Must you be Grateful to the Government?

            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.