South Africa now finds itself in an economic malaise to which liberalisation is the only viable answer. With tepid if any growth rates, the highest formal unemployment rate in the world, and disinvestment continuing apace, the last thing anyone should be thinking is, “How can we increase state power or revenue?” The recent onslaught against gambling is therefore quite concerning.
The Democratic Alliance’s Toby Chance took a crack at defending targeted gambling regulation from a liberal perspective in Business Day. I believe his endeavour was ultimately unsuccessful.
Choice
This is not a debate about whether gambling is good or bad for society.
Many (myself, and indeed many among the poor, included) do not partake in cigarettes, vapes, alcohol, drugs, or gambling – other than the “gambling” everyone does with their time and effort every day. This is a choice that we have made, and those of us on this side of that choice are not exceptional. If we can decide to not partake, then others are equally (if not more) capable of making the same decision – or deciding to go the other way.
The question liberalism asks is “Who decides?”, and it answers, “the individual does”.
This debate, therefore, is about whether politicians and their employees have any business dictating to people how they live their lives and spend their own money.
If one wants to respond with, “But it’s not always their money – sometimes it’s a social grant, being taxpayers’ money!”, then the debate must shift to whether or not the social grant must be converted into a voucher (so that it cannot be redeemed for gambling) or, ideally, phased out entirely. Gambling regulation will never just apply to welfare recipients, so using welfare cheques as an argument for such regulation simply does not track.
“Social cost”
Chance asks, “Is there such a thing as a liberal approach to regulating social habits such as gambling?”, and answers that “those with a narrow definition of liberalism” have answered “no”. In his view, the answer is yes, liberalism does provide plentiful room for the regulation of vices.
This is fundamentally incorrect.
The liberal way to regulate this social ill – just as liberalism proposes to regulate any other social ill that does not rise to the level of aggression against life, liberty, or property – is through market mechanisms, social pressures, and the instilment of cultural values.
Of course, this is hard, but necessary, work. State regulation, on the other hand, is the shortcut that usually leaves ruin and greater even harm in its wake.
If a free society develops a gambling crisis in its midst, that is not a failure of government inaction – which inaction is imperative – but a failure of the family, the church, and the community.
Other trusted fellow liberals, not only Chance, have however made the error of believing state action is ipso facto justified by mere “spillover”, “externalities”, and in Chance’s case, “costs to society”.
But everything has a social cost, so Chance’s attempt to divide phenomena into “those things without social costs, which may be left to the market” and “those things with social costs, which must be dealt with by the state” must be a nonstarter.
If “social cost” is the trigger for state interference, then it is only a short hop to totalitarianism. There is virtually nothing any person can do that does not involve a social cost. And since liberalism is ultimately social by nature – it does not only concern the things, one may do alone in one’s home but is very much concerned with the interaction between people – it conceives of liberty as a public virtue.
Multiple governments are now banning social media for users under a certain age, requiring identity verification (otherwise known as the end of anonymity) for all users. Some activists and scientists have recommended regulating the number of pets households may own due to the effect pets are having on the global climate. Soon South Africans could face jailtime for smoking or vaping inside their own cars or houses.
Why? “Social cost”.
Each of these would have been unthinkable only a decade or two ago. Now they are treated as ordinary. This slope is very slippery, and we have been slipping down it for some time already.
The solution is to attempt to brake, then climb back up to normalcy, rather than pouring on more lubrication.
Liberals recognised this risk very early on, long before the modern nanny state was even conceived. Liberalism therefore has never made a “social cost” exception to freedom of choice – only a “harm” exception, and harm is defined very strictly and “narrowly” (nowadays a term of abuse!).
It is only and exclusively where one aggresses against the life, liberty, or property of another, that the permissibility of state action is triggered. Stated otherwise: when one’s legally recognised interests have been non-consensually infringed upon, the state must intervene.
Everything else is tyranny – even if it is a largely polite, sometimes more or less non-invasive, good-vibes tyranny.
Messy freedom
Volenti non fit iniuria is an old principle of common law and means that one cannot claim damage as a result of those things one consented to. A gambler harming themselves and those dependent on them with their financial decisions is not something the state should ever interfere with.
The gambler’s family, community, colleagues, church, and so on, are all more appropriate institutions from which to seek relief.
The law has already done what it can. If a gambling husband steals his wife’s credit card, he has committed a crime. If he defrauds his brother to fund his addiction, he has committed a crime. But the law cannot – and really should never – offer a violent state intervention (on which all gambling regulation is inherently premised) as relief to every conceivable act with a “social cost”.
Freedom is messy.
It allows all sorts of people to make all sorts of decisions that we do not think are wise. But our own freedom to make the right decisions is premised on their freedom to make the wrong ones. If we do not concede that people are free to make ruinous decisions, then every potential decision we make is implicitly and ultimately subject to the approval of the political elite.
That is not liberalism. It can never be liberalism.
And none of this this is premised on a “narrow definition of liberalism”, but instead on a recognition of the narrow mandate that the state possesses under liberalism.
Contrary to what Chance writes, liberals do in fact eschew legislation and the “right” of elected governments to regulate citizens’ rights and choices. This – laissez faire – is the very definition of liberalism.
To deny the narrow mandate of the state to only engage in the minimisation of force against the liberty or property of legal subjects, is to deny liberalism itself. It is precisely this conception of the state that distinguishes the philosophy of liberty from all the other philosophies that conceive of wise politicians as occupying some paternal or maternal position in a society of perpetual children.
The liberal insight is what made the prosperity and hegemony of the West over all its competitors possible.
Not only should online gambling not be regulated, but existing specialised regulation of the gambling industry should be done away with. If the rule of law, rather than the rule of man (or, in this case, the rule of nanny) is important to us, gambling should be subject to taxation and regulation of general application (that is, labour law, consumer protection law, competition law), rather than being targeted.
In the name of freedom, yes, but also, South Africa is in no position to be chasing off any more entrepreneurial go-getters or investors. Why tempt fate?
[Image: https://www.pickpik.com/roulette-gambling-game-bank-game-casino-profit-casino-141073]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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