A half-century ago, Ludwig von Mises discussed the concept of a “perfect government.” In this excerpt from his book, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, Mises deals with what Friedrich Hayek would later refer to as “the fatal conceit” that all liberals and progressives are infected with. It is a conceit that has been with us since mankind began to govern itself. It will not die and will always have to be resisted. Here is Mises take:
The “social engineer” is the reformer who is prepared to “liquidate” all those who do not fit into his plan for the arrangement of human affairs. Yet historians and sometimes even victims whom he puts to death are not averse to finding some extenuating circumstances for his massacres or planned massacres by pointing out that he was ultimately motivated by a noble ambition: he wanted to establish the perfect state of mankind. They assign to him a place in the long line of the designers of utopian schemes.
Now it is certainly folly to excuse in this way the mass murders of such sadistic gangsters as Stalin and Hitler. But there is no doubt that many of the most bloody “liquidators” were guided by the ideas that inspired from time immemorial the attempts of philosophers to meditate on a perfect constitution. Having once hatched out the design of such an ideal order, the author is in search of the man who would establish it by suppressing the opposition of all those who disagree. In this vein, Plato was anxious to find a tyrant who would use his power for the realization of the Platonic ideal state. The question whether other people would like or dislike what he himself had in store for them never occurred to Plato. It was an understood thing for him that the king who turned philosopher or the philosopher who became king was alone entitled to act and that all other people had, without a will of their own, to submit to his orders. Seen from the point of view of the philosopher who is firmly convinced of his own infallibility, all dissenters appear merely as stubborn rebels resisting what will benefit them.
I suppose that this to some extent explains the liberal mindset but I lean more towards a moral or religious explanation. Rather than recognizing freedoms bestowed by our Creator, liberals place Man at the center of all things divorced from God. The evil and fallen nature of man then reveals itself as we’ve seen over and over again where these grand experiments have taken place. Its only due to their hubris and warped sense of infallibility that they keep trying over and over again. Rejecting facts and logic they persist in their attempts to set themselves up as the ruling elite while us peons experience and suffer the consequences of their policies and decrees.
Even a glance at the attributes of Lucifer, or Satan, indicate that they serve their true master well.