In October 2012, the WSJ ran an interview with Ron Johnson a small-government-minded businessman who got elected Senator in Wisconsin in 2010. Therein, he stated:
The government isn’t here to solve our problems. We need government. It’s necessary. But by and large, it’s something to fear because as it grows, our freedoms recede. And as a result, way too many are trading their freedoms . . . for a false sense of economic security.
It’s a repeat of a famous Ben Franklin quote, of course, but I’d argue he doesn’t go far enough. Delete the next to last word, and it’s closer to the mark. Not only is the sense of economic security false, the sense of individual and national security is false. Many want the government to protect us from criminals, from terrorists, from “bad” food, from “bad” drugs, and so forth. Yet, in doing so, it takes away our liberties – the right to self defense, the right to move about as we wish, the right to say what we want without fear of government repercussion, the right to be secure from unjustified searches in our homes and persons, the right to eat and drink what we choose to, and so forth.
And, when the government fails, as it does so often, does it take the blame? Of course not. Nor does it take responsibility. It is established law that the police are not obligated to protect you, meaning you cannot sue them for failure to perform.
The sense of security gained in abdicating personal responsibility to the government is false, hollow, a sham. No outsider or outside agency can do for you what you can do for yourself. They can help – organizations can test products and issue seals of approval that are informative to consumers. Importantly, government is not required for this to happen. Consider UL, USP, NSF, Consumer’s Union, the Snell Memorial Foundation, the IIHS – the list is long. Such organizations are informative, but not coercive, and in a world where people don’t simply presume that government will be on the lookout for all bad things, their clout would be even higher.
Consider two alternate universes. In one, citizens look to the government to establish guidelines and test goods and services for safety and efficacy. In another, the government assumes no such role. In the former, the quality of supervision depends on the good intentions and diligence of bureaucrats and government employees. In the latter, the quality of supervision depends on market forces, including the degree to which consumers “work” at selecting their goods and services. Both have their pitfalls and potential for failure. Government testers are subject to personal biases, influence from others in government, and corruptive forces from those being tested. Independent testers are no different. The only real difference is the regulatory mechanism. With government testing, quality is enforced by the people we elect and those they appoint as their proxies. With independent testing, quality is enforced by consumers being diligent.
By now you should realize where this is going. We have countless examples of corruption and near-corruption in government – rules written by the people they’re supposed to govern, people who have far greater influence over the rules-writers than the consumers do. And, we have countless examples of failure – both in under-testing and over-regulating. There’s little to nothing to stop the government from mistakenly declaring a product unsafe or insufficiently safe – consumer choice is taken away, and even if you have an ironclad set of reasons to believe that you can use a product safely, if the government says no, you’re debarred from even trying.
But what of those people who aren’t diligent? Who will protect them? For starters, companies that put out bad products face both liability and loss of sales. Put out a dangerous product, you get sued. Perversely, our current system shields bad actors, especially in the area of environmental damage, where government has established damage caps, immunities and such to protect businesses from the consequences of their failures. Beyond that, take a look at what’s happening at Amazon and EBay, where user recommendations, freely offered, make or break products and sellers. How many of you trust Amazon star ratings when assessing products? Doesn’t that system seem better than handing the keys over to government and blindly trusting that they’ll do it right? Even the people who don’t bother vetting their purchases or taking responsibility for assessing the quality of the goods and services they use benefit when there’s a lot of market pressure on producers. Not too many business models (late night infomercials aside) rely on only selling garbage to the unsuspecting, and those that do already do so despite massive government bureaucracies meant to protect us.
Of course, it isn’t an either-or choice in the real world. We currently have both government testers and crowd-sourced reviews, and that won’t change. We also have independent testers and ratings services, some of which maintain higher standards and are more overtly scrupulous in their efforts to avoid even the hint of influence. Consumer’s Union, for example, takes no advertising and no free samples. And, these independent testers are utterly reliant on their reputations. One whiff of corruption and people will start looking to other testers and ratings services. What can change is the balance between government, which is coercive, and non-government, which is suggestive and therefore far more compatible with liberty.
People are little different than other creatures in nature in that they respond to stimuli and to the nature of their environment. If you’re on a paved and well-lit road, you’re going to be less attentive and less prepared than if you were driving across an open field at night. You’re not unlikely to observe that “hey, this is great, I can cruise along without a care in the world.” You’ve put your trust in the builders and maintainers of that road, you assume that the road has continuity and no hidden traps or blind turns, and so you speed along merrily. And that’s a good thing. Aha, one might note, the government gave us the road. But that’s myopic thinking – there are and have been countless privately-built roads (and railroads and such) throughout history, and municipalities across the land are increasingly privatizing roads. Private roads are akin to independent testers in this analogy, but we can set aside that element of the analogy in favor of considering where the roads lead. Being on a road artificially constrains your choices. You can far more easily get from A to B, but if you want to go to C, where no road leads, you must step outside that which has already been created. You can get yourself a Land Rover, equip it with all sorts of off-road gear – lights, winches, suspension, satellite phone, spare parts, first aid kit, food, blankets and so forth. You can prepare yourself for going off-road with maps, with weather reports, with information shared by others who have gone that way. And you can set out with high confidence that you’ll safely traverse the open field and arrive at your desired destination. But, if the government says “we will not permit you to go out there,” no amount of preparation and due diligence will get around that decree. Your liberty, even coupled with a massive dose of personal responsibility, is denied you.
If, instead, the government prohibition was not in place, and your destination was one that many others had sought, then you might find that a well-established path had been worn into the open field, and that the information provided either freely by other travelers or by companies that exist and thrive by assisting those such as yourself is plentiful and in your opinion and experience trustworthy, you might make that open-field crossing with as little concern and caution as you traveled the paved road. The free market would have responded to a popular desire.
As mentioned at the top of this piece, government cannot be held responsible for failing you, so your abdication of responsibility in favor of its warm embrace is no guarantee against bad goods or services, nor is it a guarantee of safety. But, when government is assigned responsibility for such, it displaces and discourages independent testers and its coercive power restricts your choices and liberties. You are forced to give up liberty for the false sense of security.
There are no guarantees in life, even from the government. Comparing a system that relies on competing non-governmental testers to the utopian world where government protects us from bad things is pointless and misleading. The comparison should be between what we face today: a government that restricts our choices and declares itself the coercively authoritative arbiter of all our consumer choices without actually being responsible when it fails vs an alternate path: less government, fewer false promises that government will guard over us so we don’t have to, and the unshackling of the free market so that it can more easily provide us the information we want.
The path to that better and freer arrangement starts with all of us. Don’t demand of the government that it test and regulate everything. Don’t demand that it ban products we or it thinks unsafe. Do use and support the services of reputable independent testers. Do share your opinions of products you’ve purchased and services you’ve used. Do rate people on Ebay. Do write reviews on Amazon. In doing so, you will not only contribute to the body of knowledge and information that we all look to, you strengthen it, and that encourages more people to use it instead of simply trusting the nanny government. And as the power and reliability of non-governmental testing and rating grows, the government will be crowded out. As people stop defaulting to the government for protection, they might start noticing the restrictiveness and coercion that hinders and hampers their daily lives and reduces their choices. That’s the path to expanding our liberty – one Amazon review at a time.
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