Controls breed controls – part 3 — VOICES for REASON

In the 1972 case, U.S. v. 12 200-Ft. Reels of Super 8mm Film, then Chief Justice Warren Burger noted:

The seductive plausibility of single steps in a chain of evolutionary development of a legal rule is often not perceived until a third, fourth, or fifth ‘logical’ extension occurs. Each step, when taken, appeared a reasonable step in relation to that which preceded it, although the aggregate or end result is one that would never have been seriously considered in the first instance.

The phenomenon Chief Justice Burger was observing is wider than the development of legal rules. If people were confronted with a stark choice between freedom and dictatorship, few would choose dictatorship. But that is not what they are confronted with. While it’s true that to compromise the principle of freedom puts one on a path that ultimately leads to total enslavement, it is a long path, and each step of increasing government control can seem necessary in relation to the step that preceded it.

A few recent examples:

Example 1. In our op-ed Be Healthy or Else! ARC’s Yaron Brook and I noted two proposals that, taken by themselves, should have been shocking to anyone who values their right to liberty. John Edwards (pre-scandal) proposed forcing Americans to undergo preventative health care. In Britain, a Tory panel suggested that its citizens should be forced to adopt a government-prescribed “healthy lifestyle.”

But there was little uproar in response. After all, it was argued, since the government picks up the tab for many Americans’ and most Britons’ health care costs, it’s only fair that “society” be able to do something to reduce those costs. As we wrote in the op-ed, “When the government introduces force into the healthcare system to relieve the individual of responsibility for his own health, it is inevitably led to progressively expand its control over that system and every citizen’s life.”

Example 2. A few weeks ago I blogged about Senator Max Baucus’s attempt to silence critics of his health care bill by launching an investigation of the health insurance company, Humana. But what should have set off major alarm bells and made front page news barely raised eyebrows. After all, it was said, Humana was a beneficiary of the government’s Medicare Advantage program, and was therefore understandably subject to strict guidelines regarding what it was permitted to say to its customers.

Example 3. As I noted in the first post in this series, America now has a “pay czar” dictating compensation policies for private companies. While some politicians have been advocating government control over executive pay for years, they couldn’t get anywhere before the financial crisis. But now that the government has bailed out failing companies with a massive infusion of taxpayer dollars, regulating pay at those companies is almost uncontroversial.

In his famous 1785 tract, Memorial and Remonstrance, James Madison wrote:

[I]t is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The free men of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much soon to forget it.

To restate Madison’s lesson: Instead of examining each new call for government intervention as if it were an isolated bolt from the blue, we must see “the consequences in principle.” We must ask: is this on the principle of freedom–or of authoritarian rule? The alternative is to continue to be seduced by the “plausibility of single steps” down the road to an end we do not desire.

Image: Wikimedia Commons