I'm a McGovernite

Honest. Check out his opinion piece in today's Wall Street Journal:

Nearly 16 years ago in these very pages, I wrote that "'one-size-fits all' rules for business ignore the reality of the market place." Today I'm watching some broad rules evolve on individual decisions that are even worse.

Under the guise of protecting us from ourselves, the right and the left are becoming ever more aggressive in regulating behavior. Much paternalist scrutiny has recently centered on personal economics, including calls to regulate subprime mortgages.

...

Health-care paternalism creates another problem that's rarely mentioned: Many people can't afford the gold-plated health plans that are the only options available in their states.

Buying health insurance on the Internet and across state lines, where less expensive plans may be available, is prohibited by many state insurance commissions. Despite being able to buy car or home insurance with a mouse click, some state governments require their approved plans for purchase or none at all. It's as if states dictated that you had to buy a Mercedes or no car at all.

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Since leaving office I've written about public policy from a new perspective: outside looking in. I've come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society.

Why do we think we are helping adult consumers by taking away their options? We don't take away cars because we don't like some people speeding. We allow state lotteries despite knowing some people are betting their grocery money. Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind. But we don't operate mindlessly in trying to smooth out every theoretical wrinkle in life.

The nature of freedom of choice is that some people will misuse their responsibility and hurt themselves in the process. We should do our best to educate them, but without diminishing choice for everyone else.

Interesting how people from both sides of the aisle who have left the sphere of Washington influence suddenly become pro-freedom. If only the two sides of politics we have now didn't find it so profitable to prey on the fears of the voters. I think the people who are not afraid of either personal or economic freedoms tend to be apolitical and tend not to vote, much to the criticism of the people who become involved in politics out of their fears of Muslims, homosexuals, and capitalism.

Well, I'll be damned. I am ashamed of myself, for stereotyping this man.

Welcome aboard, George.

Paternalism or statism (and I do consider them to be the same) is for children.

Freedom includes the freedom to fail, and it is the only true means of human growth, individual or collective.

#2: Yes, once they leave the bubble, within the bubble they are well fed, provided for, and isolated - the ultimate paternalistic environment. Self-perpetuation becomes the goal at the expense of self-actualization.

First reaction: McGovern is still alive?

Second reaction: Well done, George!

In #2 Lunar said, "I think the people who are not afraid of either personal or economic freedoms tend to be apolitical and tend not to vote. . ."

If they are outside of the mainstream of American politics, especially politics bent on accruing power to the government, these people NEED to come out and vote. They should work toward building a viable political party, not just engage in mental masturbation about how things should be, but work toward effectuating their ideas.

The only way to effect major change in this country is through the vote. If you didn't vote, don't complain how screwed up things are. I get to yell at BushCo because I voted, both in 2000 and 2004 and, Lord willin' and the creek don't rise will vote in 2008.

Those brave Patriots who suffered in the winter of '77 -'78 in Valley Forge, those men who entered the camp as a straggling rag-tag band of farmers and shop keepers and emerged as an Army, ready to take on the best in the world did not suffer, fight and die for the right to form a new, different kind of government, they died for the right (remember, barrel of a gun) to take an active role and participate in the direction they wanted their government to take. They died for the vote.

Not voting doesn't mean you aren't afraid of personal or economic freedom, it means you don't care enough about that freedom to ensure it continues to be so. Not voting is a cop-out. Well, none of the candidates are running on MY issues, or I just didn't see the point, or my vote won't count anyway (one of my favorites, ask the guy who lost the mayoral race on a coin flip). Regardless of how much we may all be individuals, we live in communities and if you sit back and let Dick and Jane take care of voting those freedoms may not be around long.

I don't care who you vote for (unless it's a flat earther running for school board. If they want to teach their kids the earth is flat that's fine, I want mine to learn the modern facts not the medieval facts). Just vote.

Just to play devil's advocate: most or all of the people I hear talking about freedom--like all of trhe libertarians I know--are well off and not worrying about where their next meal/car payment/etc. is coming from. They've got theirs, and the most important thing they want is to be free to enjoy it, increase it, or whatever they want to do, with no interference. If someone else has never had the same opportunities or wealth, well that someone else must not be willing to try.

I won't argue against the idea that much of the time, when the government sets out to solve a problem, they do it in a way that puts needless restrictions on how people reap the benefits of the solution. In my mind, the answer is not to say that government shouldn't work on these problems, but to be involved in the ones that we care about and push for reducing or eliminating senseless restrictions. We can see quite clearly what the alternative is to having government work on these problems: in every area, the rich get richer and the rest get screwed. The fact thaqt the current administration has taken this approach to new heights doesn't mean that government can never be effective.

Please note that I'm not accusing anyone here of saying "I've got mine; screw you." But that seems to be the mindset of the people in my area who identify themselves as libertarians, run for office as libertarians, or speak of freedom as the one thing we've got to have more of.

PS #6, right on! get out there and vote!

7
I don't read what McGovern has written as a libertarian manifesto (not to suggest that you did either), but rather a need for flexibility in health care options. My hope is that our next Administration, whatever party it may be, will finally look for a flexible, commonsense approach to address this country's health care needs.

I understand what you mean by the libertarian mindset. It plays into what I have seen as an element of a broader strain of American thought, derived from the good ol' Protestant Work Ethic: being poor is a sign of laziness at best, moral laxness at worst.

I think we need to look at the issues around regulation as something different from paternalism vs. freedom.

The credit markets have many effects on third parties that were in no way party to the original transactions. Because of the lax policies on mortgage lending that eventually led to the collapse of a speculative bubble, we are entering a recession, and people are getting laid off who had nothing to do with the original mortgage transactions.

Moreover, people benefited from questionable financial practices without accepting either risk or responsibility. Angelo Mozilo is an example, raking in $120M in salary while driving his corporation into bankruptcy.

When financial markets are unregulated, the crooks take over. There are too many ways to deceive various participants and very little transparency. Now mortgage holders want to get bailed out without in any way helping the borrowers -- because any approach in which both borrowers and lenders share in the losses would reduce the trust in the system and make lenders more reluctant in the future. Well -- you know what? That reluctance is exactly what we need. Lenders should not lend if they don't think the loan is well secured and the borrower will pay it back.

#6: "If they are outside of the mainstream of American politics, especially politics bent on accruing power to the government, these people NEED to come out and vote."

The thing is that the vast majority of people who might agree in principle that government should be shrunken have their own personal caveats on what government should be allowed to do. This makes them side with one of the two major parties. The people left over who are in full agreement to shrink government are too few and too dispersed to make a difference. This is why the Free State Project was started, so that individuals who wanted to vote that way would have a place to go live where their vote would be effective.

#8: "being poor is a sign of laziness at best, moral laxness at worst"

I'm not going to pretend to speak for libertarians, but the closest thing I've ever seen to that kind of statement from a libertarian is that government conditions people to be incompetent and lazy and that if you got rid of things like child labor laws, people would from a younger age learn to handle responsibility better and to handle money better than they do now. Libertarianism doesn't blame the poor for poverty. It blames the government for poverty.

#9: "When financial markets are unregulated, the crooks take over."

Oh, but the market has been highly regulated this entire time. The Fed has been slashing interest rates left and right for years in an attempt to prop up the government dollar so that it can be used for Bush's deficit spending. It was foolish for lenders to think they could rely on that kind of pyramid scheme, but not necessarily criminal.

10

Caveat: I am not making the assumption that your statements reflect your personal opinions, and I'm not trying to argue a point, per se.

My implication is not that the "the poor have only themselves to blame" is a specifically Libertarian viewpoint, but a kind of deeper conditioning in the American psyche, perhaps arising from our Puritanism forebears. Neither do I claim that it is a universally shared attitude.

The problem with such measures as repealing child labor laws is the fear that the wealthy would send their children to school, and the poor would send theirs to work. If you tend to believe that knowledge is power, then a greater stratification of society would be a real fear. I have run into Libertarians who feel that Public Libraries are a waste of money: this is scary to me, because where else would the poor find access to books? If the idea is that we could rely on the benevolence of the rich, I wouldn't count on it.

And yet, any emphasis, particularly in the young, on the necessity of personal responsibility is good. Also good would be a gentle nudge, in an increasingly acquistive society, towards the ideals of social responsibility and personal service.

11: Yeah, I understand that you qualified your statement about being limited to people that you've met, but I think there's something else I want to say about the subject of "libertarians only want to increase their own freedoms and don't care about others," an observation I have also seen echoed in post #7.

The fact is that the "you're for freedom only because you're selfish and don't care about others" argument is something that people across the political spectrum sling at everyone else across the political spectrum in order to denigrate the integrity of their opinions. Social conservatives might accuse social liberals of not caring about the "fabric of society" because they fear that the freedoms social liberals espouse will plunge society into a depraved chaos of druggies and sodomites. Fiscal liberals, on the other hand, might accuse fiscal conservatives of not caring for the poor and the needy because they fear that the economic liberty that fiscal conservatives espouse would plunge society into social stratification.

Brief change of terms... fiscal liberalism and fiscal conservatism are defined in terms of a government's "freedoms" to spend money instead of individuals' freedoms to spend money. Instead, I'm going to use terms that address views from the perspective of people's economic freedoms, with economic liberals being for more economic freedoms and economic conservatives being for restrictions of economic freedoms. So a libertarian would be someone who espoused both social and economic liberalism (which some would call "classical liberalism").

Anyway, I don't think that increasing economic freedoms across the board would result in "runaway capitalism." It's like when Henry Ford said that he wanted his employees to make enough money to be able to afford the cars they produced. Business owners want customers to be wealthy enough to remain customers. That's because business transactions are voluntary. The only thing that can break the voluntary aspect of business is in a monopoly. It's only when government exists as a means to weed out competition by the force of law that a business can become a monopoly. Without a government, no monopoly can survive. A recent example of this is Microsoft's accusation that Linux violates over 200 of its patents. Microsoft knows that it's an aging dinosaur, so instead of innovating they turn to the legal system in an attempt to enforce a monopoly on computer operating systems.

Yes, with the removal of government interference, such as in the form of child labor laws, the poor might end up with their children working and the rich might end up going to school, but in that scenario both sets of children are on the path to making money for themselves. That does not paint a portrait of economic stratification. The way things are now, public schools are open to everyone and somehow we end up with a high school diploma not being a very useful document. That's four years of high school a young person who might not find to be applicable to their own life choices could have spent doing something more productive and promising.

When the poor send their children to work the place of employment pays as little as it can. That could not, and would not, be a path to making a significant amount of money. The rich send their kids to school where they learn how to make a significant amount of money. All we need do is look at the developing countries which now have sizeable amounts of child labor. Who's children work? The poor's. Do the poor get less poor? No. Do the rich get richer? yes.

Makes me think of that old bromide: those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it. Developed nations eliminatd child labor for good reason.

#13

Could these be the same developing countries whose economies the governments of developed countries screw over by dumping subsidized goods onto the market? I just wonder...

And as for the history of child labor laws, they were passed at the insistence of labor unions who didn't want children to be able to compete against them for jobs. So yes, without child labor laws children could undercut adults in some areas of unskilled labor or services. And we don't want children to be making money now, do we? They might get into the bad habit of providing for themselves.

I believe that the idea that child labor laws "were passed at the insistence of labor unions who didn't want children to be able to compete against them for jobs" is a bit simplistic. Certainly, there were some of those dreaded social reformers who believed that children should be given the chance at education, rather than being thrust into the workplace to work traditionally low-paying jobs to provide for impoverished families.

Personally, High School for me was on balance a waste of time. But if I had spent those years doing minimum wage jobs, I think my likelihood to going to University, which was indeed a gateway to better earning potential would have been quite poor. Sure, I could have learned welding or something like that, but then we get back to the idea of a stratified society, with the old Marxist stereotype of the wealthy, elite owners up on top, with the workers on the bottom. And yes, I'd rather have some man or woman with a family to support making the money than a child who ought to be provided for at home.

My children will have plenty of opportunity to make money, and a better chance for fulfilling work if they have an education. Right now, I want them to socialize and develop their intellectual potential. They, as I did, can earn pocket money and learn the rudiments of money management with part-time jobs, but as parent, it is my responsibility to provide for them until it is time for them to decide upon their own course in life.

Ultimately, I'm sorry to tell you that child labor laws are here to stay. Any politician lobbying for their repeal would probably soon be on the streets, looking for a job himself.

Here's a link to McGovern's 1992 Wall Street Journal article in which he discusses how running a business illuminated many of the problems regular businessmen go through everyday, and the effects government regulation has on them.

In retrospect, I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of such a business, especially during a recession of the kind that hit New England just as I was acquiring the inn's 43-year leasehold. I also wish that during the years I was in public office I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made me a better U.S. senator and a more understanding presidential contender.

#16: Another good argument against a permanent class of professional politicians - how do we begin to tackle that behemoth?