Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss?

I just returned from the Southern Economic Association meetings.  I have not missed a SEA meeting in close to two decades.  The wow factor is rarely there, but there is some good work being done.

Glen Whitman and Mario Rizzo are engaged in a research program tackling the new paternalism that results from behavioral economics.  The old paternalism contended that the State knew more about what was good for you than you knew so they would step in and serve as your boss, the new paternalism is slightly different, you know what is good for you, but you will not do it because of problems of self-command so the State will serve as your boss since you are incapable.  Whitman and Rizzo show that behavioral arguments are difficult to hold on to when actors are viewed as in the process of learning and discovering their life project, and also when the problems in terms of knowledge and incentives that the State would have to face in accomplishing its paternalistic policies.

While Rizzo and Whitman are addressing the paternalist policy implications of behavioral economics in a transcendent manner, my colleagues Bryan Caplan and Scott Beaulier are engage in an immanent critique of the paternalistic policy prescriptions of behavioral economics, and in the process show that behavioral economics can in fact bolster the case of laissez faire policy in issues involving self-command, etc. 

Neither Whitman and Rizzo nor Caplan and Beaulier address the demand for the State as a parent that James Buchanan has recently focused on, and is also what so concerned Tocqueville and later Hayek and Vincent Ostrom as we lose our ability to be self-governing individuals in our quest for security and safety and to escape from the 'cares of thinking and the trouble of living' as Vincent Ostrom puts it. When the State oversteps its bounds and constrains our chooses for us, we loose the capacity to live a self-governing life.  Both the Whitman/Rizzo type and the Caplan/Beaulier type critiiques of the meddlesome state are necessary components in the battle against an overzealous government, but we also must address the fear of freedom that too many individuals possess.