Of Laws And Men Part 3: Paternalism

Remember Finnish Stalinist Pentti Linkola, cited in the previous part of this series? Remember this statement:

A fundamental, devastating error is to set up a political system based on desire. Society and life have been organized on the basis of what an individual wants, not on what is good for him or her.

There are several fallacies in those thirty-seven words, but the core premise is what matters most:

You’re an enormous idiot.
You don’t know what’s best for you.
You won’t do what would be best for you.
We know better, and we’ll see to it.
Whether you like it or not.

This is the premise of paternalism. The paternalist seeks to use the force of the State to compel certain behaviors and prohibit others, under the presumption that he knows better for you than you would. In his view, the need to make you behave properly gives him a license to coerce you. Those who disagree, he dismisses as stupid or evil; those who would defy him become lawbreakers.

There are many different flavors of paternalism, of course. On the Left, the paternalist might be animated by “compassion for the poor,” or by “the environment,” or by any of a number of other pseudo-moralistic abstractions. On the Right, the paternalist might be driven by Puritanical religious convictions, or by a distaste for certain pleasures, or some by notion of “social utility.” Whatever his overt rationale, the premise beneath it all is a constant.

Just as attempts to engineer the American economy into certain directions always fails, so also does the paternalist’s attempts to compel us to want other than we want, do other than we would voluntarily do...to be other than we naturally are.

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If you destroy a free market, you create a black market. – Winston Churchill

In the overwhelming majority of cases, the behavior the paternalist wants to promote or curb involves persons acting together in some fashion.

Consider the case of illegal drugs. No other subject in political discourse involves such firmness of position or such high emotion. Enormous effort and expense has gone into the attempt to prevent the production, sale, and use of such drugs. All such attempts have failed, because black markets are inherently beyond anyone’s control. The permeation of America’s prisons by the most powerful, most dangerous illegal drugs testifies eloquently to the State’s inability to do anything effective about them. Indeed, our borders are porous in large part because of the immense profits to be made in smuggling drugs into the United States.

Consider the case of prostitution. We hear relatively little about this vice today, which has proved to be as far beyond control by the force of law as illegal drug use. When a man wishes to purchase sexual services and a woman wishes to sell them, they will find one another – and their transaction won’t appear on either one’s ledger. Nothing could illustrate the complete surrender of law to prostitution than the Eliot Spitzer / Ashley Dupree case of recent memory.

Finally for this segment of the tirade, consider gambling. It’s not that long since the only legal gambling in the United States took place in Las Vegas. Yet today, state governments routinely run lotteries, including the sort that was once called “playing the numbers,” reap considerable profits from them, and license as many casinos as there are persons willing to claim Amerind ancestry. In this case, the State decided that since it couldn’t suppress illegal gambling, it might as well get onto the gravy train. The gravy has proved rich indeed, fattening state treasuries beyond expectation owing to most persons’ inability to read the backs of lottery tickets or unwillingness to do basic arithmetic.

The above three cases are more the scourge of Right-leaning paternalists rather than Left-leaning ones; the paternalist of the Left is usually more interested in thrusting his hand into your pocket. But a Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch can easily provide himself with sufficient cases of the Left’s we-know-better-what’s-good-for-you postures.

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If we must have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point may be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely more because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. – C. S. Lewis

The paternalist dynamic opposes the determination of the paternalist to make you behave to the determination of his target to do as he pleases even so. Both persons tend to be implacable; neither is willing to concede defeat beyond a temporary setback. Their opposition often germinates into genuine anger, the sort that could express itself in violence...and sometimes does.

The paternalist’s besetting fault is his conviction of indisputable righteousness. It might be said that he cannot do other than he does; his need to maintain that conviction trumps all other considerations. One of the deadest of dead giveaways is that, when one suggests to a frustrated paternalist that his policy might be inherently impossible of application – that to revert to freedom would be preferable to the carnage his laws have evoked – his usual response is “we can’t do that.” Not “won’t,” mind you; “can’t.” To admit to error would be to sacrifice his belief in his moral and intellectual superiority, upon which his entire self-concept is founded. Besides, his addiction to “the approval of his own conscience” will not permit it.

So he sticks stubbornly to his laws, ratchets up the force behind them year after year, and as his failures mount to the skies repeatedly cries to heaven for an explanation: “Why can’t they see how much smarter I am than they are?”

Can you imagine Pentti Linkola making that plaint? I can.

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Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you. – Confucius.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. – Jesus of Nazareth

If there’s an overarching theme to these “of laws and men” pieces, it’s the power of human presumption. We all want to think well of ourselves, granted; our problems arise, in large part, from some persons’ need to believe themselves smarter and / or better and / or more moral than the rest of us.

Let’s be candid: all human characteristics, including all the virtues and all the vices, are non-uniformly distributed across the reach of Man. Some people really are smarter than the rest of us. Some possess more self-restraint, or courage, or perseverance. And some are more moral, at least by their own standards. But the leap from any such recognition, objectively sound or not, to “therefore I possess the right to coerce these others for their own good” is a classic non sequitur. In making that leap, the person so doing forfeits any and all claim to the respect of others, for he has done something he cannot justify by any citation of precedent or exertion of logic.

He has set his will against the Natural Law.

It is in the nature of men to resent being coerced.
They will reorganize their affairs so as to avert it.
They will seek ways to profit, including from coercions.
As often as not, those profits come at the coercer’s expense.
Neither the coercions nor the responses will conduce to social harmony.

Verbum sat sapienti.