Disposable Lit Reviews

Broadway Books, 2007
291 pp.
ISBN 978-07679-2432-0

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Nanny State is not a measured political meditation, as you may guess. It’s a libertarian diatribe of rage. Those have their places, I guess, and David Harsanyi’s book is satisfying in its way if you have any sympathy with its thesis, but preaching to the converted doesn’t win many converts.

What is his thesis? The title gives you a pretty big clue (as does the subtitle: “How Food Faqscists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning America into a Nation of Children”), but it’s never a mistake to define our terms. In its broadest, “nanny state” sometimes refers to the impulse to have the government supply or administer services which would otherwise be the province of the private sector (healthcare, retirement benefits, etc.) or to the “padded corners” approach to civil litigation, in which any misfortune which befalls a private citizen must be the result of a culpable corporate entity with deep pockets which owes compensation to the unfortunate. Those ideas, however, fall outside the strict definition of the nanny state as used here. Harsanyi focuses his ire on the impulse of groups of concerned citizens to assume the mandate of managing the affairs of other presumably mature and responsible adults. By that definition, it won’t surprise you what issues and examples of nannystatism show up in this book: New York Mayor Bloomberg’s vendetta against fatty foods, Chicago’s ban on foie gras, Southern California community Calabasas’ recent ordinance against smoking outdoors, anywhere. Harsanyi’s thesis is simple: that such overreach by activists into what should presumably be considered the private and legal activities of consenting adults is unwarranted, unsupportable, and unAmerican.

A look at how Harsanyi organizes his book shows that he’s not just on a rant against the left end of the spectrum, as the right appears fully as capable of regulating the lives of the citizenry, at least whenever moral standards are involved:

• “Twinkie Fascists” covers efforts to protect people from the “indulgent” or under-nutritious food they would otherwise buy for themselves;
• “Days of Whine” notes efforts to control adult drinking, an activity which is legal, by sin taxes, random sobriety checkpoints, and increased liability for bar owners;
• “The Smokists” delves into anti-smoking crusades, including a look at the misleading and politically-charged claims about second-hand smoke;
• “The Playground Despots” details how normal and healthy childhood activities are being banned because they are considered to be too aggressive or exclusionary, or because the miniscule change of injury stemming from activity exists.
• “Yahweh (or the Highway)” spotlights the (usually religious) impulse to monitor and condemn other people’s bedroom behavior, and the crusade to make sure that some perfectly natural body parts are never alluded to or thought of in public.
• “Mission Creep,” the beginning of the book’s wrap-up, points out the way in which well-meaning social policies become precedents for bureaucratic and regulatory overreach.
• “How We Pay,” the final chapter, briefly sums up the contention that over-regulation and micro-management of private lives in an attempt to forestall any possible harm or anti-social behavior attempts to negate or render superfluous the ideas of self-reliance, personal responsibility, and common sense.

As Harsanyi points out, there are two tremendous philosophical problems with integrating “nannyist” overreaches into American democratic society:

If the behavior being promulgated by ordinance or regulatory force seems like a demonstrably good idea to the populace at large (not the regulation of the behavior, but the behavior itself), it gains currency in the marketplace of ideas and is widely adopted. The prime examples here are seatbelts and tobacco, the respective increased and decreased use of each being shown by studies to be almost completely uninfluenced by the various legislative restrictions and compulsions imposed on each.

If, on the other hand, a small group of activists seeks to impose its picture of “proper” behavior on the majority (the transfat ban being a prime example here) on a population which doesn’t share those intense concerns and which chafes under the strictures added “for their own good,” then that kind of behavior-modification-by-legislative-fiat has no place in a putatively democratic society in which the government derives its powers from the consent of the governed.

In principle, if not in all specifics, I have some agreement with Harsanyi; too many government officials, elected and otherwise, are too concerned with regulating and soft-cornering private action, rather than accepting that democracy will have some rough edges thanks to the natural stupidity of the average person (though, naturally, such officials are implicitly above any similar stupidity). But Nanny State left me waiting for the meat of the argument. The book is a jeremiad against the jeremiads which motivate legislation by anecdote and hand-wringing (everyone say it with me: “Won’t SOMEBODY think of the children??”), but Harsanyi barely ever goes beyond the cataloging of excess and overreach to discuss the questions that such trends bring up:

• Is there a role in a democratic society for the community, using the governmental framework, to look out for the interests of the individual? The book is full of the blackest examples of nannyist excess, but where does even a libertarian draw a line in the shades of gray surrounding societal responsibilities to the individual’s interests, and what principles guide that determination of the role of government?
• What distinctions lie between the way in which social mechanisms should treat children, and how they should treat adults?
• How do the various pieces of socialism and public responsibility for private life interact? For instance, Harsanyi details many measures around the country designed to protect the health of the populace whether we want it or not, but he never makes the leap to the liability imposed by either the softer government-administered healthcare of today (in the form of Medicaid, Medicare, and disability benefits) or the harder single-payer public coverage system proposed by Democratic leaders: if the government accepts the burden of paying for the health of the citizen, does the government then have a fiduciary responsibility to determine the citizen’s acceptable level of risk in order to safeguard the solvency of the healthcare system as a whole?

Nanny State is half of a thought-provoking book; unfortunately, it’s the “raw data” half of that book, leaving the exploration of hard questions as yet unwritten. It will appeal to those who agree wholeheartedly with its thesis about legislative and regulatory intrusion into the private sphere, but it offers little to the undecided or hostile reader but a catalog of anecdotal semi-atrocities which fail to convince on their own.