Conservatives and libertarians are all about more choices, because more choices means more freedom. The facts disagree. (More)
Progressive Puzzle Pieces, Part II – Choice and Freedom
This week Morning Feature will try to assemble the pieces we’ve covered over the past two months in series on Exiting the Crisis, The Darwin Economy, Nudge, Class Matters, The Empathy Gap, and Republic, Lost into a progressive big picture. Yesterday we considered the free market dogma as argued by Andrew Napolitano, and why selfishness does not maximize the common good. Today we review why maximizing choices does not improve our lives, and why we need nudges toward better decisions. Saturday we’ll conclude with issues of class, empathy, and Congress.
“You would be able to choose from among corporations!”
During Andrew Napolitano’s extended interview on The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart asked why Napolitano trusts corporations over government. The former judge and current Fox News host replied: “Why would you go to a [bad] corporation? You would be able to choose from among corporations!”
Napolitano’s libertarian presumption – shared by conservatives, at least on economic issues – is that “more choices is better.” Even bad choices should remain available, because the ability to make even bad choices maximizes “freedom.” Consider this argument by Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute:
For too long, both liberals and too many conservatives have attempted to impose on people the government’s standards of what is best for them rather than leaving them to their own decisions, merely because those decisions may be mistaken. That is the real legacy of the welfare state as expanded by President Obama and as it has been practiced on a bipartisan basis for the last half century or more: We are, quite simply, less free.
Tanner goes on to argue that government regulation of health insurance “determine[s] which medical conditions and eventualities you must insure against, even if you would prefer not to cover such conditions,” that “government-run anti-poverty programs limit your ability to support the charity of your choice,” and that Social Security “prevents people – especially poor people – from saving and investing for their own retirement in ways that would allow them to build real, inheritable wealth.”
All of this presumes that people will make good choices, or that so few people will make bad choices that society need not fret about them. If only….
“I’m so glad now that I fit in when I was 12.”
According to a Centers for Disease Control study reported in WebMD news, the number of Americans who smoke dropped below 20% in 2008. In 1965, when the CDC began keeping records, the percentage was 42%.
According to Dr. Matthew McKenna at the CDC, “We think the proportion is dropping because of excise taxes that make cigarettes more expensive, smoke-free laws [that apply to most workplaces], and the availability of counseling and medications.”
Tom Glynn at the American Cancer Society was even more direct, saying “major progress is being made in the government’s war on smoking.”
Michael Tanner argues government shouldn’t fight that war, and that smoking is one of those bad choices individuals should be left free to make on their own. Perhaps he should talk to the woman who wrote this reply to a teen who asked if he/she should start smoking to fit in with a friend:
When I was 12, I started smoking because my best friend smoked, It’s 43 years later. She’s quit, I haven’t been able to, and I have emphysema. My friends don’t come over because my house smells like smoke. I can’t go out much because I can’t deal with the heat and pollen in the air that makes my breathing even worse. If I go to someone’s house or a restaurant, or any place, I have to go outside alone to smoke.
I’m so glad now that I fit in when I was 12.
The limits of willpower
A libertarian would probably argue that this writer could have quit smoking if she wanted. Her friend did. Many other Americans have. She just needs more willpower. But as we saw in The Empathy Gap, cognitive science shows that willpower has its limits. That research, and studies cited in Nudge, showed that humans are prone to predictable mistakes. We overvalue short-term pleasures and conveniences, and undervalue long-term risks and opportunities. We follow the herd. We resist or ignore opportunities to change.
Our brains evolved to solve problems in the Here and Now, relying on immediate feedback from our decisions to change or refine our choices. We use different parts of our brains to solve problems in the Here-and-Now or the There-and-Then, and the Here-and-Now part of our brains includes the pleasure centers. Solving a Here-and-Now problem satisfies us in a way that working at a There-and-Then problem can’t. Even if you know the hamper will be full again next week, you may feel good when put away the last of the laundry. You may get a similar feeling when you open a 401(k), but you won’t get that same feeling with each monthly contribution. Our brains simply aren’t wired to feel pleasure from that kind of task.
So we make predictable mistakes, and keep making those predictable mistakes, even when we know better. Even when we wish we had never started a bad habit like smoking, or wish we had started a good habit like saving for retirement long ago. In a contest between willpower, neurobiology, and cultural influence, willpower is vastly outnumbered. We can and do make choices, but as J.D. Trout wrote in The Empathy Gap: “Free will is a bit like a sheep. There really is an animal there, but it’s amazingly skinny when you’ve shaved all the wool off.”
What … or when … is “freedom?”
But what about “freedom?” When progressives advocate employing government to help us make better choices, do we advocate – as Milton Friedman charged – “dictatorship, benevolent and maybe majoritarian, but dictatorship nonetheless?”
The answer depends on how you measure “freedom.” Or, more correctly, on when.
Is freedom the liberty to pile one predictable mistake upon another until we are crushed by the weight of our past choices, except for the fortunate few who have the resources to recover from their errors? If so, then libertarians safeguard “freedom.” But if freedom is the liberty to look back over our lives – ten or twenty or forty years hence – with better health, better savings, and more hope in our futures … then progressives support “freedom” far more than do libertarians.
The woman who began smoking at 12 to fit in with her friend would be freer now had she never started. And thanks largely to government anti-smoking efforts, far fewer young Americans make that mistake.
Libertarians look at the freedom to smoke and call that “dictatorship.” Progressives look at freedom from smoking … and call that “good government.”
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Happy Friday!
A very thought provoking post, Crissie and thank you.
The line from a song, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” is running through my mind. Janis Joplin.
There are some mistakes almost anyone can shrug off, and others that almost anyone can bounce back from. The more resources you have, the more your mistakes will fit in one of those categories. Maybe that’s why libertarians and many conservatives argue that property rights are the most fundamental of all human rights. If you have enough property … you have plenty of ‘freedom,’ at least as they would define it.
Good morning! ::hugggggs::
That grabbed me more than anything else here. Only someone who has never been poor could say such a thing. The poorest of people who earn any wages at all pay 7.65% of those wages into Social Security and Medicare. It’s a burdensome tax at the lower end of the wage scale. So one has to ask, if those few extra dollars were in the paycheck of a family of four making $20K/year, would they go to food and other necessities or into a savings account?
I think the answer is obvious to anyone who has ever been poor. So we have forced savings for retirement…and now they want to ditch that, or reduce it, despite the fact that millions of the poor have been “forced” to save their entire working lives through this tax.
I reacted the same way to Tanner’s argument, winterbanyan. He writes as if Social Security were created to slake progressives’ never-ending thirst for more intrusive government. In fact, Social Security was created because too many American seniors lived in abject poverty, and a 2004 National Bureau of Economic Research study found a direct correlation between increasing social security expenditures and decreasing poverty among the elderly.
Conservatives and libertarians argue that’s a false statistic because seniors would have even more had they invested their FICA taxes into the stock market. But that argument presumes those seniors would have invested that money, and neither historical evidence nor cognitive science research suggests they would.
Good morning! ::hugggggs::
There was also an interesting prediction in the Guardian, which I can’t seem to relocate but will try, “nudging” is going to come to outright “shoving” within the next 30 years if we don’t get our economies and food production sorted out.
Libertarians would leave everything to run on “free choice” and no regulation or government interference…until the interference will have to become major in order to survive.
Quite a conundrum.
That is consistent with the studies cited in Nudge and The Empathy Gap. We tend not to worry about problems until they’re in the Here-and-Now. Problems tend to be a lot more difficult and their solutions a lot more expensive and burdensome by that point.
Good morning! ::hugggggs::
Speaking from personal knowledge, Ms LI Mike and I were fortunate enough in life to have the will power to think long term…everything was geared to early retirement. Some of my family and friends, not so lucky. One of my friends who was Mr Good Looking and Sports Hero wrapped into one, now survives because his younger sister can use him in her business, and social security. But I’m sure he has terrific memories.
Thank you for attributing that to luck, Mike. Gearing your life toward early retirement has a lot of situational prerequisites, many of which are beyond your control: your family and community background, whether your talents meet opportunities that enable jobs that support a high savings rate, etc.
Most of us could – theoretically – do somewhat better than we have. But, predictably, few of us will. We should base policy on reality, not theory.
Good morning! ::hugggggs::