The Fallacy of Control

At The Libertarian Enterprise, Patrick K. Martin offered a standard objection to market anarchism. The quote is from 2002 but it's an example of a common misconception that persists to this day:

"Anarchy (i.e. total self-governance by all) absolutely depends on the one thing it is least likely to get, Rationality! In an anarchistic society the majority of people must behave in a rational manner all the time. Think about that for a minute. We live in a world where people believe in virgin birth, Hegelian dialectic, political promises, transubstantiation, telekinesis, global warming, and professional wrestling, (just to name a few) and you expect these people to act rationally?"

Think about this for a minute: If the majority of people do not behave in a rational manner, what are the prospects for democratic rule?

It gets worse. Democracy actually discourages the employment of rationality; it encourages rational ignorance. It is rational to be ignorant of something if the expected return on your effort to learn it is less than the cost of learning it. How much effort should one invest in making the best choice in the voting booth? The chance that your individual vote will determine who gets to be your president or senator is effectively nil. And even if it does, only a tiny portion of the benefit of that decision goes to you.

Compare selecting a president to selecting a car. When you select a car, it is certain that the effort you put into researching which car is best for you will determine which car you get. And all of the benefit of that decision goes to you. So naturally rational people will invest more time and effort in determining which car they should choose than in determining which candidate they should choose. It is far more rational to invest your rational faculties in the private sector than in the public sector, the return to you is much greater.

So not only will Martin have rule by his irrational majority, his rational minority are naturally discouraged from employing their rational faculties in the public sphere.

It gets still worse. Government is itself often a threat that you need to be protected from. Which puts Martin in the position of needing an irrational majority to cooperate with him to restrain that government. But why should they put their shoulder to that wheel when they can simply vote themselves anything they want? Restraining government is hard work but voting for a free lunch is easy: Do the math. Or rather, do the game theory.

The desire for control is understandable; we want control over our own lives. Martin looks at a mass of irrational people and thinks that he will not have the control he needs over his own life if they are not controlled. But the truth is that markets give you more control over your life than government, not less.

Suppose it were up to you to determine how cars would be produced. There are a lot of irrational people out there and many of them surely have foolish ideas about how cars should be built. So would you be better off choosing a bunch of experts and giving them the responsibility for building all the cars, or just leave people free to produce cars any way they want to? The choice is between central planning and a free market. And what you'll find is that the free market will produce the best cars even though the irrational are free to be irrational. You will have more control over the car you get when coercive control is completely removed from the production process. Governing the production of cars will ultimately give you less control of your life, not more.

Markets strongly tend to discourage irrational behavior. If you try to produce cars irrationally, you will soon go bankrupt in a free market. In a free market, you can only succeed at producing cars by acting rationally. Government strongly tends to encourage and protect irrational behavior; with government it is routine for irrational enterprises to survive indefinitely at the public expense.

The fallacy of control is the notion that you can best control your life by controlling others. But in fact your control of others will ultimately be at the expense of your control over your own life.

John T. Kennedy