The Nanny State Infests Our World

Not many of us like being told how to live our lives, especially by those we don’t know and trust. It gets up our nose.

Yet there is an endless number of people who want to tell us what’s good for us. When they enlist the support of the government, we end up with the nanny state.

The nanny state is obviously of concern to many people. The Senate inquiry that I chaired some years ago attracted hundreds of submissions, with many others communicating their frustrations less formally.

Some mentioned the same issues the inquiry examined - compulsory bicycle helmets (almost unique to Australia), our tobacco taxes (the highest in the world, now prompting a massive increase in violent crime), alcohol taxes (among the highest), and the regulation of gambling.

Many also complained about unreasonable speed limits and their enforcement. Smokers complained that restrictions were no longer linked to risks of secondary smoke. Motorcyclists noted how the road safety industry assumes riders are all reckless fools. Sporting shooters pointed to the mass of petty regulations that have nothing to do with safety.

Nanny state rules often owe their origins to moral panics. These are defined as a widespread fear that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society. They invariably prompt calls for the government to “do more”.

Fear is the lifeblood of government power. Governments throughout the ages have often repeated the time-honoured tactic of taking a real concern, exaggerating it out of all proportion, and using the subsequent fear to justify more money and power for the government. The sad truth is that this tactic works very effectively.

There are countless examples of moral panics. Alcohol and gambling have been around for more than a century. Those who campaigned against them were once known as wowsers.

A recent example is nicotine vaping, a proven safe alternative to cigarette smoking. A burst of popularity among teenagers set off a moral panic that led to more stringent regulation than is applied to cigarettes.

A common question is how to explain Australia’s proliferation of laws and regulations designed to save us from our own choices. Based on the submissions of those who defended certain nanny state measures, I came to the conclusion that it is an outcome of the Dunning-Kruger syndrome. This is the psychological term for people who fail to recognise their level of competence — or specifically, their incompetence — and thus view themselves as much more competent than everyone else.

This is shown by surveys in which, when asked if they are above or below average intelligence, about three in four people say they are above average. Many are obviously kidding themselves, but it promotes the illusion that they are qualified to guide those less fortunate.

One of the consequences of an assumption that, without their superior guidance, much of the population will descend into chaos. Or, as Thomas Hobbes once said, life will be “nasty, brutish and short”.

This phenomenon is obviously not exclusive to nanny state issues. The people who imposed so many absurd and unnecessary restrictions during the Covid pandemic were obviously under the same illusion.

Nanny state thinking is obviously patronising and authoritarian, but when it extends to controlling how we think and what we say, it becomes especially sinister. This is increasingly seen with people purporting to know what’s best for, and to speak on behalf of, minority groups, policing what others say about them, and taking offence on their behalf. Contravene their rules and you are immediately branded a racist, homophobe or misogynist, subject to outrage, ostracism and cancel culture. They define it as hate speech and are well on the way to making it a crime.

And woe betide anyone from a minority group with differing views. A black or brown person who fails to go along with the racist oppression narrative, who is gay but doesn’t find homophobia around every corner, a woman who doesn’t subscribe to the male patriarchy concept, or a transsexual who expresses doubts about adolescent sex change, soon finds there is no wrath like that of a woke nanny stater whose sense of superiority is challenged.

It can reach peak absurdity when a homeless, penniless, destitute person is still considered unworthy because he is white, male, heterosexual, or enjoy any of the other imagined sources of advantage. It takes a rare kind of superior intelligence to come to that conclusion.

Irrespective of whether others would make the same choices, we should be free to live our lives as we choose provided we do not harm anyone else. Moreover, we should be free to think whatever we like and, provided we do not incite violence, to say whatever we like subject to nothing more than counter argument by those who have a contrary view.

But that is not the way it is. Despite many of us objecting to particular nanny state laws, there are just too many who think that overall they are OK. And that leaves us with an awkward question: if there are so many people incapable of making the right choices, requiring smart people to guide them, how can they possibly be expected to elect a government? Won’t they get that wrong too?