Issue new federal regulations?
Generally, the possible responses are characterized as choices among things to be done. The more primitive option—“doing something” versus “doing nothing”—is irrelevant for most issues. The fire department may choose to send one or two or three engines to a fire, based on an assessment of how many are needed to put out the fire. But the fire chief does not mull over each fire alarm, deciding whether to respond at all.
In such cases, it is appropriate to think in terms of the government “doing a little” versus “doing a lot.” The public may debate whether the fire department should institute a fire prevention program or require fire drills or add paramedics to its fire-fighting teams. People may argue for a stripped-down fire department or an extensive one. Similarly, people may argue over the size of a road-building program, the scope of a Medicaid program, the eligibility rules for government-paid scholarships to colleges. In all such cases, governments have open to them the choice of doing a lot or a little.
But now consider the question, “How much should the government do to help people pursue happiness?” At first, it sounds reasonable: Surely the government has, in this case as well, choices to make about how much to do. Won’t expanding the scholarship program (for example) do more to help people pursue happiness by expanding educational opportunity? But on reflection, that example does not refute the proposition that governments can only enable people to pursue happiness. An expanded scholarship program enables more people to pursue happiness (by expanding the number of people who are enabled to pursue happiness through access to education). But the “how much” question would have to be phrased in terms of the magnitude of aid available to a given individual: Does a government that provides full scholarships “do more” to help a given person pursue happiness than a government that provides half scholarships? If that’s the case, does providing a personal tutor for each recipient do more than not providing a tutor? And if that’s the case, does . . . But the point, a simple one, should be clear. People pursue happiness, governments cannot. The thing called “educational opportunity” always has to be
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transmuted by the individual who gets the opportunity into the process called “the pursuit of happiness.” It can never be the thing-itself. And, while different people respond in different ways, it is intuitively obvious that at some point (for now, never mind where) the government will no longer be doing more to help people pursue happiness by providing them with ever more lavish educational services more tenderly provided. It will be doing less.
And so with all governmental functions in their relationship to the pursuit of happiness. If a government chooses to build a lot of roads, it may build a lot of roads. If it chooses to treat a lot of sick people, it may treat a lot of sick people. But if it chooses to “help people pursue happiness a lot,” it can only go so far. It may not choose to pursue happiness on behalf of anyone. That must remain the quintessentially personal, undelegatable task of life. The government can “do as much as it can” to enable, but it can do no more than enable.
This is not necessarily equivalent to “government should do as little as possible.” Rather, it is a question of choosing the things to do. Consider by way of analogy the work of a park ranger responsible for maintaining a hiking trail through a wilderness area. His work is curiously contradictory. The people who use his trail have certain expectations—they do not come prepared for a Special Forces survival course—and so if he does his job right, the footpaths will be maintained. Perhaps there will be a guardrail at a treacherous spot. But when the guidebook specifies that backpackers who take a certain trail should be on the lookout for grizzlies, he will do them no favors if he goes out and shoots the grizzlies. If a trail is rated as a rough and rocky climb, he will do them no favors by smoothing and paving the trail. And when it comes to the land off the trails, the whole point of his job is to protect it, not to alter it—which in turn can involve delicate tasks that require the ranger to expend a great deal of effort so that as little as possible is changed.
The park ranger’s job is to prepare the wilderness so that it enables people to enjoy visiting a wilderness area—and there is no way in the world he can do an iota more than that. In describing the details of his job, the question is not how much is done, but choosing the things to be done and then determining whether those things are done right.
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“Enabling” applies to any activity in which the doing is the thing. I could have evoked as appropriately the preparation of other kinds of facilities—a play perhaps, or a party. Sometimes the preparers have a lot of work to do (designing the set, preparing the lighting), sometimes their work consists of doing nothing with forethought (choosing the right mix of guests and then standing aside). The question is not how much the preparers do, but whether they do it right. Does the stage manager enable the actors to give a good performance, does the host enable the guests to have a good time? And that is what I will be asking about the human activity that is most thoroughly a case of “the doing is the thing,” the pursuit of happiness: What does enabling consist of, and (in very general terms in this part of the book) how might these understandings affect what government does?
Often I will be suggesting that the things that are not done, the areas in which policy consists of deliberately refraining from action, are as critically important to enabling the pursuit of happiness as the things that policy actively tries to do. Or to return to the original analogy, I will be asking you to consider a world in which the fire department leaves certain types of fires unattended, not because it has too little equipment but because it would be a bad idea to put out the fire.
It is not such a radical thought—I am surrounded at this moment by hundreds of fires in my neighborhood that the fire department is ignoring and that everyone agrees the fire department should ignore. There’s one a few feet away from me, keeping my coffee warm. In the case of fires, of course, we all know that fire departments are for putting out uncontrolled fires and there is no need to specify that fires in stoves and furnaces don’t count. But the example calls attention to the peculiar problem facing this particular book on policy: In deciding what constitutes a good “policy for putting out fires,” one first has to decide what fires one wants put out. In the case of fire departments, the decision rules are obvious; that’s why we don’t have to think about them. In the case of pursuing happiness, the decision rules are not so obvious. The purpose of the four chapters that follow is to think about decision rules before thinking about policy. This still leaves room for saying that governments should “do a lot” or “do a little”—but only once we have decided what needs to be done.
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“Poverty” has in recent years been to policy analysts what damnation is to a Baptist preacher. For more than two decades, progress or retrogression in social policy has been measured against this benchmark. Few goals have been more highly valued than to “bring people above the poverty line.” To be below the poverty line has constituted proof that government help is needed.
There are three reasons for this preoccupation. One is that deficits in material resources are visible. We can see, paint, photograph, film, televise, and videotape sunken cheeks and tattered clothes. Deficits in the other enabling conditions are not so visible. Compounding this imbalance, deficits in any of the other enabling conditions may manifest themselves as poverty. Self-esteem again provides a good example. Large numbers of the homeless are dispirited in ways that are traceable to deficits in esteem (and in other enabling conditions besides poverty). It is often such deficits that created the homelessness. But the symptom is poverty—living in the
