No Brakes: Why Government Must Be Limited

After the filming of this week’s Wingmen segment, the conversation continued, somehow winding its way around to the topic of carbon taxes as a means of forcing polluters — especially energy producers — to pay some of the hidden costs of their activities. The suggestion arose as part of Bob’s argument that capitalism (i.e., “the market”) isn’t adequate as the guiding light of a society.

To that, I can only say that I agree. Capitalism is an approach to designing an economic system, not a moral code. It is no more appropriate to say that something is moral because it is profitable than it is to say that something is moral because it is legal. All of these measures of social value have different attributes that make them appropriate to decide in a different ways. They answer different questions.

What a society determines to be right and wrong is interwoven with the fabric of who we are as individuals and as a society and affects our behavior at the most personal level. It ought, therefore, to be mostly subject to interpersonal dynamics and free association. What a society determines to be illegal is a baseline of what simply cannot be tolerated, enunciated through the political process, and therefore ought to be a very narrow category. What it determines to be profitable is less a judgment than a measure of what people value within the context of their everyday lives.

By these guidelines, it would be absolutely appropriate for a society to impose cultural pressures that drive up the cost of something that has long-term consequences, like pollution. If the consensus is sufficiently strong that pollution above a certain level simply can’t be tolerated, then it would be appropriate for the political process to create legal ramifications.

One critical problem with doing that, however, is that the nature of government will tend to expand its use. Capitalism has brakes on excess imposed by people’s willingness to pay for something, as well as their cultural and legal tolerance for a line of business. Morality has brakes on excess imposed by people’s willingness to accept norms that are enforced through networks of free association.

But the political process is easier to manipulate than broad culture, and its rules are enforceable by police powers, rather than persuasion and peer pressure. Consequently, it is difficult to stop government over the long term, once it gets rolling, whether the hill it tumbles down is punitive or redistributive taxation, restrictive regulation, or expanding debt.

So, yes, a community’s or geography’s health may be affected by the long-term costs of pollution, and inadequately captured in the price that the market sets for the causative product. On the other hand, the long-term cost of empowering government to judge far-reaching, indirect consequences and to impose solutions determined by and benefiting a narrow range of people is increasingly proving to be a loss of the liberties so profound that a healthy culture should not tolerate it.

From a way of looking at it, our Founding Fathers strove to make that outcome illegal, through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, because the only brake, ultimately, is violent subjugation or violent revolution.

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