How to Think About Social Issues: Tips 13-14

13. Always take into account the general principles behind policies:

When considering a social/economic policy, don’t just assess it in an intellectual vacuum, in isolation; rather, assess it also based on the general rule or principle underlying it. For example, imagine that there is a rich man who is very unpleasant, not a criminal, but very unpleasant: rude, selfish, obnoxious, narrow-minded. Living in the same city is a poor man who is very pleasant: polite, concerned for others, charming, and broad-minded. Seeing this, imagine a pundit proposes that the city’s government should take half of the rich man’s assets and give them to the poor man, as by doing so a pleasant person could be enriched at the expense of an unpleasant person, surely a social gain! A social thinker considering this in isolation might say: sure, why not? The pleasant person would probably make better use of his money and besides, he ‘deserves’ it more than the unpleasant person.

If we stop and consider the principle underlying this kind of policy though, we may have second thoughts. In this case, the principle is this: any time a democratically elected municipal government deems a rich man unpleasant and a poor man pleasant, it may step in and confiscate some of the rich man’s wealth to give to the poor man. But this is a terrible principle for a number of reasons. First, what criteria does the government have for distinguishing between unpleasant and pleasant people? What’s to prevent the government from abusing its power and just arbitrarily grabbing people’s money to reward its supporters? Second, how about the very foundation of prosperity and freedom in society: the right to hold property that cannot be confiscated unless its holder has invaded the personal or property rights of someone else? Who will bother accumulating wealth and property by serving the consumers if they can just lose it all at the arbitrary whim of a judgemental government? Thus, a policy that, taken alone may seem alright, when probed for the basic principle underlying it, turns out to be a terrible policy.

It is for this reason that Henry Hazlitt, in his book on ethics, recommends rule utilitarianism over ad hoc utilitarianism. First, we have a better chance of assessing the utilitarian effects of a general rule of conduct over ad hoc, single policy decisions. Second, principles are important for future action and, once a single policy is recommended by a social thinker, it can be used as a precedent for recommending other policies that the original social thinker may not sympathize with. You may protest all you want that it was not your intent to install a general principle but merely to recommend the one policy, but the fact is that ideas take on a life of their own and your precedent will be used to justify certain general principles that you may entirely disagree with.

Let us take another example, this time a tangible, contemporary one: Mayor Bloomberg of New York’s ban on large soft drinks for health reasons. Now, even as an isolated, principle-less policy there are some possible objections, namely, who is Mayor Bloomberg to say that everyone who willingly purchases a large soft drink, knowing full well the health consequences of their action, is making a poor decision? Values are subjective, and if some individuals value the present consumption of a greater quantity of soft drink over the cost of health risks in the future, who is Mayor Bloomberg to say that they are wrong, other than by arbitrarily substituting his own values for those of the individuals in question? Nevertheless, an argument could still be made for this policy in isolation, most convincingly along the lines that since the government must in many cases, under the present institutional arrangements, pay for the healthcare of its citizens, adopting a not very harmful ban of large soft drinks in order to help improve the health of its citizens and thus lower the government’s healthcare costs could be justified. Of course, one could argue that this just proves the cumulative nature of interventions and that if the government just got out of the healthcare market (which it should for other reasons anyway), this argument is of no effect. Let us not use this line of argument for the moment though and consider the question another way.

What is the principle underlying this ban of large soft drinks? Essentially, it is that the government has the right and/or the duty to make sure that citizens live a healthy lifestyle. In this case though, why stop at banning large soft drinks and narcotics? Why not prohibit fatty foods, sugary deserts, and salty snacks? In fact, why stop at prohibition at all? Why not compel people to eat a portion of spinach a day, take vitamin tablets, and drink cranberry juice? Why not force people to exercise for at least 30 minutes every day? The answer is because this is tyrannical and completely disregards the autonomy and subjective value judgements of individuals, treating them like dependent, childish wards. Ludwig von Mises, in chapter 15 of Human Action, made a similar argument when he opined that perhaps it would not be too bad if the state outlawed the advertisement of any product which could not be proven scientifically to do what it claimed to do, ie. cure acne, make ugly people pretty, etc… But in the end he did not recommend such a policy because he said that ‘freedom is indivisible’ and that once the government started getting into the business of being a truth-commission for the claims of private citizens, why not extend this function to the far more important statements of political, social, and religious doctrines? Why not outlaw all political statements that don’t fit into the models of registered government economists or the accounts of registered government historians, and outlaw all religious statements that haven’t been proven using the methods of the natural sciences? In this case, as in the other examples given, the answer is because while the initial policy considered may not be bad, the underlying principle is monstrous to most people.     

14. Don’t conflate state and society:

Beware when someone says something like: ‘You did not build your business alone, society helped you all the way and hence you owe a debt to society. Thus, you should be willing to pay more taxes’. What is wrong with this statement? The statement conflates the idea of society and the idea of state. Society is the network of cooperative relationships between human beings, including the division of labour and networks of exchange which are known as the market. This kind of society, the market society, transcends the boundaries of nation-states and encompasses all humans that engage in exchange transactions with one another, which now means the vast majority of the world’s population. The state, on the other hand, is organized coercion that is considered to be legitimate by its subjects. Currently, different states occupy different geographical areas, and most geographical areas only have one state that is considered legitimate by the majority of the region’s inhabitants. Thus, while the market society is characterized by contractual, voluntary relations and an international scale, regional states are characterized by hegemonic, coercive relations and a regional scale. It should be clear that these two conceptual entities are not the same thing.

It should also be clear what the fallacy of the statement is. Starting with the true assertion that people cannot build businesses, or do a lot of good things that they currently do, without society, it moves on to the false assertion that because of this, individuals should be willing to pay more taxes to the state. This clearly does not follow because the market society and the state are separate entities. Perhaps though, the author of the statement just left out or left implicit the reasoning linking society and the state and that they really mean that the market society would be impossible without a state. Leaving aside the anarcho-capitalist arguments that the market society does not need a state to function well, it is true that many eminent social thinkers, even very libertarian-leaning ones such as Mises and Hazlitt, do indeed argue that a state is necessary for the smooth functioning of the market society. After all, the market society is a voluntaristic society, but if individuals and organizations are free to organize private armies and use them to aggress against the person and property of other members of the market society, then what do we have left of that voluntaristic society? Thus, it is considered by many thinkers to be the state’s primary function to defend the persons and property of its citizens against the aggression of domestic and foreign criminals or rival states. In this limited sense, we may agree that the existence of a functioning state is a necessary pre-requisite for a prosperous market society. But in this case, unless all of the government’s resources are currently devoted to the protection of person and property and the voters still feel that more protection is needed, the call for a heavier tax burden on individuals does not follow.

Thus, the author of the statement must have something else in mind. And indeed, advocates of big government do hold that the government’s role extends beyond, far beyond, the protection of person and property. Transportation infrastructure, public utilities, schools, healthcare institutions, guardianship of natural resources and the water supply, welfare payments, aggressive military ventures, prevention of victimless crimes against someone’s sense of morality (drug laws for example), and many more are considered to be vital functions of the state, necessary to the functioning of society as a whole. There is a libertarian and free-market economics literature on why these things are either not necessary or could be done better and more economically by private enterprise which we recommend you consult before deeming any of these so-called state functions vital to the preservation of society as a whole. For now, suffice it to say that unless it can be demonstrated that the people in question who are supposed to be grateful to society for their accomplishments (businessmen in this case) could not possibly have succeeded without the state provisioning one of the ‘services’, besides defence, that it currently provisions, it is illegitimate to demand that these people be grateful to the state for something that society, taken broadly as the world-encompassing market society, really made possible.