I’m all for free enterprise and true capitalism, as every right-thinking person should be. The trouble is the social and economic predicament in which we Americans presently find ourselves is both the product of and the continuing vehicle for the preservation of an anti-capitalistic regime which over the past century has gradually gained such a stranglehold on the governmental, economic, and social system as to pose a permanent impediment to free enterprise and an active threat to individual autonomy. The irony is that the regime was, is, and will remain comprised of entities that were once built upon free enterprise and true capitalism.

It goes under various names — “corporatism” and “the welfare-warfare state” are two popular terms — but its patrimony is unmistakable, being the lineal descendant of the Progressivist programs of the early 20th century, with all of Progressivism’s technocratic zeal intact and active. It would probably surprise some people in government — those who, for instance, propose labyrinthine laws without reading them or fabricating non-existent, “shovel-ready” jobs — to be characterized as “technocrats” (the term sounds so unfeeling, doesn’t it?), but exponents of technocracy they are.

The bitter, rotting fruits of Progressivism now litter the ground around us. It required nearly a hundred years to arrive at this place, but the stench of failed utopian tinkering with American constitutional government, the free market, and freedom as a whole has become stifling even to the lowest-placed, most disaffected members of society.

In the September Freeman, Kevin A. Carson shows once again how the best of intentions can have the worst of outcomes:

The Progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century — the doctrine from which the main current of modern liberalism developed — is sometimes erroneously viewed as an “anti-business” philosophy. It was anti-market to be sure, but by no means necessarily anti-business. Progressivism was, more than anything, managerialist.

The American economy after the Civil War became increasingly dominated by large organizations.

…. [at this juncture] the role of the government [was critical] in the growth of the centralized corporate economy: the railroad land grants and subsidies, which tipped the balance toward large manufacturing firms serving a national market … and the patent system, which was a primary tool of consolidation and cartelization in a number of industries.

These giant corporations were followed by large government agencies whose mission was to support and stabilize the corporate economy, and then by large bureaucratic universities, centralized school systems, and assorted “helping professionals” to process the “human resources” the corporations and State fed on. These interlocking bureaucracies required a large managerial class to administer them.

Big led to bigger, and the need to control things:

… the first corporation managers came from an industrial engineering background and saw their job as doing for the entire organization what they’d previously done for production on the shop floor. The managerial revolution in the large corporation … was in essence an attempt to apply the engineer’s approach (standardizing and rationalizing tools, processes, and systems) to the organization as a system.

But unfortunately the Progressivist zeitgeist was haunting the land, just waiting for its chance:

Progressivism was the ideology of the managers and engineers who administered the large organizations; political action was a matter of applying the same principles they used to rationalize their organizations to society as a whole.

Besides, wasn’t greater efficiency the ultimate goal not just in production but society as a whole?

The managerialist ethos reflected in Progressivism emphasized transcending class and ideological divisions through the application of disinterested expertise.

… The implications [however] … were quite authoritarian. Only a select class of technocrats with “the scientific knowledge to discern and create this superior social order” were qualified to make decisions. In all aspects of life, policy was to be a matter of expertise, with the goal of removing as many questions as possible from the realm of public political debate to that of administration by properly qualified authorities.

A free market is the last thing on a Progressive’s mind:

It’s true that Progressivism shaded into the anti-capitalist left and included some genuinely anti-business rhetoric on its left-wing fringe. But the mainstream of Progressivism saw the triumph of the great trusts over competitive enterprise as a victory for economic rationalization and efficiency — and the guarantee of stable, reasonable profits to the trusts through the use of political power as a good thing.

In the end the more utopian or socialistic Progressives found they’d become “useful idiots.” Their desire to regiment and manage was given free rein mainly when it coincided with the needs of the corporatist economy created by Rockefeller and Morgan.

To attempt to upset such “efficient” autocratic monopolies would be just plain crazy:

Mainstream Progressivism, far from embracing a left-wing vision of class struggle, saw class conflict as a form of irrationality that could be transcended by expertise.

Inevitably, authoritarian thinking permits unbridled hubris to roam freely:

Progressivism was a branch of what [James] Scott called the “high modernist” ideology, which “envisioned a sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition.” High modernism carries with it an aesthetic sensibility in which the rationally organized community, farm, or factory was one that “looked regimented and orderly in a geometrical sense,” along with an affinity for gigantism and centralization reflected in “huge dams, centralized communication and transportation hubs, large factories and farms, and grid cities …” If you’ve read H. G. Wells’s “Utopias” or looked at Albert Speer’s architecture, you get the idea.

(Even now, highly-placed “Green” eco-zealots worldwide — imbued with their high modernist aesthetic sensibilities — are implementing plans to restrict human activity to only those government-designated zones which they deem least harmful to the environment.)

The “little guy’s” concerns are of no importance to Progressivist technocrats:

High modernism, Scott writes, placed remarkably “little confidence … in the skills, intelligence, and experience of ordinary people.” The dispersed, local knowledge of the general population was, at best, to be patronized as prescientific and purified of its partial or local character by codifying it into a set of universal rules that could in turn be reduced to a verbal formula and transmitted as knowledge by the priesthood.

If you wish to read more, see Carson’s article — “Taylorism, Progressivism, and Rule by Experts” — here.