The Free Nanny State
Whenever I hear Libertarians complain about how awful and unfree our nanny state of seat belt laws and trans fats bans is, I also think to ask, when were we ever any freer? Anita Allen has a similar question:
But Americans were never as free as Harsanyi imagines, and we are not now the “children” he peevishly fears we have become. Harsanyi finds it “inexplicable” that Americans have “allowed . . . worrywarts” to be their “parents.” It seems to me, however, that Americans have historically accepted what he calls “overreaching government” as often as we’ve rejected it. Certainly measures aimed at improving character or public health and safety are nothing new to American society.
It is true that in 1960 U.S. automobile drivers did not have to wear seat belts. But overreaching rules of other sorts reigned supreme. Under “blue laws,” most retail stores and virtually all liquor stores were closed on Sundays, presumably so everyone could stay sober and go to church. More profoundly, in 1960 married couples could not legally obtain birth control in Connecticut, mixed-race couples could not marry in Virginia, black kids in Georgia attended underfunded segregated public schools and homosexual sex was against the law.
A few things Allen doesn’t mention are that marginal tax rates, though a bit too low, were enormously high 50 years ago, while the communication and airline industries were stifled by regulation. Harsanyi’s libertarianism’s obsessive focus on negative freedom is slightly bewildering. The baseline of my liberalism is that freedom is good. This means the negative freedom to direct your life plans without outside interference, as well as the positive freedom to have a fuller menu of life plans to pursue. So, 50 years ago, with stifling taxes, oppressive and repressive cultural norms (freedom to marry your black girlfriend, freedom to be openly gay, freedom to be eccentric or nonconformist in any way was limited), and without the robust economic growth and technological development (the choices and options the internet allows weren’t around 50 years ago) we were a substantially less free society, no matter the greater negative freedom to not wear a seatbelt or to smoke in bars. Any account of freedom that says we were freer50 years ago is bankrupt.
What’s refreshing about certain sectors of the libertarian movement is that they are coming around (or maybe they were always there) to this view that positive freedom is, if not as important, at least comparable to negative freedom in importance. Brink Lindsay’s Age of Abundance celebrates the cultural and economic openness that has marked post war America, seeing them as distinctly intertwined. Tyler Cowen even lauded bigger government as the likely outcome of increases in both positive and negative liberty. Will Wilkinson, though opposed to nanny state intrusions, has this great post wherein he fudges the line between positive and negative freedom, and though he ultimately comes out in favor of having the government prioritize negative freedom, it’s only because he thinks that will ultimately enable an increase in people’s substantive freedom through greater growth. So Cowen, Lindsay, Wilkinson and I all agree on the ends, it’s just a debate about how to best achieve those ends. John Harsanyi is the past, those three are the wave of the libertarian future.
Now admittedly, this line of reasoning can lead you into some weird places for a libertarian, namely that Deng Xiaoping is perhaps the greatest man ever, but that’s another post for another day.
Those marginal tax rates are deceiving. They didn’t kick in until the modern equivalent of millions of dollars of annual income, and deductions were generous; they were paid by a handful of taxpayers, no more. Rates on ordinary income were not so high. Other examples are also suspect: while the ban in Griswold was on the books in Connecticut, it was so laxly enforced that the group that wanted to remove it from the books had to set up their own clinic, and then call sympathetic cops on themselves, in order to manufacture a test case.
More broadly, the difference that libertarians see between blue laws and the current nanny statism is that at the time you’re talking about, those laws were fading relics of a nineteenth century past; the regulations we dislike now are, on the other hand, proliferating like bacteria.
Megan McArdle
October 12, 2007 at 5:05 am
Is your repeated misspelling of his last name (and completely incorrect stab at a first name) intentionally mocking, or are you just too lazy to figure out that his name is David Harsanyi? Googling “Harsanyi” includes two links on the first page to him. Noting the difference between a middle-aged blogger/columnist from Denver and a deceased Hungarian game theorist should not be so difficult.
Where does Harsanyi say that we should aspire to more negative rights because that’s what things were like 50 years ago? Here is his Denver Post page, here is his blog, feel free to peruse. While I do not have the contents of each memorized, I cannot recall him (or Radley Balko, or anybody else of similar persuasion) advancing the notion that we should strive for negative rights because they represent some golden age of America past. Strawman much?
Drew
October 13, 2007 at 12:35 am
http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/09/the_case_for_serfdom.php
There’s Radley, lamenting the high amount of government beneficiaries as opposed to private workers. The implicit argument is that 50 years ago, when the government had fewer beneficiaries, things were better. This isn’t exactly the same as the argument that there were more negative rights back then, but it’s certainly in the same vein.
Chill out about the spelling dude, Harsanyi’s name isn’t something simple like Drew Volker.
Matt Zeitlin
October 13, 2007 at 12:58 am
Well, if we want to be more general, then what of the frequent claims from lefty economists that the days when one income could raise a family and the middle class was strong and so forth were some sort of golden age of American society? Krugman hasn’t made it implicit, he’s practically shouted it from mountaintops. But of course, Krugman is not claiming that we should aspire to the days of segregrated schools and so forth. The whole notion that pointing out a positive aspect of years gone by implies that one wants a wholesale return to the era is just silly.
(Considering the number of times my name has been spelled Volcker, Voelker, Volken, Volkner, Folker, and Bolker, I must take issue with the claim that my name is simple (at least in practice). :-] )
Drew
October 13, 2007 at 11:29 am