Not Everything Is Prelude to a Witch Hunt

Critics of common good economics misunderstand the moral imperative of policymaking.

Predicting the political future is difficult. One reason for this difficulty is that some slopes really are slippery, others are not, and looking ahead from the present, it can be all but impossible to tell the difference.

Will the installation of a Ten Commandments monument on a courthouse lawn lead to a theocratic police state? Will the establishment of Medicare lead to a total government takeover of health care? Will the Patriot Act’s expansion of powers lead to an increasingly pervasive and unaccountable surveillance state? Well, as of this writing, the record on these predictions is decidedly mixed. Political life does not always follow the rules of logic—arguments that if you allow X, you therefore have to allow Y sometimes look sensible on paper but fail in the face of political realities.

In a recent essay, The Argument’s Jerusalem Demsas depicts the political setting and enforcement of communal norms as a giant water slide—take one step and you’re all the way down, hunting witches and burning heretics. It’s a striking expression of a common sentiment, one central to a certain form of postwar liberalism.

Demsas’s essay is largely a critique of Democratic Senator Chris Murphy’s recent book, Crisis of the Common Good. In it, Murphy tells the story of the Puritan-era shopkeeper Robert Keayne, who faced a hefty government fine and received official church censure for attempting to charge eight pence for six pence nails. For Murphy, this is an example of the community taking a moral stand against greed and exploitation. But for Demsas, it is the fateful step onto the slide. She answers with the story of Ann Hibbens, who, in 1640, was censured by her church for questioning the bill of her carpenter and generally failing to submit to the authority of men. Later in life, after her husband died, she was hanged as a witch.

While acknowledging that fines for price gouging do not necessarily lead to executions for witchcraft, Demsas warns that maybe they kind of do: “[it is] not an accident that a community with enough coercive power to punish someone for charging a lot for nails ends up using that coercive power in other realms of life as well.” The regulation of prices, religious orthodoxy, and women’s behavior all stemmed from the same view, “that ‘the community’ could define the good, interpret dissent as moral disorder, and punish the dissenter.” Down the slide we go.

Putting aside the question of whether “dissent” is a fair description of price gouging, or whether you need to entirely and officially “define the good” to punish price gouging, the basic idea that the government could and should regulate commercial interactions is extremely uncontroversial.

There are laws to prevent banks from taking unreasonable risks with client money. There are laws requiring merchants to tell the truth about their products. There are laws about which addictive products can be sold and to whom. There are laws about profiting from inside information. One could go on almost indefinitely. Government has long been in the business of regulating commerce—in fact, it is a specific power of Congress enumerated in the Constitution—and if anyone objects to this in principle, it is only in the most remote fever swamps of libertarianism, where age-of-consent laws and public funding of roads are also examples of government tyranny.

It is entirely possible, of course, that having gotten a taste of commerce-regulation, the government could go on to micromanage every single transaction, to the point that the economy grinds to a standstill. That hasn’t happened, of course, but maybe it will?

If the slope of commerce-regulation isn’t perfectly slippery, if the community can make some judgments and enforce them without plunging into the most insane, destructive, maximalist variations on those judgments, perhaps there is something special about the kinds of judgments that Demsas is concerned about. And indeed there is. In most of the cases of economic regulation described above, the government is ruling in favor of goods that—we imagine—most anyone can agree on. All else being equal, people seem to think that it is good to not be cheated out of your money and, perhaps to a lesser degree, to not be sick. Fair enough. Not everyone will precisely agree on the ways that government should define and pursue these goals, but that’s just politics. That’s why you argue for your positions, attempt to persuade your opponents and the undecided, and get yourself to the polls to vote.

Senator Murphy and others who argue for a common-good approach to our public life suggest that there are other judgments that we as a community can make, other legitimate goods that the government can pursue, without collapsing into hysterical moral tyranny. There is no reason, in principle, why the government can be committed to the financial and physical health of its citizens, but not also their psychological, relational, and even spiritual health.

This does not mean that the federal government can or should define “the good”—we live in a pluralistic society and so are unlikely to agree on the nature of the highest cosmic good. But perhaps we can agree on some more modest goods—the good of work that is creative, fulfilling, and pays enough to feed a family. The good of being able to shop at businesses owned by your neighbors instead of those owned by distant, unaccountable captains of industry. The good of a healthy attention span, uncolonized by Silicon Valley profiteers. The good of protection from the scourge of addiction, whether it be to online sports betting, nasty chemicals in food, social media algorithms, or opioids pushed on the economically adrift communities of Appalachia.

This might at times require shameless meddling in the interactions between businesses and consumers. We (sometimes) use the tools of government to prevent companies from literally poisoning their consumers, even if the consumers “want,” at point of sale, to buy the poison.

We can all see that the rapid explosion of phone-based sports betting has had a devastating impact on the lives and families of many Americans, especially men and boys. We can see that social media algorithms have had a cancerous impact on our public discourse, on the gender-related attitudes of young men, on the self-perception of girls and women. We can see that the hollowing out of American main streets has enriched large corporations while damaging local communities. We can see all of this, and yet we feel uncomfortable saying in public that both the companies that produce these products and the consumers who use them are making a mistake, that this is not what we want for our fellow Americans.

There is no law of logic or political life that says clamping down on these toxic realities must result in tyranny. There is also no reason to believe that the government can legitimately prevent a credit card company from charging you 50% APR, but cannot legitimately stop a social media company from hacking your dopamine system and ruining your ability to read a book, think carefully through a complicated issue, or pray.

None of this requires the government to establish a state church, or accrue new powers to impose an “Official Version of the Good Life,” which seems to be the terrifying bottom of Demsas’s slippery slope. It does, however, require us and our leaders to be realistic and honest about what actually seems to make our communities thrive, the kinds of things you want for you and yours—health, friendship, peace and safety, good books, time to reflect, beautiful public spaces, creativity, spiritual aliveness, and much more. In normal conversations with normal people, this list does not seem to us a particularly controversial one, but arguing for it will require courage, not just because it will inevitably invite some disagreement, but because human judgment about human things has seemed, for some time, inadmissible to our public conversations.

The liberal political theorist Judith Shklar famously argued for what she called a “liberalism of fear” that did not particularly aspire to create a good society (who can know what that is!) but instead to prevent oppression. And one signal way that we might oppress is by setting up some official version of the good life that everyone is required to pay fealty to. If Shklar’s is not the snappiest title for a governing philosophy, it has implicitly become dominant.

For the past several decades, both Left and Right have, in different proportions, adopted an officially non-judgmental attitude towards both the behavior of corporations and individuals, with varying exceptions for cases of outright oppression (which we are against!). On the right of center, the liberalism of fear jibed well with the rise of “shareholder primacy,” which announced that the only duty of a business is to make as much money as possible within the confines of our laws and basic rules. Considerations of what is good for our communities were to be left to pastors, philosophers, and other powerless idealists. Left of center, all judgments about other people’s choices and actions came to be treated with great suspicion, assuming no obvious harm was being done to others.

The triumph of the liberalism of fear lies downstream of the ideologically driven catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century, which have created, in Hannah Arendt’s formulation, “an ominous silence that still answers us whenever we dare to ask, not ‘What are we fighting against,’ but ‘What are we fighting for?’” We dare not say what a good action or a good life look like. That way lies exclusion, oppression, and genocide.

As time has gone on, however, this silence has grown not just ominous, but sickly. Non-oppression is really only an enabling condition for a good society. It is just the bare minimum, and frankly, its enshrinement as the be-all and end-all of political life has contributed to our current predicament. No relationship, no community, no society can subsist on these meager rations. A society that is afraid to even discuss the building blocks of a good life with one another will leave its people feeling lonely, alienated, and directionless.

And indeed, the numbers bear it out. Millions and millions of Americans currently experience their society as cutthroat, dog-eat-dog, winner-take-all competition. Younger Americans are beset with anomie, anxiety, and depression. We don’t need to build new presidential powers to decide that we can and should argue for, and legislate towards a society that truly cares about its people and is brave enough to think together about the shapes that caring might take.