One common
criticism of libertarians is that they are ungrateful for everything that their
government has done for them. Libertarians make use of government roads,
government police provision, often government schools, in many countries
government healthcare facilities, among other things, just like everybody else.
Like everyone else, it is alleged, libertarians should be grateful to the
government for these things, and not constantly criticize it and seek to shrink
it.
According to
most well-accepted codes of morality, showing gratitude when someone does you a
favor or gives you something that you value is morally right, not showing such
gratitude morally wrong. I have no problem with this tenet of morality, but in
this post I will endeavour to show why the government does not deserve the
gratitude of its citizens and why the charge of ingratitude is not a valid
argument against libertarianism.
1. The government is a conduit; it does not create wealth on
its own:
The first
thing to look into when deciding whether one should be grateful to someone for
doing you a favor or not is whether that person was actually the one directly
responsible for the favor. Imagine that you have run into some hard times and
your child is sick and you need some money to pay for their medical bills. A
wealthy man named John Smith, through his John Smith Children’s Charitable Foundation,
decides to give you the money to pay for your child’s medical bills. John
Smith, being a busy man, does not hand you the money himself, rather, his hired
administrator does that. I ask: who deserves the bulk of your gratitude for
helping you out in your time of need, John Smith or the hired administrator? I
think most people would answer that John Smith, having provided the resources
to be handed out by the administrator, is the one that deserves the bulk of
their gratitude.
The case of
government is similar. The people forming the government, as a general rule,
are not the ones struggling to produce valuable economic resources. Rather,
they tax the citizens who produce valuable resources, and then use those
taxpayer resources to finance government operations and distribute some of the
resources to other citizens. Linking this to our hypothetical above, it would
seem that government is more like the hired administrator, while the taxpayers
who actually provide the resources to be ‘distributed’ are more like the
generous John Smith. As such, the bulk of our gratitude for whatever government
‘services’ we might value should go the taxpayers whose conscripted resources
make these services possible. Demanding that even more of their resources be
conscripted through higher taxes, as most statists do, seems a peculiar way of
showing gratitude for the favor provided.
2. One need not be as grateful for an unsolicited service or
for a service which you must pay for:
As a general
rule, people are expected to be more grateful for the favors that they asked to
be bestowed on them than for favors that are unsolicited. Thus, if you ask
someone to buy you a donut and they do, you should be more grateful to that
person than to the person that just smuggles a donut into your knapsack unsolicited. Still though, I will grant that if the
unsolicited favor is appreciated by the recipient, the recipient should still
be grateful to the donor, although not as much as if the favor was solicited.
Another
thing that should lessen the obligation of gratitude is if payment is demanded
in order for a solicited ‘favor’ to be bestowed. Thus, when you exchange a
dollar for a cup of coffee, it is certainly polite to thank your server, even
though you paid for the service, although the gratitude need not be as great as
if the cup of coffee that you asked for was given to you for free.
What should wipe out the obligation
of gratitude entirely though is if a ‘favor’ granted is not only unsolicited,
but payment for the favor is demanded anyway! Thus, imagine that you plan to
take the subway train down to work and there is a musician playing near the
platform. Ordinarily, if you like the music, you might feel a touch of
gratitude for the free, though unsolicited, favor bestowed, and you might even
give the musician some money if you think his performance is worth it. But now
imagine that the musician has hired thugs to insist that you pay a specified
amount for the performance, upon threat of you being beaten up by the thugs if
you do not. Even if you might appreciate the music being played under normal
circumstances, this performer should certainly not be entitled to any of your
gratitude. If you do not appreciate the music and wish it would stop, than
being forced to pay for an injury bestowed on you by another adds insult to
injury, and certainly the performer deserves no gratitude, just the opposite.
These latter two situations are the
closest to governments’ mode of operations. Governments take your money as
taxation, and then use some of that money to provide you with ‘services’. You
may appreciate the services (‘free’ medical care, ‘free’ education, etc…) or
you may not appreciate the services (aggressive military ventures if you are a
peace lover or a pacifist). In either case, you need not be grateful for either
unsolicited, but appreciated, services that you are forced to pay for, or
especially for unsolicited, and not appreciated or actively disliked services
that you are forced to pay for.
It does not matter in this regard if
the government is democratic or authoritarian. Would the thuggish subway
musician deserve your gratitude if he were elected every four years by regular
subway customers in a poll by majority vote, with no chance of voting for
having no coercive subway musician at all? I submit that he would not, and the
same goes for governments.
3. Government actions typically impose all kinds of unseen
costs on the economy, injuries to everyone that often outweigh the apparent benefits
of the ‘favor’:
In order to
determine whether we should be grateful for a favor bestowed or not, it would
make sense to consider all of the benefits and costs of the favor to us, even
those that are not as directly evident. For example, imagine that a rich and
powerful man offers you the following: he will give you $100 000 if you give
your moral consent to him installing handcuffs on half of the population (not
including yourself) of your city. Now, for a selfish and short-sighted person,
this might seem like a great deal. Someone who even somewhat cares about others would probably not accept the deal. If you were a long-sighted individual, even if
you were completely selfish, you would also be advised not to accept the deal. The
fact is, with half of the population of your city handcuffed, the productivity
of these potential exchange partners and partners in regional economic
development would be crippled. The result would be a significant lowering of
your standard of living, especially your long-run standard of living, even
with the $100 000 added.
Though not
as obvious, a similar analysis can be applied to government actions. I will not here get into detail about how government actions cripple productivity (for that, see
section 1 of: http://thinkingabouthumansociety.blogspot.ca/2013/04/dissecting-leftist-statism.html
and http://thinkingabouthumansociety.blogspot.ca/2013/03/issue-analysis-higher-taxes-on-wealthy.html).
For
now, suffice it to say that any potential productivity crippling effects of
government actions should be carefully considered before labelling anyone
ungrateful for a governmental ‘favor’ bestowed. If it can be shown that the
costs, including indirect costs, of an unsolicited ‘favor’ outweigh its
benefits, than we must cease calling it a favor and start calling it an
imposition, something which we certainly should not be grateful for.
4. In any case, past gratitude should not stand in the way of
future reform:
If we want to do our duty as truth-seeking
social scientists and good society-seeking citizens in the present, we must not
let past gratitude stand in the way of beneficial reforms. Take a computer
scientist who learned his discipline in the 1950s and 1960s. Let’s say he did
most of his programming and learning in those years on an IBM Type 650
computer. He might, like Donald Knuth, author of the famous computer science book
the Art of Computer Programming, “affectionately” dedicate his book to the Type
650 computer he had worked on out of gratitude to the computer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programming).
Nevertheless, this does not mean that he is somehow morally obligated to only
use that computer to which he is grateful for the rest of his life. He can
still recognise (and must recognise for the good of his career) when a new
computer is an objective improvement over the Type 650 and use it for that
reason, past feelings of gratitude notwithstanding.
A similar
analysis applies to government policies. Even if you were to ignore the three
previous points I have made about why you need not be grateful to the
government for its ‘favors’ and still insist on being grateful for past
government actions, this does not mean that you have a moral duty to continue
to advocate the same policy which benefited you in the past. Your feelings of
gratitude for past government actions do not change anything about the likely
societal effects of government policy in the present, the effects that must be
analyzed in order to rationally decide whether a particular government policy
is a good idea or not. Abdicating this duty in the name of past gratitude is
not a morally commendable action, it is just intellectually lazy.
Thus, we
have pointed out three reasons why one need not be grateful for most
governmental ‘favors’ bestowed, and shown that even if despite all this one
still insists on being grateful for governmental ‘favors’ bestowed in the past,
this should not decide your policy analysis in the present one way or the
other. Given all this, the criticism of libertarians accusing them of being
ungrateful for government actions is not a valid critique of libertarianism and
does nothing to discredit the ideology.