The plausible authoritarian gets cute with the Constitution.
When last seen (at this blog), Cass Sunstein (CS) was offering a paean to FDR’s so-called Second Bill of Rights, namely the right to be cossetted from cradle to grave at the expense of others.
In a subsequent extrusion at The Volokh Conspiracy, CS talked about “constitutive commitments” — better known as backdoor amendments to the Constitution. He opened with this:
It’s standard to distinguish between constitutional requirements and mere policies. An appropriation for Head Start is a policy, which can be changed however Congress wishes; by contrast, the principle of free speech overrides whatever Congress seeks to do. But there’s something important, rarely unnoticed, and in between — much firmer than mere policies, but falling short of constitutional requirements. These are constitutive commitments. (We’re still talking, or at least not not talking, about FDR’s Second Bill of Rights.)
Constitutive commitments have a special place in the sense that they’re widely accepted and can’t be eliminated without a fundamental change in national understandings…. Current examples include the right to some kind of social security program; the right not to be fired by a private employer because of your skin color or your sex; the right to protection through some kind of antitrust law.
That’s what happens when the constitution is amended by judicial acquiescence in legislative malfeasance. The national program of social security is blatantly unconstitutional and a ripoff of the first order (see here and here). The “right” not to be fired because of skin color or gender amounts to the “right” to hold a job regardless of competence. The “right” to the “protection” of anti-trust laws (when all we need is enforcement of laws against fraud, deception, and theft) amounts to a license for government to undermine the dynamism of free markets.
CS then reverts to his main theme, which is FDR’s so-called Second Bill of Rights:
[FDR] wasn’t proposing a formal constitutional change; he didn’t want to alter a word of the founding document. He was proposing to identify a set of constitutive commitments. One possible advantage of that strategy is that it avoids a role for federal judges; another possible advantage is that it allows a lot of democratic debate, over time, about what the constitutive commitments specifically entail.
In other words, FDR wanted to amend the constitution by extra-constitutional means. Instead of avoiding a role for federal judges, however, FDR (and his successors) got their way with the help of a cowed and complaisant Supreme Court.
The past 90 years of governance in the U.S. have shown that leaving the application of constitutional principles to “democratic debate” is like leaving your liquor cabinet unlocked and your car keys on the table when your house is thronged with teen-agers.
Cass Sunstein is to the integrity of constitutional law as Pete Rose was to the integrity of baseball.
Cass Sunstein, with Richard Thaler, launched “libertarian paternalism”. I have much to say about LP and Thaler in “‘Libertarian Paternalism’ Revisited”. This post and the several to follow it will focus on other aspects of Sunstein’s infamous career as a “public intellectual”.
Way back in 2004, when CS was guest-blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy, his maiden effort was “The Greatest Generation“. Here are some relevant passages:
On January 11, 1944, the United States was involved in its longest conflict since the Civil War. The war effort was going well. Victory was no longer in serious doubt. The real question was the nature of the peace. At noon, Roosevelt sent the text of his most ambitious State of the Union address to Congress. Ill with a cold, Roosevelt did not make the customary trip to Capitol Hill to appear in person. Instead he spoke to the nation via radio – the first and only time a State of the Union address was also a Fireside Chat….
Roosevelt began by emphasizing that the “supreme objective for the future” — the objective for all nations — was captured “in one word: Security.” Roosevelt argued that the term “means not only physical security which provides safety from attacks by aggressors,” but includes as well “economic security, social security, moral security.” Roosevelt insisted that “essential to peace is a decent standard of living for all individual men and women and children in all nations. Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want.”
Roosevelt looked back, and not entirely approvingly, to the framing of the Constitution. At its inception, the nation had grown “under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.”
But over time, these rights had proved inadequate. Unlike the Constitution’s framers, “we have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” As Roosevelt saw it, “necessitous men are not free men,” not least because those who are hungry and jobless “are the stuff out of which dictatorships are made.” Recalling the New Deal, he cut to the chase: The nation had “accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.”…
Having catalogued … eight rights [expansions of the welfare state], Roosevelt said that “we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights.” Roosevelt asked “the Congress to explore the means for implementing this economic bill of rights—for it is definitely the responsibility of the Congress to do so.”
… The leader of the Greatest Generation had a distinctive project, running directly from the New Deal to the war on Fascism — a project that he believed to be radically incomplete. We don’t honor him, and we don’t honor those who elected him, if we forget what that project was all about.
I know quite well what that project was all about. It was about turning Americans into wards of the welfare state — not intentionally, but in effect. And there were plenty of contemporary critics who knew what it was all about and tried in vain to warn their countrymen.
I know as much as anyone my age can know about the Great Depression and the fears that it spawned in Americans. My parents and their many siblings were young adults during the Depression, and all of them had to go to work at an early age (when they could find work) because their families were poor. Knowing the members of my parents’ generation as well as I did, I reject the notion that “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence”. Economic security and independence are always relative matters. I had little economic security when I was 21, but I had plenty of freedom, as did my parents when they were 21. Freedom (in a society that has free political institutions) doesn’t depend on economic security, it depends on inner security (self-reliance) — a trait that many Americans of later generations lack because they have developed the habit of looking to government, instead of themselves, for the solutions to their problems. You are not free if you have sold your soul to the devil in exchange for a bit of gold.
It is fatuous to say that those who are hungry and jobless “are the stuff out of which dictatorships are made.” The United States didn’t become a dictatorship (despite what many Republicans said about FDR). Britain didn’t become a dictatorship, and on, and on. The notable exceptions (Germany, Russia, Italy, and Japan) arose from other, pre-Depression causes. Nevertheless, FDR finally got his way — posthumously — as Truman, Johnson, and others completed most of the work of the New Deal.
The New Deal was born of fear. FDR succumbed to that fear. Ironically, FDR said it best: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” It was fear that caused FDR to do exactly the wrong thing. Instead of letting the economy work its way out of the Depression, as it would have sooner than it did under FDR’s “stewardship,” he began the long descent into American socialism by turning the tinkerers loose on the economy. (Most of them were — and still are — lawyers and academics with no real idea about the business of business.) At the same time, he seduced most of the masses into dependence on government. The cycle of power and dependence begun by FDR has only gained strength over the years.
I have owned and managed businesses in the regulatory-welfare state of “economic freedom” that is FDR’s legacy. I’m here to tell you that Americans were made worse off by the New Deal and are being made even worse off by its progeny. That’s FDR’s legacy, and I most decidedly do not want to honor it.
Human beings have been trying for eons to beat back nature and bend it to accommodate and serve their needs. Such efforts have ranged from the use of fire to prevent hypothermia to the development of vaccines to fend off contagious diseases. Other things range from the building of dams to collect water and irrigate fields to the cooling of buildings for comfort.
The cooling of buildings exemplifies the kind of endeavor that copes with nature in a way that enables humans to be more productive (e.g., when a cooled building is a factory or office in which workers become more effective than they would be in the absence of cooling). It’s a small step, conceptually, from coping with nature for the sake of enabling productive endeavors to “exploiting” nature for the same purpose (e.g., extraction of oil and iron ore to build and operate machines and automobiles).
So, human beings have in many, many ways not only coped with nature but also transcended it. Some accomplishments (e.g., airborne flight, space flight, robotic interplanetary exploration, and the use of space-borne telescopes) are literally (physically) transcendental.
All of which has given rise to the illusory human conceit — in “advanced” nations, at least — of independence from nature. Nasty encounters with wildlife, tornados, hurricanes, etc., dispel the conceit — but only temporarily.
The conceit of independence from nature feeds into another illusory conceit, namely, that government, with its ability to command resources, is capable of defeating nature and human nature alike. This conceit is not only illusory but also tragic. It is the Achilles heel of human striving. It leads, and has often led, to impoverishment, famine, genocide, and war.
In a recent incarnation, the all-powerful-government conceit caused the birth and spread of a deadly pestilence, namely, COVID-19. As if that weren’t bad enough, “omniscient and omnipotent” governments made things worse by issuing warnings and edicts (masking, distancing, isolation, lockdowns, “mask-shaming”, “vaccination-shaming”, etc.) that needlessly wrought vast social and economic devastation.
To seem to be effective, and thus to retain power, it is the instinct of most office-holders and senior bureaucrats to do something. And doing something, as noted above, can have worse consequences than doing nothing and letting people strive together voluntarily in the service of their own interests. In the case of COVID-19, that is exactly what should have been done.
You have probably read recent reports about how the draconian approach taken by U.S. officials was extremely counterproductive. Here are some relevant excerpts from a Washington Monthlyarticle:
While most countries imposed draconian restrictions, there was an exception: Sweden. Early in the pandemic, Swedish schools and offices closed briefly but then reopened. Restaurants never closed. Businesses stayed open. Kids under 16 went to school.
That stood in contrast to the U.S. By April 2020, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health recommended far-reaching lockdowns that threw millions of Americans out of work. A kind of groupthink set in. In print and on social media, colleagues attacked experts who advocated a less draconian approach. Some received obscene emails and death threats. Within the scientific community, opposition to the dominant narrative was castigated and censored, cutting off what should have been vigorous debate and analysis.
In this intolerant atmosphere, Sweden’s “light touch,” as it is often referred to by scientists and policy makers, was deemed a disaster. “Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale,” carpedThe New York Times. Reuters reported, “Sweden’s COVID Infections Among Highest in Europe, With ‘No Sign Of Decrease.’” Medical journals published equally damning reports of Sweden’s folly.
But Sweden seems to have been right. Countries that took the severe route to stem the virus might want to look at the evidence found in a little-known 2021 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The researchers found that among 11 wealthy peer nations, Sweden was the only one with no excess mortality among individuals under 75. None, zero, zip.
That’s not to say that Sweden had no deaths from COVID. It did. But it appears to have avoided the collateral damage that lockdowns wreaked in other countries. The Kaiser study wisely looked at excess mortality, rather than the more commonly used metric of COVID deaths. This means that researchers examined mortality rates from all causes of death in the 11 countries before the pandemic and compared those rates to mortality from all causes during the pandemic. If a country averaged 1 million deaths per year before the pandemic but had 1.3 million deaths in 2020, excess mortality would be 30 percent….
The Kaiser results might seem surprising, but other data have confirmed them. As of February, Our World in Data, a database maintained by the University of Oxford, shows that Sweden continues to have low excess mortality, now slightly lower than Germany, which had strict lockdowns. Another study found no increased mortality in Sweden in those under 70. Most recently, a Swedish commission evaluating the country’s pandemic response determined that although it was slow to protect the elderly and others at heightened risk from COVID in the initial stages, its laissez-faire approach was broadly correct….
One of the most pernicious effects of lockdowns was the loss of social support, which contributed to a dramatic rise in deaths related to alcohol and drug abuse. According to a recent report in the medical journal JAMA, even before the pandemic such “deaths of despair” were already high and rising rapidly in the U.S., but not in other industrialized countries. Lockdowns sent those numbers soaring.
The U.S. response to COVID was the worst of both worlds. Shutting down businesses and closing everything from gyms to nightclubs shielded younger Americans at low risk of COVID but did little to protect the vulnerable. School closures meant chaos for kids and stymied their learning and social development. These effects are widely considered so devastating that they will linger for years to come. While the U.S. was shutting down schools to protect kids, Swedish children were safe even with school doors wide open. According to a 2021 research letter, there wasn’t a single COVID death among Swedish children, despite schools remaining open for children under 16….
Of the potential years of life lost in the U.S., 30 percent were among Blacks and another 31 percent were among Hispanics; both rates are far higher than the demographics’ share of the population. Lockdowns were especially hard on young workers and their families. According to the Kaiser report, among those who died in 2020, people lost an average of 14 years of life in the U.S. versus eight years lost in peer countries. In other words, the young were more likely to die in the U.S. than in other countries, and many of those deaths were likely due to lockdowns rather than COVID.
And that isn’t all. There’s also this working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which concludes:
The first estimates of the effects of COVID-19 on the number of business owners from nationally representative April 2020 CPS data indicate dramatic early-stage reductions in small business activity. The number of active business owners in the United States plunged from 15.0 million to 11.7 million over the crucial two-month window from February to April 2020. No other one-, two- or even 12-month window of time has ever shown such a large change in business activity. For comparison, from the start to end of the Great Recession the number of business owners decreased by 730,000 representing only a 5 percent reduction. In general, business ownership is relatively steady over the business cycle (Fairlie 2013; Parker 2018). The loss of 3.3 million business owners (or 22 percent) was comprised of large drops in important subgroups such as owners working roughly two days per week (28 percent), owners working four days a week (31 percent), and incorporated businesses (20 percent).
And that was two years ago, before the political panic had spawned a destructive tsunami of draconian measures.
Such measures — in addition to being socially and economically destructive — made the pandemic worse by creating the conditions for the evolution of more contagious strains of the coronavirus. If the first stage of the coronavirus had been allowed to run rampant, herd immunity would have been achieved. The most vulnerable among us would have died or suffered at length before recovering (and then, perhaps, only partially). But that would have happened in any case.
Widespread exposure to the disease would have meant the natural immunization of most of the populace through exposure to the coronavirus and the development of antibodies through that exposure — which, for most of the populace, isn’t lethal or debilitating.
In the end, millions of people will have been made poorer, deprived of beneficial human interactions, and suffered and died needlessly because politicians and bureaucrats couldn’t (and can’t) resist the urge to do something — especially when something means trying to conquer nature and suppress human nature.
There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect. The pooled results of RCTs [randomized controlled trials] did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks. There were no clear differences between the use of medical/surgical masks compared with N95/P2 respirators in healthcare workers when used in routine care to reduce respiratory viral infection. Hand hygiene is likely to modestly reduce the burden of respiratory illness, and although this effect was also present when ILI [influenza-like illness] and laboratory‐confirmed influenza were analysed separately, it was not found to be a significant difference for the latter two outcomes. Harms associated with physical interventions were under‐investigated.
I became aware of “libertarian paternalism” in 2005, when I read this dismissive post by Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek. From 2005 to 2019, I wrote more than a dozen posts about “libertarian paternalism”, which Wikipedia calls
the idea that it is both possible and legitimate for private and public institutions to affect behavior while also respecting freedom of choice, as well as the implementation of that idea. The term was coined by behavioral economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein in a 2003 article in the American Economic Review.
This post reprises the key points of my earlier ones. I give more attention here to Thaler than to Sunstein. I will devote a separate post to Sunstein because he is (or was) truly dangerous to liberty for ideas other than “libertarian paternalism”.
Thaler and Sunstein say that “libertarian paternalism” (sneer quotes removed, but implied, hereinafter) is intended to help individuals make better decisions by having corporations and governments shape choices more artfully. Blogger Zimran Ahmed Winterspeakdefended the concept because he
spoke to Thaler about this and read the monograph he [Thaler] wrote with Sunstein.
“Libertarian Paternalism” is noting that people often just take whatever default choice is offered and therefore working hard to come up with good default choices. This does not limit choice because you don’t need to stick with the default. But since *something* has to be the default, you might as well put effort into making it something good.
I don’t think it’s quite that easy to defend libertarian paternalism, which strikes me as another paving brick on the road to hell.
Consider an example that’s used to explain libertarian paternalism (and which will recur at later points in this post). Some workers choose “irrationally” when they decline to sign up for an employer’s 401(k) plan. The paternalists characterize the “do not join” option as the default option. (In my experience, there is no default option: An employee must make a deliberate choice between joining a 401(k) or not joining it.) To help employees make the “right” choice, libertarian paternalists would find a way to herd employees into 401(k) plans (perhaps by law). In one variant of this bit of paternalism, an employee is automatically enrolled in a 401(k) and isn’t allowed to opt out for some months, by which time he or she has become used to the idea of being enrolled and declines to opt out.
The underlying notion is that people don’t always choose what’s “best” for themselves. Best according to whom? According to libertarian paternalists, of course, who tend to equate “best” with wealth maximization. They simply disregard or dismiss the truly rational preferences of those who must live with the consequences of their decisions. Richard Thaler may want you to save your money when you’re only 22, but you may have other, more urgent, things to do with your money, such as paying off a college loan while affording a decent place to live and buying a car that gets you to work faster than riding a bus.
Libertarian paternalism incorporates two fallacies. One is what I call the “rationality fallacy,” the other is the fallacy of centralized planning.
As for the rationality fallacy, I once wrote this:
There is simply a lot more to maximizing satisfaction than maximizing wealth. That’s why some people choose to have a lot of children, when doing so obviously reduces the amount they can save. That’s why some choose to retire early rather than stay in stressful jobs. Rationality and wealth maximization are two very different things, but a lot of laypersons and too many economists are guilty of equating them.
Nevertheless, many economists (like Thaler) do equate rationality and wealth maximization, which leads them to propose schemes for forcing people to act more “rationally”. Such schemes, of course, are nothing more than centralized planning, dreamt up by self-anointed wise men who seek to impose their preferences on the rest of us. As I said in a different connection,
The problem with [rules aimed at shaping economic behavior] is that someone outside the system must make the rules to be followed by those inside the system.
And that’s precisely where [central] planning and regulation always fail. At some point not very far down the road, the rules will not yield the outcomes that spontaneous behavior would yield. Why? Because better rules cannot emerge spontaneously from rule-driven behavior….
Of course, the whole point … is to produce outcomes that are desired by planners.
And to hell with what the individual thinks is in his or her own best interest.
Libertarian paternalism consists of paternalism and a rather subtle form of socialism. There’s no libertarianism in it, no matter what its proponents may say.
As Michael Munger put it in an essay at The Library of Economics and Liberty,
The boundary we fight over today divides what is decided collectively for all of us from what is decided by each of us. You might think of it as a property line, dividing what is mine from what is ours. And all along that property line is a contested frontier in a war of ideas and rhetoric.
For political decisions, “good” simply means what most people think is good, and everyone has to accept the same thing. In markets, the good is decided by individuals, and we each get what we choose. This matters more than you might think. I don’t just mean that in markets you need money and in politics you need good hair and an entourage. Rather, the very nature of choices, and who chooses, is different in the two settings. P.J. O’Rourke has a nice illustration of the way that democracies choose.
Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diets and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And—since women are a majority of the population, we’d all be married to Mel Gibson. (Parliament of Whores, 1991, p. 5).
O’Rourke was writing in 1991. Today, we might all be married to Ashton Kutcher, instead. But you get the idea: Politics makes the middle the master. The average person chooses not just for herself, but for everyone else, too. . . .
The thing to keep in mind is that market processes, working through diverse private choice and individual responsibility, are a social choice process at least as powerful as voting. And markets are often more accurate in delivering not just satisfaction, but safety. We simply don’t recognize the power of the market’s commands on our behalf. As Ludwig von Mises famously said, in Liberty and Property, “The market process is a daily repeated plebiscite, and it ejects inevitably from the ranks of profitable people those who do not employ their property according to the orders given by the public.”
Paternalism — when it is sponsored or enforced by government — deprives people of the ability to think for themselves, to benefit from their wise decisions, and to learn from their mistakes.
Bryan Caplan came at the same point from a different angle regarding Thaler and Sunstein’s proposal to help consumers make “rational” choices about mortgages, Caplan observed that
government long ago took up the burden of helping consumers, and the result is a mess.
The problem with behavioral economics is that it’s more sophisticated than standard econ, but not nearly sophisticated enough. Thaler and Sunstein may have a more realistic view of borrowers than the average economist, but they have an even less realistic view of the political process. As I argue in The Myth of the Rational Voter:
Before we emphasize the benefits of government intervention, let us distinguish intervention designed by a well-intentioned economist from intervention that appeals to noneconomists, and reflect that the latter predominate. You do not have to be dogmatic to take a staunchly promarket position. You just have to notice that the “sophisticated” emphasis on the benefits of intervention mistakes theoretical possibility for empirical likelihood.
Additional regulation of mortgages isn’t going to help real human beings cope with complexity. Democracy already gave us a pile of inane “pro-consumer” regulation, and reform will probably just give us more of the same.
So what would I recommend? Abandon the vain effort to protect consumers from themselves, and switch to a message simple enough for real humans to understand:
1. You’re an adult; if you screw up it’s your problem.
2. If you’re baffled by the complexities of mortgage markets (or anything else), stick with the simple, standard options that you actually understand.
Glen Whitman weighed in with two scathing posts at Agoraphilia. In the first of the two posts, Whitman wrote:
[Thaler] continues to disregard the distinction between public and private action.
Some critics contend that behavioral economists have neglected the obvious fact that bureaucrats make errors, too. But this misses the point. After all, wouldn’t you prefer to have a qualified, albeit human, technician inspect your aircraft’s engines rather than do it yourself?
The owners of ski resorts hire experts who have previously skied the runs, under various conditions, to decide which trails should be designated for advanced skiers. These experts know more than a newcomer to the mountain. Bureaucrats are human, too, but they can also hire experts and conduct research.Here we see two of Thaler’s favorite stratagems deployed at once. First, he relies on a deceptively innocuous, private, and non-coercive example to illustrate his brand of paternalism. Before it was cafeteria dessert placement; now it’s ski-slope markings. Second, he subtly equates private and public decision makers without even mentioning their different incentives. In this case, he uses “bureaucrats” to refer to all managers, regardless of whether they manage private or public enterprises.
The distinction matters. The case of ski-slope markings is the market principle at work. Skiers want to know the difficulty of slopes, and so the owners of ski resorts provide it. They have a profit incentive to do so. This is not at all coercive, and it is no more “paternalist” than a restaurant identifying the vegetarian dishes.
Public bureaucrats don’t have the same incentives at all. They don’t get punished by consumers for failing to provide information, or for providing the wrong information. They don’t suffer if they listen to the wrong experts. They face no competition from alternative providers of their service. They get to set their own standards for “success,” and if they fail, they can use that to justify a larger budget.
And Thaler knows this, because these are precisely the arguments made by the “critics” to whom he is responding. His response is just a dodge, enabled by his facile use of language and his continuing indifference – dare I say hostility? – to the distinction between public and private.
The advocates of libertarian paternalism have taken great pains to present their position as one that does not foreclose choice, and indeed even adds choice. But this is entirely a matter of presentation. They always begin with non-coercive and privately adopted measures, such as the ski-slope markings in Thaler’s NY Times article. And when challenged, they resolutely stick to these innocuous examples (see this debate between Thaler and Mario Rizzo, for example). But if you read Sunstein & Thaler’s actual publications carefully, you will find that they go far beyond non-coercive and private measures. They consciously construct a spectrum of “libertarian paternalist” policies, and at one end of this spectrum lies an absolutely ban on certain activities, such as motorcycling without a helmet. I’m not making this up!…
[A]s Sunstein & Thaler’s published work clearly indicates, this kind of policy [requiring banks to offer “plain vanilla” mortgages] is the thin end of the wedge. The next step, as outlined in their articles, is to raise the cost of choosing other options. In this case, the government could impose more and more onerous requirements for opting out of the “plain vanilla” mortgage: you must fill out extra paperwork, you must get an outside accountant, you must have a lawyer present, you must endure a waiting period, etc., etc. Again, this is not my paranoid imagination at work. S&T have said explicitly that restrictions like these would count as “libertarian paternalism” by their definition….
The problem is that S&T’s “libertarian paternalism” is used almost exclusively to advocate greater intervention, not less. I have never, for instance, seen S&T push for privatization of Social Security or vouchers in education. I have never seen them advocate repealing a blanket smoking ban and replacing it with a special licensing system for restaurants that want to allow their customers to smoke. If they have, I would love to see it.
In their articles, S&T pay lip service to the idea that libertarian paternalism lies between hard paternalism and laissez faire, and thus that it could in principle be used to expand choice. But look at the actual list of policies they’ve advocated on libertarian paternalist grounds, and see where their real priorities lie.
S&T are typical “intellectuals,” in that they presume to know how others should lead their lives — a distinctly non-libertarian attitude. It is, in fact, a hallmark of modern “liberalism” (i.e., authoritarian leftism). Elsewhere, I had this to say about the founders of modern “liberalism” — John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hill Green, and Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse:
[W]e are met with (presumably) intelligent persons who believe that their intelligence enables them to peer into the souls of others, and to raise them up through the blunt instrument that is the state.
And that is precisely the mistake that lies at heart of what we now call “liberalism” or “progressivism.” It is the three-fold habit of setting oneself up as an omniscient arbiter of economic and social outcomes, then castigating the motives and accomplishments of the financially successful and socially “well placed,” and finally penalizing financial and social success through taxation and other regulatory mechanisms (e.g., affirmative action, admission quotas, speech codes, “hate crime” legislation”). It is a habit that has harmed the intended beneficiaries of government intervention, not just economically but in other ways, as well….
The other ways, of course, include the diminution of social liberty, which is indivisible from economic liberty.
As I have said, Thaler’s idea of rational behavior seems to be behavior that maximizes one’s wealth. The surest route to wealth-maximization — for the Thalers of this world — is to evaluate alternative courses of action by discounting projected streams of revenues (income) or costs (expenses). Consider the following passage from an old paper of Thaler’s:
A discount rate is simply a shorthand way of defining a firm’s, organization’s, or person’s time value of money. This rate is always determined by opportunity costs. Opportunity costs, in turn, depend on circumstances. Consider the following example: An organization must choose between two projects which yield equal effectiveness (or profits in the case of a firm). Project A will cost $200 this year and nothing thereafter. Project B will cost $205 next year and nothing before or after. Notice that if project B is selected the organization will have an extra $200 to use for a year. Whether project B is preferred simply depends on whether it is worth $5 to the organization to have those $200 to use for a year. That, in turn, depends on what the organization would do with the money. If the money would just sit around for the year, its time value is zero and project A should be chosen. However, if the money were put in a 5 percent savings account, it would earn $10 in the year and thus the organization would gain $5 by selecting project B. (Center for Naval Analyses, “Discounting and Fiscal Constraints: Why Discounting is Always Right,” Professional Paper 257, August 1979, pp. 1-2)
More generally, the preferred alternative — among alternatives conferring equal benefits (effectiveness, output, utility, satisfaction) — is the one whose cost stream has the lowest present value:
the value on a given date of a future payment or series of future payments, discounted to reflect the time value of money and other factors such as investment risk.
It is my view that economists seize on discounting as a way of evaluating options because it is a trivial exercise to compute the present value of a stream of outlays (or receipts). I should say that discounting seems like a trivial exercise because the difficult tasks — choosing a time horizon, choosing a discount rate, and translating outlays into future benefits — are assumed away.
Consider the choices facing a government decision-maker. In Thaler’s simplified version of reality, a government decision-maker (manager) faces a choice between two projects that (ostensibly) would deliver equal benefits (effectiveness, output), even though their costs would be incurred at different times. Specifically, the manager must choose between project A, at a cost of $200 in year 1, and equally-effective project B, at a cost of $205 in year 2. Thaler claims that the manager can choose between the two projects by discounting their costs:
A [government] manager . . . cannot earn bank interest on funds withheld for a year. . . . However, there will generally exist other ways for the manager to “invest” funds which are available. Examples include cost-saving expenditures, conservation measures, and preventive maintenance. These kinds of expenditures, if they have positive rates of return, permit a manager to invest money just as if he were putting the money in a savings account.
. . . Suppose a thorough analysis of cost-saving alternatives reveals that [in year 2] a maintenance project will be required at a cost of $215. Call this project D. Alternatively the project can be done [in year 1] (at the same level of effectiveness) for only $200. Call this project C. All of the options are displayed in table 1.
(op. cit, pp. 3-4)
Thaler believes that his example clinches the argument for discounting because the choice of project B (an expenditure of $205 in year 2) enables the manager to undertake project C in year 1, and thereby to “save” $10 in year 2. But Thaler’s “proof” is deeply flawed:
If a maintenance project is undertaken in year 1, it will pay off sooner than if it is undertaken in year 2 but, by the same token, its benefits will diminish sooner than if it is undertaken in year 2.
More generally, different projects cannot, by definition be equally effective. Projects A and B may be about equally effective by a particular measure of effectiveness, but because they are different things they will differ in other respects, and those differences could be crucial in choosing between A and B.
Specifically, projects A and B might be equally effective when compared quantitatively in the context of an abstract scenario, but A might be more effective in an unquantifiable but crucial respect. For example, the earlier expenditure on A might be viewed by a potential enemy as a more compelling deterrent than the later expenditure on B because it would demonstrate more clearly the government’s willingness and ability to mount a strong defense against the potential enemy.
The “correct” discount rate depends on the options available to a particular manager of a particular government activity. Yet Thaler insists on the application of a uniform discount rate by all government managers (op. cit., p. 6). By Thaler’s own example, such a practice could lead a manager to choose the wrong option.
For a decision to rest on the use of a particular discount rate, there must be great certainty about the future costs and benefits of alternative courses of action. But there seldom is. The practice of discounting therefore promotes an illusion of certainty — a potentially dangerous illusion, in the case of national defense.
The fundamental problem is that Thaler presumes to place himself in the position of the decision-maker. But every decision-maker — from a senior government executive to a young person starting his first job — has a unique set of objectives, options, uncertainties, and risk preferences. Because Thaler cannot locate himself in a decision-maker’s unique situation, he can exercise his penchant for arrogance only by insisting that each and every decision-maker adhere to a simplistic rule of thumb — one that obtains results favored by Thaler.
In the context of personal decision-making — which is the focal point of libertarian paternalism — the act of discounting serves wealth-maximization (a favored paternalistic objective). But, as I have said,
[t]here is simply a lot more to maximizing satisfaction than maximizing wealth. That’s why some people choose to have a lot of children, when doing so obviously reduces the amount they can save. That’s why some choose to retire early rather than stay in stressful jobs. Rationality and wealth maximization are two very different things, but a lot of laypersons and too many economists are guilty of equating them.
Thaler’s method of defending his position was to insist, repeatedly, that it is “libertarian”, even as he oozed paternalism. Consider one of his entries (“The Argument Clinic“) in the colloquium, where he wrote the following:
[S]ince the word paternalism is what seems to give [the colloquium’s lead essayist Glen] Whitman fits, let’s re-label our policy “Best Guess”. “Best Guess” is the policy of choosing the choice architecture that is your best guess of what the participants would choose for themselves if they had the time and expertise to make an informed choice.
If that isn’t pure, presumptive arrogance, I don’t know what is. It conveys a presumption of omniscience on the part of the “best guesser”, along with a presumption that the “best guesser” ought to be making decisions for others.
Here’s another passage from Thaler’s post:
In many domains we [paternalists] can drastically improve on what is customary. Consider organ donations. In most states in the United States, to make your donation available you have to take some action such as sign the back of your driver’s license and get two witnesses to sign it. In some countries such as Spain they have switched to an “opt out” system called presumed consent. In Nudge we endorse a third approach, in this domain called “mandated choice.” It also happens to be used in my home state of Illinois.
Under this plan, when you go in to get your drivers license picture retaken every few years, you are asked whether you want to be a donor or not. You must say yes or no to get a license. About two thirds of drivers are saying yes, and lots of lives will be prolonged as a result. This is a great example of libertarian Best Guess in action. Although a large majority of people say in polls that they would want their organs harvested, many never get around to opting in, and a vocal minority in the United States object strenuously to the idea of presumed consent. So it is worthwhile to find a policy that gets many of the benefits of presumed consent without while honoring the preferences of those who object to having to opt out. Mandated choice has some other advantages in this context, namely that families are less likely to overrule the choices of the donor if that choice has been made actively rather than passively.
Let me count the assumptions: (1) Organ donation is the government’s business. (2) The government should deny a driver’s license to a person does not wish to say whether or not he wishes to be an organ donor. (3) This oppression of an individual is justified by the supposed fact that “a large majority of people . . . say that they would want their organs harvested.” Why give the government yet another excuse to intrude into private matters? The obvious answer to that question is that Thaler can’t resist the urge to lead others toward the decisions that he wants them to make. If, when you renew your driver’s license, you’re asked if you want to be an organ donor, your likely (politically correct) response is to say “yes,” even if you don’t really want to be an organ donor. This is not freedom of choice; it is subtle coercion.
Thaler stretches hard to discredit Whitman’s objections to libertarian paternalism; for example:
One of the examples we discuss in Nudge is an innovation by the city of Chicago on a dangerous curve on Lake Shore Drive. The city painted horizontal lines across the road that get closer and closer together as the driver approaches the apex of the curve. As we recently posted on our blog, this innovation has reduced accidents by 36%. Does Whitman think this is bad because it was implemented by the government? Should only private toll roads be allowed to think creatively? And notice that the “customary” signage in this location, which included a reduction in the speed limit to 20 mph, was less effective than the nudge.
What does this have to do the subject at hand? The government of Chicago is already in place as the paternalistic provider of Chicago’s streets — having usurped voluntary private decisions about the placement, construction, upkeep, and regulation of those streets. Given that the government is the provider of Chicago’s streets, it has assumed the duty of making those streets “safe” for their users, without the benefit of market feedback about users’ preferences as to the the tradeoff between safety and other attributes (e.g., speed). The government merely adopted an innovation (the horizontal lines), which replaced (or supplemented) another innovation (a speed-limit sign). Horizontal lines are no more or less paternalistic than speed-limit signs, merely different in their effectiveness along one dimension of street-users’ preferences.
In the examples that I have given, Thaler simply assumes that government is “the answer”. Instead of arguing that decisions are best made by private, voluntary actors, he too readily accepts the role of government and, instead, seeks ways to embed it more deeply in citizens’ lives by making it seem more effective. That is one path down the slippery slope toward serfdom — a slope that Thaler denies, even as he pours intellectual lubricant on it.
Thaler’s invocation of the Lake Shore Drive innovation is especially revealing. Only a hardened paternalist would stretch so far (and fail) to find something non-paternalistic about one of America’s most paternalistic — and fallible — institutions: the government of Chicago.
Thaler stepped into it again in this NYT article, where he wrote this:
Want to give affluent households a present worth $700 billion over the next decade? In a period of high unemployment and fiscal austerity, this idea may seem laughable. Amazingly, though, it is getting traction in Washington.
I am referring, of course, to the current debate about whether to extend all, or just some, of the tax cuts of President George W. Bush cuts that are due to expire at year-end. They’re expiring because the only way they could be enacted initially was by pretending that they were temporary….
There is another possible argument for including the rich in these tax cuts, one based on “fairness.” By this reasoning, the wealthy are entitled to low tax rates because they have temporarily had them, and it would now be unfair to take them back.
But by that same argument, unemployment insurance should never expire, and every day should be your birthday. “Temporary” has no meaning if it bestows a permanent right.
By Thaler’s convoluted logic, the money one earns is a gift from government, and those who pay taxes have no greater claim on their own money than those to whom the government hands it. How is this “libertarian,” by any reasonable interpretation of that word?
Then there is Thaler’s defense of the individual mandate that was at the heart of Obamacare. Thaler attacked the “slippery slope” argument against the mandate. Annon Simon nailed Thaler:
Richard Thaler’s NYT piece from a few days ago, Slippery-Slope Logic, Applied to Health Care, takes conservatives to task for relying on a “slippery slope” fallacy to argue that Obamacare’s individual mandate should be invalidated. Thaler believes that the hypothetical broccoli mandate — used by opponents of Obamacare to show that upholding the mandate would require the Court to acknowledge congressional authority to do all sorts of other things — would never be adopted by Congress or upheld by a federal court. This simplistic view of the Obamacare litigation obscures legitimate concerns over the amount of power that the Obama administration is claiming for the federal government. It also ignores the way creative judges can use previous cases as building blocks to justify outcomes that were perhaps unimaginable when those building blocks were initially formed….
[N]ot all slippery-slope claims are fallacious. The Supreme Court’s decisions are often informed by precedent, and, as every law student learned when studying the Court’s privacy cases, a decision today could be used by a judge ten years from now to justify outcomes no one had in mind.
In 1965, the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut, referencing penumbras and emanations, recognized a right to privacy in marriage that mandated striking down an anti-contraception law.
Seven years later, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, this right expanded to individual privacy, because after all, a marriage is made of individuals, and “[i]f the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual . . . to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”
By 1973 in Roe v. Wade, this precedent, which had started out as a right recognized in marriage, had mutated into a right to abortion that no one could really trace to any specific textual provision in the Constitution. Slippery slope anyone?
This also happened in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, where the Supreme Court struck down an anti-sodomy law. The Court explained that the case did not involve gay marriage, and Justice O’Connor’s concurrence went further, distinguishing gay marriage from the case at hand. Despite those pronouncements, later decisions enshrining gay marriage as a constitutionally protected right have relied upon Lawrence. For instance, Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (Mass. 2003) cited Lawrence 9 times, Varnum v. Brien (Iowa2009) cited Lawrence 4 times, and Perry v. Brown (N.D. Cal, 2010) cited Lawrence 9 times.
However the Court ultimately rules, there is no question that this case will serve as a major inflection point in our nation’s debate about the size and scope of the federal government. I hope it serves to clarify the limits on congressional power, and not as another stepping stone on the path away from limited, constitutional government. (“The Supreme Court’s Slippery Slope,” National Review Online, May 17, 2012)
Simon could have mentioned Wickard v. Filburn (1942), in which the Supreme Court brought purely private, intrastate activity within the reach of Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. The downward slope from Wickard v. Filburn to today’s intrusive regulatory regime has been been not merely slippery but precipitous. And Chief Justice John Roberts did a great disservice to liberty by upholding the individual mandate. Perhaps he was operating under the influence of Thaler.
He assumes (implicitly) that everyone should make economic decisions from an omniscient, end-of-life perspective.
He substitutes his economic desiderata for the free choices of millions of persons.
Regarding Thaler’s misrepresentation of classical microeconomics, consider these passages from his article:
Economists [who adhere to traditional microeconomic theory] discount any factors that would not influence the thinking of a rational person. These things are supposedly irrelevant. But unfortunately for the theory, many supposedly irrelevant factors do matter.
Economists create this problem with their insistence on studying mythical creatures often known as Homo economicus. I prefer to call them “Econs”— highly intelligent beings that are capable of making the most complex of calculations but are totally lacking in emotions. Think of Mr. Spock in “Star Trek.” In a world of Econs, many things would in fact be irrelevant.
No Econ would buy a larger portion of whatever will be served for dinner on Tuesday because he happens to be hungry when shopping on Sunday. Your hunger on Sunday should be irrelevant in choosing the size of your meal for Tuesday. An Econ would not finish that huge meal on Tuesday, even though he is no longer hungry, just because he had paid for it. To an Econ, the price paid for an item in the past is not relevant in making the decision about how much of it to eat now.
An Econ would not expect a gift on the day of the year in which she happened to get married, or be born. What difference do these arbitrary dates make?…
Of course, most economists know that the people with whom they interact do not resemble Econs. In fact, in private moments, economists are often happy to admit that most of the people they know are clueless about economic matters. But for decades, this realization did not affect the way most economists did their work. They had a justification: markets. To defenders of economics orthodoxy, markets are thought to have magic powers.
This reads more like the confession of an Econ than an accurate description of the principles of microeconomics. Even in those benighted days when I learned the principles of “micro” — just a few years ahead of Thaler — it was understood that the assumption of rationality was an approximation of the tendency of individuals to try to make themselves better off by making choices that would do so, given their tastes and preferences and the information that they possess at the time or could obtain at a cost commensurate with the value of the decision at hand.
Yes, there are Econs, but they’re usually economists who also know full well that the mass of people don’t behave like Econs (as Thaler admits), and for whom the postulate of utter rationality is, as I’ve suggested, shorthand for an imprecise tendency. The fact that most human beings aren’t Econs doesn’t vitiate the essential truth of the traditional theory of choice. What seems to bother Thaler is that most people aren’t Econs; their tastes and preferences seem irrational to him, and it’s his (self-appointed) role in life to force them to make “correct” decisions (i.e., the decisions he would make).
I’ll say more about that. But I can’t let Thaler’s views about markets pass without comment. He continued with this:
There is a version of this magic market argument that I call the invisible hand wave…. Words and phrases such as high stakes, learning and arbitrage are thrown around to suggest some of the ways that markets can do their magic, but it is my claim that no one has ever finished making the argument with both hands remaining still.
Hand waving is required because there is nothing in the workings of markets that turns otherwise normal human beings into Econs. For example, if you choose the wrong career, select the wrong mortgage or fail to save for retirement, markets do not correct those failings. In fact, quite the opposite often happens. It is much easier to make money by catering to consumers’ biases than by trying to correct them.
This is a perverted description of the role of markets. And it betrays the peculiar vantage point from which Thaler views economic decision-making. Markets provide information, much of which reflects decisions already made by others. Markets, in other words, enable persons who are contemplating decisions to learn from the decisions of others — whether those others view their decisions as bad, good, or indifferent. But it’s up to persons who are contemplating decisions to take advantage of the information provided by markets.
Moreover, markets don’t merely “cater to consumers’ biases”. Markets enable businesses to shape consumers’ tastes and preferences by presenting them with information about the availability and advantages of their products and services. Markets transmit information in two directions, not just from consumers to producers.
What about people who make “bad” choices, such as choosing the “wrong” career, selecting the “wrong” mortgage, or failing to save for retirement? That’s Thaler the Nudge talking. He wants to save people from such fates. While he’s at it, perhaps he can also save them from choosing the wrong spouse or the wrong number of children.
I say that because when Thaler writes about “wrong” choices in such matters, he writes as if people can and should make their minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day-by-day, week-by-week, and year-by-year decisions by reckoning (like an Econ) how those decisions will affect their “score” when they reach the finish line of life, or some other arbitrary point in time. What about all those points in between, don’t they count, too? And who knows when the finish line will arrive? Given such quandaries and uncertainties, how are the irrational masses supposed to cope? Well, they don’t — or so Thaler would like to believe. So it follows that Thaler must cope for them, but only when it comes to his pet projects (e.g., automatic enrollment in 401(k) plans). He’s silent about the myriad other decisions that real people face.
Why should Thaler care if X chooses the “wrong” career, takes a mortgage he can’t afford, doesn’t save “enough” for retirement, chooses the “wrong” spouse, or has “too many” children? It’s paternalistic thinking like Thaler’s that leads politicians to concoct programs that transfer the cost of bad choices from those who make them to those who are just trying to live their lives without making them. I expect that Thaler would respond by saying that government is already in the business of making such transfers, so the best thing is to reduce the need for them. No, the best thing is to make individuals responsible for the consequences of their choices, and let them — and others — learn from the consequences. The best thing is to dismantle the dependency-creating, handout-giving functions of government. And a behavioral economist like Thaler is just the kind of person who could mount a strong economic case against those functions — if he were of a mind to do so.
Thaler doesn’t seem to be of a mind to do so because what he really wants is for people to make the “right” decisions, by his lights. Why? Because he knows what’s best for all of us. Returning to a favorite topic, he wrote:
Consider defined-contribution retirement plans like 401(k)’s. Econs would have no trouble figuring out how much to save for retirement and how to invest the money, but mere humans can find it quite tough. So knowledgeable employers have incorporated three [features] in their plan design: they automatically enroll employees (who can opt out), they automatically increase the saving rate every year, and they offer a sensible default investment choice like a target date fund. These features significantly improve the outcomes of plan participants…. [TEA: This assumes that everyone should care more about retirement income than about anything else, at the margin.]
These retirement plans also have a supposedly relevant factor: Contributions and capital appreciation are tax-sheltered until retirement. This tax break was created to induce people to save more….
[The authors of a recent study] conclude: “…Automatic enrollment or default policies that nudge individuals to save more could have larger impacts on national saving at lower social cost.”
Get it? One of the objectives of nudging people to participate in 401(k) plans is to raise the national saving rate. Saving should be a voluntary thing, and the national saving rate should emerge from voluntary decisions. It shouldn’t be dictated by those, like Thaler, who view a higher national saving rate as a holy grail, to be advanced by policies that effectively dictate the “choices” that people make. But that’s Thaler for you: Imposing his economic desiderata on others.
I was therefore irked when I learned of Thaler’s selection as the 2017 Noblel laureate in economics. (It’s actually the Swedish National Bank’s Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, not one of the original prizes designated in Alfred Nobel’s will.) The award led James R. Rogers to write about Thaler and behavioral economics:
[M]edia treatments of Thaler’s work, and of behavioral economics more generally, suggest that it provides a much-deserved comeuppance to conventional microeconomics. Well . . . Not quite….
… Economists, and rational choice theorists more generally, have a blind spot, [Thaler] argues, for just how often their assumptions about human behavior are inconsistent with real human behavior. That’s an important point.
Yet here’s where spin matters: Does Thaler provide a correction to previous economics, underscoring something everyone always knew but just ignored as a practical matter, or is Thaler’s work revolutionary, inviting a broad and necessary reconceptualization of standard microeconomics?…
… No. He has built a career by correcting a blind spot in modern academic economics. But his insight provides us with a “well, duh” moment rather than a “we need totally to rewrite modern economics” moment that some of his journalistic (and academic) supporters suggest it provides….
Thaler’s work underscores that the economist’s rationality postulates cannot account for all human behavior. That’s an important point. But I don’t know that many, or even any, economists very much believed the opposite in any serious way. [“Did Richard Thaler Really Shift the Paradigm in Economics?“, Library of Law and Liberty, October 11, 2017]
Thaler and many other behavioral economics scholars argue that government should intervene to protect people against their cognitive biases, by various forms of paternalistic policies. In the best-case scenario, government regulators can “nudge” us into correcting our cognitive errors, thereby enhancing our welfare without significantly curtailing freedom.
But can we trust government to be less prone to cognitive error than the private-sector consumers whose mistakes we want to correct? If not, paternalistic policies might just replace one form of cognitive bias with another, perhaps even worse one. Unfortunately, a recent study suggests that politicians are prone to severe cognitive biases too – especially when they consider ideologically charged issues….
Even when presented additional evidence to help them correct their mistakes, Dahlmann and Petersen found that the politicians tended to double down on their errors rather than admit they might have been wrong….
But perhaps voters can incentivize politicians to evaluate evidence more carefully. They can screen out candidates who are biased and ill-informed, and elect knowledgeable and objective decision-makers. Sadly, that is unlikely to happen, because the voters themselves also suffer from massive political ignorance, often being unaware of even very basic facts about public policy.
Of course, the Framers of the Constitution understood all of this in 1787. And they wisely acted on it by placing definite limits on the power of the central government. The removal of those limits, especially during and since the New Deal, is a constitutional tragedy.
Thaler is distinguished but not brilliant, which is par for the course. He works on “behavioral finance,” the study of mistakes people make when they talk to their stock broker. He can be counted as the second winner for “behavioral economics,” after the psychologist Daniel Kahneman. His prize was for the study of mistakes people make when they buy milk….
Once Thaler has established that you are in myriad ways irrational it’s much easier to argue, as he has, vigorously—in his academic research, in popular books, and now in a column for The New York Times—that you are too stupid to be treated as a free adult. You need, in the coinage of Thaler’s book, co-authored with the law professor and Obama adviser Cass Sunstein, to be “nudged.” Thaler and Sunstein call it “libertarian paternalism.”*…
Wikipedia lists fully 257 cognitive biases. In the category of decision-making biases alone there are anchoring, the availability heuristic, the bandwagon effect, the baseline fallacy, choice-supportive bias, confirmation bias, belief-revision conservatism, courtesy bias, and on and on. According to the psychologists, it’s a miracle you can get across the street.
For Thaler, every one of the biases is a reason not to trust people to make their own choices about money. It’s an old routine in economics. Since 1848, one expert after another has set up shop finding “imperfections” in the market economy that Smith and Mill and Bastiat had come to understand as a pretty good system for supporting human flourishing….
How to convince people to stand still for being bossed around like children? Answer: Persuade them that they are idiots compared with the great and good in charge. That was the conservative yet socialist program of Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel as part of a duo that included an actual economist named Vernon Smith…. It is Thaler’s program, too.
Like with the psychologist’s list of biases, though, nowhere has anyone shown that the imperfections in the market amount to much in damaging the economy overall. People do get across the street. Income per head since 1848 has increased by a factor of 20 or 30….
The amiable Joe Stiglitz says that whenever there is a “spillover” — my ugly dress offending your delicate eyes, say — the government should step in. A Federal Bureau of Dresses, rather like the one Saudi Arabia has. In common with Thaler and Krugman and most other economists since 1848, Stiglitz does not know how much his imagined spillovers reduce national income overall, or whether the government is good at preventing the spill. I reckon it’s about as good as the Army Corps of Engineers was in Katrina.
Thaler, in short, melds the list of psychological biases with the list of economic imperfections. It is his worthy scientific accomplishment. His conclusion, unsupported by evidence?
It’s bad for us to be free.
Exactly.
Consider the biography of the nudger-in-chief at The Library of Economics and Liberty. In it, the reader is treated to such “wisdom” as this:
Economists generally assume that more choices are better than fewer choices. But if that were so, argues Thaler, people would be upset, not happy, when the host at a dinner party removes the pre-dinner bowl of cashews. Yet many of us are happy that it’s gone. Purposely taking away our choice to eat more cashews, he argues, makes up for our lack of self-control.
Notice the sleight of hand by which the preferences of a few (including Thaler, presumably) are pushed front and center: “many of us are happy”. Who is “us”? And what about the preferences of everyone else, who may well comprise a majority? Thaler is happy because the the host has taken an action of which he (Thaler) approves, because he (Thaler) wants to tell the rest of us what makes us happy.
There’s more:
Thaler … noticed another anomaly in people’s thinking that is inconsistent with the idea that people are rational. He called it the “endowment effect.” People must be paid much more to give something up (their “endowment”) than they are willing to pay to acquire it. So, to take one of his examples from a survey, people, when asked how much they are willing to accept to take on an added mortality risk of one in one thousand, would give, as a typical response, the number $10,000. But a typical response by people, when asked how much they would pay to reduce an existing risk of death by one in one thousand, was $200.
Surveys are meaningless. Talk is cheap (see #5 here).
Even if the survey results are somewhat accurate, in that there is a significant gap between the two values, there is a rational explanation for such a gap. In the first instance, a person is (hypothetically) accepting an added risk, one that he isn’t already facing. In the second instance, the existing risk may be one that the person being asked considers to be very low, as applied to himself. The situations clearly aren’t symmetrical, so it’s unsurprising that the price of accepting a new risk is higher than the payment for reducing a possible risk.
Democrats don’t really “believe all women”, at least insofar as the women in question are claiming that they have been sexually assaulted by Democrat politicians. First, there was Bill Clinton. Then, there was Joe Biden. It follows that women are to be believed only when they accuse Republican office-seekers, or persons nominated to office by Republicans.
The foregoing is obvious and has been noted many times by conservative writers. So I won’t dwell on it here.
What I want to know is why women should be believed automatically in the first place. Is there something about women that causes them to utter the truth unfailingly? Are women in fact less prone to lying than men? The evidence is mixed — if you can call psychological studies “evidence”. And we know what such studies are worth, which is to say not much.
There are some reasons to believe a person unreservedly; for example:
The person isn’t trying to sell you something, where the something might be a used car, a house, or a story that will advance that person’s interest (including revenge against particular person of class of persons).
You have known that person for a very long time and have never known the person to attempt deception, other than to tell a “white lie” to spare another person’s feelings (e.g., you’re not fat) or to get a child to do the right thing (e.g., Santa Claus is watching you).
You are engaged in a business relationship with the person and it is a sure thing that he will suffer financially if he is being less than honest about his side of the deal.
Accusations of sexual assault don’t fit the bill, unless you know have known the accuser for a long time and trust her (or him) because of her (or his) record of veracity. But accusations should be taken seriously and investigated.
Take Christine Blasey Ford (please). Her story was incredible from the beginning because of its vagueness, lack of corroboration, her known animus toward conservatives, and Brett Kavanaugh’s track record with respect to women.
Alternatively, there’s Tara Reade, Biden’s long-forgotten accuser. (Perhaps she’ll show up in Hunter’s laptop.) Her story isn’t incredible because of its specificity, partial corroboration, Reade’s long-standing political views (a rather left-wing Democrat), and Joe Biden’s track record with respect to women.
Nevertheless, I continue to withhold judgement about Reade’s story — unlike most Democrats (who refuse to credit it) and too many Republicans (who are eager to believe it). (Contrarily, the evidene of Joe’s graft mounts daily.)
Ronald Reagan used to say (quoting Lenin and Stalin) “trust, but verify”. I say “verify, then trust”.
Capitalism, when it isn’t being used as a “dirty word” by “socialist democrats” (the correct rendering, and an oxymoron at that), simply entails three connected things:
There is private ownership of the means of production — capital — which consists of the hardware, software, and processes used to produce goods and services.
There are private markets in which capital, goods, and services are bought by users, which are (a) firms engaged in the production and sale of capital, goods, and services and (b) consumers of the finished products.
The owners of capital, like the owners of labor that is applied to capital (i.e., “workers” ranging from CEOs and high-powered scientists to store clerks and ditch-diggers), are compensated according to the market valuation of the worth of their contributions to the production of goods and services. The market valuation depends ultimately on the valuation of the finished products by the final consumers of those products.
For simplicity, I omitted the messy details of the so-called mixed economy — like that of the U.S. — in which governments are involved in producing some goods and services that could be produced privately, regulating what may be offered in private markets, regulating the specifications of the goods and services that are offered in private markets, regulating the compensation of market participants, and otherwise distorting private markets through myriad taxes and social-welfare schemes — including many that don’t directly involve government spending, except to enforce them (e.g., anti-discrimination laws and environmental regulations).
None of what I have just said is the tragic aspect of capitalism to which the title of this post refers. Yes, government interventions in market are extremely costly, and some of them have tragic consequences (e.g., the mismatch effect of affirmative action, which causes many blacks to fail in college and in the workplace; the withholding of beneficial drugs by the FDA; and the vast waste of resources in the name of environmentalism and climate change). But all of that belongs under the heading of tragic government.
The design of the product and how it is produced are determined, not by the producers who make it (the workers)….
[T]he generation of products (goods and services) is accomplished with an endless sequence of discrete, repetitive, motions that offer the worker little psychological satisfaction for “a job well done.”
These statements are true not only of assembly-line manufacturing. They’re also true of much “white collar” work — certainly routine office work and even a lot of research work that requires advanced degrees in scientific and semi-scientific disciplines (e.g., economics). They are certainly true of “blue collar” work that is rote, and in which the worker has no ownership stake….
The life of the hunter-gatherer, however fraught, is less rationalized than the kind of life that’s represented by intensive agriculture, let alone modern manufacturing, transportation, wholesaling, retailing, and office work.
The hunter-gatherer isn’t a cog in a machine, he is the machine: the shareholder, the co-manager, the co-worker, and the consumer, all in one. His work with others is truly cooperative. It is like the execution of a game-winning touchdown by a football team, and unlike the passing of a product from stage to stage in an assembly line, or the passing of a virtual piece of paper from computer to computer.
The hunter-gatherer’s social milieu was truly societal [and hunter-gatherer bands had an upper limit of 150 persons]….
Nor is the limit of 150 unique to hunter-gatherer bands. [It is also found in communal societies like Hutterite colonies, which spin off new colonies when the limit of 150 is reached.]
What all of this means, of course, is that for the vast majority of people there’s no going back. How many among us are willing — really willing — to trade our creature comforts for the “simple life”? Few would be willing when faced with the reality of what the “simple life” means; for example, catching or growing your own food, dawn-to-post-dusk drudgery, nothing resembling culture as we know it (high or low), and lives that are far closer to nasty, brutish, and short than today’s norms.
There is also an innate tension between capitalism and morality, as I say here:
Conservatives rightly defend free markets because they exemplify the learning from trial and error that underlies the wisdom of voluntarily evolved social norms — norms that bind a people in mutual trust, respect, and forbearance.
Conservatives also rightly condemn free markets — or some of the produce of free markets — because that produce is often destructive of social norms.
Thanks to a pointer from my son, I have since read Edward Feser’s “Hayek’s Tragic Capitalism” (Claremont Review of Books, April 30, 2019), which takes up the tension between capitalism and conservatism:
Precisely because they arise out of an impersonal process, market outcomes are amoral. Hayek thought it unwise to defend capitalism by emphasizing the just rewards of hard work, because there simply is no necessary connection between virtue of any kind, on the one hand, and market success on the other. Moreover, the functioning of the market economy depends on adherence to rules of behavior that abstract from the personal qualities of individuals. In particular, it depends on treating most of one’s fellow citizens not as members of the same tribe, religion, or the like, but as abstract economic actors—property owners, potential customers or clients, employers or employees, etc. It requires allowing these actors to pursue whatever ends they happen to have, rather than imposing some one overarching collective end, after the fashion of the central planner.
Hayek did not deny that all of this entailed an alienating individualism. On the contrary, he emphasized it, and warned that it was the deepest challenge to the stability of capitalism, against which defenders of the market must always be on guard. This brings us to his account of the moral defects inherent in human nature. To take seriously the thesis that human beings are the product of biological evolution is, for Hayek, to recognize that our natural state is to live in small tribal bands of the sort in which our ancestors were shaped by natural selection. Human psychology still reflects this primitive environment. We long for solidarity with a group that shares a common purpose and provides for its members based on their personal needs and merits. The impersonal, amoral, and self-interested nature of capitalist society repels us. We are, according to Hayek, naturally socialist.
The trouble is that socialism is, again, simply impossible in modern societies, with their vast populations and unimaginably complex economic circumstances. Socialism is practical only at the level of the small tribal bands in which our psychology was molded. Moreover, whereas in that primitive sort of context, everyone shares the same tribal identity and moral and religious outlook, in modern society there is no one tribe, religion, or moral code to which all of its members adhere. Socialism in the context of a modern society would therefore also be tyrannical as well as unworkable, since it would require imposing an overall social vision with which at most only some of its members agree. A socialist society cannot be a diverse society, and a diverse society cannot be socialist.
Socialism in large societies requires direction from on high, direction that cannot fail to be inefficient and oppressive.
Returning to Feser:
… Hayek — who had, decades before, penned a famous essay titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative” — went in a strongly Burkean conservative direction [in his last books]. Just as market prices encapsulate economic information that is not available to any single mind, so too, the later Hayek argued, do traditional moral rules that have survived the winnowing process of cultural evolution encapsulate more information about human well-being than the individual can fathom. Those who would overthrow traditional morality wholesale and replace it with some purportedly more rational alternative exhibit the same hubris as the socialist planner who foolishly thinks he can do better than the market.
Unsurprisingly, he took the institution of private property to be a chief example of the benefits of traditional morality. But he also came to emphasize the importance of the family as a stabilizing institution in otherwise coldly individualist market societies, and—despite his personal agnosticism—of religion as a bulwark of the morality of property and the family. He lamented the trend toward “permissive education” and “freeing ourselves from repressions and conventional morals,” condemned the ’60s counter-culture as “non-domesticated savages,” and placed Sigmund Freud alongside Karl Marx as one of the great destroyers of modern civilization.
Hayek was committed, then, to a kind of fusionism—the project of marrying free market economics to social conservatism. Unlike the fusionism associated with modern American conservatism, though, Hayek’s brand had a skeptical and tragic cast to it. He thought religion merely useful rather than true, and defended bourgeois morality as a painful but necessary corrective to human nature rather than an expression of it. In his view, human psychology has been cobbled together by a contingent combination of biological and cultural evolutionary processes. The resulting aggregate of cognitive and affective tendencies does not entirely cohere, and never will.
Feser than summarizes three critiques of Hayek’s fusionism, one by Irving Kristol, one by Roger Scruton, and one by Andrew Gamble, in Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty (1996). Gamble’s critique, according to Feser, is that Hayek
never adequately faced up to the dangers posed by corporate power. Most people cannot be entrepreneurs, and even those who can cannot match the tremendous advantages afforded by the deep pockets, legal resources, and other assets of a corporation. Vast numbers of citizens in actually existing capitalist societies simply must work for a corporation if they are going to work at all. But that entails an economic dependency of individuals on centralized authority, of a kind that is in some ways analogous to what Hayek warned of in his critique of central planning. As with socialism, conformity to the values of centralized authority becomes, in effect, a precondition of the very possibility of feeding oneself. By way of example, we may note that the political correctness Hayek would have despised is today more effectively and directly imposed on society by corporate Human Resources departments than by government.
Feser concludes with this:
None of this implies a condemnation of capitalism per se. The problem is one of fetishizing capitalism, of making market imperatives the governing principles to which all other aspects of social order are subordinate. The irony is that this is a variation on the same basic error of which socialism is guilty—what Pope John Paul II called “economism,” the reduction of human life to its economic aspect. Even F.A. Hayek, a far more subtle thinker than other defenders of the free economy, ultimately succumbed to this tendency. Too many modern conservatives have followed his lead. They have been so fixated on socialism and its economic irrationality that they have lost sight of other, ultimately more insidious, threats to Western civilization—including economism itself. To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, a madman is not someone who has lost his economic reason, but someone who has lost everything but his economic reason.
Alan Jacobs offers an orthogonal view in his essay, “After Technopoly” (The New Atlantis, Spring 2019):
The apparent captain of technopoly [the universal and virtually inescapable rule of our everyday lives by those who make and deploy technology] is what [Michael] Oakeshott calls a “rationalist”…. [T]hat captain can achieve his political ends most readily by creating people who are not rationalists. The rationalists of Silicon Valley don’t care whom you’re calling out or why, as long as you’re calling out someone and doing it on Twitter….
Oakeshott wrote “The Tower of Babel” at roughly the same time as his most famous essay, “Rationalism in Politics” (1947), with which it shares certain themes. At that moment rationalism seemed, and indeed was, ascendant. Rejecting the value of habit and tradition — and of all authority except “reason” — the rationalist is concerned solely with the present as a problem to be solved by technique; politics simply is social engineering….
Oakeshott foresaw the coming of a world — to him a sadly depleted world — in which everyone, or almost everyone, would be a rationalist.
But that isn’t what happened. What happened was the elevation of a technocratic elite into a genuine technopoly, in which transnational powers in command of digital technologies sustain their nearly complete control by using the instruments of rationalism to ensure that the great majority of people acquire their moral life by habituation. This habituation, of course, is not the kind Oakeshott hoped for but a grossly impoverished version of it, one in which we do not adopt our affections and conduct from families, friends, and neighbors, but rather from the celebrity strangers who populate our digital devices.
In sum, capitalism is an amoral means to material ends. It is not the servant of society, properly understood. Nor is it the servant of conservative principles, which include (inter alia) the preservation of traditional morality, both as an end and as a binding and civilizing force.
One aspect of capitalism is that it enables the accumulation of great wealth and power. The “robber barons” of the late 19th century and early 20th century accumulated great wealth by making possible the production of things (e.g., oil and steel) that made life materially better for Americans rich and poor.
Though the “robber barons” undoubtedly wielded political power, they did so in an age when mass media consisted of printed periodicals (newspapers and magazines). But newspapers and magazines never dominated the attention of the public in the way that radio, movies, television, and electronically transmitted “social media” do today. Moreover, there were far more printed periodicals then than now, and they offered competing political views (unlike today’s periodicals, which are mainly left of center, when not merely frivolous.)
Which is to say that the “robber barons” may have “bought and sold” politicians, but they weren’t in the business of — or very effective at — shaping public opinion. (f they had been, they wouldn’t have been targets of incessant attacks by populist politicians, and anti-trust legislation wouldn’t have been enacted to great huzzahs from the public.
Today’s “robber barons”, by contrast, have accumulated their wealth by providing products and services that enable them to shape public opinion. Joel Kotkin puts it this way:
In the past, the oligarchy tended to be associated with either Wall Street or industrial corporate executives. But today the predominant and most influential group consists of those atop a handful of mega-technology firms. Six firms—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix—have achieved a combined net worth equal to one-quarter of the nasdaq, more than the next 282 firms combined and equal to the GDP of France. Seven of the world’s ten most valuable companies come from this sector. Tech giants have produced eight of the twenty wealthiest people on the planet. Among the nation’s billionaires, all those under forty live in the state of California, with twelve in San Francisco alone. In 2017, the tech industry produced eleven new billionaires, mostly in California….
Initially many Americans, even on the left, saw the rise of the tech oligarchy as both transformative and positive. Observing the rise of the technology industry, the futurist Alvin Toffler prophesied “the dawn of a new civilization,”2 with vast opportunities for societal and human growth. But today we confront a reality more reminiscent of the feudal past—with ever greater concentrations of wealth, along with less social mobility and material progress.
Rather than Toffler’s tech paradise, we increasingly confront what the Japanese futurist Taichi Sakaiya, writing three decades ago, saw as the dawn of “a high-tech middle ages.”3 Rather than epitomizing American ingenuity and competition, the tech oligarchy increasingly resembles the feudal lords of the Middle Ages. With the alacrity of the barbarian warriors who took control of territory after the fall of the Roman Empire, they have seized the strategic digital territory, and they ruthlessly defend their stake.
Such concentrations of wealth naturally seek to concentrate power. In the Middle Ages, this involved the control of land and the instruments of violence. In our time, the ascendant tech oligarchy has exploited the “natural monopolies” of web-based business. Their “super-platforms” depress competition, squeeze suppliers, and reduce opportunities for potential rivals, much as the monopolists of the late nineteenth century did. Firms like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft control 80 to 90 percent of their key markets and have served to further widen class divides not only in the United States but around the world.
The tech oligarchs are forging a post-democratic future, where opportunity is restricted only to themselves and their chosen few. As technology investor Peter Thiel has suggested, democracy—based on the fundamental principles of individual responsibility and agency—does not fit comfortably with a technocratic mindset that believes superior software can address and modulate every problem. [“America’s Drift Toward Feudalism“, American Affairs Journal, Winter 2019]
I can’t deny that rise of the tech oligarchs and their willingness and ability to move public opinion leftward probably influenced my view of capitalism. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It is evidence that, contraKeynes, I am not the slave of some defunct economist.
Will public opinion shift enough to cause the containment of today’s “robber barons”? I doubt it. Most Republican politicians are trapped by their pro-capitalist rhetoric. Most Democrat politicians are trapped by their ideological alignment with the the “barons” and the affluent classes that are dependent on and allied with them.
In the world of humans, just about everything is a social construct.
There is an unfortunate tendency in some circles to dismiss the idea that race is a social construct. Well, it is one. But as I will point out, it is also a useful one.
Science, generally, is a social construct. Everything that human beings do and “know” is a social construct, in that human behavior and “knowledge” are products of acculturation and the irrepressible urge to name and classify things.
Whence that urge? You might say that it’s genetically based. But our genetic inheritance is inextricably twined with social constructs — preferences for, say, muscular men and curvaceous women, and so on. What we are depends not only on our genes but also on the learned preferences that shape the gene pool. There’s no way to sort them out, despite claims (from the left) that human beings are blank slates and claims (from loony libertarians) that genes count for everything.
All of that, however true it may be (and I believe it to be true), is a recipe for solipsism, nay, for Humean chaos. The only way out of this morass, as I see it, is to admit that human beings (or most of them) possess a life-urge that requires them to make distinctions: friend vs. enemy, workable vs. non-workable ways of building things, etc.
Race is among those useful distinctions for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who has actually observed the behaviors of groups that can be sorted along racial lines instead of condescending to “tolerate” or “celebrate” differences (a luxury that is easily indulged in the safety of ivory towers and upscale enclaves). Those lines may be somewhat arbitrary, for, as many have noted there are more genetic differences within a racial classification than between racial classifications. Which is a fatuous observation, in that there are more genetic differences among, say, the apes than there are between what are called apes and what are called human beings.
In other words, the usual “scientific” objection to the concept of race is based on a false premise, namely, that all genetic differences are equal. If one believes that, one should be just as willing to live among apes as among human beings. But human beings do not choose to live among apes (though a few human beings do choose to observe them at close quarters). Similarly, human beings — for the most part — do not choose to live among people from whom they are racially distinct, and therefore (usually) socially distinct.
Why? Because under the skin we are not all alike. Under the skin there are social (cultural) differences that are causally correlated with genetic differences.
Race may be a social construct, but — like engineering — it is a useful one.
For several decades I preferred feature films to TV fare. My preference has flipped in the past several years, as the quality of feature films has declined and TV fare has become more watchable with the advent of Amazon Prime Video and the access it affords to excellent offerings from Britain and Scandinavia. The following piece is an assessment of the more than 2,400 feature films that I had seen as of four years ago. The subsequent addition of a few dozen feature films to my inventory hasn’t changed my assessment.
According to the lists of movies that I keep at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), I watched 2,444 feature films released from 1920 to 2018. That number does not include such forgettable fare as the grade-B westerns, war movies, and Bowery Boys comedies that I saw on Saturdays, at two-for-a-nickel, during my pre-teen years.
I have assigned ratings (on IMDb’s 10-point scale*) to 2,141 of the 2,444 films. (By the time I got around to assigning ratings at IMDb when I joined in 2001, I didn’t remember 303 films well enough to rate them.) I have given 691 (32 percent) of the 2,141 films a rating of 8, 9, or 10. The proportion of high ratings does not indicate low standards on my part; rather, it indicates the care with which I have tried to choose films for viewing. (More about that, below.)
I call the 691 highly rated films my favorites. I won’t list all them here, but I will mention some of them — and their stars — as I assess the ups-and-downs (mostly downs) in the art of film-making.
I must first admit two biases that have shaped my selection of favorite movies. First, my list of films and favorites is dominated by American films starring American actors. But that dominance is merely numerical. For artistic merit and great acting, I turn to foreign films as often as possible.
A second bias is my general aversion to silent features and early talkies. Most of the directors and actors of the silent era relied on “stagy” acting to compensate for the lack of sound — a style that persisted into the early 1930s. There were exceptions, of course. Consider Charlie Chaplin, whose genius as a director and comic actor made a virtue of silence; my list of favorites from the 1920s and early 1930s includes three of Chaplin’s silent features: The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928), and City Lights (1931). Perhaps a greater comic actor (and certainly a more physical one) than Chaplin was Buster Keaton, with six films on my list of favorites of the same era: Our Hospitality (1923), The Navigator (1924), Sherlock Jr. (1924), The General (1926), The Cameraman (1928), and Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928). Harold Lloyd, in my view, ranks with Keaton for sheer laugh-out-loud physical humor. My seven Lloyd favorites from his pre-talkie oeuvre are Grandma’s Boy (1922), Dr. Jack (1922), Safety Last! (1923), Girl Shy (1923), Hot Water (1924), For Heaven’s Sake (1926), and Speedy (1928). My list of favorites includes only nine other films from the years 1920-1931, among them F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu the Vampire (1922) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) — the themes of which (supernatural and futuristic, respectively) enabled them to transcend the limitations of silence — and such early talkies as Whoopee! (1930), and Dracula (1931).
In summary, I can recall having seen only 51 feature films that were released in 1920-1931. Of the 51, I have rated 50, and 25 of them (50 percent) rank among my favorites. But given the relatively small number of films from 1920-1931 in my personal catalog, I will say no more here about that era. I will focus, instead, on movies released from 1932 to the present — which I consider the “modern” era of film-making.
My inventory of modern films comprises 2,393 titles, 2,091 of which I have rated, and 666 of those (32 percent) at 8, 9, or 10 on the IMDb scale. But those numbers mask vast differences in the quality of modern films, which were produced in three markedly different eras:
Golden Age (1932-1942) — 238 films seen, 208 rated, 117 favorites (56 percent)
Abysmal Years (1943-1965) — 370 films seen, 289 rated, 110 favorites (38 percent)
Vile Epoch (1966-present) — 1,785 films seen, 1,594 rated, 439 favorites (28 percent)
There is a so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, but it is defined by the structure of the industry, not the quality of output. What made my Golden Age golden, and why did films go from golden to abysmal to vile? Read on.
To understand what made the Golden Age golden, let’s consider what makes a great movie: a novel or engaging plot; dialogue that is fresh (and witty, if the film calls for it); strong performances (acting, singing, and/or dancing); a “mood” that draws the viewer in; excellent production values (locations, cinematography, sets, costumes, etc.); and historical or topical interest. (A great animated feature may be somewhat weaker on plot and dialogue if the animations and sound track are first-rate.) The Golden Age was golden largely because the advent of sound fostered creativity — plots could be advanced through dialogue, actors could deliver real dialogue, and singers and orchestras could deliver real music. It took a few years to fully realize the potential of sound, but movies hit their stride just as the country was seeking respite from the cares of a deep and lingering economic depression.
Studios vied with each other to entice movie-goers with new plots (or plots that seemed new when embellished with sound), fresh and often wickedly witty dialogue, and — perhaps most important of all — captivating performers. The generation of superstars that came of age in the 1930s consisted mainly of handsome men and beautiful women, blessed with distinctive personalities, and equipped by their experience on the stage to deliver their lines vibrantly and with impeccable locution.
What were the great movies of the Golden Age, and who starred in them? Here’s a sample of the titles: 1932 — Grand Hotel; 1933 — Dinner at Eight, Flying Down to Rio, Morning Glory; 1934 — It Happened One Night, The Thin Man, Twentieth Century; 1935 — Mutiny on the Bounty, A Night at the Opera, David Copperfield; 1936 — Libeled Lady, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Show Boat; 1937 — The Awful Truth, Captains Courageous, Lost Horizon; 1938 — The Adventures of Robin Hood, Bringing up Baby, Pygmalion; 1939 — Destry Rides Again,Gunga Din, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Wizard of Oz, The Women; 1940 — The Grapes of Wrath, His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story; 1941 — Ball of Fire, The Maltese Falcon, Suspicion; 1942 — Casablanca, The Man Who Came to Dinner, Woman of the Year.
And who starred in the greatest movies of the Golden Age? Here’s a goodly sample of the era’s superstars, a few of whom came on the scene toward the end: Jean Arthur, Fred Astaire, John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Claudette Colbert, Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Irene Dunne, Nelson Eddy, Errol Flynn, Joan Fontaine, Henry Fonda, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Jean Harlow, Olivia de Havilland, Katharine Hepburn, William Holden, Leslie Howard, Allan Jones, Charles Laughton, Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy, Jeanette MacDonald, Joel McCrea, Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, William Powell, Ginger Rogers, Rosalind Russell, Norma Shearer, Barbara Stanwyck, James Stewart, and Spencer Tracy. There were other major stars, and many popular supporting players, but it seems that a rather small constellation of superstars commanded a disproportionate share of the leading roles in the best movies of the Golden Age.
Why did movies go into decline after 1942’s releases? World War II certainly provided an impetus for the end of the Golden Age. The war diverted resources from the production of major theatrical films; grade-A features gave way to low-budget fare. And some of the superstars of the Golden Age went off to war. (Two who remained civilians — Leslie Howard and Carole Lombard — were killed during the war.) With the resumption of full production in 1946, the surviving superstars who hadn’t retired were fading, though their presence still propelled many films of the Abysmal Years.
Stars come and go, however, as they have done since Shakespeare’s day. The decline into the Abysmal Years and Vile Epoch have deeper causes than the dimming of old stars:
The Golden Age had deployed all of the themes that could be used without explicit sex, graphic violence, and crude profanity — none of which become an option for American movie-makers until the mid-1960s.
Prejudice got significantly more play after World War II, but it’s a theme that can’t be used very often without becoming trite. And trite it has become, now that movies have become vehicles for decrying prejudice against every real or imagined “victim” group under the sun.
Other attempts at realism (including film noir) resulted mainly in a lot of turgid trash laden with unrealistic dialogue and shrill emoting — keynotes of the Abysmal Years.
Hollywood productions often sank to the level of TV, apparently in a misguided effort to compete with that medium. The use of garish technicolor — a hallmark of the 1950s — highlighted the unnatural neatness and cleanliness of settings that should have been rustic if not squalid. Sound tracks became lavishly melodramatic and deafeningly intrusive.
The transition from abysmal to vile coincided with the cultural “liberation” of the mid-1960s, which saw the advent of the “f” word in mainstream films. Yes, the Vile Epoch brought more more realistic plots and better acting (thanks mainly to the Brits). But none of that compensates for the anti-social rot that set in around 1966: drug-taking, drinking and smoking are glamorous; profanity proliferates to the point of annoyance; sex is all about lust and little about love; violence is gratuitous and beyond the point of nausea; corporations and white, male Americans with money are evil; the U.S. government (when Republican-controlled) is in thrall to that evil; etc., etc. etc.
To be sure, there have been outbreaks of greatness since the Golden Age. During the Abysmal Years, for example, aging superstars appeared in such greats as Life With Father (Dunne and Powell, 1947), Key Largo (Bogart and Lionel Barrymore, 1948), Edward, My Son (Tracy, 1949), The African Queen (Bogart and Hepburn, 1951), High Noon (Cooper, 1952), Mr. Roberts (Cagney, Fonda, and Powell, 1955), The Old Man and the Sea (Tracy, 1958), Anatomy of a Murder (Stewart, 1959), North by Northwest (Grant, 1959), Inherit the Wind (Tracy, 1960), Long Day’s Journey into Night (Hepburn, 1962), Advise and Consent (Fonda and Laughton, 1962), The Best Man (Fonda, 1964), and Othello (Olivier, 1965). A new generation of stars appeared in such greats as The Lavender Hill Mob (Alec Guinness, 1951), Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly, 1952), The Bridge on the River Kwai (Guiness, 1957), The Hustler (Paul Newman, 1961), Lawrence of Arabia (Peter O’Toole, 1962), and Dr. Zhivago (Julie Christie, 1965).
Similarly, the Vile Epoch — in spite of its seaminess — has yielded many excellent films and new stars. Some of the best films (and their stars) are A Man for All Seasons (Paul Scofield, 1966), Midnight Cowboy (Dustin Hoffman, 1969), MASH (Alan Alda, 1970), The Godfather (Robert DeNiro, 1972), Papillon (Hoffman, Steve McQueen, 1973), One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Jack Nicholson, 1975), Star Wars and its sequels (Harrison Ford, 1977, 1980, 1983), The Great Santini (Robert Duvall, 1979), The Postman Always Rings Twice (Nicholson, Jessica Lange, 1981), The Year of Living Dangerously (Sigourney Weaver, Mel Gibson, 1982), Tender Mercies (Duvall, 1983), A Room with a View (Helena Bonham Carter, Daniel Day Lewis 1985), Mona Lisa (Bob Hoskins, 1986), Fatal Attraction (Glenn Close, 1987), 84 Charing Cross Road (Anne Bancroft, Anthony Hopkins, Judi Dench, 1987), Dangerous Liaisons (John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, 1988), Henry V (Kenneth Branagh, 1989), Reversal of Fortune (Close and Jeremy Irons, 1990), Dead Again (Branagh, Emma Thompson, 1991), The Crying Game (1992), Much Ado about Nothing (Branagh, Thompson, Keanu Reeves, Denzel Washington, 1993), Trois Couleurs: Bleu (Juliette Binoche, 1993), Richard III (Ian McKellen, Annette Bening, 1995), Beautiful Girls (Natalie Portman, 1996), Comedian Harmonists (1997), Tango (1998), Girl Interrupted (Winona Ryder, 1999), Iris (Dench, 2000), High Fidelity (John Cusack, 2000), Chicago (Renee Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Richard Gere, 2002), Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Russell Crowe, 2003), Finding Neverland (Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, 2004), Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman, 2005), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005), The Painted Veil (Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, 2006), Breach (Chris Cooper, 2007), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt, 2008), The King’s Speech (Colin Firth, 2010), Saving Mr. Banks (Thomson, Tom Hanks, 2013), and Brooklyn (Saoirse Ronan, 2015).
But every excellent film produced during the Abysmal Years and Vile Epoch has been surrounded by outpourings of dreck, schlock, and bile. The generally tepid effusions of the Abysmal Years were succeeded by the excesses of the Vile Epoch: films that feature noise, violence, sex, and drugs for the sake of noise, violence, sex, and drugs; movies whose only “virtue” is their appeal to such undiscerning groups as teeny-boppers, wannabe hoodlums, resentful minorities, and reflexive leftists; movies filled with “bathroom” and other varieties of “humor” so low as to make the Keystone Cops seem paragons of sophisticated wit.
In sum, movies have become progressively worse since the end of the Golden Age — and I have the numbers to prove it.
First, I should establish that I am picky about the films that I choose to watch:
Note: These averages are for films designated by IMDb as English-language (which includes foreign-language films with English subtitles or dubbing): about 84,000 in all as of August 24, 2019.
The next graph illustrates three points:
I watched just as many (or more) films of the 1930s than of the 1940s. So my higher ratings of films of the 1930s than those of the 1940s aren’t due to greater selectivity in choosing films from the 1930s. Further, there is a steady downward trend in my ratings, which began long before the “bulge” in my viewing of movies released from mid-1980s to about 2010. The downward trend continued despite the relative paucity of titles released after 2010. (It is plausible, however, that the late uptick is due to heightened selectivity in choosing recent releases.)
IMDb users, on the whole, have overrated the films of the early 1940s to mid-1980s and mid-1990s to the present. The ratings for films released since the mid-1990s — when IMDb came on the scene — undoubtedly reflect the dominance of younger viewers who “grew up” with IMDb, who prefer novelty to quality, and who have little familiarity with earlier films. I have rated almost 1,600 films that were released in 1996-2018, and also 1,200 films from 1932-1995.)
My ratings, based on long experience and exacting standards, indicate that movies not only are not better than ever, but are generally getting worse as the years roll on. The recent uptick in my ratings can be attributed to selectivity — I have seen (and rated) only 23 feature films that were released in 2015-2018.
Another indication that movies are generally getting worse is the increasing frequency of what I call unwatchable films. These are films that I watched just long enough to evaluate as trash, which earns them my rating of 1 (the lowest allowed by IMDb). The trend is obvious:
The graph represents 61 films, most of which earned good ratings by IMDb users:
You have been warned.
Will the Vile Epoch End? I’d bet against it, but I’ll keep watching (occasionally) nonetheless. There’s an occasional nugget of gold in the sea of mud.
There are those who mistake mud for gold nuggets. Two examples are Birdman, which won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2014. I tried to watch it, but it failed to rise above trendy quirkiness, foul language, and stilted (though improvised) dialogue. I turned it off. It’s the only Best Picture winner, of those that I’ve watched, that I couldn’t sit through. I will not waste even a minute on a more recent Best Picture winner, The Shape of Water.
My general point is that there are many, many films that are better than the Best Picture. Business Insider offers a ranking of Best-Picture winners in “All 91 Oscar Best-Picture Winners, Ranked from Worst to Best by Movie Critics“, which covers releases through 2018. Business Insider bases its ranking on critics’ reviews, as summarized at Rotten Tomatoes. But the Business Insider piece doesn’t help the viewer who’s in search of a better film than those that have been voted Best Picture.
I am here to help, with the aid of ratings given by users at Internet Movie Database (IMDb). IMDb user ratings aren’t a sure guide to artistic merit — as the latter is judged by members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), or by movie critics. But members of AMPAS and movie critics are notoriously wrong-headed about artistic merit. The aforementioned The Shape of Water exemplifies their wrong-headedness:
This Guillermo del Toro film has gotten rave reviews from critics, with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 93%, and lots of awards-season buzz. And while some elements of the film are praiseworthy, … the film turns out to be little more than a collection of manipulative and ludicrous set-ups for social-justice lectures lacking any nuance or wit. The Shape of Water assumes its audience to be idiots, which makes this the kind of painful and unoriginal exercise that is all but certain to win awards throughout this winter in Hollywood….
… The Shape of Water never allows the audience to get the message of tolerance from the central allegory of the love between Elisa and the creature. Instead, del Toro and the writers fill up every square inch with contrivances and lectures.
And those lectures come with all of the subtlety of a jackhammer. Giles lost his job in the advertising business for unexplained reasons, but which seem to be connected to his sexual orientation. He tries to reach out to a waiter at his favorite diner, who rejects him just as the waiter also gets a chance to demonstrate his racism by refusing service to a black couple, both of which are completely gratuitous to the film or to Amphibian Man’s fate. Shannon’s Strickland spouts religious nonsense to justify cruelty, and sexually oppresses his wife in another gratuitous scene, sticking his gangrenous fingers over her mouth to keep her from expressing pleasure…. The bad guys are the US space program (!) and the military, while the most sympathetic character apart from the four main protagonists is a Soviet spy. Strickland dismisses Elisa and Zelda as suspects, angrily lamenting his decision to “question the help,” just in case the class-warfare argument escaped the audience to that point. Oh, he’s also a major-league sexual harasser in the workplace. And so on. [Ed Morrissey, “The Shape of Water: Subtle As a Jackhammer and Almost As Intelligent“, Hot Air, March 5, 2018]
In any event, IMDb user ratings are a good guide to audience appeal, which certainly doesn’t preclude artistic merit. (I would argue that audience appeal is a better gauge of artistic merit than critical consensus.) For example, I have seen 10 of the 14 top-rated Oscar winners listed in the Business Insider article, but only 5 of the winners that I have seen are among my 14 top-rated Oscar winners.
The first table below lists all of the Best Picture winners among films released through 2018, ranked according to the average rating given each film by IMDb users. The second table lists the 100 highest-rated features released through 2018. (The list includes films that have been rated by at least 4,000 users, which is the approximate number for Cavalcade, the least-viewed of Oscar-winning pictures.) Only 16 of the 92 Oscar-winning films (highlighted in red) are among the top 100. (Lawrence of Arabia would be among the top 100, but IMDb categorizes it as a UK film.)
In short, there are many better-than-Best Pictures to choose from. (Keep reading to see a list of my very-favorite films.)
Below is a list of my very-favorite films, the ones that I’ve rated 9 or 10 out of 10.
* This is my interpretation of IMDb’s 10-point scale:
1 = So bad that I quit watching after a few minutes.
2 = I watched the whole thing, but wish that I hadn’t.
3 = Barely bearable; perhaps one small, redeeming feature (e.g., a cast member).
4 = Just a shade better than a 3 — a “gut feel” grade.
5 = A so-so effort; on a par with typical made-for-TV fare.
6 = Good, but not worth recommending to anyone else; perhaps because of a weak cast, too-predictable plot, cop-out ending, etc.
7 = Enjoyable and without serious flaws, but once was enough.
8 = Superior on at least three of the following dimensions: mood, plot, dialogue, music (if applicable), dancing (if applicable), quality of performances, production values, and historical or topical interest; worth seeing twice but not a slam-dunk great film.
9 = Superior on several of the above dimensions and close to perfection; worth seeing at least twice.
10 = An exemplar of its type; can be enjoyed many times.
What the lamestream media don’t tell you about “climate change”.
I observed, in November 2020, that there is no connection between CO2 emissions and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. This suggests that emissions have little or no effect on the concentration of CO2. A recent post at Watts Up With That? notes that emissions hit a record high in 2021. What the post doesn’t address is the relationship between emissions and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
See for yourself. Here’s the WUWT graph of emissions from energy combustion and industrial processes:
Here’s the record of atmospheric CO2:
It’s obvious that CO2 has been rising monotonically, with regular seasonal variations, while emissions have been rising irregularly — even declining and holding steady at times. This relationship (or lack thereof) supports the thesis that the rise in atmospheric CO2 is the result of warming, not its cause.
For example, Dr. Roy Spencer, in a post at his eponymous blog, writes:
[T]he greatest correlations are found with global (or tropical) surface temperature changes and estimated yearly anthropogenic emissions. Curiously, reversing the direction of causation between surface temperature and CO2 (yearly changes in SST [dSST/dt] being caused by increasing CO2) yields a very low correlation.
That is to say, temperature changes seem to drive CO2 levels, not the other way around (which is the conventional view).
It points to a new and more effective US/NATO strategy toward Russia.
What is Putin’s strategic objective for Russia? I believe it is a “greater Russia” which is strong enough economically and militarily to (a) leverage its natural resources to its economic advantage and (b) play hardball successfully when NATO or its key members try to thwart Putin’s strategic aims. “Greater Russia” must therefore include key regions of Ukraine — or perhaps Ukraine entirely — because of Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea and its natural resources. One way to think of the invasion of Ukraine is as a complement to Russia’s de facto control of Crimea, which is also consistent with the “greater Russia” objective.
In view of that, an invasion of Ukraine was almost inevitable. The NATO-Ukraine flirtation made it a certainty. Putin judged — correctly (thus far) — that neither NATO as a whole or the US (perhaps in concert with some other members of NATO) would intervene directly with combat forces. His nuke-rattling is probably an unnecessary bit of breast-beating because US/NATO wouldn’t risk direct combat that might lead to the use of nukes. Putin will resort to tactical nukes (though probably in a limited way) only if (a) he is in danger of failing to secure at least key portions of Ukraine and (b) that failure is clearly (to him) the result of US/NATO assistance to Ukraine (which includes but isn’t limited to intelligence sharing).
If Putin fails, it may well be because Russia’s armed forces aren’t up to the task. But would Putin come to that assessment, or would he blame the US/NATO? I suspect that he would do the latter.
In viw of that, US/NATO must do two things. First, continue to lambaste Putin publicly so that his role as the “bad guy” is (mostly) unquestioned in the West. Second, continue to help Ukraine (to do otherwise would be bad p.r. and a overt sign of weakness). But US/NATO should take care to avoid actions that might cause Putin to conclude that he failed because of US/NATO interference. I don’t lightly suggest tactical caution, but a temporary loss is better than a permanent one — a devasting nuclear exchange between US/NATO and Russia. (I am reminded here of Churchill’s decision not to warn the citizens of Coventry about a massive air raid because doing so probably would have compromised the Ultra program and resulted in a far greater loss of Allied lives in the course of World War II, if not defeat for the Allies.)
By the same token, it is imperative that the US/NATO grow some backbone and let Putin know that what he has in mind for “greater Russia” is matched by NATO’s commitment to the security of its member nations. Letting Putin know means policy declarations to that effect, firm commitments to building up NATO’s military strength (Europe still needs to pull more weight), and the “natural” expansion of NATO to include Finland and Sweden. (Does Putin really want to go to war over the inclusion in NATO of Sweden and Finland? I doubt it. Their admission to NATO would be a clear signal to Putin that he might have a free hand in “greater Russia”, but that’s it.)
In addition to that, US/NATO must convince Putin (and Xi and the ayatollahs) that it is economically prepared for a long cold war. Which means that Western leaders must abandon their futile and fatuous pursuit of “green” energy and drill for oil, mine coal, and build nuclear power plants. That is to say, they should do what President Trump was doing, namely, making America energy-independent. The hard-core climate alarmists would hate a policy shirt toward economic sanity, but it would win the hearts and minds of the vast majority of US/NATO citizens who are bearing the economic burden of high energy prices that their own “leaders” thrust upon them.
In sum, though it pains me to admit it, I’m suggesting something like a new Iron Curtain, where the curtain is designed and built by the West. The new status quo would resemble that of the 1950s and 1960s, when the US/NATO declined to interfere in matters behind the original Iron Curtain (e.g., the suppression of the 1956 uprising in Hungary and the “Prague Spring” of 1968). But the new Iron Curtain would not only block Russian moves to the west but also to the south and southeast (that is moves that might compromise US/NATO access to oil from sources other than Iran).
The new Iron Curtain would be a semipermeable membrane, allowing trade with Russia where it is mutually beneficial. And, with a sufficient show of conventional and nuclear strength by US/NATO, the new status quo wouldn’t engender constant dread about Russia’s ability to disrupt the affairs of US/NATO. Deterred is deterred.
Throughout this essay I use “left” and its cognates rather than “progressive” or “liberal” (in the modern, authoritarian sense). The latter terms exemplify doublespeak, an indispensable tool of leftism, inasmuch as “progressives” often endorse regressive economic and social policies, and “liberals” embrace a sanitized version of fascism.
I also use “left” and “woke” and their cognates interchangeably. That’s because the left has largely adopted “wokeism” and “wokesters” tend to be leftists. (There are exceptions of course — some of them notable (e.g., JK Rowling and Ruy Teixeira) — but the exceptions underscore the rule.)
There is a bibliography at the end of this post. I no longer add to it, but is ample enough to be of good use to anyone who wants to learn more about leftism and how it has despoiled America.
Imagine all the people sharing all the world…. — John Lennon
Make peace or I’ll kill you. — M.D. Haykin
Conservatives are the new liberals, and liberals the new fascists. — Bill Vallicella (Maverick Philosopher)
INTRODUCTION
I will try to paint a comprehensive picture of leftism, as a guide to those readers who are open to the truth behind the “compassionate” facade of leftism. Specifically, I will address the left’s agenda, the assumptions and attitudes underlying it, the left’s strategic and tactical methods, the psychological underpinnings of leftism, the heavy economic and social costs of realizing the left’s agenda, and a way to avert a complete victory by leftism in America.
Leftism is an ideology, that is, a commitment to particular outcomes of political processes. I have discussed the particular outcomes of leftism at length in this post.
Leftism may be understood better by contrasting it with a non-ideological “ism”: conservatism, which is properly understood as a disposition. (There are many people who claim to be conservative, but who are not. I will address them at various places in this essay.)
Michael Oakeshott describes conservatism as a disposition in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. I classify conservatism — of the true, traditional kind — as a kind of libertarianism (right-minarchism). But the classification is meant only to locate the conservative attitude toward the state in relation to other attitudes. I don’t mean to imply that conservatism of the kind described by Oakeshott is an ideology or creed with tokens of membership.
Leftism, by contrast, is an ideology: a collection of particular (if often abstract and shifting) objectives toward which political outcomes should be directed, nay, coerced. Leftists are abetted in their efforts by enablers of various kinds, who may not be leftists by disposition but who lend support (intellectual and material) and votes to the leftist cause because of the allure of its proclaimed goals or promised benefits.
There are, spread throughout this essay, many aperçus about leftism. This one comes closest to a summation of the left’s motivations and aims:
The most obvious assumption [of leftism] is that perceived “wrongs” and “problems” — perceived by leftists, that is — must be “righted” and “solved” by state action.
That statement warrants elaboration. Leftism isn’t just sympathy for the poor and oppressed or fear for the fate of mankind. If it were, an overwhelming majority of human beings would be leftists. Leftism is the conjoining of those attitudes and the deluded belief that the best (and sometimes only) vehicle for redressing “wrongs” and remedying “problems” is the use of state power to command the necessary resources and coerce the necessary actions.
The presumption of governmental omniscience and omnipotence has many anti-libertarian implications. Here are some leading examples:
Income and wealth belong to the state.
The property of individuals and businesses is the state’s to control.
Individuals and businesses do not have freedom of association.
Religion has no place in the governance of the populace and must not be allowed to influence or interfere with that governance.
The state decides basic social questions, such as (but far from limited to) the nature of marriage and gender.
The state decides religious and scientific matters, such as (but far from limited to) the legality of teaching alternatives to neo-Darwinianism and the correctness of the hypothesis of carbon-dioxide-driven “climate change”.
All persons are born equally meritorious in all respects, regardless of their (apparent) intellectual and physical endowments (“nurture” 100%, “nature” 0%), and must be accorded the same opportunities regardless of their endowments.
Exceptions may be made for persons who govern, “entertain”, play professional sports, deliver “news” and opinions, profess and administer at expensive universities, or are otherwise deemed worthy of special treatment — because some people are “more equal” than others. But at every opportunity, the exceptions will be limited to those persons who confess to the omniscience and omnipotence of the state.
Despite universal equality of merit, the state may authorize the killing of some otherwise blameless persons (e.g., children in the womb, the elderly) if they are deemed to be “unequal” (or simply an inconvenience to others).
Despite universal equality of merit, some persons commit acts that are called crimes because “society” denies them a “fair share” of economic rewards and social recognition.
Dissent from the foregoing positions (and others not listed here) is punishable by ostracism, loss of position, and in some cases (there should be more) civil and criminal penalties.
Most leftists won’t admit to such absolutism and barbarism, and will try to find congenial ways of characterizing their implicit views. But leftism is what it is, and shouldn’t be sugar-coated.
AGENDA
Leftists have an agenda, though it varies over time, and sometimes contradicts an earlier position on a particular issue. The first thing that is wrong with leftism is the presence of an agenda. Leftism isn’t the only ideology with an agenda, so it’s not unique in possessing that undesirable dimension. But I am focusing here on leftism, so I’ll leave it at that.
Why is the possession of an agenda a “bad thing”? Individual persons have agendas, that is, specific goals and preferences regarding the relative desirability of those goals. But, in the conservative disposition, those individual agendas are the basis of social interactions (which include economic ones) through which people find a modus vivendi in voluntary, peaceful coexistence and mutually beneficial cooperation — liberty, in other words. The state becomes involved only as a referee of last resort and enforcer of socially evolved, civilizing norms (e.g., prohibitions of murder, theft, fraud, etc.).
The possession and advancement of an agenda by a sizable group of persons is meant to suppress the modus vivendi that would occur naturally. The agenda, in other words, is meant to substitute the preferences of a segment of a society or polity for the host of individual preferences that can would otherwise be reconciled through social (and economic) intercourse.
It should go without saying that this substitution is necessarily be carried out by the use of force, or the threat of it. And the state, in its various manifestations, provides the force.
Leftism, in short, is an ideology of bullies. It’s not the only one, but it’s the leading one these days. The right — by which I mean the statist right, not political conservatism of the Burkean variety — is just the left with a somewhat different agenda.
Leftism began in earnest, as a mass movement, during the French Revolution, with its infamous Committee of Public Safety (the Red Guards of the day). The Committee conducted the Reign of Terror against “enemies” of the Revolution, that is, anyone who questioned or challenged the actions of the leading revolutionaries. Such has been the standard practice of leftist movements and regimes unto the present.
The American left’s use of coercion and violence differs in degree but not in kind from the practices of leftist dictators from Robespierre to Xi Jinping. The American left’s current methods include aggressive political correctness, the suppression of unwelcome views on college campuses (of all places) and in the media (“social” and otherwise), and the use of state power to punish untoward thoughts (e.g., thought-crime hate-crime laws, penalties for expressing opposition to same-sex “marriage”, and the criminalization of parents who criticize the teaching of critical race theory).
American leftism isn’t monolithic. It’s a coalition of interest groups, united by overlapping aims and a worldview that was articulated by Robespierre (discussed below). The overlapping aims of the groups range from the venerable one of claiming a larger share of economic output to newer ones, such as exalted status for newly discovered “victims” (e.g., persons who wish, for one reason or another, to deny that their sex is the one that is emblazoned on their genes.) These various aims are served best when the left succeeds in seizing control of state power; most of the aims wouldn’t advance far in a world of peaceful, voluntary coexistence.
The left’s essential confusion about aims is evidenced not only in shifting positions on particular issues (e.g., for Prohibition, then against it) but also in the incongruous juxtaposition of puritanism and libertinism. Thus it is good for “us” to eschew economic growth in order to “save the planet”, and it is good for “the children” to regulate smoking and tax it heavily. But at the same time the left champions the “right” to engage in behaviors long condemned as unhealthy and immoral, such as homosexuality, transvestitism, and abortion. These shifts and contradictions lend support to my view (discussed later) that one of the root causes of leftism is adolescent rebellion: If the “grown ups” think it’s bad, it’s good — and vice versa.
The rationale for the left’s agenda du jour is found in the phrase made famous by Robespierre during the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity. These words have special meanings in the left’s usage:
liberty — to do whatever one feels like doing, and to suppress whatever one doesn’t like
equality — which others will be forced to pay for (in property rights, money, jobs, promotions, etc.) and bow to (or else)
fraternity — but only with the like-minded of the moment.
It’s true that most contemporary leftists don’t go around saying “liberty, equality, and fraternity”, but the phrase captures the implicit rationale for the left’s agenda. (A current watchword is “democracy”, which in the left’s lexicon means the imposition of its agenda regardless of how it fares with voters and their elected representatives.) Consider, for example, these excerpts of a Wikipedia article (since revised, of course) about left-wing politics (my comments in bold):
Leftist economic beliefs range from Keynesian economics and the welfare state through industrial democracy and the social market to nationalization of the economy and central planning [1. “equality” through control]…. During the industrial revolution, leftists supported trade unions [2. “equality” and “fraternity” through property theft]. At the beginning of the 20th century, many leftists advocated strong government intervention in the economy [3.see #1]. Leftists continue to criticize what they perceive as the exploitative nature of globalization [4. because willing workers who are making more than before are being “exploited” and therefore denied some kind of “liberty”]….
The global justice movement, also known as the anti-globalization movement or alter-globalization movement, protests against corporate economic globalization, due to its negative consequences for the poor, workers, the environment, and small businesses [5. see #4 re “poor, workers, … and small businesses”, and see below re environment]….
From the 1970s onwards, environmentalism became an increasing concern of the left, with social movements and some unions campaigning over environmental issues [6. revenge against “fat-cat capitalists” for being “more equal” than others]…. Some segments of the socialist and Marxist left consciously merged environmentalism and anti-capitalism into an eco-socialist ideology [7. see #6, and consider that leftists put job protection about consumer interests, except where “consumer protection” is a facade for business-bashing, all for the sake of “equality”]…. Environmental degradation can be seen as a class or equity issue, as environmental destruction disproportionately affects poorer communities and countries [8. see #6 and #7]….
In the 21st Century, questions about the environment have become increasingly politicized, with the Left generally accepting the findings of environmental scientists about global warming [9. more of the same]….
The Marxist social class theory of proletarian internationalism asserts that members of the working class should act in solidarity with working people in other countries in pursuit of a common class interest, rather than focusing on their own countries. Proletarian internationalism is summed up in the slogan, “Workers of all countries, unite!”, the last line of The Communist Manifesto [10. more faux egalitarianism, which American workers resist because of globalism and illegal immigration]….
The original French left-wing was anti-clerical, opposing the influence of the Roman Catholic Church and supporting the separation of church and state. Karl Marx asserted that “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” [11. the “intellectual” left still embraces this aspect of Marxism; the left’s “liberty” excludes religious liberty]…
Religious beliefs, however, have also been associated with some left-wing movements, such as the civil rights movement and the anti-capital punishment movement. Early socialist thinkers such as Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and the Comte de Saint-Simon based their theories of socialism upon Christian principles [12. cleverly conflating voluntary charity and “charity” by governmental coercion, in the name of “equality”]…. Other common leftist concerns such as pacifism, social justice, racial equality, human rights, and the rejection of excessive wealth can be found in the Bible [13. more coercive governmental policies for the sake of “liberty” and “equality”]….
Social progressivism is another common feature of modern leftism, particularly in the United States, where social progressives played an important [14. but not exclusive] role in the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, civil rights, and multiculturalism [15. which seems to be an excuse for tolerating practices and beliefs that aren’t tolerated if they observed by white Americans of European descent, for the sake of “equality” and “fraternity”]. Progressives have both advocated prohibition legislation and worked towards its repeal [16. a leading example of the opportunism of “progressivism”, which also embraces abortion as a means of controlling the population of “dark” people, in the spirit of “fraternity”]. Current positions associated with social progressivism in the West include opposition to the death penalty and the War on Drugs, [17. leftism and personal responsibility are antithetical, thus income redistribution, etc., for the sake of “liberty” and “equality”] and support for legal recognition of same-sex marriage, … distribution of contraceptives, public funding of embryonic stem-cell research, and the right of women to choose abortion [18. that have more than a whiff of adolescent rebellion about them, and which conflate license with liberty, but are justified in the name of “liberty”].
ASSUMPTIONS AND ATTITUDES
Leftism is built on several assumptions and attitudes. They aren’t mutually exclusive, nor are they consciously adopted. In fact, leftists would (nominally) reject most of them.
The most obvious assumption is that perceived “wrongs” and “problems” — perceived by leftists, that is — must be “righted” and “solved” by state action. This assumption has psychological roots, to which I’ll come, and it draws on some of the following assumptions and attitudes.
A zero-sum perspective leads to the belief that some persons’ gains must mean losses for others. This perspective is alluded to when leftists talk about “shares” of income, as if there were a national income floating in the sky, shares of which are meted out by mysterious and sinister forces in cahoots with those who earn the highest incomes — “the 1%” or “the 0.1%”. Perish the thought that incomes — even incomes earned by so-called crony capitalists (who are often leftists) — reflect the value of the products and services from which those incomes are derived. Perish that the thought that Bill Gates, to take but one example, is super-rich because he founded a company that provides operating systems and software that are used by billions of people. Perish the thought that Bill Gates didn’t become super-rich by stealing money from the poor (how would that work?), and that his company actually made people better off by employing thousands of people and providing tools that enable untold millions of persons to earn more than they would earn without such tools. But all of that is lost on the left, whose zero-sum mentality propels state actions (income redistribution: progressive tax rates, tax credits for low-income persons, food stamps, etc) that necessarily diminish the incentive to engage in job- and income-creating entrepreneurship exemplified by Bill Gates and emulated (on a much smaller scale) by millions of aspiring business owners.
Leftists don’t like markets, especially when markets yield results that leftists dislike. When that happens, markets “fail”, according to leftists. In reality, markets fail only when they yield results that are dictated by the state, that is, results other than those which would obtain in the absence of state action. Leftists lead the charge for dictated results. Regulation, which leftists love because it “protects” people from “rapacious” business interests, benefits the (often leftist) crony capitalists whom leftists love to hate. Almost every agency of every government in the United States is in the business of devising or applying regulations of one kind or another. Leftists abhor some of those regulations (e.g., laws against abortion and marijuana use), and will go to great lengths to overturn them. But those are the exceptions that underscore the rule.
Another thing that leftists don’t like about markets is that they (are thought to) create “winners” and “losers” because they invite competition. In fact, markets mostly create winners because they enable willing buyers and sellers to engage in exchanges that make both parties better off. If competition is such a bad thing, it’s a wonder that there are any rich leftists, inasmuch as most of them became rich by selling a talent, a service, or a product — and successfully competing against other sellers of the same or similar talent, service, or product.
And a lot of those rich leftists are driven by the so-called profit motive. “Profit” is a dirty word on the left. But profit is nothing more than a signal to prospective sellers of services and products that there’s an opportunity to make some money. And if those prospective sellers heed the signal, not only will they be better off, but they’ll make consumers better off by offering them more choices, lower prices, and higher quality products and services.
But “little people” are hurt by competition? How so? Competition helps to ensure that “little people” get value for their money. It has made millions of different products and services affordable by “little people”. (Leftists’ grandparents and great-grandparents would envy the choices now available to consumers.) It has provided jobs for “little people”, which is why they can afford the fruits of competition. Competition may have put Mom-and-Pop stores out of business, but what sprang up in their place? Many times the number of convenience stores and, of course, supermarkets and big-box stores that offer a far greater variety of products at much lower prices. In sum, consumers put Mom-and-Pop stores out of business.
The nostalgia for Mom-and-Pop stores is just that: nostalgia. I share it because I’m old enough to remember real Mom-and-Pop stores, including one that sold delicious homemade bread. But should hundreds of millions of people have far fewer choices and pay more for them just to slake my nostalgia? What about the nostalgia of future generations for Costco and Walmart when they have gone the way of Mom-and-Pop stores, Montgomery Ward, Sears, Newberry’s, Kresge’s, Woolworth’s, and all the other companies of an imaginary golden age? Should online retailing be banned for nostalgia’s sake?
Well, “little people” are ripped off by big business, aren’t they? Please re-read the preceding paragraphs, and consider that competition is a safeguard against rip-offs. The biggest rip-off, for “little people” and everyone else, occurs when regulation (beloved by leftists) stifles competition.
The thing that leftists hate most about competition is that it’s conducted by private parties and often leads to results that leftists dislike (i.e, “market failure”). Therefore, in the left’s view, the best way to ensure “market success” is to socialize the provision of essential products and services. This has been tried before, of course, with a notable lack of success in the USSR, Communist China (before it shifted to a quasi-market economy), Cuba, Venezuela, and hordes of other socialist regimes. Britain, which escaped the worst excesses of socialism when Margaret Thatcher privatized most industries, remains saddled with socialized medicine. Despite the mountain of true horror stories about the poor quality of health care (and lack thereof) offered by Britain’s National Health Service, hope springs eternal among American leftists that it would be different here. (This is symptomatic of the usual response to problems created by state action, namely, double down on state action.)
Insurance, in the left’s view, isn’t something that one buys as a hedge against the unpredictable. It is, rather, something to be provided by the state as guaranteed compensation for the predictable. Old age and discretionary treatments and procedures (e.g., birth control, abortion, and regular checkups) are the most prominent of predictable conditions that give rise to “social insurance”, as the left likes to call it. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security aren’t “social insurance”, they’re just subsidies exacted from tax-paying Americans for the benefit of everyone whom leftists view as deserving of subsidies.
The risible term “social insurance” is meant to justify what the left calls “rights”. Rights are what a leftist believes people should have, regardless of the costs borne by those pay for those “rights” through taxes; regulatory constraints; lost jobs, promotions, and university admissions; and so on. This is a complete perversion of the idea of rights. If I have a right that you must pay for, then I effectively deprive you of the same right, or at least diminish your chances of enjoying that right. In sum, the left’s “rights” are really privileges.
The left often justifies its “rights” as the means of rectifying injustices done to “victims”. Thus blacks have a “right” to be hired before better-qualified whites. (That’s not how the law reads, but that’s how EEOC minions make it work. It has a perverse effect to the extent that employers find subtle ways of screening out blacks before they formally apply for jobs, as a way of avoiding the complications that arise if black applicants aren’t hired or are hired and later fired.) Thus taxpayers are burdened by payments to possessors of various “welfare rights”, even though it has been found many times (e.g., here) that applications for such “rights” diminish sharply when work requirements are attached to them.
I could go on and on, but it will be quicker to name the persons without “victims’ rights”, namely, white, male, heterosexual Christian Americans of European descent who are gainfully employed.
The constant search for “victims” points to a common attitude among leftists: condescension, born of a false sense of superiority. Whence that sense? Well, leftists are a reality-based community, as the saying went a few years ago. Not that we’ve encountered realistic assumptions or attitudes thus far in this essay, nor would we if we were to venture into such matters as the catastrophic-anthropogenic-global-warming hoax.
But no matter, leftists believe in “science”, that is, in the cherry-picked evidence which comes their way and “proves” what they choose to believe. That is why, for example, leftists like to flaunt the results of one study which purports to show that the minimum wage has “little” effect on unemployment (as if “little” were acceptable), when dozens of studies (e.g., the one discussed here) have found a large negative effect. Their belief in “science” gives them cover for their dictatorial schemes, the details of which they entrust to government “technocrats”.
Two big assumptions underlie everything else said and done by leftists. The first, and most obvious, is that leftists prefer one-size-fits-all government “solutions” to “problems” over the voluntary working out of a modus vivendi. This goes to leftist condescension. In the left’s view, the “little people” — and businesses, big and small — just wouldn’t know what to do in the absence of government action or, more precisely, wouldn’t do the “right thing”. (Isn’t it wonderful to have such the vast store of knowledge and super-computational skills that enable right-minded leftists to ascertain the proper resolution of countless social and economic transactions between hundreds of millions of people with myriad and always changing wants, tastes, preferences, skills, and abilities?)
There’s a deeper assumption at work in the left-wing mentality. It’s an assumption that permeates the thinking of many non-leftists, as well. It’s the idea of a social-welfare function. A voluntary exchange results when each of the parties to the exchange believes that he will be better off as a result of the exchange. An honest voluntary exchange — one in which there is no deception or material lack of information — therefore improves the well-being (welfare) of all parties. An involuntary exchange, as in the case of tax-funded medical research, cannot make all parties better off. No government agent — or economist, pundit, or politician — can look into the minds of millions of people and say that each of them would benefit from this or that government program and therefore willingly pay a certain amount of money for benefits received. But that is the presumption which lies behind government spending, of which leftists are the loudest and leading proponents.
Leftists usually will favor government spending without trying to justify it with numbers; they just know that it’s “a good thing”. But they’re often abetted by practitioners of the quasi-science of economics. Many — too many — economists will say that if the “social benefit” of a program equals or exceeds its cost, the program is presumably justified because the undertaking of it would cause “social welfare” to increase. But a “social benefit” — like a breakthrough in medical research — is a always a benefit to some persons, while the taxes paid to elicit the benefit are nothing but a burden to other persons, who have their own problems and priorities.
Why doesn’t the good offset the bad? Think of it this way: If a bully punches you in the nose, thus deriving much pleasure at your expense, who is to say that the bully’s pleasure outweighs your pain? Do you believe that there’s a third party who is entitled to say that the result of your transaction with the bully is a heightened state of social welfare? Evidently, there are a lot of voters, economists, pundits, and politician who act as if they believe it.
Most political agnostics (the great mass in the center who have been taught that it’s government’s job to “do something” about their particular problems) and many conservatives enable the left’s agenda. The conservatives (real or nominal) do so either because they’re stupid, hopeful of finding common ground with their political enemies (a hope founded on stupidity), or (and most commonly) eager to win votes by eschewing the “meanie” label (and its many equivalents) that leftists love to hang on conservatives.
STRATEGY AND TACTICS
That brings me to the final assumption of leftism that I will address here: The spending of other people’s money is “compassionate”. (-Well, that’s the cynical story line of (usually) atheist leftists who like to invoke Christ in support of big government.)
Another of the left’s leading strategies was enunciated by FDR’s trusted adviser, Harry Hopkins: “We shall tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect.” The key is to sell big government by playing up the benefits and playing down the costs — or ignoring them, or claiming that “the rich” will bear them. The more people who learn dependence on government, the more reason to expand it and the more support for its expansion.
There are, of course, some well-to-do leftists who welcome the opportunity to pay taxes, and advertise their willingness to do so. Some will even parrot Oliver Wendell Holmes’s empty-headed bit of rhetoric: “Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society.” You’d think there would be a limit as to how much must be spent for a “civilized society”, that is, one which is minimally troubled by fraud and aggression. But given the left’s expansive view of the requirements of civilization, “enough” is never attained or attainable. More is always better than less when it comes to government spending.
And why this is so, in the leftist view, is that government officials and minions aren’t prey to the failings that pervade private dealings. They are — by some mysterious process that is thought to be missing from the private sector — capable of delivering high-quality services of relevance to people’s “problems” at “reasonable” cost. This is known as the nirvana fallacy, which is not only an assumption of leftism but also a perennially successful basis for the sale of leftist schemes. And a lot of people swallow it because they believe, against all experience, that government is filled with experts whose sole aim in life is to guide “the people” on the path to greater happiness.
Big government wasn’t sold in a day, of course. It began in earnest during the Progressive Era, when muckrakers attacked the so-called trusts (e.g., Standard Oil) that had actually made life better for most Americans while employing millions of them. But the “fat cat” image successfully attached to capitalism during the Progressive Era has persisted. And it has been augmented by the a long parade of “benefits” that, once bestowed, are defended tenaciously and successfully by voters, left-wing politicians, and faux conservatives who value the perks of office more than principle.
The bestowal of an entitlement is an element of a hoary device employed by the likes of Stalin and Hitler (another leftist), namely, salami tactics:
The term is also known as a “piecemeal strategy”, as used by the Nazi Party … to achieve absolute power in Germany in the early months of 1933. First, there was the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933, which rattled the German population and led to the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended many civil liberties and outlawed the Communist Party and the Social Democrats. An estimated 10,000 people were arrested in two weeks, soon followed by the Enabling Act on March 24, 1933, which gave Hitler plenary power, allowing him to bypass the Reichstag and further consolidate power. Hitler and the Nazis continued to systematically establish totalitarian control by eliminating potential opponents, such as trade unions and rival political parties. They also established organizations with mandatory membership, such as the Hitler Youth, Bund Deutscher Mädel and Arbeitsdienst. The Enabling Act was renewed in 1937 and 1941. Finally, on April 26, 1942, the Reichstag passed a law making Hitler the oberster Gerichtsherr, the supreme judge of the land, giving him power of life and death over every citizen and effectively extending the Enabling Act for the rest of the war. This gradual process of amassing power is today lumped in as Salamitaktik (salami tactics). [Wikipedia, as of July 19, 2017]
An especially devious salami tactic — so devious and effective that it’s really a brilliant grand strategy — was the seizure of university “education” curricula by leftists. Schools of “education” have churned out millions of willing acolytes for the left’s preferences, on matters ranging from government (more) and internationalism (sing “Kumbaya”) to “climate change” (bad humans), unfettered immigration (good Mexicans), and gender confusion (you are what you say you are). Public-school teachers are in the vanguard of vigilantism against the mere thought of guns and the mere mention of God. And yet public-school teachers are so “indispensable” — just ask them and their board-of-education enablers — that they are more sacrosanct than Santa Claus. And so is “school funding” (more, more, more), a shibboleth that politicians of all stripes must utter or be damned, despite the fact that massive increases in “school funding” have done nothing to improve the education of America’s children.
It has become trite to observe that leftists are better than conservatives at hewing the to a party line and working together to realize an agenda. But the observation is so accurate that I couldn’t resist repeating it. Leftists are united and firm in their belief that government cures all ills, and united and firm in their definition of ills (until an influential leftist signals a change of course). Conservatives have the great disadvantage of disunity that arises from a paradox: A true conservative is loath to become a public official or serve in any kind of governing capacity. (Cops and military enlistees, yes, because conservatives understand the need to keep barbarians at bay.) Most politicians who run for office as conservatives are really something else entirely. “Opportunist” is the best that I can come up with at the moment.
Given the pervasive influence of leftist teachers and professors, it’s no wonder that most reporters and news executives are leftists. It’s easy for left-wing politicians and “activists” to strike chords that resonate with the media. Just focus on purported benefits, ignore costs, portray opponents as “meanies”, and Bob’s your uncle: another sympathetic story in The New York Times, The Washington Post, other major dailies, most broadcast news outlets, and the slave papers owned by the big chains. The left plays the media like Itzhak Perlman plays the violin, and most Americans dance to the tune.
The occasional scandal is soon forgotten because the left-wing media control the microphone, and its heart is in “the right place”. (Shades of Bill Clinton, the sexual predator and perjurer, whose female lawyer gave him a pass because his party is the party of allegiance to feminism.)
PSYCHOLOGY
Leftists (and their enablers) can be assigned to one or more of these not-mutually-exclusive categories:
Controllers – Just do it our way because (a) we have “science/social justice” on our side; (b) because we want it that way even if the “science” is phony and “social justice” is nothing but a slogan; and (c) we have the power to make you do it our way, and we love to use power.
Risk-avoiders — Someone somewhere was harmed by something, or might be harmed by something, so we’re going to enforce some rules in the vain hope of preventing more harm, and we don’t care (or even think) about the cost of those rules in foregone economic growth, employment, personal liberty, or self-reliance (i.e., learning from experience).
Token “liberals” (including many so-called libertarians) — Liberty is desirable, as long as it doesn’t have consequences of which we disapprove, such as “market failure”, any kind of discrimination (except against our ideological enemies), (relative) poverty, or the merest hint that an innocent person has been imprisoned. (In fact, “too many” people — of the wrong color — are in prison (even though the crime rate is much lower as a result.) And liberty means the absence of violence except in the final (and probably futile) throes of self-defense (if then) because everyone is a sane and reasonable as we are.
Free-riders – If government is giving away “free” stuff or granting privileges to certain groups, I’m all for more government handouts, I just don’t want to pay for them. (This is a position held mainly by blacks and Hispanics, and in the past by most working-class whites. It’s unlikely that blacks and Hispanics will defect from their opportunistic embrace of leftism, and working-class whites may return to the fold in large numbers if — as is likely — their expectations of a Trump presidency are disappointed. In fact, the ranks of the working class will be swelled by unemployed and underemployed millennials, degreed and undegreed, whose unemployment and underemployment make them easy prey for advocates of “free” stuff.)
Controllers are authoritarian and arrogant (especially the more intelligent of the lot), often with an overlay of neuroticism and psychopathy. Risk-avoiders usually are neurotics with low self-esteem. Token “liberals” are neurotic authoritarians, often with low self-esteem. Free riders are incompetents (by nature or habit, or for lack of marketable skills) with dysfunctional traits (e.g., low self-esteem, neuroses, addictions, low intelligence) that lead to dependency on other people, mind-altering substances, or both.
It’s reasonable to ask if the traits mentioned in the preceding paragraph are exclusive to leftists. They’re not, of course. Right-statists certainly must have some of the same traits — especially authoritarianism. But right-statists are simply left-statists with a different agenda. And left-statists wield far more power and are (and have been for decades) a far greater threat to liberty in America than left-statists.
That is so because the psychological traits of left-statists are made manifest in rhetoric that gives them a great advantage in political warfare. It is the rhetoric of false compassion, of caring about “victims”. (See, for example, Scott Johnson, “The Socialist Temptation“, Power Line, July 2, 2017.) This tendency is borne out in the work of Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues at MoralFoundations.org, whose
theory proposes that several innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture then constructs virtues, narratives, and institutions on top of these foundations, thereby creating the unique moralities we see around the world, and conflicting within nations too. The five foundations for which we think the evidence is best are:
1) Care/harm: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.
2) Fairness/cheating: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. [Note: In our original conception, Fairness included concerns about equality, which are more strongly endorsed by political liberals. However, as we reformulated the theory in 2011 based on new data, we emphasize proportionality, which is endorsed by everyone, but is more strongly endorsed by conservatives]
3) Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s “one for all, and all for one.”
4) Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.
5) Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions)….
Much of our present research involves applying the theory to political “cultures” such as those of liberals and conservatives. The current American culture war, we have found, can be seen as arising from the fact that liberals [leftists] try to create a morality relying primarily on the Care/harm foundation, with additional support from the Fairness/cheating and Liberty/oppression foundations. Conservatives, especially religious conservatives, use all six foundations, including Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation.
Arnold Kling captures some aspects of this taxonomy in The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divides:
In politics, I claim that progressives [leftists], conservatives, and libertarians are like tribes speaking different languages….
Which political language do you speak?… [T]hink of one of your favorite political commentators, an insightful individual with whom you generally agree. Which of the following statements would that commentator most likely make?
(P) My heroes are people who have stood up for the underprivileged. The people I cannot stand are the people who are indifferent to the oppression of women, minorities, and the poor. (C) My heroes are people who have stood up for Western values. The people I cannot stand are the people who are indifferent to the assault on the moral virtues and traditions that are the foundation for our civilization. (L) My heroes are people who have stood up for individual rights. The people I cannot stand are the people who are indifferent to government taking away people’s ability to make their own choices.
The central claim of this book is that (P) is the language of progressives, (C) is the language of conservatives, and (L) is the language of libertarians. If the theory is correct, then someone who chooses (P) tends to identify with progressives, someone who chooses (C) tends to identify with conservatives, and someone who chooses (L) tends to identify with libertarians.
I call this the three-axes model of political communication. A progressive will communicate along the oppressor-oppressed axis, framing issues in terms of the (P) dichotomy. A conservative will communicate along the civilization-barbarism axis, framing issues in terms of the (C) dichotomy. A libertarian will communicate along the liberty-coercion axis, framing issues in terms of the (L) dichotomy.
Note that the progressive is not using the phenomenon of oppression per se as a means of expressing a political viewpoint. Rather, the progressive believes that certain groups or classes of people intrinsically fall into categories of oppressor or oppressed.
And so it goes. Leftists become so detached from reality that they believe that anyone who speaks the language of “liberation” is actually in favor of it: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Chavez, and on and on. Back in the days before communists and their progeny became slick salesmen of statism, Friedrich Engels (Marx’s sidekick) let it all hang out in “On Authority” (1872):
A number of Socialists have latterly launched a regular crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian for it to be condemned….
Authority, in the sense in which the word is used here, means: the imposition of the will of another upon ours; on the other hand, authority presupposes subordination….
… [T]he necessity of authority, and of imperious authority at that, will nowhere be found more evident than on board a ship on the high seas. There, in time of danger, the lives of all depend on the instantaneous and absolute obedience of all to the will of one….
A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
Violence is a good thing if your heart is in the “right” (i.e., left) place. And violence is in the hearts of leftists, along with hatred and the irresistible urge to suppress that which is hated because it challenges leftist orthodoxy — from climate skepticism and the negative effect of gun ownership on crime to the negative effect of the minimum wage and the causal relationship between Islam and terrorism.
There’s something about conservatives that causes leftists to invoke the “H” word — Hitler, that is — and its close substitutes: Nazi and fascist. I have a little story that illustrates the tendency and suggests its cause. I was visiting Austin years ago and fell into a discussion with my brother-in-law and his wife, both ardent leftists and active in local Democrat politics. They had recently moved to the affluent Northwest Hills section of the city, ostensibly to enable their daughter to attend the schools in that part of the city, which are by reputation better than the ones in South Austin, where they had been living. Northwest Hills is mostly white; many of the whites are Jewish; and the non-white population is mainly of East Asian origin and descent. Blacks and Hispanics are seldom seen in Northwest Hills, except as employees of the city and local businesses, and as nannies and yard men. South Austin is much less affluent than Northwest Hills, and far more heavily populated by Hispanics.
The brother-in-law and his wife were apologetic about their move. Though they didn’t put it this way, they had revealed themselves as hypocrites about ethnic diversity and their supposed sympathy with the “less fortunate.” But their hypocrisy was excused by their concern for their daughter’s education. (A classic example of leftist hypocrisy, in the same mold as Democrat presidents — Clinton and Obama most recently — who sent their children to private schools in mostly black D.C.). They were especially chagrined because they (and their leftist ilk) referred to the denizens of their new neighborhood as “Northwest Nazis.” The appellation arose from the fact that Northwest Hills was then (and still is) more Republican than the surrounding parts of heavily Democrat Austin.
I thought to myself at the time, how utterly wrong-headed it is for leftists — who are ardent fans of dictatorial statism — to refer to Republicans as Nazis. Republicans generally oppose the left’s dictatorial schemes. But leftists like my brother-in-law and his wife — who are given to equating Republicans with fascists, Nazis, and Hitlers — are themselves ardent proponents of the expansion of the fascistic state that has been erected, almost without pause, since the New Deal.
The practice of applying such labels as Hitler, fascist, and Nazi to Republicans — and especially to conservatives — strikes me as psychological projection. That’s not a new explanation, but it’s a sound one. The following quotations are excerpted from two blog posts (here and here) by Australian psychologist John J. Ray, who has done a lot of research and writing about the left and its delusions:
I have been looking at the differences between the Left and the Right of politics since 1968, when I submitted my Master’s dissertation on that subject. And my aim has been to understand WHY Leftists behave like SoBs so much of the time. How is it that implementing Leftist policies always results in harm and destruction of some sort, if not mass murder?
So my interest has been not only in Leftist claims and policies but also in their underlying psychology. I think, in fact, that it is only at the psychological level that Leftism can be understood. And, in that, I find myself in a degree of agreement with Leftist psychologists. Leftists never stop offering accounts of the psychology of conservatives, adverse accounts, of course. It is one of the more popular fields of research in psychology. So Leftists are most emphatic that you need to delve into the psychological realm to understand politics. In any argument on the facts they will be defeated by conservatives so impugning the motives of their opponent is essentially all that they have left.
I am VERY familiar with the Leftist claims in that regard. Most of my 200+ academic journal articles were devoted to showing that the research they relied on in support of their claims was flawed, often hilariously so.
But there was one redeeming feature in their research. In purporting to describe conservatives they usually were quite clearly describing themselves! An accusation that they never seem able to let go of, despite much contrary evidence, is that conservatives are “authoritarian”….
* * *
The concept of “authoritarianism” as an explanation for conservatism has been like catnip to Leftist psychologists. They cannot leave it alone. It first arose among a group of Jewish Marxists in the late 1940s and was published in a 1950 book called “The authoritaian personality” under the lead authorship of a prominent Marxist theoretician, Theodor Wiesengrund, who usually used as his surname the stage name of his Spanish dancer mother — Adorno.
The theory underlying it failed in all sorts of ways so it fell out of favour after the ’60s, though it still got an occasional mention. For more on the Adorno work see here.
In the first half of his first book in 1981, “Bob” Altemeyer gave a comprehensive summary of the problems with the Adorno theory and submitted that it had to be discarded. He then went on to put forward a slightly different theory and measuring instrument of his own that rebooted the concept of authoritarianism as an explanation of conservative thinking.
That theory and its accompanying measuring instrument (the RWA scale) also soon ran aground, however. Altemeyer himself admitted that scores on the RWA scale were just about as high among Leftist voters as Rightist voters — which rather ruined it as an explanation of conservatism. The death knell came when it was revealed that the highest scorers on the RWA scale were in fact former Russian Communists! Right wing Communists?? For more on Altemeyer’s confusions see here. Or more concisely here.
So the RWA scale lost most of its interest after that, though it is still cautiously used on some occasions — e.g here.
But … Leftist psychologists did not give up. A group of them including Karen Stenner, Stanley Feldman, Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler revived the old ideas and invented a new questionnaire to measure the concept. And reading their “new” theory is like a trip back into the 1940’s. Conservatives are still said to be sad souls who live in a state of constant and unreasonable fear.
The amusing thing is that there is some reality behind their theory. The key word is “unreasonable”. How much fear is “unreasonable”? Is all fear “unreasonable”? Obviously not. Fear is an important survival mechanism. We would all be eaten by lions etc. without it. And conservatives do fear the probable results of the hare-brained schemes put forward by Leftists. Conservatives are nothing if not cautious but to the superficial thinkers of the Left, that caution seems like fear. So from a conservative viewpoint Leftists are not fearful enough. They do not fear the “unforeseen” and adverse side effects that invariably accompany any implementation of their schemes.
So, despite the laughable psychometric characteristics of their new measuring instrument, which I set out yesterday, they have in fact achieved some grasp of reality. They have just not grasped that caution can be a good thing and have not thought deeply enough about the distinction, if any, between caution and fear. So all their writings amount to little more than an adverse value judgment of things that are in fact probably desirable.
So why all the mental muddle from them? Why does the old “authoritarianism” catnip keep them coming back to that dubious concept? Why have they not learnt from its past failures? Easy: It’s all Freudian projection. They see their own faults in conservatives. The people who REALLY ARE authoritarian are Leftists themselves. Communist regimes are ALWAYS authoritarian and in democracies the constant advocates of more and more government control over everything are the Left. The Left are the big government advocates, not conservatives. What could be more authoritarian than Obama’s aim to “fundamentally transform” America? It is the Left who trust in big brother while conservatives just want to be left alone.
It’s true that conservatives have respect for authority, which isn’t the same thing as authoritarianism. To a conservative, respect for “authority” means respect for the civilizing norms that are represented in a lawful institution when it acts within its traditional bounds. For example, conservatives respect presidents when they strive to restore and sustain the constitutional order; conservatives therefore disrespect presidents who blatantly violate that order.
What about Mussolini and Hitler, who are usually thought of as right-wing dictators and therefore labeled as conservative? I return to John Ray, who has this to say about Mussolini:
Let us listen initially to some reflections on the early days of Fascism by Mussolini himself — first published in 1935 (See the third chapter in Greene, 1968).
“If the bourgeoisie think they will find lightning conductors in us they are the more deceived; we must start work at once …. We want to accustom the working class to real and effectual leadership“.
And that was Mussolini quoting his own words from the early Fascist days. So while Mussolini had by that time (in his 30s) come to reject the Marxist idea of a class-war, he still saw himself as anti-bourgeois and as a saviour and leader of the workers. What modern-day Leftist could not identify with that?…
“If the 19th century has been the century of the individual (for liberalism means individualism), it may be conjectured that this is the century of the State.
This is Mussolini’s famous prophecy about the 20th century in the Enciclopedia Italiana….
“Laissez faire is out of date.”
To this day the basic free market doctrine of “laissez faire” is virtually a swear-word to most Leftists. Quoted from Smith (1967, p. 87)….
And Mussolini’s “Fascist Manifesto” of 1919 (full translation by Vox Day here) includes in Fascist policy such socialist gems as (I quote): * The nationalization of all the arms and explosives factories. * A strong progressive tax on capital that will truly expropriate a portion of all wealth. * The seizure of all the possessions of the religious congregations and the abolition of all the bishoprics, which constitute an enormous liability on the Nation and on the privileges of the poor. * The formation of a National Council of experts for labor, for industy, for transportation, for the public health, for communications, etc. Selections to be made from the collective professionals or of tradesmen with legislative powers, and elected directly to a General Commission with ministerial powers. * A minimum wage. * The participation of workers’ representatives in the functions of industry commissions.
Elsewhere, Ray says this about Mussolini and his aims:
“Fascism” is a term that was originally coined by the Italian dictator Mussolini to describe his adaptation of Marxism to the conditions of Italy after World War I. Lenin in Russia made somewhat different adaptations of Marxism to the conditions in Russia during the same period and his adaptations came to be called Marxism/Leninism. Mussolini stayed closer to Marx in that he felt that Italy had to go through a capitalist stage before it could reach socialism whereas Lenin attempted to push Russia straight from semi-feudalism into socialism. Mussolini’s principal modification of Marxism was his rejection of the notion of class war, something that put him decisively at odds with Lenin’s “Reds”….
Mussolini’s ideas and system were very influential and he had many imitators — not the least of which was Adolf Hitler….
…Mussolini was quite intellectual and his thinking was in fact much more up-to-date than that would suggest. He was certainly influenced by Marx and the ancient world but he had a whole range of ideas that extended beyond that. And where did he turn for up-to-date ideas? To America, of course! And the American ideas that influenced him were in fact hard to miss. They were the ideas of the American “Progressives”. And who was the best known Progressive in the world at that time? None other than the President of the United States — Woodrow Wilson….
Ray takes up FDR’s resemblance to Mussolini, and defers to Srdja Trifkovic’s “FDR and Mussolini: A Tale of Two Fascists,” which includes these observations:
Genuine conservatives … may argue that FDR and Mussolini were in fact rather similar. They will point out both men’s obsessive focus on strong, centralized government structures, their demagoguery, and especially their attempt to overcome the dynamics of social and economic conflict through the institutions of the corporate state.
For all their apparent similarities, however, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a more deleterious figure than Benito Mussolini, and his legacy proved to be more damaging to America than Il Duce’s was to Italy. This is not a case of good versus bad, or of two equal evils, but of bad versus even worse: Roosevelt was a more efficient, and certainly more successful, fascist than Mussolini.
As for Hitler, I return to John Ray and his monograph, “Hitler Was a Socialist“:
It is very easy to miss complexities in the the politics of the past and thus draw wrong conclusions about them. To understand the politics of the past we need to set aside for a time our own way of looking at things and try to see how the people involved at the time saw it all. Doing so is an almost essential step if we wish to understand the similarities and differences between Nazism and Marxism/Leninism. The following excerpt from James P. O’Donnell’s THE BUNKER (1978, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, pp. 261-262) is instructive. O’Donnell is quoting Artur Axmann, the Nazi youth leader, recalling a conversation with Goebbels in the Hitler bunker on Tuesday, May 1, 1945, the same day Goebbels and his wife would kill themselves after she killed their children.
“Goebbels stood up to greet me. He soon launched into lively memories of our old street-fighting days in Berlin-Wedding, from nineteen twenty-eight to thirty-three. He recalled how we had clobbered the Berlin Communists and the Socialists into submission, to the tune of the “Horst Wessel” marching song, on their old home ground.He said one of the great accomplishments of the Hitler regime had been to win the German workers over almost totally to the national cause. We had made patriots of the workers, he said, as the Kaiser had dismally failed to do. This, he kept repeating, had been one of the real triumphs of the movement. We Nazis were a non-Marxist yet revolutionary party, anticapitalist, antibourgeois, antireactionary….
Starch-collared men like Chancellor Heinrich Bruening had called us the “Brown Bolsheviks,” and their bourgeois instincts were not wrong.
It seems inconceivable to modern minds that just a few differences between two similar ideologies — Marxism and Nazism — could have been sufficient cause for great enmity between those two ideologies. But the differences concerned were important to the people involved at the time. Marxism was class-based and Nazism was nationally based but otherwise they were very similar. That’s what people said and thought at the time and that explains what they did and how they did it.
“Stalin and I are the only ones who envisage the future and nothing but the future. Accordingly, I shall in a few weeks stretch out my hand to Stalin at the common German-Russian frontier and undertake the redistribution of the world with him.”
… Consider this description by Edward Feser of someone who would have been a pretty good Presidential candidate for the modern-day U.S. Democratic party:
He had been something of a bohemian in his youth, and always regarded young people and their idealism as the key to progress and the overcoming of outmoded prejudices. And he was widely admired by the young people of his country, many of whom belonged to organizations devoted to practicing and propagating his teachings. He had a lifelong passion for music, art, and architecture, and was even something of a painter. He rejected what he regarded as petty bourgeois moral hang-ups, and he and his girlfriend “lived together” for years. He counted a number of homosexuals as friends and collaborators, and took the view that a man’s personal morals were none of his business; some scholars of his life believe that he himself may have been homosexual or bisexual. He was ahead of his time where a number of contemporary progressive causes are concerned: he disliked smoking, regarding it as a serious danger to public health, and took steps to combat it; he was a vegetarian and animal lover; he enacted tough gun control laws; and he advocated euthanasia for the incurably ill.
He championed the rights of workers, regarded capitalist society as brutal and unjust, and sought a third way between communism and the free market. In this regard, he and his associates greatly admired the strong steps taken by President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to take large-scale economic decision-making out of private hands and put it into those of government planning agencies. His aim was to institute a brand of socialism that avoided the inefficiencies that plagued the Soviet variety, and many former communists found his program highly congenial. He deplored the selfish individualism he took to be endemic to modern Western society, and wanted to replace it with an ethic of self-sacrifice: “As Christ proclaimed ‘love one another’,” he said, “so our call — ‘people’s community,’ ‘public need before private greed,’ ‘communally-minded social consciousness’ — rings out.! This call will echo throughout the world!”
The reference to Christ notwithstanding, he was not personally a Christian, regarding the Catholicism he was baptized into as an irrational superstition. In fact he admired Islam more than Christianity, and he and his policies were highly respected by many of the Muslims of his day. He and his associates had a special distaste for the Catholic Church and, given a choice, preferred modern liberalized Protestantism, taking the view that the best form of Christianity would be one that forsook the traditional other-worldly focus on personal salvation and accommodated itself to the requirements of a program for social justice to be implemented by the state. They also considered the possibility that Christianity might eventually have to be abandoned altogether in favor of a return to paganism, a worldview many of them saw as more humane and truer to the heritage of their people. For he and his associates believed strongly that a people’s ethnic and racial heritage was what mattered most. Some endorsed a kind of cultural relativism according to which what is true or false and right or wrong in some sense depends on one’s ethnic worldview, and especially on what best promotes the well-being of one’s ethnic group
There is surely no doubt that the man Feser describes sounds very much like a mainstream Leftist by current standards. But who is the man concerned? It is a historically accurate description of Adolf Hitler. Hitler was not only a socialist in his own day but he would even be a mainstream socialist in MOST ways today. Feser does not mention Hitler’s antisemitism above, of course, but that too seems once again to have become mainstream among the Western-world Left in the early years of the 21st century.
I have no doubt that the American left — from Woodrow Wilson (if not Teddy Roosevelt) to the present day — is aligned with the political aims of Mussolini and Hitler, which were (beneath the rhetoric) the political aims of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Regarding Hitler and Stalin, I turn to chapter 6 of Revel’s Last Exit to Utopia, with the proviso that Revel’s references to communism and socialism apply equally to leftism, whether it is called progressivism, liberalism, or liberal democracy:
Communism’s stoke of genius was to authorize the destruction of liberty in the name of liberty. It allowed liberty’s enemies to carry out their work of annihilation, or to exonerate those who carried out the work, under a “progressive” rationale….
[A]n element of the left, more numerous than might be thought, needs to think that anyone who isn’t a socialist must be a Nazi….
There are two sorts of totalitarian systems. There is the kind whose ideology is what I would call direct, and which is readily decipherable: Hitler and Mussolini always made it plain that they despised democracy, freedom of expression and culture….
Communism differs from direct totalitarianisms in that it has recourse to ideological dissimulation…. A detour via Utopia allows an ideology (and the power system that it purports to legitimize) to proclaim one success after another without interruption, while in reality its results are diametrically opposed to the vaunted agenda…. The intellectual trap of a totalitarian ideology”mediatized” by Utopia is therefore much more difficult to foil than that of direct ideology because, to utopian believers, actually occurring events can never prove their ideology false.
France … invented this politico-ideological configuration with Robespierre and the Jacobin dictatorship…. Western intellectuals, never having lived under actually existing totalitarianism, clung [and cling] obstinately to its utopian facade….
Utopian totalitarianism’s infinite capacity for self-justification, in contrast to direct totalitarianism, explains why … so many of its servants go about unscathed by feelings of shame or regret. Perched in their immaculate Utopia, they absolve themselves of crimes to which they were the angelic accomplices, in the name of ideals they have shamelessly trampled underfoot. [pp. 86-91, passim]
Violence, hatred, and suppression don’t go with leftists’ self-image of “compassion” and “rationality”, so leftists engage in a lot of wishful thinking. (“Imagine all the people….”) Thomas Sowell calls it the unconstrained vision; I call it the unrealistic vision. It’s also known as magical thinking, in which “ought” becomes “is” and the forces of nature and human nature can be held in abeyance by edict; for example:
Women can do everything that men can do, but it doesn’t work the other way … just because.
The under-representation of women and blacks in certain fields is due to rank discrimination (but it’s all right if blacks dominate certain sports and women now far outnumber men on college campuses).
Race is a “social construct”.
A minimum wage can be imposed without an increase in unemployment.
Taxes can be raised without discouraging investment and therefore reducing the rate of economic growth.
Peace can be had without preparedness for war.
Regulation doesn’t reduce the rate of economic growth and foster “crony capitalism”.
The cost of health care will go down while the number of mandates is increased.
The economy can be stimulated through the action of the Keynesian multiplier, which is nothing but phony math.
“Green” programs create jobs (but only because they are inefficient).
Every “right” under the sun can be granted without cost (e.g., affirmative action racial-hiring quotas, which penalize blameless whites; the Social Security Ponzi scheme, which burdens today’s workers and cuts into growth-inducing saving).
To round out the psychological profile of leftism, one must add to magical thinking the closely related nirvana fallacy (hypothetical perfect is always better than feasible reality), large doses of neurotic hysteria (e.g., the overpopulation fears of Paul Ehrlich, the AGW hoax of Al Gore et al.), and adolescent rebellion (e.g., the post-election tantrum-riots of 2016).
But to say any of the foregoing about the left’s agenda, the assumptions and attitudes underlying it, the left’s strategic and tactical methods, or the psychological underpinnings of leftism, is to be “hateful”. In my observation, nothing is more full of hate than a lefitst who has been contradicted or thwarted. So through the magic of psychological projection, those who dare speak the truth about leftism are called “haters”, “racists”, “fascists”, “Nazis”, and other things that apply to leftists themselves.
Labeling anti-leftists as evil “justifies” the left’s violent enforcement of its agenda. The violence takes many forms, from riotous rebellion and terror (e.g., the French Revolution), to suppression by force (e.g., Stalin’s war on the Cossacks), to genocide (e.g., the Holocaust), to overtly peaceful but coercive state action (e.g., Stalin’s “show trials”, forced unionization of American industry, imposition of crop quotas, suppression of religious liberty and freedom of association, the theft of property, and almost every form of economic regulation).
COST
The left’s ascendancy in the United States has been attained at horrendous cost, as is has been wherever else it has taken hold — from the France of the 1790s to the Venezuela of today, with intervening stops in Germany, Italy, Russia, China, and on and on and on.
The economic cost to Americans has been massive. Since the end of World War II, taxation and regulation have caused the rate of real growth to decline from more than 4 percent to less than 2 percent (with negative growth lurking around the corner.)That’s a single-year loss of more than $400 billion in today’s dollars, or more than $1,000 every year for every citizen of the United States. (The loss over a working lifetime is far more than that, of course.) It means, among many things, fewer jobs and a significantly lower standard of living for poor Americans.
The immense cost of the regulatory-welfare state is well hidden by the surfeit of government programs that provide benefits to various interest groups, across the economic spectrum. But all that those programs do is to redistribute a “pie” that is much smaller than it would have been because of taxation and regulation, and from which large slices are taken to compensate armies of politicians, bureaucrats, and their cronies.
More devastating than the economic toll is the loss of liberty that results from government intervention in social and economic affairs. Social and economic liberty are indivisible; taxation and regulation diminish prosperity and thereby diminish liberty (the ability to choose where one lives, with whom one associates, etc.).
Direct attacks on liberty are on the rise, as well. The attacks have thus far been concentrated in the academy and the media. But the direct attacks on liberty will spread, and spread rapidly, if leftists succeed in gaining firm control of Congress and the White House. Freedom of speech will be suppressed to “fight hate”; “hate groups” (i.e., pro-liberty organizations) will be driven out of existence; politicians who dare speak the truth about the left, its agenda, and its protégés, will be persecuted, prosecuted, and imprisoned (thus the Trump-Russia hoax and the January 6 Committee); and the economic and social affairs of Americans will be regimented to fit the left’s agenda.
It can happen here. It is happening here. Why? Because too many Americans will go along with it. In 2015, I took the Freedom Scenarios Inventory at yourmorals.org. I was shocked by the result — not my result, but my result in comparison with the results obtained by other users.
Here is a description of the test:
The scale is a measure of the degree to which people consider different freedom issues to be morally relevant. As you may have noticed, this inventory does not include perennially contentious freedom-related issues like abortion or gun rights. These issues were deliberately excluded from this scale, because we are interested in what drives people to be concerned with freedom issues in general. On the other hand, people’s stances on well worn political issues like abortion and gun control are likely to be influenced more by their political beliefs rather than their freedom concerns.
The idea behind the scale is to determine how various individual difference variables relate to people’s moral freedom concerns. Throughout the world, calls for freedom and liberty are growing louder. We want to begin to investigate what is driving this heightened concern for freedom. Surprisingly little research has investigated the antecedents of freedom concerns. In the past, our group has investigated clusters of characteristics associated with groups of people who are more concerned with liberty (i.e., libertarians), but this type of investigation differs from the current investigation in that we are now interested more in individual differences in freedom concerns – not group differences…. It seems that many psychologists assume that many types of freedom concerns are driven by a lack of empathy for others, but we think the truth is more complicated than this.
The test-taker is asked to rate each of 14 scenarios on the following scale:
0 – Not at all morally bad 1 – Barely morally bad 2 – Slightly morally bad 3 – Somewhat morally bad 4 – Morally bad 5 – Very morally bad 6 – Extremely morally bad 7 – Extraordinarily morally bad 8 – Nothing could be more morally bad
Here are the 14 scenarios, which I’ve numbered for ease of reference:
1. You are no longer free to eat your favorite delicious but unhealthy meal due to the government’s dietary restrictions.
2. You are no longer free to always spend your money in the way you want.
3. You are not always free to wear whatever you want to wear. Some clothes are illegal.
4. Your favorite source of entertainment is made illegal.
5. Your favorite hobby is made illegal.
6.. You are not free to live where you want to live.
7. By law, you must sleep one hour less each day than you would like.
8. You are no longer free to eat your favorite dessert food (because the government has deemed it unhealthy).
9. You are no longer allowed to kill innocent people . [Obviously thrown in to see if you’re paying attention.]
10. You are no longer free to spend as much time as you want watching television/movies/video clips due to government restrictions.
11, You are no longer free to drink your favorite beverage, because the government considers it unhealthy.
12. You are no longer free to drive whenever you want for however long you want due to driving restrictions.
13. You are no longer free to go to your favorite internet site.
14. You are no longer free to go to any internet site you choose to go to.
I didn’t expect to be unusual in my views about freedom. But it seems that I am:
That my score in green. The score of the average “liberal” is in blue, and the score of the average conservative is in red.
A lot of people — too many — are willing to let government push them around. Why? Because Big Brother knows best? Because freedom isn’t worth fighting for? Because of the illusion of security and prosperity created by the regulatory-welfare state? Whatever the reason, the evident willingness of test-takers to accede to infringements of their liberty is frightening.
It is happening here.
REMEDY
A remedy requires a diagnosis. What went wrong? How did so many Americans come under the spell of big government?
Think back to 1928, when Americans were more prosperous than ever before and the GOP had swept to its third consecutive lopsided victory in a presidential race. All it took to snatch disaster from the jaws of delirium was a stock-market crash in 1929 (fueled by the Fed) that turned into a recession that turned into a depression (also because of the Fed). The depression became the Great Depression, and it lasted until the eve of World War II, because of the activist policies of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, which suppressed recovery instead of encouraging it. There was even a recession (1937-38) within the depression, and the national unemployment rate was still 15 percent in 1940. It took the biggest war effort in the history of the United States to bring the unemployment rate back to its pre-depression level.
The relatively brief but deeply dismal era did what the so-called Progressives of earlier decades had been unable to do: It converted vast numbers of Americans to the belief that their well-being depended not on their voluntary, cooperative enterprises but on the central government’s incessant intervention in their social and economic affairs. Most Americans of the era — like most human beings of every era — did not and could not see that government is the problem, not the solution. Victory in World War II, which required central planning and a commandeered economy, helped to expunge the bitter taste of the Great Depression. And coming as it did on the heels of the Great Depression, reinforced the desperate belief — shared by too many Americans — that salvation is to be found in big government.
The beneficial workings of the invisible hand of competitive cooperation are just too subtle for most people to grasp. The promise of a quick fix by confident-sounding politicians is too alluring. FDR became a savior-figure because he talked a good game and was an inspiring war leader, though in the end he succumbed to pro-Soviet advisors and gave half of Europe to Stalin.
With war’s end, the one-worlders and social engineers swooped on a people still jittery about the Great Depression and fearful of foreign totalitarianism. (The native-born variety was widely accepted because of FDR’s mythic status.) Schools and universities became training grounds for the acolytes of socialism and amoral internationalism. Dependency on government has become deeply ingrained in the psyche of most Americans.
But not everyone is addicted to government. There are millions of Americans who want less of it — a lot less — rather than more of it. I have elsewhere analyzed the options for attaining it. The only feasible option is a national divorce. that is, a negotiated partition of the country.
The time is ripe. Lefists are chafing under rulings of the Supreme Court that defy leftist ideology. And there’s a good chance that the GOP may retake Congress and the White House in the next few years. Now is the time to act — to return at least a large portion of the country to a state of liberty — before the inevitable swing of the pendulum that returns the statist party to power.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books, Articles, and Posts by Other Writers
Entries are listed alphabetically by author’s last name. This is a small sample of relevant items, and it’s weighted heavily toward material that came to my attention in the weeks and months preceding the original publication of this post in 2017, and for a few years after that. If there are broken links, please report them to me at the following email address: the Germanic nickname for Friedrich followed by the surname of the 1974 Nobel laureate in economics followed by the 3rd and 4th digits of his birth year followe by @gmail.com.
Anonymous Google employee, “Reply to Public Response and Misrepresentation” (This is predictably called an “anti-diversity screed” by Gizmodo. It’s also available in “Dissent at Google” at Vox Populi, which frames it more realistically. The “screed” relies on the kinds of scientific findings about intellectual, biological, and innate behavioral differences between males and females to which I have linked many times. For a small taste of relevant research, delivered with customary flair, see Scott Alexander, “Gender Imbalances Are Mostly Not Due to Offensive Attitudes“, Slate Star Codex, August 1, 2017. As expected, the author was identified and fired for perpetuating stereotypes telling the truth. For links to many other related posts, see “Leftism As Crypto-Fascism: The Google Paradigm“.)
I have never quite understood what “privacy” means in the context of the debate about abortion. As far as I can tell, the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade Court did nothing more than say that a decision about abortion is a “private” decision — one that should be made by the prospective mother, barring exceptional circumstances. “Private”, in that sense, really means “autonomous” (a justification made with slightly more clarity by the Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey).
Perhaps as a result of Roe, “privacy” has in the past several decades become something of a fetish. The result is a stupendous stack of laws and regulations that purport to protect “privacy”.
What is it? And is there a right to it?
The desire for privacy can be thought of the desire to keep information about oneself from the eyes and ears of others, for various reasons:
One reason would be to avoid embarrassment.
Another reason would be to avoid being a victim of a criminal act (e.g., extortion, fraud, or theft).
A third reason, which has no legal support, would be to avoid being the target of a criminal prosecution. (An illegal act conducted in privacy — such as an unwitnessed murder — is still an illegal act.)
A fourth reason — and the one that now seems to be most prevalent — is simply a desire for privacy for its own sake.
Here’s my assessment of the reasons:
There is no natural or constitutional right to avoid embarrassment. It is an unavoidable and unpreventable consequence of being a social animal.
Regarding extortion, fraud, theft, etc., the operative word isn’t “privacy”, it’s “secrecy” in the defense of one’s reputation and property. Extortion, fraud, theft, etc., involve access to things like a victim’s medical history, court records, social security number, and passwords. Keeping such things secret is essential to the avoidance of extortion, etc. But such information can be kept secret without keeping it private; that is, such information (with the possible exception of passwords) is recorded by and accessible to official parties, who are only allowed to release such information under conditions that (presumably) preclude their use for criminal purposes.
What about passwords? You keep them secret (or you should) for the sake of security. (They are not mere foibles that might embarrass you.) But, even then, you will (if you are prudent) tell someone how to find them if you are incapacitated or die.
I have already dismissed the foolish idea that an act conducted in private is defensible under the rubric of privacy.
That leaves me with the question of whether there is a right to privacy for its own sake. Having disposed of embarrassment, the avoidance of victimhood, and criminality, is anything left to discuss? What might be considered private that doesn’t fit into one of those categories?
One’s thoughts and feelings. Why should they be kept “private”? Because their exposure might embarrass one, or lay one open to a criminal charge, or give away information that might lead to extortion, etc.? But, as I’ve already explained, none of that has anything to do with privacy.
In sum, the mythical right to privacy boils down to nothing more than self-restraint: Don’t blab about thoughts and feelings that you don’t want others to know. That’s not a right, it’s a simple piece of advice that’s honored mainly in the breach.
P.S. If there could be right to privacy for its own sake, why couldn’t there be a right to a Lamborghini, a villa on the Mediterranean, or eternal life for its own sake?
Natural rights arise from voluntary and enduring social relationships. They are natural because they represent the accommodations that human beings make with each other in order to coexist peacefully and to their mutual benefit. (Natural rights, as I define them, are not the same thing as the kind of “natural rights” that many philosophers, political theorists, mystics, and opportunistic politicians claim to find hovering in human beings like Platonic essences. See this, this, this, and this, for example.)
Natural rights, in sum, are the interpersonal claims that people (generally) agree upon and (mainly) observe in their daily interactions. The claims can be negative (e.g., do not kill, except in self-defense) or positive (e.g., children must be clothed, fed, and taught about rights). For reasons discussed later, such claims are valid and generally honored even if there isn’t a superior power (a chieftain, monarch, or state apparatus) to enforce them.
Peaceful, willing coexistence does not imply “an absence of constraints, impediments, or interference”, which is a standard definition of liberty. Rather, it implies that there is necessarily a degree of compromise (voluntary constraint) for the sake of beneficially cooperative behavior. Even happy marriages are replete with voluntary constraints on behavior, constraints that enable the partners to enjoy the blessings of union.
That’s all there is to it. Liberty isn’t a nirvana-like state of euphoria; it’s just what everyday life is like when people are able to coexist peacefully, perhaps under the aegis of a superior power which does nothing more than ensure that they are able to do so.
The persistence of natural rights and liberty among a people is fostered primarily by mutual trust, respect, and forbearance. Punishment of violations of rights (and therefore of liberty) helps, too, as long as the punishment is generally agreed upon and applied quickly and consistently.
Natural rights, as discussed thus far, are distinct from “rights” (sometimes called “natural rights”) that people demand of a superior power, or which are imposed by a superior power. See, for example, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which is a wish-list of things that people are “entitled” to. Any leftist worth the name would heartily endorse the list, and add to it.
Such “rights” are really privileges. Government can (and sometimes does) recognize and protect natural rights, but it doesn’t manufacture them. The Bill of Rights, for example, consists of a hodge-podge of actual rights as they were then understood (e.g., the right to bear arms for self-defense) and privileges (e.g., the “right” to withhold information from a court of law so as not to admit one’s guilt). Some of the latter are special dispensations made necessary by the existence of government itself; that is, they are promises made by the government to shield the people from its superior power.
As mentioned in passing earlier, natural rights fall into two categories: negative and positive. Negative rights are those that can be exercised without requiring anything of others but reciprocal forbearance [1]. Wikipedia puts it this way:
Adrian has a negative right to x against Clay if and only if Clay is prohibited from acting upon Adrian in some way regarding x…. A case in point, if Adrian has a negative right to life against Clay, then Clay is required to refrain from killing Adrian….
To spin out the example, there is a negative right not to be harmed (killed, in this case) as long as Clay is forbidden to kill Adrian, Adrian is forbidden to kill Clay, both are forbidden to kill others, and others are forbidden to kill anyone. This is a widely understood and accepted negative right. But it is not an unconditional right. There are also widely understood and accepted exceptions to it, such as killing in self-defense.
In any event, the textbook explanation of negative rights, such as the one given by Wikipedia, is appealing. But it is simplistic, like John Stuart Mill’s harm principle.
It seems obvious that a person shouldn’t be harmed as long as he is doing no harm to others, which is the essence of Wikipedia‘s explanation. But “harm” is the operative word. Harm isn’t an abstraction; it’s a real thing — many real things — with concrete meanings. And those concrete meanings arise from social interactions and the norms born of them.
For example, “libertarians” (hereinafter without sneer quotes) consider it a negative right to be able to sell one’s home to another person without interference by one’s neighbors (or by the state acting on their behalf). One’s neighbors must forbear intervention, just as the seller must forbear intervention against the sales of the neighbors’ homes. But intervention may be necessary to prevent harm.
The part that libertarians usually get wrong is forbearance. Libertarians assume forbearance. They assume forbearance because they assume away — or simply ignore — the possibility that a voluntary transaction between two parties may result in direct harm to third parties.
But what if the buyer of a home is an absentee owner who will rent rooms to all and sundry (resulting in parking problems, loud parties, an eyesore property, etc.)? Libertarians reject zoning as an infringement on the negative right of property ownership. So what are put-upon neighbors supposed to do about the absentee landlord who rents rooms to all and sundry? Well, the neighbors can always complain to the city government if things get out of hand, can’t they? Yes, but in the meantime harm will have been done, and the police may not be able to put a stop to it unless the harm actually violates a statute or ordinance that the police and courts are willing and able to enforce without being attacked as racist pigs, or some such thing.
Does the libertarian conception of negative rights have room in it for homeowners’ associations that actually allow neighborhoods to define harm, as it applies to their particular circumstances, and act to prevent it? In my experience, the libertarian conception of negative property rights — thou shalt not interfere in the sale of a house — has become enshrined in statutes and ordinances that de-fang homeowners’ associations, making them powerless to prevent harm by enforcing restrictive covenants (e.g., against renting rooms) that libertarians decry as infringements of negative rights.
The only negative rights worthy of the name are specific rights that are recognized within a voluntary and enduring association of persons [2]. Violations of those rights undermine the fabric of mutual trust and mutual forbearance that enable a people to coexist in beneficial, voluntary cooperation. That — not some imaginary nirvana — is liberty.
By the same token, a voluntary and enduring association of persons can recognize positive rights. That is to say, positive rights — those broadly accepted as part and parcel of peaceful, willing coexistence and its concomitant: beneficially cooperative behavior — are just as much an aspect of liberty as are negative rights. (Doctrinaire libertarians, who aren’treally libertarians, mistakenly decry all positive rights as antithetical to liberty.)
Returning to the Wikipedia article quoted above, and the example of Adrian and Clay,
Adrian has a positive right to x against Clay if and only if Clay is obliged to act upon Adrian in some way regarding x…. [I]f Adrian has a positive right to life against Clay, then Clay is required to act as necessary to preserve the life of Adrian.
Negative and positive rights are compatible with each other in the context of the Golden Rule, the ethic of reciprocity: One should treat others as one would expect others to treat oneself. This is a truly natural law, for reasons to which I will come.
The Golden Rule can be expanded into two, complementary sub-rules:
Do no harm to others, lest they do harm to you.
Be kind and charitable to others, and they will be kind and charitable to you.
The first sub-rule fosters negative rights. The second sub-rule fosters positive rights. But, as discussed earlier, the rights in question are specific — not abstract injunctions — because they are understood and recognized in the context of voluntary and enduring social relationships.
I call the Golden Rule a natural law because it’s neither a logical construct (e.g., the “given-if-then” formulation discussed here) nor a state-imposed one. Its long history and widespread observance (if only vestigial nowadays) suggests that it embodies an understanding that arises from the similar experiences of human beings across time and place. The resulting behavioral convention, the ethic of reciprocity, arises from observations about the effects of one’s behavior on that of others, and mutual agreement (tacit or otherwise) to reciprocate preferred behavior in the service of self-interest and empathy.
That is to say, the convention is a consequence of the observed and anticipated benefits of adhering to it. Those benefits accrue not only to the person who complies with the Golden Rule in a particular situation (the benefactor), but also to the person (or persons) who benefit from compliance (the beneficiary). The consequences of compliance don’t usually redound immediately to the benefactor, but they redound indirectly over the long run because the benefactor (and many more like him) do their part to preserve the convention. It follows that the immediate impetus for observance of the convention is a mixture of two considerations: (a) an understanding of the importance of preserving the convention and (b) empathy on the part of the benefactor toward the beneficiary.
The Golden Rule will be widely observed within a group only if the members of the group are (a) generally agreed about the definition of harm, (b) value kindness and charity (in the main), and (c) perhaps most importantly, see that their acts have beneficial consequences. If those conditions are not met, the Golden Rule descends from convention to slogan.
Is the Golden Rule susceptible of varying interpretations across groups, and is it therefore a vehicle for moral relativism? Yes, with qualifications. It’s true that groups vary in their conceptions of permissible behavior. For example, the idea of allowing, encouraging, or aiding the death of old persons is not everywhere condemned. (Many — with whom I wouldn’t choose to coexist voluntarily — embrace it as a concomitant of a government-run or government-regulated health-care “system” that treats the delivery of medical services as matter of rationing.) Infanticide has a long history in many cultures; modern, “enlightened” cultures have simply replaced it with abortion [3]. Slavery is still an acceptable practice in some places, though those enslaved (as in the past) usually are outsiders. Homosexuality has a long history of condemnation, and occasional acceptance. (To be pro-homosexual nowadays — and especially to favor homosexual “marriage” — has joined the litany of “causes” that connote membership in the tribe of “enlightened” “progressives” [a.k.a., “liberals”, leftists, and “the woke”], along with being for abortion [i.e., pre-natal infanticide] and against the consumption of fossil fuels — except for one’s air travel, large residences, yacht, and SUVs, of course.)
The foregoing recitation suggests a mixture of reasons for favoring or disfavoring various behaviors, that is, regarding them as beneficial or harmful. Those reasons range from utilitarianism (calculated weighing of costs and benefits) to status-signaling. In between, there are religious and consequentialist reasons for favoring or disfavoring various behaviors. Consequentialist reasoning goes like this: Behavior X can be indulged responsibly and without harm to others, but there a strong risk that it will not be indulged responsibly, or that it will lead to behavior Y, which has repercussions for others. Therefore, it’s better to put X off-limits, or to severely restrict and monitor it.
Consequentialist reasoning applies to abortion (which is on the slippery slope to involuntary euthanasia); homosexuality (a depraved, risky practice — especially among males — which can ensnare impressionable young persons who see it as an easy way to satisfy sexual urges); transgenderism (a dangerous fad with tragic outcomes foisted upon impressionable children); alcohol and drug addiction (which carries high costs, for the addict, the addict’s family, and sometimes for innocent bystanders). In the absence of pseudo-libertarian propaganda (spread by left-dominated media) and of governmental edicts to the contrary, long-standing negative attitudes toward such behaviors would prevail in most places [4].
The exceptions discussed above to the contrary notwithstanding, there’s a mainstream interpretation of the Golden Rule — one that still holds in many places — which prohibits certain kinds of behavior, except in extreme situations, and permits certain other kinds of behavior. There is, in other words, a “core” Golden Rule that comes down to this:
Killing is wrong, except in self-defense. (Capital punishment is just that: punishment. It’s also a deterrent to murder. It isn’t “murder,” muddle-headed defenders of baby-murder to the contrary notwithstanding.)
Various kinds of unauthorized “takings” are wrong, including theft (outright and through deception). (This explains popular resistance to government “takings” ,especially when it’s done on behalf of private parties. The view that it’s all right to borrow money from a bank and not repay it arises from the mistaken beliefs that (a) it’s not tantamount to theft and (b) it harms no one because banks can “afford it”.)
Libel and slander are wrong because they are “takings” by word instead of deed.
It is wrong to turn spouse against spouse, child against parent, or friend against friend. (And yet, such things are commonly portrayed in books, films, and plays as if they are normal occurrences, often desirable ones. And it seems to me that reality increasingly mimics “art”.)
It is right to be pleasant and kind to others, even under provocation, because “a mild answer breaks wrath: but a harsh word stirs up fury” (Proverbs 15:1).
Charity is a virtue, but it should begin at home, where the need is most certain and the good deed is most likely to have its intended effect. (Leftists turn a virtue into an imposition when they insist that “charity” — as in income redistribution — is a proper job of government.)
None of these observations would be surprising to a person raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition, or even in the less vengeful branches of Islam. The observations would be especially unsurprising to an American who was raised in a rural, small-town, or small-city setting, well removed from a major metropolis, or who was raised in an ethnic enclave in a major metropolis. For it is such persons and, to some extent, their offspring who are the principal heirs and keepers of the Golden Rule in America.
An ardent individualist — particularly an anarcho-capitalist — might insist that social comity can be based on the negative sub-rule, which is represented by the first five items in the “core” list. I doubt it. There’s but a short psychological distance from mean-spiritedness — failing to be kind and charitable — to sociopathy, a preference for harmful acts. Ardent individualists will disagree with me because they view kindness and charity as their business, and no one else’s. They’re right about that, but kindness and charity are nevertheless indispensable to the development of mutual trust among people who live in an enduring social relationship. Without mutual trust, mutual restraint becomes problematic and co-existence becomes a matter of “getting the other guy before he gets you” — a convention that I hereby dub the Radioactive Rule.
Nevertheless, the positive sub-rule, which is represented by the final two items in the “core” list, can be optional for the occasional maverick. An extreme individualist (or introvert or grouch) could be a member in good standing of a society that lives by the Golden Rule. He would be a punctilious practitioner of the negative rule, and would not care that his unwillingness to offer kindness and charity resulted in coldness toward him. Coldness is all that he would receive (and want) because, as a punctilious practitioner of the negative rule; his actions wouldn’t necessarily invite harm.
But the presence of too many extreme individualists would threaten the delicate balance of self-interested and voluntarily beneficial behavior that’s implied in the Golden Rule. Even if lives and livelihoods did not depend on acts of kindness and charity — and they probably would — mistrust would set it in. And from there, it would be a short distance to the Radioactive Rule: Everyone for himself and the world be damned.
Of course, the delicate balance would be upset if the Golden Rule were violated with impunity. For that reason, it must be backed by sanctions. Non-physical sanctions would range from reprimands to ostracism. For violations of the negative sub-rule, imprisonment and corporal punishment would not be out of the question.
Now comes a dose of reality. Enduring social and cultural relationships of the kind in which the Golden Rule can thrive are possible only for a group of about 25 to 150 persons: the size of a hunter-gatherer band or Hutterite colony. It seems that a group loses its cohension when it is much larger than 150 persons. Why should that happen? Because mutual trust, mutual respect, and mutual forbearance — the things implied in the Golden Rule — depend very much on personal connections. A person who is loathe to say a harsh word to an acquaintance, friend, or family member — even when provoked — often waxes abusive toward strangers, especially in this era of e-mail and comment threads, where face-to-face encounters aren’t involved.
More generally, it’s a human tendency to treat family members, friends, and co-religionists differently than strangers; the former are accorded more trust, more cooperation, and more kindness than the latter. Why? Because there’s usually a difference between the consequences of behavior that’s directed toward strangers and the consequences of behavior that’s directed toward persons one knows, lives among, and depends upon for restraint, cooperation, and help. The allure of doing harm without penalty (“getting away with something”) or receiving without giving (“getting something for nothing”) becomes harder to resist as one’s social distance from others increases.
The preference of like for like is derided by libertarians and leftists as tribalism, which is like the pot calling the kettle black. There’s no one who is more tribal than a leftist, who weighs every word spoken by another person to ensure that person’s alignment with the left’s current dogmas. (Libertarians have it easier, inasmuch as most of them are loners by disposition, and thrive on contrariness.) But the preference of like for like is quite rational: Cooperation and help include mutual defense (and concerted attack, in the case of leftists).
When cohesion breaks down, it becomes necessary to spin off a new group or — as is mainly the case — to establish a central power (a state) to establish and enforce rules of behavior (negative and positive). The problem, of course, is that those vested with the power of the state quickly learn to use it to advance their own preferences and interests, and to perpetuate their power by granting favors to those who can keep them in office. It is a rare state that is created for the sole purpose of protecting its citizens from one another (as the referee of last resort) and from outsiders, and rarer still is the state that remains true to such purposes.
In sum, the Golden Rule — as a uniting way of life — is quite unlikely to survive the passage of a group from a self-governing community to a component of a state. Nor does the Golden Rule as a uniting way of life have much chance of revival or survival where the state already dominates. The Golden Rule may operate within non-kinship groups (e.g., parishes, clubs, ethnic enclaves) by regulating the interactions among the members of such groups. It may have a vestigial effect on face-to-face interactions between stranger and stranger, but that effect arises in part from the fear of giving offense that will be met with hostility or harm, not from a communal bond.
In any event, the dominance of the state distorts behavior. For example, the state may enable and encourage acts (e.g., abortion, homosexuality) that had been discouraged as harmful by group norms. And the state will diminish the ability of members of a group to bestow charity on one another through the loss of income to taxes and the displacement of private charity by state-run schemes that mimic charity (e.g., Social Security).
The all-powerful state destroys liberty, even while sometimes defending it. This is done not just by dictating how people must live their lives, which is bad enough. It is also done by eroding the social bonds that liberty is built upon — the bonds that secure peaceful, willing coexistence and its concomitant: beneficially cooperative behavior.
A national divorce that separates the nation into big-government and smaller-government spheres would be a good thing, especially for the citizens of the smaller-government portion (Freedomland). But it wouldn’t restore the primacy of voluntary associations of people with common values. That rebirth of liberty, if it ever came, would come only after a long and disputatious struggle (even within Freedomland) between those who are willing and able to govern themselves and those who are constitutionally incapble of allowing others to do so.
Barring a national divorce and the good fruit that it might bear, the United States is bound to continue as it has been going for the past 120-some years, since the onset of the so-called Progressive Era. From then until now, there has been a continous tug-of-war between competing factions for the power to dictate how the whole nation conducts its affairs. The outcome — an Orwellian dystopia — is inevitable when the stronger side in the tug-of war-is the side that owns a near-monopoly on information, business, and governmental power. The only thing keeping the dystopia at bay is that the outcome of tug-of-war hangs in the balance — for now. __________ 1. Here is a summary of negative rights by Randy Barnett:
A libertarian … favors the rigorous protection of certain individual rights that define the space within which people are free to choose how to act. These fundamental rights consist of (1) the right of private property, which includes the property one has in one’s own person; (2) the right of freedom of contract by which rights are transferred by one person to another; (3) the right of first possession, by which property comes to be owned from an unowned state; (4) the right to defend oneself and others when fundamental rights are being threatened; and (5) the right to restitution or compensation from those who violate another’s fundamental rights. [“Is the Constitution Libertarian?”, Georgetown Public Law Research Paper No. 1432854 (posted at SSRN July 14, 2009), p. 3]
Borrowing from and elaborating on Barnett’s list, I come to the following set of negative rights:
freedom from force and fraud (including the right of self-defense against force)
property ownership (including the right of first possession)
freedom of contract (including contracting to employ/be employed)
freedom of association and movement
restitution or compensation for violations of the foregoing rights.
This set of negative rights would obtain in a state which devolves political decisions to the level of socially cohesive groups, while serving only as the defender of such rights (in the last resort) against domestic and foreign predators.
2. The United States today (and for a very long time) is nothing like a voluntary and enduring association of persons; it is a geopolitical entity bound by the coercive power of its central government. The States and amost all municipalities within them are the same on a smaller scale. Enduring, voluluntary associations may be found in small communities (especially those bound by a common religion and ethic roots), though many of their cherished tenets have been and will be made moot by the dictates of the central government and its lesser clones.
3. Abortion is excused as a “right”, but whence the right? Legally, in the United States, it was a matter of judicial casuistry that invoked vague essences (“privacy” and liberty”). (That it will not be banned outright in any State, perhaps with narrow exceptions, testifies to the messiness of governing more than a small group of persons bound in a long, voluntary association.) In ordinary discourse (and high-pitched protests) abortion is excused by illogical emoting. There is “a woman’s right to choose”, but the intended choice is murder. And there is “a woman’s right to control her own body”, which isn’t her own body but that of another living human being who, in almost every case, was conceived by a voluntary act whose possible consequence (pregnancy) was known to the woman before she undertook the act.
4. The glaring exception is the unrelenting campaign against smoking, which is reinforced by taxes and government edicts against smoking almost everywhere but in one’s own home. This phenomenon is understandable, however, as a form of class warfare, as in “I am an educated person with a high income, and I not only want to make myself feel superior to the working/smoking class but also to avail myself of an opportunity to rub their noses in my superiority.”
In “The Bad News about Economic Growth”, I note the dire implications of my (robust) equation relating economic growth in the U.S. to four explanatory variables:
What does the equation portend for the next 10 years? Based on the most recent values of [the four variables], the real rate of growth for the next 10 years will be about -6 percent. Yes, that’s minus 6 percent!
I have added this:
Is such a thing possible in the United States? Yes! The estimates of inflation-adjusted GDP available at the website of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (an official arm of the U.S. government) yield these frightening statistics: Constant-dollar GDP dropped at an annualized rate of -9.3 percent from 1929 to 1932, and at an annualized rate of -7.4 percent from 1929 to 1933.
[I]ntuition [is] a manifestation of intelligence, not a cause of it. To put it another way, intuition is not an emotion; it is the opposite of emotion.
Intuition is reasoning at high speed. For example, a skilled athlete knows where and when to make a move (e.g., whether and where to swing at a pitched ball) because he subconsciously makes the necessary calculations, which he could not make consciously in the split-second that is available to him once the pitcher releases the ball.
Intuition is the aspect of reasoning (rationality) that is missing from “reason” — the cornerstone of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment’s proponents and defenders are always going on about the power of logic applied to facts, and how that power brought mankind (or mankind in the West, at least) out of the benighted Middle Ages (via the Renaissance) and into the light of Modernity.
But “reason” of the kind associated with the Enlightenment is of the plodding variety, whereby “truth” is revealed at the conclusion of deliberate, conscious processes (e.g., the scientific method). But those processes are susceptible of error because they rest on often-mistaken “facts” and assumptions that are hidden from view, sometimes even unwittingly but all too often wittingly, as in the case of “climate change“.
Science, for all of its value to mankind, requires abstraction from reality. That is to say, it is reductionist. A good analogy is the arbitrary division of continuous social and scientific processes into discrete eras (the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, etc.). This ought to be a warning that mere abstractions are often, and mistakenly, taken as “facts”.
Reductionism makes it possible to “prove” almost anything by hiding errors and assumptions (wittingly or not) behind labels. Thus: x + y = z only when x and y are strictly defined and commensurate. Otherwise, x and y cannot be summed, or their summation can result in many correct values other than z. Further, as in the notable case of “climate change”, it is easy to assume (from bias or error) that z is determined only by x and y, when there are good reasons to believe that it is also determined by other factors: known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.
Such things happen because human beings are ineluctably emotional and biased creatures, and usually unaware of how their emotions and biases affect their reasoning. The Enlightenment’s proponents and defenders are no more immune from emotion and bias than the “lesser” beings whom they presume to lecture about rationality.
The plodding search for “answers” is, furthermore, inherently circumscribed because it dismisses or minimizes the vital role played by unconscious deliberation. How many times have you found the answer to a question, a problem, or a puzzle by putting aside your deliberate, conscious search for the answer, only to have it come to you in a “Eureka!” moment sometime later (perhaps after a nap or good night’s sleep). That’s your brain at work in ways that aren’t well understood.
This process (to put too fine a word on it) is known as combinatorial play. Its importance has been acknowledged by many creative persons. Combinatorial play can be thought of as slow-motion intuition, where the brain takes some time to assemble (unconsciously) existing knowledge into an answer to a question, a problem, or a puzzle.
There is also fast-motion intuition, an example of which I invoked in the quotation at the top of this post: the ability of a batter to calculate in a split-second where a pitch will be when it reaches him. Other examples abound, including such vital ones as the ability of drivers to maneuver lethal objects in infinitely varied and often treacherous conditions. Much is made of the number of fatal highway accidents; too little is made of their relative infrequency given the billions of daily opportunities for their occurrence. Imagine the carnage if drivers relied on plodding “reason” instead of fast-motion intuition.
The plodding version of “reason” that has been celebrated since the Enlightenment is therefore just one leg of a triad: thinking quickly and unconsciously, thinking somewhat less quickly and unconsciously, and thinking slowly and consciously.
Wasn’t it ever thus? Of course it was. Which means that the Enlightenment and its sequelae have merely fetishized one mode of dealing with the world and its myriad uncertainties. I would have said arriving at the truth, but it is well known (except by ignorant science-idolaters) that scientific “knowledge” is provisional and ever-changing. (Just think of the many things that were supposed to be bad for you but are now supposed to be good for you, and conversely.)
I am not a science-denier by any means. But scientific “knowledge” must be taken with copious quantities of salt because it is usually inadequate in the face of messy reality. A theoretical bridge, for example, may hold up under theoretical conditions, but it is likely to collapse when built in the real world, where there is much uncertainty about present and future conditions (e.g., the integrity of materials, adherence to best construction practices, soil conditions, the cumulative effects of traffic). An over-built bridge — the best kind — is one that allows wide margins of error for such uncertainties. The same is true of planes, trains, automobiles, buildings, and much else that our lives depend on. All such things fail less frequently than in the past not only because of the advance of knowledge but also because greater material affluence enables the use of designs and materials that afford wider margins of error.
In any event, too little credit is given to the other legs of reason’s triad: fast-motion and slow-motion intuition. Any good athlete, musician, or warrior will attest the the value former. I leave it to Albert Einstein to attest to the value of the latter,
combinatory [sic] play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought — before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others….
[F]ull consciousness is a limit case which can never be fully accomplished. This seems to me connected with the fact called the narrowness of consciousness.
With friends like libertarians, liberty needs no enemies.
I long ago concluded that the path to liberty is found in conservatism, not in what is (wrongly) called “libertarianism”. By conservatism I mean the disposition to rely on the tried-and-true, which doesn’t preclude a willingness to innovate but does insist that the acceptance of innovation must be voluntary. (See “Social Norms and Liberty” and the posts listed at the end. “True Libertarianism, One More Time” and “Why Conservatism Works” are especially relevant here.)
Among many reasons for my rejection of “libertarianism” is its essential similarity to leftism, both ideologically and in its implementation.
In politics, I claim that progressives, conservatives, and libertarians are like tribes speaking different languages. The language that resonates with one tribe does not connect with the others. As a result, political discussions do not lead to agreement. Instead, most political commentary serves to increase polarization. The points that people make do not open the minds of people on the other side. They serve to close the minds of the people on one’s own side.
Which political language do you speak? Of course, your own views are carefully nuanced, and you would never limit yourself to speaking in a limited language. So think of one of your favorite political commentators, an insightful individual with whom you generally agree. Which of the following statements would that commentator most likely make?
(P) [Progressive] My heroes are people who have stood up for the underprivileged. The people I cannot stand are the people who are indifferent to the oppression of women, minorities, and the poor.
(C) [Conservative] My heroes are people who have stood up for Western values. The people I cannot stand are the people who are indifferent to the assault on the moral virtues and traditions that are the foundation for our civilization.
(L) [Libertarian] My heroes are people who have stood up for individual rights. The people I cannot stand are the people who are indifferent to government taking away people’s ability to make their own choices….
I call this the three-axes model of political communication. A progressive will communicate along the oppressor-oppressed axis, framing issues in terms of the (P) dichotomy. A conservative will communicate along the civilization-barbarism axis, framing issues in terms of the (C) dichotomy. A libertarian will communicate along the liberty-coercion axis, framing issues in terms of the (L) dichotomy….
If there is a real difference between P and L, I cannot find it. “Liberty-coercion” is just another way of saying “oppressor-oppressed”. One who isn’t oppressed is therefore (in the view of the “progressive”) enjoying liberty, or is at least one step closer to it.
The operational similarity between leftism and “libertarianism” is the enthusiasm shown by many “libertarians” for government intervention when it advances their particular causes. The following passages, lifted from an old post of mine, elaborate on the ideological and operational similarities of leftism and “libertarianism”.
Some “libertarians” have become apologists for PCness. Will Wilkinson, for example, suggested that
most PC episodes mocked and derided by the right are not state impositions. They are generally episodes of the voluntary social enforcement of relatively newly established moral/cultural norms.
Wilkinson grossly simplified the complex dynamics of PCness. His so-called “newly established … norms” were, in fact, norms that had been embraced by élites (academics, think-tank denizens like Wilksinson, Big Tech oligarchs, etc.) and then foisted upon “the masses” by the élites in charge of government and government-controlled institutions (e.g., tax-funded universities). Thus it is no surprise that proposals to allow same-sex marriage fared poorly when they were submitted to voters. Similarly, the constitutional “right” to an abortion, invented in 1973, remained far from universally accepted until it was un-invented in 2022.
Another issue that inflames many libertarians against political correctness is the issue of speech codes on campuses. Yes, many speech codes are daft. But should people really enjoy exactly the same freedom of speech on university property that they would rightfully enjoy on their own property? Why, exactly?
If the answer is that the purposes of a university are best served by an atmosphere of free exchange of ideas — is there no validity to the claim that certain kinds of speech might tend, through an intimidating effect, to undermine just such an atmosphere?…
At my university [Auburn], several white fraternity members were recently disciplined for dressing up, some in Klan costumes and others in blackface, and enacting a mock lynching. Is the university guilty of violating their freedom of expression? I can’t see that it is. Certainly those students have a natural right to dress up as they please and engage in whatever playacting they like, so long as they conduct themselves peacefully. But there is no natural right to be a student at Auburn University.
Long — who describes himself as a “left-libertarian market anarchist” (whatever that is) — makes a clever but fallacious argument. The purposes of a university have nothing to do with the case. Speech is speech, except when it really isn’t speech, as in sit-ins (trespass), child pornography (sexual exploitation of minors), and divulging military secrets (treason, in fact if not in name).
Long is rightly disgusted by the actions of the fraternity members he mentions, but disgust does not excuse the suppression of speech by a State university. It is true that there is no “natural right” to be a student at Auburn, but there is, likewise, no “natural right” not to be offended.
The late economist Steven Horwitz was a kindred spirit (source no longer available online):
Yes, legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 involved some interference with private property and the right of association, but it also did away with a great deal of state-sponsored discrimination and was, in my view, a net gain for liberty.
Well, some parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, together with its progeny — the Civil Rights Acts of 1968 and 1991 — did advance liberty, but many parts did not. A principled libertarian would acknowledge that, and parse the Acts into their libertarian and anti-libertarian components. A moral scold who really, really wants the state to impose his attitudes on others would presume — as Horwitz does — to weigh legitimate gains (e.g., voting rights) against unconscionable losses (e.g., property rights and freedom of association). But presumptuousness comes naturally to Horwitz because he — like Lindsey, Wilkinson, and Long — stood high above reality, in his (academic) ivory tower.
Wilkinson is sympatico with Horwitz in the matter of state action:
Government attempts to guarantee the worth of our liberties by recognizing positive rights to a minimum income or certain services like health care often (but not always) undermine the framework of market and civil institutions most likely to enhance liberty over the long run, and should be limited. But this is really an empirical question about what really does maximize individuals’ chances of formulating and realizing meaningful projects and lives.
Within this framework, racism, sexism, etc., which strongly limit the useful exercise of liberty are clear evils. Now, I am ambivalent about whether the state ought to step in and do anything about it.
Wilkinson, like Horwitz, is quite willing to submit to the state (or have others do so), where state action passes some kind of cost-benefit test. (See “Utilitarianism vs. Liberty.”)
In any event, what more could the state do than it has done already? Well, there is always “hate crime” legislation, which (as Nat Hentoff pointed out) is tantamount to “thought crime” legislation. Perhaps that would satisfy Long, Wilkinson, and their brethren on the “libertarian” left. And, if that didn’t do the trick, there is always Richard Thaler’s “libertarian” paternalism (with its statist slant), and Cass Sunstein’s proposal for policing thought on the internet. Sunstein, at least, doesn’t pretend to be a libertarian.
Where is libertarianism (without the sneer quotes) to be found? In conservatism, of all places, because it is a reality-based political philosophy.
But what does conservatism have to do with libertarianism? I have in various posts essayed an answer to that question (here, here, here, and here, for example), but now I turn the floor over to John Kekes, who toward the end of “What Is Conservatism?” says this:
The traditionalism of conservatives excludes both the view that political arrangements that foster individual autonomy should take precedence over those that foster social authority and the reverse view that favours arrangements that promote social authority at the expense of individual autonomy. Traditionalists acknowledge the importance of both autonomy and authority, but they regard them as inseparable, interdependent, and equally necessary. The legitimate claims of both may be satisfied by the participation of individuals in the various traditions of their society. Good political arrangements protect these traditions and the freedom to participate in them by limiting the government’s authority to interfere with either.
Therein lies true libertarianism — true because it is attainable. Left-libertarians believe, foolishly, that liberty is to be found in the rejection of social norms. Liberty has become the first victim of the brave new disorder that they wished for.
Nothing that a moral and electoral revolution wouldn’t cure.
Theodore Dalrymple, in a typically brilliant column, “First Slowly, Then Quickly“, traces the corruption of language and values pertaining to the subject of sex; for example:
In a publication aimed at dermatologists, the Dermatology Times, we read in an article devoted to the treatment of the skin in transgender patients the following:
Patients of reproductive potential who are not…abstinent with penis-containing partners, 2 forms of contraception are required.
In other words, women who would like to be men but still have their ovaries and wombs can become pregnant by sexual intercourse with fertile men, the latter now being known as “penis-containing” persons….
At the same time as we are enjoined to think of biological sex as unimportant to the point of nonexistence, and to believe that men who can have babies by penis-containers are men in precisely the same sense that Tarzan was a man….
There are several wider cultural trends discernible in the current agitation over transsexualism, or whatever name one wishes to give it…
The first cultural trend is an increasing reluctance to accept any limitation whatsoever to the satisfaction of one’s desires that are placed by circumstances beyond one’s control, that is to say an exaggerated or exacerbated Prometheanism: You can be anything you want, without limitation, and therefore you do not have to accept anything you were born with as ineluctable….
The second trend is to magical thinking, despite the supposed rationality of our age and its vaunted defeat of superstition. We believe that we can change reality by means of mere verbal incantations…. Thus, if we go on saying long enough that women who take male hormones are men, and outlaw the opposite proposition, such women will become men.
The third trend is the worship of power. The object of deliberate language change is not to improve the state of the world, or even anyone’s state of mind, but the exertion and consolidation of power for its own sake….
The fourth trend is centralization of the marginal; that is to say, a marginal phenomenon such as transsexualism comes to occupy the center of intellectual attention. To employ a different metaphor, the tail wags the dog.
The fifth trend is to the increasing spinelessness or cowardice of much of the intelligentsia, who in this case have proved themselves astonishingly easy to intimidate, a pack of intellectual Neville Chamberlains (but Chamberlain had more excuse, for he had lived through the horror of the First World War, which he did not want to repeat). Nothing has proved too absurd for this intelligentsia to swallow; indeed, the swallowing of absurdity is easier for the intelligentsia than others, for rationalization is their métier. There is no point in being an intellectual if you think only what everyone else thinks.
Which leads to this:
The most important question is, What next?—for there will be a next, because transgressive reform is what gives meaning to life in the absence of any other meaning. My money is on incest, against which there is no rational argument these days, given the availability of birth control and abortion and the moral authority of mutual consent.
Dalrymple’s answer applies only to matters sexual. But his observations have broader implications for the fate of the West. The alarming reluctance among “wokesters” to accept natural limitations, magical thinking, centralization of the marginal, and spinelessness have burrowed into the social and economic fabric of the West. And encourage its subjugation by enemies who scoff at such “woke” delusions as transgenderism, “climate change”, “equity”, and the rest of the left’s “woke” agenda.
In America, these delusions have been accumulating since the onset of the so-called Progressive Era in the 1890s. That naissance (it was nothing like a renaissance) occurred on the (figurative) eve of my maternal grandparents’ marriage. My maternal grandmother was born in 1880 and lived to the age of 96. I was close to her from my early childhood until her death in 1977, when I was 36 years old..
She was a typical American woman of her generation, and of at least one generation to follow. She worked at a menial job until her marriage, bore and raised ten children, never traveled more than 150 miles from her home (until a late-life trip to visit a son in Florida), cooked on a wood-burning stove and lived without indoor plumbing until she was 70, never owned a TV, and never drove a car. (For more about Grandma and her progeny, see this, this, and this.)
No thanks to the Progressive Era and all that it unleashed, the America of today isn’t my grandmother’s America. Nor is it my mother’s America. Nor is it the America that I grew up in.
What is it? And what happened to make it the way that it is?
Before I try to describe the America of today and explain how it came to be, I must try to describe what it was for most Americans in the first five decades of the twentieth century:
Life, for a significant fraction of the populace — a fraction that dwindled, swelled in the 1930s, and then dwindled sharply — was a fragile thing. It was threatened by disease, malnutrition, injury, lack of adequate shelter, and much else that (as of now) has been “conquered” by economic and scientific progress. (Economic progress occurred in spite of government action — see, for example, this, this, this, and this. Scientific progress has become regress, witness the government-funded plague known as Covid-19 and the wholesale hysteria known as “climate change”.)
Physical labor was central to life and fraught with dangers that were taken in stride.
Family ties were crucial because of the foregoing.
Religious belief was taken for granted and the central tenets of the Judeo-Christian tradition guided behavior (with the usual lapses that are endemic to human nature).
The vicissitudes of life and shared religious beliefs made community (but not communism) a real thing, not a faux construct fostered by “social” media.
Social life centered on family, church, and community.
Entertainment was largely home-made and wholesome.
One’s income and wealth were one’s own responsibility.
The super-rich promoted the arts, not thought control.
Immigrants entered the country legally and studied America’s Constitution and history to become citizens. (They weren’t allowed in the back door and released into the general population to burden taxpayers.)
Fairness was striking a deal and sticking to it, not claiming to be “owed” something because of one’s color, creed, or gender-confusion.
Sex was a fact of life, and (usually) a private matter. And there were only two sexes.
Homosexuality was an aberration that undercut the social fabric and, accordingly, wasn’t flaunted or “celebrated”.
Race and racial differences (cultural, economic, criminal) were facts of life, not a “social construct”.
Crime was punished quickly and with all due severity.
College was a privilege for the brightest, not a “right” to be thrown at millions who were unfit for it.
Politicians, despite their tendency toward mendacity and venality, were by-and-large to be trusted, as long as their power was circumscribed.
Washington was a far-off place (metaphorically if not geographically) that had little to do with daily life.
What’s wrong with that list? Nothing, as far as I can see. It’s anchored in reality.
How, then, did America come to be run by a cabal of super-rich “oligarchs”, politicians, bureaucrats, academics, and “journalists” who sneer at the list and reject it, in deed if not in word?
It happened one step backward at a time. America’s old culture, along with much of its liberty and (less visibly) its prosperity, was lost step by step through a combination of chicanery (by the left) and compromise (by “centrists” and conservative dupes). The process — the culmination of which is “wokeness” — has a long history and deep roots. Those roots are not in Marxism, socialism, atheism, or any of the other left-wing “isms” (appalling and dangerous they may be). They are, as I explain here, in (classical) liberalism, the supposed bulwark of liberty and prosperity.
An “ism” is only as effective as its adherents. The adherents of (classical) liberalism are especially ineffective in the defense of liberty because they are blinded by their own rhetoric. Take Deirdre McCloskey, for example, whom Arnold Kling quotes approvingly in a piece that I eviscerated recently:
The quality of life you personally lead, dear reader, is better than the lives of your thirty-two great-great-great-great grandparents. I’ll speak for myself. An Irish peasant woman digging pratties in her lazybed in 1805 or a Norwegian farmer of thirty acres of rock soil in Dimmelsvik in 1800 or the American daughter of poor English people in 1795 had brutish and short lives. Many of them could not read. Their horizons were narrow. Their lives were toilsome and bitter….
Richer and more urban people, contrary to what the magazines of opinion sometimes suggest, are less materialistic, less violent, less superficial than poor and rural people. Because people in capitalist countries already possess the material, they are less attached to their possessions than people in poor countries. And because they have more to lose from a society of violence, they resist it.
… The richer, more urban, more bourgeois people… have larger, not smaller, spiritual lives than their ancestors of the pastoral. They have more, not fewer, real friends than their great-great-great-great grandparents in “closed-corporate” villages. They have broader, not narrower, choices of identity than the one imposed on them by the country, custom, language, and religion of their birth. They have deeper, not shallower, contacts with the transcendent of art or science or God, and sometimes even of nature, than the superstitious peasants and haunted hunter-gatherers from whom we all descend.4
That drips with smugness and condescension. And it wildly mischaracterizes the wealthy “elites” who have taken charge in the West. As I will discuss, there is noting spiritual about them.
McCloskey, who is an economist of some note, should know better than to make what amounts to interpersonal utility comparisons. She writes as if she were able to evaluate the “utility” of the dead and weigh it against the “utility” of the living. No such evaluation is possible, even for the living. The dead are beyond reach, of course, but they certainly weren’t able to weigh their circumstances against the unpredictable circumstances of their descendants and find themselves wanting — materially or spiritually — relative to those as-yet-unborn descendants.
All that McCloskey has told is is that she (formerly he) views his/her way of life as superior to that of the unwashed masses, living and dead. Further, holding that view — which is typical of liberals classical and modern (i.e., statists) — he/she obviously believes that the superior way of life should be adopted by the unwashed — for their own good, of course. (If this isn’t to be accomplished by force, as statists would prefer, then by education and example. This would include, but not be limited to, choosing a new sexual identity if one is deluded enough to believe that he/she was “assigned” the wrong one at birth.)
It is hard to tell McCloskey’s attitude from that of a member of the “woke” elite, though he/she undoubtedly deny being such a person. I am willing to bet, however, that most of McCloskey’s ilk (if not he/she him/herself) voted enthusiastically for “moderate” Joe Biden because rude, crude Donald Trump offended their tender sensibilities (and threatened their statist agenda). And they did so knowing that Biden, despite his self-proclaimed “moderation”, was and is allied with leftists whose statist ambitions for the United States are an affront to every tenet of classical liberalism, not the least of which is freedom of speech. Shallowness, thy name is (classical) liberalism (when it is not never-Trump “conservativism”.)
What is a “wokester”, then? A “wokester” is someone with an anti-American agenda has become impatient with such trifles as freedom of speech and due process of law for those who oppose that agenda. Here is Bari Weiss on the subject:
Let me offer the briefest overview of the core beliefs of the Woke Revolution, which are abundantly clear to anyone willing to look past the hashtags and the jargon.
It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools. And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.
So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings.
Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.
In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully.
In this ideology, if you do not tweet the right tweet or share the right slogan, your whole life can be ruined. Just ask Tiffany Riley, a Vermont school principal who was fired—fired—because she said she supports black lives but not the organization Black Lives Matter.
In this ideology, the past cannot be understood on its own terms, but must be judged through the morals and mores of the present. It is why statues of Grant and Washington are being torn down. And it is why William Peris, a UCLA lecturer and an Air Force veteran, was investigated for reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” out loud in class.
In this ideology, intentions don’t matter. That is why Emmanuel Cafferty, a Hispanic utility worker at San Diego Gas and Electric, was fired for making what someone said he thought was a white-supremacist hand gesture—when in fact he was cracking his knuckles out of his car window.
In this ideology, the equality of opportunity is replaced with equality of outcome as a measure of fairness. If everyone doesn’t finish the race at the same time, the course must have been defective. Thus, the argument to get rid of the SAT. Or the admissions tests for public schools like Stuyvesant in New York or Lowell in San Francisco.
In this ideology, you are guilty for the sins of your fathers. In other words: You are not you. You are only a mere avatar of your race or your religion or your class. That is why third-graders in Cupertino, California, were asked to rate themselves in terms of their power and privilege. In third grade.
In this system, we are all placed neatly on a spectrum of “privileged” to “oppressed.” We are ranked somewhere on this spectrum in different categories: race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Then we are given an overall score, based on the sum of these rankings. Having privilege means that your character and your ideas are tainted. This is why, one high-schooler in New York tells me, students in his school are told, “If you are white and male, you are second in line to speak.” This is considered a normal and necessary redistribution of power.
Racism has been redefined. It is no longer about discrimination based on the color of someone’s skin. Racism is any system that allows for disparate outcomes between racial groups. If disparity is present, as the high priest of this ideology, Ibram X. Kendi, has explained, racism is present. According to this totalizing new view, we are all either racist or anti-racist. To be a Good Person and not a Bad Person, you must be an “anti-racist.” There is no neutrality. There is no such thing as “not racist.”
Most important: In this revolution, skeptics of any part of this radical ideology are recast as heretics. Those who do not abide by every single aspect of its creed are tarnished as bigots, subjected to boycotts and their work to political litmus tests. The Enlightenment, as the critic Edward Rothstein has put it, has been replaced by the exorcism.
What we call “cancel culture” is really the justice system of this revolution. And the goal of the cancellations is not merely to punish the person being cancelled. The goal is to send a message to everyone else: Step out of line and you are next.
And:
It has worked. A recent Cato [Institute] study found that 62 percent of Americans are afraid to voice their true views. Nearly a quarter of American academics endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences.
It has worked because it is the culmination of a decades of indoctrination in public schools and universities — indoctrination that derides and denies the America that I described earlier. It has worked because wealthy “elites” in positions of power — academic power, corporate power, media power, and governmental power — are among the indoctrinated are able to make it work. And if they are not indoctrinated, they are willing and able to make it work for their own enrichment and power.
Why would they do that? For the perquisites of being in power and being allied with the all-powerful state. Here, for example, is Theodore Dalyrmple, writing about Britain (though he could just as well be writing about America or another other rich Western nation):
Britain has pioneered and is now a world leader in a phenomenon that might be called legalized corruption or corruption without breaking the law. This allows private looting of funds raised by taxation and government borrowing on an unprecedented scale. Combined with the moral and intellectual corruption of such services as the police, who indulge in para-police activities such as eliminating hatred from the human breast while ignoring burglaries, arson, and assault, value for money has become a concept without meaning or application….
The state, said Bastiat, is the means by which everybody seeks to live at everyone else’s expense. (You need not believe that this is the only function of the state to see the truth, or strong element of truth, in Bastiat’s dictum.) But in the past what most people wanted from the state was a secure living and a decent pension rather than a pharaonic scale of living. In Britain, at least, Mrs. Thatcher opened the Pandora’s box of bureaucratic ambition, and out flew all those soi-disant chief executives, directors of operations, deputy directors of business development, etc., and now they will never return where they belong.
Seen in this light, the recent shindig or orgy [“climate change” conference] in Glasgow becomes rather more intelligible. There were 400 private jets said to have landed, like a swarm of bees (or is it vultures?) at Glasgow airport, for this event. It would be instructive to know how many of the owners of those jets owed their wealth in large part to favors done them by governments. Not all, probably, but many. We do not live in a liberal order, at least not liberal in the classical economic sense, but in a corporatist one, or one rather like the apartheid regime in South Africa, with its socialism and positive discrimination for one race. No doubt corporatism is to some extent inevitable because of the complexity of modern technology, which we cannot, or do not wish to, do without, but at least let us get our terminology right.
According to Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chair of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the 4-IR [fourth Industrial Revolution] follows the first, second, and third Industrial Revolutions—the mechanical, electrical, and digital, respectively. The 4-IR builds on the digital revolution, but Schwab sees the 4-IR as an exponential takeoff and convergence of existing and emerging fields, including Big Data; artificial intelligence; machine learning; quantum computing; and genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. The consequence is the merging of the physical, digital, and biological worlds. The blurring of these categories ultimately challenges the very ontologies by which we understand ourselves and the world, including “what it means to be human.”5….
[I]f existing 4-IR developments are any indication of the future, then Schwab’s enthusiasm is misplaced, and the 4-IR is misrepresented. These developments already include internet algorithms that feed users prescribed news and advertisements and downrank or exclude banned content; algorithms that censor social media content and consign “dangerous” individuals and organizations to digital gulags; apps that track and trace covid suspects and report violators to the police; robot police with QR code scanners to identify and round up dissenters; and smart cities where everyone is a digital entity to be monitored, surveilled, and recorded, while data on their every move is collected, collated, stored, and attached to a digital identity and social credit score….
Many positive developments may come from the 4-IR, but unless it is taken out of the hands of the corporate-socialist technocrats, it will constitute a virtual prison.
Under the Great Reset governance model, states and favored corporations form “public-private partnerships” in control of governance. The configuration yields a corporate-state hybrid largely unaccountable to the constituents of national governments….
In Google Archipelago, I argued that leftist authoritarianism is the political ideology and modus operandi of what I call Big Digital, and that Big Digital is the leading edge of an emerging world system. Big Digital is the communications, ideological, and technological arm of an emerging corporate socialism. The Great Reset is the name that has since been given to the project of establishing this world system.
Just as Klaus Schwab and the WEF hoped, the covid crisis has accelerated the development of the Great Reset’s corporate-socialist statism. Developments advancing the Great Reset agenda include the Federal Reserve’s unrestrained printing of money, the subsequent inflation, the increasing taxation on everything imaginable, the increased dependence on the state, the supply chain crisis, the restrictions and job losses due to vaccine mandates, and the prospect of personal carbon allowances.10 Altogether, these and other such policies constitute a coordinated attack on the majority. Ironically, they also represent the “fairness” aspect of the Great Reset—if we properly understand fairness to mean leveling the economic status of the “average American” with those in less “privileged” regions. And this is one of the functions of woke ideology11—to make the majority in developed countries feel unworthy of their “privileged” lifestyles and consumption patterns, which the elite are in the process of resetting to a reduced and static new normal.
Over the past twenty-one months, the response to the covid-19 scourge has consolidated the monopolistic corporations’ grip on the economy on top, while advancing “actually-existing socialism” below. In partnership with Big Tech, Big Pharma, the legacy media, national and international health agencies, and compliant populations, hitherto “democratic” Western states are increasingly being transformed into totalitarian regimes modeled after China, seemingly overnight. I need not provide a litany of the tyranny and abuses. You can read about them on alternative news sites—until you can no longer read about them even there.12
The Great Reset, then, is not merely a conspiracy theory; it is an open, avowed, and planned project, and it is well underway.
As Rahm Emanuel infamously said, never let a serious crisis go to waste. In other words, exploit it to the hilt in order to increase the power and scope of government.
Therein lies the story of the dissolution of America (and the West). Trust in government, whether sincere or cynical, has displaced personal responsibility, which was — with other aspects of virtue — the mainspring of the American character. The mainspring wore down under the pressure of Progressivism, the crisis that was the Great Depression, the growth of government spawned by that crisis, the false sense of security generated by the welfare state, and — paradoxically — just enough prosperity (for which proponents of the welfare state falsely claim credit) to make Americans (figuratively and too often literally) fat, dumb, and happy.
Economic security — or the illusion of it — is an enemy of liberty. And the failure of liberty eventually brings about the failure of economic security because “Big Brother” destroys the initiative (springing from personal responsibility) that makes possible true prosperity, which the printing of money cannot sustain.
“Big Brother” not only destroys personal responsibility, he also destroys the communal esprit that is animated by mutual trust, respect, and beneficial cooperation. In other words “Big Brother” destroys the essence of liberty. And, to that end, “Big Brother” has become the manservant of “wokeness”.
What do “wokesters” want? Their agenda has coalesced around a long list of ideological desiderata. Some of them are hangovers from the Progressive Era and FDR’s New Deal. Most have arisen in the past six decades, with the most bizarre among them having been hatched in the past decade. Here are as many of them as I can list without retching:
income redistribution
universal health care
abortion, for any reason, up to and even beyond the birth of a child
reverse anti-racism, anti-sexism, etc., aimed mainly at the imagined enemy of “equity”: the straight, white male of European descent
anti-whiteness, just because whites do happen to be smarter and less violent than blacks (on average)
sexual libertinism and “reproductive liberty”
“prison reform” (i.e., lighter and shorter sentences, or none)
de-funding police departments because of an occasional wrongful death (and many more debunked charges of racism and brutality)
reducing defense expenditures because peace is just a matter of diplomacy
cultivating convenient scapegoats (e.g., “Big Business” before much of it joined AMBT, Trump, and Russia)
saving the planet from an imaginary incendiary death, which is somehow to be accompanied by ever-rising seas
replacing reliable sources of energy with unreliable ones because they are “sustainable” (a mockery of the word)
debasing the language and erasing the nation’s cultural heritage on the pretext that some parts of it are “offensive” (mainly to effete whites who cringe at a sketch of a gun)
the practical debarment of religion from political discourse (Christianity and Judaism, to be precise)
and anything else that bestirs the combination of utter naivete and adolescent rebelliousness which characterizes AMBT.
The list is always growing because the quest for cosmic justice never ends. It cannot end because it is impossible to attain: Reality — the stubbornness of human nature, the limitations of nature, the prohibitive costs of attaining cosmic justice — always intervenes.
But that doesn’t deter the “woke”, who have a cult-like devotion to the attainment of their desiderata. Cult-like because it is the goals that matter, not the possibility of their attainment or the social and economic costs of striving to attain them. It is a cult ruled by feelings, not facts.
Any failure to advance the cult’s agenda is called an attack on democracy, as if the cult had anything to do with democracy. If it did, it wouldn’t be in the business of trying to suppress dissent from cult’s tenets; it would react peacefully (in rhetoric and deed) to judicial decrees that thwart the accomplishment of its desiderata (contra the reaction to Supreme Court rulings on guns, abortion, and EPA’s overreach); and it would accept the outcomes of election results that rebuff its candidates. If it did, its members would understand that they, not their political opponents, are the real fascists to be loathed and feared.
Nor are the members of the cult devotees of science. They use the word cynically to justify their dictatorial impulses.
Actual (representative) democracy and actual, fact-based, refutable science are to the cult as sunlight is to a vampire.
The cult is abetted by a large segment of the populace. Having captured the Democrat Party, the cult has captured some of its habitual adherents. (Though there are signs that some of those adherents have had enough of the “woke” agenda.) Then there are the over-educated and affluent professional classes, whose members believe in the idealistic, pseudo-scientific malarkey that propels “wokeism”, and who cannot see (or do not care) about its effects on the nation’s social and economic fabric. There is also the “education” industry, which has for decades faithfully regurgitated the cult’s agenda and indoctrinated tens of million of young Americans. It deserves special mention and a place in the Ninth Circle of Hell. As for the many others unmentioned here, theirs is a combination of venality, envy, ignorance, and the aforementioned adolescent rebelliousness at work. Not every member of the cult ascribes to every item on the cult’s agenda, but all support it because they believe — falsely and foolishly — that its attainment will be to their benefit.
The cult would not be where it is today without the aid and comfort of professional politicians — Democrats, of course. Many of them may not be true believers, but they evidently believe that their profession of faith in the cult’s agenda helps them to attain power, which is what they mean when they say that they are public servants.
The cult and its enablers are so committed (in practice if not in conscience) to the cult’s desiderata that the attainment of those desiderata justifies the use of any means to advance them. Limits placed by the Constitution and constitutional laws are sundered; ideological opponents are slandered, libeled, and shamed; lying (including the fabrication and use of the so-called Steele dossier) and cheating (as in rigging elections) are taken for granted; violence is condoned or encouraged — and excused because it is done by the “oppressed” (or something along those lines).
In a phrase: Their ends justify their means.
The long list of ends comes down to three things:
The first thing is to make people dependent on government (a dependency that began in earnest under FDR).
The second, and related, thing is to relieve people of taking personal responsibility for their life outcomes. (FDR, again, takes “credit” for having initiated this practice.)
The third thing is to accomplish the first two things not just by making people dependent on government and relieving them of personal responsibility, but also to dragoon the population at large into supporting the first two things (whether or not they support them). This used to be done by regulation and taxation. It is now being done (in partnership with Big Tech) by controlling speech under the rubric of combating “disinformation”.
It is the preservation and advancement of the cult’s agenda that drives the myth of the “insurrection” on January 6, 2021.
Which brings me to Donald Trump. It was he who crystallized opposition to the agenda of “wokeism”. For that sin he was the subject and victim of the hoax that begin during his candidacy and endures to this day. For that sin he was the victim of the greatest electoral fraud in this country’s history.
If the acts perpetrated against Trump because of his opposition to the cult’s agenda do not convince you that the cult must — must — be defeated, nothing will. The coming mid-term elections may put the country back on the right road. But it will take victory — a resounding GOP victory — in the presidential election of 2024 to stride further down that road and away from the Sovietization of America.
My hope for 2024 is that a politician who is more articulate, personally credible, and bureaucratically adept than Donald Trump will be the GOP’s candidate for president. If the election of 2016 was the Flight 93 election — as Michael Anton dubbed it — the election of 2024 will be the Armageddon election.
You may not know about the Rahn Curve, but it’s central to the story I’m about to tell. The theory behind the Rahn Curve is simple — but not simplistic. A relatively small government with powers limited mainly to the protection of citizens and their property is worth more than its cost to taxpayers because it fosters productive economic activity (not to mention liberty). But additional government spending hinders productive activity in many ways, which are discussed in Daniel Mitchell’s paper, “The Impact of Government Spending on Economic Growth.” (I would add to Mitchell’s list the burden of regulatory activity, which grows even when government does not.)
What does the Rahn Curve look like? Mitchell estimates this relationship between government spending and economic growth:
The curve is dashed rather than solid at low values of government spending because it has been decades since the governments of developed nations have spent as little as 20 percent of GDP. But as Mitchell and others note, the combined spending of governments in the U.S. was 10 percent (and less) until the eve of the Great Depression. And it was in the low-spending, laissez-faire era from the end of the Civil War to the early 1900s that the U.S. enjoyed its highest sustained rate of economic growth.
Elsewhere, I estimated the Rahn curve that spans most of the history of the United States. I came up with this relationship (terms modified for simplicity (with a slight cosmetic change in terminology):
Yg = 0.054 -0.066F
To be precise, it’s the annualized rate of growth over the most recent 10-year span (Yg), as a function of F (fraction of GDP spent by governments at all levels) in the preceding 10 years. The relationship is lagged because it takes time for government spending (and related regulatory activities) to wreak their counterproductive effects on economic activity. Also, I include transfer payments (e.g., Social Security) in my measure of F because there’s no essential difference between transfer payments and many other kinds of government spending. They all take money from those who produce and give it to those who don’t (e.g., government employees engaged in paper-shuffling, destructive social-engineering schemes, and counterproductive regulatory activities).
When F is greater than the amount needed for national defense and domestic justice — no more than 0.1 (10 percent of GDP) — it discourages productive, growth-producing, job-creating activity. And because government spending weighs most heavily on taxpayers with above-average incomes, higher rates of F also discourage saving, which finances growth-producing investments in new businesses, business expansion, and capital (i.e., new and more productive business assets, both physical and intellectual).
I’ve taken a closer look at the post-World War II numbers because of the marked decline in the real rate of GDP growth since the end of the war. (A smoothed trend line goes from 4.2 percent in 1947 to 1.6 percent in 2022).
Here’s the revised result, which spans 1946-2021 and accounts for more variables:
Yg = real rate of GDP growth in a 10-year span (annualized)
F = fraction of GDP spent by governments at all levels during the preceding 10 years
A = the constant-dollar value of private nonresidential assets (business assets) as a fraction of GDP, averaged over the preceding 10 years
R = average number of Federal Register pages, in thousands, for the preceding 10-year period
P = growth in the CPI-U during the preceding 10 years (annualized).
(The r-squared of the equation is 0.74 and the F-value is 1.9E-14. The p-values of the intercept and coefficients are 0.050, 1.33E-08, 2.27E-09, 5.95E-07, and 0.0030. The standard error of the estimate is 0.0048, that is, about half a percentage point.)
Here’s how the equation stacks up against actual 10-year rates of real GDP growth:
What does the equation portend for the next 10 years? Based on the most recent values of F, A, R, and P, the real rate of growth for the next 10 years will be about -6 percent. Yes, that’s minus 6 percent!
Is such a thing possible in the United States? Yes! The estimates of inflation-adjusted GDP available at the website of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (an official arm of the U.S. government) yield these frightening statistics: Constant-dollar GDP dropped at an annualized rate of -9.3 percent from 1929 to 1932, and at an annualized rate of -7.4 percent from 1929 to 1933.
TV offerings suggest that the peak is in the past.
The title of this post is taken from the title of a post at BBC Future by David Robson, a journalist who has written a book called The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes. Inasmuch as “humanity” isn’t a collective to which “intelligence” can be attached, the title is more titillating than informative about the substance of the post, wherein Mr. Robson says some sensible things; for example:
When the researcher James Flynn looked at [IQ] scores over the past century, he discovered a steady increase – the equivalent of around three points a decade. Today, that has amounted to 30 points in some countries.
Perhaps the best comparison is our change in height: we are 11cm (around 5 inches) taller today than in the 19th Century, for instance – but that doesn’t mean our genes have changed; it just means our overall health has changed.
Indeed, some of the same factors may underlie both shifts. Improved medicine, reducing the prevalence of childhood infections, and more nutritious diets, should have helped our bodies to grow taller and our brains to grow smarter, for instance. Some have posited that the increase in IQ might also be due to a reduction of the lead in petrol, which may have stunted cognitive development in the past. The cleaner our fuels, the smarter we became.
This is unlikely to be the complete picture, however, since our societies have also seen enormous shifts in our intellectual environment, which may now train abstract thinking and reasoning from a young age. In education, for instance, most children are taught to think in terms of abstract categories (whether animals are mammals or reptiles, for instance). We also lean on increasingly abstract thinking to cope with modern technology. Just think about a computer and all the symbols you have to recognise and manipulate to do even the simplest task. Growing up immersed in this kind of thinking should allow everyone [hyperbole alert] to cultivate the skills needed to perform well in an IQ test….
[Psychologist Robert Sternberg] is not alone in questioning whether the Flynn effect really represented a profound improvement in our intellectual capacity, however. James Flynn himself has argued that it is probably confined to some specific reasoning skills. In the same way that different physical exercises may build different muscles – without increasing overall “fitness” – we have been exercising certain kinds of abstract thinking, but that hasn’t necessarily improved all cognitive skills equally. And some of those other, less well-cultivated, abilities could be essential for improving the world in the future.
Consider the abundant literature on our cognitive biases. Something that is presented as “95% fat-free” sounds healthier than “5% fat”, for instance – a phenomenon known as the framing bias. It is now clear that a high IQ does little to help you avoid this kind of flaw, meaning that even the smartest people can be swayed by misleading messages.
People with high IQs are also just as susceptible to the confirmation bias – our tendency to only consider the information that supports our pre-existing opinions, while ignoring facts that might contradict our views. That’s a serious issue when we start talking about things like politics.
Nor can a high IQ protect you from the sunk cost bias – the tendency to throw more resources into a failing project, even if it would be better to cut your losses – a serious issue in any business. (This was, famously, the bias that led the British and French governments to continue funding Concorde planes, despite increasing evidence that it would be a commercial disaster.)
Highly intelligent people are also not much better at tests of “temporal discounting”, which require you to forgo short-term gains for greater long-term benefits. That’s essential, if you want to ensure your comfort for the future.
Besides a resistance to these kinds of biases, there are also more general critical thinking skills – such as the capacity to challenge your assumptions, identify missing information, and look for alternative explanations for events before drawing conclusions. These are crucial to good thinking, but they do not correlate very strongly with IQ, and do not necessarily come with higher education. One study in the USA found almost no improvement in critical thinking throughout many people’s degrees.
Given these looser correlations, it would make sense that the rise in IQs has not been accompanied by a similarly miraculous improvement in all kinds of decision making.
So much for the bright people who promote and pledge allegiance to socialism and its various manifestations (e.g., the Green New Deal, and Medicare for All). So much for the bright people who suppress speech with which they disagree because it threatens the groupthink that binds them.
Robson also discusses evidence of dysgenic effects in IQ:
Whatever the cause of the Flynn effect, there is evidence that we may have already reached the end of this era – with the rise in IQs stalling and even reversing. If you look at Finland, Norway and Denmark, for instance, the turning point appears to have occurred in the mid-90s, after which average IQs dropped by around 0.2 points a year. That would amount to a seven-point difference between generations.
Psychologist (and intelligence specialist) James Thompson has addressed dysgenic effects at his blog on the website of The Unz Review. In particular, he had a lot to say about the work of an intelligence researcher named Michael Woodley. Here’s a sample from a post by Thompson:
We keep hearing that people are getting brighter, at least as measured by IQ tests. This improvement, called the Flynn Effect, suggests that each generation is brighter than the previous one. This might be due to improved living standards as reflected in better food, better health services, better schools and perhaps, according to some, because of the influence of the internet and computer games. In fact, these improvements in intelligence seem to have been going on for almost a century, and even extend to babies not in school. If this apparent improvement in intelligence is real we should all be much, much brighter than the Victorians.
Although IQ tests are good at picking out the brightest, they are not so good at providing a benchmark of performance. They can show you how you perform relative to people of your age, but because of cultural changes relating to the sorts of problems we have to solve, they are not designed to compare you across different decades with say, your grandparents.
Is there no way to measure changes in intelligence over time on some absolute scale using an instrument that does not change its properties? In the Special Issue on the Flynn Effect of the journal Intelligence Drs Michael Woodley (UK), Jan te Nijenhuis (the Netherlands) and Raegan Murphy (Ireland) have taken a novel approach in answering this question. It has long been known that simple reaction time is faster in brighter people. Reaction times are a reasonable predictor of general intelligence. These researchers have looked back at average reaction times since 1889 and their findings, based on a meta-analysis of 14 studies, are very sobering.
It seems that, far from speeding up, we are slowing down. We now take longer to solve this very simple reaction time “problem”. This straightforward benchmark suggests that we are getting duller, not brighter. The loss is equivalent to about 14 IQ points since Victorian times.
So, we are duller than the Victorians on this unchanging measure of intelligence. Although our living standards have improved, our minds apparently have not. What has gone wrong?
The Flynn Effect co-exists with the Woodley Effect. Since roughly 1870 the Flynn Effect has been stronger, at an apparent 3 points per decade. The Woodley effect is weaker, at very roughly 1 point per decade. Think of Flynn as the soil fertilizer effect and Woodley as the plant genetics effect. The fertilizer effect seems to be fading away in rich countries, while continuing in poor countries, though not as fast as one would desire. The genetic effect seems to show a persistent gradual fall in underlying ability.
Woodley’s claim is based on a set of papers written since 2013, which have been recently reviewed by [Matthew] Sarraf.
The review is unusual, to say the least. It is rare to read so positive a judgment on a young researcher’s work, and it is extraordinary that one researcher has changed the debate about ability levels across generations, and all this in a few years since starting publishing in psychology.
The table in that review which summarizes the main findings is shown below. As you can see, the range of effects is very variable, so my rough estimate of 1 point per decade is a stab at calculating a median. It is certainly less than the Flynn Effect in the 20th Century, though it may now be part of the reason for the falling of that effect, now often referred to as a “negative Flynn effect”….
Here are the findings which I have arranged by generational decline (taken as 25 years).
Colour acuity, over 20 years (0.8 generation) 3.5 drop/decade.
3D rotation ability, over 37 years (1.5 generations) 4.8 drop/decade.
Reaction times, females only, over 40 years (1.6 generations) 1.8 drop/decade.
Working memory, over 85 years (3.4 generations) 0.16 drop/decade.
Reaction times, over 120 years (4.8 generations) 0.57-1.21 drop/decade.
Fluctuating asymmetry, over 160 years (6.4 generations) 0.16 drop/decade.
Either the measures are considerably different, and do not tap the same underlying loss of mental ability, or the drop is unlikely to be caused by dysgenic decrements from one generation to another. Bar massive dying out of populations, changes do not come about so fast from one generation to the next. The drops in ability are real, but the reason for the falls are less clear. Gathering more data sets would probably clarify the picture, and there is certainly cause to argue that on various real measures there have been drops in ability. Whether this is dysgenics or some other insidious cause is not yet clear to me.…
My view is that whereas formerly the debate was only about the apparent rise in ability, discussions are now about the co-occurrence of two trends: the slowing down of the environmental gains and the apparent loss of genetic quality. In the way that James Flynn identified an environmental/cultural effect, Michael Woodley has identified a possible genetic effect, and certainly shown that on some measures we are doing less well than our ancestors.
How will they be reconciled? Time will tell, but here is a prediction. I think that the Flynn effect will fade in wealthy countries, persist with fading effect in poor countries, and that the Woodley effect will continue, though I do not know the cause of it.
Here’s my hypothesis, which I offer on the assumption that the test-takers are demographically representative of the whole populations of the countries in which they were tested: The less-intelligent portions of the populace are breeding faster than the more-intelligent portions.
Just for the fun of it, let’s divide the world into the old racial categories — Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid — and stipulate that they are associated with broadly different cultural heritages. By cultural heritages, I mean not just such things as weird languages, funny dance steps, and peculiar ways of decorating oneself, but also such things as the STEM disciplines, the technologies resulting from their application, and various other refinements (or lack thereof) in the various arts (e.g., plastic, visual, musical, and terpsichorean).
Now, it is widely believed by those persons who are sensitive to such things that Caucasoids commit grievous social sins when they adopt and adapt (i.e., “appropriate”) the cultural artifacts of Mongoloids and Negroids. But Mongoloids and Negroids are free of sin when they appropriate the cultural artifacts of Caucasoids.
This is a good thing for Mongoloids and Negroids because, unlike those Caucasoids who claim to detest cultural appropriation, they know where they would be without it. Where’s that? Living in primitive conditions without the following (and much more):
Computers (of all sizes)
Internet
Smart phones
Radio and TV
Movies
Automobiles (of all kinds), airplanes, and trains (including subways)
Mass production of myriad products, from foodstuffs to folderol
Complex and efficient distribution networks for the aforesaid products
The vast array of services that has accompanies, enabled, and evolved with the aforesaid artifacts (and other)
Classical music
Country music
Various sports (e.g., baseball, basketball, soccer, football)
That’s enough of that.
Now consider the number of Mongoloids and Negroids (billions, actually) who benefit from such things. And consider the number of Mongoloids and Negroids in the U.S. (millions, certainly) who are among the country’s top earners because of such things.
Where would those billions and millions be without “cultural appropriation”?
So, as a Caucasoid, I am quite willing to forgo “cultural appropriation” and to repudiate its benefits if my brethren of color will join me in the noble effort to eliminate cross-cultural contamination.
Politics and Prosperity 