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> Namely, that government creates crimes to control people, ("There is no way to rule an honest man. The only power government has is over criminals. Thus we cr

> Namely, that government creates crimes to control people, ("There is no way to rule an honest man. The only power government has is over criminals. Thus we create more and more laws until every man is a criminal.") Things like public health directly contravene this concept. There is a collective public good (say vaccination), it only works if some percentage of the population opts in, either through incentive or obligation. Infants are protected from whooping cough only by our ability to guarantee vaccination of other citizens (since they are protected not by the vaccine itself, but the cocoon effect of having a vaccinated population that is not susceptible to whooping cough). In other words, governments definitely do have power over honest people.

bo1024 15y ago
I prefer to think of it in terms of economics. There aren't honest people and dishonest people; there are incentives and people who respond to them. The question is what your political and economic system incentivizes. In the face of good incentives, most people are good. In the face of bad incentives, no amount of moral clamoring will save your society.
- dkarl 15y ago
  Economic incentives are sandwiched between two other factors. One is more attractive, and tends to dominate discussion, and the other is more powerful and tends to dominate actual behavior. The more attractive force is morality. People consciously approach their own behavior in moral terms, and they struggle, occasionally successfully, to defy economic incentives that conflict with their moral values. This personal focus on morality (even if it is a narcissistic delusion) makes it much more natural to discuss policy in moral terms than it terms of incentives. I don't think this is helpful for policy discussions. We should all follow what we think is right, but policy needn't reflect moral consensus. The more powerful force is culture. Think of all the people in jail for selling drugs who could be living middle class lives if only they had rejected their social identities and social ties to follow economic incentives. It's hard to imagine more powerful economic incentives than the ones operating in American life today. If you're a poor kid and you dedicate your life to achieving technical competence in a highly paid profession, the economic elite is ideologically invested in the idea that you should be rewarded with a comfortable, secure upper-class life. Not only are they eager to see you assume the most economically productive position in life you can, in order to bolster the U.S. economic growth that their investments largely track, but even more importantly, denying you the social position you've earned would undermine the legitimacy of their social position. And if you shoot for Harvard law or Harvard medicine but fall short, you'll still fall in the upper middle class somewhere. The incentives couldn't be more clear, but mistrust and cultural ties muddy things up. The fact that people make many of the most crucial decisions of their lives as ignorant children, or have those decisions made for them by ignorant parents, gives culture a big advantage over incentives. People don't see incentives with perfect, X-ray vision. They see them through whatever lens they've been equipped with by their upbringing. The effectiveness of incentives, then, depends on cultural factors. In the case of corporations and thoroughly bourgeois businesspeople, we underestimate the power of incentives. In the case of everybody else, we overestimate the power of incentives. In the case of persuading inner-city youth to dedicate themselves to lucrative (for us as well as them) middle-class lives instead of lives of crime, our failure is less in providing opportunity (aka incentives) than in teaching them to see the opportunity and believe in it so that it becomes possible for them to work towards it. I do believe laws should be seen more as a system of incentives than as enforcers of a privileged morality, but laws should be designed to be effective incentives for the people who live under them, not for homo economicus.
AdleyEskridge 15y ago
I understand the point you're trying to make, but I don't think there is a single country in the world (free or otherwise) that makes it illegal to abstain from vaccination. If there is such a country, please correct me—I simply couldn't find one after a few minutes of research. The benefits of vaccination for the receiver of the vaccine are usually enough to entice voluntary vaccination. In fact, I'm sure there are plenty of civic-minded people who get themselves (or their children) vaccinated for the benefit of everyone else, too. The government would only feel compelled to forcibly vaccinate its citizens if people refused en masse to get vaccinated. And that would likely only happen if the cost/risk benefit ratio for getting vaccinated was (perceived to be) unsatisfactory. In that case, do you really want to criminalize honest, well-intentioned people who are abstaining? I'd say no—that'll create a bitter backlash, because these people don't feel like they deserve to be criminals. Instead, you'd want to educate those people and explain to them why it is worth it to get vaccinated (alternatively, if the vaccine really is too risky, you'd want to improve the vaccine). When honest, well-intentioned citizens oppose something en masse, simply making them all criminals for the common good is likely to make them oppose you, distrust you, and listen even less to what you have to say.
- philwelch 15y ago
  I assume you are blissfully unaware of the Luddite anti-vaccination movement.
  - AdleyEskridge 15y ago
    I'm aware of them, but I'm under the impression that they make up a tiny sliver of any given country. And for what it's worth I didn't downvote you (nor can I).
- scott_s 15y ago
  I'm not aware of a country that makes it illegal to abstain from vaccination, but it's bureaucratically difficult in the US once the child reaches school age. I know that the state I grew up in (Virginia) required proof of vaccination upon entering public school. Even my college required proof of vaccination. Which is something I hadn't thought about when it comes to the anti-vaccination crowd. I wonder what they do when their kids need proof of vaccination for school.

bo1024 15y ago

I prefer to think of it in terms of economics. There aren't honest people and dishonest people; there are incentives and people who respond to them. The question is what your political and economic system incentivizes. In the face of good incentives, most people are good. In the face of bad incentives, no amount of moral clamoring will save your society.

dkarl 15y ago
Economic incentives are sandwiched between two other factors. One is more attractive, and tends to dominate discussion, and the other is more powerful and tends to dominate actual behavior. The more attractive force is morality. People consciously approach their own behavior in moral terms, and they struggle, occasionally successfully, to defy economic incentives that conflict with their moral values. This personal focus on morality (even if it is a narcissistic delusion) makes it much more natural to discuss policy in moral terms than it terms of incentives. I don't think this is helpful for policy discussions. We should all follow what we think is right, but policy needn't reflect moral consensus. The more powerful force is culture. Think of all the people in jail for selling drugs who could be living middle class lives if only they had rejected their social identities and social ties to follow economic incentives. It's hard to imagine more powerful economic incentives than the ones operating in American life today. If you're a poor kid and you dedicate your life to achieving technical competence in a highly paid profession, the economic elite is ideologically invested in the idea that you should be rewarded with a comfortable, secure upper-class life. Not only are they eager to see you assume the most economically productive position in life you can, in order to bolster the U.S. economic growth that their investments largely track, but even more importantly, denying you the social position you've earned would undermine the legitimacy of their social position. And if you shoot for Harvard law or Harvard medicine but fall short, you'll still fall in the upper middle class somewhere. The incentives couldn't be more clear, but mistrust and cultural ties muddy things up. The fact that people make many of the most crucial decisions of their lives as ignorant children, or have those decisions made for them by ignorant parents, gives culture a big advantage over incentives. People don't see incentives with perfect, X-ray vision. They see them through whatever lens they've been equipped with by their upbringing. The effectiveness of incentives, then, depends on cultural factors. In the case of corporations and thoroughly bourgeois businesspeople, we underestimate the power of incentives. In the case of everybody else, we overestimate the power of incentives. In the case of persuading inner-city youth to dedicate themselves to lucrative (for us as well as them) middle-class lives instead of lives of crime, our failure is less in providing opportunity (aka incentives) than in teaching them to see the opportunity and believe in it so that it becomes possible for them to work towards it. I do believe laws should be seen more as a system of incentives than as enforcers of a privileged morality, but laws should be designed to be effective incentives for the people who live under them, not for homo economicus.

AdleyEskridge 15y ago

I understand the point you're trying to make, but I don't think there is a single country in the world (free or otherwise) that makes it illegal to abstain from vaccination. If there is such a country, please correct me—I simply couldn't find one after a few minutes of research. The benefits of vaccination for the receiver of the vaccine are usually enough to entice voluntary vaccination. In fact, I'm sure there are plenty of civic-minded people who get themselves (or their children) vaccinated for the benefit of everyone else, too. The government would only feel compelled to forcibly vaccinate its citizens if people refused en masse to get vaccinated. And that would likely only happen if the cost/risk benefit ratio for getting vaccinated was (perceived to be) unsatisfactory. In that case, do you really want to criminalize honest, well-intentioned people who are abstaining? I'd say no—that'll create a bitter backlash, because these people don't feel like they deserve to be criminals. Instead, you'd want to educate those people and explain to them why it is worth it to get vaccinated (alternatively, if the vaccine really is too risky, you'd want to improve the vaccine). When honest, well-intentioned citizens oppose something en masse, simply making them all criminals for the common good is likely to make them oppose you, distrust you, and listen even less to what you have to say.

philwelch 15y ago
I assume you are blissfully unaware of the Luddite anti-vaccination movement.
- AdleyEskridge 15y ago
  I'm aware of them, but I'm under the impression that they make up a tiny sliver of any given country. And for what it's worth I didn't downvote you (nor can I).
scott_s 15y ago
I'm not aware of a country that makes it illegal to abstain from vaccination, but it's bureaucratically difficult in the US once the child reaches school age. I know that the state I grew up in (Virginia) required proof of vaccination upon entering public school. Even my college required proof of vaccination. Which is something I hadn't thought about when it comes to the anti-vaccination crowd. I wonder what they do when their kids need proof of vaccination for school.