Liberty–An Unwanted Burden?
Jeremy GayedAs the world economy continues to deteriorate, as the American government continues, in essence, to nationalize the top tiers of business and industry, and as the President-Elect continues to hint that even greater federal intervention is coming, likely in the guise of New Deal-esque programs, I’ve noticed one remarkable common theme among all the rhetoric: no one is to blame, and no one is responsible.
Politicians and commentators sneer at the idea that borrowers should be blamed for taking on mortgages they couldn’t afford and for failing to inquire into the terms of their loans. They act as if it’s self-evidently absurd to blame individuals for entering into contracts they aren’t able to honor–and, more fundamentally, that it’s self-evidently absurd to expect any normal person to read his mortgage documents and make whatever inquiries are required to understand them.
Politicians and commentators vilify the “predatory mortgage brokers” that “tricked” so many people into taking loans beyond their means. But, when Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the indispensable facilitators and accomplices of “predatory lenders” felt the bite of massive defaults, Congress tripped over itself in its haste to bail them out.
What has followed has been wave after wave of “bailouts,” which have taken the form of effective (at least partial) nationalization of major sectors of the American economy. After all, why should the shareholders of companies like AIG, Citibank, or GM (of which I am one) be blamed for foolish decisions by the management? It is, politicians and commentators tell us, self-evidently absurd to expect a normal person to be able to monitor the news and the markets, and to make well-researched decisions about what stocks to buy.
President-Elect Obama continues to hint that the path out of this mess will involve continued nationalization of the economy, coupled with a New-Deal type intervention of the federal government as a generator of jobs and a primary employer in its own right. After all, his aides appear to suggest, it is self-evidently absurd to expect individuals hit by hard times to go through all the hardship of finding a new job in the private sector, or starting their own business, or–heaven forbid–working more than one job to make ends meet.
The common idea underlying all of these facets of the crisis is that “normal” people obviously cannot be expected to be smart enough or knowledgeable enough to be held accountable for important decisions about their own economic lives. And, as individuals cannot be expected to shoulder this burden, the government must.
The essence of liberty is the right and obligation to shoulder such decisions and to reap all the success or bear all the burden of failure. But our leaders and our media are at pain to convince us of the “self-evident” fact that normal people are simply not capable of carrying such a load. That liberty is a burden we cannot carry, and should not want.
December 1st, 2008 at 5:48 pm
To be fair, it should also be acknowledged that the politician’s job is (in the end) to give voice to the will and desires of those he or she represents, and certainly some part of the nationalization push comes not from the center of the governmental body, but from the people. This is, I think, motivated by several factors. Primarily (in my observation) people are frustrated by the already overwhelming bureaucracy which is in place both in government and in the financial sector. Many (most?) people do not believe themselves capable of navigating these realms on their own and/or are not motivated to do so. This is underscored by living in a society where you can usually get what you want, when you want with relatively little hassle. Taxing activities are undervalued, especially when there is someone else who will ‘take care of it’.
Anyway, the point is, there is an attitude of entitlement at work here, and many people are trusting the government to “fix it”, and do not consider themselves in danger of being subjected to policies which actually intrude on their personal liberties more than having to remove shoes at the airport. (The banal nature of the enactment of socializing policies warrants a essay unto itself). You are (I believe) rightly raising a flag to signal the dangers of letting the government assume increasing control of the financial institutions in our nation. However, the point (implied in your essay) which warrants explicit statement is that checks and balances of the power of the government begin with personal responsibility. Your essay is on point, but there is danger in blaming the various arms of the government for taking too much control when, after all, a vampire cannot come in unless you invite him; the root of the issue being personal responsibility.
I want to state this again just in case it reads to others differently than it sounds to me. The point of your essay is that the government is undermining the very essence of liberty by acting upon the assumption that people are not capable or competent to assume responsibility for their decisions. While this is correct, the root of the problem is that people are not taking this responsibility on, and are to some degree handing it over rather than the similar idea that the government is wrestling it from the people. It would be not only a distraction, but improper to place too much blame on politicians for correctly representing an attitude that a lot of citizens have embraced.
December 1st, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Daniel Larison, the Libertarian blogger over at The American Conservative, made a similar point regarding Christianity and the problem of evil. The standard Christian response to why there’s so much evil in the world is that God made man free, but men has done horrible things with his freedom, and yet God would not take that freedom from him because it includes the freedom to choose Him, as well as to choose evil. Larison noted that, in the wake of horrible events (like genocide, wars, murders, etc.) people often ask, “How could God allow this to happen?” In effect, they say to God, “How dare you give us this freedom! What were you thinking? Take it away and clean this mess up right now!”
It’s unfortunate that so many people have lost the sense of honor, diligence, and independence that makes self-government possible. As many sages have noted, however, it may also be inevitable, something baked into the cake of mass democracy, as it were. The Founders foresaw this possibility. That was why they created such “elitist” institutions like the electoral college and insisted on the indirect election of US Senators — to keep the government in the hands of the dedicated and enlightened few so that the many couldn’t corrupt and ruin it with their fickleness and short-sighted goals. (Not that the masses had no say in national government, of course. The House or Representatives was always conceived of as “the People’s House.”)
Abhorrence of such attitudes is bred into the bones of good, egalitarian, post-modern folk like us. It’s a fact of history, thought, that the wider the scope of people’s participation in their government grows, the smaller the scope of their individual liberties becomes. You see this right now in Thailand. The middle-class, which clamored for democracy in the ’90s, has been instrumental in the bloodless (so far) coup that recently ousted Prime Minister Thaksin, precisely because Thaksin was too democratic for their tastes. He appealed directly to the poor, rural Thais who’d never had direct representation before, promising them all kinds of government benefits (paid for by the work of the upper-and middle-classes, of course) if they voted for him, which they did in droves. Once they saw what mass democracy really meant in practice, upper-and middle-class Thais recoiled in horror and begged the military to step back in and retake control of the country to stop Thaksin and his Huey Long-style “soak the rich” policies. They wanted democracy, but only a little bit of it.
The Founders realized that Americans would only be free as long as they remained good. Benjamin’s point — that the state has only encroached on people’s freedoms to the extent that it was invited to by the people themselves — is well taken (and closely related to my Money for Nothing essay). We have long since ceased to be good. Now we are ceasing to be free. The power to reverse this trend is in our hands, if we have the will to use it. Using it means becoming freer people, however, and freedom is difficult. Many of us secretly hate our freedom and long to give it up. The burden is too great. Do enough of us have the strength of character to rise up against the suffocating embrace of the soft, flabby arms of the Nanny State and say “No!” to the (undeniable) benefits it gives us (at the cost of our liberty)? Time will tell, but I truly hope the answer is yes.
December 1st, 2008 at 11:40 pm
Ah, sweet liberty. A beautiful imaginary ideal which has never existed and will never exist. But what a word.
You see, words such as liberty, justice, and the American way mean absolutely nothing. These are merely labels which human beings gave to feelings. While feelings are wonderful, they generally make terrible public policy.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of people feeling “free.” That’s why I love America, apple pie, and gay sex on a plate. What I don’t like is people thinking that feelings reflect some sort of cosmic universal ideal. It’s all too easy to masturbate in Plato’s cave. It’s much harder to define what freedom is.
You see, if you were to make the argument that government bailouts won’t make people feel free, I would be happy to listen. However, you are arguing that there is some putative “freedom” hanging in the sky somewhere that we should bow down and worship like a latter day snake on a stick. Where is this freedom? What does it look like? Does it have a smell? Can I measure it? Can I eat it?
Once again, I, like my fellow Americans, want to feel “free.” That is generally the test of whether something is constitutional or not. Does it feel right? And you know what, I think that is a great test. We’re all people, we all have feelings, and the point of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence is to get as many people as possible to have the feelings that they want. Let’s let try and get people to feel healthy, free, and happy.
I’m still open to your argument about bailouts being bad for the economy, but I think the next few years will prove you wrong. I certainly don’t want to presumptively say I told you so, so I’ll say, let’s wait and see. Obama will be president for four years and the Dems will have control of Congress for at least two. So let’s give them their chance to fix it or f*** it up. If they fail miserably, then, maybe you’ve got something to say.
However, don’t tell me that “freedom” is something objectively real. Every society on earth has justified their form of government with the word “freedom.” And at the same time, there were societies with competing values that told these folks they weren’t “free.”
The North told the South that having slaves meant the South didn’t value “freedom.” The South told the North that marching your armies across an independent country and suspending habeas corpus didn’t value “freedom.” I’m thankful the North won, but the argument didn’t resolve the debate about “freedom.”
The Soviet Union and the Nazi Empire both paid homage to “freedom,” I certainly don’t like their definition, and I don’t think you guys do either. But I look at a failed State like Somalia, and I certainly wouldn’t want to live there. I am sure glad I wasn’t in the 19th ward when Katrina hit.
Anyways, once you guys have finished your vision quest in Plato’s cave, tell me what exit to get off at so I can pick up lunch at the McDonald’s in Freedom.
P.S. Secret freedom haters, next week’s meeting will be at my house.
December 1st, 2008 at 11:59 pm
Mr. Lind, you are right in identifying the relative value of feeling( being very little), but incorrect in simplifying freedom to a feeling. A good functional definition of freedom has been given in this very essay:
“…the right and obligation to shoulder such decisions and to reap all the success or bear all the burden of failure.”
I do not see where feeling comes in here. Freedom really has more to do with how much you pay in taxes, or whether you can make calls on your cell phone without worrying about who might be listening, etc.
Your point is well taken that proclaiming policies (such as the bailouts) to be foolish, or to label them as good or bad at all is less helpful to the discussion than it would be to simply discuss the merits and potiential drawbacks and let the evidence speak for itself.
Along the lines of being helpful to discussion, in general, comments are better at fostering “productive” discussion if kept relatively free of non-specific (although more colorful and interesting) language. I do appreciate the passion expressed with your language (eg Plato’s cave), and I agree with President-elect Obama in saying that I like to be around strong-willed and strongly opinionated people. They tend to get things done…if they do not get in their own way, that is.
December 2nd, 2008 at 12:13 am
One further comment which Mr. Lind raises which is worth commenting on…
Both liberals and conservatives has typical flaws. While, liberals as a group tend to oversimplify or be short-sight in their analysis of policy, conservatives as a group have a tendency to under-appreciate the justified concerns which drive people to support liberal policy.
I think liberals and conservatives often realize “freedom” is the allowance to succeed as well as to fail, but while conservatives tend to focus on the upside, liberals tend to focus on the downside. This is not right or wrong. It simply is how people think. These thoughts may be malleable (the function of discussions like these), and people may change their minds if they become aware of implications they had not seen before, but it is valuable to keep in mind the concept of government as a social contract and that comments such as asking if, “…enough of us have the strength of character to rise up against the suffocating embrace of the soft, flabby arms of the Nanny State.” is rhetoric and may distract us from the goal of discerning truth just like comments about freedom-hating societies.
December 2nd, 2008 at 12:35 am
Matt,
The problem with your argument is that your conclusions rest on factually baseless and logically incoherent premises.
You presume, without seeking to justify, that freedom is a “feeling,” that the Constitution and Declaration of Independence were designed to maximize good feelings, and that feeling free is the general test of Constitutionality, and from there conclude that I and others here are clueless and naive. The problem is that your unilateral definition of freedom affects freedom itself no more than if I decided to give an apple stripes by proclaiming it to be a zebra. If you’re going to make an assertion this radical, you should do us the courtesy of sharing your reasoning.
You see, the only way I can figure it, freedom is objectively observable and empirically measurable in terms of the things that other people can force you to do or prohibit you from doing.
For example, can I say what I please, to whom I please? If I can, I’m free in the article of speech. If men with guns imprison, threaten, or shoot me for expressing certain ideas, then I am less free. If I have to seek permission from the men with guns to express the ideas I want, then I have very little freedom in the article of speech.
Or, may I dispose of my property and income as I see fit? If I can, I am free in the pursuit of wealth. If men with guns threaten, imprison, or shoot me if I don’t dispose of some or all of my property as they dictate, then I am less free. If I have to seek permission to use my property as I want, then I have little freedom in that area.
You have concluded that I labor in the darkness of ignorance with my assumption that freedom exists as something more than a mood I have on random Wednesday mornings. If I am blundering around in the cave, I’d appreciate you showing me the light of reason.
December 2nd, 2008 at 3:08 am
“the point of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence is to get as many people as possible to have the feelings that they want. Let’s let try and get people to feel healthy, free, and happy.”
yikes…
if freedom has no transcendent value, then mankind is but an animal that must be herded around, cleansed, and fed antibiotics when appropriate. the goal of society is to distribute freedom-feelings evenly, so everyone gets their fair share. so then people getting their fair share of good feelings is therefore a transcendent value. if it weren’t, then we could easily say, along the same lines, that people getting their fair share comes from this idealistic notion of ‘equality’ which is a Western idea rooted in creationism (as opposed to reincarnation), and in the Judeo-Christian cultural tradition. so let’s give that up, too, (never-mind that our hyper-rationalism is itself a tradition) and try to distribute feelings to those who will best use them to further the evolution of mankind. and why further man’s evolution? those who do not see the obviousness of this ought to be shot at once.
. . .
“A great many of those who ‘debunk’ traditional…values have in the background values of their own [fill in the blank] which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.
“A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.
“The kind of explanation which explains things away may give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ’seeing through’ things for ever… To ’see through’ all things is the same as not to see.” -C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
December 2nd, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Well, Benjamin, I won’t deny that my “soft flabby embrace of the Nanny State” was rhetoric. I don’t think that such rhetoric distracts from the issue itself, however. Indeed, it seems to be at the heart of the discussion.
Will Americans continue on a path towards increased dependency on and servitude to an increasingly omnipresent state — which is, as a matter of empirical fact, clearly contrary to the America envisioned by the Founders or that experienced by Americans before the 1930s — or will they renounce the benefits of such a state and return to the values of independence and self-sufficiency which characterized most Americans for the first 200 years of their existence? If this article is legitimate, this question would also seem to be legitimate. Equivocating between the two options (”This is not right or wrong. It simply is how people think.”) doesn’t seem to be the way to answer such questions.
You have two diametrically opposed ways of living, two completely opposite orientations of values. Unless there is no real objective morality towards or further from which we are moving in each moral action we take (something I’ve written about before, but which is not necessarily in the scope of this essay), this situation absolutely involves being right or wrong. Both decisions can’t simultaneously be right (although the can both be wrong). Neither one may be totally right, but given how clearly opposite of each other they are, either one or the other must be closer to capital-”R” Right (whatever that Right truly is, which is what people’s real disagreements on these issues usually concern). In which case, that would be the better path to choose. (Even if both are wrong, one would be less wrong than the other; of course, in that case, we’d still have to find the really Right thing to do.)
December 10th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Paul,
Sorry for the long delay in my response. Could you redirect me to the article where you discuss the morality of socialism versus democracy? I tried to find it again unsuccessfully.
I do not think diametric opposition of two things necessarily implies moral hierarchy. Black and white are diametrically opposed to one another, but which I choose to paint my walls is not a moral issue. I would love to re-read your previous article and continue the discussion there as appropriate if you could remind me which one that was.
December 10th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
The fact of the diametric opposition itself doesn’t give this issue moral weight, Benjamin. The issues themselves already have moral weight. You’re talking about what the state should or should not be doing to free people, and what things free people should or should not be doing for themselves. You’re dealing with the very nature of freedom: whether individuals should be viewed as actually independent actors responsible for the consequences of their actions, or as dependent actors relatively incapable of making really difficult choices (and therefore not responsible for the consequences of those choices). Those issues are charged with moral weight, and you have two fairly opposite answers to them.
The article I wrote wasn’t about the morality of socialism vs. democracy, it was about the nature of moral language. http://www.theonlyorthodoxy.com/2008/02/05/speaking-gibberish-in-a-more-delicious-society/
December 12th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Ok, well I re-read the article, and I think the discussion would be best continued here.
“…whether individuals should be viewed as actually independent actors responsible for the consequences of their actions, or as dependent actors relatively incapable of making really difficult choices (and therefore not responsible for the consequences of those choices). Those issues are charged with moral weight…”
I am having trouble understanding why you are assigning normative value to freedom and the role of the state. Are you proposing that freedom is a normative value, and that governments which do not interfere overmuch with individual liberties are closer to the objective standard of right and wrong by facilitating this Freedom? Are you saying that a government which reduces to ability to assume individual responsibility is less good by escaping the moral of responsibility? What morals are behind your assertion, and how are they being affected differently by different models of government?
If a government is more restrictive and re-distributive in nature (especially if it came to be so by popular demand) it is not intuitive (to me) what moral injustice is necessarily being done in this model.
December 13th, 2008 at 5:10 am
“If a government is more restrictive and re-distributive in nature (especially if it came to be so by popular demand) it is not intuitive (to me) what moral injustice is necessarily being done in this model.”
It’s not doing any, but if AND ONLY IF one believes that government is not bound to the same moral rules that individuals are.
If I removed at gunpoint and threat of imprisonment your money, if I dictated what you can say, or how you spend your money, or how you regulate your business, or how your state and municipality conducts its affairs, we consider this a moral infomnia. In fact, a “moral injustice,” as you put it. That government does these exact things, though, NECESSARILY means that by ‘being more restrictive and re-distributive in nature’ government is committing a moral injustice.
For whatever reason, people afford to government a moral permissiveness they don’t afford uniformly. Yes, it’s an injustice.
December 13th, 2008 at 11:26 am
Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems your reasoning has one flaw and begs one question.
The flaw:
Is your reasoning circular? You are defining redistribution as immoral and calling socialism evil because it is redistributive. Forgetting the moment that you do not appeared to have given a reason this is immoral, you also have not addressed whether the citizen minds the redistribution. You cannot steal from me what I give willingly.
Also, your statement begs the question:
Wouldn’t any government dictate what you may say, how you spend your money or regulate your business on some level? If not you, certainly someone in society? If you find this problematic, it seems inappropriate to enforce that upon someone else. The logical conclusion of your statement is that no government is the most moral form government (ie anarchy).
December 13th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
In “The Constitution of Liberty”, F.A. Hayek identifies the basic flaw of a centrally-planned society: its leaders think that they are God. He doesn’t mean this in the sense that they require citizens to worship them (although most socialistic societies end up creating a quasi-religion of the state). He means it in the sense that they think themselves omniscient.
The value of freedom is that it allows individuals to solve social problems on smaller levels through personal interactions — frequently, though by no means always, through the market. The collective wisdom of the masses working without compulsion, aided by the collected wisdom of previous generations (i.e. tradition), almost always solves social problems more effectively and more completely than centrally-planned governments are able to. The reason? All of us are collectively smarter than some of us. All of us working together as individuals, in the absence of coercion, can, over time, find the best ways to deal with nearly every social problem. Some of us working together, usually devising plans for the rest of us to follow, are never able to foresee tomorrow’s unintended consequences of today’s imposed solutions. The solutions of some of us almost always inevitably create more problems for the rest of us than solutions which come from all of us.
Freedom is valuable (maybe not inherently, normatively valuable — that’s an interesting question, and I’ll have to think about that more — but valuable nonetheless) because it reminds all of us of our creaturelyness (if that’s even a word). It is the only proper response an organized society of finite, fallible individuals to the problems which life in an imperfect world begets. It’s an admission that we are not God. Because we are not God, we lack the ability to foresee every coming development and ever unforeseen consequence of the decisions we make. Consequently, we have no right to impose our far-reaching and meddlesome decisions on our fellow human beings.
To think or act otherwise is to implicitly claim for ourselves powers and knowledge which belong only to God. That is what a centrally-planned society means: a society of people who believe that they’re as smart and knowledgeable as God, who can solve every problem and foresee every obstacle. That’s why centrally-planned societies continually expand the scope of their authority: their belief in their infallible, divine knowledge assures them that they know how to organize and direct people’s lives better than the people themselves (who, presumably, lack such infallible, divine knowledge). All centrally-planned society are thus based on sin in a way that no free society is: they are based on the sin of pride, the sin of Satan. Free societies are made up of sinful individuals, but at least the societies themselves are not predicated on a sinful concept of human nature. Every centrally-planned society — EVERY ONE — is predicated on such a sinful concept, however.
That is why a free society is, simply, better than a centrally-planned society. And that is why any development which surrenders more discretion or liberty to the state should be viewed as highly suspicious. There is a basic level of organization and planning that is prudent and appropriate. There is a basic level of moral proscription that is prudent and appropriate. A government which moves beyond such basic (and I intentionally stress “basic”) levels, however, flirts with mortal danger.
December 14th, 2008 at 1:35 am
Benjamin,
I’m calling redistribution immoral and socialism evil because they necessarily rob us of our natural rights. I don’t believe that when the government forcibly removes my property it’s any more morally permissible than when an individual does it. My reasoning is not circular. I have no problem with voluntary donations or certain user fees going to the government. The difference is that in those cases the will still acts freely.
As to your question…the great history of governments suggests that generally speech, spending, and regulation are dictated at some level. For that reason, if we’re going to do the whole government thing — and I’m happy to put anarchy as an option on the table, though I’m not arguing for it now — the people need to be highly skeptical, and the government needs to be local in jurisdiction and limited in scope, so as to mitigate this historical tendencies.
December 14th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
You have both proposed that there is some balance of governmental power which is appropriate. You have not done so on the basis of economics or efficiency, but on the basis of morality. Now, if you had said it is more efficient for the society to operate with some government but not too much, I would agree without further discussion. You have both made arguments that would seem to lead to the conclusion that no government would be ideal, but also both explicitly concluded that there should be some level of governmental oversight. Since we are dealing in the realm of morality, what factors would the two of you propose to determine the correct level of involvement of the government? (I am beginning to think, by the way, it might be useful to eliminate ideological terms from the discussion and simply focus on the scope of government - ie more or less invasive, redistributive, etc and in what ways).
As a side note, Paul, I have some trouble with your arguments above. After reading your comment, I wondered what any leadership is if not an implicit (or explicit) assumption of expertise. There seems to be an almost imperceptibly blurry line between leadership and assuming one’s own omniscience. Any government is going to stipulate what you may or may not do on some level, where you can or cannot spend your money. This is true even in a government which minimizes redistribution principles and adheres closely to your personal conclusions about how the resources it commands from you are allocated. How does an increasing level of redistribution suddenly imply that those in leadership positions think themselves omniscient? And how is this somehow not the case for a less intrusive government? Assuming this omniscience attitude is real, where is the line?
My question for you, Mr. Lyons, is a question I have often asked myself. Your argument seems to go something like this…
1. We have natural rights
2. Things which attempt to remove these rights from us or impede our ability to exercise them are immoral
3. Redistribution is an infringement upon natural rights
C: Redistribution is bad.
What are these natural rights, where do they come from, and why is it bad if something impedes your ability to exercise them?
I should stress that the original question I posed about where the line should be for limits upon governmental power is the one I really care to discuss, but I suspect we will have to address the other questions I have asked to get there. I would much rather deal with the first question as directly as possible though.
December 15th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
I.) To your first question, it is entirely possible that the only morally correct option is a stateless society.
II.) To your second…Your rendition of my argument is excellent. I would replace ‘bad’ in the conclusion with ‘immoral.’ Then, if one could proof the truth of the 1st and 2nd tenet, you’d have a sound argument…that redistribution is immoral.
Jeremy and I went back and forth on whence comes freedom a while back. My contention is that rights are self-evident gifts from God/nature.
If I am alive, then you have no right to kill me (unless in self-defense) without first admitting that you are wiser than God/nature. (If you make that admission, then the entire basis of morality is shattered, so that’s no small claim.) Hence I have a God-given right to life.
If my will is free, then you have no right to invade on my liberty without first doing the same. (Or you can get around that by proving determinism.) Hence I have a God-given right to liberty.
Property rights stem from both the right to life and liberty.
It’s bad to impede on these for the same reason that it’s bad to commit any other moral ill. Moral codes indicate right behavior, breaking this indicate wrong behavior.
December 16th, 2008 at 12:23 am
“…I’m happy to put anarchy as an option on the table, though I’m not arguing for it now…”
Allowing for the moment full validity and universality of natural rights (ignoring what happens when people disagree about which truths are self-evident), you have left us with a convincing argument that the essence of organized government is an infringement on your natural rights and thus inherently immoral. But it also seems appropriate to infer from your statements that you would agree that some government is better than none.
I suppose your can either agree with or reject my conclusion that all government is restrictive and therefore inherently immoral (based on your reasoning).
If you agree, you must argue that some small amount of this immorality is tempered by the efficiency of the system, or perhaps is offset by some good that comes out of the structure? I know we have discussed ‘ends justifying means’ somewhere here before.
Or if you choose to challenge this conclusion, you must justify that a small amount of government can exist without infringing upon these rights, which seems contrary to your above statements.
Did I miss any options? I could maybe have guessed at most of your answers to this point, but I am at a loss to your reasoning here. Would you mind parsing this out for me?
December 16th, 2008 at 9:16 am
I won’t comment on your discussion with Tom, Benjamin. I’ll just confine my response to our discussion.
You make two major claims which either involve, or are based on, fundamentally flawed assumptions or conceptions. I’ll take them one at a time.
First: your call for us to leave morality out of this discussion, or to make our cases primarily through non-normative arguments (economics, efficiency, etc.).
I agree with you, Benjamin. I really think we should stop talking about morality — as long as you agree that my moral position is the correct one. Ah, but there’s the rub — my moral position is the very thing you seem to be objecting to isn’t it? Just as I’m objecting to your unstated moral position: that authoritarian, intrusive isn’t necessarily wrong — that is, it’s not necessarily bad, but only bad after a certain point.
The attitude that moral arguments shouldn’t be the focus of discussions about policy is at heart about as arrogant an attitude as a person can possibly have. (Please note: I’m not calling you an arrogant person. I am claiming that this position is an arrogant one, however.) This is because moral arguments involve the really fundamental questions: “Why are we doing this? Should we be doing this? What kind of society do we want? Why do we want it? Is it good?” To explicitly shelve such questions implies that they’re not important. But the only way they’re not important is if they’re already answered. To say that it’s fruitless to talk about moral arguments first is effectively to say that we already know the answers to these questions (and hence it’s a waste of time to continue pursuing them). Well, unless you’re agreeing with me or Tom, your words imply that your preferred position regarding intrusive government action is the morally correct position, and that what we really need to talk about is how we should be putting that position into practice. Why else should we stop talking about moral arguments?
Here’s another thought experiment. Let’s say you and your wife (and daughters, of course) want to take a vacation. Let’s say you want to go to Egypt, because you absolutely loved it when you went there with your family 7 years ago. Let’s also say that your wife and daughters hate the heat and despise air travel. They want to go to the Wisconsin Dells, instead. Would it be reasonable for you to say to them, “All this talk about where we’re supposed to be going is clouding the discussion. We should be pricing air travel and thinking about what the best season to visit Egypt is.”? Of course not. The whole argument is about where your family should be going for vacation. But your statement presupposes that the argument’s already been settled in your favor. All your family needs to figure out is what’s the cheapest, most effective way to get to Egypt. Well, moral arguments involve talking about what direction our society should take. To say that we shouldn’t talk about them implies that we already know the correct direction society should take, and we only need to worry about how to get there.
This is a topic that came up frequently in my policy courses in grad school. The key example used was Secretary of Defense Bob McNamara’s policies during the Vietnam War. McNamara, the man who rescued Ford from bankruptcy in the 50s by focusing on maximizing efficiency, brought a similar focus to DoD. There was a rigorous set of requirements concerning the amounts of bombs dropped and Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers killed. The army functioned like a well-oiled killing machine. The question of whether America should actually be engaged in war with Vietnam was never asked, however. Consequently, America lost a war it should never have been involved with in the first place, in spite of the fact that she prosecuted the war with the utmost efficiency. This was because the moral questions — like “Should America be involved in this war?” or “Should America be involved in any war which isn’t directly in her national interest?” — were shelved in favor of focusing on secondary concerns.
Your calling Tom and me out for not focusing on such secondary concerns, and your implicit call to focus only on such secondary concerns, are of a piece with McNamara’s prosecution of the Vietnam War. No, this doesn’t mean that you’re indirectly responsible for the unnecessary deaths of millions of people. It does mean that your attitude displays an implicit arrogance and disregard for other opinions, like McNamara’s did. So that’s one problem.
Second: your argument that claims to leadership or expertise are, in practice, hard to distinguish from claims to omniscience.
I think you’re a little confused here, Benjamin. Omniscience means “all knowing”. Expertise just means “knowing a lot about something”. Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to patronize you here. But the two are clearly different. The line between them is neither imperceptible nor blurry. An expert can know a lot about a given subject (like the economy), perhaps more than any other person in the world, and still not know everything about it. That expert, speaking from his expertise, can make public claims and predictions about how thus-and-such will turn out and honestly believe them to be true to the best of his knowledge, and not be sinning at all. This is because he is using his expertise as a finite creature — his limited knowledge of something — in appropriate ways.
If God endows a person with the talents and abilities to know and study something incredibly well, its not sinful for that person to make full use of those talents and abilities, anymore than it was sinful for Eric Little to train as hard as he could to win Olympic gold. This is because the person is operating as an individual, using his talents as an individual, not using them in a manner appropriate only to someone with total knowledge of the way the world works (something centrally-planned governments implicitly claim for themselves).
Leadership, as you noted, complicates this picture somewhat because the decisions a leader makes will necessarily bind others, force them to do X, or to at least not do Y. A leader is not simply an individual acting as an individual: his decisions have ramifications for the lives of many others. And yet, this reality doesn’t fundamentally alter the situation at all.
The need to establish basic order in society is a legitimate function of government. The binding decisions leaders really have to make to effect the basic ordering of society are not complex, however, nor are they necessarily far-reaching. A free, basically well-ordered society will have very few laws specifying what citizens should or must do. A free society will have laws saying what citizens must not do. There’s a world of difference between the two. Laws specifying what must not be done preserve the maximum amount of freedom for citizens in a complex social system (that is, a social system beyond the proverbial Robinson Crusoe stage).
(Such laws, in fact, mirror God’s original commands to humanity vis a vis the Tree of Knowledge. God basically said, “You can eat every tree except for this one.” If God had given positive commands, He would have said, “You must eat from trees A, B, and C and trees X, Y, and Z.” The difference between the two scenarios, in terms of what people have the ability to choose to do — that is, in how free they are — is enormous.)
Here’s the point: making the basic laws required to have a free society involves virtually no claims to omniscience (implicit or otherwise). You don’t have to plan for eventualities or unintended consequences, because the laws or regulations you enact will allow the people themselves to act as they see fit and respond to any unseen or unintended consequences of their actions on their own. Individuals acting through society can react much quicker and much more effectively to changes in society than any government can. (This, of course, is one of the main reasons for Capitalism’s triumph over Communism.) It doesn’t take omniscience — or even expertise — to recognize this. It just takes common sense. Only if such common sense is explicitly denied — that is, only if the order of the day is a centrally-planned government — does leadership in any way involve claims to excessive knowledge or omniscience. In a free society, it simply isn’t a problem.
In other words, I believe you are fundamentally mistaken in your objections.
December 16th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
“The attitude that moral arguments shouldn’t be the focus of discussions about policy…”
I have attempted to avoid stating any conclusions, implicitly or explicitly, unless it was based on your own arguments. I have gone to some length to avoid making any arguments whatsoever. I am simply trying to root out the support for the conclusions you had stated initially. I never meant to suggest that morality could be taken out of the discussion. My intention was to clarify that you were in fact carrying this conversation on in terms of morality and not in terms of amorality, and then to seek your reasoning therein. I have not made any objections; I am simply trying to follow your logic to its logical conclusion.
You have, incidentally, answered my question in your post. (That being, what the difference is between a basic government, which you support, and an immorally intrusive one). You have indicated that the difference between a government which is intrusive (in the immoral sense instead of the inconvenient one) and non-intrusive is that the intrusive gov’t does not restrict policy to negative rights, and the non-intrusive does. The embodiment of positive rights in the law seems to be the defining feature of what you call “centrally-planned government”. Am I correct?
December 16th, 2008 at 11:25 pm
I wouldn’t put the statement in terms of rights, but yes, you are correct. As I see it, the philosophical foundation of virtually all activist (or centrally-planned) government is the idea that the government’s primary responsibility is to do things FOR individuals, instead of to stop some individuals from doing things TO others.
You’ve been quite gracious in your comments, and I appreciate your attempts to not take positions and only respond to what you’re given. I feel compelled to point out, however, that we don’t necessarily have to explicitly state our positions for our words to make clear what those positions are. Your choice of words in your previous reply to me (regarding what the basis for our replies concerning government should be) would have seemed either meaningless or incoherent unless they flowed from an unstated position like the one to which I replied.
December 17th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
“I suppose your can either agree with or reject my conclusion that all government is restrictive and therefore inherently immoral (based on your reasoning).”
Condominium associations, church boards, homeschooling associations, most clubs, etc….in the sense that these groups “govern” they are not immoral. The difference is that members can freely opt out; their individual liberty is not compromised as the governing power of these entities is derived from the voluntary nature of the governed.
December 17th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Paul,
So when the government does something for an individual (making it an activist government per your last comment), is this immoral only when it is an inconvenience (or contrary to your preference) or would this type of policy be immoral regardless of the nature of the policy and its relative benefit to you?
Mr. Lyons,
So you are saying the Government is immoral when you cannot freely opt out of it, and it restricts what you may do with your resources (to the extent that it does so)?
December 18th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Bastiat wrote that the law is merely the collectivism of individuals’ rights to self-defend against attacks on life, liberty, or property. Where the law does not do that, or does so involuntarily, it acts immorally.
December 18th, 2008 at 10:56 am
Well, it depends what the “something” in question is, Benjamin. When it comes to public goods there’s nothing immoral about government providing them. I would say that doing so is a major raison d’etre of governments in the first place. Public goods are things that private actors have every incentive to use but few (or no) incentives to provide them themselves. Think national defense or the police. (Some people — like me, for instance — would also lump at least some environmental regulation in that category too, but that’s more controversial.) National defense is the classic public good: it’s virtually impossible to not give it to everyone if you’re going to provide it at all, and everyone benefits from it once it’s provided. So I suppose I need to add a qualifier like “except for public goods” to my statement about government doing things FOR people.
Once a government moves beyond public goods, however, it usurps the role and responsibility of the individual in ordering his own life. It assumes the position of a parent instead of a government. That is wrong, assuming citizens are really adults and not grown infantile beings dependent on their Mommy for survival. The modern state in the West has gotten so far beyond simply providing public goods (in Europe it went beyond that centuries ago), however, that it’s safe to say that nearly everything done by the government in the West is immoral to one degree or another. That doesn’t mean there aren’t good things done. It’s good to provide health care for people, but just because something is good doesn’t mean that the state should be doing it.
December 18th, 2008 at 11:02 am
I should add that providing public goods doesn’t make a government activist. As I said, providing for public goods is one of the major reasons (some would say the only legitimate reason) governments exist. Calling something “activist” implies that it goes beyond its legitimate scope of action. Providing for public goods is, by definition, not an activist thing for a government to do. So your statement that a government that “does something for an individual” is an activist government by my definition seems to be flawed and in need of correction.
December 18th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Paul:
1.) National defense, or rather, collectivized defense of contracting individuals, is absolutely possible without the state.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/bryan4.html
2.) To me, environmental regulation is a cause for defense of property rights. You absolutely cannot pollute my property without my permission if you respect my property rights. You don’t have to be shy about parking that into something Bastiat wouldn’t complain about.
December 18th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
I can’t deny that it’s theoretically possible, Tom. A lot of things are theoretically possible, though. The article you linked to is interesting, and makes some arguments that seem well-reasoned, though it strikes me as more than a little utopian.