Collective Conscious

After a week of blud­geon­ing by the media at large (with the excep­tion of some defense from Repub­li­cans), Rand Paul is on the defen­sive over his Civil Rights Act com­ments on the Rachel Mad­dow Show on Wednes­day. Now, how­ever, things are get­ting inter­est­ing. The ini­tial out­rage has died down, and think tanks and com­men­ta­tors are begin­ning to more fully eval­u­ate Rand Paul’s pol­icy stances.

The Cato Insti­tute stands at the ide­o­log­i­cal cen­ter of the debate as the nation’s promi­nent lib­er­tar­ian think tank. Over the past few days they’ve been build­ing up a for­mal response to the fall­out. It began with the eva­sive, two-​​handed take on the civil rights issue as a whole in Newsweek. Then there was David Boaz’s defen­sive “peo­ple still hold lib­er­tar­ian views” piece in response to a WSJ quote. But at last Cato has come out swing­ing: their chair­man, Robert Levy, let loose a Politico op-​​ed today build­ing directly off the work of the others.

The Politico piece is a defin­i­tive state­ment of pol­icy, and it is hard-​​hitting: “[Paul’s] posi­tion is … intel­lec­tu­ally hon­est, unlike those who insist that, because the Civil Rights Act is benef­i­cent, it must nec­es­sar­ily be con­sti­tu­tional.” Levy goes on to take a shot at the phi­los­o­phy endorsed by this very blog: “The essence of col­lec­tivism is force. The essence of lib­er­tar­i­an­ism is choice.”

But he’s wrong. Col­lec­tivism isn’t about force. Col­lec­tivism is about coop­er­a­tion — choice con­strained by social con­tract for the net ben­e­fit of soci­ety. Unre­strained choice has, time and time again, shown itself to be an inef­fi­cient way of life. Besides the actual-​​historical exam­ples, which the Newsweek piece accepted, it can be math­e­mat­i­cally and the­o­ret­i­cally demon­strated.

About mid­way through the above-​​linked pre­sen­ta­tion is the proof: there exists a class of sit­u­a­tions where increased choice yields worse out­comes. It car­ries over quite nicely to real­ity; the sim­ple fact is that a whole soci­ety full of actors mak­ing unre­stricted choices can be less effi­cient than one which has some mea­sure of cen­tral­ized regulation.

This is not “force.” It is true that the laws are under­writ­ten and legit­imized by the military/​police power of the state, but these imple­ments are a part of the social con­tract that allows a coher­ent soci­ety to main­tain order against those who would dis­re­gard the rules in a self­ish pur­suit. A law is not a gun to your head — it is a legal agree­ment among cit­i­zens. The more impor­tant piece of the log­i­cal puz­zle is the very idea of rep­re­sen­ta­tive gov­ern­ment: the bills and votes of our Sen­a­tors and Con­gress­men rep­re­sent our own implied agree­ment to the social con­tracts at issue.

When we agree that every­one must have health insur­ance so that aggre­gate costs may be kept down, we engage in col­lec­tivist leg­is­la­tion. When we agree that the own­er­ship of assault weapons is a dan­ger to pub­lic soci­ety that exceeds even the guar­an­teed free­doms of the Sec­ond Amend­ment, we pro­tect our­selves by col­lec­tive action. When we, as Ezra Klein and then Rachel Mad­dow so elo­quently stated, ban child labor, or inspect food, or set min­i­mum wages, we as a peo­ple are agree­ing that some of us can sur­ren­der our per­sonal free­doms in exchange for a bet­ter over­all society.

Yes, this requires a broadly empow­ered gov­ern­ment, and a plain read­ing of the Con­sti­tu­tion enables just that: “The Con­gress shall have Power To … pro­vide for the com­mon Defence and gen­eral Wel­fare of the United States … And To make all Laws which shall be nec­es­sary and proper for car­ry­ing into Exe­cu­tion the fore­go­ing Powers.”