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On J.S. Mill, liberty and choice Samuel Brittan Financial Times 07/04/06 A commonsense view is that personal choice is desirable, so long as it does not inflict harm on other people. Nevertheless, there are periodic attacks on the idea. This is an appropriate time to consider the subject as May 20 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of John Stuart Mill, the philosopher whose classic book On Liberty is still the best treatment. The issue became topical in the 1980s because of the invocation of choice by?the Thatcher government in defence of its economic and social policies. At the mere mention of Margaret Thatcher too many otherwise level-headed commentators lost all sense of proportion and started to ask: “What is so wonderful about choice?” In Britain today, some of the same people who demonstrated against the former Conservative prime minister are out in force against Tony?Blair. One object of their anger is his emphasis on extending personal choice in services such as health and education. Some critics ask whether people really want more choice or more efficiency in these services. Their basic mistake is to assume that efficiency is unambiguous. It can only be so if there is one very clear objective to be pursued at the lowest possible cost. This is decidedly not the case with medical treatment. It is not even possible to measure efficiency until people reveal their own values and trade-offs. Some people will attach the greatest value to the availability of qualified consultants. Others will attach importance to privacy. Further objectives include the reduction of waiting times or hospitals being nearby. Patients will attach different weights to these objectives and also to the tax cost of trying to achieve them. A spartan patient may regard a quick high-tech in-and-out job as the most efficient treatment. A sybarite might attach almost equal importance to a cheerful room and easy visiting hours. It is worth emphasising, however, that if the dogma of providing services “free at the point of delivery” is upheld, choice must remain limited. With zero prices there can be no limit to what is demanded. So some rationing and selection are inevitable. When political parties discuss extending choice for public services they really mean allowing people to choose between a number of carefully selected packages. By all means let Mr Blair and David Cameron, the Conservative leader, experiment with such ideas; but I cannot get very excited about them. There is a wider issue. Choice is worthwhile, whether or not it promotes some concept of efficiency. Its value lies in the absence of coercion or man-made obstacles to the exercise of people’s powers and capacities. It is part of the western tradition but it cannot, in the final analysis, be rigorously demonstrated against those with incompatibly different values. There are those who find choice a burden. But with a little imagination it can be delegated. For instance, I used to buy flowers from a shop which decided for me what was best seasonal value. And one can express one’s preference for dinner parties with set places which avoid having to shuffle round embarrassingly. And if you do not like the 200 varieties of cereals you can surely find a smaller shop with a smaller selection. Economic growth ought to increase choice. But it is coming under attack because surveys show that after a certain point people do not say they are happier as national income grows. This is argued in The Challenge of Affluence by Avner Offer, professor of economic history at Oxford (OUP). The book is an invaluable source of information on changing attitudes and practices in the US and Britain since the end of the second world war. But his concluding message is that neither choice nor economic growth in modern conditions promotes individual and social well-being. Here we come to a parting of the ways. It is, in my view, presumptuous of legislators or social scientists to tell us how to promote our happiness. Their objective should be to promote conditions in which people have the maximum of options. What they make of these opportunities is their business; and whether they then fill in questionnaires saying that they are happier or not is interesting, but not the final criterion. It is necessary to go even further. The bedrock value on which classical liberals ought to rest is freedom. Someone who attaches importance to freedom is committed to attaching importance to choice, but it does not necessarily work the other way round. You can have a lot of choice but be fundamentally unfree. What matters is freedom of action and speech among consenting adults. A society is unfree if your income has increased but you can be put in jail for expressing beliefs contrary to the prevailing political or religious ideology. It is also unfree if you are prevented from travelling abroad either by edict or by an exiguous official travel allowance. Choice among hospitals, or even among varieties of cereals, may not have the same importance, but it is still part of a free society.
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