some organized way of dealing with domestic and foreign aggressors, either some minimal night-watchman state or competing night watchmen. Then let individuals organize themselves spontaneously, as the natural world does, without imposing anyone's top-down notions of the good society on anyone else. Let people make their own plans, as long as they're peaceful, instead of giving power to a relatively few micromanagers and forcing everyone to conform to prefabricated central plans.
According to Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson, however, the above doesn't even count as a vision. People who are suspicious of government, he wrote this past weekend, have "an aversion to any kind of 'vision' for society, because vision usually means mobilizing the resources of the state for some collective purpose." Of course, if you define away a certain kind of vision, then it's no longer a vision. But defining words to mean what you want them to mean is hardly fair, no matter what Humpty Dumpty says.
Simpson is right on the money, though, when he points out that "Thatcher's children" as he calls them—the current conservative leaders of Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand—often promise more than they deliver when it comes to shrinking the governments they claim to view with suspicion. They talk the talk, but they generally don't walk the walk. And until the libertarian vision of respect and spontaneous order is more widely appreciated, we can expect them to continue paying mere lip service to the ideas of freedom.
According to Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson, however, the above doesn't even count as a vision. People who are suspicious of government, he wrote this past weekend, have "an aversion to any kind of 'vision' for society, because vision usually means mobilizing the resources of the state for some collective purpose." Of course, if you define away a certain kind of vision, then it's no longer a vision. But defining words to mean what you want them to mean is hardly fair, no matter what Humpty Dumpty says.
Simpson is right on the money, though, when he points out that "Thatcher's children" as he calls them—the current conservative leaders of Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand—often promise more than they deliver when it comes to shrinking the governments they claim to view with suspicion. They talk the talk, but they generally don't walk the walk. And until the libertarian vision of respect and spontaneous order is more widely appreciated, we can expect them to continue paying mere lip service to the ideas of freedom.