Authored by Artis Shepherd via The Mises Institute,

In modern America, an obsessive fixation on “safety” has given rise to a culture of fear, paralyzing action and warping decision-making across all levels of society. The conditioning begins early, with children trained to be fearful rather than competent in facing challenges or unfamiliar situations. In their formative years, children are inundated with rules and guidelines, ostensibly designed to maintain safety. But this only stunts their adventurous spirit, undercuts the development of real confidence, and provides an excuse to avoid the uncertain striving necessary for growth.

Corporations and commercial establishments claim “safety is the highest priority” while failing to understand what that statement entails when taken to its logical extreme. If safety is indeed the highest priority, then we should all stay home and slowly decompose.

Without irony, governments use the safety of the citizenry as a pretext to commit brutal acts of war and strip away natural freedoms at the point of a gun. The same is done to provide cover for merging the state with the economy, to the detriment of most and the benefit of a politically connected few.

It is evident that the pursuit of safety, with fear as the motivator, prevents one from living a good life — one consisting of productive work driven by the attainment of values through reason and effort, the result of which is true self-esteem.

Rather than safety, pursue competence. Genuine safety lies in acquiring the skills necessary to deal with life’s challenges, not simply avoiding them.

Baby Kneepads

In her book “Free Range Kids,” Lenore Skenazy discusses her decision to let her 9-year-old son ride the New York City subway by himself. By her telling, he was ready, capable and prepared. So she let him do it, and he did. Her son had just accomplished something of which he could be proud and which would be challenging for many adults.

Unfortunately, the response to Ms. Skenazy’s decision was not one of approbation. National media, so-called parental experts and the frightened masses all learned about the event and condemned it. She was called horrible names and dubbed “America’s Worst Mom” by the U.S. media.

The people who attacked Ms. Skenazy view the world as a scary place, one where selective observation substitutes for rational thinking — where the risk-reward equation is reduced to a big neon “RISK” sign flashing red. These are the same people who put kneepads on their babies when they learn to crawl.

Ms. Skenazy highlights the benefits of kids spending time in nature, building skills of self-reliance and eschewing today’s conventional methods of risk avoidance. One gets the sense that children are capable of much more than they’re given credit for. Far from pushing them into danger, allowing children to confront and overcome challenges on their own provides the ultimate safety — a true sense of competence.

The “Fed Put” and Subversion of the Free Market

For over a century, the American economy has been subject to the vagaries of central bank control, including the management of “inflation” — poorly defined as the change in the general price level, an absurd abstraction that’s impossible to accurately measure — and the overall stability of the job market. Another stated goal of the Federal Reserve was ensuring the “stability of the banking system.” Despite this, all of the most severe episodes of bank failure in the U.S. occurred on the Fed’s watch, including the Great Depression.

Since the 1980s, the Federal Reserve has been employing an all-but-explicit program of bailing out the capital markets — the stock market especially — every time there is a significant pullback in prices. Known as the Fed put, this is an especially sickening example of welfare for those of mediocre ability but the right political connections.

While a desire to control — and enrich a small group at the expense of the majority — is at the heart of the motivations in creating the Federal Reserve, or any central bank, the ostensible reasons have to do with safety. In the rationale of the state and its adherents, Americans need to be kept safe from high price inflation, bank failures and other perceived threats of a free market. By this rationale, people need protection from the consequences of voluntarily exchanging goods and services at market prices, unimpeded by a bureaucracy. Heaven forbid.

As a result, the central bank and federal government essentially control most of the economy. For single-family homes, 95% of mortgages are ultimately held and guaranteed by federal government agencies. As a profession, medicine has been subsumed by the requirements of government insurance and research funding. Food is regulated to the extent that obtaining a glass of real milk is impossible in many states. The costs of buying an automobile are substantially due to compliance with government regulations. No industry is untouched.

The Welfare State

As with the creation of a central bank, the forcible redistribution of capital — from the capable and driven to the incapable and indolent — is an attempt to remove the risk of failure from favored groups. Tellingly, these programs are referred to as “safety nets.”

What the welfare state accomplishes, however, is the elevation of weakness as a character trait. Rather than allowing the freedom to achieve, the state acts as a mother with Munchausen syndrome by proxy — facilitating the dependency and helplessness of its wards so as to increase its own relevance via the caretaking process. In keeping with its role as the oppressive mother, one result is that fatherhood has become nonexistent, particularly in those groups most reliant on welfare.

The destruction of the productive spirit is nowhere more obvious than in those reliant on government handouts, who have attempted to trade independence for safety but end up with neither.

The Warfare State

Woodrow Wilson’s slogan for entering World War I at the beginning of the 20th century was “making the world safe for democracy.”

The world, then ostensibly safe for democracy with the entry of the U.S. military, incurred 40 million casualties during that war. That’s before counting the many tens of millions more over the following decades caused by events and regimes, including the Bolshevik Revolution, facilitated by that war. World War II, which would not have happened in the absence of World War I, saw another 75 million deaths, with some estimates north of 100 million.

The war on terror has only reduced freedoms at home while creating increasingly aggressive enemies elsewhere. The cost is in the trillions, with no material benefit of which to speak.

The Covid Panic

Using “public health and safety” as a front, the Trump and Biden regimes, as well as most state governments, implemented one of the most blatant examples of wicked government action in history. People were locked down inside their homes, unable to even enjoy open spaces like parks and beaches. Children were encouraged to gaze into a computer all day instead of going outside or to school. The truly sick, those with cancer and other serious conditions, were discouraged from hospital visits to increase capacity for patients who seemed to have a minor cold virus—one that leaked from a research lab in China.

That government would gin up a crisis out of nothing is expected. It was the lack of pushback from the public that was astounding. There was almost total mask compliance, even in “conservative” states and counties. Low-status individuals took it upon themselves to push the government’s safety propaganda — the only chance for them to wield authority. When an injection was offered — one whose trials had no control arm, an absolute necessity in scientific studies, and blanket immunity for the manufacturers — people lined up to take it, then bragged about it.

The Nature of Risk

In human activity, risk is involved — sometimes a considerable amount. In seeking to manage that risk, one should strive for competence over it, not avoidance of it. This naturally entails confronting fear, especially the fear of failure, and using it for productive gain. The accumulation of skills, confrontation of hurdles and commitment to a process with uncertain outcomes are essential to a life worth living.