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The Rise of Parentalism
30 March 2007Myths of the Nanny State
by Radley Balko
From the Cato Institute: In a recent paper published in the journal Public Choice, “Afraid to be Free: Dependency as Desideratum,” Nobel Prize–winning economist James Buchanan composes a new taxonomy of socialist threats to liberty. Buchanan argues that the conventional threats to freedom from managerial socialism (central planning) and distributionist socialism (the welfare state) are today joined by paternalistic socialism and “parental socialism,” which Buchanan describes as the willingness among many to allow the government to take control of their lives.
The emerging threat to American liberty today, then, is a combination of these latter two forms of socialism—the desire among some in government to interfere in nearly every aspect of our lives, and the lack of concern on the part of many Americans that this is happening. And while conventional critics of capitalism came primarily from the left, the parentalist-paternalist movement isn’t as easily marginalized.
From the left, for example, a new class of critics has emerged under the banner of “public health.” True public health is, of course, a perfectly legitimate function of government. The collective nature of the threats posed by highly communicable diseases, for example, makes protection from them a legitimate public good, deliverable by government. Today one might also include the threats posed by biological or chemical terrorism.
But modern “public-health” initiatives have moved well beyond what could reasonably be classified as public goods. Today, government undertakes all sorts of policies in the name of public health that are aimed at regulating personal behavior. It began in the 1970s and 1980s with anti-smoking initiatives and today includes a wide range of programs, including efforts aimed at reducing alcohol consumption, encouraging seatbelt and motorcycle helmet use, regulating diet and lifestyle in the name of curbing obesity, federalizing local issues like speed limits and the minimum drinking age, and generally using the power of the state to regulate away lifestyle risk.
As Buchanan points out, parentalism and paternalism are at heart merely new forms of socialism. They value community and the collective good over choice and individual freedom. Public policy recommendations aimed at curbing alcoholism or obesity, for example, are rarely aimed at alcoholics or obese people themselves. Rather, they’re usually aimed at taming “the environment” of alcohol or obesity, code for the food and alcohol industries. Specific recommendations inevitably target marketing and advertising, the tools free markets use to distribute information.
When policies are aimed at individuals, they’re generally redistributionist in nature—sin or vice taxes, for example. Proposals like the “fat tax” tax all users of high-calorie foods, with proceeds going to obesity treatment and prevention programs— meaning they redistribute wealth from people who consume calorie-dense foods responsibly to those who don’t.
Which brings us back to Julian Simon. Simon used empirical data to deflate claims that capitalism and industry were making us sick, irreparably damaging the earth, and bringing about the end of humanity. Simon instead showed how free markets and liberal institutions ushered in health, wealth, and longevity unprecedented in the history of man.
The emerging paternalist-parentalistsocialist threat to liberty, then, is in many ways the same old threat dressed up in new clothes. Critics of capitalism and consumerism can no longer credibly predict that free markets will eradicate the world’s food supply. So today they argue that the food industry has created a nation of gluttons (which, considering that the bulk of human history has been a struggle against starvation, isn’t such a bad problem to have). Of course, only a society prosperous enough to do away with child labor can worry about its children having too much to eat. The proliferation of Internet pornography or online gambling isn’t of much concern in countries where less than 5 percent of the population has Internet access.
The “problems” this latest form of socialism attempts to solve, then, are afflictions of prosperity. They’re problems much of the world would still consider itself fortunate to have.
Read the whole article at the Cato Insititute
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