The Progress of Liberty

Now we come to the issue of reconciling the Time Criterion and the Pain Criterion of government oppression.

The issue concerning us is that the Time Criterion is purely cardinal and measures government oppression in terms of the amount of time the government demands of any subject – directly or indirectly. The Pain Criterion, on the other hand, is purely ordinal and has no measurement units for pain. Rather, it simply consists of an absolute ranking of pains and a normative conception of some pains as being absolutely worse than others.

But if we can put wasted time within the ordinal ranking of pains, then our complication will be resolved. Hence, I propose the following principle.

Wasted time is the least of possible pains. Wasted time does not kill one, permanently injure one, or even necessarily entail emotional abuse. It does not need to involve stress or vicissitudes such as those present in a crowded room or a traffic jam. A bureaucrat can even (possibly) make his office reasonably comfortable for those who wait to see him. (This is in part what makes American bureaucracy tolerable by comparison to many bureaucracies around the world.)

Thus, I propose to put wasted time at the bottom (at number eight) of the ordinal ranking of pains I presented in the previous post – unless the wasted time results directly or indirectly in higher-ranked pains. For instance, a government policy (under socialized healthcare) that denies a person treatment for a life-threatening cancer should not just be condemned on account of wasting time. Rather, this policy causes death (the worst pain) and therefore ought to be condemned on that account.

Sincerely,
Gennady Stolyarov II

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