Tag: choices

Four Options When Government Gets in the Way of Your Dreams

Four Options When Government Gets in the Way

Illustration by Matthew Drake

 

This article is adapted from a presentation given at FEE and SFL seminars.  Co-authored with James Walpole for The Freeman.

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We all want to live free, but we have a problem: governments don’t always want us to.

From seemingly mundane rules (like banning raw milk sales) to the truly horrific (like taking your house from you or throwing you in jail), the state is probably going to mess with you at some point in your life. It will throw taxes and fees and fines and rules at you and erect roadblocks and regulations inhibiting your progress — especially if you’re trying to do something new and innovative.

What can you do?

You do have options. Grave as the stakes may sometimes be, you must first accept this outlook: it’s all a game. If you treat it that way, you’re more likely to find a way forward rather than simply cowering in fear or trembling with anger.

Here, then, are four options when you’re faced with the game of government interference.

1. Play the Game

This is the strategy you’re probably most familiar with. It’s what we’re all encouraged to do. Whether through voting, lobbying, or holding office, you can try to take on the state while playing by its rules. You can try to change it from the inside. This is a strategy we cannot recommend.

In business, this strategy leads to the phenomenon economists call “regulatory capture.” Many companies become involved in lobbying and political action to prevent hostile regulations. It’s understandable. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on campaign donations and dinners trying to sway politicians and regulators to delay a vote, join coalitions, or carve out exceptions.

It’s a tough, slow process, one that involves endless compromise of principle and decency, and the few who succeed end up with political power and the ability to gain more. They end up using that power not just to expand their own freedom but to crush the freedom of competitors.

But any changes you make will be temporary. Laws passed in one decade are easily repealed in the next, especially if they limit state power. The bigger loss is a personal one. If you play the game long enough, the game ends up playing you. You become a part of the power structure you were trying to fight.

2. Defy the Game

When the state crushes your dreams, you can fight back. History is full of people who stopped taking oppression for granted and started resisting. Look at the civil rights movement in the United States, the Hungarian revolt against Communist rule, or even Uber’s commercial rebellion.

Today, the ridesharing company is operating illegally in dozens of cities, and it’s already paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for its drivers who are caught violating local laws. The company is growing fast enough to absorb the damage, and while governments don’t like Uber, customers love it. In Uber-hostile cities like New York, riders are standing up for their favorite way to get around. The “rebellion” has been a huge success.

But rebellion plays out in more desperate ways in the rest of the political world. For people and companies without the money and reputation of Uber, successfully defying the game is hard. While you can get tremendous satisfaction from sticking it to the man, you might end up in jail. You might be killed. In other words, playing this way means you might run into the real power of the state in its rawest form.

3. Change the Game

Changing the game is about recognizing the incentive structures and putting external pressure on the government to bend. Often, all you need to do to win is to hold the state to its own rules.

But it’s not as easy as it sounds, and the people who try to change the game in this way have to be heroic, if not martyrs. They’re taking the longest route. Game-changers lower the cost of information to the public while raising the cost for government to break its own rules or be thuggish. This group includes lawyers, journalists, public intellectuals, and everyday citizens.

Look at the case of occupational licensing. Municipal and state governments throughout the United States require entrepreneurs to give up money and time to comply with regulations. Many would-be entrepreneurs are stopped dead in their tracks by competition-killing regulations.

Before the Institute for Justice (IJ) challenged the regulation, eyebrow threaders in Texas were required to train for 750 hours before they could set up shop. Before another IJ case in 2011, Texas required bakers wanting to sell cookies to the public to rent commercial kitchen space and obtain food-handling permits.

Changing the game isn’t limited to the courtroom. Governments will break their own rules if they can get away with it. Both IJ cases included concerted efforts to raise public awareness about the unfair consequences of the regulations while simultaneously challenging them in court. These efforts raised the stakes for any judge who wanted to rule for the status quo. It also resulted in politicians jockeying to change the law before the court case was even settled so that they could take credit and benefit from the positive PR. Think about the state lawmakers who jumped at the chance to restrict eminent domain after theKelo outrage.

This is one of the biggest pros of changing the game: if you’re successful, you’ve kept your own integrity, and you’ve helped to protect others from the dream crushers in government.

The problem is that you may not win. You can spend years of your life fighting the battle to change the game and lose — plenty of people have, from the Dred Scott case to the Kelo decision. Even if you do win, the victory is too often short-lived: as soon as public awareness and scrutiny abate, courts will “reinterpret” hard-fought constitutional changes put in place to restrict government.

4. Ignore the Game

Entrepreneurs in the last decade have made international-trade and immigration restrictions less and less important. Today, anyone can telecommute to work in the United States from a call center in India, an Internet cafe in Bangladesh, or a personal laptop in Mexico. These innovations allow labor to move freely, and the inventors never needed to lobby politicians.

You can quit, exit, and opt out of the games government uses to stop you. You can move. You can pull your kids out of school. You can alter your business plan. You can quietly sidestep the obstacles placed before you.

There are major benefits to ignoring the game. For one thing, you don’t have to think about politics. Psychologists and philosophers have long told us to not worry about things not under our control. By ignoring the game, you can be politically ignorant and much happier. You don’t have to fight court battles or Internet comment threads. You can focus on creating, not protesting.

Ignoring the game isn’t always as satisfying as defying it, but ignoring the game offers an immediate sense of personal freedom. It allows you to create a freer life for yourself while providing an example that others can learn from. Over time, if enough people ignore the game, it begins to wane in importance and power.

How Will You Respond?

If your goal is to live free, first understand the game and know the rules. The way you respond to the game is then up to you. The strategy you choose will have more influence over your quality of life than any near-term victory or defeat will.

You may respond to the government in many different ways throughout your life, but if you treat it like a game, it will be less likely to ruin you.

The Limitations of Cost-Benefit Analysis

It’s easy to assume a simple cost-benefit analysis is always in order for every important decision.  I’ve found that the more important and radical the decision, the less valuable c-b analysis is.  It’s often little more than a way to complicate things, stall a decision, add stress, and provide cover for a choice your gut tells you is wrong but you fear to pick otherwise.

When I think about all the biggest decisions in my life they all had a moment of crisis where c-b ceased to bring any clarity and I was forced to answer one simple question – the only question that really matters – do I want to do this or don’t I?

Whether considering marriage, moving to a new city, having a child, starting a business, or any other major life-altering action, c-b analysis is probably distracting you from being honest about what you want and doing it.  It’s possible analyzing the pros and cons can help you discover what you really want, but far more likely you know with your knower already, but what you want is scary or unconventional or hard to explain or justify to others, so you look for additional ammunition or an out.  Push all the clutter aside.  Throw away your two columned pros and cons list.  Sit down with yourself in the quiet and ask, “Do I want to do this or don’t I?”  Sit in it.  Imagine what choosing no feels like.  Imagine what choosing yes feels like.  Which do you know deep down you want?

Once you honestly know the one-word answer to “Do I want this?”, commit.  Resolve to do it.  Take some action that holds you accountable to your commitment. (Tell someone in private, make it public, etc.)  The rest will follow.

Cost-benefit analysis is great for picking a web-hosting service or a tagline – decisions that don’t affect the core of your being and that have a lot of small differences worth exploring – but it’s woefully insufficient and even counter-productive for deciding which bold steps to take on your life journey.  None of the pros or cons can really be known with any degree of certainty, and all the best decisions have more unknowns than knowns, thus fewer items that can fruitfully be put on the ledger.

Trust your gut.  If you want it, go get it.  There is no such thing as the perfect choice, or the right choice.  There is only what you want to take a chance on and what you don’t.

Waging Generational Warfare Against Yourself

I just read a wonderful book called How They Succeeded.  I was struck by how many of the highly accomplished individuals interviewed mentioned staying out of debt as a key to success.  It’s obvious that being debt free has practical benefits like the ability to accumulate capital, the maintenance of good credit and a good reputation.  But these seemed rather simple and obvious and not enough to warrant the repeated advice.  None of them mentioned personal hygiene or other obvious practical disciplines, so why debt?

I think there are reasons beyond the practical and material for minimizing debt.  There is a psychological loss of freedom that can take place with the knowledge of debt hanging over ones head.  This can subtly subvert free-thinking and creativity and narrow the lens through which one sees the world.

This is probably not the case for everyone in every circumstance.  If you’re involved in lots of business endeavors where you need to operate on credit you may be very comfortable with and adept at handling debt.  I know people who do not seem to have any trouble with a constantly fluctuating personal balance sheet.  It’s not that way for me.  I definitely feel the steady pressure of debt like white noise in the background of all I do.

On the one hand, it seems odd that debt would be problematic.  Borrowing money from the probable excess of the future to subsidize consumption of the tighter present can make financial sense and result in an overall increase in enjoyment of life.  Indeed, if we never changed or grew and our preferences were the same through time, debt would make perfect sense as a way to smooth the ups and downs of material pleasures.  But that’s just it, we change.

This excellent blog post about doing what you love mentions being stuck with the career choices made by your teenage self.  If you are determined to be a lawyer or a doctor at a young age and persist down that path at some point you may realize you no longer enjoy it, but your options have narrowed with your skill set.  You are a captive to the choices of your earlier self.  It’s no different with consumption decisions than educational or career decisions.  Going in to debt is a way for your present self to borrow from your future self.  Think about the level of presumption.  Are you really confident your future self will be the type of person who would think it a good idea?  Might they have other uses to put the debt payments to?

When you go into debt, you are binding another person – your future self – to subsidize the desires of your present self.  It may be a good idea in some cases, but it warrants very careful consideration.  It’s not merely a question of whether your future self will have the resources to subsidize your present preferences; it’s also a question of whether you’ll be happy about doing it.  I don’t want to be bitter at my former self for the financial obligations I have.  I’d rather the self of the past, present and future work together towards the fulfillment of our individual and shared life goals.