“It’s for your own good”: power’s kindest phrase

Imagine you need a shirt. You choose the size, fabric, color, price, and store. If you get it right, you enjoy the purchase. If you get it wrong, you learn. No one convenes a national commission to protect you from an overly long sleeve.

Now let us change one premise. Clothing is a basic good. Without it, you cannot live with dignity. Therefore, someone concludes that it should not be left to the whims of the market or to each family’s unequal means. The state collects the money, selects suppliers, and delivers a standard shirt to every citizen.

The idea seems ridiculous because we can clearly see what is lost. Need does not automatically turn a personal decision into a public responsibility.

Yet the same logical leap appears in far more important matters.

  • Something is necessary; therefore, the state must finance it.
  • If it finances it, it must regulate it.
  • If it regulates it, it must provide it.
  • If it provides it, it must standardize it.
  • And if someone asks to choose, they are suspected of wanting to destroy the right itself.

That is how the protective state is born. And that is how the dependent citizen can eventually appear.

Protecting is not deciding for everyone

Public protection has a legitimate role. Some people cannot defend themselves, some risks exceed the individual, and some harms reach third parties. A decent society does not abandon an abused child, someone suffering through a disaster, or someone left without basic resources.

The problem begins when the exception comes to define the entire population.

  • If some people cannot save, a single system is designed for everyone.
  • If some parents fail in their duties, every family’s autonomy is reduced.
  • If one business deceives, every customer is treated as unable to compare.
  • If one citizen engages in dangerous behavior, the government assumes that no one should be allowed to decide.

This shift usually occurs with good intentions. There is no need to imagine evil rulers. A combination of fear of error, a desire for control, bureaucratic incentives, and an incomplete idea of equality is enough.

Equality before the law does not mean identical decisions. Protecting a minimum does not require imposing a maximum.

Deciding is also learning

Freedom produces different outcomes because people want different things, understand different realities, and make different mistakes.

Error is not an accidental defect of freedom.

  • It is part of freedom’s learning mechanism.
  • We choose, test, correct, and accumulate judgment.
  • A society that allows decentralized decisions generates thousands of small experiments.
  • Most will not deserve a headline; some will produce solutions no one had foreseen.

Guardianship reverses that process.

  • It reduces variety, shifts responsibility, and concentrates error.
  • When one person makes a mistake, the harm is usually contained.
  • When a compulsory system makes a mistake, millions of people receive the same bad answer.

The citizen also learns a perverse lesson: deciding is pointless because someone else will assume the responsibility.

  • After years without choosing a school, savings plan, provider, or type of service, the citizen loses information and the habit of choosing.
  • Power then points to that weakness as proof that guardianship was necessary.

First, responsibility is withdrawn. Then the resulting irresponsibility is used to justify never giving it back.

Three zones to avoid fanaticism

Not all decisions have the same nature. It is useful to separate them into three zones.

  • The first contains mainly personal decisions: clothing, ordinary food choices, one’s own schedule, cultural preferences, voluntary savings, or household technology. The cost of error falls on the person deciding and is usually reversible. The presumption of freedom should be very strong.
  • The second is a gray zone. It includes conduct involving personal risk and partial effects on third parties: helmets, seat belts, tobacco use, cash payments, vaccination against certain diseases, water use during a drought, or urban mobility. Evidence, proportionality, and concrete design matter here.
  • The third contains clear collective functions: defense, justice, protection against violence, disaster response, control of severe epidemics, or pollution that crosses borders. Higher-level coordination has a solid justification, although its instruments still need limits.

This classification avoids two traps. The first is calling every rule tyranny. The second is calling every restriction protection.

Smoking: a freedom that fills someone else’s lungs

Smoking shows why subsidiarity does not mean “everyone does whatever they want.”

The decision to smoke affects one’s own body, but smoke in an enclosed venue reaches workers and customers. Third parties cannot always avoid exposure without leaving their jobs or giving up the space. There is a direct externality.

Spain’s ban in bars, restaurants, and other enclosed spaces, expanded in 2010, can be defended under a subsidiarity test: it protects third parties from harm that individual agreement did not resolve adequately.

That does not make every imaginable extension legitimate. Prohibiting smoking in a shared enclosed space is not the same as regulating every act outdoors, at home, or in solitude. The cause defines the boundary.

A sensible rule contains the harm. A paternalistic rule pursues the habit.

Cash: fraud versus privacy

Spain limits cash payments to 1,000 euros when a business owner or professional is involved.

  • The stated purpose is to combat fraud and money laundering. The objective may be legitimate.
  • The instrument carries a real cost: it reduces privacy, increases traceability, and requires the use of financial intermediaries.

The question does not have an automatic answer.

  • Has it been shown that the threshold produces a proportionate benefit?
  • Are there alternatives based on risk or individualized suspicion?
  • What happens to older people, those who are not digitally connected, or citizens who want to retain an independent means of payment?
  • Is the limit reviewed against published results?

Subsidiarity answers neither “unlimited cash” nor “total control.” It requires acknowledging the trade-off. Anyone who restricts a freedom must explain what society gains, how much it gains, and why no less intrusive option exists.

Power loses credibility when it describes only the benefit and hides the cost.

Helmets, seat belts, and the collective cost of risk

Helmets and seat belts primarily protect those who use them. Why make them compulsory? The usual argument points to the health, family, and workplace costs of accidents. It is reasonable, but it can expand without limit: almost every risky activity creates some social cost. If that were enough, government could regulate exercise, weight, rest, and every life decision.

Compulsion is more defensible when four elements are present: strong evidence, a low cost of compliance, a large reduction in harm, and difficulty protecting minors or third parties through another measure.

Even so, it retains a paternalistic component. Acknowledging that does not weaken the argument; it makes it honest.

Adult citizens can accept certain prudential obligations without declaring that their bodies belong to the state. The important thing is to prevent a reasonable exception from becoming a general theory of guardianship.

Water, pollution, and scarcity

During a severe drought, individual consumption contributes to a common risk: the collapse of the water supply. A temporary restriction on irrigation, swimming pools, or nonessential uses may be legitimate.

But the key word, once again, is temporary.

Before imposing bans, authorities should review prices, leaks, incentives, infrastructure, and major users. Government should not make citizens bear the burden of scarcity worsened by years of poor management. And when conditions improve, the restriction should disappear without anyone having to demand it.

An emergency justifies coordination. It does not erase the coordinator’s responsibility.

Licenses: safety or permission to compete

Many activities require accreditation because an error can cause serious harm. We do not want just anyone to design a bridge, operate on a brain, or work on a gas installation without the necessary knowledge.

The problem arises when requirements extend to low-risk work and become barriers to entry. A license can protect the customer; it can also protect the established professional from new competitors.

The test should examine the potential harm, whether reputation and insurance can screen for it, the cost of the requirement, and who helps design it. When a profession regulates its future rivals, the risk of capture increases.

Safety, yes. A legal cartel, no.

Light bulbs and plastics: governing objects

The European Union has used efficiency requirements to phase out less efficient lighting technologies and has restricted certain single-use plastics when alternatives exist.

  • In both cases, there is a collective argument: energy consumption, emissions, waste, and marine pollution.
  • There is also a risk of regulating with too broad a brush: household realities, medical uses, incomes, and available alternatives are not always the same.

The useful discussion is not about mocking a drinking straw or declaring every product sacred. It is about comparing instruments. Information, producer responsibility, waste pricing, performance targets, innovation, and prohibition do not destroy the same freedoms or create the same incentives.

A decree can speed up a transition. It can also freeze the wrong technical solution.

The more detailed the rule, the stronger the evidence should be.

Guaranteeing, financing, providing, and choosing

The Nanny State grows when four functions are mixed together.

  • Guaranteeing means defining a floor: no one will be left without emergency care, basic education, or protection from violence.
  • Financing means deciding what share the public budget pays and how to help those without resources.
  • Providing means operating the hospital, school, transportation system, or service.
  • Choosing means retaining room to select a provider, mode, supplement, or project.

These functions can be distributed.

  • A publicly funded service can be provided by different organizations.
  • A national standard can allow local management.
  • A universal network can permit voluntary supplements.

The regulator can oversee without becoming the sole producer. Subsidiarity does not predetermine a formula. Instead, it prevents one function from automatically dragging the others along with it.

An adult society protects differently

An adult society does not abandon people, but neither does it infantilize them.

  • It helps those who need it without declaring those who can decide incapable.
  • It pursues harm, not difference.
  • It provides information before prohibiting.
  • It uses incentives before standardizing.
  • It reserves coercion for clear risks and reviews its results.

Above all, it allows exit. The possibility of choosing another provider, another center, another solution, or even another municipality disciplines power in a way that no annual report can reproduce.

  • Guardianship promises frictionless security.
  • Freedom demands responsibility.
  • A tension exists between them that will never disappear.

Subsidiarity does not resolve it with a slogan. It gives it a direction:

  • autonomy by default,
  • support when necessary, and
  • coercion only when harm to third parties has been sufficiently demonstrated.

Whenever someone says, “It’s for your own good,” it is worth listening. They may be right.

But then we must ask: why do you need to decide, why is there no less intrusive alternative, and when will you return the decision to me?

If those questions are irritating, they were probably necessary.

Verified sources and references