A while back in the New York Times, Henry J. Aaron of the Brookings Institution, one of this country’s most prestigious Washington think tanks supporting nearly all welfare-state measures, laid out the case for the continuation of Social Security. Here is how he put his case: “Most individuals . . . do not do a very good job of planning for distant or unlikely events like retirement or disability. Moreover . . . since many people are already exposed to the risks of big stock market swings through 401(k) programs and Individual Retirement Accounts, there is good reason to maintain Social Security as a guaranteed benefit in which any investment or economic risks—as well as administrative costs—are spread across the generations and income levels. The wild gyrations in the stock market . . . underscore the point.” Mr. Aaron then added, “The reasons that led the nation to adopt social insurance are about as strong now as they ever were.”

This is indeed a standard and familiar way to defend Social Security and many other welfare-state measures. How can the libertarian insist that Social Security is immoral? Here is how.

Perhaps it is true that “most individuals do not do a very good job of planning for distant or unlikely events like retirement and disability.” This fact, if it is one, does not support in the slightest the imposition of various costs on other people who in fact do do a good job. Why should the negligence and oversight of some people impose burdens on others who are prudent and who use foresight? What is the point of being prudent if you are still burdened with the insolvency and debt of other people? We could justify bank robbery that way too: The savers should not complain when those who have failed to save take their money, since the thieves simply did not do a good job of planning. Furthermore, if most people aren’t good at planning for distant and unlikely events, why would most politicians, who must constantly worry about re-election, or bureaucrats, who need security as much as the next person, be better at this than the rest of us? No reason to think so at all.

What about the other concern, namely, stock-market volatility? This argument is deceptive because, in fact, over the long haul the stock market has long paid good returns. Moreover, the government’s management of wealth is far from a sure-fire guarantee against disaster. (The Social Security Trust Fund, for example, is a myth.) But never mind the mythology of government guarantees; what about the alleged propriety of having government force you to avoid taking bad risks?

Government’s Function

Mr. Aaron and others of his persuasion should be reminded that it isn’t the proper function of government to be our mommies and daddies. Government folks are, after all, human beings, no different in wisdom and virtue from the rest of us. How dare they make themselves our guardians? It is our right to manage our lives as we see fit, even if there are serious risks involved. (Everything we embark on in life entails risk.) Why not oversee our marriages, sex lives, religious affiliations, and so on? Why not just forget about this “free country” stuff and make us all wards of the state? What is forgotten by Mr. Aaron & Co. is that citizens are not children and the less they are trusted with their own lives, the more inept they become not only at living life, but also at figuring out who should hold political office. Dumbing down America is what the Aaron political economy amounts to, nothing less.

In general terms, the libertarian thinks more of human beings than many people think of themselves, probably because he discounts much of what is implicit in American public education, where kids are mostly treated as units in a rather dumb herd. The libertarian holds on to the conviction that free men and women can—and often do—deal with life better than the ruling elite thinks they can.

To be sure, there are risks associated with living as free men and women. But they are not so great as the risks involved in allowing bureaucrats to violate our rights to free judgment and action, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

A surprising percentage of the population seems willing to entertain this idea. According to the Globe and Mail, 48 percent of the respondents polled agreed either “strongly” or “somewhat” with it. Coincidentally, 48 is exactly the same percentage of the population that experts classify as overweight or obese.

Unfortunately, the pollsters didn’t correlate respondents’ opinions with their waist measurements, so we don’t know whether it was only thin people who voted yes to the tax, or perhaps even only fat people — both within the realm of possibility. My guess, though, is that the numbers didn’t break down quite so neatly — that there was probably a mix of fat and thin people on both sides of the issue.

That’s always the way it is with “morality” laws like this. There are plenty of smokers who say they’re glad the government forces them to look at hideous pictures on their cigarette packages. Take a poll at a casino or racetrack and you’re sure to find some patrons who think gambling should be outlawed. Many drinkers think taxing booze is wise public policy, and plenty of men who’ve patronized hookers think prostitution should be severely punished.

I can understand to some degree the mentality of those who don’t indulge in a particular vice and want to legislate others out of doing so. In this day and age, when we’re all chained together through the tax system and socialized medicine, we have an interest in preventing our fellow chain-gang crew from self-destructing and burdening us even further.

However, I’m skeptical about whether this can be accomplished by taxing vices. Most vices already have their own form of punishment built in. I mean, if the possibility of a heart attack or the humiliation of not being able to fit your enormous bulk into a bus seat isn’t enough to scare you away from overeating, are a couple of extra dollars a week in taxes going to do the trick? Are financial incentives really the only form of reward and punishment that human beings respond to?

What I really can’t understand is the mentality of those who do engage in a particular vice, but nevertheless tell pollsters that they’d like to see their vice either heavily taxed or completely outlawed. What happens to these people the moment they get off the phone with the pollster? Do their backbones instantly turn to jelly?

If overeaters really think a tax on fatty foods is a good idea, they can stick a piggy bank in the kitchen and deposit a loony (dollar) or two every time they open the refrigerator and sin. When the bank is full, they can donate the money to their local hospital. Why involve the rest of us in this scheme?

Of course, the answer is that it’s easy to muster enough will power for a one-time telephone poll or a one-time vote for a politician who promises to punish you later for your own good. It’s a lot harder to muster the will power to discipline yourself each and every time you feel the urge to sin.

So what these people would really like to do is borrow a little backbone from other people. They’re like Ulysses, asking to be lashed to the mast so they’ll be able to resist temptation later on.

If they would only confine themselves to borrowing backbone from willing lenders, there’d be no problem. Borrowing backbone is what people do in self-help groups like Alcoholics Anonymous. When they’re tempted to sin, they call up another member who lends them the will power to resist. In return, they commit themselves to do the same for their fellows. It’s voluntary and it’s reciprocal—a great system.

Backbone Theft

But asking for new taxes or restrictive laws to help you control your vices is equivalent to trying to steal backbone, not borrow it. New laws would affect everybody—thin and fat, occasional drinkers and chronic alcoholics, the disciplined and the undisciplined. Someone who likes the occasional cookie, the occasional drink, or the occasional evening’s entertainment at the casino would get punished for the sake of others who recklessly and habitually overindulge.

Canadians as a society have become so accustomed to the idea of redistributing wealth that we don’t utter a peep—indeed, we may not even recognize what’s happening—when we are confronted with a proposal to redistribute an intangible form of wealth: strength of character. We’re willing to impose laws on those who don’t need them—in effect, expropriating the sense of virtue that their behavior should rightfully earn them—in order to dole out a phony sense of accomplishment
to those who haven’t earned it.

I call this socialism of the spirit. To rephrase Karl Marx, it’s: “From each according to his strengths, to each to indulge his weaknesses.” And just as material socialism undermines a country’s material productivity, so does spiritual socialism sap its production of character.

The Nanny State’s next target?

FEE Timely Classic:
“Live Freely, Live Longer,” by Max More

There is a growing subset of consumers who would prefer not to buy their milk this way. They want it unpasteurized, unhomogenized—in a word, “raw.” They would prefer to drink their milk as humans have consumed it for centuries, which is also how every single signer of the U.S. Constitution drank it.

To procure such a basic product, however, these consumers—with some exceptions—are forced to break the law. The basic retail sale of raw milk for human consumption is legal in only eight states—Arizona, California, Connecticut, Maine, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, New Mexico, and Washington. Its sale for human consumption across state lines is illegal nationwide. In some other states raw milk can be sold at the farm site only, sold through “cow share” programs, or legally marketed as “pet food.” Seventeen states completely forbid the sale of raw milk in any way.

How did this happen? We all learned in childhood about Louis Pasteur’s development of pasteurization in the mid-1800s. For mass-produced milk in an age before refrigeration, pasteurization was indeed a godsend. Early in the twentieth century, as people died at alarming rates due to contaminated milk from filthy urban dairy centers, pasteurization caught on as a hot market trend. In a time when milk collection and storage on large-scale farms was unsanitary and unrefrigerated (and when additives as diverse as marigold petals and animal brains were placed in milk to add body), pasteurization helped save lives. Thus people were willing to pay for it. But then one city after another began to mandate the process through legislation. In 1948 Michigan became the first state to ban the sale of unpasteurized milk, and other states soon followed suit. In 1986 a federal judge ordered that interstate shipments of raw milk be banned, further limiting supply for consumers.

Now, despite advances in dairy-production techniques, it doesn’t matter how clean the equipment or how healthy the cow; raw milk is either illegal or highly suspect, and state and federal bureaucracies see it as a threat to the population. Regulation overstepped the free market and did an end run around common sense.

Raw-milk advocates argue that milk in its pure state is quite beneficial to health. According to the Weston A. Price Foundation, a leading natural-foods organization, raw milk reduces the incidence of asthma, eczema, and hay fever in children. Unpasteurized milk also aids the body’s natural digestive system. Pasteurization, the Foundation insists, kills helpful bacteria and breaks down delicate proteins in milk, leading to the dairy intolerance seen in so many individuals in this modern age. Advocates also state that unpasteurized milk strengthens the immune system and provides optimal growth and development for young people.

The opinion of government officials, backed up by the bulk of the medical community, is that every bit of that is hogwash. A joint press release from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, dated March 1, 2007, reminds consumers “of the dangers of drinking milk that has not been pasteurized.” Among the litany of diseases said to be carried by raw milk are “listeriosis, salmonellosis, campylobacteriosis, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria and brucellosis.” It is enough to make one wonder how Amish communities manage to survive.

The FDA/CDC claims that “There is no meaningful nutritional difference between pasteurized and raw milk.” The Price Foundation retorts that no research is cited by the FDA/CDC to substantiate such claims. The press release also states that “From 1998 to May 2005 CDC identified 45 outbreaks of foodborne illnesses,” accounting for “1,007 illnesses, 107 hospitalizations, and two deaths.” Aside from the fact that these are minuscule numbers for a population of nearly 300 million being tracked over seven years, there seems to be little evidence to back up the figures. Thomas Bartlett, in an article on raw milk (“The Raw Deal,” October 1, 2006), went looking for such cases of illness. In addition to finding no anecdotal evidence whatsoever, he also asked John Sheehan, then-director of the FDA’s dairy and egg safety division, for evidence linking raw milk to deadly disease outbreaks.

Sheehan admitted that he didn’t know of any such cases in the United States in the past 20 years. Nevertheless, the official line on raw milk is so ingrained as to be farcical. In interviewing a Maryland state health official about raw milk sales, Bartlett was told selling raw milk was as bad as selling marijuana, and the official compared such producers to heroin dealers.

Indeed, the question is far more important than, “Is raw milk beneficial?” or even, “Is raw milk safe?” It is this: What right does the state have to outlaw the sale of unpasteurized milk in the first place?

Imagine the case of Mark Nolt of New Line, Pennsylvania. Nolt was arrested—arrested—last May in a sting operation in which undercover officials purchased raw milk from his farm. Nolt, a Mennonite farmer with ten children, was fined $4,040, had his equipment and products seized, and was threatened with jail if he tried to sell raw milk again. His case is not unique. Nolt’s spokesman at his trial, Jonas Stoltzfus, eloquently summed up the situation: “This issue has very little to do with raw milk and health, and everything to do with freedom.”

Controlling the Milk Supply

But why milk? Indeed, as the 2008 pepper scare has proven, harmful bacteria can find their way to many other food sources. However, milk is different from most other food products. It is a staple among staples. To control the milk supply is to control the food supply.

Pasteurization is not a cheap process, and therefore the legal demand for pasteurization favors large producers. A small, independent dairy farm may very well not be able to afford pasteurization equipment (not at government standards, at least), and thus micro-dairies can rarely operate legally on their own. With the dairy industry more centralized, it becomes easier to track and regulate—and control.

Control of the milk supply has been a primary step in the state’s efforts to control the larger food supply. Agriculture continues to fall further and further under the eye of government regulation, as do businesses as diverse as potato-chip manufacturers and fast-food restaurants. The USDA, FDA, and myriad other state and federal agencies make no bones about their goal of controlling every morsel Americans consume—all for our own good, of course.

And where better to start than with milk? Think of the psychological benefits for the state emanating from such regulation. If a product as central and wholesome as milk can only be safe through government control, reliance on the paternalistic state grows. Has it worked? Ask a random acquaintance if he would consider drinking unpasteurized milk. You may very well get a look of horror in return. Why do people feel that way? Simply because they have been indoctrinated to feel that way. Why not be just as accepting of government regulation over their mayonnaise or their chicken or their lettuce? How about their water supply or the cars they drive or how warm they keep their homes in the wintertime? Though not necessarily a conscious progression, control by the state, when left unchecked, simply grows and expands naturally.

As ingrained in our social conscience as pasteurization has become, it is hard for many to step back and realize just how preposterous milk laws happen to be. One must ask if the many citizen-farmers who valiantly fought for liberty two centuries ago could have ever envisioned a “free” state in which one citizen would be legally barred from selling milk from his cow to another citizen. Even King George III would have laughed at that idea.

I had attended a Marijuana Policy Project event celebrating the New York State Assembly’s passage of a medical-marijuana bill. I told the audience I thought it pathetic that the mere half passage of a bill to allow sick people to try a possible remedy would merit such a celebration. Of course medical marijuana should be legal. For adults, everything should be legal. I’m amazed that the health police are so smug in their opposition.

After years of reporting on the drug war, I’m convinced that this “war” does more harm than any drug.

Independent of that harm, adults ought to own our own bodies, so it’s not intellectually honest to argue that “only marijuana” should be legal—and only for certain sick people approved by the state. Every drug should be legal.

“How could you say such a ridiculous thing?” asked my assistant. “Heroin and cocaine have a permanent effect. If you do crack just once, you are automatically hooked. Legal hard drugs would create many more addicts. And that leads to more violence, homelessness, out-of-wedlock births, etc.!”

Her diatribe is a good summary of the drug warriors’ arguments. Most Americans probably agree with what she said.

But what most Americans believe is wrong. (For details, see the links here.)

Myth No. 1: Heroin and cocaine have a permanent effect.

Truth: There is no evidence of that.

In the 1980s, the press reported that “crack babies” were “permanently damaged.” Rolling Stone, citing one study of just 23 babies, claimed that crack babies “were oblivious to affection, automatons.”

It simply wasn’t true. There is no proof that crack babies do worse than anyone else in later life.

Myth No. 2: If you do crack once, you are hooked.

Truth: Look at the numbers—15 percent of young adults have tried crack, but only 2 percent used it in the last month. If crack is so addictive, why do most people who’ve tried it no longer use it?

People once said heroin was nearly impossible to quit, but during the Vietnam War, thousands of soldiers became addicted, and when they returned home, 85 percent quit within one year.

People have free will. Most who use drugs eventually wise up and stop.

And most people who use drugs habitually live perfectly responsible lives, as Jacob Sullum pointed out in Saying Yes.

Myth No. 3: Drugs cause crime.

Truth: The drug war causes the crime.

Few drug users hurt or rob people because they are high. Most of the crime occurs because the drugs are illegal and available only through a black market. Drug sellers arm themselves and form gangs because they cannot ask the police to protect their persons and property.

In turn, some buyers steal to pay the high black-market prices. The government says heroin, cocaine, and nicotine are similarly addictive, and about half the people who both smoke cigarettes and use cocaine say smoking is at least as strong an urge. But no one robs convenience stores for Marlboros.

Alcohol prohibition created Al Capone and the Mafia. Drug prohibition is worse. It’s corrupting whole countries and financing terrorism.

The Post wrote, “Stossel admitted his own 22-year-old daughter doesn’t think [legalization] is a good idea.”

But that’s not what she said. My daughter argued that legal cocaine would probably lead to more cocaine use. And therefore probably abuse.

I’m not so sure.

Banning drugs certainly hasn’t kept young people from getting them. We can’t even keep these drugs out of prisons. How do we expect to keep them out of America?

But let’s assume my daughter is right, that legalization would lead to more experimentation and more addiction. I still say: Legal is better.

While drugs harm many, the drug war’s black market harms more.

And most importantly, in a free country, adults should have the right to harm themselves.

by Gregory Clark

Princeton University Press • 2007 • 420 pages • $29.95

Reviewed by Gene Callahan

Economic historian Gregory Clark has written a fascinating book offering a serious challenge to the currently predominant explanation of why, beginning around 1800, “Western” societies have experienced a rate of economic growth never before seen in history. Clark supports his case with an impressive body of empirical evidence, making his challenge impossible to ignore.

Contemporary economists commonly propose that the West experienced its recent, unprecedented growth because there alone people finally hit upon the “right” institutions to promote prosperity. Just why they did so has been attributed to various causes. Max Weber, for example, pointed to the Protestant exaltation of worldly success as the key factor.

However, Clark contends that the historical evidence does not support this thesis. To the contrary, as he illustrates with many instances, the conditions supposedly responsible for the unique phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution also were present in a number of other societies. For example, late-medieval and Renaissance England was characterized by tax rates hovering around 1 or 2 percent, negligible government budget deficits, secure property rights, little violent crime, extensive social mobility, and active markets in land and capital. But centuries passed before the surge in English productivity occurred. Clark argues that such cases demonstrate that the institutional explanation is unsatisfactory.

Instead, Clark claims that the Neolithic Revolution, when humans first adopted agriculture, meant that certain traits, which previously had been unimportant, became pro-survival. These included skill in the symbolic thinking, particularly literacy and numeracy, needed to follow increasingly complex transactions, the self-control to forgo some current consumption in favor of ensuring future success, a lowered preference for leisure over labor, and the reduced impulse to employ violence. Clark proposes that, over the millennia separating the Neolithic and Industrial Revolutions, the reproductive advantage yielded by such traits gradually made them commonplace in agricultural societies, transforming the character of their populations and finally producing modern “bourgeois” society.

Clark notes that his thesis doesn’t mean that those humans who embraced agriculture were intellectually superior to those who did not. In fact, a medieval English peasant’s productivity peaked around the age of 20, while a hunter from the Ache tribe of South America doesn’t reach maximum productivity until 40, indicating that the hunter is mastering the more complex set of cognitive skills. Rather, a settled farming existence rewards forms of intelligence that are irrelevant to a hunter-gatherer, forms that are prerequisites for sustained economic growth. Groups that adopted agriculture did so under environmental pressures rendering hunting and gathering progressively inadequate sources of sustenance, certainly with no inkling that ten thousand years later their choice would make their descendants wealthy.

In fact, as Clark demonstrates with various measures, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the members of technologically advanced societies achieved better living standards than “primitive” tribesmen. As the chief culprit responsible for this counterintuitive economic stagnation, he points to the “Malthusian trap” in which all of humanity, prior to 1800, was ensnared. In that condition, any advance in technology resulted, not in greater individual well-being, but only in population growth sufficient to negate the productivity gains, leaving incomes unchanged.

While Clark makes a compelling case for his thesis, there are a few places where I think he goes astray. For example, he shows that modern, high-growth economies operate under higher tax burdens and levels of governmental economic intervention than did their low-growth predecessors. He suggests that this finding contradicts the belief held by many economists that a minimally intrusive government is a major factor promoting prosperity. But I suspect that he may have put the cart before the horse: perhaps only prosperous societies can afford expansive government and would be even wealthier in its absence.

Clark also feels compelled to disparage historians whose research, unlike his, focuses on historical specifics, claiming that the “individual personalities and events, so beloved of narrative historians, do not matter [for an explanation of the Industrial Revolution].” That irrelevance is not, as he appears to be suggesting, a conclusion discovered in the course of his research, but is rather an inherent consequence of the methods he has adopted: if one’s attention is fixed on searching for macro-level trends in data aggregates, then it’s hardly surprising that the different details one has generalized away do not appear in one’s results.

What does this thesis imply for attempts to spur Third World development? Clark argues that there is “no simple economic medicine” with which wealthy nations can “cure” poverty if modern growth arose from the long, gradual transformation of individuals’ characters. The best, short-term prospect for the residents of the world’s poorest countries is to allow them to immigrate into rich nations, where they can share in the benefits of that evolutionary process. The dismal results of decades of programs aimed at promoting Third World growth suggest that Clark has a point.

Gene Callahan is the author of Economics for Real People.

Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t

by John Lott

Regnery Publishing • 2007 • 275 pages • $27.95

Reviewed by Robert P. Murphy

Lately economists have been making it onto the bookshelves of Barnes & Noble with breezy volumes for the lay reader. The most striking example of this newfound hipness is Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics. John Lott’s Freedomnomics, another example, is itself largely a response to that runaway bestseller.

In taking on some of Levitt and Dubner’s glib dismissals of the free market, Lott doesn’t disappoint. In my favorite duel, Lott quotes Freakonomics‘ rendition of the “problem of the lemons” in the used-car market. Because of asymmetric information, the authors casually claim that a new $20,000 car can’t be resold for more than $15,000 (because people will assume it is defective) and that the owner of a lemon should just wait a year in order to fool buyers.

From the first time I heard this particular market-failure story in college, I thought it was wrong, but never bothered to follow my hunch. Fortunately, Lott isn’t nearly as lazy. He asks the reader to imagine he has just bought a $20,000 car but needs to resell it immediately. Assuming the car is in perfect condition, is it really true that the owner needs to eat $5,000 due to imperfect markets? Lott transforms the problem: “Here is the real question: can you convince someone for, let’s say, $4,000 that there is nothing wrong with your car? What about for $500? Could you hire the car’s original manufacturer to inspect the car and certify that it’s in brand new condition?”

Typical for Lott, he doesn’t stop with these rhetorical musings. He did the research and found that for cars with only a few thousand miles, the “certified used car price was on average just 3 percent less than the new car MSRP [manufacturer's suggested retail price],” while cars that were a year old sold for 14 percent less than the new car MSRP. This directly contradicts the tale in Freakonomics, but accords entirely with common sense.

Like others of its genre, Freedomnomics is full of “Didja ever wonder why . . . ?” explanations. For example, one reason that lunch prices are lower than dinner prices is that diners linger over their meals longer at night, tying up the valuable table. Here’s another: last-minute airline tickets aren’t expensive just because “you have no options.” Rather, the airlines are providing a service by holding some seats for last-minute travelers, and they need to be compensated for the chance that those tickets will go unsold. And do you want to know why the spread between self- and full-service gasoline gets smaller as the grade of gasoline improves? If so, you’ll just have to buy Lott’s book.

I enjoyed Freedomnomics and can honestly say that I was sorry when it ended. Even so, I did have some serious misgivings, which I think many Freeman readers will share. In his efforts to debunk popular misconceptions about our “way of life,” Lott goes beyond defending the free market. He defends the American political system too, making it sound as if anyone who criticizes U.S. politics must be a whiny leftist who hates McDonald’s to boot. In a particularly inexplicable section, Lott argues that despite a few bad apples, “the vast majority of American politicians and businessmen” remain untainted by charges of corruption. This is because “there is a powerful incentive toward honest behavior that is built into our democratic political system and free market economy—that of maintaining a good reputation.”

Now what’s incredible is that Lott then goes through and explains point by point why the incentives for honest marketplace behavior are not present in the political sphere. (For example, a firm’s good name can be sold, whereas a political record cannot.) When one also factors in items that Lott doesn’t discuss—such as the lack of free entry into the political realm and the fact that 49 percent of the population can be forced to deal with a politician they despise as a liar—it is all the more mysterious why he didn’t write a section explaining why politicians are more likely to be crooked than a businessperson in a free market.

My final objection is that Lott at times is blatantly partisan, seeming to overlook that Republicans have grown government quite nicely during George W. Bush’s tenure. Space doesn’t permit me to justify my charge of partisanship, but suffice it to say that at one point Lott declares, “Remarkably, it looks as if virtually all felons are Democrats.” I promise that I’m not taking that out of context.

Despite its shortcomings, Freedomnomics is an enjoyable read for those who can’t get enough economics books for the layperson. Libertarian readers will be put off by Lott’s casual attitude toward certain aspects of government intervention, but they will learn much from the book to compensate.

Robert Murphy is senior fellow in Business and Economic Studies at Pacific Research Institute and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism.

Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval that Inspired America’s Founding Fathers

by Michael Barone

Crown/Three Rivers Press • 2007/2008 • 270 pages • $25.95, hardcover; $14.95, paperback

Reviewed by Martin Morse Wooster

In the mid-1980s Michael Barone, a columnist for U.S. News and World Report and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, decided he would write a history of American politics from 1930 to 1988. “Since I had never written a narrative book before,” he writes, “I decided to read some of the great narrative history.” He read Thomas Macaulay’s multivolume The History of England from the Accession of James II.

Ever since then, Barone says, he’s been interested in the Glorious Revolution, the struggle of 1688–89 that ended with the ousting of Britain’s King James II and his replacement by the team of King William III and his wife, Queen Mary II. This revolution, he writes, was “a significant step forward for representative government, guaranteed liberties, global competition, and a foreign policy of overcoming hegemonic tyranny.”

As Barone observes, when the Founding Fathers were rebelling against Britain, they modeled their complaints against the British Crown on those made in 1688. If we are to understand what the Founders were thinking when they made their enduring arguments for freedom, we need to know what happened during the Glorious Revolution. If you’re interested in the history of liberty, you’ll find Michael Barone a very good guide.

It should be noted that Our First Revolution is very much a book for Americans unfamiliar with British history. British readers will find that the book tills familiar fields. Readers who enjoy Barone’s columns should know that he is as forceful and eloquent at longer lengths as he is in op-eds.

When King Charles II died of a stroke in 1685, his death provoked a political crisis in England. Charles’s brother, James II, succeeded him. King James had converted to Catholicism. Britain was a Protestant nation, and the Church of England was (and is) the state church. Many foes of King James feared that his goal was to force Protestants out of the military and religious posts, and possibly to crush Protestants as ruthlessly as the kings of France had.

King James tried to loosen the connections between church and state to allow Catholics to become high-ranking military officers. He also made fitful attempts to reach out to Dissenters—Protestants who were not affiliated with the Church of England.

But King James, in Barone’s view, wasn’t a very smart man. He exploited ambiguities in the nature of Parliament at the time. Parliament existed and had some control over government spending during wartime. But it did not meet regularly, and British monarchs thought they had enough control over excise taxes that they could rule without Parliament.

King James intimated that he could try to rule without Parliament. He also tried to pack lightly populated rural election districts with enough pro-Catholic voters to ensure that Catholics were elected to Parliament,

Then in 1688 the court announced that King James’s wife, Mary of Modena, was pregnant. If Queen Mary gave birth to a son, that Catholic child would have precedence to the throne over James’s Protestant daughters, Mary and Anne. Protestants, fearing a permanent restoration of Catholic rule began what became known as the Glorious Revolution, in which James and his court fled for France, while James’s daughter Mary and her husband, King William III of Holland, jointly ruled the throne.

King William was engaged in wars with France and needed Parliament’s help to pay the bill. Moreover, the king wanted to ensure the legitimacy of his rule. So Parliament began to meet continuously. In 1689 William issued the Bill of Rights, which for the first time said that his subjects had rights—to worship as they pleased, to have a trial by jury without having the jury packed by the court, and not to have excessive bail placed on them if they were arrested. Protestants were allowed “arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and allowed by law.” And the Crown had to get Parliamentary approval for any spending.

By doing this, Barone writes, King William ensured that Britain would have a representative government that would not be threatened by a monarch wishing to reach for absolute power. The king’s legacy also reached to America. When the Framers were drafting the Constitution, the model they used for the Bill of Rights was the document King William had approved in 1689. Many of the protections in the American Bill of Rights—including the right to bear arms—were based on the bill King William signed a century before.

The Glorious Revolution is an unjustly neglected advance for freedom and liberty, and Americans should know more about it. Anyone interested in the history of liberty ought to read Michael Barone’s excellent book.

Martin Morse Wooster, an author living in Silver Spring, Maryland, frequently reviews history.

Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning America Into a Nation of Children

by David Harsanyi

Broadway Books • 2007 • 236 pages • $24.95

Reviewed by George Leef

Several years ago I drove a colleague to his house a little more than a mile from the office. While driving back over city streets at low speeds, I was stopped by a policeman. Why? Because I had neglected to buckle my seatbelt. For having ignored that nanny-state regulation, I was hit with a ticket.

Alas, the nanny state is not confined just to traffic enforcement in my town. It has spread across the whole of America, and almost every day some new mandate or prohibition is decreed. For example, Washington dictates that we must use only certain kinds of light bulbs and may not use the Internet for gambling; and officials in San Francisco demand that “pet guardians” (their approved term for pet owners) must have a tip-proof water dish for Fido and change the water at least once a day.

In Nanny State, Denver Post reporter David Harsanyi surveys the numerous fronts on which America’s elected officials are waging war against our freedom. He covers the crusades being waged against alcohol, tobacco, pornography, junk foods, and other things that some people like but others detest. “As you read this,” he writes, “countless do-gooders across the nation are rolling up their sleeves to do the vital work of getting your life straightened out for you.” Freeman readers all know about this malignant trend, but seeing the big picture is really frightening.

The idea that the government needs to treat us like children is everywhere. Republicans and Democrats both love the nanny-state concept, although they sometimes disagree on exactly where to apply it.

Many Republicans, especially of the social-conservative faction, demand nanny-state measures to save us from our own immorality, enthusiastically pursuing laws against gambling, drugs, and other real or imagined vices. Such initiatives are presumably of no interest to “liberal” Democrats, who instead demand that government control us so we’ll be safer, healthier, and kinder to the planet. Unfortunately, Harsanyi points out, the different factions don’t fight each other. Instead, they seem to have worked out a pact that says, “We won’t try to block your do-gooderism if you won’t try to block ours.”

Unlike a real nanny or parent who just sends you to your room if you aren’t good, the modern nanny state is prepared to use force against its disobedient children. Harsanyi relates some utterly jaw-dropping stories where the state arrives in SWAT gear and packing heat. When it comes to cracking down on Things That Are Bad, the nanny staters are happy to copy the tactics of Prohibition enforcers—armed raids in the middle of the night. Furthermore, police-state enforcement doesn’t much trouble the Supreme Court, which found no constitutional problem in jailing a mother who had briefly and slowly driven her car with a child unbuckled.

Arresting a mother in front of her children is pretty disgusting, but Harsanyi has even worse tales to tell. In 1998 a SWAT team was sent along with officials who were intent on serving a warrant on a gambling operation. A security guard who thought the intruders were a criminal gang was fatally shot in the confusion. Just some “collateral damage” in the great war to rid America of vice.

Slowly but surely our freedom to live as we please is being erased by self-righteous crusaders who believe themselves entitled to use coercion to make us behave the way they know we should. Their crusades are a terrible menace to what’s left of liberty in America.

My only quarrel with the book is Harsanyi’s optimistic statement that our burgeoning nannyism “is anathema to the spirit of the American people.” I’m afraid that such spirit was broken long ago. It was broken not by niggling annoyances like mandatory seat-belt usage, but by massive frontal assaults such as Social Security and compulsory school attendance. Once the authoritarians among us had established that they could get away with huge infringements on freedom, the Nanny State became a sure thing. People accustomed to the lash won’t rebel at frequent spankings with a willow switch.

The sad fact is that most Americans have had the spirit of independence crushed out of them, thanks to government education and other sources of collectivist propaganda. Has any politician ever been voted out of office for his support of nannyism? I’m not aware of even one instance. I rest my pessimistic case.

Still, damp as the kindling may be, it is worth the effort to ignite the indignation at the continuing encroachments on our liberty.

George Leef is book review editor of The Freeman.

But our situation is not as bleak as that might sound. I write most often about threats to freedom. But just as I chide the mainstream media for ignoring the good news about prosperity, technology, health, and life expectancy, I sometimes need to remind myself of the good news about freedom—which of course is what makes possible all that other good news.

Our recent political history provides ample cause for depression. Forty years of Democratic control of Congress gave us what the Republicans in 1994 called “government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public’s money.” Dissatisfaction with that record and with the Clinton administration’s efforts to make government yet bigger and more intrusive led to a historic Republican victory.

It didn’t take long for the Republicans to get just as comfortable in power as the Democrats had become, especially after the election of George W. Bush gave the GOP control of the presidency and both houses of Congress. For decades the Republicans had promised voters that they would reduce the size and power of government if only they controlled the White House. . . if only they controlled the Senate . . . if only they controlled the entire government. Beginning in 2001, they did.

And what did complete Republican control of the federal government deliver? Federal spending up $1 trillion in six years. Exploding earmarks. The centralization of education. The biggest expansion of entitlements since Lyndon Johnson. A proposed constitutional amendment to take marriage law out of the hands of the states. Federal intrusion into private family matters. Spying, wiretapping, “sneak and peek” searches. A surge in executive power. And a seemingly endless war.

No wonder the voters quickly tired of that and returned Congress to the Democrats. As Dr. Phil would say, How’s that working out for ya?

Within two months of the Democratic takeover, the Washington Post reported that Democrats were charging lobbyists—including some of Jack Abramoff’s favorite clients—big bucks to meet Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the chairmen of the congressional committees that write tax laws, regulations, and spending bills. After six months, they’d held hearings and press conferences and all-night slumber parties.

But the war goes on. The spending goes on. Citing Citizens Against Government Waste’s “Pig Book,” the Washington Times reported, “Congress stuffed 11,610 projects into fiscal 2008 spending bills, the second-highest total ever and more than triple the number of projects in fiscal 2007.” American citizens are still being held in jail without access to a lawyer. Democrats are proposing huge increases in federal spending—on top of Bush’s trillion-dollar increase—and tax hikes to pay for them.

Which is presumably why a CBS News-New York Times poll in April showed that 81 percent of Americans said the country was on the wrong track. Only 22 percent approved of Congress’s performance, according to a February Associated Press-Ipsos poll.

The politics of big government continues to flounder. Maybe it’s time for the politics of freedom.

Assaults on freedom come from all sides these days. The right and the left, the military-industrial complex and the teachers unions, the environmentalists and the family-values crowd, they all have an agenda to impose on us through government. Political scientists offer a number of labels for the vast and powerful state that threatens our constitutional freedoms:

The Nanny State. On both left and right we’re bombarded by people who just want the government to take care of us, as if we were children. This takes many forms—Bill Clinton was famous for “I feel your pain and I have a program for it.” George W. Bush responded with “compassionate conservatism” and “We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.” Both conceptions offer a sweeping mandate for the federal government, one never envisioned by the Founders nor even by FDR. They combine Progressivism with Prozac.

And once in a while politicians reveal the patronizing attitude toward the voters that underlies these promises. Vice President Al Gore told an audience, “The federal government should never be the baby sitter, the parents,” but should be “more like grandparents in the sense that grandparents perform a nurturing role and are aware of what parenting was like but no longer exercise that kind of authority.”

Bush’s one-time chief of staff Andy Card disagreed: The government should be the parents, he said; “this president sees America as we think about a 10-year-old child,” in need of firm parental protection.

And so we get sexual-harassment laws from the Democrats and niggling regulations on workplaces, and smoking bans, and fat taxes, and gun bans, and programs to tuck us in at night.

Political Goodies

And from the Republicans we get federal money for churches; and congressional investigations into textbook pricing, the college football bowl system, the firing of Terrell Owens, video games, the television rating system, you name it; and huge new fines for indecency on television; and crackdowns on medical marijuana and steroids and ephedra; and federal subsidies to encourage heterosexuals to marry; and bans to prevent homosexuals from doing so.

And on both sides the politicians and the intellectuals tell us they’re just trying to encourage “socially desirable behavior”—not a role that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison envisioned the government playing.

The Entitlements Crisis. Everyone in Washington knows that the burden of “entitlement” programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid is growing to an unsustainable level. But not only does no politician want to talk about the problem, they continue to pile on more benefits that make the situation worse.

Entitlements already cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion a year, about 40 percent of the federal budget. That’s a heavy enough burden. But the first members of the huge baby-boom generation are retiring this year. In barely 20 years, economists predict, entitlements will almost double as a share of national income. Today’s young workers will find themselves staggering under the burden of supporting tens of millions of retired boomers.

After years of discussion of this looming fiscal crisis, what have the politicians done? They all declare themselves “fiscal conservatives” and then keep on spending. They reject reform proposals and promise more benefits. “Nobody shoots at Santa Claus,” Al Smith used to say of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal handouts, and politicians have found that a useful reminder ever since. Instead of fiscal responsibility, in 2003 Democrats and Republicans combined to pass a prescription-drug entitlement for Medicare recipients. Critics said it might cost a trillion dollars over the next decade.

But even that figure drastically underestimates the problem. Jagadeesh Gokhale, an economist at the Cato Institute, calculated the real costs of our current entitlement programs. The numbers are simply incomprehensible: the total cost of the drug benefit alone will eventually be more than $16 trillion, on top of the $45 trillion that Medicare was already going to cost taxpayers. That’s how much more money we’ll eventually have to raise in taxes if we’re going to pay off these debts.

Terror, War, and Surveillance. Theocratic Islam is a real threat to freedom in the Muslim world, where people often face a desperate choice between secular dictators and religious totalitarians. Americans need not worry about living under an Islamic theocracy, but terror is certainly a threat to our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Thus we need a strong national defense, better intelligence, and international cooperation to track and prevent terrorism.

But ever since the September 11 attacks, we have let fear and panic drive us to put up with infringements on freedom that change the nature of our society without any real increase in safety. Laws like the Patriot Act were passed without careful scrutiny, and without providing for the normal checks and balances of constitutional government. The more power government has in such areas, the more important it is to constrain that power within the law, with congressional oversight and judicial review.

Secrecy and Presidential Absolutism

In this new world the Bush administration is pushing secret subpoenas, secret searches, secret arrests, and secret trials. American citizens are being held without access to a lawyer, and without access to an impartial civilian judge. The Great Writ of habeas corpus is denied. The administration’s “torture memos” have been most notorious for their carefully oblique definitions of what constitutes torture and for the fact that they were kept secret for years. What has been too often overlooked in discussions of the memos is their assertion that the president cannot be restrained by laws passed by Congress. They claim executive powers that far exceed what our constitutional tradition allows. As Gene Healy and Timothy Lynch write in their study “Power Surge,” “The Constitution’s text will not support anything like the doctrine of presidential absolutism the administration flirts with in the torture memos.”

One problem with the new powers is that they aren’t used just to investigate and prosecute terrorists. There’s a bait-and-switch game going on. Citing the threat of another 9/11, administration officials demand and get greatly expanded powers to deal with terrorism. But then it turns out that the new powers aren’t restricted to terrorism cases. And indeed the Bush administration has been using the powers granted in the Patriot Act with increasing frequency in criminal investigations that have little or no connection to terrorism. Those cases range from drugs and pornography to money laundering, theft of trade secrets, and simple fraud. No doubt we could prevent or punish more crimes if we allowed the federal government to put a surveillance camera in every conference room and every living room. But we don’t want to live in that kind of society. We’re moving in that direction, though, by granting government new powers to deal with terrorism and not restricting the scope of those powers.

And of course the fight against terrorism isn’t the only source of expanded powers for police and prosecutors. Long before 9/11 legal scholars were bemoaning the “drug exception to the Fourth Amendment.” The Supreme Court ruled that government investigators do not need warrants to conduct aerial surveillance of areas that any pilot could legally fly over, including both the fenced yards of private homes—where they might be looking for marijuana—and highly secure chemical factories, where the Environmental Protection Agency was looking for evidence of air pollution violations.

Every new war, real or metaphorical—war on terror, war on drugs, war on obesity—is an excuse for expanding the size, scope, and power of government. A good reason to organize antiwar movements.

The Politics of Statism. For any friend of freedom, one of the most frustrating aspects of our current political system is the near absence of politicians challenging any of these expansions of state power. It’s hard to find officeholders, Republican or Democratic, who don’t support one or another aspect of the nanny state. Practically every member of Congress turns away when the problem of our unsustainable welfare state is mentioned. “It won’t go bankrupt before the next election, so it’s not my problem,” seems to be their attitude. As for the wars on both terrorism and drugs, most politicians just want not to be labeled as “weak.” The Patriot Act passed the Senate with only one dissenting vote, even though few if any members of Congress had
actually read the bill. Most Democrats, including all presidential candidates then in the senate, joined nearly all Republicans in voting for the authorization for war with Iraq. And virtually no elected officials will protest the insanity of the war on drugs, or even vote against its continued escalation.

It’s not that politicians couldn’t show a little courage once in a while. After all, gerrymandering and campaign-finance regulations have given House members a reelection rate of over 98 percent. With so little to fear from the voters, they ought to be able to vote their consciences. But there aren’t many citizen-politicians these days; they all want to be part of a permanent ruling class, in office forever until they collect their congressional pensions, so they try to play it safe. All the talk about increased polarization between Democrats and Republicans just obscures the increasing agreement on most aspects of the welfare-warfare state, a sprawling federal government that promises to meet our every need, as long as we give it ever-increasing amounts of money, and keeps us embroiled in conflicts around the globe.

A Stacked Deck

It’s no wonder that ever-larger numbers of Americans express disgust with the current political establishment, even though the election laws make it difficult to organize and fund a new party, an independent campaign, or even an insurgency within the major parties.

After a litany of problems like that, it’s easy to get discouraged, to believe that we’re losing our freedom, year after year. Libertarians often quote Thomas Jefferson: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

But let’s take a moment to think about some of the laws we don’t have any more: Slavery and established churches. Segregation and sodomy laws. Sunday-closing laws, 90 percent income-tax rates, wage and price controls. In many ways Americans are freer today than ever before.

Politicians don’t get much of the credit for that. They often tended to react, not to lead. Social change and a mass movement challenged segregation before Congress responded. Popular resentment over rising taxes led to Proposition 13 in California and then the election of Ronald Reagan. A court challenge struck down the last few sodomy laws, which had fallen into disuse anyway. Economists produced enough evidence on the costs of transportation, communications, and financial regulation that Congress finally had to recognize it.

It’s certainly not time to rest on our laurels. But we should take pride in the freedom that we have wrested from government and remain optimistic about the future of freedom.

When I argue for a society that fully recognizes each person’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I’m often asked, Where’s an example of a successful libertarian society? The answer to that question is easy: the United States of America.

As I noted above, the United States has never been a perfectly libertarian society. But our Constitution and our national sense of life have guaranteed more freedom to more people than in any other society in history, and we have continued to extend the promises of the Declaration of Independence to more people.

More than any other country in the world, ours was formed by people who had left the despots of the Old World to find freedom in the new, and who then made a libertarian revolution. Americans tend to think of themselves as individuals, with equal rights and equal freedom. Our fundamental ideology is, in the words of the political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, “antistatism, laissez-faire, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism.” Some people don’t like that fact. Professors Cass Sunstein and Stephen Holmes complain that libertarian ideas are “astonishingly widespread in American culture.”

And indeed they are. My recent work with David Kirby found that in several different public-opinion surveys, 15 to 20 percent of Americans give libertarian answers to a range of questions—answers that in combination distinguish them from both “liberals” and conservatives. But that figure seriously underestimates the prevalence of libertarian ideas. Many American conservatives are fundamentally committed to small government and free enterprise. Many American liberals believe firmly in free speech, freedom of religion, and the dignity of every individual. Both liberals and conservatives may be coming to better appreciate the value of the Constitution in restraining the powers of the federal government. The sharpening of the red-blue divide in the past decade causes liberals and conservatives to deepen their opposition to “the other team.” But it may obscure the number of Americans on both sides of the divide who are fundamentally libertarian in their attitudes.

As one measure of that, after the 2006 election the Cato Institute commissioned Zogby International to ask poll respondents if they would describe themselves as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.” Fully 59 percent of the respondents said yes. When we asked the same question but noted that such a combination of views is “known as libertarian,” a robust 44 percent of respondents still answered yes.

Freedom Versus Power

Part of the challenge for libertarians is to help those Americans understand that their fundamental political value is freedom. Instead of being frightened and distracted by politicians, they should recognize that the main issue in politics—in 2008 and beyond—is the freedom of the individual and the power of government.

In some ways the idea of freedom is very simple. Recall the bestseller, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. You could say that you learn the essence of libertarianism—which is also the essence of civilization—in kindergarten:

Don’t hit other people,

Don’t take their stuff, and

Keep your promises.

Most people understand that idea in their personal lives. Now if only we could get people to apply it to “public policy” as well: Don’t use force to make other people live the way you think they should. Don’t use the power of taxation to take their stuff. Don’t interfere with contracts, and don’t make promises the taxpayers can’t keep. A politician who ran on such a platform would find a large and receptive audience.

There’s never been a golden age of liberty, and there never will be. There will always be people who want to live their lives in peace, and there will always be people who want to exploit them or impose their own ideas on others. There will always be a conflict between Liberty and Power.

In the long run, freedom works, and people figure that out. I have no doubt that at the dawn of the fourth millennium more of the human beings in the universe will live in freer societies than do today. In the shorter run the outcome is less predictable, and it will depend on our own efforts to capitalize on our strengths and learn to counter the trends that work against a free and civil society.

But no longer in North Carolina.

Pointing to the high cost of payday borrowing, a coalition of groups claiming to represent the poor stampeded the North Carolina General Assembly into putting all the payday-lenders out of business. The reason I’m writing about this now is that the North Carolina Office of the Commissioner of Banks recently felt the need to justify the ban with the release of a study purporting to demonstrate that the politicians did the right thing. How do they know? Because payday lending “is not missed.” The preposterous lack of logic in this whole exercise cannot pass without comment.

Before we look at the defense that has been given for this Nanny State dictate, we should consider what I call Sowell’s Axiom: You can’t make people better off by taking options away from them. (It’s named for the economist Thomas Sowell, one of whose books drove this point home to me many years ago.)

An individual will act to further his self-interest, and in doing so, will choose the course of action that is most likely to succeed. Sometimes a person faces difficult circumstances and has to choose the option that’s least bad. But that doesn’t change the analysis. If he’s out of money and needs cash until his next paycheck, he will have to consider various unpleasant alternatives and choose the best one.

Obtaining money through a payday loan works like this: The borrower, after proving to the lender that he is employed and has sufficient income, writes a check to the lender postdated to his next payday for some amount, say, $300. The lender gives him a smaller amount of cash, say, $260. The lender then cashes the check on its due date. That is obviously a very high annual rate of interest if you consider the $40 fee as an interest charge. A payday loan is not an attractive option—unless all your others are worse. No one would do it unless every other course of action looked even costlier.

Nevertheless, the North Carolinians who worked to abolish payday lending are eager to say they did no harm. A group called the UNC Center for Community Capital conducted a telephone survey of 400 low- and middle-income families in the state about how they deal with financial shortfalls. Only 159 reported having had financial troubles they couldn’t meet out of their regular income. From this small number of responses, the people doing the study concluded that “Payday lending is not missed.” That’s because, based on the telephone surveys, “almost nine out of ten said payday lending was a ‘bad thing’ and “twice as many respondents said the absence of payday lending has had a positive effect on their household than said it has had a negative effect.”

There you have it. Most people said payday lending was “bad” and few miss it now that it has been banned. That certainly proves that the state did the right thing in getting rid of it. Or does it?

Completely forgotten in the rush to justify the ban are the people who said they think they are worse off for not having this option anymore. Yes, they were a minority of the respondents, but that is no reason to conclude that “payday lending is not missed.” An accurate conclusion would instead be, “Payday lending is missed by some people.”

Maybe the silliness of this approach will be apparent if we consider a hypothetical case that parallels it.

Imagine that a group of people in New York hates opera. They regard it as too costly and time consuming, and a bad moral influence. Using their political connections, they succeed in getting the city government to ban live opera productions. Out goes the Met, the Civic Opera, and any other companies.

A year later this group commissions a survey asking 400 New Yorkers if they miss having opera in the city. Since most people don’t care about or even dislike opera, the results come in showing that the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers agree “Opera is not missed.” Would that justify taking opera away from the, say, 5 percent who said they would like to have had the option of going?

My point is that the views of the people who don’t patronize a business or art form shouldn’t count for anything. The people who don’t like opera are free not to go, and the people who think payday lending is “bad” are free to avoid it. As long as anyone wants to attend an opera or needs a payday loan, the government has no business forcibly depriving them of those choices.

Returning to the North Carolina study, people were also asked how they respond when they have a money shortage. The results showed that people coped in various ways, including paying bills late, dipping into savings, borrowing from family or friends, using a credit card to get cash, or merely doing without things. Jumping on that information, North Carolina’s deputy commissioner of banks, Mark Pearce, said in the November 14, 2007, Raleigh News & Observer, “Working people don’t miss payday lending. They have a lot of financial options and they use them.”

We can only wonder why it doesn’t occur to Pearce that having one more option might be good. What if someone has already exhausted all possible money sources and faces serious consequences from either paying late (suppose the next missed payment means the power gets turned off) or doing without (you’ve got to have some car repairs so you can get to work)? A payday loan might be the best option left.

In an August 2006 paper on the payday-lending business (“Payday Lending and Public Policy: What Elected Officials Should Know”), Professor Thomas Lehman of Indiana Wesleyan University found that this kind of lending fills a market niche and concluded, “Preventing or limiting the use of payday loan services only encourages borrowers to seek out and utilize less attractive alternatives . . . that put the borrower in an even weaker financial position.”

A November 2007 study by two economists with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (“Payday Holiday: How Households Fare after Payday Credit Bans”) came to the same conclusion. Authors Donald Morgan and Michael Strain found that a ban on payday lending results in increased credit problems for consumers. They wrote, “Payday credit is preferable to substitutes such as the bounced-check ‘protection’ sold by credit unions and banks or loans from pawnshops.”

So I maintain that Sowell’s Axiom holds. When government takes away options, it is bound to make some people worse off. Instead of acting like Big Nanny, government should stick to enforcing laws against coercion and fraud.

“We look forward to the time when the power of love will replace the love of power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.”

So declared British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone more than a century ago. His audience surely responded then the same way audiences would today—with universal, nodding approval. But the world, perhaps more so now than when Gladstone spoke, seethes with hypocrisy. Though we say we prefer love over power, the way we behave in the political corner of our lives testifies all too often to the contrary.

Gladstone was eminently qualified to say what he did, and he sincerely meant it. He was a devout man of faith and character, lauded widely for impeccable integrity in his more than six decades of public life. Four times prime minister, he still ranks as one of the few politicians who really did “grow” in office. He came to Parliament in the early 1830s as an ardent protectionist, opponent of reform, and defender of the statist status quo. As he watched government operate from its highest levels, he evolved into a passionate defender of liberty. When he died in 1898 his admirers were proud of a Britain strengthened by his legacy of cutting taxes, bureaucracy, and intrusive regulation. The Irish loved him because he fought hard to restrain London ‘s heavy hand over Irish life. Biographer Philip Magnus believed that he “achieved unparalleled success in his policy of setting the individual free from a multitude of obsolete restrictions.”

Gladstone knew that love and power are two different things, often at odds with each other. Love is about affection and respect, power about control. Someone who pursues power over others for his own personal advancement is rightly deserving of opprobrium. Gladstone ‘s friend Lord Acton warned about how absolutely corrupting this can be. If love is a factor in such instances, it’s more likely love of oneself than love of others.

When real love is the motivator, people deal with each other peacefully. We use force only in self-defense. We respect each other’s rights and differences. Tolerance and cooperation govern our interactions.

Suppose we want to influence or change the behavior of another adult, or want to give him something we think he should have. This person has done us no harm and is in full command of his faculties. Love requires that we reason with him, entice him with an attractive offer, or otherwise engage him on a totally voluntary basis. He is free to accept or reject our overtures. If we don’t get our way, we don’t hire somebody to use force against him. “Live and let live,” as Americans used to say with more frequency than they do today.

When we initiate force (that is to say, when self-defense is not an issue), it’s usually because we want something without having to ask the owner’s permission for it. The nineteenth-century American social commentator William Graham Sumner lamented the prevalence of the less-noble motivators when he wrote, “All history is only one long story to this effect: Men have struggled for power over their fellow men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others, and might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others.”

Adults necessarily exert great power over infants, whose very existence requires nearly constant attention tempered by a strong and instinctive affection. By adolescence, the adult role is reduced to general supervision as the child makes more of his own choices and decisions. The child eventually becomes an adult empowered to live his life as he chooses and bear all the attendant risks and responsibilities.

In normal, healthy families during this nearly 20-year maturing process, a parent’s power over a child recedes but his love only grows. Indeed, most people understand that the more you love a child, the more you will desire him to be independent, self-reliant, and in charge of himself. It’s not a sign of love to treat another adult as if he were still an infant under your control.

A mature, responsible adult neither seeks undue power over other adults nor wishes to see others subjected to anyone’s controlling schemes and fantasies: This is the traditional meaning of liberty. It’s the rationale for limiting the force of government in our lives. In a free society the power of love, not the love of power, governs our behavior.

Consider what we do in our political lives these days—and an unfortunate erosion of freedom becomes painfully evident. It’s a commentary on the ascendancy of the love of power over the power of love. We have granted command of over 40 percent of our incomes to federal, state, and local governments, compared to 6 or 7 percent a century ago. And more than a few Americans seem to think that 40 percent still isn’t enough.

We don’t trust the choices parents might make in a free educational marketplace, so we force those who prefer private options to pay twice—once in tuition for the alternatives they choose and then again in taxes for a system they seek to escape.

Millions of Americans think government should impose an endless array of programs and expenses on their fellow citizens, from nationalized health insurance to child daycare to subsidized art and recreation. We’ve already burdened our children and grandchildren, whom we claim to love, with trillions in national debt—all so that the leaders we elected and reelected could spend more than we were willing to pay.

We claim to love our fellow citizens while we hand government ever more power over their lives, hopes, and pocketbooks. We’ve erected what Margaret Thatcher derisively termed the “nanny state,” in which we as adults are pushed around, dictated to, hemmed in, and smothered with good intentions as if we’re still children.

Resolutions for Liberty

If you think that these trends can go on indefinitely, or that power is the answer to our problems, or that loving others means diminishing their liberties, you’re part of the problem. If you want to be part of the solution, then consider adopting the following resolutions for this year and beyond:

• I resolve to keep my hands in my own pockets, to leave others alone unless they threaten me harm, to take responsibility for my own actions and decisions, and to impose no burdens on others that stem from my own poor judgments.

• I resolve to strengthen my own character so I can be the model of integrity that friends, family, and acquaintances will want to respect and emulate.

• If I have a “good idea,” I resolve to elicit support for it through peaceful persuasion not force. I will not ask politicians to foist it on others just because I might think it’s good for them. I will work to free my fellow citizens by trusting them with more control over their own lives.

• I resolve to offer help to others who genuinely need it by involving myself directly or by supporting those who are providing assistance through charitable institutions. I will not complain about a problem and then insist that government fix it at twice the cost and at half the effectiveness.

• I resolve to learn more about the principles of love and liberty so that I can convincingly defend them against the encroachments of power. I resolve to make certain that how I behave and how I vote will be consistent with what I say. And I resolve to do whatever I can to replace the love of power with the power of love.

A tall order, to be sure. Let’s get started.

But Roberts’s argument implicitly assumes that government provides security. That assumption flies in the face of much evidence on the welfare/nanny state. It ignores the government’s sometimes-lethal iron fist that is only modestly hidden beneath its velvet glove. Government’s tragic track record shows that regulations and spending programs often make people less secure. And even when they provide security, they often do so by trading one risk for another, sometimes bigger risk. Consider three areas where this happens: drugs, education, and jobs.

Since 1962 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has required that any new drug be tested not just for safety but also for efficacy. Economists have estimated that the efficacy requirement has added many years to the time between a drug’s discovery and its sale. Let’s grant that the requirement for proof of safety reduces risk. But the regulation that requires proof of efficacy does little or nothing to decrease risk and necessarily increases risk, sometimes lethally. Imagine you have a terminal disease and, without a drug that is currently being tested for efficacy, you will die in six months. Unfortunately, the drug won’t be on the market until after that. Imagine there is a 30-percent probability that it would extend your life. Has the government reduced your risk by forcibly preventing you from taking it? This example is not hypothetical. Economist Daniel Klein estimates that withholding new effective drugs causes at least 50,000 premature deaths a year. (See “Economists Against the FDA,” The Freeman, September 2000.)

And think of other drugs that government regulators try to prevent you from taking—drugs like marijuana, cocaine, LSD, and heroin. Here the issue is a trade-off of risks. One could argue that if the government makes the penalties harsh enough, you will decide not to take these drugs and will therefore avoid the associated risks. But stopping the analysis there is to engage in single-entry bookkeeping. We need to examine the other side of the ledger: the risks that government creates. For those who decide to use the drugs anyway, their risk is much greater—and the higher risk is due to government regulation. They face two new risks they wouldn’t face if the drugs were legal. The first is the risk of getting an impure drug. When drugs are illegal, providers do not have the same incentive or ability to provide high quality and establish a good reputation that they would have if the drugs were legal. Many people who die from illegal drugs do so because they don’t know the potency of the drugs or what they are spiked with.

The second is the risk of going to jail. One of the few effective anti-drug ads run by the federal government was the one that showed a drug user running from the cops. But notice that this risk is entirely government-created: if drugs were legal, there would be no risk of going to prison just for using them. And the risk of going to prison is not one of those little risks. As the drug warriors correctly point out, going to prison could wreck your life.

One might argue—and many do—that we should not be sympathetic to those who take illegal drugs and go to jail. To this I have two answers. First, those who make the argument cannot also argue for drug laws on the basis of saving people from harm because they have revealed that they don’t care about those people being harmed. Second, when I ask even strongly anti-drug audiences what they would do if they found illegal drugs in their teenager’s room, they never say they would report their child to the police. So they do seem capable of being sympathetic to at least some people who risk going to prison.

My second example of where government creates risk is the schools. Most schools in the United States are government-run, and parents are forced by law to enroll their students at these schools, at private schools, or in home-schools. Government schooling is not cheap: it now costs about $7,200 per student, which is about $2,500 more than the average tuition at private schools. But because government gives it away “free,” only those who value private schooling very highly will choose it for their children. If private school tuition is $4,700, for example, you won’t buy it unless it’s worth $4,700 more than the value of what the government school provides.

What does this have to do with risk? When you drop your child off at the government school, you have little control over what happens to him or her. Within broad limits the government can do a lot to your kid: teach him things you’d rather he not know, such as how to put a condom on a banana; teach him things that are not true, such as the idea that the industrialists of the late nineteenth century were “robber barons”; and, in thousands of little ways, deaden your child’s inherent love of learning. I’d call that a pretty big risk. Of course, all this can and does happen in private schools. But with lots of private-school choices, which you would have if the government exited the business and cut taxes to reflect its lower spending, the risk would be much less.

Harm from Forced Higher Wages

Finally, consider jobs. Government regulations give unions the power to force people to join or to at least have the union represent them in wage bargaining. Unions use that power to bargain for wages higher than they could have otherwise. At those higher wages new workers are less likely to find jobs and must settle for lower-paying jobs in nonunion sectors of the economy. When there’s a downturn in the economy, employers, facing unions that want to preserve higher-paying jobs for their more senior members, lay off the more-junior workers. Absent the unions’ legal monopoly, the employers and workers could have bargained for lower wages that preserved more jobs. So the loss in freedom due to government-granted union privileges goes hand in hand with a loss in security for younger, less-experienced workers.

Big government is a big lottery, and as in all lotteries, your expected winnings (which equal the probability of winning multiplied by the prize) are substantially less than the price of the ticket. But there is a fundamental difference between the big-government lottery and the typical game of chance. In the latter, the participants choose to play; in the big-government lottery everyone is forced to play.

Benjamin Franklin once said that those who are willing to trade liberty for security deserve neither. They’ll also get neither. If my major goal were security, I would want, even more than I do, freedom from government.