Pick a “social good” government initiative at random. Legislation and regulation directed at tobacco, at alcohol, at narcotics or psychotropics, at sugar, at trans-fats, at sodium, at obesity, at poverty – take your choice. Got one? Good. First, contemplate on which side of the “line” you find yourself. If you picked alcohol, for example, are you a drinker or non-drinker? Occasional, moderate, heavy, binge, raging alcoholic? Same with cigarettes, or obesity, or sodium sensitivity – establish in your mind where you land on the government’s spectrum of use/abuse. Now, consider how the government’s policies affect you personally. Are you one of the people who the government is looking to save from yourself? Or are you one of those who manages that particular “vice” responsibly, or isn’t on the “bad” side of the line, yet pays the price for the greater social good?
If you’ve a BMI of 20 and run half marathons all the time, but enjoy the occasional 64 ounce Double Gulp tub of Coca Cola from 7-11, you’re certainly not on Mike Bloomberg’s list of “at risk” people who need their access to large sugary soft drinks limited. If you enjoy a bottle of wine with your spouse a couple nights a week, you certainly don’t need to have the alcohol industry heavily regulated to keep you out of harm’s way. If you’re among the large majority of people whose blood pressure isn’t sodium-sensitive, you don’t need government forcing the food industry to serve you bland, unsalted food. Yet if you complain at unnecessary government intrusions into your personal choices or about excessive taxation meant to discourage certain behaviors, you’re likely to hear as a response “well, you should be OK being burdened a little for the greater good.”
Government is a blunt instrument and highly insulated from the sort of feedback-based accountability and sensitivity that market forces impose. As such, it is not particularly well-suited to focusing assistance on those who truly need it. So, politicians find it easier to impose universal acts – and sometimes, a universal act is the only way to pursue a particular social remedy. Some of the recent egregious efforts have been denied by the courts (the aforementioned soda size limit in NYC) and others are still in the “talking” stages (salt in prepared foods), but they’ve been preceded by countless other interventions, interventions that have been around so long we’ve either grown resigned to them or aren’t even conscious of their existence. Yet interventions and interferences in our lives they are.
Yet how is it conscionable to punish the innocent for the transgressions of others? How is it moral to impose restrictions or burdens on those who don’t need outside assistance to manage the negative aspects of the targeted behaviors? If I’m not a problem drinker but very much a night-owl, why can’t I buy a beer at my local bar after the government imposed “last call?”
The argument in favor of burdening even the responsible in order to rein in the excesses of the irresponsible often rests upon the argument that everyone ends up bearing the costs of the behaviors that the irresponsible engage in. Drunk drivers do terrible harm to the innocent. Diabetics and the obese use more health care than the healthy, as do smokers and chronic over-drinkers (there is evidence that disputes this assertion, but it is the rationalization offered, so lets take it at face value for now). Some don’t know the potential health perils of unpasteurized cheese or raw milk. Some don’t know that trans fats are unhealthy, or they may be unaware that the cupcake they’re eating is chock full of them. Fat people don’t know how fattening that McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with Cheese is unless the calorie count is posted (seriously – if you live off McDonalds and have gained a hundred pounds in the last year, you shouldn’t need someone to suggest that A causes B).
Since “we” provide health care even to those who don’t secure their own insurance, it benefits “us” to regulate their behaviors. And, if our own behaviors are restricted along the way, better that than the alternative. But, isn’t the offer of that health care imposed by “society” in the first place? Isn’t the “societal cost” something that society has chosen to burden itself with? And in doing so, hasn’t society created a set of perverse incentives, an absolving of personal responsibility for personal irresponsibility, a transfer of the consequences of ill-advised actions and behaviors? Consider the converse – society punishes the responsible by burdening them with the consequences of the behaviors of the irresponsible.
Extend this idea to the various forms of social insurance, the “safety nets” we are told are a fundamental part of a modern and healthy society. These safety nets are imposed by governmental force, of course, rather than a voluntary cooperative effort, and funded with tax revenues. Since tax revenues are progressive in both rate and in starting point (leaving Social Security and Medicare out of the story for now – the sins of those programs are myriad but of a different sort), we again witness government activities that adversely impact those who are taking care of themselves for the benefit of those who aren’t. While this sort of government nannying is of a different sort – the behaviors being addressed (those that result in insufficient income) aren’t necessarily destructive, just insufficiently constructive. The reasons for them may be completely “legitimate” i.e. there are people who, through various combinations of chance and circumstances beyond their control, need help to get by. What’s important to the discussion at hand are the incentives that the safety nets produce.
All creatures, people included, respond to their environment. This is the thinking behind, among other things, sin taxes. Make a behavior prohibitively expensive and you discourage it. Setting aside the fact that this lesson is lost on those who’d heavily tax the most productive wealth creators and earners in society, consider what sort of responses are incentivized by all that government does for the people it feels need “doing for.” Consider, also, the broader message sent. If your bad behaviors are going to be managed externally, if the cost of those behaviors is going to be borne by others, if the insufficiency of your income (or the excessiveness of your expenditures in relation to that income) is going to be addressed by others, wouldn’t you feel less urgency to take matters into your own hands? Mightn’t you, if you were unemployed, choose to wait until a “good” job presents itself instead of taking one that you find distasteful? Conversely, if you’re living a prudent, responsible life, opting to work more, moderating your intake, managing your health and fitness, doesn’t the message sent by government make you feel like a fool? Instead of being one of Aesop’s ants, isn’t there incentive to be the grasshopper?
The destructiveness of government’s paternalism and nannying to society and on the mind set of its members certainly isn’t intentional – those who look to care for others, even if they do it via coercion and with other people’s money, are usually very well intentioned. I needn’t remind readers of the aphorism regarding good intentions, rather I want to make clear that I don’t ascribe bad or malevolent intent to the do-gooders. I look to challenge their mind-set – a mind-set that subordinates individualism and individual liberty to a bottom-of-the-barrel collectivism. The right of an individual to be left alone, to do as he wishes with himself and his life, provided he extends the same courtesy to others, is given the lowest priority and level of consideration. People, their individuality, their varying needs, wants, desires and motivations, are considered only in the aggregate, with those who are getting along without assistance burdened in order to fix those who aren’t. The perverse incentives such attitudes foster don’t get considered, or get considered only in retrospect and get addressed only with further interventions.
The results aren’t good. More people than ever receive public assistance, obesity is considered to be at “epidemic” levels, participation rate in the workforce is steadily declining, the number of things the government feels compelled to regulate seems to only get greater, and so forth. The number of single-parent households has tripled in the last 50 years (hey, if government’s going to help raise your kids, why burden yourself?). Self-reliance has become a quaint notion. Moderation is for the boring. Delayed gratification is for saps. Who is to blame? Whence does this increase in grasshoppers come? Reward behaviors, they become more common. Punish others, they become less common. In looking to manage the lives of those who act less responsibly towards themselves, government sweeps up and punishes those who are being responsible. In doing so, government is destroying the very society it seeks to help.
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