A Practical Guide to Making People Less Free

On the day after I was born, Charlie Munger was telling a roomful of graduates how to live a miserable life.

It was June 13, 1986, and he was delivering a commencement address at the Harvard School in Los Angeles. Forty years later, sitting outside, reading Poor Charlie's Almanack, I came across the speech and noticed the date.

I have long admired Munger for the breadth of his interests and the economy of his expression, for the way he could draw upon mathematics, psychology, history, and business without making a production of his erudition. His wit often made an observation difficult to forget, and here he turned the familiar commencement assignment backward: instead of setting out the ingredients of a happy life, he considered what would reliably produce a miserable one. It was an application of the counsel he attributed to the algebraist Carl Jacobi, "Invert, always invert," and he illustrated it with the rustic who said, "I wish I knew where I was going to die, and then I'd never go there."

As I read, I began to wonder whether the same approach might clarify a subject about which I have written a great deal. Freedom has no shortage of eloquent defenders, yet people who agree upon the word can disagree profoundly about the conditions that sustain it. Perhaps I could see those conditions more clearly by considering how to dismantle them—by inverting.

Suppose, then, that I were asked to write a handbook for making a society less free.

The obvious methods would hardly require a handbook. Imprisoning critics and banning opposition are familiar enough; the more interesting assignment would be to consider how a society might diminish its freedom while retaining both its affection for the word and its conviction that it was making progress. A people accustomed to liberty would be unlikely to embrace its abolition, but just might welcome a succession of "improvements" undertaken on their behalf, each answering a need and supported by people whose motives were admirable.

Our task would be to arrange matters so that their good intentions did much of the work for us.

Make freedom conditional

Begin by changing the presumption under which people conduct their lives. A person accustomed to freedom generally assumes that he may act unless there is a particular reason he should not; encourage him to understand that an ordinary choice must first satisfy some group responsible for approving it. He may continue to speak of his rights, provided he acquires the habit of asking when they apply, under what circumstances, and whether the conditions have recently changed. A right that requires a stamp of approval will soon be exercised with the gratitude appropriate to a favor.

Safety offers a useful beginning because, after all, some dangers are real. People can spread illness, deceive customers, injure patients, and construct buildings that fall down, so you will seldom need to invent a concern. During a health emergency, restrictions upon movement, gathering, work, or medical choice may find support among people who would ordinarily resist them, particularly where one person's conduct puts others at risk. Begin with that concern, then allow the boundary between protecting and directing to grow less distinct. While the public attends to the emergency, you can attend to the precedent.

The duration of a measure deserves as much care as its scope. A restriction with a definite end requires you to justify its renewal, whereas an indefinite one requires citizens to justify its removal; see to it that the person wishing to resume his life must make the case. Keep the evidence required for restoration under review, since a standard you have not finished defining is impossible to satisfy. People anxious to regain their freedom can be reminded that anxiety is a poor basis for public policy, although it may have served perfectly well when the policy was introduced.

Written limits deserve respect, which is to say they should be left exactly as written. A constitution that reserves the declaration of war to the legislature says nothing about a conflict, an operation, or a kinetic action, and a statute that starts a clock upon hostilities is silent wherever you find that hostilities have not occurred. Where a clock cannot be avoided, pause and resume, since a second beginning is entitled to a full allowance of time. An emergency may be renewed each year by a signature, and a tax that would be unpopular can be collected as a fee. In each case you leave the text untouched and change only the name of what you are doing, and citizens who go to check will find the limit precisely where they left it.

Carry the presumption into work and property, where it can become a settled feature of life long after any emergency has passed. The aspiring worker should obtain a credential, the proprietor a license, and the family hoping to add a room or accommodate a relative should satisfy people who will neither live in the addition nor pay for it. Existing practitioners can help write the qualifications for entry into their professions, bringing the expertise of people who know the business and the impartiality of people who would prefer less competition. Neighbors, too, may have concerns, which with sufficient care can become a general entitlement to decide what happens on somebody else's property.

Keep the conditions modest enough to defend separately, leaving the person trying to work, travel, improve his home, and make decisions about his health to discover their cumulative effect. Should he complain that his freedom has diminished, explain that he remains free to do all these things once he has met the requirements.

Give everyone purposes of your choosing

People left to themselves pursue an inconvenient variety of ends. One wants a cheaper appliance, another an education suited to his child, and a third enough income to work fewer hours, and although each purpose may be intelligible on its own, none has been selected with adequate regard for your larger design. Encourage them to see this diversity as a failure of coordination, something a serious society ought to overcome by giving private decisions a more useful public direction. They have mistaken knowing what they want for knowing what they ought to want.

For example, purchases can be made to advance national strength, investments to support approved industries, and the terms of exchange to express your conception of fairness. Tariffs will help establish the principle, since an additional charge upon importing selected goods can be explained by reference to employment, industrial capacity, and national security. The consumer who supposes he is shopping for a refrigerator should be invited to consider his responsibilities in matters of foreign policy. If he objects to paying more, remind him that private economy must sometimes yield to public ambition, particularly when the ambition is yours and the expense is his.

Keep the beneficiaries of protection where they can be seen. A factory has a location, employees, and an excellent venue for a speech, while the people paying more for many different goods are scattered among households and businesses with little occasion to organize. Once the measure is in place, you can photograph the jobs you claim to have saved while ignoring any second-order effects. When a business seeks relief from the burden, invite it to explain why its private needs deserve an exception within your public purpose. Both the producer hoping to preserve protection and the producer hoping to escape its expense will learn that access to an official is a productive asset, and an entrepreneur who once asked what customers would buy will begin to ask what officials will reward.

Where prices produce outcomes you dislike, prescribe more agreeable terms. A rent ceiling, for instance, can answer the genuine hardship of expensive housing while leaving questions about the willingness to build and maintain apartments for later. As the supply contracts and applicants accumulate, expand your responsibilities from supervising the price to supervising the allocation. This is the most economical feature of the method: each remedy produces the complaint that justifies the next, and the shortage your ceiling created will be the strongest argument for your new duties.

You need not insist upon a single political vocabulary, since national greatness and economic justice can both make people's own purposes appear insufficiently public. Supporters may argue fiercely over the destination while helping establish your authority to prescribe it, and you should give their dispute every opportunity to occupy the public's attention. People absorbed in deciding which plan everyone must follow may overlook the question of why everyone must follow one.

Put decisions beyond the reach of those affected

The people nearest a problem possess information that can complicate an orderly solution. They remember earlier attempts, know the circumstances, and may hold inconvenient opinions about bearing the expense, all of which can be made less troublesome by placing authority with people who need neither consult them nor live with the result. Uniformity will be easier to appreciate from the office issuing a rule than from the classroom, household, or business in which somebody must abide by it.

In education, the distance can be made quite practical. A teacher may discover that a prescribed method is failing her pupils, while a parent may find that the assigned school is failing his child; require the teacher to obtain approval before changing the method and the parent to pursue an appeal before changing the school. Keep the power to act with people whose own children may be educated elsewhere. Local institutions will sometimes be oppressive, incompetent, or captured by insiders, and their failures can furnish persuasive reasons for distant supervision; when the distant supervisor fails, return the explanation to uneven local implementation. Centralize the remedy and decentralize the blame, and experience at either level will confirm the wisdom of authority at the higher one.

The finances should follow the same principle, allowing ambitious decisions to be made with resources collected from people whose individual purposes need not be considered. Place the benefits where they will be recognized and the costs where they will be difficult to track, extending the distance into time wherever possible. Recipients available to express their gratitude today can be assisted through obligations assigned to people still learning their ABCs, whose inability to vote should not prevent them from contributing.

Bailouts offer another way to loosen the connection between a decision and its consequences. A firm expecting to bear its losses weighs risk against its own resources; one expecting rescue can weigh risk against the resources of everyone. Encourage favored institutions to become sufficiently important that their failure would harm innocent people, furnishing a reason to rescue them again when they disappoint. Small firms should remain responsible for their mistakes, giving their owners an incentive to become larger. If an investigation becomes necessary, commission a thorough review by people familiar with the original decision, whose understanding of its intentions should help establish that nobody could reasonably have expected what everyone must now pay for.

Throughout, combine concentrated authority with dispersed responsibility, giving enough people a part in the process that no one can be held clearly accountable while reserving the power to revise it to a group small enough to resist correction. Those who are dissatisfied should be given procedures through which they may appeal indefinitely to the body that has disappointed them. Every stage should offer an opportunity to submit views, so that nobody can fairly complain of having been denied participation in a decision he was never permitted to make.

Leave people nowhere else to turn

A society with many independent institutions will present a continuing difficulty: a person disappointed by one can go to another. A congregation can sustain convictions an employer dislikes, a newspaper can examine claims an official prefers unexamined, and a new school or business can try an idea the established ones have rejected. Worse, the mere possibility of leaving does work of its own. An institution whose members can walk away must improve to keep them, whether or not it has been persuaded that anything is wrong. People with somewhere else to go are harder to direct, since your disapproval need not become the verdict of their whole world.

Attend to the resources that make these alternatives possible. Property, savings, voluntary contributions, and the loyalty of members allow people to maintain undertakings without obtaining your favor, which may encourage them to mistake independence for a permanent condition. Bring more of their work within programs you finance, authorize, or supervise, offering enough assistance that refusal becomes costly. A school reliant on families can answer to families; one reliant on a discretionary grant will have another audience to consider. A newspaper financed by readers may lose some of them when it offends their judgment, but a newspaper whose continued operation depends upon official favor must take care not to offend the wrong reader.

There is no need to abolish these institutions, and much to be gained by preserving their appearance. Let them retain their names, trustees, traditions, and distinctive stationery while their leaders acquire the habit of asking which decisions might jeopardize continued support. Their independence should be celebrated annually and funded conditionally. A director responsible for paying employees may become so diligent in anticipating your preferences that you need never state them, and this is worth more than any instruction you could issue. A preference you have not stated cannot be quoted, appealed, or laid at your door, and because he must guess at it, prudence will carry him somewhat further than you would have dared to ask. He will describe the result as responsible stewardship.

Give particular attention to anyone proposing to start anew. The point is to ensure that changing institutions does not allow people to escape the conditions they object to; a choice among several organizations answering to the same authority can still be advertised as choice. Suppose a group of teachers, dissatisfied with the existing colleges, sets out to found a new one. Its students may draw upon public loans and grants only if the college is accredited, and it will be accredited by a body drawn from the colleges it hopes to improve upon. They will bring to the review their settled views about libraries, administrative offices, and the proper credentials of a faculty, and the founders will learn that they are welcome to differ from their predecessors in any respect the predecessors consider unimportant.

You will have made progress when a person can leave the institution that has failed him only to encounter the same requirements at its replacement. He may continue to object, but with nowhere else to take his children, his work, his convictions, or his support, the objection will become easier to disregard. You have not compelled him to agree; you have merely ensured that disagreement offers him no practical alternative.

Make disagreement evidence of unfitness

Some people will continue to question whether your programs work, whether you possess the authority to impose them, or whether their benefits justify the sacrifices. These objections may arrive with evidence, which is an inconsiderate way to conduct a public discussion. Encourage the conversation to move toward the character of the person asking: a dispute about the effectiveness of a policy can become a dispute about whether its critic cares about the people it is intended to help. A question about results is difficult to answer; a question about compassion is much easier to ask.

The vocabulary can be adapted to the occasion. A critic of trade restrictions may be insufficiently patriotic, a critic of an economic program indifferent to hardship, and a critic of a health directive hostile to science, allowing quite different objections to receive the same treatment. Accuracy matters less than the burden the label places upon its recipient, who must now establish what sort of person he is before anyone examines what he said. A man busy proving that he is decent has less time to prove that you are wrong, and others watching him may decide that their own objections can wait.

Carry the habit into institutions that confer standing, where reasonable expectations of competence and decent conduct can be enlarged to include agreement on matters only loosely related to the work. Universities, employers, and professional associations need not make the requirement explicit if applicants understand that their prospects depend upon discovering it. Where troublesome evidence emerges from inside an institution, remind the researcher of the confidence his findings might undermine, and remind the employee who reports a failure how much morale matters.

Open censorship should be approached with caution because it identifies the censor, supplies a grievance, and can attract readers to material they would otherwise have ignored. Leave people free to speak while improving their reasons for remaining silent, particularly where employment or professional standing can be made uncertain without an express prohibition. Everyone should feel free to offer an opinion, provided he has given adequate thought to how he will pay his mortgage. Keep the boundaries indistinct enough that a few conspicuous examples can help many others arrive, quite independently, at the same prudent conclusion.

You should know what this will cost you. As employees conceal difficulties and advisers become skilled at confirming your expectations, the information reaching you will grow steadily less accurate, and you will be among the last to learn that a program is failing, having taught everyone in a position to know that telling you is unwise. Regard this as the price of the method. Freely examined errors create pressure for correction, whereas unspoken doubts can coexist for a considerable time with assurances that everything is going well. If agreement becomes universal, resist the temptation to congratulate yourself on the quality of your argument; you may simply have improved the audience's judgment about speaking. Success will be apparent when an objection prompts an inquiry into the objector's fitness to participate, and the question he raised are left behind.

Teach people to fear unsupervised life

The preceding instructions will become easier to maintain if people learn to regard uncertainty itself as a failure of public administration. Encourage the expectation that a properly managed society should spare them the hazards of choosing badly, drawing upon the inexhaustible supply of investments that lose value, purchases that disappoint, careers that become obsolete, and enterprises that fail. Each can demonstrate the need for direction; successful independent choices should receive less attention.

Finance offers useful opportunities because losses are painful and difficult judgments unavoidable. Concern with fraud and truthful disclosure can be extended into deciding which investments adults are fit to consider, with financial resources serving as a qualification for those whose judgment you are willing to recognize. People without much money can then be protected from opportunities available to people who already have it, a rule you should take care to describe as investor protection. Where citizens wish to accept a risk you have deemed inappropriate, remind them that protection would be incomplete if they were allowed to decline it.

The same expectation can be carried into ordinary purchases and pursuits, where removing a choice will often be administratively easier than helping people understand it. Food is a convenient place to begin. A farmer and his customer may both be perfectly satisfied with a bottle of raw milk or a young unpasteurized cheese, and since neither has asked for your opinion, a rule should supply it. The seat belt shows how far the principle travels: wearing one is plainly sensible, which makes it an ideal case for establishing that an adult may be required to be sensible about a risk that falls chiefly on himself. Once that is settled, differences in preference and tolerance for risk need no longer be weighed one person at a time; establish an acceptable level on behalf of everyone and encourage those who value an activity more highly to acquire a safer preference. The method works because of what can be counted: illnesses and injuries that no longer occur can be tallied and published, while the pleasure of the cheese and the principle surrendered with the belt have no section in the report.

Entrepreneurship deserves particular attention because people who attempt things learn about costs, customers, cooperation, and their own capacities, sometimes emerging from failure better prepared for another effort. Approved routes and supervised opportunities can limit the development of this habit. Citizens may still be encouraged to regard themselves as competent to endorse sweeping plans for millions of strangers, with elections giving them regular practice in that responsibility; your expanding duties will spare them excessive practice in the comparatively modest business of directing their own affairs.

Apply different standards to the disappointments that follow. An individual's mistake should demonstrate the hazards of independent judgment, while an authority's mistake should reveal the need for better staffing. If supervision succeeds, its value is established; if it fails, its budget is inadequate. As opportunities to act independently diminish, fewer people will acquire experience doing so, and their inexperience can then be cited as evidence that greater independence would be impractical. Having discouraged them from learning to swim, you will be well positioned to explain why they must remain in the boat.

Never let them learn they can manage without you

Everything so far can be undone by a single discovery, which you must work to prevent: that people manage perfectly well without you. An argument against your rules can be handled, as you have seen, by turning attention to the person making it. A free person makes no argument. He opens a shop without asking, teaches his children at the kitchen table, settles a dispute with his neighbor across the fence, and the difficulty is that nothing terrible happens. He has disputed none of your claims and has no character you can usefully examine; he has merely been seen, by people who would never have followed an argument, getting on with it.

Understand what this costs you. Every problem solved without you is a problem that no longer justifies you, and people who have solved one are apt to attempt another. The habit spreads as your own method does, by small steps that each seem reasonable: a man who has done without permission once begins to wonder where else it might be unnecessary, and his neighbors, having watched, begin to wonder too. They will not rise against you. They will do something much worse, which is to stop asking, and an authority that nobody consults soon finds that it has very little to supervise.

Give this work your patience, because free people need not be numerous to do their damage. One town, one school, or one stubborn tradesman is sufficient to show the rest what can be done with room to begin, the means to refuse, and somewhere else to go. Attend to each as it appears. Eventually an unfamiliar possibility may suggest a need for oversight before it suggests an opportunity, and requests for direction will arrive without your having to solicit them. Freedom can retain its place in speeches, ceremonies, and national memory while becoming an increasingly unusual way to conduct ordinary life.

Invert again

Here I would close the handbook and turn the question around again.

Its imaginary adviser has pursued one objective with a consistency actual governments seldom achieve, and real institutions deserve to be judged on their particulars. But nothing in the handbook requires a secret committee to carry it out. Munger remarked that he had understood the power of incentives better than almost anyone his age and had still underestimated it all his life; the adviser's whole method is to set the incentives and let people do the rest. The benefits then appear in reports and speeches, and the costs in the business never begun, the objection left unspoken, and the choice somebody ceased to regard as his.

This is part of what makes inversion useful. A desired outcome invites us to dwell upon its attractions, and we can become so absorbed in the destination that we give the means of reaching it less attention than they deserve. Approaching from the other end brings the means into view. Munger's rustic did not ask for a map of everywhere worth going, only for the one place to avoid.

The same method can be put to almost anything. Someone asking how to build a durable business might begin by considering how to make its customers regret dealing with it; someone hoping for a good marriage might examine the habits that would reliably exhaust affection. In each case, the exercise gives us something more definite to examine than our aspirations, which have the advantage of flattering us without requiring much of us.

Inversion is also a test of consistency. Every instruction in the handbook is a tool, and a tool does the same work whoever picks it up. I need no prompting to scrutinize power in the hands of people I distrust; Munger's advice is worth most when it interrupts my approval. What it asks of those of us who care for liberty is to give up powers we sincerely believe we would use well: the power to make other people's choices wait upon our approval, to enlist their lives in our purposes, and to shelter our decisions from the consequences others must bear. If we object only when an opponent holds these powers, we have accepted the machinery and are merely questioning who should operate it. A commitment to freedom becomes credible when it protects a choice we dislike, an institution we would not join, or an argument we would rather nobody found persuasive.

I was one day old when Munger delivered his address, and I have spent the forty years since living on the work of strangers who began things for their own reasons and without asking anyone's leave. None of it was planned for me, and I could not have planned it myself.

Somewhere today a child is one day old. I would like her to have the same room: to begin without our permission, to disagree without our favor, and to build a life beyond the limits of our imagination. I would also like her to acquire, sooner than I did, the habit that prompted this essay: when a proposal promises something she cherishes, to ask what she would recommend to someone determined to destroy it. She may discover that she has already been handed several of his instructions, each accompanied by an excellent account of its intentions.