married to the state?

It's all too easy to forget that some of the arguments for same sex marriage which drive the rank-and-file supporters involve -- surprise -- money (especially government "entitlement" money). From today's Inquirer:

Since her heart attack and stroke in March 2005, Heggs has been in and out of the hospital and unable to work. A nurse for 35 years, Heggs now receives $1,400 a month in disability payments from Social Security.

"When I die, who is going to get my benefits, my Social Security?" Heggs said. "I'm with Paula. She is entitled to my benefits. She was there for me when I was sick. She was there for me when I got depressed. When I lost everything, she didn't leave."

I never thought about it, but why on earth should person A be entitled to government benefits because person B died? I don't care whether they married or not; it's one thing for a spouse to leave his property to the other, but why should government entitlements be involved?

It strikes me that there's nothing fair about that. The problem is, once something is an entitlement, it becomes like tangible property. Fair or not, an entitlement to something tends to create a sense of unfairness for others who aren't entitled, and so on.

So, while I haven't given much thought to it before, I have to admit that same sex marriage would at least compound unfairness more fairly. Perhaps there's somewhat of a nexus between here libertarian and conservative thinking.

But the nexus ends where it comes to the confusion between allowing something and the illogical belief that if a thing is allowed it must be good. I advocate allowing sexual freedom, so in the eyes of conservatives this makes me a "hedonist" even though I'm personally monogamous, and the type of person who refuses to take off his clothes at a nude beach. It's about as logical as saying that supporting heroin decriminalization means advocating heroin or saying it's good. Likewise, I don't think abortion is a "right," although I'd have problems with imprisoning women for doing that to themselves; in the eyes of moral conservatives this makes me complicit in murder. If I hear that "we" "slaughter" "millions" one more time I'll scream, because I am only responsible for my moral crimes. Am I to blame for my friends who died of AIDS because I believed in the right not to be arrested for screwing? People would say that I am. These are the sorts of things that make me tend to distrust social conservatives. It's annoying to be blamed for the acts of others, and reminds me of the endless scolding by gun control people for shootings. How am I to blame in any way for someone else's shooting spree?

So, at the heart of my libertarianism is a sense of annoyance. It's the idea of reducing everyone to the level of the worst offender, and treating all people as suspects that I can't abide. Being personally conservative means nothing; to be an officially licensed conservative these days, you have to believe in moral seat belt laws for everyone else. My problem is, I hate the people who would reduce us to the level of the worst, and do not agree with anticipating their behavior by reducing everyone to the lowest common denominator. There are alcoholics. Therefore, no one should be allowed alcohol, and people who think it should be allowed are moral degenerates allied with the distillery lobby? If I heard that enough times, I'd reach for my checkbook and proudly send my money to the distillery lobby.

As to the people who screw up, I know this will sound selfish, but there is no way to prevent people from harming themselves or being evil. All I can do is be prepared to kill them if they try to harm me. I don't think I have any illusions about humanity; I just don't think government solves problems. I go along with libertarianism to that extent, but I'm generally skeptical about anything that smacks of utopian thinking. Just restore the Constitution and leave me the hell alone. If I cared about the morality of other people (at least, to the point of intervening in their lives beyond arresting them for committing crimes) I'd go nuts. People who claim to care about my morality (which collective morality by definition includes) worry me, because they don't know me, and people who don't know me and want to tell me what I should think make me very suspicious.

I know it sounds frivolous, but it's getting harder and harder to be left alone, and it worries me. Little stupid things, like not wearing the funny gun diversity t-shirt to an airport, not offending anyone lest they take it the wrong way. I mean, what if I had a kid? Might some insane bureaucrat want to take my kid away because I have a pit bull (yes, it happened in San Francisco) or a house full of guns?

Are such concerns mere paranoia? Suppose someone with kids and guns decided to ridicule the local child protective bureaucrats relentlessly in blog post after blog post. While there's a First Amendment right to do that, aren't these "faceless bureaucrats" actually human beings with a huge amount of discretionary power to conduct home inspections on the slightest pretext? I mean, it's not as if the "Nanny State" is some wholly artificial externality. There are real people with real human failings, who have power, and who believe that they have the right to use it. (Not that I'd ever ridicule bureaucrats, but I do have a right to do that, don't I?)

I think that as information becomes centralized, and moralists converge from both sides, perhaps these will not remain idle or theoretical worries. That's my main worry about broadening marriage; I think the goal is to broaden society's control net, safety net, whatever you want to call it. I used to think homosexuals wanted to be left alone; now it's communitarian lesbians with children supported by a network of government bureaucratic activists -- many of whom would probably love to inspect the homes of all neighbor children who expressed disapproval of communitarian lesbians.

People are increasingly unable to keep their lives and lifestyles to themselves. I'll never forget a San Francisco Bay Area lesbian who hated and feared Newt Gingrich because she felt he was "threatening" her lifestyle. What, I wondered, could he possibly do to her? The answer was not much actually; it was a feeling thing. He made her feel uncomfortable, disrespected, disapproved.

While no one likes being disapproved of or disrespected, I think it's better to tolerate disapproval than demand approval. But it's still a free country. People are allowed to demand approval. It's when they demand approval enforced by the power of the state that a certain line is crossed for many people. Not that same sex marriage does this by itself. But when there's an army of activists backed up by an army of bureaucrats, "hate crime" laws can lead directly from a kid teasing another kid to visits from the child police. I could see that eventually leading to SWAT teams enforcing laws against intolerance.

Culture wars are bad enough, and I deplore them. But if the government gets into being the culture police, things could deteriorate further. In England a student was recently questioned by police for making a racist remark:

"She asked to be taken out of her group because the other five students were Asians and four didn't speak English so there was no point in her being with them. When she pointed this out to the teacher she was accused of being racist.

"The matter was referred to the community police officer based at the school and she was taken to the police station and kept in custody for over six hours while they questioned her."

This country isn't England yet. Here, there has always been a right to disapprove of or disagree with lifestyles, and even to be a racist. But if laws are enacted to protect people against bigotry, where does it lead? Martin Luther King Jr. used to say that there was no way to police what was in a man's heart, but I'm not sure that represents the modern trend.

I remain very distrustful of state involvement in the lifestyle business, and I'm wondering whether there might be more common ground between libertarians and conservatives than is commonly supposed.

I do wish differences in philosophy didn't take the form of accusations of hedonism and murder (and of course bigot), but I guess if I can get used to being called a "RINO," I can tolerate being a hedonistic murdering bigot.

Besides, if all things are relative, and there's no such thing as right or wrong, who's to say there's anything wrong about hedonism, murder, or bigotry?

ADDITIONAL NOTE: My thanks to an unnamed muse who helped me generate these thoughts during an email exchange.

posted by Eric on 10.29.06 at 07:43 AM





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Comments

Laws are necessary for human communal life.

Laws cannot accommodate all views, beliefs, and desires.

So laws are - unavoidably - an expression of morality.

The protected individual freedoms granted us in America - to speak, congregate, bear arms, and air our views without fear of repurcussion - do not mean that our legal system does not ultimately approximate a mainstream moral code. Just like every other code of law in existence.

They simply mean that the government is restricted in its ability to curtail certain behaviors judged basic to maintenance of a free society. Which is itself a moral judgement of communal values - there are other communities in which other values are elevated above these freedoms.

But the law is an expression of communal morality, to which individuals must - at some point - defer if they wish to be part of the community.

So?

Ben-David   ·  October 29, 2006 12:00 PM

So what happens when those who believe that the government is restricted in its ability to curtail the right to "speak, congregate, bear arms, and air our views without fear of repurcussion" come in conflict with those who don't believe the government is so restricted? I don't know, and I'm worried that merely reciting a belief in the Constitution might not suffice.

Eric Scheie   ·  October 29, 2006 12:18 PM

Just to play devil's advocate, there is a reason to let a spouse "inherit" social security benefits: it is very common for families to decide that the man will work and the woman will stay home to take care of the children. In lower income families, it even makes more sense financially to do this because the salary that the woman would earn would at best cover the cost of child care. These are also the families that depend most on Social Security. Also, young children benefit from the personal attention of a full-time mother. So there is some social good served by giving benefits to surviving spouses.

Given all that, I think that replacing social security with personal savings account would be fairer and create less government intrusion into people's lives. It would even help in the case of families with stay-at-home mothers because the pension becomes personal property that can be inherited.

eulerfunction   ·  October 29, 2006 12:19 PM

What eulerfunction said. The purpose of "joint" Social Security benefits is how society rewards people for marriage and the costs borne for having children, and sacrificing wages/time to do it properly.

The slight difference is that you have to be married for 10 years for it to kick in (at least I think that is what it is now). Prior to the 1970s, it was 20 years.

I remember a friend of my mothers (from the 1960s) who had been married for 19.75 years. Just under the wire to collect her husband's Social Security rate. She had been a loyal housewife and mother, and got was going to get nana because she had never worked outside the home. She was having to scramble to make up for lost time.

Just to be clear though, you don't get theirs and your own. You get the higher of the two when one spouse dies. How do I know that? That's how we found out my father died (long story).

Mrs. du Toit   ·  October 29, 2006 03:42 PM

People think of SS benefits as something "they paid for" by paying SS tax - this isn't true as a matter of law, but that's how it's commonly thought about.

Thus the idea of the benefits being transitive at time of death makes sense (if not necessarily legal force) as an expectation, like any annuity or investment.

I'm right there with eulerfunction on the idea that SS reform to personal accounts would make this a non-issue, even beyond its salutory effects on program solvency. (Especially since it would be personal property, rather than an outside entitlement!)

Sigivald   ·  October 30, 2006 04:45 PM

Yes, Ben-David, but a philosophy of limited government demands enforcement of a limited morality, known since the 18th century as the Rights of Man. The reductio ad practicum of this principle is their articulation of life (freedom from murder, not the right to support), liberty (of action, not from that which distresses us), and property (the individuals right not to share should he so choose). Trying to satisfy everyone's particular moral codes beyond these using government force is impossible, and enforcing the majority's upon everyone else is tyranny.

Tyranny, I'll add, is the result of most political activism ongoing in the U.S. Shame on us.

Brett   ·  November 1, 2006 09:33 AM


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