By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil. Cross posted from Fixing the Economists

Blackwhitethis word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.

George Orwell, 1984

Hey, look, Im not racist but. You just know that this statement is likely to be followed by a racist comment of some sort, right? Well, what about the statement issued in the title of a paper that libertarian paternalism is not an oxymoron. Yeah, youre probably going to think that what is likely to follow is going to be oxymoronic and poorly argued.

Well, youd be right. But even the term itself libertarian paternalism is so obviously a perversion of language that it should be immediately confined to the dustbin of duoblethink words along with blackwhite and goodbad. What the coiners of the term have done is fuse together two words that are mutually contradictory. In doing so they seek to obfuscate thinking and confuse people.

Dont get me wrong. Politically and economically Im very sympathetic to the argument put forward by the so-called libertarian paternalists. I certainly think that state intervention is a necessity in a modern economy; I certainly think that people do not always act in their own self-interest; and I fully agree that the less encroachment upon personal freedom that the state has to engage in to achieve the best results the better. But this does not excuse nonsense. We do not need to pervert language and reason to make this case.

Here is the basic argument as laid out in Sunstein and Thalers paper Libertarian Paternalism is Not an Oxymoron,

We elaborate a form of paternalism, libertarian in spirit, that should be acceptable to those who are firmly committed to freedom of choice on grounds of either autonomy or welfare. Indeed, we urge that libertarian paternalism provides a basis for both understanding and rethinking a number of areas of contemporary law, including those aspects that deal with worker welfare, consumer protection, and the family. In the process of defending these claims, we intend to make some objections to widely held beliefs about both freedom of choice and paternalism. Our emphasis is on the fact that in many domains, people lack clear, stable, or well-ordered preferences. What they choose is a product of framing effects, starting points, and default rules, leaving the very meaning of the term preferences unclear.

The substance of the above quote is actually true. When scrutinised in any meaningful way so-called preferences in marginalist economics are fairly meaningless. Human beings are not robots and their decisions are usually made under the substantial weight of framing and subject to all sorts of biases and blindnesses. Put more simply: sometimes people dont make very good decisions.

See the article here:

Philip Pillkington: Libertarian Paternalism is Clearly an Oxymoron