Liberty Is Hard

”Choice” vs. Cost-Shifting

It is interesting the way that ideas get framed in politics. If you were to ask the average American which segment of the political spectrum most favored “choice,” the response would almost certainly be “liberals” or “progressives.” After all, they have created an entire political vocabulary around being “pro-choice.” The reality is very different. Indeed, I would argue that the left as a whole dislikes the notion of people making choices. The harder left takes this in a totalitarian direction with things like hate crimes and speech codes. The softer left seeks to use the language of choice to hide the fact that what they are doing is shielding themselves from having to make any actual choices.

Here’s a way to think of making choices: if it involves weighing costs and benefits and making some sort of trade-off, then you are making a choice. If it involves shifting the costs of one’s preferred choices onto others so that you do not have to make a trade-off you do not like, then it is probably liberal policy in action.

A primo example of this logic is on display the Minnesota Legislature. Now run by the Democrats, the Legislature has taken a quick break from passing tax-hike laws to pass a smoking ban for the entire state. Smoking will no longer be permitted in any indoor eating or drinking establishment or place of work, even – using the “employee safety” as a hook – private clubs. In one fell swoop they took away the ability to choose on the part of millions of owners, patrons and employees. But in doing so the progressive legislators and their buddies no longer have to make unpalatable choices of their own. They now can go to any restaurant or bar in the state and not have to think about whether the reality of ambient smoke outweighs their desire to enjoy the food, drink and atmosphere.

They always had the choice to do this, mind you. They could always choose whether or not to attend an establishment based on its smoking policies. They could always choose where to work based on exposure to annoying smoke. But they don’t want to choose like that. They wish to have their cake and eat it too. So they pass a law restricting the choices of millions so that they can avoid making one they don’t like.

Another superb example of the liberal antipathy for choices is – oddly enough – abortion. In the narrowest sense, abortion is about giving a mother the choice of whether to destroy her unborn child. But from the larger perspective it is designed to eliminate choice, to remove uncomfortable choices from the liberal worldview.

To hear feminist activists rant, one would think that those on the pro-life side seek to strap young women down in clinic beds and forcibly impregnate them. The default actual conservative position is that sexual behavior by definition requires choices. Period. From time immemorial, nature has presented hormonally-addled young adults with a serious choice. Give in to your urges and risk becoming chained to a screaming rug rat way ahead of schedule, or defer the urges until you are ready to be a responsible parent. But the time to make that choice is before engaging in the behavior, as difficult as that can be.

But that’s no fun! What’s the point of having a sexual revolution if it carries the baggage of outmoded icky bourgeois choices? So they had to implement a fail-safe to eliminate the need for choosing. And as is usually the case, the choice was not eliminated at all. The costs of the choice were just shifted to someone else, in this case from the mother (and father) to the baby. Hardly seems fair does it?

It is reasonable to assert that the willingness to honestly face hard choices at a personal level is a defining characteristic of ordered liberty. I have always believed that neither democracy nor liberty is an “easy” form of government. It is much easier – and probably more in synch with human social nature – to simply take orders from the leader of the pack. To straightforwardly consider options, accept trade-offs, and live with the costs of one’s choices is the very essence of the mature democratic citizen. Such notions play well on Rush Limbaugh, but are very scary to a political culture that has elevated victomology to an art form.

No, although liberalism recognizes that the language of “choice” is popular and somewhat seductive, what it means when it speaks of choice is a fervent desire to run away from the consequences of personal decision making, to avoid making the trade-offs and bearing the costs of personal choice. And to impose those costs on others through the coercive power of government.

No wonder I don’t like that ideology.

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