The State is Not a Moral Parent

Fear Makes Authority Attractive

Most political disagreement doesn’t begin with policy. It begins with trust. When a society feels economically, morally, or socially fragile, people look to the state for stability. They want the reassurance that someone is in charge – someone who can protect them from uncertainty. In those moments, the appeal of authority becomes stronger, not weaker. 

The impulse to turn to government is understandable. It promises coordination when people feel overwhelmed, stability where life feels precarious, and justice in place of disorder. A functioning state is essential to any enduring society. Without it, freedom quickly devolves into chaos. Government exists to enforce contracts, protect borders, adjudicate disputes, restrain violence, and provide the legal framework within which free people can flourish. The problem is not that people don’t expect enough. It’s that they often expect the wrong things.

The question is not whether government should exist but what it should be trusted to do, and, more importantly, what it should be prevented from doing, regardless of how noble its intentions appear. History has repeatedly shown the danger of assuming that power becomes wiser as it becomes larger – or more moral as it becomes more centralized. Yet every generation seems convinced that its circumstances are somehow different. 

Sometimes, fear persuades people that authority must be absolute. At other times, hardship renews faith in liberty and restraint. Political thought has always oscillated between trust and skepticism, hope and caution.

Governments are made up of the people who run them. That means understanding the role of state power begins, not with ideology, but with human nature. A nature that is shaped less by intention than by incentive. In those moments of uncertainty, people don’t start asking philosophical questions. They want to know who’s in charge. 

When systems appear fragile – public corruption, rising crime, judicial activism, weak supply chains, disputed elections – the desire for a strong authority becomes visceral. Citizens demand that rules be enforced and chaos contained. They want someone visibly responsible for stability. This instinct is not philosophical. It is human. 

Hobbes and the Promise of Security

This instinct has deep roots in political thought. In the years leading up to the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes wrote that without a powerful sovereign, life would descend into conflict. His solution was clear – liberty without security is meaningless, and therefore order must take precedence. When people are afraid, they will accept extraordinary authority as long as it promises peace. How many examples of that have we seen in our short lifetimes?

Emergency powers are always presented as temporary. Citizens are told that stability requires compliance, while surveillance is justified as protection. In the moment, the tradeoff feels reasonable, even virtuous. Better a firm hand than no hand at all. 

But Hobbes’ solution comes at quite a cost. When order is purchased through fear, the authority doesn’t merely restrain violence. It becomes the arbiter of what is necessary, acceptable, and eventually moral. It shifts from referee to guardian, gradually transforming citizens from participants to wards. 

Locke and the Limits of Government

John Locke offered a different starting point. Writing in less chaotic times, he argued that individuals possess rights prior to the state – rights that the government exists to protect, not create. In his view, authority is legitimate only so long as it remains constrained. Power is not a moral upgrade, but a practical tool, limited by design. This distinction matters more than ever in a culture where people speak of the government “fixing” social problems, managing personal risk, and correcting moral failures. In many ways, Hobbes’ vision has proven more influential than Locke’s; just look around.

The tension between these two visions is anything but academic. It plays out whenever the promise of order tempts society to forget that power, once granted, rarely volunteers to shrink. 

When fear creates the demand for authority, compassion often justifies its expansion.

Compassion and the Expansion of the State

In moments of genuine crisis – economic collapse, social dislocation, or widespread uncertainty – moral urgency intensifies. Restraint appears callous when suffering is visible and immediate. Action feels virtuous. In these moments, the state is no longer asked to merely preserve order but to repair society itself.

This expectation was virtually unheard of in America before the World Wars but is now a defining feature of modern political life. Beginning in the early twentieth century, the state started to present itself not simply as an enforcer of law, but as the guarantor of stability and dignity. The language changed. Assistance became entitlement, while temporary measures hardened into permanent obligations. 

The appeal of the transformation is easy to understand. When markets fail and families fracture, centralized power promises coordination at precisely the moment personal responsibility feels insufficient. Its stated purpose is relief. Cloaked in the language of care, authority rarely announces itself as a threat. One has to ask… was it by design?

The problem is not that compassion has entered the public square. The problem is that once compassion is embedded in public policy, it demands permanence. Emergency measures are never allowed to expire. Programs designed for problems grow into systems that require continual justification for their removal. Over time, the state acquires not only new powers but new moral expectations. Citizens no longer judge the government by whether it governs justly, but whether it governs generously.

From Public Service to Moral Authority

Politicians have done their part to encourage the transformation. It was articulated most clearly in the twentieth century by leaders such as President Theodore Roosevelt, who argued that freedom required more than political rights – it required economic security through government action. His claim that what good is liberty if people lack basic necessities may have been sincere, but embedded in his reasoning was a subtle redefinition of responsibility, not to mention a complete revision of liberty. The suggestion that I cannot be dragged off the street and thrown in prison without trial for an unpopular opinion is a useless right if I also lack heating oil in winter or access to a dentist, is a remarkable argument to make. Nevertheless, Roosevelt got his way, and soon the state did not merely encourage conditions for flourishing; it assumed responsibility for the outcomes themselves.

Once that line is crossed, limits get harder to defend. All attempts at intervention are cast as a moral indifference. Authority expands, not primarily through coercion, but conscience, which is ruthlessly wielded against all challengers. And since the motivation is continually represented as benevolent – even in the face of failure – skepticism is portrayed as callousness.

This is how power grows – not through force alone- but through the promise of safety and care, a logic later formalized by Hegel and radicalized by Marx into a vision of authority that claims not only power over society but insight into the direction of history itself. 

The Cost of Good Intentions

The expansion of all this benevolent authority hasn’t ended in confidence. It’s ending in disappointment. Programs meant to stabilize families degraded and fractured them. Regulations enacted to protect consumers calcified into bureaucratic barriers. Power marketed as temporary is now permanent, while responsibility quietly migrated away from ordinary life. 

This pattern has repeated across countries and generations. Over time, citizens begin to notice the gap between intentions and outcomes, which explains why periods of government expansion are often followed by calls for limitation. The skepticism does not arise from ideology, but from experience. The slow realization that good intentions may not be enough. 

Why Incentives Matter More Than Intentions

As a response, the late twentieth century saw leaders like Ronald Reagan begin to give voice to the growing unease that government had made promises it could never deliver. By the 1990s, Bill Clinton attempted to recalibrate state responsibility by acknowledging limits.

What emerged in the decades since was no victory for liberty. It was the growing recognition that governments are not unified moral agents. They are individuals who respond to the constraints placed on them, the rewards offered, and the pressures embedded within the institutions themselves.

Economists like James M. Buchanan have argued that political actors should not be treated as benevolent caretakers but as ordinary people subject to the same corrupt spirits as everyone else. The danger of ignoring this reality is profound. When policy is built on assumed virtue rather than on predictable human behavior, the consequences are not aberrations. They are expected results.

Every generation eventually discovers for itself that moral urgency is not a substitute for realism. Systems designed on the assumption that authority improves character inevitably concentrate authority while dispersing responsibility. Accountability erodes not because people become worse, but because the bureaucracy requires it. No political system should depend on sustained moral excellence to function properly – least of all one entrusted with coercive power.

A just political order is not one that promises a perfect outcome but one that anticipates failure and moves to limit damage to individual liberty. The State is the servant of a free people. It is not their moral parent.

Discernment:

The next time you hear a politician promise to eliminate uncertainty, ask yourself three questions:

• Is this a proper function of government, or a responsibility that belongs to families, churches, communities, or individuals?
• Does this proposal increase personal responsibility – or replace it?
• If this power were placed in the hands of my political opponents, would I still want the government to possess it?

Promises are easy to make. Power is much harder to reclaim once it has been surrendered.