What if a tornado hits? What if a lot of tornadoes hit? The issue isn’t very complicated, but it is challenging. The free society is supposed to be governed with an eye to securing the rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and other rights not enumerated in, say, the Bill of Rights. Briefly, such a society rests on principles derived from the fact that human beings at all times, in all places, are first and foremost sovereign individuals with the capacity for self-rule, self-directedness. This capacity is a defining attribute of human beings, not merely specific to certain cultures, as some critics of classical liberalism would have it. An adult human being needs to and is capable of learning how to live and flourish independently. Any community worthy of being considered a human one must accommodate this fact about us. We are also social beings, but not just any kind of society will do our individuality justice. The novelty of the American political vision, however ill or well realized it has been, is an affirmation of the sovereignty of individuals and an established legal order in which this sovereignty is to be secured, protected, and maintained.
But what do we do when disaster strikes? Natural calamities—earthquakes, floods, tidal waves, hurricanes, tornadoes, typhoons, and the like—seem to warrant an expansion of governmental authority beyond what a free society would sanction. And government has indeed habitually stepped in with all sorts of measures whenever and wherever disasters have struck. Flood control measures are usually deemed to be its business. Few batted an eye even when the U.S. Army was called out to battle Hurricane Andrew in Florida. What is government for if not to come to the aid of citizens in such circumstances? Charles Dunlap argues that deploying the military for extraneous, non-defense purposes is likely to convince military leaders and enthusiasts that they, not civilians, ought to be governing the country. (See Charles J. Dunlap Jr., “The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012,” Parameters, winter 1992– 93, pp. 2–20.)
Even in personal affairs, using physical force can sometimes be justifiable—for example, when one needs to yank an unsuspecting person from the path of imminent deadly danger. John Stuart Mill argued that physically blocking someone from stepping onto a collapsing bridge is justified even in the context of adhering to the basic principles of individual liberty and minimal government.
Yet as Robert Higgs (in Crisis and Leviathan) and others have shown, it is nearly impossible to reestablish limits on government once it has acquired the legal authority to expand its powers for the sake of handling emergencies. In the law and in the making of public policy, precedent counts for a great deal; there is a slippery slope here. Once an approach is legitimized, extensions of power beyond the particular and special areas originally intended are almost inevitable. The definition of what constitutes an eligible emergency tends to broaden. Eventually, lawmakers may neglect no dire need whatever. What might slow or reverse such encroachment is a change of heart, some fear of going too far or the like. But once the logic of intervening in a particular special case has been established, it is difficult to offer a persuasive rationale for declining to apply the same logic to similar cases—unless the legitimacy of the original intervention itself is challenged. As a result, most “temporary powers” assumed by government remain part of its permanent repertoire....
....Principles are tested by hard cases. Despite the temptation to abandon the principle of limited government when it comes to calamities—such as the Exxon-Valdez mess, Katrina, and the Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe precipitated, in appears, mainly by the giant oil corporation, British Petroleum—it may best be to encourage the development of institutions that meet the problems without the involvement of the government (private insurance policies are one such institution). Of course, the temptation to use government power is difficult to resist, and it is legitimate to ask whether the use of government power in such cases can ever be proper and consistent with the ideal of limited government or whether it must always generate that slippery slope. When such governmental interference is not promised and not expected, free men and women make preparations without recourse to violence, to coercion. And this is what would happen in free societies faced with calamities, disasters, catastrophes, and the like. But that isn't likely to happen given how the governmental habit persists throughout the globe, including in the so called free country of the United States of America.
None of us is unfamiliar with the hazards of the slippery slope in our own personal lives. If a man hits his child in some alleged emergency, the very act of doing so may render him more amenable to smacking the kid under more typical circumstances. Slapping someone who is hysterical may make it easier to slap someone who is only very upset or recalcitrant or annoying or just too slow fetching the beer from the refrigerator. Similarly, a “minor” breach of trust can beget more of the same; a little white lie here and there can beget lying as a routine, and so forth. Moral habits promote a principled course of action even in cases where bending or breaking the principle might not seem too harmful to other parties or to our own integrity. On the other hand, granting ourselves “reasonable” exceptions tends to weaken our moral habits; as we seek to rationalize past action, differences of kind tend to devolve into differences of degree. Each new exception provides the precedent for the next, until we lose our principles altogether and doing what is right be- comes a matter of happenstance and mood rather than of loyalty to enduring values.
The same is true of public action. When citizens of a country delegate to government, by means of democratic and judicial processes, the power to forge paternalistic public policies such as banning drug abuse, imposing censorship, restraining undesirable trade, and supporting desirable trade, the bureaucratic and police actions increasingly rely on the kind of violence and intrusiveness that no free citizenry ought to experience or foster. And the bureaucrats and the police tell themselves, no doubt, that what they’re doing is perfectly just and right.
Consider, for starters, that when no one complains about a crime—because it is not perpetrated against someone but rather involves breaking a paternalistic law—to even detect the “crime” requires methods that are usually invasive. Instead of charges being brought by wronged parties, phone tapping, snooping, anonymous reporting, and undercover work are among the dubious means that lead to prosecution. Thus the role of the police shifts from protection and peacekeeping to supervision, regimentation, and reprimand. No wonder, then, that officers of the law are often caught brutalizing suspects instead of merely apprehending them. Under a paternalistic regime, their goals have multiplied, and thus the means they see as necessary to achieving those goals multiply too.
The same general danger of corrupting a free society’s system of laws may arise when government is called on to deal with calamities. There is the perception, of course, that in such circumstances the superior powers of government are indispensable, given the immediateness of the danger. The immediate benefits—a life saved by a marine—are evident. Yet the dangers of extensive involvement by legal authorities in the handling of non-judicial problems are no less evident, if less immediate in impact.
The contributors to volume mentioned below set out to explore (a) whether government action is indispensable under such circumstances and (b) what might be done to restrain the expansion of the scope of governmental power if indeed emergency circumstances warrant governmental intervention.
This is a work in normative political theory and public policy. Contributors are at times examining imaginary cases, doing thought experiments, with the aid of what might be considered approximations of historical models.
This approach is typical not only in scholarship and research on normative human affairs (where experimentation is precluded unless conducted on volunteers) but also in ordinary life. We often wonder how we might best acquit ourselves under difficult circumstances, even if we realize that rarely does everyone do his or her best at the task. The point is we might do our best if we prepare well. Asking “what if?” helps us prepare.
So what if a fully free society were battered by calamities? Could it preserve its liberty while also handling the emergencies promptly and well? This is the question taken up by contributors to the volume I edited, Liberty and Hard Cases (Hoover Institution Press, 2002).
* This essay is based on the Introduction to the above volume in which policy matters are fully explored.
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Contents of Liberty and Hard Cases:
N. Scott Arnold, The Role of Government in Responding to Natural Catastrophes
Barun S. Mitra, Dealing with Natural Disaster
John Ahrens, A Fool’s Errand?
Aeon J. Skoble, Liberty, Policy, and Natural Disasters
June 16, 2010
We are delighted to present Lessons in Freedom, essays by Dr. Tibor Machan, for your pleasure.
Dr. Machan holds the R. C. Hoiles Chair in Business Ethics & Free Enterprise at Chapman University's Argyros School of B&E.
Visit his web site here...
