You dare not walk down a street in Santa Cruz, California smoking a cigar or wearing a mink coat - though you might just get by doing both. French Fries will soon be as unknown in the public schools as Chaucer, and twinkies may be remembered only as a sin and extravagance of a barbaric past.

This is the age of bumptious busy bodies and professorial meddlers with every trifle calculated and anything with taste and edge suspect. The sort who would smother you with excuses if you ate your grandmother and condemn you to the eighth ring of hell for nibbling a Sperm Whale has become as common as horse flies on a summer afternoon.

All this is familiar enough. It provides much of the irritation that evokes dissident comment, and thus bears something of the aspect of an old companion whose persistent follies will always fill an evening's conversation.

I do not wish to be ungrateful, but one wonders at the persistence. Prohibition after all ended just over seventy years ago as a fiasco having discredited authority (not such a bad thing), increased the rate of alcoholism, filled the jails with innocents, and launched the Mafia. Drug prohibition nevertheless flourishes, revealing the officials involved as liars, making drugs fashionable, flooding the prisons with the best of several generations, and creating a criminal network in comparison with which the Mafia is merely picturesque.

There is some talk of calling retreat, changing tactics, or declaring victory and coming home. Mostly, our leaders are busy declaring war on tobacco, cheeseburgers, and dyed apples, perhaps hoping commotion will mask failure, and that their willingness to apply the model more widely will suggest its success in the first instance.

But, again, why keep beating the dead donkey at all? I suggest two possibilities, by no means exhaustive or incompatible:

1) Some people adore bustle and uplift, and are consequently inclined to interpret past failure only as reason to persist in their sundry crusades. Just one more major drug raid and sobriety descends. Another welfare program and bliss prevails. A little more "affirmative action" and playing fields shed their bumps.

That some might prefer the occasional lapse, the rare problem, or a rough footing , is lost in the concern and agitation. The rough places are to be made plane, the crooked straight, and we cannot worry about the flying chips.

The best thing about all this, of course, is that it doesn't work. People seem to be inherently angular, their edges will not smooth. One of the corners that keeps sticking out is, indeed, the invincible belief by some that everyone else can be made to toe the line, and that all want the same amounts of the same things. Collectivists in their eccentricity and dissent undermine the imagined collective.

There is a larger irony. Campaigns against drugs, donuts and red meat seem designed to help people incapable of so much as safely taking nourishment. But the only thing that makes human beings worthy of any particular notice is their apparent ability to preserve themselves and even adjust to changing environments while thinking they are not doing so or noticing that they are.

If this is an illusion, then any special duty to protect people from moon pies is also an illusion. Even what might be imagined as our duty to provide for the welfare of higher animals disappears. The only thing that would prompt us to "free willy" is what we recognize as a personality, and we recognize it as such because he acts as we would in like circumstances. Were he entirely innocent of any ability to help himself, it wouldn't mean anything to free him in the first place, and we thus would have no such obligation to him or any other so-called higher animal including ourselves.

So, if people needed to be tricked and coerced into taking care of themselves, they would not be worth it; and if they were worth it, there would be no need. With all its quacking advocacy and self assurance, the sincere belief in large welfare initiatives is incoherent and thus while it may well motivate, cannot justify their persistence.

2) To compound paradox, what if failure is success? It is hard to believe that such ventures as the mentioned drug war, the minimum wage, affirmative action, and the heroic battle against hen's eggs are not modeled on those mechanical sculptures, which clatter and whirl for awhile before flying apart, the artist producing an improved version for his next exhibition.

To be sure, the sculptures never looked as if they were accomplishing any thing, though there was no particular reason why they might not have, while these noisy pieces of social engineering must appear useful, as they do mischief.

Once our social mechanic can convince enough people that there is some emergency that can only be met by wheeling out his particular contraption, he is in business, and it is at this point that he shows his unique artistry. If his device is set to work on a real problem, not only is the lack of success likely to be too conspicuous, the design is inelegant. If the machine succeeds in amplifying some genuine complaint, his effort is adequate proportionate to the degree of amplification, and the effectiveness with which the failure is masked. Virtuosity is achieved when his gadget is convincingly applied to nothing at all. With no problem there can be no failure: the elegance is palpable. But our social engineer only attains supreme artistry when his device creates out of this nothing a real problem. The elegance of creation ex nihilo is absolute, and the opportunities for control are maximized. The risk that the thing may fly out of control is the danger that attends any genuine work of art.

If the fabrication of an entirely new discontent cannot be expected every time, care must be taken that there at least be no reduction in the current stock. The State's existence is only excused as such problems endure; resolving the difficulties, even supposing such capacity, imperils its rationale and diminishes its capital. The State is in short a device for enlarging such disorders as it cannot cook up. It then triumphantly goes through some show of bringing them to heel, and when it fails pleads for resources and authority with which to pursue the struggle. If according to Scchumpeter the motive force of capitalism is creative destruction, the State is animated by creative failure.

But all may not be lost even if problems lose their luster. Often they may be preserved as photographic negatives. In affirmative action as white becomes black and black white we have the most literal example, and recall that global warming was once global cooling, cow's milk was wholesome, and women were gentle. Paradox, not to say a sort of transvaluation, may indeed be necessary if the state apparatus is to rattle on.

The greatest paradox of all, and the one from which the others have grown, is in the tenaciously held notion that you assist people by in effect proclaiming their incompetence. You must not dictate what people can eat, smoke, or drink. Still less must you constantly bother them about their supposed "greed". You thereby reduce them to retarded children and yourself to a petulant "caregiver". A truly humane society is one free of such monsters, and yet safe for both cigars and mink coats - separate or together.