Crispin Sartwell writes:

We want the government to guarantee our health, deflect hurricanes, educate our children and license us to drive; we want to be told what to eat, what to smoke and whom to marry. We are justly proud of the fact that no enduring society has ever incarcerated more of its people. Noting that the policeman has a pistol, a club, a stun gun, a can of pepper spray and a database that includes us, we feel happy and secure.

Our submission is absolute: We want to be operated like puppets and provided for like pets.

The terrorists hate our freedom. But we should be comfortable with that. We hate our freedom, too.

Advocates for liberty are increasingly facing a new challenge. Used to be that our main fight was against the ever expanding size and scope of government. But it’s fast becoming the case that half the battle is convincing people that freedom is actually a good thing in the first place. People would rather have a massive government that makes all of their decisions for them, ostensibly because they’d rather have someone other than themselves to blame when they make the wrong decisions. Hence, the uncomfortable number of smokers who support smoking bans because they think it’ll help them kick the habit.

Another outgrowth of fears of freedom are those trendy attacks on choice itself, where choice was once seen as an almost universal positive.

The phrase for this is parentalism (as opposed to paternalism), or the idea that grown adults are distubingly beginning to see the government as a parent, someone to watch over them, and guide their hand toward good decisions. Julian Sanchez wrote a bit about this last year, citing new work by Nobel Laureate James Buchanan. Buchanan writes:

[Economists and political theorists] have assumed that, other things being equal, persons want to be at liberty to make their own choices, to be free from coercion by others, including indirect coercion through means of persuasion. They have failed to emphasize sufficiently, and to examine the implications of, the fact that liberty carries with it responsibility. And it seems evident that many persons do not want to shoulder the final responsibility for their own actions..[They] want to be told what to do and when to do it; they seek order rather than uncertainty, and order comes at an opportunity cost they seem willing to bear.

To which Julian adds:

Classical liberals have become good at explaining how the market order they favor promotes freedom and happiness. They have been less adept at explaining why–at least past a certain point–people ought to want that freedom, which when genuine is always at least a little frightening. In the face of the parentalist impulse, we may need to develop the case that our bad choices, the choices that make us unhappy, are as vital and precious as the ones that bring us joy.

The fight against the growth of government often feels like a jog on a treadmill that’s a setting or two too fast. Toss in the fact that many people no longer want their freedom, and suddenly we’re on an incline, too.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 31st, 2006 at 7:47 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.