Dr. Tom Palmer on Self Control vs. State Control
2017-01-14 · Guest: Tom Palmer (Atlas Network) · 47:37
Individual Self-Control versus Government State-Control
Bob Zadek and Dr. Tom Palmer discuss the fundamental tension between individual self-control and government state-control, particularly in the context of the 2016 election and the upcoming Trump administration. They explore how the welfare state and regulatory regimes erode personal responsibility and social trust, while offering insights from Palmer’s book on how to reclaim autonomy.
Topics: Self-control, State-control, 2016 Election, Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, Welfare State, Drug Prohibition, Environmentalism, Property Rights, Neuroplasticity, Atlas Network
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek – Host
- Dr. Tom Palmer – Guest; Executive Vice President for International Programs at Atlas Network
- Caller (Nick) – Listener from San Carlos
Introduction and Historical Context [00:19]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. The show of ideas, not attitude. Thanks so much for listening. 424-BOB-SHOW is the way to call to join my conversation at any time.
Well, here we are at January 15th, 2017, a momentous day because in a few short days after this, America will start to become great again. Oh god, I am tingling with anticipation for the Trump inauguration on January 20th, and America will stop being a second-rate tin-horn dictatorship and start to become great again. Look forward to that for the next four years.
January 15th is a quite significant day in our history as well. In 1777, Vermont—a little-known fact—the non-state, the county or the province of Vermont, declared independence from New York and from the United States, becoming the first independent country in North America. Little-known fact: Vermont was part of New York, it declared its independence, didn’t want to be involved in the war between Great Britain and the colonies, declared its independence, and it enacted the first written constitution in North America, January 15th, 1777. Ultimately, Vermont became an independent state, but it became a state after the ratification of the Constitution a couple of years later. Vermont was the 14th state to join the union.
With that little-known fact, I am happy to introduce my guest this morning. It is with great pride and gratitude that I welcome back to the show Dr. Tom Palmer. Tom has written his third or fourth book, Self-Control or State-Control? Who Ought to Be in Control of Your Life: You or Elected and Unelected Government Officials? And Why Do You Care? Tom’s book is a collection of essays, many of which were written by Tom and others written by scholars, philosophers, thinkers, and the like. The subject of self-control versus state-control is an important topic today because we seem to be about to have a president who lacks self-control and who seems to be highly dependent upon state-control as the answer to all of our problems. Enough of the voting population supported the principle of relinquishing their personal control to the state that I thought it was real important to have Tom join us this morning. Tom, welcome to the show this morning.
Tom Palmer: Well, Bob, it’s a great pleasure to be with you. Thank you very much for having me on.
The 2016 Election and Rhetoric of Control [02:31]
Bob Zadek: So Tom, are we about to have—has the voting public in America answered the question which is the title of your book, Self-Control or State-Control?, or do you think it is still up for grabs?
Tom Palmer: Oh, I think it’s very much up for grabs, and for a couple of reasons. The first one is that we should be very cautious about reading into electoral outcomes broad conclusions about where society is. The choice between two, I would have to say, generally unsavory candidates, Clinton and Trump, both of whom offered more authoritarianism and more state intervention into our lives, put us into this awkward position of having to choose which kind of poison we wanted to consume.
Then finally, of course, you ended up with 80,000 people actually deciding the election. We have a system that’s federal, it’s based on the Electoral College, and Trump clearly won that based on the Electoral College. He lost the popular vote by quite a substantial margin. He ended up with one of the smallest victories, if you will, in the history of the United States. Nothing really to crow about in that regard, but he did win.
But I don’t think that it said that there was a big shift towards one thing or another in the electorate, particularly given the options that we were presented by these two candidates. With regard to what we have now, we have a candidate who promises “Trust me,” as he said in his acceptance speech. He said, “I am your voice. I alone can fix it.” What a remarkable claim.
I was struck last night, I did a little bit of reading, and I read Ronald Reagan’s acceptance speech alongside Donald Trump’s. Reagan said, “Don’t trust me. Trust in yourselves to live up to your own standards and hold me accountable to act within our Constitution.” And then reading Trump: “Trust me. I alone can fix it.” He was basically claiming, “Give me absolute power over the state and over your lives, and I’ll fix all of the problems in the country.” And as he said in another speech, “You will be able to realize every dream you’ve ever had.” Well, that’s really quite a remarkable claim and not consistent, in my opinion, with the principles of the American founding.
Bob Zadek: Tom, that is a wonderful idea to read both speeches side-by-side. In doing that, Tom, I think our listeners would understand precisely the premise of your book and why you wrote the book. You’re exactly right. There it is set forth, and readers of both speeches ought to ask themselves which speaks to them and which more accurately describes the life they would choose to lead and how they would choose to organize their life.
Defining the Scope of Control [05:08]
Bob Zadek: Now, your book is Self-Control or State-Control?. Self-control or state-control over what? Control of what?
Tom Palmer: Well, two things. The decisions that you make in your own life, and those can range from whether to drink alcohol or not to drink, whether to smoke marijuana or not to smoke, how to set up a business, how to run your business, whether and how to save for your retirement—all those different choices that we make in our lives, and many of which have been taken away from us by government. Healthcare, obviously, another very important example. It’s about one-fifth of the American economy, and it is over 50% controlled by government right now, so that our freedom to make decisions about our own healthcare has diminished quite dramatically.
So those are the questions: whether you get to make those decisions about your own life or does the state? But then there’s an ancillary question as well, and that is that as state intervention and control over society advances, social forms of organization—voluntary organization—recede. We’ve seen this very strongly in our society and in others, that voluntary organization to provide social order, amenities, to help people to coordinate their behavior, to help them to become better people, tend to recede as the state uses its power to colonize more and more forms of social life. That’s explored quite extensively in the book as well.
Why Do Citizens Cede Control? [06:50]
Bob Zadek: So, the strange thing is—and we’re going to go to break, Tom, in about a minute—but when we come back from break, I’d like you to focus on, if you would, a question that always puzzles me. That is: what is the dynamic by which voters, citizens, Americans have been willing, so willing, to cede control over their lives to the government? People don’t—you don’t really think of people as being willing to turn over their life to others voluntarily. They might do it under the threat of force, but what is the dynamic that enabled government to accumulate so much power that used to be autonomous? When we come back, Tom, I’d love to hear the answer to that question. This is Bob Zadek speaking with Dr. Tom Palmer on Self-Control or State-Control?. We’ll be back in one short minute.
Responsibility as a Prize, Not a Burden [08:00]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. 424-BOB-SHOW is the way to call in to join my conversation with Dr. Tom Palmer. Tom has written Self-Control or State-Control?. Tom, welcome back to the show. Before we went to break, I teed up a question that has been troubling me for some time, really puzzling me. One would think that individuals jealously guard their autonomy—“Don’t tread on me,” “It’s my life.” There was a Broadway show in the ’70s, Whose Life Is It Anyway?. Why was the country so willing, passively, to cede so much control to the state?
Tom Palmer: Well, before I address that—because that’s a very powerful question—just suggest that if people wanted to get the whole book, I arranged last week to have copies available at zero price, free. There is a download of the book, or to have one sent to you, if they go to our website: atlasnetwork.org/selfcontrol, all one word, no hyphen or anything. Then they can judge for themselves what I have to say about it along with my co-authors.
But I think that the first point is that people have tried to break apart the relationship between responsibility and freedom. I think that those are intimately connected for reasons that I articulate in the book. Once you give up one, the other one is at risk and you are likely to lose it within your own lifetime. But many people present responsibility as a burden, something that we should get away from. And so you give up your responsibility and the government says, “We’re happy to take it from you. We’ll be responsible for your life.” The problem is that you then lose your freedom as a part of that package deal.
Think about the welfare state as an example. I’ll talk about a number of other issues such as drug prohibition as well. But the welfare state is a deal that says the state will be responsible for your welfare. Welfare means not how Americans now think of it as a check from the government; it means your well-being. That the state is now a well-being state. It’s not there just to protect your freedom or your rights or justice or security from attack or invasion. The purpose of the state instead is to make your life go really well. You don’t have to worry about it. Worried about retirement? Don’t. The government’s going to take care of that. Worried about healthcare? Don’t worry about that. The government’s going to take care of that. And down the list.
When responsibility is presented as a burden, people try to flee from it. I argue instead that responsibility should not be seen as a burden. It is the prize. It is the thing that we want, or at least should want: the ability to say, “I did this. I accomplished this. I’m responsible for building this business. My spouse and I are responsible for raising these children. We did this.” That is the great prize. It is the feeling of satisfaction that one has for a life that is well-lived.
If someone else takes responsibility from you and makes those decisions instead, you lose one of the greatest benefits in life. Aristotle understood that very neatly in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics, which I also use in the book. He talked about praise and blame as the fundamental markers of moral behavior or ethical conduct. He said in the Nicomachean Ethics, praise and blame are dependent on whether the people in question are compelled or not to act as they do. You don’t get any credit, if you will, if you only do something out of compulsion. You’re not generous when the state taxes you ostensibly in the name of helping poor people.
So, that’s the first thing. We need to re-understand, as the American founders did, that responsibility is not the burden; it is the prize. It is the thing that we should want.
Secondly, of course, there are many people who think, “Oh, I can handle my own life, but those other people can’t.” And so a great deal of nanny state regulation is about protecting other people from themselves, not me from myself. It’s very easy to imagine everyone else is incompetent to manage their lives, and I’m afraid that that is a constant temptation and has fed into it.
And then additionally, there are people who benefit from these accretions of additional state power: politicians and bureaucrats. Take a very simple example. The state took your freedom from you to decide whether or not to use marijuana. This had a number of knock-on effects. One of them is people lost the ability to make informed judgments about their own life because you don’t know what the quality of the marijuana is out there. It’s become stronger and stronger over time—that’s the economics of prohibition at work. And then moreover, there are people who benefit from that. We call it the prison-industrial complex. Billions and billions of dollars that are being reaped by special interests because they build prisons, because it’s the prison unions, the guards’ unions, who are extremely powerful political players in many states, including California. Those people benefit from the loss of freedom of others, and they lobby and work very hard to maintain that loss of freedom because it’s in their economic interest. So those are some of the reasons. It certainly does not exhaust the discussion, but I think it’s a part of the explanation.
Special Interests and the Prison-Industrial Complex [11:30]
Bob Zadek: Now, just to supplement what you have said, as you know, Tom, in California, far and away the most powerful public service union is not the teachers, although they are quite powerful, but rather it is the prison guards. And the prison guards are the ones who, when California had an unsuccessful vote to legalize marijuana in I think 2010 or 2014—I don’t remember the date—but California had on the ballot legalization of marijuana, and the largest funding source opposing legalization were the prison guards. Because legalization…
Tom Palmer: Yes, I think it’s important that we should open our eyes that there are highly predatory interests in our society that benefit from taking away freedom from other people and taking away their responsibility. This is a very powerful case in point. The biggest support for our failed war on drugs is in fact government agencies themselves, unionized state employees, and then those, let’s call them semi-private companies and firms that supply to them, that supply all the mechanisms for the state to intervene into our lives and control us. That is a part of the story. It’s what we call public choice. You ask, “Who benefits from this?” And when you go ask that question, you go and look, and it turns out they’re very active spending resources to make sure that those powers are not diminished and that the freedom of the citizens is not restored to them.
The Collective vs. The Individual [13:00]
Bob Zadek: Tom, I find it very telling that the slogan that Trump stumbled upon or adopted was “Make America Great Again.” If you think about that slogan, that tells us so much. He doesn’t—the slogan is not “Make individuals great.” It’s “Make America great,” the collective, not the individual. Making America great should be the result of other activities and other policies. It should not be the goal. The goal should be focused on the individual, and America will then take care of itself. And so that slogan is quite revealing, don’t you think?
Tom Palmer: Well, it’s also so empty. What does it mean? Ultimately, it boiled down to “Give me power.” There’s no content, no coherent strategy or policy. There’s no vision other than “Give me power.” And this expression that was a regular feature of the President-elect’s language, which he uses all the time, is “I alone can fix it.” That should tell us something. It’s about ceding power to one particular man to be responsible for everything. I find that chilling and disturbing.
That said, I want to make it very clear that the arrogance of power was also a hallmark characteristic of Mrs. Clinton as well. So if I’m critical of one, sometimes people will say, “Oh my god, you must love the other one.” If I’m critical of Clinton, people think I’m a Trump supporter, and vice versa.
Bob Zadek: We understand you’re not pouting because Clinton lost. We understand that. That’s for the record. This is Bob Zadek and I’m speaking with Dr. Tom Palmer on his new book, Self-Control or State-Control?. We’ll be back in two really short minutes. Please stay tuned.
The Welfare State Trap [15:30]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. 424-BOB-SHOW is the way to call in to join my conversation with Dr. Tom Palmer. Tom has written Self-Control or State-Control?, a very important collection of essays by Tom and others on this important issue of who controls your life: you or a whole bunch of folks you mostly didn’t elect, never have met, and if you met them, you probably wouldn’t like them all that much. Tom, welcome back to the show. Tell us again how our listeners can get a copy of your book. As you said, I have negotiated you way down, Tom, so I have negotiated you down to freedom, giving the book away for free. As a result of my very clever negotiation, tell our friends out there the offer you’re prepared to make for them.
Tom Palmer: Bob, you are the greatest dealmaker. Actually, if people go to atlasnetwork.org/selfcontrol, all one word, they can download a copy of the book in three or four different electronic book formats, or they can fill in their mailing address and I will have one mailed to them. The price is zero. So zero dollars, zero pesos, zero rubles, zero Bitcoins—all across the board, it’s zero.
I hope that people will enjoy it. All the essays are standalone essays. You don’t have to read the whole book. If something interests you, read that. You don’t have to read the other stuff. I’ve assembled a group of writers—I wrote a number of the essays, but I got very fine authors who are experts in their fields, in environmental economics, in financial economics, Jeffrey Miron from Harvard University economics faculty, Lynne Kiesling from Northwestern University, and others, to address these questions and provide evidence and arguments and data about the relationship between personal freedom and personal responsibility, and why those two need to be understood as a bundle. You cannot have only one because you will lose that one if you’ve given up the other.
Bob Zadek: And I should mention that Lisa Conyers also wrote a wonderful chapter on the nanny state.
Tom Palmer: Actually, that was I think one of the more powerful ones. It’s a quite elegant chapter based on huge numbers of interviews that she did with people who have been or currently are trapped in the welfare state. Anyone who reads it will come away with a much greater appreciation and admiration for people who have been in welfare, were perhaps born into it, and managed to extricate themselves from it.
The reason is: it’s not easy to do. The system is set up to make it very difficult to get out of welfare once you’re in it. I’ve seen this in the case of my own life, dealing with family members and friends who have been enticed into welfare statism. It’s not easy to get off of it.
One very simple example. Imagine that you have someone who’s on rental assistance and food stamps and so on, struggling to make ends meet and to raise a family. All of a sudden, they inherit an automobile—an uncle or a grandparent or someone passes away. You think this would be a great thing. Now you have a car, you can take care of your family more easily, you could look for a better job that might entail a commute. It turns out this is a disaster for you because now you’ve been raised above the asset level, the threshold for assets, and you suddenly are disqualified for all of those other things that you’ve become reliant on. The welfare workers tell you—not because they’re bad people, but they’re explaining the system—“Get rid of it. Quick, quick, quick, give that away, sell it, spend the money as fast as you can so that you can requalify,” which also means a very onerous procedure typically of being re-interviewed and so on. And so the incentives are for people to stay on the welfare state. It is not easy to extricate yourself from it. I have great admiration for people who have been able to leave the welfare state and acquire a life of independence. The chapter that she produced is very powerful and based on personal stories. She has data in it and charts and graphs, but it’s mainly about what it’s like for those people to be trapped in the welfare state.
Caller Nick: Unions and Medicaid [17:30]
Bob Zadek: Now Tom, we have a caller which I’ll take in a moment. But after we’ve had our conversation with Nick in San Carlos, which we’re going to take in a second, an important issue where the government has successfully persuaded large numbers of people that government is the only answer is in environmental issues. There is so much lack of understanding on that issue. So that’s an important chapter in your book I’d love to cover. But first, let’s hear from Nick in San Carlos. Nick, welcome to the show this morning.
Caller (Nick): Hello Mr. Zadek. Hello Dr. Palmer. How are you both?
Bob Zadek: Hi Nick, how are you?
Caller (Nick): I’m well. This is interesting. So my father came from Southern Italy and when he came to San Francisco, he, like many of the Italians, got a job on the dock under the union. He left the union in the ’60s because—this is what he said to me before he passed away—he said, “I was tired of people limiting my mobility.” I never understood what my father meant by that. You know, what did he mean by that? I didn’t understand.
So I’m a mason and I joined the masons many years ago, but it wasn’t until I understood that kind of sacred sense of pride from accomplishing something that I truly understood what he meant. And my final example: my wife and I were in graduate school at the University of North Carolina and she was pregnant. I had saved up money to go pay the doctor to have the baby. The doctor goes, “Well, keep your money. Go down and get Medicaid.” I was like, “Well, what’s that?” So he told me. We had the child, Medicaid paid for it. And then, you know, we both graduated, we had jobs, and I went down to the Medicaid office. I told them, “Thank you very much, we appreciate your help. We both have secured employment.” And they said, “Well, you can keep it for five more years.” I said, “Well, ma’am, I don’t need it.” We felt very humbled to have it, we’re thankful. They almost refused to take my wife and child off Medicaid.
This experience of robbing people of the double-edged sword of success or failure, I might add, has been probably the best part of my life. I have been to your website before; my sister, she’s a marine colonel, she had pointed it out to me. I look forward to reading your book. But here’s my question. You know, this spread like a disease—the European model, which people think is so great, I just think is a horrible model that robs people, again, of what you described as liberty and the sense of responsibility and even morality. It’s spreading, and people here are starting to be infected by it. Single-payer health insurance—I’m a scientist, I see that all the time in clinical research. “Somebody will take care of me.” How is that supposed to be inhibited and changed? You know, it’s almost a flood. Mr. Zadek just talked about climate change. If you even suggest that the models are negative in the ability to infer data is wrong, you are essentially silenced and looked upon as a crazy kook. So I’m interested to hear your comment on the spread of this European model around the globe. I’ll listen off the air. Mr. Zadek, I love your show. Take care.
Bob Zadek: Nick, thank you so much. Tom, we’re going to go to break for one minute. Nick raised some wonderful points, especially the infatuation with the European model. When we come back in one minute, I’d love to hear Tom’s response to Nick. Please stay tuned. This is the Bob Zadek Show. I’ll be back in one really short minute for Tom’s answer.
The European Model and Social Trust [20:50]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. Thanks so very much for listening to my conversation this morning with Dr. Tom Palmer. Tom has written Self-Control or State-Control?, a very important book available for free at Tom’s website. Tom, before we went to break, Nick raised some really interesting and very important points, most important of which perhaps was his wondering at and posing a question to you as to what was behind the apparent infatuation by many Americans with the “European model” of democratic socialism, if that’s the appropriate label. If you could compare—obviously a full comparison would take a very long time—but if you could give our listeners out there a comparison between what we aspire to be the American approach to individual responsibility and self-control versus the European model.
Tom Palmer: Well, that’s a very interesting set of questions. There’s a quite fine chapter in the book by Nima Sanandaji, who’s a Swedish-based social scientist looking at these questions for the Nordic countries in Europe. The first point is: I’m not sure I’d call it just the European model, because there’s a wide variety of systems in Europe. Many of them, particularly in Northern Europe, recognizing many of the problems that we have been discussing, have been cutting back on the welfare state in a variety of ways. Means-testing them and so on. The Netherlands has been a leader in this, Sweden as well. They realized that when you make all these promises and you cannot fulfill them, you have a big problem. And so more and more of those things are becoming means-tested and there is a movement to try to control expenditures and reel them back.
When it comes to single-payer, it’s also the case that many European health systems are far more private and based on insurance than most American commentators understand. They are not simply systems of state provision in a monopolistic sense. But that said, I think that there is a very serious problem which is now in this country as well, of the sense that the state will be responsible for you.
Here’s the canary in the mine shaft, if you will. That is the increasing numbers in many countries, United States included, of young people during prime working years who qualify for permanent disability. You see the numbers rising in the United States, you see them rising in most European countries, and it’s quite shocking. These are societies where people are living longer, health is improving and so on, and nonetheless more people are saying, “I can’t work, I’m permanently disabled.”
In the European cases, in the Nordic countries, this has been quite startling, most notably in Norway because of the huge amount of money from the oil which is heavily taxed by the state or is a state industry, has flooded the government’s coffers. They have so much money they can, at least in the short term, afford this, and more and more people are opting out of the labor force.
But it is happening in this country as well. It’s something that Sanandaji addresses and connects to that is a loss of moral and personal responsibility. The World Values Survey is a most interesting measure of that. It used to be that Sweden, Norway, Denmark were very high-trust societies with very little cheating. That’s how they could sustain a welfare state for so long. Welfare states do not fare so well in low-trust societies such as Greece. But what he found was if you look at this question: “Do you agree with the statement: claiming government benefits to which you are not entitled is never justifiable?” Go back to the 1980s, 82% of Swedes say, “Yep, never justifiable.” 80% of Norwegians. That drops over time. By 2005, it’s only 56% of Norwegians and 61% of Swedes say it’s never justifiable to claim government benefits to which you are not entitled. The most recent one, 2010-2014, only 55% of Swedes answer that it was not justifiable to claim benefits to which you’re not entitled. That is a real erosion in morality, and even advocates of state provision of these things should find this extremely sobering. It turns out that these institutions have an impact on our personal character as well, and frankly, not a positive one.
The Disease of the Public Mind [23:40]
Bob Zadek: You know, what’s really important, and I want to just at the risk of stating the obvious: it’s easy for one to say, “Well, everybody cheats on welfare benefits, like everybody cheats on their tax return,” as if that can be looked upon in isolation. But once you make an adjustment in your head that the laws are not to be respected or to be evaded, once you lose respect for the law, that approach to life will bleed into all other aspects of your life. Every moral decision you make will now be affected by that compromise, by that dilution of right, blurring of right and wrong. So it’s—to use the title of a book written by Thomas Fleming—it’s a “disease of the public mind” because it goes well beyond just welfare or just taxation. Once we lose as a society respect for our laws, when laws are something to be evaded rather than respected, it starts a very serious decline.
Tom Palmer: That’s absolutely right. I’m not one of those who celebrates how wonderful it is that people are evading the law. When you have laws that people feel they need to evade, and that becomes a standard in society, you lose respect for all kinds of norms of behavior, respect for other people, and respect for the law. This is one of the costs of a state that balloons out in the way that ours has.
Let me raise another one from a psychological perspective, and that’s something that is a very important part of this book as well. I drew a lot on contemporary experimental psychology research. There is something that is becoming quite widely discussed and it’s called neuroplasticity. It’s good news for people who are my age or your age, not only for young people whose brains are developing so rapidly. It turns out that our brains are constantly changing. Not only children’s brains, but your brain when you’re 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 years old is also changing. And it is changing in response to your choices. You can rewire your brain. You can acquire better habits. It’s never too late to acquire better habits regarding personal finances, control of spending, control of drinking or overeating, or whatever it may be that concerns somebody. It’s never too late to be able to acquire better habits of self-control. The book is full of advice and tips on that based on the neurosciences of basically understanding how our brains work and how it’s connected to our behavior. A chapter by John Tierney, who’s a science reporter for the New York Times, on brain chemistry and self-control I think people would find especially interesting. It has a number of tips on how to change our behavior and rewire our own brains in the ways that we think will be more conducive to our well-being.
Bob Zadek: And what’s most important is to the extent that individuals acquire more self-control, more autonomy over their lives—and this is going to just reinforce something I mentioned earlier—to the extent that individuals, acting in their self-interest, improve their self-control and responsibility over their lives, the byproduct—the byproduct will be, whatever this vacuous phrase means—the byproduct will be America will collectively, simply the collection of individuals exercising self-control, America will become great with no action at all by the state other than stepping aside.
Environmentalism and Property Rights [26:00]
Bob Zadek: Now Tom, we have—and I want to spend some time in the last couple of minutes we have in having you, A, tell the audience how to acquire the book Self-Control or State-Control?, and most importantly, tell us about the Atlas Network. But speak, if you would, about the environmental issues. A very important section of your book, and one where there is a wide segment of the population who believes that individuals, that the marketplace acting without government intervention, will destroy Earth and we have to “save the planet.” Speak about the issue of environmentalism as it is discussed in your book.
Tom Palmer: Well, Lynne Kiesling from Northwestern University has a chapter I commissioned from her. She focuses on environmental policy and regulation. What she shows is that there are institutions of human life that are part of government, by the way—the rules of property and contract and so on—that enable people to be more responsible for their behavior.
So the first point is: it’s not a choice between markets that are regulated and markets that are unregulated. All markets are regulated. It’s regulated by the rule of law, by the establishment of property rights, responsibility for your behavior, tort law, and so on. The question is: should we use those institutions that function very, very well, or instead give unaccountable bureaucrats, or barely accountable bureaucrats, discretionary power to change the rules and rejigger things in such a way that you don’t have rules anymore? It’s impossible for people to follow them.
Bob Zadek: Well, you don’t have private rules. You don’t have private rules; you have governmental rules.
Tom Palmer: Well, I wouldn’t even go that far because property…
Bob Zadek: Tom, I’m sorry, the music—sorry to do this, but the music is telling us we have to go to our last one-minute break. We’ll be back in one minute to discuss environmentalism.
Conclusion and Atlas Network [28:00]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. Hard to believe, but sadly it is true. Happily, I am here. This morning I’m speaking with Dr. Tom Palmer. Tom has written Self-Control or State-Control?, a very important collection of essays. Tom, before we went to break, we were talking about the issue of environmentalism where there is so much belief that without state action, our planet is doomed to become barren like the surface of the moon. So Tom, environmentalism: does it require state control or does state control exacerbate any problems with the environment?
Tom Palmer: Well, here it’s very important to define what we mean by state control. If by that we mean directives as to what people must, must not do that are very specific, I think it has generally quite negative consequences. We saw that with the case of real existing socialism was an environmental catastrophe. The Aral Sea is completely dead; there’s nothing living left in it. The pollution of groundwater and air and so on in the Soviet Union was just an absolute horror.
But if what we mean by governmental action is helping us to define our rights, to secure them by establishing a system of the rule of law—that’s government’s responsibility—then I’m all in favor of it. That’s what government should be doing. And then once those rules are established, including rules for responsibility—if I pollute your air or poison the water, I should be held accountable for that either as a tort matter, a civil matter, or as a criminal matter—that’s government’s responsibility.
Once you establish those rules, you are likely to get better outcomes because property rules help us to become more responsible for our behavior in two ways. Number one, property gives us a longer horizon when we realize that we can sell this in the future, we want to sell it for more than we paid for it in the past. We want to augment its value, not destroy it. And then secondarily, liability rules under property require me to be responsible for any harm that I might cause to other people. The evidence is very strong that that is a better approach to environmental regulation than empowering bureaucrats with the power to come in and dictate to people what they should or should not do. So regulation through the rule of law I think is a better approach, and it helps us to harness self-interest to responsibility and being responsible for our behavior: good citizens and good neighbors.
Bob Zadek: And it recognizes that self-interest is a very strong motivator and driving force. Establishing property rights and giving individuals control over their own lives is harnessing this incredible power, this incredible motivation of taking care of oneself, so that motivation operates towards the common good even though it is initially done to protect one’s own property, but the beneficiary of that is society as a whole.
Tom, we only have a minute or so, and I want to spend some time in the last couple of minutes we have in having you tell the audience how to acquire the book Self-Control or State-Control?, and most importantly, tell us about the Atlas Network.
Tom Palmer: Well, very quickly, anyone who wants to get a copy, either a printed copy mailed to them or download one, go to atlasnetwork.org/selfcontrol, just one word, selfcontrol, no space or hyphen. And you can get a copy. I hope it’ll be useful; it has lots of tips on how to improve our lives.
What Atlas Network does is primarily we’re a service organization for a network of 458 organizations around the world in 98 different countries that promote the ideas of limited government, of peace, personal freedom and responsibility, of toleration, free trade, and market economy—the classical liberal values, now called libertarian in America.
Bob Zadek: The music is telling us, Tom, we’re going to have to get off. I’m sorry. I wish I had another four or five hours, Tom. Thanks so much for the hour of your time this morning and thank you very much for your book.
Tom Palmer: Pleasure is mine.
Bob Zadek: Stay well, Tom. Thank you.