Recently, House Speaker John Boehner made the following observation:

You know, I’ve always believed, the bigger [the] government, the smaller the people.

Matt Yglesias points to the fact that the Dutch have the tallest median height in the world, and that the citizens of a number of northern European democracies are taller than Americans and, more narrowly, than non-Hispanic white Americans.

You won’t be surprised to learn that some of our friends on the left have thus concluded that egalitarianism is the key to health and associated increases in height. Ezra Klein and Dylan Matthews prepared a chart to this effect:

He took the data from Wikipedia’s table listing the average male height in more than 60 countries and plotted each country’s height against the percent of GDP it collects in taxes. The result? A weakly, but noticeably, positive relationship between the size of government and the size of people. Bigger governments, in other words, mean bigger people.

A few things to note: Americans are taller than citizens of a number of other countries that are considered more egalitarian, including Canada. Singapore has grown more unequal in recent years, yet average height has increased. The list of anomalies goes on.

Moreover, as Will Wilkinson has reminded us, the percent of GDP collected in taxes is a decidedly imperfect indicator of the what I suspect Boehner meant by the “size” of government. If a government collects 50% of income in taxes and then returns that money in the form of “universal spending vouchers,” e.g., cash, government is playing a very different role than if it were to spend said tax revenue on an army of public servants insulated from competition and consumer choice.

My sense is that Speaker Boehner meant that the larger the role government plays in providing for our basic needs, the more diminished are our capacities for meeting those needs through means of voluntary cooperation. Perhaps the paradigmatic example of this phenomenon were the “friendly societies” that served the British working class during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which met a wide range of needs for adult education and social insurance. The state took over these roles, and a tradition of collective self-help declined. Though the friendly societies were decidedly imperfect, one can imagine a scenario in which the state did not supplant them. For example, the emerging British state might have chosen more direct forms of redistribution in lieu of building a paternalistic welfare state staffed by middle class professionals who were only rarely embedded in the neighborhoods and class networks of those they ostensibly served.

There is a certain kind of left that would appreciate this insight, i.e., that is wary of the dangers of what Keith Joseph called a “pocket-money society,” in which citizens, their needs having been met by anonymous public bureaucracies, use their disposable income to seek little more than simple pleasures. In Britain, center-left thinkers like James Purnell, Frank Field, and Maurice Glasman, the guru of the “Blue Labour” movement, have been attuned to these questions. I can’t say I’m a fan of Glasman, and I find many of Purnell’s views fuzzily unconvincing. It is nevertheless heartening to remember that there are alternative narratives out there.

My own view is much like that of Speaker Boehner. While I believe that there is a place for some degree of redistribution and that an affluent society should guarantee some decent social minimum, I much prefer the idea of a society that respects the capacities and creativity of its citizens, and that doesn’t automatically assume that different ways of life are necessarily inferior ways of life. There are people who, for a wide variety of reasons, choose different work-life balance patterns, or who choose to accumulate social and cultural capital rather than economic capital. It is important to provide children with a high-quality education so that they can make informed choices in these domains.

But narrowly economistic views of what constitutes the good life can lead us into a dangerous trap. Some of our left-of-center interlocutors believe that it is the laissez-faire right that is narrowly economistic, e.g., Paul Krugman often argues that it is perfectly legitimate to choose more leisure and less labor supply even if it means less income. I would argue that the really salient argument is about work and identity: do we have the freedom to meaningfully govern our own lives in the form of the work we do and how we collaborate with others? Income definitely matters. But I don’t think it matters as much as dignity and freedom, which is why I want to see more emphasis on reducing incarceration rates and much less on regulating terms of employment. It is also part of why tax expenditures — which seek to shape and manipulate our behavior — bother me much more than taxes as such.

Finally, I’ll note that as a physically small person, I have a strong aesthetic preference for inequality and diversity (which I consider inseparable) over equality and homogeneity (which I also consider inseparable). I realize that many if not most people disagree.