On Trusting Freedom

A Penchant for Controlling Others

By 

Mises.org

February 6, 2021

[Editor’s Note: In this 2009 article, Lew Rockwell lists the problems with government mandates on private use of mobile phones. Observant readers will note the “public safety” arguments against the freedom to use phones as we choose are essentially the same as current claims that “public health” is a justification for dictating daily habits and behavior. ]

We all want freedom for ourselves, but many people have doubts about the way others might use their own freedom. Under these conditions, the state is there to help. Get enough people to favor enough restriction, and the state is good to go, administering every aspect life from its smallest to its largest detail.

Every day presents more cases, but the most recent case is stunning. It turns out that 97% of people polled support a universal ban on texting while driving. Half of those surveyed say that the penalty should be as severe as that for drunk driving. Among these, how many do you suppose do text and drive but don’t want to admit it to the pollster? Probably plenty. And yet I couldn’t find a single online defense of the practice anywhere on the web.Best Price: $20.34Buy New $21.14(as of 03:27 EST – Details)

The truth is that it is not necessarily unsafe to text behind the wheel. It all depends on the situation. If you are in a traffic jam, and are late to an appointment, the ability to text can be a lifesaver. Or if there are no cars around, you might be able to risk it. On the other hand, it would probably be a mistake to attempt this doing 80 mph around slower traffic on a freeway.

How can we know the difference between when it is safe and when it is not? The principle applied on American roads is that the driver himself makes that decision. If this principle didn’t make sense, there would be no way that the roads themselves could work at all.

Think of this the next time you are in a big city zooming around curves and between lanes along with thousands of others, doing top speeds. Here we have 4,000-pound hunks of steel barreling down the road without aids other than a dotted yellow line on the road. These are real-life death machines in which one wrong move could cause a 100-car pileup and mass death. We do it anyway.

What’s remarkable is not that there are so many wrecks. The miracle is that it works at all and that, for the most part, people get to where they are going. And consider too the demographic behind the car: old, young, abled, disabled, experienced, inexperienced. Some people have a facility for driving and others do not. Some people have spatial agility and others do not.

How does it all work? Don’t tell me that it is due to central planning and the police. The police aren’t driving every car and controlling every wheel. Our human volition on the road and the decisions we make that affect other drivers are nearly 100% our own.

And yet it works. Why? The reason is that it is not in anyone’s interest to get in a crash. It is in everyone’s interest to get to where one is going in one piece and to do it efficiently. Roll together tens of thousands of people with the same broad goal and you get spontaneous cooperation. Something that people normally think could not work does in fact work. Looked at from that angle, the orderliness we see on the roads is a general expression of the capacity for human society to work in the context of self-interested individualism.

Now think of this poll showing a widespread opposition to texting while driving. I submit that you would get similar results from a poll that asked people about the right to drive:

Do you support or oppose the right of everyone to own 4,000-pound heaps of steel and control them completely and autonomously at top speeds in the midst of thousands of other citizens whose lives could be in danger with so much as a slight flick of the wrist to the right or left?

That question could elicit nearly 100% negative results. We generally trust our capacity to manage ourselves but we do not trust the capacity of others to manage themselves. And we surely don’t believe that society can generally function well under conditions of freedom. Even though we live in the midst of spontaneous order and use its brilliance every day (grocery store, the world wide web, restaurants, housing developments), we don’t really understand it.

Or how about this one:

Do you support the right of anyone over a certain age to buy and consume as much hard liquor as he wants, even to the point of drinking himself into a life-threatening stupor, neglecting the kids, wrecking family life, and killing brain cells that cannot be replaced?

Probably most people would say no. And yet this is precisely the reasoning behind Prohibition, which most people today regard as a terrible error. Today, we supposedly realize that the social cost of the right to drink hard liquor was greater than the supposed benefit we receive from enforcing Prohibition.

So it is with texting and driving. There are times when it is safe. There are times when it is not safe. The only ones who can really know the difference are the people behind the wheel. These people already enjoy the freedom to talk to passengers, to fiddle with their stereo, to drive following an exhausting jog, to drive while distracted with anxieties over work and marriage, to pray or sing in the car, and do many other things that seem like a distraction from the goal at hand. Somehow it all works, and there is a lesson here. You can count on more order to emerge from trusting freedom than you get from attempting to micromanage people’s lives.

Now, the libertarians among us might point out that these roads are publicly owned and that this is the core source of the problem. Under privately owned roads, there might be intense restrictions on what you can and cannot do and these might be part of the contract you make with the road owner.

The market would take care of the rest. If an owner were too restrictive, drivers would take other routes. If they are too lenient, their insurance premiums would rise and they would pay too high a price. The resultant rules of the road would be a result of this careful calibration, tested constantly by the forces of supply and demand.

Under the existing rules of private roads, we see no evidence of a crackdown on texting. Maybe it would come in the future, but at least there would be a market test. When a rule fails in private markets, the rule is changed.

But it is different with government. No matter how preposterous the rule, it stays and stays, regardless of whether it works to accomplish its end. And there can be no question that a crackdown on texting is coming. Obama has already banned texting while driving for federal workers. A bill that would deny federal funds to states is flying through the Senate. Look for a nationwide ban in the coming months.

The ban says, You don’t know what is good for you so you must be forced to do what the government thinks is good for you. The ban gets support because people generally think that while they are responsible and good at calibrating what is safe and unsafe, others are not. Through this method, all freedoms could be abolished.

It’s a bad way to form the rules of a society.

Originally published November 2009.

From LRC, here.

Feeling Gratitude Means Remembering the Creation EX NIHILO

From “Heretics”, by Gilbert K. Chesterton, Chapter Four:

For the truth is that Mr. Shaw has never seen things as they really are. If he had he would have fallen on his knees before them. He has always had a secret ideal that has withered all the things of this world. He has all the time been silently comparing humanity with something that was not human, with a monster from Mars, with the Wise Man of the Stoics, with the Economic Man of the Fabians, with Julius Caesar, with Siegfried, with the Superman. Now, to have this inner and merciless standard may be a very good thing, or a very bad one, it may be excellent or unfortunate, but it is not seeing things as they are. It is not seeing things as they are to think first of a Briareus with a hundred hands, and then call every man a cripple for only having two. It is not seeing things as they are to start with a vision of Argus with his hundred eyes, and then jeer at every man with two eyes as if he had only one. And it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a demigod of infinite mental clarity, who may or may not appear in the latter days of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots. And this is what Mr. Shaw has always in some degree done. When we really see men as they are, we do not criticise, but worship; and very rightly. For a monster with mysterious eyes and miraculous thumbs, with strange dreams in his skull, and a queer tenderness for this place or that baby, is truly a wonderful and unnerving matter. It is only the quite arbitrary and priggish habit of comparison with something else which makes it possible to be at our ease in front of him. A sentiment of superiority keeps us cool and practical; the mere facts would make our knees knock under as with religious fear. It is the fact that every instant of conscious life is an unimaginable prodigy. It is the fact that every face in the street has the incredible unexpectedness of a fairy-tale. The thing which prevents a man from realizing this is not any clear-sightedness or experience, it is simply a habit of pedantic and fastidious comparisons between one thing and another. Mr. Shaw, on the practical side perhaps the most humane man alive, is in this sense inhumane. He has even been infected to some extent with the primary intellectual weakness of his new master, Nietzsche, the strange notion that the greater and stronger a man was the more he would despise other things. The greater and stronger a man is the more he would be inclined to prostrate himself before a periwinkle. That Mr. Shaw keeps a lifted head and a contemptuous face before the colossal panorama of empires and civilizations, this does not in itself convince one that he sees things as they are. I should be most effectively convinced that he did if I found him staring with religious astonishment at his own feet. “What are those two beautiful and industrious beings,” I can imagine him murmuring to himself, “whom I see everywhere, serving me I know not why? What fairy godmother bade them come trotting out of elfland when I was born? What god of the borderland, what barbaric god of legs, must I propitiate with fire and wine, lest they run away with me?”

The truth is, that all genuine appreciation rests on a certain mystery of humility and almost of darkness. The man who said, “Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed,” put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth “Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised.” The man who expects nothing sees redder roses than common men can see, and greener grass, and a more startling sun. Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall possess the cities and the mountains; blessed is the meek, for he shall inherit the earth. Until we realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are. Until we see the background of darkness we cannot admire the light as a single and created thing. As soon as we have seen that darkness, all light is lightening, sudden, blinding, and divine. Until we picture nonentity we underrate the victory of God, and can realize none of the trophies of His ancient war. It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we know nothing until we know nothing.

Some Micro-Instability Is Necessary for Greater Macro-Stability

From Falken Blog’s review of Nassim Taleb:
One theme of the book Antifragile is hormesis, the finding that things that are clearly bad for you at extreme doses, are good for you in small doses; a glass of wine a day, radiation, germs, etc. If you have zero exposure to germs, you won’t develop a healthy immune system. Arthur Robinson has been a lead of hormesis with his work in the 1970’s, and there’s a fascinating tale about how he discovered this in the context of the assertions about radiation extrapolation by Robinson’s mentor, the famous chemist Linus Pauling, and a nasty legal battle that ensued. The fact that micro-instability is necessary for greater macro-stability is a very good, and very Austrian point.
See a similar point about Brisk here.

Want To Escape Police Persecution? Act Like a Fool!

Other Wise Men of Gotham

by James Baldwin

 

One day, news was brought to Gotham that the king was coming that way, and that he would pass through the town. This did not please the men of Gotham at all. They hated the king, for they knew that he was a cruel, bad man. If he came to their town, they would have to find food and lodging for him and his men; and if he saw anything that pleased him, he would be sure to take it for his own. What should they do?

They met together to talk the matter over.

“Let us chop down the big trees in the woods, so that they will block up all the roads that lead into the town,” said one of the wise men.

“Good!” said all the rest.

So they went out with their axes, and soon all the roads and paths to the town were filled with logs and brush. The king’s horsemen would have a hard time of it getting into Gotham. They would either have to make a new road, or give up the plan al-to-geth-er, and go on to some other place.

When the king came, and saw that the road had been blocked up, he was very angry.

“Who chopped those trees down in my way?” he asked of two country lads that were passing by.

“The men of Gotham,” said the lads.

“Well,” said the king, “go and tell the men of Gotham that I shall send my sheriff into their town, and have all their noses cut off.”

The two lads ran to the town as fast as they could, and made known what the king had said.

Everybody was in great fright. The men ran from house to house, carrying the news, and asking one another what they should do.

“Our wits have kept the king out of the town,” said one; “and so now our wits must save our noses.”

“True, true!” said the others. “But what shall we do?”

Then one, whose name was Dobbin, and who was thought to be the wisest of them all, said, “Let me tell you something. Many a man has been punished because he was wise, but I have never heard of any one being harmed because he was a fool. So, when the king’s sheriff comes, let us all act like fools.”

“Good, good!” cried the others. “We will all act like fools.”

It was no easy thing for the king’s men to open the roads; and while they were doing it, the king grew tired of waiting, and went back to London. But very early one morning, the sheriff with a party of fierce soldiers rode through the woods, and between the fields, toward Gotham. Just before they reached the town, they saw a queer sight. The old men were rolling big stones up the hill, and all the young men were looking on, and grunting very loudly.

The sheriff stopped his horses, and asked what they were doing.

“We are rolling stones up-hill to make the sun rise,” said one of the old men.

“You foolish fellow!” said the sheriff. “Don’t you know that the sun will rise without any help?”

“Ah! will it?” said the old man. “Well, I never thought of that. How wise you are!”

“And what are _you_ doing?” said the sheriff to the young men.

“Oh, we do the grunting while our fathers do the working,” they answered.

“I see,” said the sheriff. “Well, that is the way the world goes every-where.” And he rode on toward the town.

He soon came to a field where a number of men were building a stone wall.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Why, master,” they answered, “there is a cuck-oo in this field, and we are building a wall around it so as to keep the bird from straying away.”

“You foolish fellows!” said the sheriff. “Don’t you know that the bird will fly over the top of your wall, no matter how high you build it?”

“Why, no,” they said. “We never thought of that. How very wise you are!”

The sheriff next met a man who was carrying a door on his back.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I have just started on a long journey,” said the man.

“But why do you carry that door?” asked the sheriff.

“I left my money at home.”

“Then why didn’t you leave the door at home too?”

“I was afraid of thieves; and you see, if I have the door with me, they can’t break it open and get in.”

“You foolish fellow!” said the sheriff. “It would be safer to leave the door at home, and carry the money with you.”

“Ah, would it, though?” said the man. “Now, I never thought of that. You are the wisest man that I ever saw.”

Then the sheriff rode on with his men; but every one that they met was doing some silly thing.

“Truly I believe that the people of Gotham are all fools,” said one of the horsemen.

“That is true,” said another. “It would be a shame to harm such simple people.”

“Let us ride back to London, and tell the king all about them,” said the sheriff.

“Yes, let us do so,” said the horsemen.

So they went back, and told the king that Gotham was a town of fools; and the king laughed, and said that if that was the case, he would not harm them, but would let them keep their noses.

From American Literature, here.