A gun by any other name ...

... is still a gun.

And your rights are still being violated when it is being pointed at your head, whether you see it or not.

At Secular Foxhole, Blair notes an article in The Economist about something it is calling "soft paternalism". Last year, the New York Times called it "libertarian paternalism". From the Economist piece that called it "soft":

Soft paternalism has much in its favour. First, it is certainly better than hard paternalism. [How is any paternalism "good"? --ed] Second, a government has to provide information to citizens in order for them to make rational decisions on everything from smoking to breastfeeding to organ donation. [Why should I pay the government to circumvent natural selection? --ed] Even a government reluctant to second-guess its citizens ends up advising them in one way or another. What people decide they want is often a product of the way a choice is framed for them -- they take the first thing on the menu, or a bit of everything. Even a truly liberal government would find itself shaping the wishes and choices to which it earnestly wants to defer. It's surely better to lure people into pension schemes than out of them.

This last sentence essentializes what is wrong with paternalism. It is not the task of the government to guide man's actions one way or the other, but to permit him to act freely according to his best judgement. It does this by preventing those who would force us to act contrary to our judgement from doing so. In other words, "soft paternalism" is the government doing exactly the opposite of what it should be doing. Period. Any time the government deviates from its purpose, human life is injured, if not lost outright, as we shall see.

To its credit, the magazine does at least mention some of the pitfalls of "soft paternalism", but it misses the overall point, as did a major libertarian blogger last year. In a piece a bit on the snarky side, I had this to say when I read that under "libertarian paternalism", the government might just decide to pursue a "social good" by making us all organ donors "by default".

Are you an organ donor? In America, if you don't know, then you aren't, and you needn't worry about being "harvested" a little too quickly should you get into, say, a bad traffic accident. That could change if this approach gains much traction.

...

A "social good?" American defaults could "just" be flipped around? That's my body, asshole, and possibly my life you're talking about like it's a damned toggle switch! Whether I part myself out is up to me. The "difference" between the United States and "parts of Europe" is not so much that "the defaults" are different, but why they are different: In the United States, the government is designed to protect individual rights by default, not infringe upon them. The argument against the government applying "libertarian paternalism" in cases like this, and in getting it away from more benign instances like the one I cited above, is that the government should respect individual rights.

It is very disheartening to see that this idea is still floating around and has enough of a following to appear in such an influential publication. What is worse is that the very inertia its advocates cite as an excuse for implementing it is arguably widespread enough to make it a cinch for a bunch of busybody legislators to begin implementing it.

To my countrymen: Wake up! Please!

-- CAV