Tocqueville on the BP Spill

LIBERTYCENTRAL.ORG, 6/18/2010 by Brian Faughnan (via The New Ledger, et. al) - ...Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw the collision between big government and quick, decisive action, and wrote about it in Democracy in America. Tocqueville observed that by its very nature, big government makes responding to problems like the Gulf oil spill more difficult. As Tocqueville observed:

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

There are many virtues to a limited central government. But as we see in the case of the stopped barges, one is that big government inherently hampers the creativity and ingenuity of millions of Americans. And the fact that the story of the barges is not a national headline shows that our culture has largely come to accept this as the norm. After all, if it were shocking that the Coast Guard had stopped disaster response teams over some minor rule, it would be leading the news nationwide. Instead, many Americans accept that this is normal. That’s a sign of how bad the situation is.