Freedom or Privacy - Pick One
A lot of the people that I tend to socialize with are libertarian types with strong feelings about freedom and privacy. I have always been very pro-freedom, but am skeptical about the need for privacy.
Although please note that I am talking about only physical privacy here - that is, privacy concerning ones actual physical actions - as distinguished from communications. In the book God Wants You Dead, that Paul and I wrote, we discussed the fact that privacy can be broken up into physical and communications spheres, and that physical privacy is disappearing as cameras become smaller and cheaper. However, we also noted that because communications devices are likewise becoming smaller and cheaper, that communications privacy might be able to survive the death of physical privacy, and that there are some very good reasons to try to keep communications privacy alive.
Anyway, what got me onto this particular rant today was my wife mentioning that a friend of ours did not believe in having her children vaccinated. This seems to becoming a more and more common attitude for new parents to have, with claims of links between vaccination and autism or other problems. It may also be tied in with the strengthening of environmentalist ideology or other religious belief - certain medical practices being thought of as unnatural or unholy by some true believers - which is another topic we discuss in GWYD.
Now I have no particular knowledge concerning the risks of vaccination, but I believe that even doctors who do not believe any of the stronger health risk claims will still admit that vaccination poses some risk to a child. At the very least you are poking them with a needle, and any breach of the skin can become infected - there is always the risk that a vaccines could be contaminated in some way - and in some cases, there exists a risk that the vaccination can actually give a child the disease it was intended to protect against.
As someone who believes strongly in individual freedom, I must respect each persons individual wishes on the subject of vaccination. It is up to each person to asses the risks of the world around them and act accordingly.
So what then, you ask, is the problem?
The problem is that vaccinations are a useful tool for providing us a better world to live in. Before inoculation was common, many horrible diseases ravaged the human population - children and adults alike. The practice of vaccinating children against many diseases has given us all much better health.
There is little doubt that, on the whole, the practice of vaccination has been a net positive - no matter how risky you believe it to be for each child.
However, any individual evaluating the risk of vaccinating their own child may well decide that it is safer not to get the vaccination. The reason for this is that if a large portion of the population is vaccinated, those few that choose not to receive inoculations are protected by the risk taken by others. With very few susceptible hosts, epidemics do not occur, and those who choose not to inoculate are given a free ride by those who do.
And it is not like a parent making this decision has ever seen an outbreak of the horrible childhood diseases that killed so many just a couple of generations ago - these things would seem to be artifacts of the past. Much the same way that those who complain about the unnatural chlorine and fluoride in there drinking water have never seen a cholera epidemic, those who fear the risks of vaccination have no first hand experience of a world without them. So it is quite understandable that many parents do not want to expose their own children to ANY risk that vaccination might hold - however slight.
This is a classic economic/game theory problem such as the tragedy of the commons or the prisoners dilemma. In problems of this nature, the rational course of best self interest, when taken by all (or some large portion) of the existing population, produces a worse overall average result than when people choose a personally sub optimal course of action that increases overall good.
Many such situations exist where some small sacrifice by all (or most) produces a greater gain for all. So then the question becomes - how do we make people do the right thing for the common good when it is not necessarily in their immediate best interest to do so?
If you believe in personal liberty, then you can not advocate the most common solution of having the government force people to do the right thing (and you are probably also skeptical that a government given the power to force people to do the right thing will magically always know what the right thing to do is, or that it will confine itself to just using such power for collective benefit.)
So what is the other option?
Well, it turns out that if everyone has perfect information, the market takes care of such problems all by itself. If everyone knows who has received vaccination and who has not, they are free to exact economic penalties against those they perceive as free riders. If your children are not vaccinated, some parents may not want their children to play with or go to school with your kids. They are free to (without using any physical force) react in any number of ways that will cost you and your children certain opportunities to profitably exchange value with them.
Shunning people who do not exhibit what you believe to be proper behavior is a powerful market tool for producing good solutions to such problems without the need for any use of force.
In a world with perfect information, you are free to defect from courses of behavior that produce greater overall benefit, but you will pay a fair market price for doing so - you will never be getting a free ride at the expense of others. If you believe that vaccinations are riskier than the average person believes them to be, then you may be willing to pay the additional price for not vaccinating your children - otherwise you will go ahead and take the small risk.
A properly informed market will do the best job of finding the right level of cooperation or defection concerning any rules of behavior that people would like to impose upon each other. But all of this only works at the expense of privacy. Unless everyone can know the truth of each other’s actions, they can not impose the proper penalties and bonuses for the specific actions they believe to be worthy of punishment or reward.
So it’s either freedom or privacy. If you want an efficient solution to these types of problems, you are forced to either diminish freedom by using force or to sacrifice privacy for greater shared information.
Because the solutions produced by a free market with the best possible information are likely to be better than those imposed by any central authority, I feel morally compelled to choose freedom over privacy.
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May 4th, 2008 at 3:33 am
If vaccinations could be imposed, the one with the most benefits would be breast-feeding your child. To what age shall a government impose this service / vaccination? Those who don’t breast-feed, and I believe there are many with valid excuses, are putting their own other children at risk. This is not so far off-base as it sounds with the government all over women’s bodies on many other issues concerning reproduction. While we’re at it, the sanctions limiting what children put in to their bodies could be expanded upon, cigarettes, alcohol, why not sugar, fatty food, red dye #? hmmm….
I just remembered reading about a woman sentenced to death for being raped by her brother-in-law who was kept alive long enough to breast-feed her child until the age of two when it would stand a chance of surviving on its own, so that answers my question, two!
May 4th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Follow up:
I know this post goes against the normal Libertarian dogma, but if you find yourself wanting to reject what I have written because you want to remain a faithful Libertarian, please try to keep in mind what one of my very favorite authors once wrote:
Additionally, It has already occurred to me that the choice being presented: “Freedom or Privacy - Pick One” is a false dichotomy, and it has been deliberately presented that way to provoke thought on the topic. We can not individually choose either complete freedom or complete privacy without others cooperating with our choice. Physical coercion exists in the world, and while it is being used, privacy offers an excellent shield against those who would use force to dictate the behavior required by the idea-organisms they host.
But the main idea behind the article - that there exists a freedom/privacy trade off - is a truth worthy of understanding clearly. It is important to note that we seek privacy only because we fear both judgment and coercion based on the wants of various parasitic idea-organisms. Without the coercion part, the natural trend is for market judgment to enforce behavior that approaches the greatest overall good for replicators generally - and with the elimination of parasitic replicators this becomes the greatest overall good for individual human beings.
May 4th, 2008 at 8:40 am
You analogy between people who refrain from vaccinating and the tragedy of the commons is flawed. The tragedy of the commons deals with a limited resource being hoarded and therefore restricted from the community. In the case of vaccination, those who are vaccinated are using the resource and are also insulated from any ill effects from the unvaccinated.
Tragedy of the commons relates to an opt-in resource that is hoarded and would fit if people were using up all the vaccines before others could use it. In this situation it’s opt-out and doesn’t affect the resource. In fact the brunt of the risk is borne by those who opt out.
Your main point regarding the balance between freedom and privacy speaks directly to open-societies where the actions of any individual (or group of individuals as they will likely be viewed as a whole.) Debated in detail on separate discussion on various times and place exhaustively. I don’t think this article brings anything new to that discussion except using the example of vaccinations as an example. I think a better example would serve your purposes.
May 4th, 2008 at 9:13 am
John,
Each vaccinated person reduces risk to every other person in the population - vaccinated or not. Each un-vaccinated person increases risk to ever other person in the population - vaccinated or not. Each of these statements would be only partially true if vaccination equated to 100% immunity - but this is not the case. In a transparent society, the degree that a vaccination was perceived to approach 100% immunity would act to reduce the social price one would pay for choosing not to vaccinate.
I referred to both “tragedy of the commons” and “prisoner’s dilemma” as well known examples of this type of economic problem. Do you disagree that the issue of vaccination is a problem of this category? Are you just saying that it is more like PD than TOTC? Or are you simply pointing out that it is its own distinct example of this sort of problem that does not exactly match either case?
As for the issue of whether what I have to say is new - most of it usually isn’t - but that doesn’t make it not worth saying. :-)
May 7th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
I have considered this issue from both a Prisoner’s Dilemma and Tragedy of the Commons and I’ve found both lacking to describe the situation. I can’t even mutate the box for PD to fit.
You have two sets. One set is immune and one set is not. The immune set has taken what they think is a very small risk to gain immunity, and once achieve will not get ill. The other group rejects the benefit of immunity because they see the risk of gaining immunity too a cost.
Your supposition is that those who are not immunized have taken something from those who are, but this is reverse of the truth. The immunized are secure and happy with their condition and with very few exceptions can’t fathom why anyone wouldn’t be. The un-immunized pose no threat to the immunized and therefore you can’t use PD or TOC. This opt out situation is one where the government is forcing a medical procedure on the population for the “common good”. That a marginal amount opt-out doesn’t change the protection of those that opt-in.
You’re article would be more interesting and evocative if the government wasn’t allowing people to get immunized when they wanted to be because of a limit supply of a vaccine.
May 7th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
You continue to (deliberately?) ignore the fact that vaccination is not 100% effective in your reasoning on this topic.
June 1st, 2008 at 1:38 am
Hi,
I was fascinated by your logic until your assumption that vaccinations ‘work’. there have been many people including doctors that have researched the validity of vaccinations and found that the ’so called ‘facts’ do not stand up. The ‘net is a great resouce for this.
The second weak argument was your linking chlorine and fluoride together as a control of cholera. Again there is lots of on line research that fluoride not only does not help with cholera control but is a damaging poison.
Clearly your idea of a perfect information is sound. Adquiring perfect information ‘is’ the problem. Earth would truly be heaven like and we would truly love our neighbours. In our present world Imperfect information is the tool of governments institutions, businesses, that wish to mold public perception.
June 1st, 2008 at 3:22 pm
I am convinced that the general concept of vaccination is a sound one. There is strong experimental evidence that people can and do develop partial immunities with exposure, and the use of ‘dead’ viruses or small quantities of live virus can be experimentally shown to stimulate the production of such antibodies. So anyone that says that the general concept of vaccination is bad needs to explain away experimental evidence that supports a well understood mechanism. I have not seen any arguments that meet this challenge. I have seen some statistics that attempt to show that vaccination has no effect, but all the arguments along these lines, that I have seen, shift between evidence about specific viruses and the general concept of vaccination in a logically invalid way.
The question of how helpful these techniques are with any given virus versus the potential damage they might cause is certainly an open question and would vary from virus to virus based on such issues as how likely infection is, how dangerous the virus is, how effective the specific vaccination is, and how dangerous the vaccination is. But that is exactly the point of my article - showing how more efficient economic balance for personal/community risk choices can be achieved through greater information flow and social feedback, without government mandates. In an ideal world, everyone would have their own opinions about how effective and necessary a specific vaccination is, and would act accordingly - and the opinions of other people would exert only social pressure on them - never enforcement through threat of violence.
The issue of chlorine and fluoride is not a part of the overall argument, but was merely included to show how, when an effective technique for controlling a problem is used for a time, people often forget why it was needed in the first place. The fact that fluoride is a poison does not reduce the effectiveness of this analogy - chlorine and fluoride are both poisons - that is why they kill bacteria. Thus it is quite analogous to the situation of the small risk of vaccination for a potential greater good.
A small quantity of poison is good for you, if the only alternative is something worse.
Fluoride may not, in fact, have any specific effect on the cholera bacteria - so perhaps I should not have included it in the analogy - which would have stood just as well on its own by just mentioning chlorine. However, having two different poisons at work reduces the chance of bacteria developing resistance to the single poison, so I would guess (but am certainly not certain) that fluoride has some effect beyond just fighting the bacteria that causes tooth decay. I think we can be pretty sure that cholera bacteria is not overly fond of fluoride, even if chlorine happens to be the far greater agent of its destruction.
June 5th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Clearly we are all convinced by the information that we have been exposed to, when expounded by ‘professionals’ with research to back up their claims.
Yet the focus of the article is the merit of perfect information with which I wholeheartedly concur. i view your examples on vaccination as unfortunate, as in my view, they detract from the validity of your argument (or perhaps are a good example of?). For the very reason, that I view them as an example, of the potentially viral nature of imperfect information.
There are many types of ‘experimental evidence out there’ both for and against. e.g. some would argue that reduction in infectious diseases is more to do with cleanliness and hygene in modern societies than vaccinations. and there is lots of research to match this view point. In a world of imperfect information (because of vested interests) How do we choose between competing explanations and guide ourselves? .
July 17th, 2008 at 3:20 am
“In a world of imperfect information (because of vested interests) How do we choose between competing explanations and guide ourselves?”
We all just do the best we are able to sort out the truth from the bullshit.
As long as no central authority tries to force people to believe something (or to act as though they do) free communication and individual action/reaction based on personal belief and self-interest produces a market solution that is, in the average case, as close to optimal as we can get. This approaches being actually optimal as information flow approaches being perfect.