We Already Pay the Price of Freedom, We Just Do Not Collect the Goods

People who argue against giving the public more say in government usually reach, sooner or later, for the cost. Freedom is expensive, they say. It brings instability, insecurity, responsibility that most people do not want. A society that decides everything for itself would be exhausting to live in.

I agree that freedom is expensive. My objection is to the accounting. We are already paying that price, in full, every day. What we are not doing is collecting what it should buy.

The Bill We Are Already Paying

Look at what life in a free country actually costs its citizens, compared with the life of a peasant under a lord or a subject under a priest.

We are dynamic in our work. Industries appear and vanish within a career. We change employers, retrain, relocate. The result is that we feel far less connection to our place of work, to our customers, to our trade, than anyone did when a man was a cooper because his father had been one. That is a real loss and we bear it.

We are dynamic in our relationships. We choose our partners, and so we also lose them. We divorce at rates no traditional society would recognise. We experience rejection many times over a lifetime, and heartache that arranged marriage largely spared people from, at the price of everything else it inflicted.

We are dynamic in our thinking. We no longer believe as strongly in religion, and so we no longer feel secure in our knowledge. The body of what is known is now beyond any single person's comprehension. There was a time when one holy book, read once, contained the entire truth, and a person could feel that he had the whole of it. Nobody can feel that now, and the loss of that feeling is a genuine psychological cost.

We are dynamic in our surroundings. The technologies of communication change under us every decade. We are cosmopolitan whether we want to be or not: we deal with many ways of doing things, many languages, many customs, and we are expected to adjust to all of them.

None of this is a complaint. I would not trade any of it back. But it is a bill, and it is a heavy one, and every citizen of a free country pays it whether or not he ever thought about freedom at all.

What the Bill Was Supposed to Buy

Here is what strikes me as strange. Having paid for freedom in our work, our marriages, our beliefs, and our daily surroundings, we stop at the door of government.

The realm where the biggest decisions are taken, war and peace, the distribution of the national income, what is legal and what is punished, is precisely the realm where we have arranged to have almost no freedom at all. We choose a person every few years and hand him the lot. The instability and responsibility we accept everywhere else, we decline exactly where the stakes are highest.

So the situation is this. We have bought the expensive package. We have paid for the insecurity of a dynamic life. And we have left the single most valuable item in the package unopened, on the grounds that opening it would be unsettling.

The Better Deal

Consider what it would mean to extend the same dynamism to government.

Yes, it would raise our insecurity a little further. Decisions would be revisited. Policies would change when the public changed its mind. We would have to pay attention to matters we currently outsource. That is more of the same cost we already pay in every other part of life.

In return we would get the largest decisions of all taken in our favour rather than in the favour of whoever currently holds the lever. Not perfectly. Publics make mistakes. But a decision taken by the people who bear its consequences is at least aimed at them, and the decisions taken on our behalf today are demonstrably aimed elsewhere often enough to matter.

Set the marginal cost against the marginal gain. The additional insecurity is small, because we are already living with insecurity in every domain that touches us. The gain is the one domain where the money is. This is the best value for the price of freedom available anywhere, and we are declining it while paying full price for the rest.

Why the Accounting Goes Wrong

I think the error comes from treating the cost of freedom as something that would begin if we extended it to government, rather than as something we have been paying since the Enlightenment.

Someone who says direct democracy would make life unstable is describing the life we already lead. He has simply not noticed that the instability arrived long ago, with the freedom to leave a job, a spouse, and a church. The one place it has not arrived is the one place it would pay for itself.

It may even be that extending freedom into government would make the rest of the package feel worth it. A person who has paid heavily for a dynamic life and has no say in the decisions that shape it has good reason to feel cheated. Give him the say, and the same insecurity looks less like a burden imposed and more like a price he chose to pay, for something he actually got.