“The great problem of our age is precisely this: Who should determine what is to be produced and consumed, the people or the state, the consumers themselves or a paternal government? If one decides in favor of the consumers, one chooses the market economy. If one decides in favor of the government, one chooses socialism. There is no third solution.”
~ Ludwig von Mises

— Some deem “libertarian” a dirty word, but it is clean compared to this newly-discovered synonym for non-libertarian: “State supremacist”.
— By the authority vested in me, I hereby proclaim that non-libertarians shall henceforth be known as State supremacists.
— While striving to learn from Frank Devine’s Australian column, I lucked upon “State supremacist”. Did he coin it? Did he only use it in two articles? Why not more? Why didn’t he write about his word choice? I don’t know.
— To assist future research and draw attention to what should be an everyday term of political discourse, republished below are the two articles containing the aforementioned fresh, witty, cutting, incisive and instructive non-euphemism. Without further ado:
1. “Resolve to kick that dependency habit,” The Australian, 4/1/93.
2. “Family ties need knots in policy unravelled,” The Australian, 25/1/93.

***
1.
Frank Devine, “Resolve to kick that dependency habit,”
The Australian, January 4, 1993, p. 9.

Seen one year, seen them all? Not so, thank God. He seems somehow to keep the good old infinite variety coming. My guess is that one important way 1993 will be different is in the new directions Australian thinking takes about government. This is not just because 1993 is an election year, in which we will be obliged to vote under pain of fine for one party or another.

Scepticism reigns. Many of us will wonder about really basic issues, such as why the devil we cannot make up our own minds about whether or not to vote.

Over the past decade we have had a devastating demonstration of how narrow the capacity of government is and how incompetent officials and politicians are when they attempt to exceed its limits.

As entrepreneurs in Western Australia, Victoria and South Australia they blew billions of dollars in shareholders’ funds because of their failure to grasp elementary business principles.

The futility of their attempts from Canberra to heal the suffering of more than a million unemployed Australians makes mock of Il Duce attempts to act commanding. Fewer and fewer of us believe that making “grants” of other people’s money “creates” jobs.

If we keep our wits about us during 1993, we will use our compulsory vote not so much to choose between a leader who says things will be okay if we obey orders, and one who says he has a system that will make things okay, as to establish a new order in which we are able to put our foot down about what we do not want the government to do.

Advocates of State supremacy, on the defensive the world over, have recently taken to sneering at the idea of reducing government activity as a “right-wing panacea”. That is supposed to outlaw it as either cynical or Pollyana-ish, and too stupid a concept, either way, to be accomodated in a cultivated mind.

Yet, heaven help us, think of how government bloat is forced upon us to our disadvantage. The co-opting of “environmentalists” into government is a strong example.

Green organisations have received millions of dollars of public money. Their members are ensconced on the boards of statutory authorities and consultative committees so firmly and numerously as to be almost beyond extraction. The thousands of hours spent together by officials and environmentalists dreaming about sustainable development and pristine habitats have created entire bureaucratic provinces.

Remember the solemn coming together of Bob Hawke and Australian Conservation Foundation director Phillip Toyne to discuss the environmental impact of the Gulf War?

The smoke cloud from burning oil wells, Toyne declared, would blot out the sun and possibly reduce the temperature of the northern hemisphere by as much as 2.5 degrees. It could disrupt monsoon patterns and cause crop failure for up to a billion people.

Toyne had no idea what he was talking about but he and Hawke conferred with the gravity of treaty-makers at Versailles.

What the green madness has done over the past three years (overlooking the commercial costs of government pandering, which are beyond computation) is to add to government a layer of incompetent, inadequately skilled, often self-aggrandising individuals who have corrupted and confused policy-making.

In trying for a new order at the polls this year we might include among our objectives an end to all gifts of public money to environmental groups and the elimination of the Environment section of the Department of Arts, Sport, the Environment and Territories, which has become a costly hotbed of eco-Nazis.

Our fresh line of thinking about government in 1993 must also embrace the issue of monarchism versus republicanism. As well as having had a horrible year in 1992, the Queen still has a horrible family. The irresponsibility and selfishness of its key members may cause popular rejection of the monarchy.

But we must be on the alert against efforts to thrust a republic on us by stealth, through progressive removal of references to the Crown and its authority in ceremonial and official proceedings.

Nor should we be tricked into accepting dodgy propositions as self-evident truths. Already it is claimed that of course a president could not be elected by direct popular vote because that would undermine the prime ministership. In fact, the office of prime minister is not even mentioned in the Constitution and the last thing we want is a first minister of the Crown acting like a president — without being elected to the job — in the absence of the Crown.

Of course the American form of republic is not for us. Really? Our first requirement of a republican arrangement must be that it guarantees the supremacy of the individual over the State, which the American method does better than any.

The biggest challenge for 1993 is to cure ourselves of our wretched compulsion to invite government into our lives.

During the holidays a small boy was drowned off a weir in Sydney. Television news reported that “local residents had been concerned for a considerable time about the uncontrolled access to the weir”. How desperately sad. Why didn’t they build a fence? I suppose they were waiting for the Government to do it.

Rampaging crowds at the post-Christmas sales outraged State supremacists at the ABC. On December 27, ABC news indignantly noted that “there has been no apology” from Grace Bros to customers who suffered minor injuries in the Sydney rush for bargains. Even the duty of self-criticism evaded!

On December 29, the ABC carried the more encouraging news that “authorities agree that the shopping frenzies need investigation”. Authorities! Investigation! Normalcy was returning.

Finally, on December 30, the national broadcaster triumphantly brought the NSW Minister for Consumer Affairs, Kerry Chikarovski, on camera to declare that her officials would join with the shopkeepers to “review security”. The good word that governments were taking charge was soon flowing to ABC-TV screens from all corners of the Commonwealth.

By coincidence, in Parliament a few days previously, Graeme Campbell, ALP member for Kalgoorlie, had spoken of a visit he made to a department store in Beijing. During his guided tour he and an accompanying official had to step over extension cables taped to the floor at the top of some stairs. Campbell asked what would happen if somebody tripped over them and hurt himself. Wouldn’t the store be responsible?

“Goodness, no,” replied the official. “People have a responsibility to look after themselves. They should watch where they are walking.”

***
2.
Frank Devine, “Family ties need knots in policy unravelled,”
The Australian, January 25, 1993, p. 9.

Husbands work 50 per cent harder than bachelors, according to a recent study. For wives who take the responsibility for home and childcare, the burden of work is immensely greater than when they were single.

Both take on commitments in marriage — from gardens to mortgages, to savings to having children — which they would not consider outside marriage. This is what husbands and wives expect of each other in marriage. It is part of the “deal” they voluntarily make.

From this deal flow benefits provided by families for their members that are “clearly more valuable than government transfers”. The absence of strong families enlarges the need for welfare services from other sources. A sound family policy is almost the whole of a good welfare policy. Trying to get it right should be “the single greatest focus of the national will”. At present, government family policy is a destructive mess.

This is the trenchant theme of Marriage, Divorce and Family Justice, a 45,000-word monograph by Barry Maley which the Centre for Independent Studies will publish next month and excerpts of which have already been published by The Australian and other periodicals. We will be lucky if this year of elections and probably new directions brings forth another public policy commentary of such weight and importance.

Maley is a senior fellow of the CIS and, in fact, half its population of resident fellows. For all the institute’s intellectual energy and productivity, and the international stature it has gained in the 16 years since its founding by Greg Lindsay, then a 27-year-old high school mathematics teacher, the institute lives closer to rags than riches.

Marriage, Divorce and Family Justice is an unusually lavish project, having absorbed most of Maley’s attention for the best part of two years. Most CIS studies are commissioned case by case and penny by penny from outsiders. Maley’s book has the usual logical and dispassionate tone of CIS publications. Indeed, some readers such as, well, me, may find Maley a shade too dispassionate.

He concentrates on the legal and economic aspects of family policy and contends that, in its execution, the Family Law Act has diminished the institution of marriage — the most powerful linking force in family structures — by ignoring its contractual nature. He also argues that the traditional family of mother, father and children is disproportionately and unfairly taxed in order to provide subsidies for other lifestyles.

Maley offers only one glimpse of personal philosophy: “It is the greatest of boons to be … born into a good family; and one of the best things we can do with our own lives is help create a good family.”

While acknowledging in his extensive bibliography familiarity with Ferdinand Mount’s The Subversive Family, Maley studiously skirts its bold assertion that the nuclear family is “a biologically derived way of living which comes naturally to us and which generates an emotional force of enduring and unquenchable power. It is part of being human.”

Nor does Maley explicitly consider the lively characterisation by Mount, a British novelist and editor of The Times Literary Supplement, of the family as a subversive element in society, enemy by its nature of the triumphal State.

The likelihood that Mount’s second perception of the family is correct has probably given impetus to efforts — now being made with special ferocity and prolific publication in the United States — to demonstrate that his first contention is unsound. Some US dissenters claim that the “traditional” family is not only an historical hiccup but is essentially exploitative of women.

Maley does complement Mount’s ideas about the subversiveness of families with his own view of marriage as an alternative lifestyle. This alternative, at present the choice of 80 per cent of Australians, is progressively being eliminated, he says, by legal blurring of the distinction between marriage and cohabitation.

He notes that the Family Law Act gives lip service to the status of marriage as an agreement voluntarily and publicly entered into with the expectation and mutually declared intention that it will be permanent. In practice, however, the Act has become a vehicle for achieving “procedural ease in sweeping aside a failed marriage”.

Maley concedes the necessity for divorce on demand but says that in a disputed divorce the law should provide for a husband or wife to receive damages for proven breach of contract. If marriage was not a contractual arrangement, it was nothing. To propose that contract-breaking was of no interest to the law was at odds with every concept of justice.

If the law took marriage rights and obligations seriously and justly enforced them, so would husbands and wives. In Maley’s judgment, the knowledge that misconduct in marriage might incur penalties would also influence people’s behaviour.

On the financial side, Maley notes that some $2 billion in public funds is paid each year in allowances for more than three million children in intact families, but $3 billion for just over 400,000 children in sole-parent families. For intact families to be equally compensated the cost would be $20 billion.

Maley says all existing allowances should be replaced with a single tax credit for each child, available to married and unmarried parents alike of, say, $2000 a year — the difference being paid in cash to parents whose incomes do not attract that amount of tax. He also recommends income splitting for tax purposes for parents of dependent children when only one goes out to work.

Maley questions the basic concept of a one-parent family, noting that having a child is a joint enterprise in and out of marriage. He urges a sharpening of legal procedures to ensure that no parent opts out of his or her responsibilities without penalty.

As was the case in last year’s US presidential elections, the state of the family will be a mainstream issue in our federal election. The usual sentimental posturing and espousal of State supremacist ideology will be a given a run. This time, fortunately, Barry Maley and the Centre for Independent Studies have given us a means of keeping a grip on pragmatic reality.