A state is not a family

In her column, American economist Deirdre McCloskey criticizes the illusion of the protective state and shows how the promise of security can undermine individual freedom.

The most eloquent metaphor for anti-liberalism is that of the family, with its pater familias. The father decides. James of England wrote in 1598: «In well-governed republics, the title of pater patriae was always... reserved for kings.» A famous speech to the Swedish parliament in 1928 introduced the term folkhemmet, «the house of the people». It summed up an alliance, characteristic of the time, between conservative corporatists and progressive planners - hence the New Deal in the USA, or Fascism, Hitler's Volksgemeinschaft, with Il Duce as Lo Stato's father - sometimes consecrated by the holy water of a soci