And then I felt shame. I had fallen victim to the same statist impulse that afflicts today’s so-called “progressives.” For 40 years, I thought I was a passionate, uncompromising believer in the free society. Yet for a few seconds, I took pleasure in government trampling on the liberties of consenting adults in a private setting.
This incident troubled me enough to think about it a long while. I wanted to know why my first instinct was to abandon principles for a little convenience. And if a committed freedom-lover like me can be so easily tugged in the wrong direction, what does that say for ever getting nonbelievers to eschew similar or more egregious temptations?
At first, I thought about the harm that many doctors believe secondhand smoke can do. Perhaps it wasn’t wrong for government to protect nonsmokers if what we have here is a case of one person imposing a harmful externality on an unwilling other. Then I quickly realized two things: no one compelled me to enter the place, and the restaurant belonged to neither the government nor me. The plain fact is that in a genuinely free society, a private owner who wants to allow some people in his establishment to smoke has as much right to permit it as you or I have to go elsewhere. It’s not as though people aren’t aware of the risks involved. Moreover, no one has a right to compel another citizen to provide him with a smoke-free restaurant.
Besides, I can think of a lot of risky behaviors in which many adults freely engage but which I would never call upon government to ban: sky diving and bungee jumping are just two of them. Statistics show that merely attending or teaching in certain inner city government schools is pretty risky too—and maybe more so than occasionally inhaling somebody’s smoke.
This is about as slippery a slope as slopes can possibly get slippery. Concede that it’s proper for government to dictate what activities a person can engage in when they only involve himself, and where does it stop? Some people read really bad books. Should we take those from them, especially the ones that may champion what some regard as quack remedies or, heaven forbid, those that even propagate resistance to the state? And how about those sugary drinks that former New York City Mayor Michael “Nanny” Bloomberg tried to punish restaurant owners for selling to willing customers? Will progressives please tell us how invasive they ultimately want the state to be for our own good?
It seems to me that enforcing private property rights (in both your body and the physical goods you can rightfully claim as yours) produces a far more precise and predictable set of rules for a civilized society. Rather than a sweeping mandate to coercively adjust our behaviors in ways that somebody in government thinks would be good for us, wouldn’t it make more sense to define property rights and then enforce them? Allow for voluntary, peaceful interactions and punish only those actions that do violence to the rights or property of others. You can smoke all you want, as long as you don’t blow smoke in my face or smoke next to me in a restaurant that declares “No smoking.”
Of course, the more we “socialize” things, the more invasive and intrusive the state must necessarily become. If everybody is paying for everybody else’s health care through government redistribution programs, for instance, then everybody has an incentive to scrutinize, denounce and regulate everybody else’s behavior. If I’m paying for your food stamps, then I don’t want to see you in line in front of me at the grocery store buying junk food with them. But if you’re paying for your own groceries, then it’s none of my business. This is an argument for peace and minding your own business by avoiding the socialization of human affairs, lest we all become nosy, petty dictators.
The statist impulse is a preference for deploying the force of the state to achieve some benefit—real or imagined, for one’s self or others—over voluntary alternatives such as persuasion, education or free choice. If people saw the options in such stark terms, or if they realized the slippery slope they’re on when they endorse government intervention, support for resolving matters through force would likely diminish. The problem is, they frequently fail to equate intervention with force. But that is precisely what’s involved, is it not? The state government in Florida did not request that restaurants forbid smoking; it ordered them to under threat of fines and imprisonment.
I tried this reasoning on some of my friends. Except for the diehard libertarians, here were some typical attitudes and how they were expressed:
Delusion: “It’s not really ‘force’ if a majority of citizens support it.”
Paternalism: “In this instance, force was a positive thing because it was for your own good.”
Dependency: “If government won’t do it, who will?”
Myopia: “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. How can banning smoking in restaurants possibly be a threat to liberty? If it is, it’s so minor that it doesn’t matter.”
Impatience: “I don’t want to wait until my favorite restaurant gets around to banning it on its own.”
Power lust: “Restaurants that won’t keep smoke out have to be told to do it.”
Self-absorption: “I just don’t care. I hate smoke and I don’t want to chance smelling it even if a restaurant owner puts the smokers in their own section.”
On a larger scale, every one of these arguments can be employed—indeed, they are invariably employed—to justify shackling a people with intolerable limitations on their liberties. If there’s one thing we must learn from the history of regimes, it is that you give them an inch and sooner or later, by appealing to popular weaknesses, they will take a mile. The challenge is getting people to understand that liberty is more often eaten away one small bite at a time than in one big gulp, and that it’s wiser to resist liberty’s erosion in small things than it is to concede and hope that bigger battles won’t have to be fought later.
Delusion, paternalism, dependency, myopia, impatience, power lust and self-absorption: All are reasons people succumb to the statist impulse. As I pondered this, it occurred to me that they are also vestiges of infantile thinking. As children or adolescents, our understanding of how the world works is half-baked at best. We expect others to provide for us and don’t much care how they get what they give us. And we want it now.
We consider ourselves “adults” when we learn there are boundaries beyond which our behavior should not tread; when we think of the long run and all people instead of just ourselves and the here and now; when we make every effort to be as independent as our physical and mental abilities allow; when we leave others alone unless they threaten us; and when we patiently satisfy our desires through peaceful means rather than with a club. We consider ourselves “adults” when we embrace personal responsibility; we revert to infantile behavior when we shun it.
Yet survey the landscape of American public policy debate these days and you find no end to the demands to utilize the force of the state to “do something.” Tax the other guy because he has more than me. Give me a tariff so I can be relieved of my foreign competition. Subsidize my college education. Swipe that property so I can put a hotel on it. Fix this or that problem for me, and fix it pronto. Make my life easier by making somebody else pay. Tell that guy who owns a restaurant that he can’t serve people who want to smoke.
I wonder if America has become a giant nursery, full of screaming babies who see the state as their loving nanny. It makes me want to say, “Grow up!”
Societies rise or fall depending on how civil its citizens are. The more they respect each other and associate freely, the safer and more prosperous they are. The more they rely on force—legal or not—the more pliant they are in the hands of demagogues and tyrants. So resisting the statist impulse is no trivial issue. In my mind, resisting that impulse is nothing less than the adult thing to do.
(Editor’s Note:. The original version of this essay appeared in FEE’s magazine, The Freeman, in October 2006 under the title, “Growing Up Means Resisting the Statist Impulse.”)
SUMMARY
•It’s easy to fall into the trap of the “quick fix” that suggests the use of force to addres
s a perceived problem. A thinking person will step back and consider the consequences, all of them, including the impact on individual rights
•Private property rights, clearly stated and strictly enforced, provide a better framework for society’s rules than the whims of people who want to dictate to others what’s good for them
•Delusion, paternalism, dependency, myopia, impatience, power lust and self-absorption may prompt us to call the cops but are hardly sound motivations for government policy
#28
“GOVERNMENT SPENDING BRINGS JOBS AND PROSPERITY”
BY HENRY HAZLITT
A YOUNG HOODLUM HEAVES A BRICK THROUGH THE WINDOW OF A BAKER’S SHOP. The shopkeeper runs out furious, but the boy is gone. A crowd gathers, and begins to stare with quiet dissatisfaction at the gaping hole in the window and the shattered glass all over the bread and pies. After a while the crowd feels the need for philosophic reflection. And several of its members are almost certain to remind each other or the baker that, after all, the misfortune has its bright side. It will make business for some glazier.
As they begin to think of this, they elaborate upon it. How much does a new plate glass window cost? Three hundred dollars? That will be quite a sum. After all, if windows were never broken, what would happen to the glass business? Then, of course, the thing is endless. The glazier will have $300 more to spend with other merchants, and these in turn will have $300 more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum. The smashed window will go on providing money and employment in ever-widening circles. The logical conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor.
Now let us take another look. The crowd is at least right in its first conclusion. This little act of vandalism will in the first instance mean more business for some glazier. The glazier will be no more unhappy to learn of the incident than an undertaker is to learn of a death. But the shopkeeper will be out $300 that he was planning to spend for a new suit. Because he has had to replace a window, he will have to go without the suit (or some equivalent need or luxury). Instead of having a window and $300 he now has merely a window. Or, as he was planning to buy the suit that very afternoon, instead of having both a window and a suit he must be content with the window and no suit. If we think of him as part of the community, the community has lost a new suit that might otherwise have come into being, and is just that much poorer.
The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier. They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor. They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene. They will see the new window in the next day or two. They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made. The see only what is immediately visible to the eye.
So we have finished with the broken window, an elementary fallacy. Anybody, one would think, would be able to avoid it after a few moments’ thought. Yet the broken-window fallacy, under a hundred disguises, is the most persistent in the history of economics. It is more rampant now than at any time in the past. It is solemnly reaffirmed every day by great captains of industry, by chambers of commerce, by labor union leaders, by editorial writers and newspaper columnists and radio commentators, by learned statisticians using the most refined techniques, by professors of economics in our best universities. In their various ways they all dilate upon the advantages of destruction or they declare that the mere act of government spending “stimulates” without ever asking where the money must come from.
Though some of them would disdain to say that there are net benefits in small acts of destruction, they see almost endless benefits in enormous acts of destruction. (Editor’s Note: “progressive” economists like Paul Krugman see no problem in suggesting the economy would be stimulated if your house is blown up but has so far they have not done their part to goose the economy by blowing up their own.)
They see “miracles of production” which require a war to achieve. And they see a world made prosperous by an enormous “accumulated” or “pent-up” demand. After World War II in Europe, they joyously counted the houses—the whole cities—that “had to be replaced.” In America they counted the houses that could not be built during the war, the nylon stockings that could not be supplied, the worn-out automobiles and tires, the obsolescent radios and refrigerators. They brought together formidable totals.
It was merely our old friend, the broken-window fallacy, in new clothing, and grown fat beyond recognition.
(Editor’s Note: Henry Hazlitt’s inspiration for this essay was the French economist Frédéric Bastiat. The most notable of Hazlitt’s many books was the popular Economics in One Lesson, from which this essay is adapted, available for no charge on FEE.org.)
SUMMARY
•The broken-window fallacy essentially calls us to be thorough in our thinking. It’s not enough to simply see the immediate or what strikes the eye. We must also consider the long-run effects of an act or policy on all people
•When government “spending” seems to stimulate, it’s because we’re not seeing its redistributive nature. If government spends more, then there is precisely that much less spending done by those from whom the money is taken. If the government spends more and borrows to pay for it instead of raising taxes, then it’s today’s capital market that is smaller precisely to the extent government spending is bigger
#29
“UPTON SINCLAIR’S THE JUNGLE PROVED REGULATION WAS REQUIRED”
BY LAWRENCE W. REED
A LITTLE OVER A CENTURY AGO, A GREAT AND ENDURING MYTH WAS BORN. MUCKRAKING novelist Upton Sinclair wrote a novel entitled The Jungle—a tale of greed and abuse that still reverberates as a case against a free economy. Sinclair’s “jungle” was unregulated enterprise; his example was the meatpacking industry; his purpose was government regulation. The culmination of his work was the passage in 1906 of the Meat Inspection Act, enshrined in history, or at least in history books, as a sacred cow (excuse the pun) of the interventionist state.
A century later, American schoolchildren are still being taught a simplistic and romanticized version of this history. For many young people, The Jungle is required reading in high-school classes, where they are led to believe that unscrupulous capitalists were routinely tainting our meat, and that moral crusader Upton Sinclair rallied the public and forced government to shift from pusillanimous bystander to heroic do-gooder, valiantly disciplining the marketplace to protect its millions of victims.
But this is a triumph of myth over reality, of ulterior motives over good intentions. Reading The Jungle and assuming it’s a credible news source is like watching Star Wars because you think it’s a documentary.
Given the book’s favorable publicity, it’s not surprising that it has duped a lot of people. Ironically, Sinclair himself, as a founder of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society in 1905, was personally suckered by more than a few intellectual charlatans of his day. One of them was fellow “investigative journalist” Lincoln Steffens, best known for returning from the Soviet Union in 1921 and saying, “I have seen the future, and it works.”
In any event, there is much about The Jungle that Americans just don’t learn from conventional history texts.
The Jungle was, first and foremost, a novel. As is indicated by the fact that the book originally appeared as a serialization in the socialist journal “Appeal to Reason,” it was intended to be a polemic—a diatribe, if you will—not a well-researched and dispassionate documentary. Sinclair relied heavily both on his own imagination and on the hearsay of others. He did not even pretend that he had actually witnessed the horrendous conditions he ascribed to Chicago packinghouses, nor to have verified them, nor to have derived them from any official records.
Sinclair hoped the book would ignite a po
werful socialist movement on behalf of America’s workers. The public’s attention focused instead on his fewer than a dozen pages of supposed descriptions of unsanitary conditions in the meat-packing plants. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” he later wrote, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
Though his novelized and sensational accusations prompted congressional investigations of the industry, the investigators themselves expressed skepticism about Sinclair’s integrity and credibility as a source of information. In July 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt stated his opinion of Sinclair in a letter to journalist William Allen White: “I have an utter contempt for him. He is hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful. Three-fourths of the things he said were absolute falsehoods. For some of the remainder there was only a basis of truth.”
Sinclair’s fellow writer and philosophical intimate, Jack London, wrote this announcement of The Jungle, a promo that was approved by Sinclair himself:
Dear Comrades: . . . The book we have been waiting for these many years! It will open countless ears that have been deaf to Socialism. It will make thousands of converts to our cause. It depicts what our country really is, the home of oppression and injustice, a nightmare of misery, an inferno of suffering, a human hell, a jungle of wild beasts.
And take notice and remember, comrades, this book is straight proletarian. It is written by an intellectual proletarian, for the proletarian. It is to be published by a proletarian publishing house. It is to be read by the proletariat. What “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” did for the black slaves “The Jungle” has a large chance to do for the white slaves of today.
The fictitious characters of Sinclair’s novel tell of men falling into tanks in meat-packing plants and being ground up with animal parts, then made into “Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard.” Historian Stewart H. Holbrook writes, “The grunts, the groans, the agonized squeals of animals being butchered, the rivers of blood, the steaming masses of intestines, the various stenches . . . were displayed along with the corruption of government inspectors” and, of course, the callous greed of the ruthless packers.
Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism Page 11
