Libertarian's Corner: The Case Against Meliorism-Veiled Tragedies

Joseph S. Fulda

      Joseph S. Fulda is a free-lance writer living in New York City.

      Life's difficulties are distributed unevenly, and that causes the meliorist to advocate the lessening of the burden on life's unfortunates through measures that redistribute some of their travails across all of society. The hope is that although lifting the burden of the unfortunate few significantly, the masses will hardly suffer as the burden is redistributed so widely as to be barely noticeable.
      Nowhere is the meliorist impulse more evident than in the federal requirement that vehicles such as buses carrying more than eight passengers must have a wheelchair lift. No one can question that those in wheelchairs are truly unfortunate, that public transportation options immeasurably enhance their lives, and that only a small fraction of the total population is so encumbered.
      Every time I ride a New York bus equipped with the mandatory lifts and wait for a wheelchair passenger to board, I confront the meliorist impulse within me, for I feel good about waiting a few minutes so that the disabled person can go from place to place and I wonder whether redistribution in this case is not justified. Then I remember. The seen and the unseen. The great benefit to folks in wheelchairs is obvious to me and a source of good feeling. But at the same time, I am sometimes-like all New Yorkers-late, and then I wish I were on a different bus. Although no dire consequence has befallen me when I have been late, I am sure that such is not the case with everyone, although I do not know, for the tragedies are unseen, hidden within the kernel of principle that tells us that redistribution always has real losers as well as obvious winners.
      Lateness to a crucial date, for example, especially if one is already late as it is, can cause a budding relationship that might have resulted in a lifetime marriage to end prematurely. Lateness to a crucial interview can result in loss of a prospective job, at which one might have enjoyed twenty years of satisfaction and income. It is the nature of the unseen that not even those who lose because of this redistribution may ever know just how much they have lost. These consequences-as certain as they are to occur-are truly unseen.
      Then, there's the money. The federal mandate raises fares for everyone as the lifts are exceedingly expensive. "So," asks the meliorist,

. . . what if a nickel is added to everyone's fare? The disabled beneft so very much; the masses sacrifice so very little.

Again, the issue of the seen and the unseen comes to the fore.
      A nickel's loss on each of several hundred rides a year may leave a passenger just some twenty or thirty dollars shy of the price of something he otherwise might have bought. Perhaps an air conditioner, the lack of which-rarely-lands one in the hospital with heat exhaustion. Perhaps a day's household help and rarely, in doing the work oneself one may slip and fall. Perhaps a dog which-rarely-saves the life of its owner. We'll never know just what the passenger would have done with that additional small sum of money, which purchases would then be marginally possible, and how his life might have been thus improved.
      In rare cases, at least, the purchase would have made a significant difference in his life's story-we will never know; he will never know. The tragedies that might have been averted are unseen, unfelt, and unlikely. But they are nonetheless real, and they cast a shadow over the whole meliorist programme.
      Because of the veil of ignorance, the costs of meliorist programs are incalculable, for who can tell us the costs of not traveling along "the roads not taken" when we do not know where those roads lead? It is, thus, in principle impossible to pin down the costs of meliorist programs, since we cannot use economic analyses on what is not but only might have been.
      Thus does meliorism-the systematic attempt to better the human condition through mild and programmatic means-actually cause many tragedies that affect all of us, for here we have but considered one tiny little program, while the meliorist seeks to redistribute many of life's unfair, as it were, distribution of burdens. A nickel here, a nickel there, and the taxpayer is shelling out many thousands of dollars annually for transfer programs and regulatory burdens alike. It is often argued that these are "rife with waste, fraud, and abuse," and that often they do not go to the "truly, deserving needy," and these claims are very true-but off the mark. For even when as with wheelchair lifts the program perfectly embodies the meliorist impulse, it is the cause of veiled tragedies. Writ large, over many, many such programs, the tragedies are compounded and affect us all profoundly.