Living the legislated life

After they leave school, wordsmiths who cannot bolster their skills with other characteristics valued by society may experience downward mobility in comparison with their more successful, but less intellectual, classmates. This breeds envy and resentment. Clearly, any system that allows Kylie to get rich while leaving intellectuals behind cannot be trusted. It produces the "wrong" outcome. Sometimes, they call this "market failure".

Note, this yearning for a "merit" system can come from both the right or left of politics - although the two sides may have different orders of merit. Nozick claims that schools exert such an important life-long influence because they are the first social institutions children encounter outside their families.

Whatever the cause of their unhappiness, the proposed solution offered by critics is to re-create the system that served them so well at school. This brings us back to the legislated life. Intellectuals want to make laws (lots of them) to ensure that the benefits of society are allocated by a central government according to a merit system, preferably one devised by them.

Thus, they favour laws that take from Kylie and give to the opera (a much more meritorious recipient). In an extreme example of imposing your merit criteria on society, the WA Greens once advocated increasing the tax on beer but not on wine.

Anyway, you get the idea. Take from everyone and give back to those who meet the merit criteria. All this taking and giving back puts enormous power in the hands of government. We have to assume that the government will make fairer judgements than we would by freely interacting with one another. Unfortunately, world history does not support this assumption. There have been many more bad governments than good ones.

To protect freedom, we must guard against those who seek to legislate it away, but we must also guard it from ourselves. I said that world history is not full of good governments. It is not full of good voters either. Remember, Adolph Hitler was elected to office.

The blessings of social and economic freedom are always under threat, even from those who benefit from them. Let us not permit the freedom that has given us so much to be devoured by a jealous few. Let’s refuse to live the legislated life.