One of the grand divisions in economics — and politics for that matter — is between those who think that we must be told what to do, how to do it, and be thankful for having been so.
On the other side are those who think that much of life — between most and near all things — will be worked out among reasonable people and we can all rub along together without all that much central direction.
You know, the difference between your life being run by your mother-in-law, and being influenced by your wife (it is possible to suggest a husband here in gender parity, but mother-in-laws are mother-in-laws; that does not change). I am in the less central direction in this argument, and not just because I have a lovely wife and a problematic mother-in-law.
All of us know what a white stick means, and in my native Britain, what the possible additional red stripes do (deafness). It’s also true that there are laws about such things in many countries. Cars must give way, say, or have priority in other legal senses.
Which isn’t the point, not at all. Yes, of course, the stick itself has huge value for the user — this is why people use them, obviously. The white is there to tell the rest of us. It all works. Sure, we’d prefer that no one were ever blind, but given some are, then we’ve this system that reduces the difficulties of being so.
But how did this start? Well, it started like so many things — someone just did it and it worked. Therefore, people did more of it. At which point, the white stick is carried by the blind.
Mohammed Bhuiyan writes about both his dependence and the freedom it gives him here in this newspaper.
The white appears to be a James Briggs from the next town over from where I come from (Bristol, a whole 13 miles from my native Bath, both in England). He went blind as a result of an accident, painted his stick white, and people saw that this was good and did more of it. And that’s it really. Sure, governments have come along since then and formalized matters, but that’s secondary.
Of course, we can take sides in the larger things. It should be the bureaucrats, the politicians, who tell us how to solve problems. Or there’s Edmund Burke, a British conservative of the 18th century, who argued in favour of the “Little Platoons”. Just people spotting a problem, solving it locally, and then getting on with life.
Or there’s my formulation of the same idea. Freedom, liberty, and a better society all come from people just being allowed to do things. Try everything and then do more of what works and stop doing the things that don’t.
We might even allow the government to get involved after we’ve all worked out which things actually succeed. Although in one of those actually free societies, we’d not require people to confirm what we all already know — this works and that doesn’t. People naturally do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
True, there are some things we cannot decide on this basis. Some decisions really do have to be formally collective. But it’s amazing how far we can get just through that exercise of liberty and experiment. So, we should do more of that liberty and experiment.
Agreed, I don’t go out of my way to disobey my mother-in-law, as domestic contentment doesn’t lie that way. But telling more bureaucrats and politicians to exit our lives still has that attraction.
Tim Worstall is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London.
