Nanny States
What is the difference between an intervention that is “nanny state” – the government intruding into your life unnecessarily to “protect” you – and an intervention that is a sensible health and safety precaution. Are they just a matter of degree? Of intention? Of level of intrusion?
I suspect it is not any one thing that sets us off, but the big three seem to be:
- The “nanny” agent treats an adult like a child – overriding decision processes that are perfectly capable of making a rational choice.
- The “nanny” agent sponsors an enforcement that is both highly intrusive and has low perceived social or communal value. The more intrusive and the lower the value, the more likely the “nanny state” moniker is invoked.
- The “nanny” agent is not in the social majority.
To illustrate, I have two excellent examples:
Firstly, the EU has just banned the manufacturing and import of incandescent light bulbs. That’s one better than the great nanny state debacle of the previous government – you won’t even be able to order your bulbs from overseas. Apply the Nanny Criteria:
- Everyone in Europe is apparently too stupid to make up their own mind on this issue.
- It is hugely intrusive, causing some to have to change their entire household wiring systems. It is also of dubious value. Overlooked by most advocates of CFLs is the simple fact that they take time to warm up. Switching them on and off markedly reduces their life span. Therefore most users tend to leave CFLs on all the time, in every room. And that is before we factor in the costs of disposing of all that mercury…
- I strongly suspect as many home owners object to this policy as did in New Zealand.
Contrast this with the new Ford MyKey which can be given to a teenager and automatically limits the top speed of the car plus won’t play the stereo until everyone is buckled up.
- It treats teenagers as teenagers. Adults can still use the car in the normal way.
- The use of the car is only moderately curtailed even for teenagers and then only in the ares you want to limit. Granted, it is intrusive, but the value of the intervention is high. High speed and not wearing safety belts are the two biggest killers of teenagers caught in accidents (alcohol is the biggest cause of accidents, but not the biggest killer)
- The vast majority of parents will love this and only the teenagers wanting to speed without safety belts will be objecting.
There is no doubt in my mind that the first is an egregious case of “nannyism” and the second a bona fide safety device.
You can use these three criteria against anything the government (or others) propose. Take the anti-smacking legislation for instance.
- Only the (childless) government knows how to bring up your children. Parents are too stupid/brutal
- You can’t get more intrusive than a law preventing you from effective child-rearing. The benefit of said law is exactly zero – no child abuse prevented at all.
- 87.6%
NANNY STATE χ
See how easy it is to analyse?
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- Did you see the one about . . . « Homepaddock — [...] Nanny States at Macdoctor – a three point checklist for differentiating between nanny & necessary. [...]
Sep 2 09 9:15 am
Great post! I’ll put up a link to it over at CR.
kg´s last blog ..‘Flashing women to be a traffic-stopper’
Sep 2 09 9:59 am
MacD another of your very simple three rules. Like the statistics one it has the elegantly simple.
As for the edison bulbs, I posted about that the other day with a different twist. Germans are often held up as bastions of the Green ideals yet as a society they are stockpiling Edison lamps as fast as they can.
A quick scan of the three rules shows that German citizens are not at all happy about Nanny.
Sep 2 09 10:16 am
Mac, we should be breeding from you (artificially of course).
I particularly like the low social value line.. that really does hit the smacking button.
JC
Sep 2 09 11:27 am
Great post, but I would suggest another:
4. No problem, perceived or real, is ever analysed for cost/benefit – i.e. doing nothing is never considered a solution that will deliver better results than regulation/control.
I would suggest that most problems around the old law were perception rather than reality, and that the solution is far worse that the problem ever was.
scrubone´s last blog ..That’s what I always ask
Sep 2 09 12:51 pm
“There is no doubt in my mind that the first is an egregious case of “nannyism” and the second a bona fide safety device.”
Yes, but even more simply, the first is an example of state force and the second a personal option.
Sep 2 09 2:42 pm
There is one significant difference in your two examples you haven’t spotted, Mac (though I just noticed that Sus did).
The government has a legal monopoly on the use of force. Ford doesn’t.
Makes a difference to the level of “intrusion,” don’t you think?
Sep 2 09 8:01 pm
Sus and Peter:
You are both, of course, quite right. The second would have probably been a better example if I had postulated that the state legislated that all cars met that standard, which is more what I had in mind.
I suspect you two would then have accused me of differentiating in degrees of “nannyism”, but, to a non-libertarian, the difference is between tolerable state intervention and intolerable.
Sep 3 09 1:31 am
This post has been linked for the HOT5 Daily 9/2/2009, at The Unreligious Right
Sep 3 09 6:17 pm
Fair enough.
Sep 3 09 8:28 pm
The government has a legal monopoly on the use of force. Ford doesn’t.
Ah more libertarian crap. The government has nothing of the sort. Even under Hellen parents can use force for all sorts of things – just not to box the ears of a kid who can’t be arsed tidying up their room or doing their homework! (and we wonder why NZ is a litter filled mess of illiterates and innumerates). Break into my house when I’m away and hopefully you’ll be met by PRIVATE security with (at least) some very large sticks and you bet they won’t hesitate to use them! And if I’m here, well, let’s just say no jury would every convict me.
What is the difference between an intervention that is “nanny state” – the government intruding into your life unnecessarily to “protect” you – and an intervention that is a sensible health and safety precaution. Are they just a matter of degree? Of intention? Of level of intrusion?
The real answer is of course: nothing at all. Although PC is wrong about force, he is right to point out that neither Ford nor parents are “The Government”. Now I still think the MyKey is a stupid idea: if you don’t trust the kids on their own, you shouldn’t rely on the car’s programming to keep them save. But yes, if the state legislates anything like this at all, then it is Nannying. And that is a whole lot of stuff!