A Life of One's Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State - Review

Reason, August-Sept, 1999 by Daniel Shapiro

A Life of One's Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State by David Kelley, Washington, D.C.: The Cato Institute, 1998, 176 pages, $9.95

Serious alterations of the welfare state are no longer politically impossible. Welfare reform passed in 1996, and privatizing Social Security is a respectable idea. Still, as David Kelley points out in A Life of One's Own, the legitimacy of the welfare state remains largely intact. Few challenge the idea that it is the state's job to provide welfare for the poor and "social" insurance such as retirement pensions and health care for all its citizens. Kelley, the director of the Institute for Objectivist Studies, casts a critical eye upon the central claim that gives the welfare state its legitimacy - that there are basic, "positive" rights to things such as food, shelter, and health care which are on a moral par with the "negative" rights to life, liberty, and property.

How did such a claim become widely accepted? Welfare state proponents often claim that poverty and the economic risks inherent in a market economy require an activist state. Kelley rejects this argument. Poverty in the midst of rising living standards and economic risks were indeed problems, although far less than the pre-industrial problems of universal poverty and natural cycles of famine and disease. As important, people had begun addressing and solving such issues through voluntary actions - charities, insurance systems, and the like. Kelley argues that the reason for the adoption of the welfare state from the late 19th- to the mid-20th century was mainly intellectual, not economic, change.

Reformers successfully challenged and transformed the classical liberal concepts of rights that had emerged during the 17th and 18th centuries. Classical liberals had defined freedom as "negative": as the right to choose among options without threats of force and violence. In contrast, reformers argued that negative freedom could only be valuable if supplemented by a positive right to certain basic economic goods and a guaranteed range of options. Hence, reformers argued that benevolence and generosity were no longer values or virtues, to be exercised voluntarily. Instead, such traits became duties that the state discharged for us. The reformers rejected the emerging society of voluntary contract, where positive obligations were self-imposed, in favor of a model of community consisting of unchosen positive obligations to care for citizens who are unable or unwilling to care for themselves.

Kelley's main aim is to show that the arguments from positive freedom, benevolence, and community all fail. This is no simple task. At first glance, the positive freedom argument - that freedom requires many options, not just non-interference - is plausible. As Kelley acknowledges, a hard-and-fast line cannot always be drawn between not being prevented from choosing an option and the number of options one has. After all, any obstacle, restraint, or limitation can be viewed as something that eliminates an alternative or as something that prevents a person from choosing it. The argument from positive freedom asks us to see lack of an opportunity due to poverty or disability, say, as something that prevents someone from choosing that opportunity, and overt coercion as simply removing alternatives one would otherwise have.

Nevertheless, Kelley points out there are real differences between being prevented and lacking an opportunity. First, when an obstacle results from nature or reality, not other persons, it is "wishful thinking to regard it as an obstacle to what we otherwise would be free to do." Thus it makes little sense to say that being iii is a restriction on freedom, or that facts about economic reality (e.g., that income requires production), limit the freedom of those who wish to be idle. Second, lacking an opportunity can simply result from someone failing to provide a benefit, which is different from being deprived of something. For instance, if I want to marry a woman and she turns down my offer, her refusal hardly limits my freedom to marry; without her consent, my marrying her is not on my list of alternatives.

Failure to make these distinctions renders the concept of positive freedom so broad as to be meaningless. We end up with everyone being "coerced" all the time because reality and other people's choices always eliminate options. This point gets overlooked, Kelley says, because those who use the concept of positive freedom are rarely consistent. Economic pressures on the poor are described as economic coercion, but businesses losing money because of changes in consumer preference are rarely so described.

These points are fine as far as they go, but fortunately Kelley does not stop there. He argues that these conceptual disputes are really rooted in disagreements about the ordinary person's ability to succeed in the market, and whether expansion of state power should be viewed with alarm or solace. What really underlies the claim that the poor have no choice but to accept a lousy job, or the comparison between poor working conditions and slavery - common motifs in the positive freedom literature - is economic determinism, the notion that workers in free market capitalism are helpless victims of forces beyond their control and can be liberated through state power to provide economic goods. Thus, an equally important part of Kelley's argument is that the poor are not helpless creatures and that achieving positive "freedom" through government action leads to a sacrifice of both real freedom and opportunity.