Remember this? "There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not
attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish
to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it
softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We
will control the vertical. ..."
Younger readers may not remember the opening to "The Outer Limits," a pretty
good sci-fi rip-off of "The Twilight Zone" (and they may have only a fuzzy
understanding that TVs used to have knobs to control the horizontal and
vertical). But as they read the news these days, maybe they can find a new
appreciation for the creepy feeling of powerlessness that opening once gave
viewers.
For instance, California recently proposed revisions to its housing code
that would require all new or remodeled homes to have a "programmable
communicating thermostat." Equipped with special "nonremovable" FM radio
receivers, these devices would allow state power authorities to set the
temperature in your home as they see fit. Ostensibly to manage demand during
"price events" and other "emergencies," you would basically cede control of
your home's heating and air conditioning to the state (when and if state
officials wanted to exercise it).
Taken by itself, this may not sound so scary - and indeed, California
recently sent the thermostat proposal back for further study after some
public criticism. But then again, as Gulliver learned, one Lilliputian is an
intriguing freak. Two are kind of cool. But 10,000 teeny-weeny folk tying
you down?
Of course, tying Americans down, limiting their options, foreclosing on any
path not acceptable to today's social controllers of the right and the left
is perhaps the defining spirit of our age.
In New York City, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg has become a champion of a
supposedly new "post-partisan" movement of for-your-own-good-government,
trans fats are off the menu. Smoking has become the ceremony of heretics and
outlaws. In 2006 alone, New York City banned - or attempted to ban - pit
bulls; trans fats; aluminum baseball bats; the purchase of tobacco by 18- to
20-year-olds; foie gras; pedicabs in parks; new fast-food restaurants (but
only in poor neighborhoods); lobbyists from the floor of council chambers;
vehicles in Central and Prospect parks; cell phones in upscale restaurants;
the sale of pork products made in a processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C.;
mail-order pharmaceutical plans; candy-flavored cigarettes; the Ringling
Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus; and Wal-Mart.
David Harsanyi, author of "Nanny State," reports that there are "No Running"
signs in Florida playgrounds, perhaps to make it easier for the authorities
to catch toddlers and outfit them with mandatory helmets, chin guards and
corrective shoes.
Nor is this a purely American phenomenon. Paris - where smoking a Gauloise
while tucking into some runny cheese has long been the national pastime -
recently banned smoking in bars, restaurants and cafes. Britain has gone
just plain bonkers, updating its omnipresent anti-crime and anti-terror
security cameras to catch people eating in their cars while on the road, now
a major offense.
In Canada, there are now a slew of public service announcements that use
fear, terror and gruesome imagery to encourage workplace safety. You can
find them on YouTube. My favorite features an attractive young female chef
in the kitchen of her restaurant, gushing that she's about to get married
and have a wonderful life. Unfortunately, proper safety precautions weren't
taken, and in the middle of the ad, while she's speaking to the camera, she
slips and falls, pouring boiling oil on herself. She screams in agony. We
see her scalded hands clenched in pain, the singed flesh on her face peeling
off. So remember kids, safety never takes a vacation!
Much of this, as Reason magazine's Jacob Sullum has long argued, stems from
the "totalitarian" temptation inherent to seeing health care as a
sub-category of politics and policy. When government picks up the tab for
health costs, it inevitably feels it is responsible for curtailing them
through "prevention," which can often elide into compulsion. As Faith
Fitzgerald, a professor at the University of California-Davis School of
Medicine, put it in the New England Journal of Medicine: "Both healthcare
providers and the commonweal now have a vested interest in certain forms of
behavior, previously considered a person's private business, if the behavior
impairs a person's Œhealth.' Certain failures of self-care have become, in a
sense, crimes against society, because society has to pay for their
consequences."
But there's another factor at work as well. We are seeing a return to the
idea - first championed by social planners in the progressive era - that
government can and should play the role of parent. For instance, Michael
Gerson, once a speechwriter for President Bush, advocates a new "heroic
conservatism" - an updating of his former boss' compassionate conservatism -
that would unleash a new era of statist regulations. On the stump, Hillary
Clinton refers to her book, "It Takes a Village," in which she argued that
we all must surrender ourselves to the near-constant prodding, monitoring,
cajoling and scolding of the "helping professions." Clinton argues that
children are born in "crisis" and government must respond with all the tools
in its arsenal from the word go. She advocates putting television sets in
all public gathering places so citizens can be treated to an endless loop of
good parenting tutorials.
Mike Huckabee, who represents compassionate conservatism on steroids, favors
a nationwide ban on public smoking. Everywhere, from Barack Obama to John
McCain, we are told that our politics must be about causes "larger than
ourselves." What we used to think of as individual freedom is now being
recast as greedy and selfish.
We've seen this before. The original progressives - activist intellectuals,
social reformers, social gospel ministers and other would-be planners in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries - touted "social control" as the
watchword of their movement. One reason the progressives supported World War
I so passionately was not because they supported the aims of the conflict
but because they loved domestic mobilization. John Dewey, the American
philosopher and educator who sang the praises of the "social benefits of
war," was giddy that the conflict might force Americans "to give up much of
our economic freedom. ... We shall have to lay by our good-natured
individualism and march in step." The progressives believed that people
needed to be saved from themselves. Journalist and commentator Walter
Lippmann dubbed average citizens "mentally children and barbarians."
"Organized social control" via a "socialized economy" was the only means to
create meaningful freedom, argued Lippmann, Dewey and others. And by free,
the progressives meant free to live the "right" way.
A similar dynamic defined much of Nazi Germany. Nazi Youth manuals
proclaimed that "nutrition is not a private matter!" "Gemeinnutz geht vor
Eigennutz" - essentially, all for one, one for all - was the rallying slogan
of the Nazi crackdown on smoking, the first serious anti-tobacco campaign of
the 20th century. The first systematized mass murder in Nazi Germany wasn't
of the Jews but of the "useless bread-gobblers" and other lebensunwertes
leben ("life unworthy of life"). The argument was that the mentally ill, the
aged, the infirm were too much of a drain on the socialist economy.
Now, nobody thinks anything like that is in store for us these days. But we
can come far short of that and still overshoot the mark of what is desirable
by a wide margin.
More important, it's worth remembering that liberty is usually found in the
small joys of daily life. In "Democracy in America," Alexis de Tocqueville
warned: "It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave
men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to
think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones."