Not jumping the Berlin Wall can save lives. Somebody won’t get shot. Over the longer term, however, it is likely that tyranny wastes more lives than liberty. Anyway, the real question is not how many lives are destroyed under the two regimes, but what can justify forbidding a specific individual to cross what he thinks is a wall against his own flourishing.
I was reminded of this sort of questions when I followed a link in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal about a “debate” the newspaper hosted some months ago on the question “Do E-Cigarettes Do More Good Than Harm?” The subtitle explained that it was “a debate over which is bigger: the damage from the rise in teenage vaping or the benefits of using e-cigarettes to stop tobacco smoking.”
The elephant missing in the room was and remains the ignored alternative: Does it cause still bigger damage to use government coercion to forbid adults to do what they want with their lives, and to teach the young that they will never be adults? What about individual liberty? Even if tyranny saved lives, it is not the same lives as would have flourished in a free society. (I wrote on vaping and “children” in a recent blog post here: “A Move to the Left,” June 27.)
Is it an exaggeration to draw an analogy between the sort of state that built the Berlin Wall and our nice and benevolent state that protects individuals against themselves for their own good? Is there any common denominator between the two sorts of state? Is it impossible that one ever morphs into the other? One must be careful, but not naïve. In The Road to Serfdom (1944), Friedrich Hayek quotes Reinhold Niebuhr, a socialist American theologian, who, in 1932, described Germany as the place “where all the social and political forces of modern civilization have reached their most advanced form.” This was apparently a commonly held opinion. The American progressives of the turn of the 20th century admired Germany. And Germany remained a public-health state under the Nazis: see Robert Proctor’s The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton University Press, 1999) or my essay on the book in The Independent Review.
One advantage of individual liberty was advanced by James Buchanan in a 1978 lecture reproduced in his book What Should Economists Do? (Liberty Press, 1979). He wrote (the emphasis is his):
Man wants liberty to become the man he wants to become.
But here is a troubling question: Does man, in the sense of all human individuals, really want liberty? In a 2005 Public Choice article, “Afraid to Be Free: Dependency as Desideratum,” Buchanan himself seemed to have second thoughts after observing how many people ask the government to treat them like children:
The thirst or desire for freedom, and responsibility, is perhaps not nearly so universal as so many post-Enlightenment philosophers have assumed.
This troubling question echoes a terrible sentence in Bertrand de Jouvenel’s On Power (see my recent review, “How the State Has Grown to Be the Monster We Know: Bertrand de Jouvenel’s On Power”):
Where the idea comes from that men hold despotism in detestation, I do not know. My own view is that they delight in it.
I suggest that the skewed debate on e-cigarettes, after the one on tobacco, serves as an illustration.
READER COMMENTS
Phil H
Jul 5 2019 at 1:13pm
“Is it an exaggeration to draw an analogy between the sort of state that built the Berlin Wall and our nice and benevolent state that protects individuals against themselves for their own good?”
Yes, it’s absolutely an absurd exaggeration, because the latter part of your sentence is a horrible barefaced lie.
“…that protects individuals against themselves…”
This is not what we are being protected from. We are being protected from an army of faceless zombies created in the name of economic growth, who have no morality, no shame, no human feeling. They are corporations. Granted, astoundingly, actual legal personhood by the government, but unable to be controlled as other persons (real people!) are controlled. They cannot be arrested. They cannot go to prison. What they can do is wreak upon us endless harm (as well as endless good), by selling us poisons and claiming that they are goods.
OK, that was the heavy rhetoric version. In more neutral terms: It is a historical contingency that a poisonous product became so widely adopted. With the exception of alcohol, there has never been anything like it. The only other leisure activity that was similarly lethal was sex, and we pumped and continue to pump billions and billions of dollars into neutralising the harms of sex (STDs). The mania for stamping it out is matched by the mania of the corporations who continue to profit from this poison, so no, it’s not really excessive.
Jon Murphy
Jul 5 2019 at 2:27pm
I don’t think this explanation really works. It’s no secret that cigarettes are poisonous if used in large amounts. If you ask smokers, they will acknowledge this fact, yet they smoke anyway. Regulations on e-cigs, especially their banning and various other restrictions, are very much a “protect people from themselves” mindset since some politician decided that people, even if they know what are doing, are being bad because no one would willingly choose that behavior. Thus, they need to be protected from their own foolishness.
Further, there are countless regulations on far, far less harmful products than cigarettes: video games, movies, autos, clothing, just to name a few. It’s not about knowledge dissemination; the market already does that.
So, it’s more than just corporations peddling poison.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 5 2019 at 3:50pm
Q.E.D.
Phil H
Jul 6 2019 at 6:28am
Jon:
“Regulations on e-cigs, especially their banning and various other restrictions, are very much a “protect people from themselves” mindset since…”
I specifically rebutted this. Repeating it doesn’t really help. You can disagree, but you haven’t really advanced the argument.
I was trying to advance the argument by rejecting this silly libertarian trope of “people can do what they want, so the government shouldn’t interfere”. It’s a silly trope because the government specifically, deliberately, legislatively created a whole new breed of person: the corporation. That is a government action. When the government intervenes in the economy, it acts mostly on corporations, which are not people. This is why you end up looking like shills for business: You claim to be standing up for the rights of people, but often that involves defending the rights of *persons* – a large number of whom are not people at all.
“Further, there are countless regulations on far, far less harmful products than cigarettes”
Pierre announced that a ban on vaping is like the Berlin Wall. That’s a massive rhetorical move (hence why I went rhetorical in my answer). He didn’t do that about gaming or cars… if he had, I would be comfortably dismissing him as just another crazy person on the internet. If you can’t tell the difference between video game regulations and the Berlin Wall, then you’re really not worth engaging with!
But he didn’t, he picked a specific arena, smoking, in which governmental regulatory efforts have, in fact, been massive and intrusive. Even though I think his analogy goes too far, I certainly can see why he made it. My reply was to indicate why I think the state has done so much regulation in this area. Smoking really is a special case.
Jon Murphy
Jul 6 2019 at 6:34am
I know you addressed it, but my point, stated unclearly, is that your example works against you explanation. E-cigs are not harmful to the same extent; indeed, they’re a manner of getting off the more dangerous stuff.
Further, the dangers of cigarettes are well known; no one smokes in ignorance anymore. Thus, the increasing regulations and taxation is about “save from themselves” since the politician decided, even fully informed, they are making the wrong choice.
Jon Murphy
Jul 6 2019 at 7:04am
One other point:
I don’t think it’s correct to tie the need for regulations to corporations for several reasons under the guise they are “selling poison”:
1) The idea and legal existence of corporations are millennia old, dating back at least to the Roman Republic.
2a) Corporations cannot be arrested, true, because that is an absurdity. How do you imprison a collection of assets? So, that point you raise is irrelevant.
2b) Individuals in corporations can be arrested if they violate legislation. Ask Ken Lay.
3) Legal personhood is different from natural personhood. All “legal personhood” means is they are granted primary rights, like the right to due process, the right to own and sell property, and basic protections under the law. Basically, it’s an extension of property rights to groups of people; people do not lose rights just because they form a group.
4) The idea of collective action goes back even farther than corporations, with special privileges granted, either by consent, convention, or legislation, to those collectives. Some famous examples: the Catholic Church, governments, militaries. So, the idea is not as absurd as you claim.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 8 2019 at 12:43am
A classic explanation of why the corporation is not a creation of the state is Robert Hessen’s In Defense of the Corporation. A more philosophical-historical defense of the benefit of corporate organizations between individuals and Leviathan is Bertrand de Jouvenel’s classic, On Power–which I just reviewed in Liberty Classics.
Thaomas
Jul 7 2019 at 10:55am
Restrictions on vaping are a classic case of failure to apply cost benefit analysis to regulations.
nobody.really
Jul 11 2019 at 2:34pm
There’s a whole string of memes on the topic of Headlines posed in the form of questions to which the answer is NO. (e.g., “Did Obama Eat Jimmy Hoffa’s Remains?”) This is a rhetorical method employed by weasels who wish to imply a conclusion they know they cannot defend.
Case in point: “Is it impossible that one [governments that regulate smoking] ever morphs into the other [Communist Germany]?” No–just as it’s not impossible that we might find life on the moon. But by and large, we ask people making such a claim to bear the burden of their claim–not to shift it onto the audience.
More to the point: I find NO EVIDENCE for the idea that authoritarian regimes evolve from normal garden-variety regulation. The Nazis did not come to power because the Germans favored health care and minimum wage laws. Rather, they came to power when all the prior regimes FAILED TO PROTECT THE COMMON MAN FROM THE DEPRIVATIONS OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION. Analogous circumstances led to the rise of the Soviets and the Chinese and the Cubans. Examples of authoritarian regimes arising when the poor revolt against the rich: Many. Examples of authoritarian regimes arising because a developed economy regulated itself into authoritarianism: zero.
It is the failure to defend the interests of the common man–not the regulation of smoking–is what leads the common man to throw in his lot with a dictator. The moral is that governments should do what they can to promote the interests of the common man.
I see plausible arguments that we should promote laissez faire policies because they best promote the long-term interests of the common man. But I don’t find much merit to the argument that we should promote laissez faire policies because the alternative leads to totalitarianism. Anyone who has studied how actual totalitarians arise will know otherwise.
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