We are required by law to wear seatbelts in cars and crash-helmets on motorbikes, to refrain from smoking in public indoor areas, from injecting heroin and smoking marijuana – all in the interests of our health, our well-being and our safety. Such laws imply that government knows our interests better than we ourselves do, and has a duty to act accordingly. Given that government has the information, the experts, the commissions of enquiry, the ministries with teams of civil servants and special advisers and their responsibilities, could this be right?
What is at stake in this question? The answer is – liberty. When the authors of the Federalist Papers were debating whether to add a Bill of Rights to the then new United States Constitution, Alexander Hamilton objected that drawing up a list of positive rights would imply that they were the only ones to which citizens were entitled, whereas the absence of prohibition left open the whole field of what Isaiah Berlin later called ‘negative liberties’, defined as absence of constraint. Pertinently, Berlin declared himself wary of ‘positive liberties’ – those permitted or (worse) enjoined constitutionally or by statute – on the grounds that they are in the interests, as decided by those who know best, of those destined to enjoy them.
Once our legislators are endowed with the power to decide what is in our interests, it is not long before they begin to exercise it. We think it is a joke to say that sugar will soon be the new heroin, to be proscribed as injurious to health – but laws on the size of soda drink bottles in New York (a way of limiting corn syrup intake by the American obese) are a staging post on the way thither. It is accordingly important to distinguish between laws that require information about the content of foodstuffs – stating how much fat and sugar they contain – and laws that (might one day) ban sugar, because the former provide people with information on which they can choose for themselves how to act, whereas the latter embody the principle that nanny – the drafter of the relevant laws – knows best.
There is a difficult line to be trodden here, of course. Through its representatives in government a community might make rational decisions to do certain things that limit individual freedoms in the interests of all – such as requiring everyone to drive on the same side of the road, and not to do it under the influence of mind-altering substances like heroin and alcohol – but the temptation to paternalism and condescension in the form of other less evidently publicly beneficial laws that prohibit this or that behaviour because it is not in the interests of individuals to engage in it – the drug laws are a prime example – is another matter. The line in question is now regularly and in large strides overstepped by governments of all stripes, not least because of the passivity with which such tramplings on individual liberty are received by the trampled.
A high value attaches to the autonomy that individuals should have over decisions about their own lives. Such autonomy carries responsibility. Responsibility requires thought. Most people do not like to think. They thereby give an opening – too often, force governments to enter the opening – for governments to start taking decisions that should be each individual’s to take.
Those who suffer most as a result are those who wish to, and can, take decisions for themselves. Because most of the rest will not do so, the autonomous are dragged into the queue that governments form on their behalf.
Obviously enough, questions and answers have an incestuous relationship: how the former are phrased determines how the latter are formulated. Controversies over the wording of census and referendum questions illustrate the point well. Consider, therefore, alternatives to the question. ‘Under what circumstances can a person expect help from the state?’ ‘Under what circumstances should a person not expect help from the state?’ ‘Under what circumstances is there no reasonable entitlement for a person to expect help from the state?’
Perhaps the one question that sums up the concern behind them all is: ‘How far is it morally acceptable for welfare spending cuts to go, in the light of their effect on people in vulnerable circumstances?’
There is a consensus, fuzzy at the edges but otherwise firm enough, in most Western European polities, that the state exists to provide basic securities and equities – using these terms in their non-financial sense of course: securities at very least in defence and the maintenance of law and order, equities in provision of health and education in quality and quantity sufficient to offer the least advantaged a chance to progress, if they will accept the offer – and in general to make a civilised distribution from the common purse, to all who wish to accept it, of the goods of health and education.
But the provision of security does not stop with the army and police. Subsistence and shelter for those who cannot pay their own way because of unemployment, disability, illness, age and like factors, are also forms of security. Much of the debate about levels of welfare spending concern how much such security should be provided, not whether or not it should be provided. The consensus in question is that the state has welfare responsibilities; the arguments are almost always about how much should be spent in discharging them.
The politics of that debate revolve around what we should devote resources to: is it to solving the underlying problems (say, the causes of unemployment) which generate a need for welfare spending, or palliation of the symptoms of the problem in the form of dole and housing benefit? After all, say this view’s proponents, fixing the problem will obviate the symptoms. The response is to query the implication that this is an either-or matter: of course the underlying problem should be fixed, but in the meantime welfare should be maintained at civilised and compassionate levels, because allowing people (and especially children) to fester in poverty causes long-term problems of a kind that could and probably will make greater demands on future welfare budgets.
So the summary answer to the question posed above about what people should legitimately expect from the state is: that people should (are entitled to) expect help from the state when they are, for one or another reason, unable to attain by their own endeavours the basic securities and equities mentioned.
But there are other things people can legitimately expect of the state. Here is a list: protecting civil liberties; ensuring that economic life – work, trading, investment, manufacture, services, everything – is fair, safe and rewarded; responding sensibly to the myriad difficulties that spring up in a complex society; being an enabler rather than an interferer in citizens’ legitimate activities, but interfering when justice requires; protecting minorities, and promoting the common good while respecting individual diversity, autonomy and privacy.
This is not an idealist’s list, but a simple statement of basics, regarding what we should expect from the state in addition to its organisation of society’s collective resources to provide a welfare net. We do not expect the state to moralise, to nanny, to over-protect, to make our personal decisions for us. But we do expect it to apply the shared resources of society to the interests of its members, and that fundamentally includes helping those who need it.
What about the freeloaders? There are doubtless some. If identified, they can be required to do their share. But their numbers are assuredly small: it takes a large lack of self-respect to be a parasite. Treat their thefts from the common purse as the charge we willingly pay so that no one in real need lacks their entitlement.