Beware of the Common Good or Public Interest

I recently had someone tell me that we should enact Pres. Obama’s domestic agenda for the sake of the common good and that his policies were in the public’s interest. His statement forced me to consider the fallacy of the argument that is “the common good” or “public interest.” To justify a decision based upon “the common good” is merely a tool of using an indefinable concept to justify someone’s ideological agenda. If you break “the common good” of society down to its core, you realize that the public is merely a collection of individuals.

When politicians argue that “the common good” of society is somehow different from and superior to the individual good of society’s members, they are essentially concluding that the good of SOME men should take precedence over the good of others. So what is to become of the less fortunate members of society? Well, they become the proverbial sacrificial lambs that must be slain for “the common good."

The use of terms such as “common good” and “public interest” assume that it is moral and just for the good of the majority to trump the individual. However, if we understand that a society is nothing more than a collection of individuals, we will recognize that the good of the majority is delusional because the violation of an individual’s rights means the abrogation of all rights. As we have seen in Russia, China, Germany and in many other tyrannical states over the past 100 years, the end game of justifying “change” in the name of “the common good” is a deliverance of a helpless majority into the hands of any demagogue that claims to have the “voice of the people.” History of such regimes has proven that the State acting in the interest of “the common good” is always at the expense of the individual’s liberty and freedom.