Liberalism (Bites)

Libertarian Paternalism?

By J. Wesley ⋅ June 23, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Back in 1983, Joe Sobran took George Will apart in his American Spectator article “George Will and the Contemporary Political Conversation.” He argued, rather justly, that Will’s self-proclaimed “Toryism” was preening and scored unfair points against the rest of American conservatism (a bit like Compassionate Conservatism.) As Sobran pointed out, Will’s conservatism saw government as a vehicle for the recreation of society.

Time marches on and George Will has mellowed into one of the finer columnists in America. And thankfully, he no longer makes his name by impugning the rest of us. Nevertheless, he’s still enamored with State intervention in the lives of people. The dismal failure of the past sixty years seems to have made little impression upon him.

In his latest column, he praises the notion of “libertarian paternalism” as advocated by Cass Sunstein at the University of Chicago. As Will writes:

“Thaler and Sunstein say the premise of libertarian policy is that people should be generally free to do what they please. Paternalistic policy ‘tries to influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves.’ So ‘libertarian paternalism is a relatively weak, soft, and nonintrusive type of paternalism because choices are not blocked, fenced off, or significantly burdened.’”

Intead, the government consciously frames the available choices of individuals, thereby directing their decisions without ever putting a mandate into place.

“Thaler and Sunstein stress that if ‘incentives and nudges replace requirements and bans, government will be both smaller and more modest.’ So nudges have the additional virtue of annoying those busybody, nanny-state liberals who, as the saying goes, do not care what people do as long as it is compulsory.”

Such thinking badly misunderstands the nature of power. The notion of the government subtly, purposefully crafting and manipulating the choices of individuals is much scarier than that of government dictating those choices. When government power is bound up in statutes and regulations, people can easily identify its influence and work to change it. Such “soft” power as advocated Thaler, Sunstein and Will (and Obama), is much less easy to resist and much more destructive to real liberty. “Libertarian paternalism” creates rat mazes in which the choices of individuals are crafted from above yet leave them the illusion of freedom.