19

Government and Self-government

We must give up the insane illusion that a conscious self, however virtuous and however intelligent, can do its work single-handed and without assistance.

—ALDOUS HUXLEY

If self-mastery is such a problem, should we demand that government do more to protect us from ourselves? And is it really capable of doing so?

The answers are yes and maybe. Governments operate under many disabilities, including, to name just a couple, the politicians and the electorate. And Americans have a long tradition of not wanting a great deal of government. That people are freer here—even if we are freer to commit financial hara-kiri—is a source of our strength, I think, and uniqueness. Besides, there are always good reasons to be wary of the power of the state—and to be skeptical that someone in officialdom really knows what is better for each of us than we do. John Stuart Mill expressed the position succinctly in On Liberty: “The only purpose for which power may be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”

Ah, but there is evidence that, left completely to his own devices, he will harm others—for example, by running up debts that will later need to be socialized. And recall that few of us can live up to our second-order preferences without some outside assistance. The problem isn’t just weakness; we’re also ignorant, and by this I mean something other than unschooled. I’m talking here about the impenetrable complexity of modern life, the limits of time, energy, and rationality, and our inability to sort everything out for ourselves. How many of us really want government to abolish medical licensing and allow anyone to set up shop as a surgeon? Do we really believe we have the ability to judge basic competence in this realm? How many of us want government to do away with auto safety regulation? Or allow swimming in treacherous waters, with their hidden currents and depths, when the lifeguards are off duty? “I suggest we think of the imposition of paternalistic interferences in situations of this kind,” the philosopher Gerald Dworkin writes, “as being a kind of insurance policy which we take out against making decisions which are far reaching, potentially dangerous, and irreversible.”

Our ignorance, moreover, makes it hard for us to guard against weakness. When people exercise, for example, they often end up overeating; ignorant of the actual number, they overestimate how many calories they’ve burned by exercising and feel entitled to eat a lot more. And then there is the problem of protecting ourselves from the weakness of others. Isn’t gun control a way of enlisting government to guard against the passions of our neighbors? As Adam Smith puts it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “There are some situations which bear so hard upon human nature that the greatest degree of self-government . . . is not able to stifle, altogether, the voice of human weakness, or reduce the violence of the passions.”

One way the government might protect us, paradoxically, is to expose us fully to the consequences of our actions, no matter how terrible. If societies let people starve, for example, they would be a lot more careful with their money. If hospitals didn’t have to treat the uninsured, more people would get insurance. A few horror stories might scare many more citizens into cleaning up their act. But we are not prepared to let people die in the streets, thankfully, and we do not want to live in a society that would. Some people are merely victims of misfortune, after all, and most of us believe they deserve help. The problem is that once we take up this burden, however reluctantly and inconsistently, we become all the more invested in one another’s choices.

Questions about the role of government have been asked with renewed insistence since the financial crisis, which laid bare the inadequate regulation of major players such as Citicorp and AIG, whom the taxpayers had to bail out in order to save the financial system. The crisis also made clear the inability of average citizens to properly assess complicated and risky financial products, never mind their own ability to repay what they borrow, leading too many of us to take on too much debt from too many greedy or myopic lenders. It’s wonderful to give everyone access to powerful financial tools, but in retrospect even the experts couldn’t use many of them safely. Perhaps it’s not so very cruel to keep monkeys away from dynamite and matches.

In the modern world, with its weak family ties and strong temptations, it’s inevitable that some part of this job should fall to government. One reason we have a government is that individuals cannot adequately regulate themselves. David Hume is good on this point; in his view, our response to intertemporal choice—our preference for lesser, sooner objects over larger, later ones—will lead us to pursue our own short-run interests in ways that are damaging to ourselves and our society. Even those who are not inclined to act in this way would be forced to do so by the stampede of the rest to grab what they can today without regard for tomorrow. The prudent would suffer right along with the imprudent— as is happening today.

Hume’s answer was a government that, with the consent of the governed, will constrain some behavior for the good of all. This government would be a kind of precommitment device by means of which people would give up some authority over themselves so as to counteract their natural myopia. In this way, people might “acquire a security against each other’s weakness and passion, as well as against their own.”

There is a potentially slippery slope problem here—give the government enough authority and you have North Korea. Nonetheless, I think government can and should do more—at the very least, it needs to step in where informational asymmetries or dangerous appetites make people easy marks for amoral profit seekers. It needs to shape the public realm in ways that promote healthy choices. And most of all, it needs to provide strong weapons of precommitment to those who would use them.

It won’t be easy.

The Difficulty with Democracy

Democracy presents problems because it depends on individuals who might not be good at controlling themselves nonetheless voting for others to do the job for them. It needs people to have some second-order preferences—and a willingness to let someone else enforce them. There is the added problem, in any government, that it must consist of human beings—all of them subject to the same temptations as the rest of us, and in addition, to the unique temptations of power.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the uncannily observant Frenchman who discovered practically everything we would ever need to know about America, recognized long ago that self-control can pose problems for a democracy. Here is his devastating diagnosis, no less accurate today than the day he made it:

The difficulty experienced by democracy in conquering the passions and silencing the desires of the passing moment in the interest of the future can be observed in the United States in the most trivial of things. The people, surrounded by flatterers, find it difficult to master themselves. Every time they are asked to impose some privation or discomfort even for an aim their reason approves, they almost start by refusing.

Not just at first, either. Ever since the 1973 Arab oil embargo sparked gasoline lines all across the country, Americans have known that we have an energy problem. Subsequent oil shocks, the increasing realization that oil imports were funding some of the world’s worst regimes, and a growing consensus that burning fossil fuels is warming the planet, possibly catastrophically, still haven’t prompted any significant change in behavior. Not only is there a complete absence of political will for meaningful new energy taxes, but when oil prices go up some politicians demand that energy taxes be cut to help people cope. When it comes to oil, as with so many things, we are unable to overcome our inclinations.

Why do we lack the political will to make a change? First, as Tocqueville observed, it’s hard for elected representatives to ask the voters to do anything unpleasant. Democracy, at least as practiced in America, is the opposite of paternalism. Uncle Sam is a kind of Dutch uncle, easygoing and indulgent, who doesn’t even try to make us take our medicine—and anyway doesn’t want to buy it for us (unless we’re old). Can you blame him? The electorate would surely turn out anyone who, for example, attempted to raise gas taxes or reduce Social Security benefits, no matter what the consequences of inaction. Democracy is good at promising people things, and sometimes even delivering. It’s less good at taxing people to pay for them, which is why it excels at borrowing money.

Many of the strengths and weaknesses of our American system are a reflection of the founders’ embrace of precommitment in the form of our Constitution. National constitutions often serve this function, especially constitutions as difficult to change as ours. These documents are a way to confine current and future citizens and leaders to a particular path and are adopted in full knowledge that folks might later think differently about things. That’s the whole point, I suppose. “Constitutions,” in the words of the nineteenth-century politico John Potter Stockton, “are chains with which men bind themselves in their sane moments that they may not die by a suicidal hand in the day of their frenzy.”

That kind of constraint is necessarily somewhat inflexible; our Constitution has helped safeguard essential freedoms but has made it difficult for the national government of a large, complex nation to deal with large, complex problems, absent some dire emergency.

It’s also hard for democratic governments to put the proper emphasis on the future because today’s voters are the ones casting ballots, and those voters care less about the voters of tomorrow than they care about themselves. So democratic governments tend to overpromise and undertax, relying on budget-balancing gimmicks and excessively rosy projections of future revenue. Thus, at the end of 2008, public pensions in this country had $3 trillion in liabilities but only $2 trillion in assets. These huge obligations arise due to the willingness of politicians to promise costly pension benefits to public employees. The promises bring immediate benefits—mollified workers, campaign contributions, employee support at the polls, and perhaps even lower cash wages for public employees, which helps keep taxes down. All the immediate beneficiaries, including the electorate, have reason to rejoice, since the costs have been deferred to their later selves or to future generations. These payers-to-come would be entitled to shout, “Taxation without representation!” if only they were around to make themselves heard. It’s like the high hotel taxes you see in many cities; they exist because visitors don’t vote.

Democracy suffers from an essential contradiction concerning self-control, which it depends upon, reinforces, and undermines all at the same time; in this way it is much like capitalism, which both breeds and undermines the restraint and calculation on which it relies. Yet the very idea of democracy implies some form of self-regulation on the part of the citizenry—and theoretically, a democratically elected government ought to be a means of helping people commit to their best interests. Make no mistake: any vacuum left by individual willpower will tend to be filled by the state and its proxies. Even the citizens of well-established democracies will accept the infringement of civil liberties when freedom is not accompanied by self-command.

Thus in England, a place once known for self-restraint as much as it is for liberty, an Orwellian crop of more than four million public surveillance cameras—flowers of evil watered by crime—captures each Briton on camera many times daily. It’s as if the United Kingdom decided to turn itself into a giant version of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a round prison designed so that invisible jailers could watch any inmate at any time—creating a climate of constant surveillance whether anyone was watching or not. In the United States, meanwhile, employers demand not just résumés but urine to test prospective workers for drugs. In both cases, bad public policies would seem to be at work, yet these policies do not spring up in a vacuum, and it’s fair to say that civil liberties were compromised at least partly as the result of crime and drug abuse—of lapses, in other words, of self-regulation. “Men are qualified for civil liberty,” Edmund Burke wrote in 1791, “in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.

Our own government presents us with many good examples of how mechanisms of control can fail, including most famously Prohibition and its equally ugly latter-day correlate, the war on drugs. Even before Prohibition, elected leaders had taken to adding repulsive chemicals to cheap industrial alcohol (a project later ramped up to include lethal poisons) so that people wouldn’t drink it. This form of collective precommitment, echoing what individuals can do with Antabuse and the like, evidently proved fatal to thousands of Americans.

Control measures sometimes also backfire by encouraging abandon. Federal deposit insurance is an example. Think back to the thrift crisis of the 1980s; savers had every incentive to park their money with the riskiest institutions—which paid the highest interest rates—because they knew that if that thrift failed, Washington would pay them back. When thrifts started to fail in large numbers, the insurance magnified the scope of the disaster—and left taxpayers in the position of reimbursing depositors who had reaped extra gains because they were indifferent to the risk involved in investing with dodgier institutions. It’s possible that the rise of the modern welfare state has undermined the private safety nets once provided by individual savings, family ties, fraternal organizations, and other powerful nongovernmental social institutions.

Yet there’s no point pretending government has no place in protecting us from ourselves—or that its successes are few. Thalidomide was kept off the market in this country by a vigilant federal official, Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey. Seat belt laws have saved lives, as have workplace safety regulations and government funding for science, which helps underwrite medical advances. And thanks partly to public education and government policies that include higher taxes on tobacco, the prevalence of smoking in the United States today is roughly half what it was in the 1950s. Indeed, we cut per capita cigarette consumption more than any other nation from 1970 to 2000 (although that probably accounts in part for why we’ve also gained more weight than people in other countries).

How Government Can Help

It seems to me that the first step in determining what government’s role should be is to acknowledge that the government already exercises quite a bit of influence over behavior and always will. Through the tax code, for example, Uncle Sam encourages people to buy bigger houses than they need, diverts resources to home construction, and makes home ownership more appealing than renting. Some changes in the government’s own behavior, in fact, could have a big economic payoff by saving us just a little from ourselves. Taxing consumption rather than earnings would probably bolster savings and reduce consumer indebtedness even while increasing productivity. A consumption tax could be quite progressive and vastly simpler than the income tax system we have now, although, of course, even Einstein’s theory of relativity is easier to understand than the American tax code.

The second step is to acknowledge that any time government limits our choices for our own protection, it levies a kind of tax on those most capable of taking care of themselves (the wealthy, the well educated, the highly conscientious), who suffer some loss of advantage. But the advantage isn’t altogether lost; for the most part, it’s just transferred— to those least able to control their impulses (the poor, the undereducated, the marginalized). I am willing to admit, in other words, that greater paternalism will have a price, and I am willing to pay it. I doubt I will have a choice because, short of allowing people to perish as the result of their improvidence, I’m going to pay one way or another, just as the prudent are now forced to pay for the financial profligacy of others. The global financial system will always be too big to fail, and when governments rescue it now and again, responsible taxpayers must pick up the tab. So yes, it would have been better for all of us if it weren’t possible to buy a house with no money down and if we opted instead to require higher capital requirements for all borrowers, from Citibank to Joe and Mary Sixpack. As even Mill acknowledges, “it is a proper office of public authority to guard against accidents.”

Just as individuals have to recognize the limits of willpower, societies recognize that private action can go only so far to constrain unwanted choices. Rare is the community whose laws protect us only against the actions of others, even if there isn’t much rhyme or reason to these constraints. In the United States, some intoxicants (like cocaine) are prohibited, while others (like bourbon) are allowed. Gambling was once mostly off-limits; nowadays it’s not. Suicide is against the law, but certain slow forms of suicide are actively encouraged, at least by the commercial interests that stand to gain from the consumption of tobacco or other less egregiously harmful products. Over the years, our government has sought to protect us at various times from drinking beer, owning gold, engaging in certain sex acts with other consenting adults, buying or selling a spare kidney, aborting a pregnancy, marrying a partner of another race, and eating some imported deli meats. The historical record is enough to make a libertarian out of almost anybody.

In many ways I am one, but libertarianism, too, has its limits. To a libertarian, the conceit shared by liberals and conservatives is that they know what is best for everybody. But libertarians also suffer from a harmful conceit—the belief that each of us knows what is best for himself and can enact these judgments. In reality, however, while most of us have some general idea of our own best interests we have only a limited ability to act accordingly in the face of human nature and temptation.

So what is to be done? Banning what people want doesn’t work, as we should have learned by now from Prohibition and the drug war. Higher sumptuary taxes on unhealthy items might help but would run into practical problems (is candy more harmful than cheese?) while penalizing those who eat and imbibe in moderation. A little alcohol, for example, is said to be good for you. So should booze taxes be higher or lower?

One easy answer is more and better education. You can’t graduate from most colleges without studying a foreign language, but you can (and probably did) emerge ignorant of financial management and nutrition. Even if a national campaign to educate people on these matters had little effect on those who suffer weakness of will, it could at least bring around some of the thoughtless by raising their consciousness. Some of these impetuous akratics, as Aristotle called them, might be persuaded to form healthy second-order preferences and (God willing) adhere to them.

But what people really need are binding ways to commit themselves to their enduring preferences. As I mentioned earlier, several states and countries offer self-exclusion programs so that problem gamblers can have themselves barred from casinos for a fixed period. The programs are hard to enforce, and some self-banned gamblers have even sued casinos for letting them in. Nonetheless, these do seem to help; an evaluation of 161 participants published in 2007 in the Journal of Gambling Studies found a reduction in gambling problems as well as in the urge to bet.

Why stop with gambling? One can imagine all kinds of equally voluntary analogues; people could agree to be taxed for excessive weight or blood pressure, for example, as they already are by life insurers, who demand higher premiums from those with such risk indicators. Perhaps we could allow people to make voluntary additional contributions to the Social Security system—contributions that couldn’t be withdrawn until retirement. And surely the notion of covenant marriage, which is harder to dissolve than the regular kind, is worth some additional experimentation. Couples might even be given a tax break every time they reach some marital milestone—a project that could give new meaning to the term “golden wedding anniversary.”

Carrying this further, maybe purchases of cigarettes or alcohol could require a driver’s license or official photo ID—and we could have the right to request a “no alcohol” or “no tobacco” label that couldn’t be removed, at least until the next renewal. Several states (including, when I last looked, California, Texas, and Florida) had carried this precommitment concept quite a bit further with their castration laws for sex offenders. Although defendants can be sentenced to a period of mandatory chemical castration (a temporary measure that relies on medication), the laws also allow convicts to request chemical or even surgical castration. The Texas law was passed in 1997, inspired by a serial offender who begged to be surgically castrated before he harmed another child, and by 2005, three men had chosen to have the surgery. Said Bill Winslade, a University of Texas medical ethicist: “The three people who underwent the procedure, to my knowledge, have expressed no regrets and felt it contributed to their ability to exercise self-control.”

All the warnings plastered all over everything are largely a waste, but any reasonable self-paternalist should welcome informational disclosures. Requiring freshness dates and nutritional information on foods surely helps—as does banning trans fats, which are invisible, poisonous, and without many redeeming advantages. There is every reason for government to acknowledge the power of automaticity in our choices and, by use of incentives, psychological “framing,” and other techniques, to guide people toward what most of us would agree is best for us in the long run. The costs of not doing so are steep indeed, and as Locke reminds us, “that ill deserves the name of confinement which hedges us in only from bogs and precipices.”

Since people who have poor self-control often have lower income and inadequate education as well, it might help to work harder on those things, even if we’re not sure whether low income causes poor self-control or vice versa. Reducing income inequality (as national health insurance is likely to do) and improving the public schools (perhaps by ending their monopoly on public funding) would seem obvious measures that might help with self-control.

Voters often recognize their self-control problems. As noted earlier, this may explain widespread support for the Social Security system from an electorate that suspects it wouldn’t save for its own retirement. In the United Kingdom, similarly, people more or less willingly pay a TV tax to fund the BBC, which helps to insulate the audience from its own worst instincts. In effect, U.K. voters have chosen to make themselves pay for the healthy media diet they know they should consume rather than the junk food they would likely choose on their own. (The tax, by the way, is quite a bit less than Americans pay for cable.)

The Anglo-Israeli economist Avner Offer has suggested that this is precisely why the public sector is so large in Western democracies, consuming roughly 30 to 55 percent of gross domestic product. In his view, people are sophisticated enough to know that the package of benefits provided by the state—a package they have to pay for—will do more for their well-being than they could accomplish if they were left to spend their money on their own. Taxes, in this way of thinking, are just a costly precommitment device by means of which the electorate makes itself forgo unsatisfying profligacy in favor of insurance against age, illness, and destitution.

But everything has its limits, including public spending and the patience of taxpayers, who are not so sure, over here at least, that the government can use their money more effectively than they can. There’s an old saying about socialism: sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money. The funny thing is that after the financial crisis of 2008, the same could be said of capitalism. Somewhere along the line, somebody has to exercise some self-control, as Burke reminds us: “Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.”