We Cannot Predict the Many Ways Freedom Will Improve Our Lives

Mises Daily: Wednesday, December 18, 2013 by Gary Galles (http://mises.org/daily/author/134/Gary-Galles)

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Defenders of liberty are often challenged to supply exhaustive descriptions of w hat w ould happen if some aspect of our increasingly government-dictated lives were returned to peoples free choices. What would happen if gov ernment didnt educate our children? What would happen if Social Security didnt force people to sav e for retirement or Medicare and Medicaid didnt provide health care? What would happen if the Fed didnt control the money supply and the FDIC didnt insure bank deposits? What would happen if the FDA didnt ensure that food was safe and the EPA didnt protect us from pollution? What would happen if the SEC didnt rein in Wall Street and the FTC and antitrust laws didnt protect us from monopolies and collusion? These questions, and many more like them, make up an almost unending list. In the face of such questions, it is nonetheless important to recognize that such questions are rhetorical traps designed to put an unachievable burden of proof on voluntary arrangements, shortcircuiting the need to deal with the many v alid criticisms of coercive policies. The trap works because answers to such questions are beyond our competence. But that does not mean statism wins by default. It only means that detailed prediction of w hat w ould happen in a future w here some government-imposed constraints on freedom are eased is beyond anyones knowledge. Therefore, an accurate answer to What, precisely, would freedom produce? is I dont know; no one know s. But failure to satisfactorily answer the unanswerable in no w ay detracts from justified confidence that voluntary arrangements will do things better. In fact, the inability to answer helps explain why freedom works so well it allows previously undiscovered beneficial arrangements that serve people more effectively to develop, even though no one knows exactly what will happen in adv ance. To see this, simply reflect on what freedom has produced in the past. The miracles that freedom has produced, unknown in adv ance, offer overwhelming testimony for faith in freedom. For example, compare the Post Office w ith any other form of communication. Its snails pace changes contrast with advances in digital communication possibilities beyond even recent fantasies. In fact, freedom has produced miracles all around us whose nature we fail to understand, because we now take them for granted and forget their genesis (e.g., in a world of digital copying, few remember the lost joys of carbon paper and its purple progeny). We need only revisit the rev olutions involv ed to see that no one ever knew exactly what would happen beforehand. If people had only pursued what could be clearly foreseen, none of those miracles would hav e happened and we would be immeasurably poorer. But how do we know that freedoms results w ill be improvements when anything could happen? First, self-interest the desire to improve the circumstances we currently face means that
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improvements are sought. Second, when peoples rights are protected, the need to get others

voluntary agreement means no one can force worse results on others, but leaves plenty of room for results to be not only better, but unimaginably better. Neither is assured under governments heav y hand. As Leonard Reads famous I, Pencil, illustrated, market miracles are ev eryday occurrences. Pencils are cheap and plentiful, even though no one know s everything involved in making them. And so are staggering arrays of other things. In addition, no politician w ho ov ersees, or bureaucrat who administers, one of the many government enterprises that have grown to surround us could have met the same burden of proof when the gov ernment ov errides voluntary arrangements with their dictates. Moreover, questions posed to the gov ernment of what would happen in the face of some new proposed government program, such as Obamacare, are often tossed aside w ith impunity. The initial promises made with such conviction for new gov ernment solutions have been unrealized pipedreams. And unlike self-ownership and the jointly beneficial market arrangements it allows, which has produced uncountable successes without theft, there are no such success stories that demonstrate miraculous improvement from the intrusion of government that can match the historical successes of the market. In fact, the only real examples of government-produced miracles, those produced by stringently restricting its reach, as with the thou shalt nots of our Constitutions Bill of Rights, only reinforce a legitimate belief in freedom and corollary distrust of government. One of my professors once said that I have been an economist long enough to realize I dont know is an intellectually respectable answer. In fact, when predicting the future, that is v irtually always an important part of the answer. But w hen people are free, the results of their voluntary arrangements will be as good as they can discover, ev en if they are unknown in advance. In contrast, public policies based on what Friedrich Hayek called the pretense of knowledge, backed by coercion, are neither intellectually respectable nor a guarantee of improvement, however frequently or adamantly such promises are made. In fact, if the burden of proving its effectiv eness was put on gov ernment, rather than liberty, vanishingly little of gov ernment would surviv e, and the shackles binding the miracles that are possible would be loosed.

Note: The views expressed in Daily Articles on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute. Comment on this article. When commenting, please post a concise, civ il, and informative comment. Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. He is the author of The Apostle of Peace: The Radical Mind of Leonard Read (http://www.ama zon.com/gp/product/1 62129 0972/ ref=a s_li_ qf_sp_asin_il_t l? ie= UTF8& camp= 1789& creat ive=9 325&creativeA SIN=162 12909 72&linkCode=as2 &tag= mises insti-20) . Send him mail (mailto:Gary.Galles@pepperdine.edu). See Gary Galles's article archives (ht tp:// mises .org/ daily /author/13 4/Gar y-Galles) . You can subscribe to future articles by Gary Galles v ia this RSS feed (ht tp:// mises .org/ Feeds /articles.ashx? Aut horId=134) .
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