Government morality hurts social progress

Economics Political Theory
1

I have come to the conclusion that government-instituted social morality hurts the actual progress of social morality.

What do I mean by social morality? I do not mean legal ethics, I mean the “nice, proper, and ‘fair’” way to do things. In general, making your society a place where you want to live.

So how does government hurt this morality?

By relying on its own inherently immoral existence to enforce morality, it triggers a rebellious instinct in people to fight the injustice of government. The ensuing fight between government and opposition creates a new, pointless issue and draws attention away from true societal concerns.

Take monopolies and Walmart. When government wants to regulate Walmart, people line up with Walmart to defend its owners’ rights. Then comes the fight with government. While this fight goes on, the fact that Walmart may indeed be doing some unpleasant things gets forgotten. Government intervention prevents this liberty-loving part of the population from looking at the ethical but “uncool” practices of Walmart.

Same with climate change. There are opponents of climate change who would be sympathetic to a free-market movement against polluters but not to a government movement against polluters.

Same with unions. While unions are an inherently capitalistic constructs that may very well be healthy for a free market, the government intervention on part of unions distorts market forces so that to protect their freedom, people are forced to fight against unions. In this way, government prevents capitalism from fixing itself.

This imposition of unethical government morality prevents the society from developing and evolving its own voluntary solutions for problems.

2

The Results of Legal Plunder

It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.

What are the consequences of such a perversion? It would require volumes to describe them all. Thus we must content ourselves with pointing out the most striking.

In the first place, it erases from everyone’s conscience the distinction between justice and injustice.

No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law. These two evils are of equal consequence, and it would be difficult for a person to choose between them.

The nature of law is to maintain justice. This is so much the case that, in the minds of the people, law and justice are one and the same thing. There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are “just” because law makes them so. Thus, in order to make plunder appear just and sacred to many consciences, it is only necessary for the law to decree and sanction it. Slavery, restrictions, and monopoly find defenders not only among those who profit from them but also among those who suffer from them.

  • Frederic Bastiat