By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, January 11, 2013
"As the president said, if your actions result in
only saving one life, they're worth taking," Vice President Joe Biden
declared on Wednesday as he previewed what his commission on gun violence might
actually do.
"There are
executive orders, there's executive action that can be taken. We haven't
decided what that is yet. But we're compiling it all with the help of the
attorney general and the rest of the Cabinet members as well as legislative
action that we believe is required."
Biden insisted
that it is a moral imperative for the White House to do something: "It's
critically important that we act."
Most of the
attention, understandably, is on Biden's suggestion that the president will
consider using executive orders to do things he couldn't possibly accomplish
legislatively. The imperial presidency is always troubling, but when it rubs up
against the Bill of Rights it is especially so.
But what I find to
be arguably the most disturbing -- and definitely the most annoying -- part of
Biden's remarks is this nonsense about if it saves only one life, the White House's
actions would be worth it.
Maybe it's because
I wrote a whole book on the way phrases like "if it saves only one life,
it's worth it" distort our politics, but whenever I hear such things the
hairs on the back of my neck go up.
The notion that
any government action is justified if saves even a single life is malarkey, to
borrow one of Mr. Biden's favorite terms. Worse than that, it's dangerous
malarkey.
Let's start with
the malarkey part. The federal government could ban cars, fatty foods, ladders,
plastic buckets, window blinds or Lego pieces small enough to choke on and save
far more than just one life. Is it imperative the government do any of that?
It's a tragedy when people die in car accidents (roughly 35,000 fatalities per
year), or when kids drown in plastic buckets (it happens an estimated 10 to 40
times a year), or when people die falling off ladders (about 300 per year).
Would a law that prevents those deaths be worth it, no matter the cost?
Now one obvious
response to this sort of argument ad absurdum is to say, "We don't have to
ban buckets or cars to reduce the number of deaths. We can simply regulate
them." And that's true.
Indeed, that's the
point. But when we regulate things, we take into account things other than the
singular consideration about saving lives. Banning cars would cost the economy
trillions -- and also probably cost lives in various unintended ways. So we
regulate them with speed limits, seat belt requirements, etc. And even here we
accept a certain number of preventable deaths every year. Regulators don't set
the speed limit at five miles per hour, nor do they make highway guardrails 50
feet high.
Every serious
student of public policy -- starting with Joe Biden and Barack Obama -- knows
this to be true. Some just choose to pretend as if it isn't true in order to
push through their preferred policies.
The idea that the
government can regulate or ban its way into a world where there are no
tragedies, no premature deaths, is quite simply ridiculous. But that is
precisely the assumption behind phrases like "if only one life is saved,
it's worth it."
Which brings us to
the dangerous part. Pay attention to what Biden is saying. The important thing
is for government to act, not for the government to act wisely.
And that's the
real problem with this kind of rhetoric. Not only does it establish a
ridiculously low standard for what justifies government action -- indeed,
action itself becomes its own justification -- but it also sets the expectation
that the government is there to prevent bad things from happening.
Biden has a
warrant to investigate the role not just of gun laws but also video games,
movies, mental health policies and lord knows what else in order to make sure
we don't have another Newtown or Aurora massacre. I am wholly sympathetic to
the desire to prevent such a thing from ever happening again.
But for starters,
I would first like to hear exactly what Biden would have us do, with regard to
the First, Second and Fifth Amendments, before I think action is
self-justifying on the grounds that if it saves even one life, it's worth it.
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