This is a tough choice for government and for the governed. It requires great legislative executive or judicial restraint often in the face of true human suffering not to create some new government solution. However this is what I believe we must be prepared to do if our societies are not to become ossified webs of regulation.
This is not some personal frolic into far right conservatism or libertarianism. I have always believed and continue to believe that there are two core functions of the nation state: To protect its people and to preserve their liberty. These always exist in a certain dynamic tension; however of late I have begun to worry that at least in the US and Western Europe the balance is overly tilted to nanny-state protectionism.
Unfortunately bad stuff sometimes happens to good people. Cancer and other disease is an obvious example so are many other less life-threatening conditions. Let’s imagine that this morning Glocer the Klutz slipped and broke his leg in the shower. Not a good way to start the day but also not to my mind ground to sue the bathroom tile manufacturer for failure to affix a warning label reading: "Danger May Be Slippery When Wet." Similarly but on a grander plane some real bad acts were committed in the US mortgage banking crisis but that does not mean that the right answer for society at large is the passage of the Dodd-Frank legislation and its tangled web of implementing regulations.
Here is the crux of the issue: It is very difficult in the face of a specific bad outcome to stay the legislative hand from enacting new rules that when added to all the existing and accelerating lawmaking do not make society as a whole worse off. Or as I learned in law school bad facts make bad law. What makes this a particuarly difficult issue is that the bad outcome is known and measurable but the benefits of liberty are general and unquantified. I cringe each time a sitting President of either party points to the upper tier of Congress during a State of the Union address and singles out one American citizen by name (usually seated next to the First Lady) as deserving of some government-privided solution. You can almost feel the surfeit of legislation to come.
This phenomenon is not by any means limited to lawmakers. So for example when a civil jury awards millions in damages for pain and suffering in the last seconds of an accident victim’s life the money is not a "free" good; rather it will be funded through small increases in the insurance costs for all of the responsible citizenry. It would be far more efficient for society to provide adequate healthcare generally to accident victims than to use the courts and juries to allocate lottery-like awards to the specifically litigious few.
One person who has been doing more than just talk about these issues is Philip K. Howard author of The Death of Common Sense (subtitled "How Law is Suffocating America") founder and chairman of Common Good (www.commongood.org) and cited favorably in prior posts to this blog (see Debt vs. Equity –The Ossification of Economics and Politics). Core to Phil’s message is that the continual enactment of new laws much like the successive hardening layers of lava in Pompeii have ossified and buried the ability of the Nation to govern itself. What we are left with is a modern America in which good people elected to high office with the best of intentions find themselves incapable of using their best judgment to govern in our common interest.
As Phil writes:
"Today Americans are tied in legal knots and can’t use their common sense. Teachers are diverted by endless bureaucracy. Doctors are paranoid about lawsuits. Officials have their noses in thousand-page rulebooks… Even the president is stuck unable to approve environmental projects without a decade of review… To fix things however officials must be free to do things differently. There’s only one solution: Allow officials flexibility in exchange for individual accountability if they abuse their authority."
Rather than Tea Party conservatism or Occupy Wall Street nihilism we need a national reset. A return to common sense for the common good in which we stop trying to micro-manage every individual outcome in a nation of 300 million and let good people get on with the serious job of governing a great country.
Tom I would normally give you the benefit of the doubt regarding your insistence that you’re not wading into far-right or libertarianism thinking here. But when you lump the US and Western Europe together in terms of government involvement in the lives of individuals I lose willful suspension of disbelief. The US is light years away from the level of “nanny-state protectionism” (as you put it) that Western Europe — and for that matter Canada and some East Asian nations — have reached. So to suggest that the US and Western Europe are too far statist when the US is just about the least statist nation in the developed world and Western Europe comprises just about the most statist nations in the developed world it rings like it is playing right into modern conservative statiphobia. Note too that historically that conservative wing has not as a rule been so anti-state (or in US parlance anti-federal) until about 35 years ago so it is a fairly recent development. Now unless I’m misreading your example of the accident victim damages awards it sure sounds like you are suggesting that a universal health care plan would be a better solution than litigation-based insurance sloughing. But (at least according to the wags in the US) that is one of the most statist developments in existence! Which also incidentally reinforces my point above: I can’t think of a Western European nation that does not have a universal national health care system whereas in the US even the notion of a regulated private insurance market — which for once the target industry is not even opposed to — is decried as the paramount of statism. Lumping the US and Western Europe together as examples of the critical mass of nanny statism? One of these things is not like the other.
I agree wholeheartedly. If President Obama or David Cameron also agreed what should they do to remedy the situation?