From Force to Persuasion

A couple of years ago I was chatting with a neighbor about the rolling reassessment that had recently swept though our part of town. We both felt our assessments had risen disproportionately in comparison with similar homes in our area. After a few minutes of grumbling the man shrugged his shoulders and sighed. “Taxes are the price you pay for civilized society,” he said.

With all due respect to my neighbor and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who originally stated this idea, I strongly disagree. It seems to me taxes are the price we pay for uncivilized society.

This is true on two levels and on the surface is easy to see. Since many tax dollars are spent on law enforcement, courts and national defense we can see a direct correlation between uncivilized behavior and the use of tax money.

But at a deeper level, anti-social behavior is the justification of state-involvement in just about every aspect of modern life. When people fail to treat themselves, their family members, their neighbors or communities with kindness and respect the state has the opening it needs to respond with force. If we are to consider ourselves a civilized society we need to rely on persuasion rather than force in order to achieve the social goals we aspire to.

Force, in the form of new laws and programs, is all too often the first resort amongst modern lawmakers. Increasingly they create legislation “for our own good” that compels certain personal behaviors in which they really should not be involved. Dietary and seatbelt laws are good examples of this controlling behavior. In these cases any damage is inflicted mainly on the person engaging in the undesirable behavior yet the government has stepped in to protect him from himself.

Unfortunately, this attitude has permeated society to the point where whenever we consider one behavior to be superior to another we automatically turn to the government to compel our fellow citizens to adopt this preferred conduct. The expression, “there ought to be a law” is far too often said in more than a little seriousness.

Consider a discussion I was recently involved in. The topic was recycling and one of the people in the group declared “I think it should be mandatory.”

Let’s slow down and think about what that means. Does she really want to give the government power to go through garbage in search of violations? Does she really want to make a criminal out of the harried mother who throws out a baby food jar rather than preparing it for the recycling bin, or the senior citizen who quite reasonably fears cutting himself on the sharp and jagged edge of the cat food can lid? Of course she does not mean all this but ultimately this is what law does – it makes certain behaviors illegal and therefore subject to the force embodied in government.

It is a mistake to believe that because something is legal it is morally good or because something is illegal it is morally bad. Some laws are morally reprehensible, such as many of the laws existent in Nazi Germany, Communist Russia or even the United States during some eras. Most laws are morally neutral and represent the triumph of one group over another in gaining control of fellow citizens.

Liberty consists of voluntary interactions between individuals and this is perhaps best represented by commerce. The unwarranted vilification of the free market system notwithstanding, for the most part we are not forced to participate in commercial transactions but participate willingly. A sad exception to this is the recently enacted health care legislation, which will compel persons who do not wish to purchase health insurance to buy government-approved policies. This intrusion into the free market by a player as large and powerful as the federal government is sure to wreak havoc on the market as well as set a dangerous precedent in control of a large sector of the economy.

Lawmakers demonstrate a low opinion of us every time they pass a law to protect us from ourselves. Unfortunately, far too many of us have earned their scorn. It is probably not coincidental that government has taken upon itself the role of moral arbiter at same time social institutions such as churches are losing influence among us. If we are to be a free society we as individuals need to seek out and support the institutions that persuade and inspire people to regulate their own behavior and help them aspire to higher standards of human thought and action.

Regulating human behavior through coercive laws addresses outward symptoms rather than root causes and weakens our ability to self-regulate. Persuasion rather than compulsion teaches us to take responsibility for our own behavior and ultimately strengthens society.