Each time the government regulates your choices, it attempts to sell the notion that it cares more about your well-being than you do.
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That ridiculous notion is the guiding principle beneath countless laws and regulations regarding employment, health care, consumer products, retirement savings, and personal safety. The underlying assumption is that, left to your own judgment, you will make dumb decisions, and therefore, the government must step in as your guardian.
But Americans elect representatives, not self-appointed conservators. We want to make our own choices, unrestricted by collectivist policies that subjugate our preferences to those of politicians and bureaucrats.
No one bears the consequences of decisions that affect your life more directly than you do. You experience the rewards of wise choices and the costs of foolish ones. Your family depends upon your success. Decisions affecting your income, your health, your future, and your happiness should reflect your personal ambitions, not those of overlords.
Minimum wage laws are said to protect workers from accepting wages that politicians argue are exploitative. Mandatory health insurance requirements presume that the government can better judge your medical needs than you can. Retirement savings mandates imply individuals are incompetent to prepare for old age. Restrictions on things like tobacco, flavored vaping products, and even oversized soft drinks are justified in order to save you from your preferences.
The government increasingly assumes responsibility not merely for protecting citizens from one another, but from themselves. That erroneous presumption represents a dangerous philosophical pretense.
America’s founders envisioned government primarily as a protector of liberty. Its legitimate purpose was to safeguard individuals against force, fraud, theft, and foreign invasion while leaving peaceful adults free to direct their own lives.
The nanny state reverses that relationship. Instead of protecting your freedom to make decisions, the government claims authority to make decisions that treat sovereign citizens as government property.
The rationalization is always cloaked in compassion. “We’re protecting workers.” “We’re protecting consumers.” “We’re protecting children.” “We’re protecting public health.” In reality, their focus is on protecting lobbyists and donors.
Consider minimum wage laws.
If two consenting adults voluntarily agree on the terms of employment, why should a third party — government — possess veto power over that agreement?
Everyone works at the job he has determined to be the best opportunity available. Removing options never serves the people; it simply restricts them.
Many workers willingly accept lower wages because their primary interest is entering the workforce, acquiring skills, obtaining experience, or simply earning something instead of nothing. Minimum wage laws not only create arbitrary barriers to employment; they ignore the interests of those they pretend to protect.
It is important to realize that minimum wage laws were initiated not because the poor demanded them, but rather because Big Labor sought to raise the cost of competitive labor. It was a cronyism scheme — one that destroyed a basic right to enter into a mutually agreeable contract.
Then there is Obamacare.
Mandatory health insurance requirements forced consumers to purchase coverage beyond what they wanted or needed. That has driven health premiums sky-high. A healthy young adult may prefer a less expensive catastrophic policy. An older individual may value different coverage altogether. Neither may want to pay for mental health or pregnancy coverage.
Yet lawmakers required everyone to purchase standardized plans containing numerous mandated benefits. This demand only fattens the coffers of medical service providers and expands the realm of government — both at the expense of individuals.
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The same reasoning extends to mandatory retirement contributions. Politicians tell us we need to have a Social Security system to insure income in our old age. But the facts beg to differ. The average worker who toils for 30 years and pays $166,000 into the system collects about $2,000 a month in Social Security at age 67. If he dies before that, that money is lost. His heirs collect nothing.
Had the same worker invested the same money in the stock market, he would have more than half a million dollars at age 67 — and if not he, his heirs.
Think about how the incentives differ between individuals and government officials.
Unlike individuals, when bureaucrats make bad decisions, they rarely bear the consequences. A regulator whose policy destroys thousands of jobs generally keeps his pension. A legislator who passes ineffective laws just keeps passing more laws. A failing government agency often receives larger budgets rather than smaller ones.
The result of nanny state provisions is always the same. They reduce options for consumers and citizens to empower the politically connected.
The government’s paternalistic policies are marketed on the pretense of “good intentions.” And while the unseen costs imposed upon liberty, opportunity, and innovation are largely ignored, the greatest casualty of all is individual responsibility.
Freedom and responsibility are inseparable companions. Every time the government removes an individual’s ability to choose, it also removes an opportunity to exercise judgment, learn from mistakes, develop wisdom, and accept accountability.
A society that continually teaches citizens that experts should make their decisions gradually produces citizens poorly equipped to make decisions for themselves.
It cultivates dependency. The ultimate irony is that politicians routinely campaign by promising to trust the people while governing as though the people cannot be trusted.
A free society begins with a different assumption: an acknowledgment that each of us naturally acts in our own self-interest. It recognizes that in no world does a distant bureaucrat care more about your well-being than you do.
The government has an indispensable role in protecting liberty, enforcing contracts, punishing crime, and defending the nation. But those responsibilities differ fundamentally from directing the everyday choices of competent adults.
The core principle of government in general, and socialism in particular, is to transfer wealth, power, and decision-making from the individual to the state. That simple truth is at the core of each and every government action without exception.
The American government was not created to tell us how to live; it was created to protect our liberty. In a free society, the individual’s pursuit of happiness should not be subjugated to the government goal of creating a nation of sheep.
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