No one put humanity’s explosion of wealth and prosperity into better perspective than Simon. Simon’s targets were the doom‐​and‐​gloom environmentalists and zero‐​population‐​growth activists who in the last half of the 20th century peddled dire predictions of the coming cataclysm they said would be wrought by free markets and American consumerism. Using a wealth of economic, demographic, health, and consumer data, Simon showed how capitalism has made us more prosperous, healthier, better educated, longer lived, and generally better off than we’ve ever been. Furthermore, he demonstrated how prosperity and technology tend to make scarce resources more abundant, not less.

Though Malthusian prophets still pop up from time to time, Simon seems to have largely won that debate. Today’s critics of free markets don’t invoke Armageddon as their predecessors did. Nor do they declare that prosperity will be our undoing. Rather, today they argue that we simply aren’t equipped to handle our freedom and our success. Instead of invoking government to heavily regulate the economy and redistribute wealth, they now argue that we need government to make many of our personal decisions for us, because individual Americans can’t be trusted to make them on their own.

The Rise of Parentalism

In a recent paper published in the journal Public Choice, “Afraid to be Free: Dependency as Desideratum,” Nobel Prize–winning economist James Buchanan composes a new taxonomy of socialist threats to liberty. Buchanan argues that the conventional threats to freedom from managerial socialism (central planning) and distributionist socialism (the welfare state) are today joined by paternalistic socialism and “parental socialism,” which Buchanan describes as the willingness among many to allow the government to take control of their lives.

The emerging threat to American liberty today, then, is a combination of these latter two forms of socialism—the desire among some in government to interfere in nearly every aspect of our lives, and the lack of concern on the part of many Americans that this is happening. And while conventional critics of capitalism came primarily from the left, the parentalist‐​paternalist movement isn’t as easily marginalized.

From the left, for example, a new class of critics has emerged under the banner of “public health.” True public health is, of course, a perfectly legitimate function of government. The collective nature of the threats posed by highly communicable diseases, for example, makes protection from them a legitimate public good, deliverable by government. Today one might also include the threats posed by biological or chemical terrorism.

But modern “public‐​health” initiatives have moved well beyond what could reasonably be classified as public goods. Today, government undertakes all sorts of policies in the name of public health that are aimed at regulating personal behavior. It began in the 1970s and 1980s with anti‐​smoking initiatives and today includes a wide range of programs, including efforts aimed at reducing alcohol consumption, encouraging seatbelt and motorcycle helmet use, regulating diet and lifestyle in the name of curbing obesity, federalizing local issues like speed limits and the minimum drinking age, and generally using the power of the state to regulate away lifestyle risk.

But the American right, which has traditionally claimed to favor limited government, is no better. The Republican‐​led Congress is attempting to prohibit Internet gambling. That same Congress wants to expand the FCC’s regulatory power beyond broadcast television to include cable television and satellite radio. President Bush’s Department of Justice has declared prosecuting pornography a “top priority.” And of course, the Bush administration has enforced the nation’s drug laws with particular vigilance, paying little heed to traditional conservative notions of state sovereignty. The White House has vigorously defended the federal government’s authority to regulate medical marijuana, physician‐​assisted suicide, and prescription painkillers, for example, even in states where voters have explicitly indicated their preference for laxer enforcement. In the case of medical marijuana, White House efforts may have resulted in the final deathknell for federalism.

Though the public health movement seems to have come largely from the left, and the “culture war” crusades against gambling, pornography, pop culture, and drugs largely from the right, it’s important to point out that there is significant convergence between the two. Fervent anti‐​alcohol activists such as former Carter administration official Joseph Califano, for example, are every bit as active in promoting drug prohibition. National Review contributing editor David Frum has called for a “fat tax” on high‐​calorie foods, joining more left‐​oriented organizations like the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Family values advocates like William Bennett and John DiIulio and Republican Congressmen like Tom Osborne and Frank Wolf have joined with liberal organizations like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in calling for heavy government regulation of alcohol. And there seems to be wide, bipartisan support for a powerful state on issues like continuing the drug war, instituting smoking bans in private bars and restaurants, the aforementioned ban on Internet gambling, and increased government scrutiny over pop culture media such as rap music and violent video games.

On the right, movements like National Review contributor Rod Dreher’s “crunchy conservatism” borrow bons mots from Marx in denigrating wealth, consumption, and consumerism. Meanwhile, the left‐​leaning editorial boards at the Washington Post and New York Times abandoned traditional civil liberties concerns in supporting the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the federal ban on medical marijuana, because a ruling the other way might have adversely affected the federal government’s massive regulatory state.

As Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker has put it, “There is no party of tolerance in Washington—just a party that wages its crusades in the name of Christ and a party that wages its crusades in the name of Four out of Five Experts Agree.”