Creeping Collectivism: Insufficient refutation of public safety laws
by Scott D. DeSalvo
It seems that politicians of all levels and stripes are running for public office on platforms that include promises of more regulation, and more government infringement upon private lives and private decisions. Examples of such regulations include mandatory seatbelt laws, mandatory motorcycle helmet laws, and bans on public smoking. Knowing why these government incursions into individual liberty are morally wrong, and how refute the arguments in their support are important for Objectivists, to the extent that helping to create real world freedom is a personal value.
At first blush, these public safety laws seem very reasonable. After all, seatbelts save lives. Survival rates skyrocket when motorcycle accident victims wear helmets. Cigarettes cause cancer. Don't these laws protect individuals in a way that present virtually no infringement on individual liberty? None of these laws infringe the right to vote, the right to free speech, or any of the other of the rights we learned in grammar school were so important. If you do a cost benefit analysis, don't the lives that are saved far outweigh the fractional cost to individual liberty? And why are Libertarians so upset about these little details, when we have war, domestic security, and the economy to worry about, not to mention our personal concerns like our jobs and families?
This is the mindset of the majority. It is an issue of context. These 'public safety' infringements are just not important enough in everyman's current hierarchy of values to merit a second thought.
Libertarians generally combat this insensitivity to the issues by making use of the argument I call the 'Creeping Collectivism' argument. It goes like this: abrogating small rights leads to the eventual destruction of fundamental rights, at which time resistance to the government is futile. The experiences of Europeans before and during the rise of Nazi Germany are cited as compelling evidence of a slow and subjectively imperceptible slide into totalitarianism.
I submit that this argument is ineffective at convincing the mainstream of the importance of combating 'public safety' law, as well as convincing the uninitiated that Libertarians are anything other than nit picking crackpots. As a partial proof I cite the spotty adoption of Libertarianism and Objectivism.
I believe this is true because the mainstream's hierarchy of values categorize these laws as low priority concerns, and the increasing complexity of daily life makes low priority concerns 'some day' issues at best--and that day never comes. Rather than spending their time and mental resources on new, strange ideas, it is easier to conclude that these 'minor' concerns are important only to the 'crackpot' contingent, and move on.
Objectivists must pick their battles. If recruiting the mainstream population away from the Democratic and Republican Parties is the context, Objectivists must focus on the big and currently most-marketable issues: huge tax cuts across the board, on the way to completely eliminating compulsory taxation, and ending government waste, on the way to eliminating government involvement in private concerns. These are issues that fall high on the mainstream hierarchy of values. As such, we avoid the mainstream resistance to attempting to effect political change on the back of a low priority issue. It provides a context high enough on the mainstream hierarchy of values that it will engage people sufficiently so that they may actually exert themselves in learning some of details of the idea system that says it is moral and proper to return one-third of their earnings to them. The threat of creeping collectivism in the face of a public safety laws will never comparably stir passion.
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