The first sentence of Chapter 1 of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” reads:
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them.
It’s astounding to consider that, 238 years later, it remains not only true and relevant, but also a central problem of our political landscape. It is absolutely true that many people see a situation or problem and automatically think of government as the default pathway to a solution. This applies both in the affirmative, as in if something’s a good idea, the government should implement or mandate it, and in the negative, as in if something’s a bad idea, the government should ban it.
This puts those of us who believe government should be limited in scope in a bit of a pickle when having conversations with our more statist-minded brethren. If we advocate charity for the poor, they presume we support government redistribution. If we oppose government redistribution, they presume we oppose charity for the poor. If we suggest that narcotics should not be illegal, they presume we support their use. If we suggest that the EPA is overstepping its bounds, they presume we’re in favor of unfettered pollution and despoiling of the land. If we oppose discrimination, they presume we want laws prohibiting it. If we oppose laws that prohibit discrimination, they presume we support discrimination.
The conflation of government and society is self-reinforcing, a positive feedback loop of a sort. The greater the presumption that government should act when there’s a societal desire, the more likely it is that government will act. As government acts on more and more things, we witness two phenomena. First, big-government becomes so ubiquitous in our lives that we process all we see with a nod to the existence and involvement of government. Second, government action has an exclusionary effect in that voluntary actions and free market activities are forcibly crowded out. Sometimes, it’s impossible to effect a particular change simply because government has already tangled itself up in the subject.
This false conflation runs rampant in our fellow citizens, yet if you ask someone the question:
Can you think of something that’s a good thing to do but that should NOT be done by the government?
they’re very likely to answer in the affirmative. Flip the question around and ask:
Can you think of something that’s a bad thing to do but that should NOT be banned by the government?
and they might take a bit longer or need a bit of prodding to answer in the affirmative. By this measure all those people believe in some degree of limited government, yet I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that these same people are far more likely to knee-jerk with “there oughta be a law!” in response to some perceived outrage or injustice.
There is also the peril of unwarranted opposition. Government, via various mechanisms, grants special favor to “alternative” energies such as solar and wind power. If you’re naturally suspicious of government, you may reflexively declare opposition to those technologies rather than embracing a proper free market philosophy of “if they can compete, great.” Solar energy itself isn’t necessarily a Bad Thing, but government making bad (and possibly cronyism-fueled) bets on outfits like Solyndra and using its power and our money to prop up some technologies and punish others is. Likewise, if you’re not on-board with the government’s approach to various things environmental, there’s the risk that your opposition might broaden to other or all things environmental, simply because the government has put you into a particular mindset.
Government is not society. It is a component of society, and its relative size is something that society ultimately determines. But so much of what society is functions perfectly well without government involvement, and worse when government gets involved. Government also lags society. Many of the things government writes into law are a reflection of things society has already agreed upon. The 1964 Civil Rights act followed a social shift. Abolition followed a social shift. Many landmark laws were responses to societal decisions – oftentimes imperfect responses, and usually responses that involved removing laws that society no longer wanted. Would our (racist at the time) society have been better off had Jim Crow laws never existed? Would we have needed a massive civil disobedience movement if segregation wasn’t the law of the land? Would the societal change have occurred sooner and with less heartache? Hard to say. But, we can look at history, recent and old, and find countless other examples of government lagging society. Certainly, society gets things wrong, but government often codifies and enshrines society’s wrongs when the two are conflated.
Society is not government. Unfortunately, decades of growing government have conditioned people to look to government when they see something in their society that they think should be addressed. In doing so, in making that false conflation, they do real harm to society, to liberty, and to the prospects for properly addressing that which they feel should be addressed. Rather than demanding new laws to correct problems, we should encourage people to ask can these problems be corrected without involving government? People might be surprised by how often the answer to that question is “yes!” and how good the non-government outcomes are.
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