Intolerable Nudging

Champions of government intervention in our lives make every effort, especially in a country with a tradition of libertarian political rhetoric, to disguise that they are embarking upon tyranny. Yes, much of it may be of the petty kind, such as thousands of government regulations produced by various congressional committees. But as politicians and bureaucrats always reach beyond their authority to gain power over us, these petty tyrannies, these minor intrusions that the nudging amounts to, begin to get out of hand. In time the population just will not stand for it. We get political movements like the Tea Party arising to defend our liberties even from these allegedly minor nudgings.

It was the influential Professor Cass Sunstein – now President Obama's regulation czar – and his buddy Richard H. Thaler who wrote the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale UP, 2004) in which they developed the idea that what governments need to do is not deploy brute force and its threat to make citizens comply with their agendas, but make use of small bits of coercion, to nudge them, so they do not find the process objectionable. They make use of the examples of people encouraging their friends, for example, to conform to various rules, as when they place a bunch of footwear by the door so that those coming to their party will take off their shoes before they come into the rest of the house or flat. They will not even notice that they have been forced into compliance with the house rules! They won't complain or protest that they have been imposed upon.

Now the analogy here is a poor one because such encouragements usually occur in areas over which the guests don't have rightful control, quite the contrary. Nudging is quite acceptable when it occurs within the nudger's realm, his or her home or garden or yard or office. All of that is quite different from when governments nudge us, that is to say, push people around.

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