Go Ahead and Let Him Try:
A Plea For Egonomic Laissez-Faire

by

Daniel B. Klein, Associate Professor of Economics,
Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95053, dklein@scu.edu

Acknowledgments: I have received valuable comments from D. Boaz, M. Cowen, T. Cowen, W. Grinder, T. Klein, T. Krasnasky, R. Kroszner, and D. McCloskey.

At a sandwich shop I used to frequent in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, there was a video game -- Galaga, I believe -- with a sign on it saying, "Must be 16 years old to play." Evidently someone felt that video playing by "youngsters" was "getting out of hand." In truth, playing Galaga can, in the case of the skillful, consume a lot of time, and, in the case of the unskillful, a lot of time and money. It won't expand the mind, and the skills developed are unlikely to be of lasting service, except in playing video games. In favor, however, is the sheer joy of it -- what else is life for?

Suppose we call in a cost-benefit analyst who follows the writings of Thomas Schelling. The analyst says: There are two utility functions to account for, the ephemeral utility function enjoying the video game, and the enduring utility function which gets very little from the activity yet bears a cost in the form of forgone constructive activity. She reaches into her scientist cap and pulls out weights for each of the two utility functions, accounts for the corresponding costs and benefits, and comes up with a policy recommendation of whether to permit the activity. I submit that such a procedure overlooks something important.

For several weeks a certain high school freshman has been sharpening his Galaga game. He has learned not to neutralize all the alien-bugs so one may capture his fighter, which if then rescued delivers double-barreled fire power. No longer is his fighter destroyed by flies hovering treacherously at the foot of the screen. The boy has mastered the wiggles of the scorpion-trio and regularly picks up the point-blank bonus on them. The pattern of the first Challenging Stage is so familiar that he often polishes off all 40 bugs even with single fire power. This week he achieved a new personal best and now claims second position on the machine's record of scores. To the boy the game is a meaningful challenge and a basis for friendship among his peers.

Ignorant of the new ordinance he bikes down to the sandwich shop and discovers the sign on the machine. He asks the sandwich maker, Why? and learns of the new law. Is this not a blow to his self-respect, an assault that can have lasting effect? The local authorities have told him, "trying to advance to the seventh phalanx of bugs is not the proper way to spend your time. You've behaved foolishly these past weeks, possibly reflecting a fundamental personal defect. It's time to shape up." The boy is demeaned -- his notion of self-determination damaged -- by the peremptory ability of the prohibitionists to strip meaning from his life.

He tries to forget the insult and decides to play anyway, thinking, "What are they gonna do, throw me in jail?" But the sandwich maker says, "You gotta be 16 to play. We can get a summons." Looking his age and having given it away by his earlier behavior, he decides nervously to finish just this one game. He doesn't even make it to the fifth phalanx. The machine is taken over by an older and much inferior player, and the boy looks on for a while. He has stopped playing Galaga. Being of tender years the boy lacks the confidence and worldliness to feel only contempt for his prohibitionists. The incident leaves him less sure about his instincts in spending his time and more apprehensive about his pleasures and challenges.

* * *

The literature on multiple selves -- sometimes called "egonomics" - challenges one of the most basic precepts of economics: that the individual knows best in matters that concern her alone. If individual behavior consists of impulses that sometimes conflict, maybe the one that holds sway at a particular moment will do something regrettable. Even Robinson Crusoe generates externalities, as when he gorges himself with clams and fried coconut. Afterward one Robinson curses the now vanished glutton that left him with a bellyache, just as Pigou's laundry curses the factory.⁽¹⁾ The externality is internal. The presence of an externality brings to mind a second economic precept -- that externalities may call for restriction -- undercutting the precept of individual sovereignty. The inclination to use government measures to guard against internal externalities I (and Paul Heyne⁽²⁾) call parentalism.

A careful examination of the multiple selves literature turns up little of a parentalist flavor.⁽³⁾ Perhaps a high respect for letting the individual play out her drama of self-control on her own accompanies a fascination with how people grapple with the problem. Thomas Schelling gives off a very faint (and very humane) parentalist glow when he writes about the "intimate contest for self-command."⁽⁴⁾ Schelling was more outspoken when he appeared on The Today Show in 1985 to comment on the federal excise tax on cigarettes. He advocated doubling the tax on a pack of cigarettes from 16 cents to 32 cents, because it would help people not to smoke. Schelling takes similar parentalist stances in an interview published in Health Affairs (1990).⁽⁵⁾

But regardless of what egonomists say about parentalism, the parentalist potentialities of egonomics are logically clear and routinely heard in policy commentary. The notion of rash and regrettable behavior helps to justify many laws in the United States. In most states one can suffer interrogation and a fine for motorcycling without wearing a helmet. Similar penalties are prescribed for unbuckled seatbelts. Safety zealotry stands behind many of the "consumer protection" laws (in a recent effort to ban drain cleaners a lawyer said, "Using Lewis Red Devil Lye is akin to playing Russian roulette").

Indulgences in nefarious and supposedly self-destructive activities are guarded against. States have limited gambling to keep the poor from falling into bad habits. To help people preserve their self-respect and the family circle we have proscriptions on sexual graphics, commerce in sex, and certain bedroom practices. For those in a self-jeopardizing mental state, mental health experts help them, willy-nilly, through tough times. Laws help prevent the abuse of a wide variety of substances, from heroin to antibiotics. Laws also limit the advertising of liquor and tobacco.

Many laws supplement the wills of young people: there is P.E. in school, in case they neglect to exercise; there is school, in case they neglect to think. Child labor laws help young people escape wage slavery, and ordinances like those of Cliffside Park aid them in managing their time wisely. As they reach adulthood and begin to earn their keep Social Security helps them overcome the impulse of racing through their earnings and arriving at a state of insolvency.⁽⁶⁾ Other laws protect them from buying on impulse, from hiring unqualified plumbers or therapists, from marrying someone who is already married, from murdering themselves. These restrictions are not justified solely on parentalist grounds.⁽⁷⁾ But in as much as they are, the parentalist offers the restriction as a service to the erstwhile partaker.

Schelling's program of self-control is primarily tactical, the message being that "some intriguing parts of strategic self-management are like coping with one's own behavior as though it were another's."⁽⁸⁾ Well, Schelling's program is a nice aid, but if it turns out to be insufficient in subduing the Mister Hydes that lurk, perhaps the government can lend a hand. After all, subduing bad guys is what the government is all about.

Schelling says that he is not talking about "the development of inner strength, character, or moral fiber."⁽⁹⁾ It is to Schelling's credit that he can treat the matter of self-control so searchingly while avoiding "anything mysterious or philosophically profound." But "the development of inner strength" (which in truth Schelling is getting at) may be a point worthy of concern.

The undying nature of the egonomic challenge leaps from Schelling's prose. Nevertheless there prevails a tendency, even among Schelling readers, to think of conflicting selves as special cases. Some people concede that unsmoked cigarettes swirling down the toilet and Christmas Club savings accounts are striking cases, but feel that the idea doesn't extend too much further. How far the idea extends matters when thinking about parentalism. If regrettable behavior arises in isolated and identifiable ways, more or less uniformly across individuals, then a helping hand from the government may be just the thing. If regrettable impulses are pervasive and personal, and the ability to deal with them is an art that applies beyond specifics, an art that is learned and strengthened through exercise and a sense of autonomy, then the parentalist hand needs to show its own restraint.

In a social milieu where many relationships intertwine, out of common purpose or propinquant convenience, there often develop vague notions of propriety that express themselves in shoulds and shouldn'ts, supposed tos, Good and Bad. Drugs are Bad, work is Good. Too often the consensus accords, for focal point reasons, with whatever is passed down from official opinion headquarters.

But even the defender of the official theory of Good and Bad is left with a world of unprejudged options to steer through, trying to do the right thing at the right time in a very particular world only he, and sometimes a spouse, knows. The day is a constant motion through rapids, around bends, always surprises around the corner. To hang on we fall back on our impulses. But our impulses do not always steer us through, or, at any rate, not to the satisfaction of a later us. To discriminate unfailingly between our impulses on the spot, for a remote voice, larger than the waves and bends, to guide us always, is the dream we all dream of. But, on the spot, is this dream a guiding angel, or just another impulse, albeit a better one?

In bed, Sunday morning, cares for the day come to mind. Let's get things done! Searching for resolve I head for the grapefruit juice, but on the way slip on a grease spot: the morning paper, a cafeteria of easy amusement. Two hours later I try to recall the first care on the list. Some people spend hours every day following the press. A simple pleasure, we might say -- some deem it productive for the valuable knowledge it bestows. Could be, but for some I'd call it addiction. The spouses, children and pets tend toward this view. Books are surely a Good thing -- isn't reading the first purpose of primary school? Still there is excess, "the bibliobibuli . . . who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey... They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing."⁽¹⁰⁾

If the country's leading addictions call for an official campaign, I propose the following slogan: Just Say No to Sports. We've got 17 weeks of football, college and pro, plus the bowl games, about 30 weeks of basketball, and about the same for baseball. There is professional hockey, soccer, golf, bowling, boxing, track and field, autoracing and gymnastics. The irresolute can get on a wheel a year in circumference and never get off. The wives tend toward this view. But, hey, what about the thrill of the kick-off return, the sublime beauty of the opposite field base hit, the complete catharsis of one fighter driving another to the mat? Sports are a leading source of beauty and drama. For most American males the role of sports as social glue is probably second to none, and the sheer joy of it is probably second to one, or two. So lay off. Still, I know more than one person who wonders why he bothers to look at the lifeless denouement of nine-to-nothing ball games and messages from the sponsors.

Like sports, minus the grace and nobility, is politics. Around campaign time many people become fanatical for political news, including people who ought to know better. I am often amazed to learn of apparently sensible people solemnly taking in the soothing platitudes of politicians, whether Republocrat or Demopublican. In this case, however, people do not display much regret, in consequence, no doubt, of the outward legitimacy of the addiction.

Even supposed tos can be bad impulses. Paying the bills is Good. But we can fritter away important blocks of time by listening too closely to "Take care of paperwork" impulses. We've got to discriminate even when all the likely options are Good. We are hatched with a stock of impulses, many of them troublesome and unbecoming, that we learn to subdue. We cultivate a richer array of impulses and empower them, through reflection and exercise, to come forward at the appropriate time.

And time isn't the only casualty of regrettable impulses. Schelling has described a vast array of egonomic challenges that, if handled badly, can mean financial, professional, or personal setback. And sometimes financial or professional advancement is the addiction. The attaining of something eclipses the thing itself. Earning money eclipses enjoying the things money buys. I am not speaking of creative passion or even the simple pleasure of carrying a project to completion, but mere compulsiveness. I refer to the pious turners of fast bucks, the promoters of efficiency at all cost, the strategy infatuates, and the vitae vikings. In like fashion I refer to the die-hard dusters and spongers, the feverish bundle-uppers, the politeness hounds, the crack-brained fixers, the insatiable conservationists, the somersaulters for safety, and the pixilated logic-choppers. Sometimes we revel in our compulsion and wouldn't dream of surrendering a bit of it. Sometimes we wonder why the less fervent corners of life, perhaps our health or domestic joy, are growing musty.

As you see, two can play at the game of pejorative flinging (pejoratives like "addiction," "drug abuse," "irrational," "compulsion," and a battery of psychiatric terms that demean⁽¹¹⁾). Part of my point is to suggest the vast similitude of all peaceful habitual activities, namely the human effort to elude boredom. Also, I hope to suggest the depth of self-command.

In a split second a mischievous smile can ruin the mood for an entire evening. Many of us will agonize for weeks, months, even years over a cogent demonstration of our obnoxiousness, wishing we could take it back. Sarcasm that's meant to wound is often regretted, as are pestering and teasing, arrogance and snideness, deceitfulness and trickery, interrupting and abruptness, humiliation and intimidation, complaining and criticizing, shouting and swearing, slapping and kicking.

If we are awake we know that every impulse has its regrettable moments. Sometimes we would like to take back having worked overtime, having pulled our weight, having been forgiving, having not slapped or kicked. The impulse of conciliation may lead one into cowardice, helpfulness merges subtly with toadyism, and the wholesale repression of sarcastic and derisive impulses, especially at an early age, may strand the individual in the slippery chute that empties into conventional thinking. There is great danger in making a habit of caution. Every turn presents a chance for regret.

The course never gets more perilous than in the torrent of love, where basic impulses often find themselves in conflict. Propping up faith in the fairy tale of love while salvaging independence and self-respect is, for many, an impossible feat of navigation. In a song entitled "Two Faces" Bruce Springsteen sings of an inner foe that rebels against the fairy tale. Permit me all five verses:

I met a girl and we ran away
I swore I'd make her happy every day
And how I made her cry
Two faces have I

Sometimes mister I feel sunny and wild
Lord I love to see my baby smile
Then dark clouds come rolling by
Two faces have I

One that laughs one that cries
One says hello one says goodbye
One does things I don't understand
Makes me feel like half a man

At night I get down on my knees and pray
Our love will make that other man go away
But he'll never say goodbye
Two faces have I

Last night as I kissed you 'neath the willow tree
He swore he'd take your love away from me
He said our life was just a lie
And two faces have I
Well go ahead and let him try

* * *

When we are engaged it is an ephemeral self, an impulse, maybe several, that is scurrying to handle the business. I has eyes on but not hands on the business. I is the captain (or, if you like, the soul), confined to a grey room, only a few inches from one side to the other, and equipped with an enchanted violin. He plays tunes that magically summon and set to dancing a crew of pulsing helpers. They perform the tasks, including the thinking. They feel the world, hear its noises, taste its flavors, but their experiences echo back to the captain in the grey room. Through memory the captain relives the echoes. In solitary moments when the impulses are retired -- lying in bed awake, meandering through the hills on a still afternoon, settled behind the wheel on a long, lonely drive -- the captain nearly sees the sun.

The captain aspires to travel certain courses -- to write the book, to build the home, to carry on as a nonsmoker, to be a gentleman. In the small his missions are from A to B -- perhaps the port of impetuosity to the port of better manners. In the large the captain makes his journeys to trace out a self-portrait in the expansive waters. His ship is like a wood carver's knife. It is not a portrait of who he is but of who he wants to be. With his enchanted violin he tries to find the tunes that get his crew to cooperate.

The captain does not page through a wish book and order up the self-portrait of his choice. His journeys are continually adapted from where he has been, both because his history shapes his wants and because his history shapes the inclinations of his crew. The crew, as Schelling has made clear, are not mere puppets waiting to have their strings pulled. They often have an agenda of their own. Perhaps these impulses were well adapted to a former self-portrait, perhaps one of the absurd and beautiful self-portraits of youth. Or perhaps these impulses took shape at a time of sleep for the captain, when there was no course, when the bundle of impulses just took cover from a barrage of instruction from outside. Now these unwanted impulses have become habits. Each impulse now feels entitled to its own little turf. The captain faces a formidable task in subduing and disarming these impulses, just as a statesman or organization chief faces a formidable task in crushing entrenched interests to get his government or organization on the right course. Through determined reflection the captain searches for the resolve to turn out his obstructive impulses, sometimes taking the form of Schelling's tactical warfare. Only through conscious effort does he find a new tune on the enchanted violin. Only over time can a habit be supplanted.⁽¹²⁾

We may never achieve all the features of a projected self-portrait. Ask a smoker if she would welcome a tiny detector, implanted in the arm, that would zap her with pain if she lit up but would otherwise be unnoticed. She knows that it is removable only at considerable trouble and that it would prevent her from smoking. With the zapper her existing "Let's light up!" impulse is overmatched by her "Keep that #$*%&!@ pain out of my arm!" impulse. If, after deliberation, the smoker chooses the zapper, then in this matter she has trouble managing herself. Her ship is not tracing out the desired self-portrait. If, on the contrary, the smoker declines the zapper, she is, on the whole, happy as a smoker (although she still may smoke too much, since the zapper offers only all or nothing alternatives).

What do we want to be? In Harry Nilsson's tale The Point!, everyone in the Land of Point has a point on the top of his head (except Oblio). To produce, to join, to believe. We could all produce more, we could all rise to greater heights in our arena. Schelling gives the example of the Hungarian radical Georg Lukacs, who was magnificently prolific thanks to house arrest.⁽¹³⁾ If "output" is society's goal, maybe we should incarcerate more writers. Obviously we want time for amusement, time to loaf, time to celebrate. We feel most alive when we find combinations of activities that are compatible, cohesive, and challenging.

We may not be everything we would like to be, but the ship sails on and a portrait is traced. Often we struggle and fret to become what we are, and are proud of it. Once we have cultivated the impulses to maintain a self-image, plying along on the same course, retracing the same portrait, becomes more relaxed. But when we will not settle for what we are we have to work on managing ourselves, we have to combat our habits. What makes us want to improve our self-portrait? How do people depose the entrenched impulses? And what makes people joyful in being who they are?

* * *

When Gargantua asked Friar John Hackem, who had shown good sense during the Cake-Peddlers' War, to govern the Abbey of Seuilly, of Bourgueil, or of Saint-Florent, the friar refused, demanding, "For how could I govern others, who cannot even govern myself?" The friar consented to founding his own community, the Abbey of Theleme, where the motto was Fay ce que vouldras (Do as thou wouldst).⁽¹⁴⁾

Such humility is rare, especially in those with political prerogative. As a sovereign one could accommodate an orgy of elaborate impulses. Whether bleeding the subjects would be a matter of remorse depends on the sovereign's character. In the film The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Essex chose death over life because life would mean supreme power, by virtue of bonding with Elizabeth, and supreme power would mean the pursuit of conquest and the ruin of England. He saw in a brave moment the hubris that would prevail.

Hubris breeds regret and in turn an awareness of the need for better self-command. We believe much too readily that when we come to "that bridge" we will remain faithful to the design we now hold. We forget that life is a series of overlapping but separate and often quite engrossing aesthetic experiences, that the mood and vision in which plans are laid may vary greatly from the moods and scenes experienced as the course is traveled. Before hand we say we won't gamble it all, we won't get angry, we won't watch TV, we won't crash the ship on the rocks, we won't, we won't! I say I won't indulge myself in a book all evening and neglect the dishes, but in the morning we have to look at a pan of crusty, cat-licked spaghetti sauce. For a long time I said I wouldn't drive fast, I wouldn't! But I advanced to "Driving Safety" school none the less. I have learned to seek a car with a manual transmission and a small engine because they disarm my dangerous and otherwise supreme impulse to speed excessively ("dangerous" because of the chance of levies by the highway patrol and allied agencies). My impulse to speed is fully armed and aroused by my motorcycle, but I take a dubious pride in saying that I am free from hubris in this regard -- not because I don't speed but because I have surrendered completely to the impulse. O how it basks on the 405!

People discover their hubris and learn how to lessen it not by a compulsory diet of Sophocles, but by experience. Although hubris is like a bull terrier, people who want to overcome it learn to after repeated failure, embarrassment, and regret. In my line a common hubris we learn to overcome is that of perfect recall. Many are slow to realize how fleeting a valuable idea can be. Our first disposition, it seems, is that what we see clearly in the mind's eye now we will see clearly at the appropriate moment in the future. When we sit down to "write it up" it will all come back. Then we finally confront that terror and our mind is nearly blank, just two or three stray ideas are adrift. In terms of impulses the hubris is a rationalization for a "Leave me alone I don't want to make notes and files" impulse. The struggle during the terror teaches us something for next time.⁽¹⁵⁾

Sometimes it is not our own outrageous fortune that sets us in search of better impulses, but the pleasing fortune of someone else. We see someone perform deftly in the sort of situation we usually perform poorly in, and think, "I'd like to learn to do that." Nothing awakens our soul like the image of one we admire. Sometimes the contrast between ourselves and the foil just screams at us to revise ourselves. What these situations are, and what our shortcomings are, are so special, so particular, so personal, that only we can sense the lesson that another's example teaches. Trying to impart deftness of any but the most formulaic sort by uninvited instruction is unlikely to succeed:

Example draws where precept fails
And sermons are less read than tales⁽¹⁶⁾

In fact, overinstruction can turn precepts into mental prophylactics and numb the soul. Here we have a sort of moral application of Hayek's principle about the knowledge of time and place.⁽¹⁷⁾

Turning out an unwanted habit can be quite a battle. We may need to psyche ourselves up, to build a vigilance. We mythologize the importance of self-reform. A parent says, "If I criticize him I will lose his love and deserve to lose it." To learn to buckle-up I told myself that if I don't buckle my seatbelt I am not being fair to someone. By finding meaning in the self-improvement we nurture a new impulse, an impulse crafted to war on the entrenched impulse. The unfolding of the matter -- sensing our shortcoming, reflecting on its nature, molding a new impulse, empowering it to surge forward at the right moment -- gives a touch of drama that makes us rejoice at success. It is a real challenge and a real accomplishment. The interest in reforming our self and the ability to do so are things that outsiders cannot enhance, but can diminish.

* * *

We are all authors of a sort. Of all the legends, tales, allegories, fables, anecdotes and biographies we take in, none commands greater empathy than our own. The setting is gritty and real, the details are many and charming, the cast immense, the characters alive, the plot . . . well, the plot may not be as firm as George Lucas' or even Mark Twain's, but it is of our own authorship.

The helm is ours to command, to become what we want and what we can. May every captain cultivate a crew elaborate, competent, and happy! But measures like "Must be 16 years old to play" do not bolster the captain's confidence and may actually damage it. Virgil said: "They are able because they think they are able." Parentalisms tell them, "you are not able," and thereby may make them unable.

Europeans are often startled by the drinking habits of American college students. In Greece, where alcohol is available to all, teenagers drink wine like their parents do. Treating someone like a child may induce him to behave like a child. There may be two Nash equilibria: one in which the individual is treated like a child and behaves like a child; another in which the individual is treated like an adult and behaves like an adult. A parentalist restriction selects the first equilibrium, which is probably suboptimal and certainly distasteful. In the film Mary Poppins, Jane and Michael write an advertisement for a nanny (which their father tears up) reading, "If you won't scold and dominate us / We will never give you cause to hate us." Sociologists' "expectation theory" or "labeling theory" says that people tend to fulfill the role others expect of them.⁽¹⁸⁾

When choices are made for us we fall into habits we know not why. Our impulses just go day to day without ever passing the captain's circumspection. Our activities do not have a larger meaning. We can march around in a bureaucratic stupor, where each impulse has its sacred little turf. Wean a person in a world of decrees and proscriptions and he may fear life beyond the bureaucracy. When government yelps out Rights and Wrongs, and enforces obedience, people may figure that the government -- or Opinionators of a hundred sources and varieties -- can do the choosing for them. They make a habit of letting others shape their habits.

There will be some who resist. Without a seatbelt law I am proud of my habit of buckling up. With a law I am proud of not buckling up. A similar effect operates for drug use or suicide. With the law I have to ask myself, If I buckle up is it because I have come to my own conclusion that it is a good idea, or because I do as I am told? The second possibility repulses me. If I buckle up a doubt remains. If I don't, I ask myself, is it because I just don't care to or is it because I refuse to obey? So either way there is doubt; but in the latter case the doubt is between two more acceptable possibilities. Similarly, when a husband orders his wife to be loyal, the wife might disobey just to eliminate the possibility in her mind, and his, that he can command obedience. Prohibiting an activity is a sure way of providing a good reason to do it. Defiance is the self-respecting reflex to tyranny.⁽¹⁹⁾

Prohibition may create another motive for partaking. Schelling has pointed out that people may flout self-imposed rules not because they succumb to temptation but because they rush for "freedom from suspense, freedom from indecision, ... from perpetual unfinished decision."⁽²⁰⁾ In the culture that grows like vines on the trellis of prohibition people may have to endure a similar suspense, the question of whether to "try it." People might try it just to relieve themselves of the perpetual unfinished decision. And trying it may not be understood as a mere relief, a mere peccadillo. The embroiling of the activity by prohibition may mean that the individual takes the decision to try it as a shameful brand and is ready to fry in hell. The experimenter is immediately a drug abuser, the adventurous wife is immediately a slut. "All Right! Persecute me!"

Prohibition may eliminate the temptation of nefarious activities, but it doesn't eliminate hubris. It doesn't confer a personal ability for steering a wise course in bewitching circumstances. Just as self-respect cannot be placed under a Christmas tree, self-command cannot be instilled by prohibition. Do we want to live in a society where our fellows are compelled to be Good, or where our fellows feel that they are one of a kind, their lives their own making? In "A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing"⁽²¹⁾ Milton wrote:

If every action which is good or evil in man at ripe years were to be under pittance, prescription, and compulsion, what were virtue but a name, what praise could be then due to well doing, what gramercy to be sober, just, or continent?...

They are not skillful considerers of human things who imagine to remove sin, by removing the matter of sin;...

Suppose we could expel sin by this means; look how much we thus expel of sin, so much we expel of virtue: for the matter of them both is the same: remove that, and ye remove them both alike.

In a too neglected statement of the personal dimension in political philosophy, Wilhelm von Humboldt said, a society "in which the citizens were compelled . . . to obey even the best of [behaviors], might be a tranquil, peaceable, [and] prosperous [one]; but it would always seem to me a multitude of well-cared-for slaves, rather than a nation of free and independent men."⁽²²⁾

Coming to face one's hubris, being aware of our impulses, wanting to learn from example, wanting to make and meet challenges, enjoying what we are -- these abilities run deep. They meet a thousand opportunities. They are not like algebra or good penmanship, mere skills of crew-members. Our society emphasizes the proficiency of certain crew members, but shows disregard and even disdain for the captain's proficiency on his enchanted violin.

Hubris did not conquer Ulysses. But had Ulysses known a world girdled with parentalisms he would have been stripped of his self-command. His ship would have been lost at sea, and with it a tale worth believing in.

  * * *

Without pretense to any fundamental principle from which wise social policy can be derived, let me share a conviction which I think can bear usefully on matters of parentalism (as well as other matters). It is the Pantagruel Code:

Social decency and good conduct show themselves most unmistakably in a readiness to spare others of shame and to preserve their dignity.⁽²³⁾

True social decency does not dwell on, pity, or patronize someone's weakness or disadvantage, real or supposed. It does not rescue when rescue has not been sought. It does not judge or even draw attention to. It proceeds on the assumption that the individual is conducting his affairs as he sees fit, no matter how mad the method may seem. It in no way questions the captain's command.

Some may point to extreme cases to show that the Pantagruel Code is not a complete guide. They might conjure the image of the heroin addict, who has no self-respect to preserve, who cannot control his behavior. He is like a scratched record. The needle just keeps repeating, never getting out of the same horrible groove, never progressing in life. Surely a shove on the needle is justified.

Even for the posited extreme cases we have to ask: Are they really so horrible, really so much worse than the hidden and hellish cage we continue to know as year chases year? Are the extreme cases really numerous? Can the government really help them? What else must we endure if we set up a government machinery to deal with the extreme cases? Even for the extreme cases I am inclined to hold the line, invoking the Albert Jay Nock Principle: If those actually involved can stand it, so can I.⁽²⁴⁾ If someone really is in a horrible groove let him reach out to friends, family, or a support group. If he fails to, is he worth rescuing? A grandmother I know has her own way of putting the Albert Jay Nock Principle: Everyone has a right to go to hell in his own toboggan.

* * *

I have spoken of the personal aspects of parentalism. Before withdrawing, let me mention other reasons to reject parentalism.

**

A friend of mine going back to grade school lives in Greenwich Village, works on Wall Street, and has done his share of cocaine. Several years ago at about the highwater mark of his rate of cocaine consumption I tried out my theory on him that half the allure of doing cocaine was in the illicitness -- the adventure of procuring it, the signal it sends to companions, especially young ladies, the discretionary power in sharing it, the in-ness of having to keep a watch out, the naughtiness of partaking, the renegade delight in experiencing its effects -- in brief, my theory that prohibition was the soil out of which ritual sprouts. I said that if cocaine were as legal as mayonnaise, and bore a similar price, the spice would be removed, the rituals would fade, and his usage would in a short time discontinue altogether. He laughed and said I was probably right.

In his book, The Long Thirst: Prohibition in America, 1920-1933, Thomas Coffey remarks: "It is appallingly ironic, however, that the same methods which totally failed to suppress alcohol, which on the contrary stimulated its greater use, should now be employed against narcotics."⁽²⁵⁾

**

Some of our prohibitions have effects like those witnessed during Prohibition, which H.L. Mencken summarized in 1928: "Its damages widen and multiply. It has corrupted the police almost everywhere; it has prospered and encouraged criminals; it has brought religion into politics; it has sowed bitter and relentless hatreds. The Federal courts, once remote and impeccable, already show its smirches..."⁽²⁶⁾ And defining certain peaceful activities as crimes means a reallocation of public resources. As Thomas Szasz observes, "the more politicians protect people from harming themselves, the more they fail to protect them from being harmed by others."⁽²⁷⁾

**

Justice in this country is little more than a word, and one of the reasons is parentalism.⁽²⁸⁾ Parentalism contributes to the erosion of sound norms of justice. I may be an extreme case, but to some extent others share the sensibility that the enforcement of seatbelt laws, of video game ordinances, of drug prohibitions, of school attendance, of child labor laws are less than noble duties. When I see on the roadside, as I occasionally do, the police frisking some poor Joe, hunched over the trunk of a car, sometimes a gun pointed in his direction, my instinct is not that justice is being served. The police are the bad guys. And my reaction is not so eccentric. The respect for the police (and public attorneys and judges) has been declining steadily and has almost gotten to the point where movie goers feel compromised by a premise of a cop earnestly fighting crime. If a sense of privacy leads one to regard the enforcement of parentalism as distasteful, the symbols of justice are stained. Public support for the police slips even when they are engaged in apprehending actual criminals. Of course parentalist restrictions are not the only dubious duties that the police must assume -- I shall spare you a list -- but parentalist restrictions represent a sizeable and highly visible chunk. The effect on the self-image and morale of the police and the court workers cannot be good, which further reduces public esteem. Parentalist laws contribute to the stoogification of our guardians of justice.⁽²⁹⁾

Then there is the impact on the norms of wrong doing in your neighbor's mind. Selling candy is basically a peaceful and useful service. So is selling cocaine. But selling cocaine is an illegal and (therefore?), according to many people, immoral activity. So is mugging and house-breaking, according to them and me. The sound normative distinction between selling candy and mugging is a shade less distinct. In the evolution of norms of acceptable behavior we cannot expect the preservation of perfect logic. Schelling remarks: "a large number of consumers [of black-market services] who are probably not ordinary criminals - the conventioneers who visit prostitutes, the housewives who bet on horses, the women who seek abortions - are taught contempt, even enmity, for the law by being obliged to purchase particular commodities and services from criminals in an illegal transaction."⁽³⁰⁾

**

I don't doubt the sincerity and good will of Thomas Schelling when he advocates doubling the excise tax on cigarettes, but voices like Schelling's are seldom met with in the world of policy making. In practice, parentalism is mainly a fraud. Let me state the Mencken Thesis. In his denouncements of Prohibition Mencken often put forth his conviction -- a sincere and studied one, I believe -- that uplift and do-gooding of that sort was rooted mainly in: (a) envy, and (b) a yearning to run things, to satisfy one's ego by harassing one's fellow humans. Karl Kraus, who had much to say about both (a) and (b), remarked: "Sensuality is oblivious to what it has experienced. Hysteria is obsessed with what it has not."⁽³¹⁾ Regarding (a), note that it is never the motorcyclist who piously wears a helmet that pushes for helmet laws, and the opponent of other-than-missionary sex is rarely suspected of missionary gusto. After (a) and (b) we can add: (c) compassion posturing, made glamorous (in some circles) by certain dogmas (just as libertarian dogmas make glamorous posturing as a defender of "individual rights"); (d) mere political opportunism, whether vote buying (conspicuous in Social Security and child labor laws), revenue enhancement (conspicuous in sin taxes and the government gambling monopoly), or issue making (conspicuous in drug demonology). Finally, trailing far behind in blood and bone but leading the parade in effigy is: (e) sincere, good-natured altruism. The Mencken Thesis is that (e) accounts for no more than three percent of the animation for uplift.⁽³²⁾

If the Mencken Thesis is true, and especially if it is true and not recognized as true, then there is real hazard in having parentalist palliatives floating free like circus balloons in the tent of policy making. It's-for-their-own-goodism will be invoked by political operators in Washington, Sacramento, and City Hall when putting through a piece of plunder or oppression. Better to wipe It's-for-their-own-goodism off the scrolls of political justification.

* * *

Of Schelling's many vivid examples, one of the most illustrative is the plight of Captain Ahab, whose preservation depended on having his whale-bitten leg cauterized without anesthesia.⁽³³⁾ I like to think that I would help the shipmates pin down Captain Ahab as he resisted the hot iron that was applied to his bloody stump. I would hope they would pin me down if the bloody stump were mine. Likewise I subscribe to parentalism when it comes to toddlers who march off coffee tables and fall headlong into your arms, grinning, or friends, or strangers, in really exceptional circumstances of confusion, emotional debilitation, or intoxication. Of course.

But as a matter of social policy, I see a line here, a glimmering and protruding line, a line worth consecrating.

Endnotes

1. A.C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare (London: MacMillan, 1960), p. 184.

2. "Most people would say paternalistic. But parentalistic is a more accurate and less sexist term." Paul Heyne, The Economic Way of Thinking, eighth edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), p.

3. In their survey on intertemporal choice George Loewenstein and Richard Thaler say, "How can it be rational for a consumer to choose a refrigerator that costs $50 less than another equivalent model but consumes $50 more in electricity every year? While such cases do not establish a need for government intervention, the presumption that consumers choose best for themselves is rather weakened"; `Anomalies: Intertemporal Choice,' Journal of Economics Perspectives 3 (1989). Thomas A. Barthold and Harold M. Hochman discuss parentalist policies in relation to their model of addiction; `Addiction as Extreme-Seeking,' Economic Inquiry 26 (1988), pp. 102-05. See also Robert J. Michaels, `Addiction, Compulsion, and the Technology of Consumption,' Economic Inquiry 26 (1988), pp. 85-86, and Tyler Cowen, `Self-Constraint versus Self-Liberation,' Ethics 101 (January 1991): 360-373. In a brief discussion Jon Elster rejects parentalism, Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 84-85. For discussions of the justifications of paternalism see John Kleinig, Paternalism (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984) and the collection edited by Rolf Sartorius, Paternalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

4. See Thomas C. Schelling, `Egonomics, or the Art of Self-Management,' American Economic Review 68 (1978), pp. 290-94; `The Intimate Contest for Self-Command,' and `Ethics, Law and the Exercise of Self-Command,' both in his Choice and Consequence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). In the last, for example, one gets the feeling that Schelling might favor a mandatory delay procedure for getting a tattoo, which he describes as a "permanent mutilation" (p. 105). On the other hand, in the essays on organized crime (chaps. 7 and 8) Schelling's words have a certain libertarian resonance.

5. `Perspectives of an Errant Economist: A Conversation with Tom Schelling,' interviewed by John K. Iglehart.

6. Laurence J. Kotlikoff presents paternalism as a leading argument for Social Security, saying, "[f]or all such myopic, misinformed, miscalculating, and lazy households, government-forced saving and insurance purchase through Social Security...may be highly beneficial." In his conclusion he says, "empirical evidence...suggest a basis for paternalistic concern about inadequate savings and insurance;" `Justifying Public Provision of Social Security,' Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 6 (1987), pp. 689.

7. Several of the restrictions described are defended with the charge-of-the-state argument: people must be restrained because the cost of catastrophe falls on the community chest. Being bound collectively by the long fingers of the welfare state, we much bind ourselves individually with seat belts.

8. Schelling, `Intimate Contest,' p. 63.

9. `Intimate Contest,' p. 69.

10. H.L. Mencken, Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), p. 59.

11. See Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin (New York: Doubleday, 1973), pp. 20-22, 26, 31-32, 64, 70-76, 119; and Heresies (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1976), pp. 36-42, 137-38, 145-46.

12. My captain-crew metaphor is akin to the more technical metaphors of Richard H. Thaler and Hersh M. Shefrin, `An Economic Theory of Self-Control,' Journal of Political Economy 89 (1981), pp. 392-406, and Gordon C. Winston, `Addiction and Backsliding: A Theory of Compulsive Consumption,' Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (1980), pp. 295-324, and to the less technical metaphor of Walt Whitman, `That Shadow My Likeness,' [1860], The Portable Walt Whitman (New York: Viking Press, 1973), p. 201.

13. 'Ethics, Law and the Exercise of Self-Command,' p. 91.

14. Rabelais, The Portable Rabelais, Samuel Putnam (ed.) (New York: Viking Press, 1946 [1533]), pp. 198-200.

15. As does reading D.N. McCloskey's The Writing of Economics (New York: MacMillan, 1987), pp. 13-15.

16. Matthew Prior, Poems on Several Occasions, 1708.

17. Friedrich A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 80.

18. See Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils' Intellectual Development (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968); and Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, revised and enlarged (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1957), pp. 430-36.

19. In one of his masterpiece's having nothing to do with egonomics, however, Schelling gives a subtle and plausible argument why we might welcome laws mandating the use of hockey helmets, motorcycle helmets, and seatbelts; 'Hockey Helmets, Daylight Savings, and Other Binary Choices,' in his Micromotives and Macrobehavior (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), esp. p. 224.

20. 'Intimate Contest,' p. 81.

21. I find this quotation opposite the title page of A Plea for Liberty: An Argument Against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation, Thomas Mackay (ed.) (New York: D. Appleton, 1891).

22. The Limits of State Action [1791], J.W. Burrows (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 79. In On Liberty [1859], J.S. Mill praises von Humboldt's emphasis on personal development and makes individuality a primary value in his discussion. Alexis de Tocqueville makes some characteristically beautiful remarks on this theme; Democracy in America, 2 vols. [1835/1840], (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), pp. II, 336-39, 347; he also makes pertinent observations about the self-reliance of women in America, pp. II, 209-211.

23. See H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), pp. 172-75; H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, pp. 231, 233, 211; and Albert Jay Nock, 'Pantagruelism,' [1932], in Charles H. Hamilton (ed.), The State of the Union: Essays on Social Criticism (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991). In "The Gay Science" (1882) Nietzsche wrote, "What do you consider most humane? -- To spare someone shame" (Aphorism 274). See also Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin, pp. 14, 15, and Heresies, p. 49.

24. I am unable to relocate this passage in Nock's writings. In Nock's article "On Doing the Right Thing," he says: "The practical reason for freedom, then, is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fibre can be developed." The State of the Union: Essays in Social Criticism, C.H. Hamilton (ed.) (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), p. 323.

25. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. xi. See also Mencken, Notes on Democracy, pp. 162-63.

26. H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe, Malcolm Moos (ed.) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), p. 217.

27. Heresies, p. 77.

28. An indictment of our institutions of justice is made by Bruce L. Benson, The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State (San Francisco: Pacific Institute, 1990).

29. On the stoogification of judges, see Mencken's "Justice Under Democracy," Prejudices: Fourth Series (New York: Knopf, 1924), pp. 85-102.

30. "Economics of Criminal Enterprise," Choice and Consequence, p. 177.

31. See Thomas Szasz, Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry (re-issue) (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), p. 153.

32. "Mencken Thesis" is a term of my invention; see Mencken's 'The Anatomy of Ochlocracy,' [1921] in H.L. Mencken's Smart Set Criticism, William H. Nolte (ed.) (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1987), esp. pp. 154-156; 'Moral Indignation,' in A Book of Calumny (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1918), pp. 23-26; Notes on Democracy, pp. 35ff, 155ff, 176ff; A Carnival of Buncombe, p. 164; Minority Report, p. 261.

In the second volume of his memoirs, Mencken did dub his own Mencken's Law: "Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel;" Newspaper Days (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), p. 38. Szasz makes many remarks in tune with the Mencken Thesis, principally elaborating on item (b); see The Second Sin, pp. 33, 46, 57, 65, 120, 121.

33. 'Ethics, Law and the Exercise of Self-Command,' p. 83.

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