Republican presidential contender Herman Cain is all of the news at the moment. Cain, as everyone now knows, achieved a startling upset victory in the Florida Straw Poll.  With 37% of the vote, he received more support than GOP “frontrunners” Rick Perry and Mitt Romney combined. 

Cain is certainly an affable enough fellow, but in spite of the apparently pervasive perception among the GOP faithful—a perception that Cain himself has in no small measure labored tirelessly to inculcate—that his candidacy marks a radical departure from “politics as usual,” Cain has of yet to do or even say anything to distinguish himself from the Republican Party establishment.  In fact, not only has he failed to set himself apart from his party, but from his support of TARP to his endorsement of Mitt Romney in 2008, from his support of the military-centered crusade to export Democracy to the Middle East to his insistence on the eve of the economic collapse that there was no impending crisis, Cain has proven himself to be a party man through and through.    

But there is more.

To listen to Cain throughout these primary debates, one could be pardoned for thinking that he has never known of a government program or policy that, with just the right amount of care, couldn’t be salvaged.  Whether it is Social Security or anything else, Cain’s answer is always: Don’t end it, mend it.  It is reform, not abolition, for which circumstances call, as far as Cain is concerned.

This position has much to gain in the way of political expediency. However, it reflects an ignorance of the natures of both government and liberty that is at once appalling and, quite frankly, disturbing.  

Cain is no different from any number of the communists who I have met during my time in academia insofar as he speaks as if the woeful inadequacies of this or that governmental policy are a function of those specific individuals who, up to this juncture, have been entrusted with administering them.  That is, the corruption, costliness, and inefficiency attending to government programs and policies are accidental by-products of either the malevolent intentions or the incompetence or the negligence of past and present office holders.  In short, from this perspective, it is the folks implementing these programs and policies and operating these agencies that are responsible for their failures.  If only we get rid of them and replace them with ourselves, we can redeem our system of government.

Don’t end them, mend them.

But as any student of politics, of our constitutional arrangements, and, thus, our liberty, knows all too well, the problems from which Big Government suffers are intrinsic to its size and scope.  Communism failed, yes, but it would have failed even if angels had presided over its implementation.  Similarly, regardless of which party or group of individuals control the reins of the federal government, the ills that afflict it now will continue to do so as long as it remains the Leviathan that it is.  As long as the federal government is permitted to subvert the design of the U.S. Constitution—a design according to which it is assigned a subordinate role vis-à-vis the individual states—our situation will not change an iota. 

This brings us to our second point about Herman Cain. 

Cain’s vision of government reflects a misunderstanding, not just of the character of Big Government, but of liberty itself. Liberty, or at least the liberty with which Americans have always been enamored, is inseparable from the structure of government.  It is the wide dispersion of power, the decentralization of authority, in short, the divided government to which our Constitution gives expression that makes our liberty possible. To state this point another way, our liberty is located in the interstices of our Constitution, with its numerous “checks and balances.”    

Judging from Cain’s reluctance to eliminate any part of the federal government, it is only reasonable to conclude that he fundamentally misapprehends the relationship between government and individual liberty.

But like I already said, in this regard, he is not unlike the vast majority of his fellow partisans (as well as, of course, their leftist counterparts). 

There is one final problem with Cain.

He seems to think, along with Mitt Romney and a whole lot of other folks, that a presidential candidate with business expertise preferable to a one without this experience.  Not only, though, is this presupposition—and it is indeed a presupposition—anything but the axiom that it is usually treated as; a businessman turned politician could very well be the most dreadful of politicians. 

Business is an enterprise.  The country is not.  While some measure of individuality is, of course, permitted in a business, each of its members is expected to devote his time and energies toward the realization of the common end or “good” for the sake of which the business exists. In the case of business, this final end is that of profit.  In contrast, in a civil association, an associational type that Americawas originally intended to embody, there is no single or final end.  There is a staggering multiplicity of ends, each of which is chosen by the individuals whose ends they are.

Will a President Cain (or, for that matter, a President Romney) use the power at his disposal to impose uponAmericathe character of the one associational type with which he is most familiar?  Will he, that is, resolve to governAmericaas a business enterprise?

Those who love liberty will serve themselves, and their beloved country, well to look carefully at Cain.

Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.