Those in political power always seem to be in a hurry. It is not surprising that their time horizons for “action” never extend more than a few years ahead of them, though for different reasons. If it is a dictatorship, the tyrant in power can never be sure when an assassin’s bullet might cut his life short, or if some of his “loyal” followers may be conspiring to overthrow him and replace him with one of their own.Little by little, however, some began to make the case that of course liberty is essential and property rights are important, but there are some particular needs or problems for which, surely, there can be an exception.
[Click to Tweet]
The famous Italian classical-liberal historian Guglielmo Ferrero (1871–1942) explained more than once in the 1930s, particularly in The Principle of Power (1942), why the dictators that arose following the First World War were in a hurry. Lacking both the traditional legitimacy of the hereditary monarchs of the past or the more modern democratic legitimacy of acceptance by the many through a majority vote, they could create a less-stable legitimacy only by attempting to introduce great and impressive changes in society, that is, “great deeds” — bigger than life accomplishments of one sort or another to awe and impress “the masses” as legitimization of the dictators’ right to rule. Their fear of assassination or revolution against their rule made them men in a hurry.
This is what the German free-market economist Wilhelm Röpke referred to in The Social Crisis of Our Time (1942) as the “Cult of the Colossal,” that is, massive public works and industrial manufactures, huge government buildings and giant stadiums, and large mass rallies and demonstrations — all of which was meant to make the individual human being feel small and inescapably part of some social collective larger than himself, led by the dictator.
Dictators are always in a hurry
Dictators, for all their self-images of courage, leadership, vision, and commanding powers setting them aside and above those over whom they rule, are always afraid of death by an assassin’s bullet. In 1918 and 1919, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, there were several assassination attempts on Vladimir Lenin’s life, one of which seriously wounded him. Over the quarter of a century that Joseph Stalin was the unchallenged dictator of the Soviet Union, there were few real threats or attempts on his life. Nonetheless, constantly imagining that there were “enemies everywhere,” Stalin carried out purges against prominent members of the Soviet Communist Party and in the senior ranks of the Soviet military in the 1930s. As a Sovietologist once noted, with a touch of irony, Stalin probably killed more communists in these purges than any anticommunist government in history!
The last of such purges was after World War II and centered around a group of Jewish doctors accused of planning to murder Soviet leaders in Stalin’s circle, what came to be called “the doctor’s plot.” The only thing that prevented it from being fully set in motion with public executions in Red Square in Moscow and the exiling of millions of Soviet Jews to the country’s desolate far east in Siberia was Stalin’s death in March 1953, from seemingly natural causes (a stroke).
Being a meticulous conspirator himself in planning the defeat of his rivals and those who might be threats to his absolute power, Stalin was suspicious of everyone and everything. In his memoirs, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev recounted that during a conversation with Stalin, the Red Czar of the Kremlin said, “I trust no one, not even myself!” In spite of attempts by “left” intellectuals and historians to claim that Stalin wasn’t a real socialist, Marxist ideology as interpreted by him played a central role in Stalin’s worldview. Indeed, Marx’s theory of class conflict, in which “the workers” and “the capitalists” are in an irreconcilable war over who would control the means of production and for whose benefit, is a theory of human relationships that easily leads to a paranoia that “class enemies” are everywhere and are at work to destroy you — even among those who claim to be your “comrades” in the cause of the great socialist revolution.
Stalin hurried to build socialism
If you are working to create the first and great socialist state, as Stalin was; if you are arresting millions of people as slave labor to conjure up centrally planned industrial cities in the middle of nowhere in as short a time as possible; if you uproot entire peasant populations and starve millions of men, women, and children to death to impose collectivization of the land; if you institute five-year plans to “modernize” a backward agrarian country in less than a decade to catch up with “capitalist” enemy nations that surround the Soviet Union; if you hermetically seal off the country from all foreign information and influence to methodically indoctrinate the entire nation into becoming the new “Soviet Man”; if you are doing all this, with the confidence that only you have that superior ability to bring about the promised socialist paradise on earth, then you have to be in a hurry, since your life might end at any moment. There is not a minute to waste, regardless of the human cost. After all, you are on Marx’s “right side of history,” and the individuals who you execute as “enemies of the people” or who lose their lives being worked to death in labor camps to “build socialism” are nothing compared to the bright, beautiful future of the “working class” as a whole, which Stalin intended to create.
Hitler hurried to create a greater Germany
The same was true for Adolph Hitler. He, too, was in a hurry. If Hitler saw himself as “destined” to bring about a “thousand-year” German Reich and he became chancellor of Germany only in January 1933, when he was already 44 years old, what could he hope for? At most, 30 or 40 more years of a normal lifespan. Not a long time to be about the business of laying the foundation for a purified, powerful, and self-sufficient Germany to last and rule over others for a millennium. (Hitler committed suicide in his wartime bunker in Berlin in April 1945 when he was 56 years old.)
Hitler had to quickly centralize power in the hands of the Nazi Party. He had to rebuild the German military as quickly as possible; he had to take the youth of the country and indoctrinate them into the race-ideology of the National Socialist movement. He had to isolate and separate from the rest of the German people those who he declared to be “race-vermin” whose “blood” threatened to defile the master Aryan race. Hitler had no time to waste to achieve his plans for a war to liberate, now and forever, the German people from enemy nations all around.
There have been counted more than 40 plans to assassinate Hitler between his ascendency to power in 1933 and July 1944, when there was the famous German officers’ plot to kill him, from which he escaped wounded but not dead. Fear and paranoia enveloped Hitler. Access to him was restricted, military officers could not be armed for meetings with him, and the Gestapo was expected to be ever vigilant against those who might want to take the Führer’s life. For those arrested for planning or attempting to kill Hitler, torture and brutal methods of execution were not uncommon.
Hitler, like Stalin, undertook a savage purge to destroy those considered a threat to his dictatorial power, especially with the famous Night of the Long Knives in the summer of 1934 against his own Brownshirts who were considered a danger to his rule and life. A day after this Night of the Long Knives, Stalin told members of his inner circle during a meeting in the Kremlin that he admired Hitler’s actions, saying that Hitler knew how to take care of his enemies. A few months later, Stalin began his own series of purges that killed thousands in the years before the Second World War. Hitler’s 1934 purge, in fact, was partly the inspiration for Stalin’s own purges in the 1930s.
How dictators search for legitimacy
In Hitler’s pursuit of legitimacy, there was that exaggerated nature in all that the Nazi regime did to rationalize and demonstrate the right to rule; everything was, again, bigger than life. From the Nuremburg rallies of thousands of Nazi followers; to massive public works projects like the German autobahn highway system connecting one end of Germany to the other to put Germans back to work after the high unemployment of the Great Depression; to Hitler’s colossal architectural works of government buildings, stadiums, and art galleries; to his subsidized cruise-ship vacations for thousands of ordinary German workers; to his plan for the “people’s car” — the Volkswagen — to be a means of transportation for all good and “real” Germans — all of this was meant to show the wonders that the superior Adolph Hitler could do for the “common man” as part of legitimizing his right to rule.
As Guglielmo Ferrero explained Hitler’s situation in July 1934, about 18 months after he came to power:
But what is the basis of Hitler’s power? Hereditary right? But he is a little Austrian bourgeois who in the Germany of twenty years ago would have been a mere foreigner excluded from all public office. The will of the people? Up to the time when he came to power Hitler could never claim to represent more than half the people of Germany. As soon as he found himself in office he destroyed every means by which the people could express their opinion freely….
Elections and plebiscites could legitimize his power provided they were held with some measure of freedom; but there is no trace of freedom in Germany today…. Legitimate democracy implies the right to oppose, and consequently the existence of an opposition. Unable to base its claim either on the principle of heredity or on that of democracy, the Nazi government, like the Fascist government [in Italy] seeks to legitimize itself by making the people believe that it is capable of working miracles.
Force as the ultimate means of political power
But at the end of the day, dictators rule not by miracles of bigger-than-life public-works projects or great military victories, but by one fundamental means: the use of force or its threat. Determined to rule regardless of whether those under their control support him or not, whether or not he has succeeded in sufficient indoctrination of the people over whom he rules for them to accept his power over them as just, right, or legitimate, the dictator will resort to violence to subdue and intimidate any who might be tempted or who try to overthrow his position of ultimate control in the government.
Have we not seen this in our own times, as in China in June 1989, when the Communist Party, determined to maintain its power, brutally crushed Chinese students and others in Tiananmen Square in Beijing when they called for democracy? Have we not seen that in Putin’s Russia, when anyone who is viewed as a political threat is arrested and imprisoned on trumped up charges, or is shot on a bridge just next to the Kremlin, or poisoned in an arctic prison to bring about his demise? Have we not most recently seen that in Iran when huge demonstrations were held against inflation, taxes, commercial restrictions, and when student demands for greater freedom were met by the theological tyrannical regime that controls the country with mass violence and the murder of several thousands of people?
Legitimacy through democratic majorities
This type of ruthless use of violence normally is not usually present or used in representative democracies. Here the “rules of the game” determine legitimacy for holding political office through open, free, and competitive elections. Explaining the American political system in his book A Stranger in America (1835), a German immigrant and later prominent American political scientist, Francis Lieber (1798–1872), said:
However great the excitement may appear, on paper or in words [during an election], the people know very well that their lives and property are not in jeopardy; that whatever party may come in or go out, the broad principles of the whole system will be acted upon, the general laws will be observed….
There is in this country [America] no dishonor whatever connected either with being turned out of office or being vanquished at an election. It is no shame to be defeated. One party must be victorious, and the other tries to be so the next time. An American, as the member of a party, may be defeated, he is not conquered. Persecutions do not take place; the successful party does not annihilate its opponents — each party continues to have its meetings, papers, etc…. The frequency of changes [holding regular elections], likewise, prevents the higher offices from becoming the objects of so ardent an ambition as to affect seriously the mental faculties of the disappointed candidates.
Lieber also emphasized that in a country like mid-nineteenth century America in which the government was relatively small and the private sector of industry and commerce was so large in comparison, there were “so many opportunities of gaining one’s livelihood … that … a loss of [a government] office is not so ruinous as in France, where a man often thinks that his honor is gone, and his career forever destroyed, as soon as he is thrown out of public employment.”
So why is it the case that in America today (and in most other modern democratic countries), those who hold political office seem so much in a hurry with short-term horizons guiding their actions, in their own way similar to dictatorships? It is not that the American government did “nothing” in that earlier period, as historians like Jonathan Hughes emphasized in The Governmental Habit: Economic Controls from Colonial Times to the Present (1991). The federal and state governments handed out taxpayer-funded contracts for “internal improvements” (government infrastructure projects), granted semi-monopoly privileges in trade and finance, and provided business subsidies of various sorts.
The rush to grow government
But by twentieth- and, now, twenty-first-century standards, these were minimal and limited in their impact relative to the society as a whole. Today, government at the federal, state, and local levels combined spends nearly $12.6 trillion out of a $31.4 trillion economy, as measured in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or over 40 percent of all expenditures in America. In 1840, about the time Francis Lieber was explaining life in America in the pages of his book, federal spending comprised about 2.1 percent of the GDP of that time, with state and local government expenditures coming to only between 3 and 4 percent of GDP, or at the most a total of 6.1 percent of U.S. GDP. Another way of saying this is that in 1840, the expenditures and incomes earned in the private sector made up about 94 percent of the American economy, compared to only 60 percent in 2025.
Today, government’s hand is everywhere and in virtually everything. The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s annual report Ten Thousand Commandments for 2025 estimated that paperwork and compliance costs for American private enterprises to meet all federal-level regulations and controls on business comes to about $2 trillion. A 2024 Cato Institute report estimated that state and local government regulatory compliance costs may come to as high as an additional $500 billion imposed on the private sector. That would raise the amount of government burden on society to nearly 48 percent of GDP.
This helps us understand a bit more why those in political office in America always seem to be in a hurry and have their own version of fear of real and potential opponents. If dictators are fearful of any next attempt on their life, then politicians in democracies are afraid of those who may run against them in the next election cycle, both in their own party’s primaries and in the general election. In the United States, this means that their time horizons never go out further than, at most, two, four, or six years for, respectively, the House of Representatives, the presidency, and the Senate. Indeed, they are already thinking of the next election the day after they may have won their election or reelection to the political office they hold.
Buying votes with other people’s money
In democratic systems, two things are crucial to gain and keep political office: campaign contributions and votes on election day. The problem every politician confronts is how to gain each of these from a large enough number of people in society to make it possible for them to win the next election. Everyone in the private sector has plenty of uses for and ways to spend what they have earned. The question is, why should they part with some of their income and hand it over to someone running for political office and to take the time and effort to first know something about those asking for those dollars to decide whether it is worth it or not to do so?
At the end of the day, politicians have nothing to offer prospective campaign contributors and voters other than other people’s money. Someone in society thinks that there is a good “cause” deserving of money being spent on it, say, cancer research, or preserving some wildlife area, or assisting “the poor and needy” either here in America or helping some oppressed or starving people in another part of the world. Such a person may have attempted to arouse the interest and support of their fellow Americans for one or more of these good causes by appealing to their “better nature” or an altruistic sense of a responsibility to humanity.
But, alas, not enough of their countrymen are aroused to part with their time and money to voluntarily cooperate in alleviating or solving that “social problem” — or at least not enough of them to the advocate’s desire or satisfaction. What other avenue is open to the proponent of this good cause other than the free and voluntary assistance of their countrymen? Well, the government. The government can do something that no one of these “cause” advocates can do – force others in society to pay funds to finance what they want done — or to get people to act in ways that they want them to act. The government can compel the payment of taxes and compliance with regulations that government imposes on them.
When Francis Lieber was writing about the 1830s America, he had come to know after emigrating from Germany that most Americans did not consider it the duty or responsibility for government to compel some to pay for other people’s “good causes” or to make them act in their personal or business lives in ways other than they desired to, as long as they did not resort to force or fraud in their dealings with their fellow Americans.
Earlier Americans cherished their liberty
That was because the fundamental assumption in the minds of almost all Americans was the paramount importance and value of liberty. Again turning to Francis Lieber, in this case to his book On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853, revised ed. 1874), he emphasized what nearly every American took for granted — the right to and protection of private property and its peaceful use by its owner:
One of the staunchest principles of civil liberty is the firmest possible protection of individual property — acquired or acquiring, produced and accumulated, or producing and accumulating. We include, therefore, unrestrained action in producing and exchanging, the prohibition of all unfair monopolies, commercial freedom, and the guarantee that no property shall be taken except in the course of [legal and constitutional due process of] law…. The true protection of individual property demands likewise the exclusion of confiscation.
At the bedrock of this right to property, said Lieber, was the love and want for individual liberty, above all else, and for which the free people of America were most jealous and watchful against any violation. As he put it
It is the liberty we prize and love for a hundred reasons, and which we would love if there were no other reason than that it is liberty. We know it is the political state most befitting to conscious man…. We are proud of our self-government and our love of the law as our master, and we cling the faster to all these ancient and modern guarantees, the more we observe that, wherever the task which men have proposed to themselves is the suppression of liberty, these guarantees are sure to be the first objects of determined and persevering attack…. [So] may we learn what those who love liberty ought to prize, by observing what those who hate freedom suppress or war against.”
Liberty lost one step at a time
But little by little, however, some began to make the case that of course liberty is essential and property rights are important, but there are some particular needs or problems for which, surely, there can be an exception. And once one exception or “emergency” circumstance had justified a growth in the role and duty of government, well, then, one more and then another followed. Money is appropriated; spending or regulations are introduced; a new bureaucracy is instituted or an existing one is expanded in responsibility and oversight; and those receiving the financial benefits from the government program or regulation come to feel dependent on it. After a while, not surprisingly, it begins to be thought of as something government is expected to do, and to which they, finally, have a “right.”
As the British historian Willliam Greenleaf explained in his volume on The Rise of Collectivism (1983) about the experience of moving away from the more laissez-faire society in nineteenth century Great Britain:
First of all, there was commonly the public exposure of a social evil or problem…. Then there was a demand that the preventable or intolerable circumstances thus revealed be dealt with…. The second stage ensued with the realization that existing legislation was ineffective, perhaps almost wholly so…. [Third], the obvious remedy was to appoint enforcement officers especially charged with carrying the existing statutes into effect…. Fourthly, further experience would show that the occasional Parliamentary legislation would never be enough to deal with the matters at issue, that what was needed was a continuing process of regulation in the light of growing and changing experience. So that, finally, executive officers would demand and receive a discretionary initiative to deal with the complex problems arising in practice…. Inherent in this whole process there is a strong and cumulative trend towards a much more dynamic role for government than had usually been envisaged…. For if a body of able and sedulous men is put in charge of a branch of the public service, it is (as one commentator has observed) “certain that they will magnify the office, take a disproportionate view of its claims, and increasingly strive to increase its functions and its staff.”
This political process cumulatively created the modern interventionist-welfare state that in the democratic setting means that those aspiring to and holding government elected office are in that hurry to organize coalitions of the growing number of special-interest groups all clamoring for various privileges, favors, and “entitlements.” Those in political positions have to not only constantly promise on the campaign trail and during their term in office that they will preserve the existing political benefits which these interest groups are already receiving from the government but must also constantly promise new and better benefits from the state.
Failing to successfully do so might mean not getting elected to begin with or not being reelected. This is the basis of the fear of those in political office, the fear that those in their own party would like to edge them out by offering constituents more than what he has successfully provided. If he stays the course with his renomination as his party’s candidate, he then faces the candidate of the opposing party in the general election.
There is constantly the push for the next new program or piece of legislation designed to impress the voters and make them think that he is always bringing them something new back from Congress. Like business subsidies, or income redistribution, or public-works projects, or domestic regulations and foreign trade protection, or government contracts and sweet deals, he wants them to know he does it all because he “cares.” He wants to “give back” to society by “serving” them because he is devoted to “social justice,” or “national defense,” or “saving the environment,” or protecting American culture by keeping undesirable “aliens” out of the country, or fighting “inequality,” or regulating speech and voluntary association to preserve “morality” and “decency.” And he always has to be in a hurry to do so, as the next election cycle is not that far away.
Ending the power of ruthless politicians by restoring liberty
Many democratic politicians can be as ruthless, backstabbing, amoral, and manipulative as any dictator. When the miniseries House of Cards was showing on television from 2013 to 2018, a number of Washington politicians were asked by interviewers if politics in America was really that ruthless and manipulative. More than one said, “Yes, except for the murder!” But, of course, those in high government office frequently order the killing of others, mostly in the arena of global political and military intervention. U.S. presidents have ordered the assassination of foreign leaders and other political figures or groups over the decades, which has often resulted in the “collateral damage” of innocent bystanders whose lives have been lost in the process. We have recently seen this in the Middle East.
If we ever find ourselves with those in political authority who are not in a hurry, it will only be because we as the American people have returned to that belief and philosophy that it is not the duty, or responsibility, or the right of the government to use its power to collect taxes from some or regulate the actions of particular people for the benefit of others.
As Francis Lieber observed, “To protect the individual against interference with his personal liberty by the powerholder is one of the elementary requisites of all freedom, and one of the most difficult problems to be solved in practical politics.” We who value liberty have not yet found the most effective way to solve this problem of “practical politics” because we have not yet learned how best to persuade our fellow citizens to refrain from picking the pockets of their neighbors through the government, even when the theft is couched in soothing and altruistic words of collective responsibility and sense of individual guilt on the basis of which some citizens are expected to sacrifice their own peaceful and honest purposes for someone else’s benefit.
But merely because we have not yet found the right types of arguments to win over more people in America to that love of individual liberty of which Francis Lieber spoke with such a clear tone of deep sincerity in the 1850s does not mean we cannot or should not try to do so today. What is the alternative? There is none, other than to give into those who want to control our lives and determine our futures through the use of government power, which, at its best, is limited to protecting our liberty, and, at its worst, is used to take our liberty away.
This article was originally published in the May 2026 issue of Future of Freedom.
