by Sheldon Richman
Sheldon Richman is the editor of The Freeman and In Brief.
In 1977 the late economic historian Jonathan R. T. Hughes published a book called The Governmental Habit (updated in 1991 as The Governmental Habit Redux). It showed how pervasive government intervention in the economy has been since colonial times. The title captures an important phenomenon. People are in the habit of looking to government — the only agency that may legally wield or threaten force against non-aggressors — to get what they want. While earlier generations of Americans were hesitant to ask the local, state, or national government to do certain things (although perhaps not as hesitant as we thought), few modern Americans have any such scruples.
Americans of all classes expect the government (translation: taxpayers) to pick up the tab for services, and the politicians and bureaucrats to compel others to do things they don't want to. Someone must be buying Matthew Lesko's books or he wouldn't keep paying for those irritating television commercials.
People even want the government to do things that are outright dumb, such as compel us to conserve energy. What's so funny is that the greatest outcry for mandatory conservation comes when prices are rising. It would be foolish enough to compel conservation when prices are falling. But when they are rising? (Some don't want prices to fall. See this.) What can the government do that the discipline of the price system wouldn't do. (Well, a lot, but they aren't things we should want done.)
When I was growing up in the 1950s and '60s my father's voice would often boom through the house with the words, Why are all these lights on? — his response to finding rooms of our home brilliantly illuminated but unoccupied. (It's one of his habits I picked up.) I don't recall if he did this only when electricity prices were rising, but I doubt it. He was being a conservationist, although not in the way the George Bushes and Al Gores want us to be. He wasn't thinking about unborn generations or the health of the planet. He was thinking about his family and himself. It was his own money he was conserving. Yet, as if by an invisible hand, he was led to save energy as well. I'm sure he never read Adam Smith. But he understood that money spent to light up empty rooms is money that couldn't be spent to buy his children clothes or to send them to college. He was a businessman, not an economist. But it takes no special knowledge to understand that wasting one's own money is unwise.
Isn't it slightly silly for the first reaction to rising gasoline prices to be, The government should increase the mandatory fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles? Leaving aside that the CAFE standards encourage driving by increasing miles per gallon and kill people by encouraging the production of lighter cars, why would it be necessary for the government to force us to buy higher-mileage cars? Won't we think of this as we look out for of our own financial interest? Are we presumed to be idiots in need of guidance from our congressmen or the head of the Environmental Protection Agency? How much do we know about them anyway? What interests guide them?
Other Priorities
If some of us decide against trading in our cars for more fuel-efficient ones, it means we have higher priorities than saving money on gasoline. Maybe we'll cut expenses elsewhere so we can continue driving less-efficient bigger, heavier cars. People without the governmental habit would understand that freedom means the right to set one's own priorities, regardless of what the neighbors or the politicians think. After all, waste is a meaningful term only in reference to specified objectives. A use of gasoline is not waste if the user values what it achieves over whatever else he could have done with the gasoline. As the Spanish proverb puts it, Take what you want and pay for it, said God.
Energy conservation is just one example of the governmental habit. It is hard to think of any area of life where someone doesn't want to call in the constable to have his way. Don't like smoky restaurants? Fast-food joints offend you? Radio is raunchy? The wrong people want to marry? A company's wages are too meager? An American's prices are too high? A foreigner's prices are too low? The wrong people want to migrate here? Some folks use strange drugs? Online gambling is too popular?
For too many people the answer is the same: there oughta be a law. We've got to break this bad habit before it breaks us.