Self-Reliance

Our Fearless Leader was speechifying a few months ago, and he offered up this gem:

It was the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, who said the role of government is to do for the people what they cannot do better for themselves.

Now, in the first place, I couldn’t actually find this quote attributed to Lincoln. (Probably due to not trying very hard.) I did find this, however:

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away men’s initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.

Which seems like it would serve as a pretty thorough rejection of the legislative agenda of the past 20 months, but whatever. What I want to talk about is thresholds. The standard in the first quote is “what they cannot do better for themselves”. This is the wrong standard. Even if it were true that gov’t could do some thing “better” than the people, that isn’t sufficient reason for the gov’t to do it.

COIN

Consider counterinsurgency doctrine:

The Host Nation Doing Something Tolerably Is Normally Better than Us Doing It Well
1-154. It is just as important to consider who performs an operation as to assess how well it is done. Where the United States is supporting a host nation, long-term success requires establishing viable HN leaders and institutions that can carry on without significant U.S. support. The longer that process takes, the more U.S. public support will wane and the more the local populace will question the legitimacy of their own forces and government. General Creighton Abrams, the U.S. commander in Vietnam in 1971, recognized this fact when he said, “There’s very clear evidence,…in some things, that we helped too much. And we retarded the Vietnamese by doing it.…We can’t run this thing.…They’ve got to run it. The nearer we get to that the better off they are and the better off we are.” T.E. Lawrence made a similar observation while leading the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire in 1917: “Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.”…

This standard is reflected in the second Lincoln quote: he does not say that you ought not do for a man what he can do as well for himself, or do better for himself — the standard is whether or not he can do it for himself at all. The notion that government should do some thing because “the people … cannot do better for themselves” is base stealing on two levels: First, because it probably isn’t demonstrably true that the gov’t can do better, and second because even if it could, that would not be sufficient justification for usurpation of the people’s independence and sabotage of their self-reliance.