nothingsinister asked: (I tried to reply to your message but I queued it and it posted to my page accidentally, oops.)
hipsterlibertarian asked: Politics, please. If you click the headline of that post, it should be all set up. Thanks again!
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done, glad to help
Also, I just wanted to say I really enjoy your tumblr. Your post are enlightening, interesting and challenging. Please continue to educate me with your extensive knowledge!
One last thing. I had a discussion recently with a few friends and found myself a little stuck on how to counter this argument. Please take a second to read and comment on if you can. I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas, anything is appreciated! (I also don’t mind if you use this in a post, just please credit appropriately)
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While discussing a multitude of topics, most notably health care, I was arguing the importance of moral hazard created by increased regulation. By increasing the intervention of regulation in our lives, a moral hazard is created that begins to remove people’s perception of responsibility, making them more careless because they assume they will be taken care of anyway. These bad decisions lead to increased dependency on a system that will inevitably demand more resources down the road.
After setting up my perspective, my friends countered with the argument that the majority of America is ‘too stupid’ to make good decisions for themselves. Giving them the opportunity, most citizens would make poor decisions, as seen by our problem with obesity, smoking, etc…
I was stunned at their comment; who are you to say that someone is ‘too stupid’ to take care of themselves? What makes one more qualified to make decisions for others? I tried to explain to them that the generalizations they are seeing about American’s stupidity are developed from extreme outliers in the gene pool, that the fantastic stories in the news are hyped and few and far between.
They didn’t buy my argument and pointed to the falling test scores in schools and other stereotypes similar to the movie Idiocracy. (I attempted to explain falling test scores by using the CATO institutes data on public vs private school funding and test scores, but that fell on deaf ears.)
At this point, I am frustrated by how my friends could boil down their argument for more government intervention in our lives by saying that most of America is too stupid and needs someone else to make that decision for them (or prevent them from making bad decisions). Despite my plea that only a totalitarian government could ever attempt to guarantee a world free of problems at the expense of your liberty, they still called for more regulation regarding health care and other things.
How does one argue that Americans are smart enough to make their own decisions about health care, insurance, diet, and other things? How would you begin to counter such a broad and hateful comment on the ability of people as a whole to make rational decisions for themselves?
Thanks, Kevin
First, kudos on the moral hazard argument. If you can explain that coherently, you’re miles ahead of most people, libertarian and otherwise.
As for the too stupid argument…well, it’s a tough one. To start with, I think it’s good that they openly make the argument. That gives you an easier starting point than you’d have if they denied that this is their real opinion of their fellow citizens, as many favoring bigger government will do.
I think you can go two primary ways with this. The first, which they will probably like less, is to say that if the average American is too stupid to care for himself, what makes them think they’re so infinitely smarter that they have the best plan to care for not only themselves but also 310 million other people? As I said in an earlier post today, they’re playing the role of the “organizer” of which Bastiat speaks:
If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?
It’s basically Hayek’s fatal conceit:
Socialism fails, unavoidably, because it is based on the flawed concept, the “fatal conceit,” that one man or one group, one cabinet of commanding officials or one central committee, or one team of planners from Harvard and Yale, can gather and understand enough information in order to reshape the world around them according to their wishes, reshape human nature, and design an economic system that can outstrip the overall and long run performance of the decentralized and basically self-ordering and spontaneous processes of the marketplace.
So this first line of argument accepts their premise that people are stupid, but says that giving the government control over health care is not a smarter plan. The second line of argument is to deny the stupidity — or at least its relevance to the conversation.
Your friends are right, of course, that government schools do an abysmal job educating Americans. Indeed, why they would want to give government control over health care when it has failed so drastically with education is beyond me. But they do, and it would be unrealistic to deny this point about poor education.
Nonetheless, low test scores and bad education do not equate to economic, or common sense, stupidity. This is largely because the vast majority of people, however uneducated, are aware of what they need to survive, as well as the needs of their families. And most of them have a decent idea of what to do to fill those needs (i.e. get a job, make some money, pay the bills, etc. And that’s only the most basic plan which nearly anyone can manage).
So at least for the kind of decisions you’re discussing with your friends, most Americans have the self (and familial) interest they need to deal with it themselves — though they may lack the education and even intelligence. I’m no objectivist, but self interest goes a long way in this sort of thing; even animals can learn to do what it takes to get food (outside of their natural instincts, that is — a begging dog, for instance). Surely no one would suggest Americans can’t do at least the same thing.
For the minority which is incapable of recognizing its own self interest, there are charitable organizations to fill the gap. But most people have the self interest necessary to decide what health care, insurance, and food is best for their families (To hearken back to the first argument, you could also point out that your friends’ definition of what is best may not be the same as what other people think is best for themselves — and who are they to decide what’s right for everyone?).
Those are the two arguments I would try first. Good luck and let me know how it goes! (Sorry, this is loooong!)
