Henry Luce Founder Of Life Magazine On The Threat To Liberty When The Government Tries To Fix Social Problems, Rather Than The People Fixing Them- 1946

Henry Luce photo via: PBS

Henry Luce, the founder of Time, Fortune and the modern Life magazine was prescient in what might become of the United States in the future if we rely upon the government to solve social issues.

While reading Lloyd Morris’  Postscript To Yesterday – America: The Last Fifty Years,  (Random House) 1947, I came across this passage describing Life magazine and Luce’s views: on the matter.

To the citizen’s thinking, Luce addressed editorials and feature articles which made little concession to mental inertia. The basis of Life’s gospel could be described as an aggressive conservatism. To the increasingly collectivistic trend of mid-twentieth century liberal thought, it opposed a dogmatic assertion of the necessity for individual liberty.

After “a century and a half of steady social reform,” it inquired in 1946, “where are we?” Would not altruism fail, “when attempts are made to erect it into a social philosophy”? It declared that the besetting temptation of all democracies is to become “welfare States,” at the inevitable cost of restrictions on liberty. Since “no political system offers a perfect answer” to the social problem, should not “the burden of prosperity and better living standards .. . be shifted back to the nation’s inventors, engineers and business mangers”?  For Life discounted the theory that government can raise living standards. It opposed all forms of social planning, and was content to leave the problem of welfare to the operations of free enterprise and a tree market.