Freedom in One Lesson

69.

Worrycrats

Outside of the D.C. Beltway, state capitols, and city halls, bureaucrats don’t exactly receive adulation from citizens. Libertarians often lead the chorus of criticism. But some bureau employees are necessary. Leonard Read discusses this in “The Worrycrats,” from his 1972 book To Free or Freeze (Read 1972a). “Even when government is limited to codifying the taboos, invoking a common justice, and keeping the peace, there is . . . an operating staff: a bureaucracy.” In other words, even a nation of “laws and not men” needs some people to enforce what laws there are, even though their incentives will be far worse in their bureaucratic roles than in their private relationships. (This is why America’s founders were so keen on carefully monitoring their behavior.)

Despite the need for bureaucrats to defend legitimate laws, some of them clearly deserve our mistrust. Read called them worrycrats.

Worrycrats . . . are a special breed of totalitarian bureaucrats who spawn rapidly as society is socialized. These people concern themselves with our health, education, welfare, auto safety, drug intake, diet, and what have you. Worrycrats today outnumber any other professionals in history, so rapidly have they proliferated.

Why should we mistrust them?

The activities of these worrycrats in no way resemble a free market operation. Freedom in transactions has no part in this political procedure. Citizens are coerced to pay these professional worriers whether they want their services or not. A nongovernmental operation of similar nature would be called a racket. . . . I question the propriety of our being coerced to pay worrycrats to worry about us. We worry enough on our own without paying to have our worries multiplied.

What is the evidence for the existence of these bureaucrats who want us to worry more?

Observe the massive outpourings of the worrycrats—over TV, radio, and in the press—about lung cancer, heart failure, mercury, cranberries, cyclomates, seat belts, groceries, and so on. Unless one sees through all of these unsolicited oral and verbal counsels, he is going to be unnecessarily concerned . . . ordinary fears and worries substantially multiplied. . . . Fear and worry are far deadlier menaces than all the things from which the worrycrats pretend to protect us.

How do worrycrats worry more effectively on our behalf than we do? They have a know-it-all sense of overconfidence and ignore huge differences among individuals.

Are these political saviors really concerned about your welfare and mine? Actually, they do not know that you or I exist. . . . [What do] they know about what is good or bad for me?

What is their competence? . . . They are not experts when it comes to your welfare or mine. . . .

. . . Suppose that these worrycrats are the world’s most advanced physicians and scientists. Would they know enough of what is injurious or helpful to you or me to justify forcing this information upon us or frightening us about it? . . .

. . . Individuals vary widely. . . .

. . . There is no average person! . . .

I care not who sits behind the worrycrat desk. . . . Prescribing for and presiding over 200 million distinctive, unique individuals is no more within man’s competence than . . . directing the Universe. Contrary to socialist doctrine, we are discrete beings—not a mass, a collective.

In fact, those worrying on our behalf may be undermining our health and well-being.

[There are] many illustrations of how death is hastened through fears, anxieties, rage, worries. . . . The outpourings of the worrycrats tend to multiply our stresses, anxieties, worries . . . literally scaring us to death.

That does not mean there is no role for government with regard to our health, but the role should not be multiple times greater than it is in other areas of the economy.

Ideally, there is a role for government with respect to health, education, welfare. That role is to inhibit misrepresentation, fraud, violence, predation, whether by doctors . . . or others. No false labels! No coercive impositions on anyone! . . . All of us should be prohibited from injuring others. Actions that harm others—not what one does to self—define the limits of the social problem and of governmental scope.

Americans are now confronted with an even vaster crazy quilt of federal executive agencies, mandates, regulations, and czars. Those bureaucracies house phalanxes of worrycrats who inhibit choices that individuals and groups would take in search of their own growth, fulfillment, and wellbeing. They infringe on our right to choose how to live our lives.

Worrycrats interfere with individual choices and mutual agreements that carry risk. They try to scare us into “voluntary” compliance with what they decide is good for everyone despite the huge variance in preferences, circumstances, and health histories among us. Failing that, they move to forcibly override what we would choose because, while they may not know us at all, supposedly they “know better.”

It is not hard to see how such do-gooder regulations harm our economic health. What if mining, logging, or cab driving was restricted for being “too risky”? Since police and fire personnel and healthcare providers are exposed to elevated risks, should we ban their jobs? The answers to these questions are obvious. Even though some professions are riskier than others, there is no justification for overriding the choices adults make to bear those risks.

Restrictions and impositions can impose greater risks in other areas. Because traffic-calming policies, for example, can slow emergency vehicle response time, they may cause more deaths than they prevent. “Green” policies, for a whole set of examples, increase other forms of pollution and environmental hazards: wind farms must dispose of blades and produce massive carbon emissions to acquire cement; battery backup systems and electric vehicle mandates generate emissions in the extraction of cobalt and rare earth metals; and stopping oil pipeline projects moves oil transportation into trucks that produce far more pollution and come with a greater risk of environmental harm. Food and Drug Administration regulations that delay life-saving drugs in the name of safety fall under the same category as these examples, as do efforts to force energy costs upward, which reduces resources to improve our health.

Worrycrats, according to Read, practice chicanery. It is striking how much the scope of their chicanery has expanded since the time of his essay. Many people have begun to see this for themselves due to the multiple forms of malfeasance that covid provided cover for, including a notable increase in coercion and violations of individual rights (e.g., mask mandates and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s unconstitutional ban on evictions). Read ends his article with a good reminder for those thinking about such issues today:

You know yourself better than anyone else does. Better that you turn yourself toward what you think is your advantage than be turned by a worrycrat toward what he thinks is your advantage. You at least know something, whereas he knows nothing of you as an individual.