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Man Wants Liberty to Become the Man He Wants to Become
...But Buchanan has more recently argued that we may be losing this sense of ourselves in the modern age. Autonomy is losing its appeal. The learned helplessness we have acquired by living in a political culture of preferential treatment and protection from ourselves may have left the modern mind incable of accepting the responsibilities of freedom. We are instead afraid to be free. This shift in our human imagination is perhaps the most dangerous threat to economic and political freedom we have faced yet.

The threats to political and economic freedom in the 20th century came from:

(1) managerial socialism --- which argued that central planning by the government could organize affairs more ratioally than market forces;

(2) paternalistic socialism --- where an elite argued that the government had to step in and protect individuals from the poor choices they would make (the nanny state);

(3) distributional socialism --- where the state would be entrusted to provide an equitable distribution of resources.

But Buchanan claims in his essay "Afraid to Be Free: Dependence as Desideratum" that the new threat in the 21st century comes in the form of:

(4) parental socialism --- where the individuals invite the government to meddle in their lives to protect them from themselves and provide security in their lives from the vagaries of a life left to their own making.

This form of statism has been understudied by political economists. It was one thing to intellectually fight the conception of human choice as pre-programmed with an emphasis on the open-endedness of choice and the meaning our lives find in the process of constructing that life through time with our choices. But embracing that freedom also implies embracing the responsibility that goes with open ended choice. What are we to make of things when individuals "do not want to shoulder the final responsibility of their own actions"?

Benjamin Franklin once remarked that anyone who would trade-off their liberty for security deserves neither. But to even make that remark means that the phenomena that Buchanan is talking about isn't really new....