Dr. Nelson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado where he has taught since 1950. Articles and papers by him have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and books in the United States and abroad.
A veritable frenzy to multiply government regulation presently rules almost every electorate and every legislature. What are we to say of this obsession? We might point out that it has a close affinity to the practices of socialism. But is it, therefore, wrong? May it not be justified? Is not law a good, something we all desire? Let us examine the last question first.
We do not desire our own oppression. That can be affirmed with certainty. Do government laws oppress us? And if so, all laws, or only some? The answer is: some do, and some do not.
Some government laws prohibit what we find it no effort not to do and command what we find it no effort to do. There are, for instance, laws against murder and laws that command us to drive on the right-hand side of the street.
These and like laws are not oppressive nor do we find them to be. But plainly, many laws that are legislated by government do exact from us an effort in our obeying them. The farmer, for example, has to curtail or ignore his own judgment and desires in obeying laws that tell him just how much he may plant. That takes effort. And so does having to measure his acreage, having to fill out the many forms that always accompany such laws, and so on. When a law exacts effort from us it is, to that extent, oppressive. Thus, we may conclude that most current government regulation is oppressive. Moreover, even laws that taken separately might not be oppressive become oppressive when multiplied sufficiently. It does not require any particular effort, for instance, to drive on the right-hand side of the street; but if this regulation is combined with a hundred others as innocuous, just keeping in mind what all the regulations are and attempting to obey them all requires effort. Thus, we find oppressive the mere number of laws and regulations.
What justification is offered, then, for this present insistence on multiplying laws? A typical excuse is that without government regulation men’s lives and affairs must lapse into chaos. This prevalent belief makes it seem incumbent that every nook and cranny of our lives and affairs be regulated by government, no matter how oppressive such regulation may be; for nothing, we shall be inclined to admit, is worse than chaos. I take exception to the belief that without government regulation men’s affairs and lives must lapse into chaos. How, though, can the validity of my view be demonstrated?
If we could cite a case where order in a certain area of men’s affairs prevailed without government regulation, we should have gone a long way in substantiating our claim. But, even more conclusive would be to cite a case where government actually opposed private efforts to produce order out of chaos and, yet, order was produced. For this case would be tantamount in kind to what is sometimes called a “crucial experiment” in science. All important variables would be accounted for and controlled: a certain chaotic condition in man’s affairs; private effort; and government action. A determinate result would be obtained through the direct agency of private effort — namely, order where there had been chaos. Since government action was moving in an opposite direction to private action with respect to the result obtained, it could not be held that government action was somehow indirectly the cause of this result. Thus, private effort must have been the cause; and hence, government regulation could not be claimed to be the necessary condition of order in men’s affairs.
A Time to Remember
Let us envisage, first, the possible case of every city and general locality in the United States having its own time, determined by the position of the sun at noon. And let us compound this variety of times by supposing that a vast network of railroads exists and that each railroad employs the time of its home terminal in all its operations and schedules. In picturing this state of affairs, we picture — I think it must be agreed —a temporal chaos. We may suppose, moreover, that this chaotic multiplicity of times would impose almost unsupportable burdens on travelers, shippers, and the railroads. Presumably, we have been envisaging a mere possibility. Has any such state of temporal chaos ever in fact existed in the United States? A look at history reveals that it has.
Before 1883, local time — that is, time determined by the local noonday position of the sun — prevailed throughout the United States. Thus, there were more than 26 local times in Michigan, 38 in Wisconsin, 27 in Illinois, and 23 in Indiana. A traveler going by rail from Maine to California had to change his watch 20 times during the trip if he meant to keep accurate time. In addition, each railroad operated its trains according to the local time of its home terminal. The Pennsylvania Railroad, whose home terminal was in Philadelphia, employed a time that was 5 minutes slower, for example, than New York’s, the home terminal of the New York Central, and 5 minutes faster than Baltimore’s, the home terminal of the Baltimore & Ohio. Not surprisingly, this multiplicity of time standards confounded passengers, shippers, and railway employees alike. Errors in keeping time and correlating local times resulted in innumerable inconveniences and costly disasters. Passengers missed trains in wholesale lots; the trains themselves frequently collided.1
Something obviously had to be done. Given our contemporary prejudices, we would naturally think that government had to step in and did step in to bring order out of chaos by legislating the time zones with which we are familiar today. But not so at all.
What actually happened was poles apart. By 1872, a majority of railroad executives were convinced that some system of time zones should be established. A meeting of railroad superintend-ants was convoked in St. Louis, calling itself initially the Time-Table Convention and later the General Time Convention. Under the guidance of its secretary, William Allen, former resident engineer of the Camden & Amboy Railroad, plans were drawn up to eliminate the chaotic multiplicity of local times. The first plans projected the adoption of time zones bounded by meridians an even hour apart. None of these plans passed the muster of close examination. Finally, in 1881, Allen conceived the idea of five time zones based, not on theoretical considerations, but practical knowledge of geography, economics, the location of large cities, and the general habits of the populace. The plan provided for time zones roughly divided at the 75th, 90th, 105th, and 120th meridians west of Greenwich and thus falling approximately on the longitudes of Philadelphia, Memphis, Denver, and Fresno. The General Time Convention adopted Allen’s plan on October 11, 1883, and selected the noon of November 18 as the moment it should go into effect. At that precise moment the railroads, all acting in perfect concert, changed their operations and schedules from local to the new time.2
Let us note: this regulation of time initiated by the railroads was a purely private undertaking. The new time zones had no force of law. No one except railroad employees was compelled to set his watch by the new standards. What, then, was the response of the general public? Except for a few preachers who thundered that the change of time “was a lie” and “un-Christian,” a few newspaper editors who objected that the railroads were tyrannically dictating time to 55,000,000 Americans and should be stopped by law from doing so, and some local politicians who cried that the act was “unconstitutional, being an attempt to change the immutable laws of God Almighty and hard on the workingman by changing day into night”3 — a typical political misinterpretation of plain fact — except, in short, for the predictable fulminations of some local politicians, clerics, and journalists, the general public found the change good and adopted it. Without being forced, people by and large set their watches by the new railroad time; towns and cities followed — indeed, had to follow — suit.
Government’s Role
Now, all this time, what was the attitude or response of government? As we have already noted, some local governments and their officials opposed the new dispensation, though the opposition proved ineffective. What about the Federal government? Surely — behind the scenes at least — it must have loaned a helping hand to the Time Table Convention and encouraged or indeed inspired the bringing of order out of chaos! But, again, not so. In fact, the very opposite. Let me quote from Holbrook’s illuminating account:
The traveling public, and shipper too, quickly fell in with the new time belt plan, and naturally found it good. But Uncle Sam wasn’t ready to admit the change was beneficial. A few days before November 18th the Attorney General of the United States issued an order that no government department had a right to adopt railroad time until authorized by Congress. The railroads went right ahead with the plan, and the Attorney General, according to a good but perhaps apocryphal story, went to the Washington depot late in the afternoon of the 18th to take a train for Philadelphia. He was greatly astonished, it was reported, to find he was exactly 8 minutes and 20 seconds too late.4
It might be added that on March 19, 1918 — a full generation after the general adoption of railroad time by the country — Congress passed the Standard Time Act, which gave (to what purpose, it is hard to see) a government commission power to define by law the boundaries of each time zone. One is reminded here of a plagiarist who, having stolen and in the process mangled another man’s work, then takes credit for its creation.
We have demonstrated as conclusively as such things can be demonstrated that government regulation is not necessary to the existence of order in men’s lives and affairs. The belief that it is, therefore, is false. Does it follow that we have shown that the current multiplication of oppressive government regulation is unjustified? Not quite. We have shown that this current practice is not justified by the belief that without government regulation men’s affairs would lapse into chaos.
It might be claimed, however, that the present multiplication of oppressive law can be justified on other assumptions. For example, it might be argued that though private effort as well as government regulation can produce order in men’s affairs, government regulation can produce greater order, or greater safety, or greater security, or greater prosperity; and that, on these grounds, the multiplicity of government regulation currently taking place is justified, even though oppressive. Now, I am sure that each of these claims can be shown to be absolutely false. I merely want to point out that we have not shown this in the present paper. Our results have thus been more limited.
The many-headed monster of socialistic misconception which dominates the modern mind is not likely to be slain by one blow. However, cutting off one of its heads is a step toward its eventual destruction. We have, I believe, lopped off the most central and voracious one.
—FOOTNOTES—
¹ See, Stewart H. Holbrook, The Story of American Railroads (New York: Crown Publisher, 1947), pp. 354-55.
2 Ibid., pp. 355-56.
3 Ibid., p. 356; see also p. 357.
4 Ibid., p. 359.
