Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman has been a steady defender, via all his scholarly and semi-scholarly works, of America’s growing welfare state. He has volunteered umpteen times to step up to the plate with yet another bag full of sophistries with which to give pseudo-legal justifications for expanding the power of government, even as he laments those powers whenever his own favorite team doesn’t happen to run the show. His most recent vigilant efforts can be read in recent issues of that pink magazine, The London Review of Books, one even more unabashedly loyal to Leftists political economic dreams than its North American counterpart, The New York Review of Books. The recent offerings from Ackerman have a certain sting, of course, since their target is the administration of George W. Bush, someone’s whose presidency has demonstrated probably the least measure of courage and leadership among the Republican presidencies of the past hundred years. Picking on Bush isn’t a hard task, although as one does so, precisely because it is so easy, one can get careless and show one’s own weaknesses. In the second installment to Ackerman’s rant against Bush & Company, he starts with a counterfactual recent history of the U.S. government, imagining how it might have been had the conservatives been at all triumphant. Here is how Ackerman describes one of the imaginary triumphs of the Bush team: “...On the home front, the Republican Congress was proving equally responsive to his call to privatize Social Security — replacing tired New Deal notions of communal solidarity with a bright individualistic future in an Ownership Society.” Notice the wording of this so-called triumph — the New Deal’s coercive government measures mandating hoary and widespread redistribution of people resources is characterized with that ever-so-benign phrase, “communal solidarity.” This is a very revealing choice of terms. It shows what modern liberals — the American version of Europe’s social democrats or democratic socialists — would just love to have us all believe: their ideal society consists of millions of people coming together of their own free will to form a commune. However, what the modern liberal actually supports is not a commune, which is, except for the children, inhabited by people who choose to be there. The kibbutz is a good example of the commune, or the convent or monastery, where the solidarity comes from the separate individual commitments of the members, not by threats of prison sentences. The modern liberal’s actual project, however — which FDR’s New Deal ratcheted up by several decimals from what had been the prior mild welfare state — involves no voluntary solidarity. It is a massive coercive state apparatus, with the IRS confiscating people’s resources and the bureaucracies across the country, led proudly by the Washington gang, spending other people’s money as they see fit. So, Ackerman’s characterization of what the New Deal was all about is a flat-out distortion. Instead of communal solidarity the New Deal amounted to a type of lynch mob. It brought about its regime by means of a politically active majority — encouraged by a president who blamed the Great Depression on human liberty and offered to repair it by means of state planning and regimentation (but only got it somewhat fixed via World War II) — that set out to conscript the labor of some for the benefit of others, no questions asked, no refusals accepted. But just as all tyrannies pretend to rest on some higher goal that justifies the tyrant’s conduct, so Ackerman’s polity of massive wealth redistribution — which, as the late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick made clear, was on par with forced labor — has to be presented as a gentle place, one where communal solidarity reins. Ackerman’s distortions need to be rebuffed because even today, sadly, too many people adhere to the ancient tribal notion that when “we” have decided to rob Peter to benefit Paul, something perfectly acceptable has occurred. Since, however, that mythical “we” is nearly always an actual special gang that runs roughshod over others, that picture isn’t at all benign as Ackerman wants us to think of it. The New Deal had some decent objectives, but these should have been achieved voluntarily, by means of the free choices of the individual members of the American public, not with the use of the threat of prison and violence. That, especially for Americans, should make a big difference. It shouldn’t be allowed to be obscured by the verbal trickery of Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman. Tibor Machan advises Freedom Communications, parent company of this newspaper. E-mail him at Machan@chapman.edu