Motives vs. Results

Image courtesy of Cafe Hayek

By RUSS ROBERTS 

A fan of liberty writes me of her struggle of being surrounded by people with a different world-view–people who make her feel that in defending liberty, she is greedy, selfish, and uncaring. I wrote a novel  on this issue–here’s a shorter answer…

Are you greedy, selfish, and uncaring? A little. We all are. Even people who oppose liberty. But I don’t think self-interest explains your view of the proper role of government intervention.

But it’s not surprising that you worry about your motives. In our daily interactions, motives are nearly everything. I want friends and family that care about me and whose motives count me in, alongside their own concerns.

So we pay a lot of attention to motives because they’re important. But the motives of strangers are much less important. For starters, by definition, it is hard to know strangers as well as my friends and family. So their motives will be much harder to read. But there is a much worse problem which is that by definition, strangers don’t have much information or knowledge of my needs, desires, and dreams. They can’t. They’re strangers. It’s hard enough for my friends and family to know me well. But strangers can’t know me well. So even with the best of motives, they may not be able to help me. In fact, they may end up hurting me despite their motives. We know that we sometimes hurt our friends and family even with the best of motives because of our imperfect knowledge of who they are.

This suggests a humility for intervening in the lives of strangers. Those on the other side of the spectrum of government intervention often lack this humility. They claim to know what is best for others–what they should eat, how they should behave in the bedroom, whether they purchase health insurance, and what is the best use of other people’s money. When these plans go awry, when they cause harm to those they would help, they fall back on their motives–after all, they meant well.

But when dealing with strangers, with people outside our circle of friends and family, results trump motives. Or at least they do for me. For you see, I too, have good motives. I just believe, perhaps naively, that sometimes, it is better to leave things alone than to intervene. Not always. Sometimes. We know that is true in public policy just as it is true in parenting where the motives are very powerful. Sometimes good parenting means letting children make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. Sometimes it means letting children come to grips with responsibility.

So we teach our children to drive and let them take the car. We know it’s dangerous but we accept the risk. We do so not because we do not care about our children. It’s just the opposite. We accept the risk because we care about them. We respect them. We want them to leave the nest and learn to fly on their own.

So my opposition to a minimum wage or government schools or agricultural price supports or bank bailouts or mandatory health insurance or mandatory retirement contributions or mandatory eating habits doesn’t come from my selfishness or greed. Rather it comes from respect for my fellow human beings and a belief (not a faith) that leaving people free to choose what is best for themselves usually works out better than strangers making decisions for them.

The other day a friend of mine was defending a regulation related to smoking. I hate smoking. I’ve never smoked in my life. But I think people should be free to smoke if they want and I believe that private establishments–restaurants and apartment buildings and businesses–should be free to allow people to smoke on their premises. My friend doesn’t. He’s a great guy and knows as I do, that smoking has some very damaging health consequences. He feels very self-righteous about his quest to regulate smoking even more throughly than we currently do. Part of that self-righteousness comes from his motives. He knows they are pure and they are. He is a fine person. I respect him. He also happens to be overweight. I wonder how he would feel if I explained to him that I have been doing a lot of reading lately on diet and health and that I thought he should eat fewer carbohydrates and spend more time at the gym? I do wish he were thinner. I think it would be good for him. But I would never want to force him to change his habits and even more than that, my respect for him would keep me from even making the suggestion. I think he knows he’s overweight.

He’s not a close friend. He’s a casual friend. With a very close friend or a sibling, I might say something about the virtues of diet and exercise. But a stranger? I can’t imagine going up to a stranger on the street and lecturing him about his weight. Forcing a stranger to do something about his weight is even harder to imagine. But I don’t think my motives are the issue. It’s a question of respect and imperfect knowledge.

One of the points I make in The Invisible Heart  is that those of us who want smaller government because we think it will make the world a better place are the allies, whether we like it or not, of purely selfish people who want smaller government in order to avoid taxes and who have no intention of giving to charity. That should give us pause. At the same time, those who care so much about others that they would run their lives for them are allied with those who would run the lives of others because of less attractive motives–for power and profit.

So don’t lose any sleep over your motives. And don’t let others who are no better than you are, convince you that there is something wrong with you because you don’t want to use the power of the state to try to improve the lives of others. Their strategy has a very mixed track record. They are always saying this time will be different. But it is unlikely to be different because of the knowledge problem and because the other side centralizes power. And centralized power doesn’t attract nice people. Just the opposite.

Both sides want to make the world a better place. We just disagree on how to get there.

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The above article is re-published here in it's entirety with Professor Roberts express permission. Please visit the excellent site Cafe Hayek to enjoy and enlighten yourself with the fine articles concerning liberty to be found there.



Russell Roberts is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and the J. Fish and Lillian F. Smith Distinguished Scholar at the Mercatus Center, and a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.


His latest book is The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity (Princeton University Press, 2008). Told in the form of a novel, it's the story of how prosperity is created and sustained, and the unseen order and harmony that shape our daily lives.

Who, But Us?

It's been a tad longer than usual since my last post. I have been working on an essay about the furor over the new Arizona illegal immigration law. It's a difficult essay because it's a difficult problem. The debate is long on emotion and short on logic. It is for subjects like this that I posted the quote at the bottom of this blog, "Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood."

To some, it may have been only a song title from the era of my youth, but to me, it is an earnest prayer. I have spent my life trying to express myself clearly, mostly to no avail. I tend to ramble on until I have lost my train of thought, or my perspective, or my regard for the opinions and feelings of others. It is the main reason for this blog. It's the reason I write, so I can be thoughtful and reflective instead of reactive and argumentative when I express myself. That goal has been only partially achieved.

And so I am still editing the piece. I'm OK with that, the topic deserves the time and thought. In the meantime, I stumbled across a quote, mainly by accident, (or maybe it was serendipity).
And it caused me to write this piece instead.

Today we had a most welcome and unexpected guest at our home. A very dear friend of ours came to town and we were excited to hear she could visit us. Of course, she brought us gifts. Unnecessary gifts are the very best kind. The gifts were a pizza and a book. Both were fabulous. The pizza is gone. The book will last for a lifetime.

As some of you know, I'm a history buff. I'm not really good at it, but I enjoy it more than almost anything else I do. The book is titled "The Civil War" by author Geoffrey C. Ward. It's an illustrated history of that conflict. I already own it, so I plan on re-gifting it. The one I already have was a gift from someone who loved me, on some occasion, many years ago. But since my memory is poor nowadays, I cannot remember the last time I looked at it or who gave it to me. (I'd bet plenty it was my wife, she knows me the best and loves me the most.)

As I welcomed the book like an old friend I was trying to catch up with, the first page I turned had a quote on it. It might have been written yesterday. It concerns a concept which I have always held true, but one that is met with incredulous stares when expressed publicly.

Many people think you are crazy when you express it as an opinion. Left wing writers go bonkers when they hear it. (As far as I am concerned, they were bonkers before, but let's just say the reaction is not the same as when they get that "tingle going up their leg" like they do when Obama speaks.)

The concept is simply, no other country, or group of countries on this earth can ever take our freedom by force. Only we can do that.

We can cede our rights and freedoms to ourselves in an act of personal and national suicide, but no Hitler or Tojo or Osama can take it from us by force. True Americans will never allow it.

As one of my most important childhood mentors, Ralph Rose, told me on several occasions when I was a high school kid, "Better dead than red." And as someone who fought in "the forgotten war", Korea, he meant it. Literally.

The quote is as follows;

"At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth...could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years...If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

Abraham Lincoln, 1838.

Lincoln knew, and he wasn't afraid to say, that the dangers to our freedoms and rights was/is from within. And although he wrote those words 172 years ago, the steady erosion of our rights has always been perpetrated by our own governments. From slavery to "Jim Crow", from internment camps of our own citizens during WWII to property takings in a perversion of eminent domain, we have always lost our rights primarily to ourselves via government. And the pace of such losses has recently increased more than uncomfortably. Our government should be our servant to defend our rights. Instead, it has become an enemy to our fundamental freedoms.

So who now to be our savior? The only people saving anything around here lately are Jesus of Nazareth and Antti Niemi of the Chicago Black Hawks.

That leaves us. To defend ourselves at the ballot box in November or finish the job of self annihilation by staying on what Friedrich von Hayek called "the road to serfdom."

Somehow, I don't think Barak Obama had this Lincolnian concept in mind when he claimed Ole Abe as his political idol back in 2008.