Outliers and Paternalism

I have this pet theory that since taking over the LA Times editorial section Michael Kinsley has implemented a plan of only publishing the least-persuasive conservative writers he can find as a clever, covert means of discrediting the right. Certainly, today's totally inane David Gelertner column seems to bolster that theory. Gelertner's "arguments" are too silly to be worth rebutting in particular, but it's worth saying something about the general question here. Gelertner seems to be objecting to any sort of paternalistic regulation whatsoever. He does so not on principled libertarian grounds (i.e., "paternalism is always wrong because people should be free") but on the grounds that any paternalistic policy can only be justified on the grounds that people in general are too dumb to make decisions for themselves and that this is empirically false.

So let's consider an example. Lets say one of my libertarian friends were to propose the total deregulation of heroin. This not only means heroin users and dealers won't be thrown in jail. There will be no more heroin dealers. Instead, you'll buy heroin at your local supermarket and it will come in pretty packages. It'll be sold by Heroin, Inc. and Smackcorp and they'll advertise during children's television shows, sporing events, popular sitcoms, in magazines and on billboards, etc., etc., etc. Most people -- liberal or conservative -- would think this is a pretty bad idea. Why? Well, because it would lead to a lot more heroin addiction. And heroin addiction is bad. But is the point here that "people" are too stupid to avoid heroin addiction? Of course not. No matter what kind of stupid policy we adopted most people still wouldn't take heroin, and some people who tried heroin would avoid becoming addicts.

At the same time, even with heroin being illegal and everything, some people still become heroin addicts even though it's obviously a bad idea to become addicted to heroin. The more you deregulate heroin sales, the more people will become addicted. If you totally deregulated heroin marketing, you'd get a lot more heroin addiction, even though most people would still be addiction-free. Paternalism usually works like this. You're concerned about outliers. It's a big country. Even if only 15 percent of the population were to do something silly, that would still be over 30 million people -- more than enough to worry about.