Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

There Are Free Markets And There Is Government Control. There Is No Third Way.

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Every government intervention into the economy may not be socialism, but it is a step toward socialism.

Interventionists claim to advocate for a ‘third way’ of economic organization, one that preserves the productive nature of capitalism, while merely reining in some of its destructive excesses.

For instance, Sen. Elizabeth Warren last year described herself as a “capitalist to the bone,” even declaring “I believe in markets and the benefits they can produce when they work.”

However, she added the caveat that it is “markets with rules” that can create value and insisted “markets worked better” during the timeframe of 1935 to 1980 in large part due to “more aggressive regulation of markets.”

But is there a reasonable “third way”?

The defining difference between socialism and capitalism, as described by Ludwig von Mises in his 1950 essay “ Middle of the Road Policy Leads to Socialism,” is “the substitution of public control of the means of production for private control.”

More properly understood, socialism would eliminate the private ownership of the means of production by capitalists.

So efforts to impose “more aggressive regulation of markets” – which typically amount to more confiscatory taxes and stricter government regulations – may fall short of actual socialism, but erode the defining characteristic of capitalism, namely private ownership over the means of production.

It is important here to note that ownership implies the right to utilize, trade or otherwise dispose of property as the owner sees fit, as long as his actions don’t infringe on the rights of others.

Any restrictions on the owner’s use, therefore, represents an erosion of private property rights over the means of production, and a step in the direction of centralized, or public, control over those means.

Taxes, naturally, erode ownership rights of the capitalist by forcibly confiscating a portion of the fruits of the capitalist’s utilization of the means of production under his ownership, and shift them into the hands of a centralized authority.

Regulations restricting free exchange in the marketplace likewise curtail private ownership rights. Indeed, as Mises discussed, establishing price controls even over one product will not only restrict the free exchange of that item, it will lead to a domino effect whereby the end result may be full-blown socialism.

Take the case of a price ceiling imposed by the government on milk, established behind the reason to make milk affordable, and thus available, to more consumers. “The result is that the marginal producers of milk, those producing at the highest cost, now incur losses” because they are unable to sell their product at a profit, wrote Mises.

In response, these producers will instead use their means of production like cows, farm equipment and labor to produce, for instance, butter, cheese or meat. The result will be less milk available for consumers.

As such, the price ceiling will create a condition contrary to what the government intended with the ceiling in the first place. It brings about a state of affairs “even less desirable than the previous state of affairs which it was designed to improve,” wrote Mises.

To correct this situation, the government then must add “a second decree fixing the prices of the factors of production necessary for the production of milk” in order for the marginal producers to no longer suffer losses.

But then the supply of the factors of production for milk will end up being reduced, “and again the government is back where it started,” observed Mises. This additional intervention will set off a chain reaction that quickly spreads, as “the same story repeats itself on a remoter plane.”

If the government doesn’t want to admit defeat and wants to avoid shortages of milk, it will have to continue to set price ceilings for those factors necessary to produce the factors of production for milk, and then for the factors needed to produce those factors, and so on, ad infinitum.

“Thus the government is forced to go further and further, fixing step by step the prices of all consumers’ goods and of all the factors of production” in order to see the amount of milk the government wants to see produced, Mises wrote.

And no industry can be excluded from these price controls, because, as Mises pointed out, “capital and labor would tend to flow into them and the result would be a drop in the supply of those goods” that had their prices fixed by government order.

At this point of government control of prices over all the means of production, Mises concluded, “This is no longer capitalism, it is all-around planning by the government, it is socialism.”

This was no theorizing, either. As Mises pointed out, during World War II “Great Britain again resorted to price ceilings for a few vital commodities,” which lead to a chain reaction just as Mises described until the country had “substituted all-around planning of the country’s whole economy for economic freedom.” By the time the war concluded, “Great Britain was a socialist commonwealth.”

There is no sustainable “third way” to organize the economy. The fundamental struggle is between capitalism and socialism, between true private ownership over the means of production and their collective ownership.

Any intervention, even those thought to be benign, eats away at private ownership rights and pushes the economy toward socialism. As Mises argued: “Interventionism cannot be considered as an economic system destined to stay. It is a method for the transformation of capitalism into socialism by a series of successive steps.”

Bradley Thomas via mises.org

Government Can’t Solve The Nation’s Problems. Let’s Try Voluntarism And Civil Society Instead.

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A recent Gallup report revealed a paradox of today’s national political debate: While a number of candidates on the campaign trail say more government will help solve the country’s problems, people increasingly believe government itself is the No. 1 problem. Further, Americans’ trust in the federal government’s ability to solve problems is at its lowest point in decades.

This isn’t surprising to those who believe in the power of independent problem-solving. In fact, it’s encouraging. For if people rely less on their national government, the more important civil society becomes. It’s our local institutions—schools, churches, voluntary associations—that are most likely to guide behaviors and transform lives, not the wishlist of politicians in Washington.

America’s commitment to civil society has been a hallmark of our country’s exceptionalism. It’s the intangible glue outside of government that binds us as a nation. And we must not take it for granted.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed in early 19th century America that one of the country’s most remarkable aspects was the extraordinary participation of citizens in local governance and civil society.  “With much care and skill, power has been broken into fragments in the American township, so that the maximum possible number of people have some concern with public affairs,” he wrote.

Americans are incredibly generous, ranking fifth among 140 countries in the percentage who had volunteered with an organization.

Although America today is vastly different, our strong tradition of local control, can-do attitude, and service to others remains a seminal characteristic of our country. This never stood out to me more than when I was an ambassador in central Europe. It was very clear that donating money or volunteering time was simply not a natural or expected part of the culture.

This observation is substantiated by research. As author Jeremy Beer has pointed out, the value of American philanthropy is equivalent to 5.5 percent of the national GDP, by far the highest in the world. No other country reaches two percent of GDP.

When it comes to volunteering, Americans too, are incredibly generous, ranking fifth among 140 countries in the percentage who had volunteered with an organization. Encouragingly, volunteering in the U.S. has hit a record high, with citizens volunteering nearly 6.9 billion hours, worth an estimated $167 billion in economic value, according to a 2018 report by the Corporation for National and Community Service.

We often see independent problem-solving in times of crisis. Take, for instance, the Cajun Navy,  groups of boat owners who voluntarily assist in search and rescue efforts following natural disasters in the South and have saved thousands of lives. Recently, in my home state of Wisconsin, a farmer formed a “Badger army,” to bring supplies to Nebraska farmers impacted by flooding.

Or take the need to curtail the opioid epidemic, which is prompting private, voluntary solutions to help overcome drug addiction. One Midwestern company facing a worker shortage has started providing drug treatment programs to potential employees who test positive for drugs but still want a job.

Citizens solving problems and improving their communities are at the heart of The Bradley Foundation’s mission.

Citizens solving problems and improving their communities are at the heart of The Bradley Foundation’s mission. Our founders were successful 20th-century industrialists who believed in the richness of community and culture that are the basis of a well-lived life. Today we carry on that legacy by supporting organizations that strengthen the fabric of American society.

Next month, the Foundation will honor distinguished individuals whose achievements reflect the pillars of American exceptionalism, including civil society, when we host the annual Bradley Prizes. We look forward to honoring this year’s recipients: author and publisher Roger Kimball, historian and journalist Jim Grant, and former federal judge Janice Rogers Brown.

It’s worth noting the poignant words of Judge Brown during a speech she once gave to the Federalist Society:

Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates, and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit.

It’s tempting for politicians to offer more government programs as a fix to society’s problems. But it’s families, social clubs, churches, and the like that have a greater and lasting impact on daily life. We must work to improve and sustain civil society in every way we can by encouraging self-governance and engaging in our communities. American exceptionalism depends on it.

This article appeared at fee.org

 

Who Is Responsible For The Propagation Of The Official Belief System? Politicians And Their Captive Intellectuals.

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On May 4, 2019, we published Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s pithy summary of the belief system that is pressed upon us. Today, he explains who does the pressing.

Who are we to thank for this nonsense, whom does it benefit, and how is it that we are fed daily with it by the official media?

Here I want to hint at the answer only very briefly. It has two parts. One has to do with the institution of a state, and especially of a democratic state, with its occupants and representatives. And the other has to do with the intellectuals.

The state is a monopoly of legislation and law enforcement. In all conflicts, including those which it or its representatives are involved in, the state or people appointed by the state decide who is right or wrong. The predictable result is: the state is always right, in everything that it does. Whether robbed, plundered, killed, lied to and threatened in the name of the state – or summarized in single sentence: when force is exerted on other people and violence is used against other persons – everything can and everything will be painted by it and its agents as just, and assigned with another, deceptive and attractive name. This makes the institution of the state naturally attractive for all people who would like to rob, plunder, kill, lie, and defraud other people, that is, use violence against others. Above all, it is these kinds of people who therefore try to infiltrate and take over the institution of the state. And if, as under democratic conditions, the entrance in and the occupation of the state stands free and open for everyone, that is, when it becomes a downright competition for votes between power thirsty crooks, then it is to be expected, that the persons who will get to the top of the state are those who possess the greatest talent of rhetorically covering up their own predatory, treacherous and murderous intentions and selling these as good deeds to the voting masses. In short: The best demagogues, the best pied pipers, and corrupters get to the top.

Though when one looks at these democratically elected politicians and members of parliament, who day by day impose their obvious megalomaniac will though law or decree on millions of people, one can only marvel. Because these people are as a rule not some kind of formidable, impressive alpha males or females, but an epitome of mediocracy or merely a collection of losers, idiots and failures, who have never in their entire life produced a product or rendered a service which someone would have voluntarily bought with his own money.

And faced with these tragic figures, who grandiosely claim to be “our” highest representatives, the question then arises, whether such light-calibrated people are even in the position of conceiving by themselves the entire nonsense which they tell us every day, and furthermore, whether they have what it takes to come up with the diverse justifications and rationalizations for this nonsense which they everywhere feed us.

There one surely has a considerable doubt! And that leads me directly to the second part of my answer to the question of the originators and beneficiaries of the above described “politically correct” view of the world and the nature of things: the intellectuals, or put more precisely, those intellectuals who occupy themselves with social, economic and philosophical questions and problems, and their connection to the state and its leaders.

As in the case of the politicians, so is there in the case of the intellectuals hardly a person who through her intellectual work, her writings and speeches – for these are what she produces – could secure a comfortable livelihood and income. The market demand for such products is low and is furthermore subject to large deviations. Only a small number of intellectuals would succeed in making a profession out of their writings and speeches. The vast majority of actual or alleged intellectuals would be advised to conduct their scientific interests as a mere inner vocation and to earn their livelihood elsewhere, by the practice of a normal civilian profession. But this naturally contradicts the feeling of self-esteem of an intellectual, and all those who view themselves as such. The intellectuals are convinced of the importance and value of their work like no other group and are accordingly resentful when the alleged appropriate high social recognition fails to materialize.

What is then left for them instead? They are usually not suitable for politics, for they are typically too honest and wonkish, too shy, awkward, introverted and particularly antisocial. And for this reason, they mostly lack the desire for power, which is precisely what makes a politician.

But the intellectuals are naturally smart enough to know that even if they are not made to be politicians, they nevertheless need the politicians to get the money required for a comfortable living. And they obviously also know what they must offer as a service in return so to get the biggest possible cut of their pillage: namely well-sounding justifications for continually expanding the powers of the state, and “bold” visions and programs with noble, well-intentioned goals, for example, that of “equality of all people” which cannot ever be achieved, no one can ever achieve, but precisely because of this one never has to give up on, but can repetitively revive and ceaselessly renew.

And so it comes to an unholy alliance: that of the early, monarchical times between church and crown, and that of today, in the American age, between democratic politicians and intellectuals. The result? Never before were there so many politicians and above all so many alleged intellectuals who live and indulge in luxuries at the expense of an ever-decreasing number of productive persons. And never before, in order to stay among the intellectuals, have the numerous and large universities, as the publicly funded and supported citadels of intellectual power and influence and the breeding ground of future politicians and intellectuals, produced so much horrific intellectual nonsense and contributed to the misleading of the public as in our times.

In light of this fact, what can one do? Not much, I am afraid – except to repetitively and openly call out the whole hoax. This means that for one thing, to recognize and describe the politicians for what they really are: a band of liars, crooks, robbers, murderers, and associates to murder; and treat them accordingly with contempt, scorn, and ridicule. But also their intellectual masterminds and assistants, without whom the politicians could never carry out their evil work, must be targeted, and as the first step toward a return to normalcy and sound human understanding, to common sense, it is imperative to push for the financial draining of the universities. Not only should all centers for Blacks, Latins, women, gender, and Queer-studies, and everything else that there is of this previously unheard of exotica, be closed, but also the social science departments altogether, starting with political science and history, through sociology and up to economics and social and economic statistics (whose statistics also serve the goals of uncovering ever new “inequalities” and to call for redistribution or reeducation!) And likewise should the profession of the academic literary studies and criticism and, as much as it hurt me to say, the profession of the academic philosophers as well be thinned out. And the people who believe, that they know how one controls the climate, one should issue them a certificate of illness and send them for treatment in a psychiatric clinic.

Freed from the intellectual pollution which is currently produced by the universities, there would appear once more the possibility of a rise of a class of new and better intellectuals, characterized by firm stance and authentic understanding of reality.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe via lewrockwell.com. Lightly edited for length and translation from German.

Here Is A Summary Of The Official Belief System To Which You Must Adhere, Otherwise You Are A Non-Person.

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According to the official, USA approved belief system, we are all equally intelligent and reasonable people, who are confronted with the same “harsh reality” and are bound to the same facts and truths. Of course, it is true, that even in the age of the American empire, in the USA, people do not live in the best of all worlds. There are many more problems to be solved. Though with the American system of a democratic state, humanity has found the perfect institutional framework which makes the next step in the direction of a perfect world possible; and if only the American system of democracy would take over worldwide, the way to perfection would be clear, smooth and free.

The single legitimate form of government is democracy. All other forms of government are worse, and any government is better than none. Democratic states like the USA are of the people, by the people and for the people. In democracies no one rules over the other; instead, the people rule over themselves and are thus free. Taxes in democratic states are therefore contributions and payments for governmentally provided services; accordingly, tax avoiders are thieves, who take without paying. To provide shelter for fleeing thieves is thus an act of aggression against the people, from whom they are trying to escape.

There are still other forms of governments around the world. There are monarchies, dictatorships, theocracies, and there are feudal landowners, tribes, and warlords. And for this reason, democratic states often must necessarily deal with non-democratic states. Eventually, all states must be converted to the American ideal, because only democracy allows for a peaceful and continual change for the better.

Democratic states like the USA and its European allies are inherently peaceful and do not wage war against each other. If they must fight any wars all at, then these are preventive wars of defense and liberation against aggressive and undemocratic states, that is, just wars. All countries and territories that are presently in war with or occupied by American troops or its European allies – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen – were therefore guilty of aggression and the war waging and occupation on behalf of the democratic West were an act of self-defense and liberation. However, there is still much to be done. Especially Russia and China still pose a huge threat and must be liberated, in order to make the world finally safe.

Private property, markets, and profits are useful institutions, but a democratic state must ensure that with the appropriate legislation, private property and profits are acquired and used in a socially responsible manner and that markets function efficiently. Moreover, markets and profit-seeking entrepreneurs cannot produce public goods and are thus incapable of satisfying any social needs. And they cannot take care of the truly needy. Only the state can take care of social needs and the less fortunate. The state alone can, through the finance of public goods and aid to the poor, increase the public welfare, and diminish poverty and the number of the needy, if not completely eliminate them.

The state has to put the private vice of greed and the pursuit of profit under control. Greed and the pursuit of profit were the leading causes of the most recent large financial crisis. Reckless financiers generated an irrational exuberance among the public, which ultimately had to crash into reality. The market was wrecked, and only the state stood ready to save the day. Only the state, through appropriate regulation and supervision of the banking industry and financial markets, can prevent such a thing from happening again. Banks and companies went bankrupt, yet the state and its central banks held ground and protected the money and jobs of the workers.

Advised by the leading and best-paid economists in the world, states and especially the USA have discovered the causes of economic crises and realized that in order to get out of an economic mess, the people must simultaneously consume more as well as invest more. Every cent under the mattress is a cent withheld from consumption and investment, which in turn impairs future consumption and investment expenditure. In a recession, spending must first of all and under all circumstances be increased; and when the people do not spend enough of their own money, the state has to do it instead. Prudently, states have this option, for their central banks can produce any necessary liquidity. If billions of Dollars or Euros are not enough, then trillions will do; and if trillions do not meet the goal, then surely quadrillions will. Only massive state expenditure can prevent an otherwise unavoidable economic meltdown. In particular, unemployment is the result of low consumption: people who do not have enough money to buy consumer goods; this problem must be remedied by providing them with higher wages or higher unemployment benefits.

When the last financial crisis is finally overcome, the democratic state can and must devote itself once more to the really urgent remaining problems of humanity: the battle against inequality, the elimination of all unjust discrimination, and the control of the global environment and the global climate in particular.

In principle, all people are equal. Differences are only apparent, shallow and meaningless: some people are white, some brown, some black, some are big, others are small; some are fat and others thin; some are male, and some are female; some speak English and others Polish or Chinese as mother tongue. These are accidental human traits. It is a coincidence that some people possess these and some do not. But accidental traits like these have no influence whatsoever on and do not correlate with mental properties like motivation, time preference or intellectual abilities, and they do not contribute to the explanation of economic and social success, especially of income and wealth. Mental and psychic properties have no physical, biological or ethical basis and are limitlessly malleable. In this regard is everyone, except for a few pathological individual cases, equal to the other, and every nation has made in the course of history a contribution to civilization of equal value or would have done so, if only it would have gotten the same chance. Seemingly obvious differences are solely the result of different external circumstances and education. All differences in income and achievements between Whites, Asians, and Blacks, women and men, Latins, Anglos-Saxons and Thais as well as Christians, Hindus, Protestants, and Moslems would disappear, if only equality of opportunity would be established. If instead it will be discovered, that all these different accidental groups are unequally represented in and distributed across different levels of income, wealth, or professional status, some are richer and more successful than others, then this demonstrates unjust discrimination; and such discrimination must be counterbalanced through appropriate, targeted affirmative action on behalf of the state, in which the discriminators have to compensate the unjustly discriminated.

And the studies of the leading and best paid social scientists have clearly shown, who, above all, are the discriminators. The people in question are first and foremost white heterosexual males and the institution of the traditional, patriarchal organized family. It is, therefore, most notably this group of people and this institution which must compensate all other groups and apologize to all other forms of social organization.

But this would not suffice. The reparations to all disadvantaged, to all victims of inequality and discrimination, require likewise strong governmental support of multiculturalism. The highly developed and white male dominated countries of the Western world have obtained their wealth at the expense of the inhabitants of all other regions of the world and are caught in a disastrous and prejudiced particularism and nationalism. This situation lends itself to be overcome through the promotion and systematic incentivization of immigration of people from different, foreign countries and cultural environments, in order to ensure that the foreign immigrants could finally unleash their full human potential and simultaneously replace the Western parochialism with an authentic cultural diversity.

And with the victory over the disastrous particularism and nationalism through a systematic policy of multiculturalism is one finally able to turn to the crucial stride toward a solution to the undoubtedly biggest global, borderless and world-encompassing problem of climate change. Divergent particularistic and nationalistic interests have thus far led to the fact that the production and the consumption of non-renewable energy sources were left mostly unregulated and uncoordinated worldwide. And that is why, as the leading and best-paid climate researchers have undoubtedly proven, the whole globe is threatened by unimaginable catastrophes: floods, suddenly rising sea levels and the emergence of fatal ecological disequilibria and instabilities. Only through a worldwide, concentrated action by all states, and ultimately the establishment of a supranational world government under the leadership of the USA and an enforced systematic regulation of any production and consumption activities, can this life-threatening danger be avoided. “The common good comes before the individual good” – this is, above all, what the problem of climate change shows, and it is on the states and especially on the USA to permanently implement this principle.

Now, I tell you no secret when I admit that I hold all this for a massive pile of rubbish, for complete nonsense and a highly dangerous one at that.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe via lrc. Lightly edited for length and translation from the German.

Don’t Be A Conservative. Aim For Abolition, Rather Than Reform.

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One of the fundamental differences between conservatives and libertarians is with respect to reforming the welfare-warfare state way of life versus striving for a genuinely free society. Conservatives aim for reform. Libertarians strive for freedom.

The way that one can usually tell whether a particular book, article, or speech is conservative or libertarian is by examining its conclusion. If the conclusion says something like, “The system needs reform” or if it calls for a specific reform of the government program it’s complaining about, it is a virtual certainty that the author or speaker is a conservative. If instead the conclusion calls for a repeal, dismantling, or abolition of the program, there is a high likelihood that the author or speaker is a libertarian.

The difference between reform and abolition is night and day. By advocating reform, conservatives have made peace with the welfare-warfare state way of life. They have given up any hope of attaining a genuinely free society. Their only aim is to make the serfdom under which people live in a welfare-warfare state more palatable or more comfortable.

Imagine you lived in Alabama in 1855. Conservatives would likely be dedicating their lives to improving the plight of the slaves through such reforms as fewer lashings, shorter work hours, and better healthcare. Libertarians would be striving to abolish, end, or repeal slavery. Our goal would be freedom, not reform.

While libertarians have nothing against conservative (or liberal) reforms that might improve the lives of the serfs under a welfare-warfare state, that is not our goal. Our goal is a genuinely free society, which necessarily entails a lifting of infringements on freedom. We hold that if all we do is reform or improve infringements on liberty, we have failed to achieve our goal of a free society.

Let’s consider some real-world examples.

Education. Conservatives, like liberals, have come to accept the inevitability of state control over the education of children in American society. Thus, they have come to embrace educational reform, which consists of school vouchers. In fact, they even claim that their reforms will improve public schooling.

Not libertarians. We understand that a free society necessarily presupposes the separation of school and state, just as our ancestors understood that a free society presupposes the separation of church and state. Thus, we oppose vouchers as just another welfare-state program, one that in this case actually embeds the state more deeply into education. We libertarians say: Repeal compulsory school-attendance laws and school taxes and end all state involvement in education.

Monetary policy. Conservatives, like liberals, believe in the Federal Reserve System, which is nothing more than a socialist system of monetary central planning. Conservatives think that if they can just get conservatives appointed to the Fed, they will be better central planners than liberals. A good example is President Trump’s appointment of conservative Stephen Moore to the Fed. Moore is fighting hard against the personal attacks being leveled against him in his quest to become a member of the Fed and move it in a conservative direction, which, he says, entails maintaining low interest rates to boost the economy.

Not libertarians. We understand that monetary freedom and sound money necessarily presuppose an abolition or end of the Fed. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek put it, freedom entails the “denationalization of money” — a free-market monetary system in which the government plays no role whatsoever.

Borders. Conservatives, like liberals, believe in government-controlled borders, at least with respect to international borders. At best, they want the government to “let in” more immigrants, so long as they are “qualified” and “safe.” At worst, they want the government to build a Berlin Wall along the border and convert the borderlands into an even fiercer police state.

Not libertarians. We understand that an immigration system of border controls is one based on socialist central planning, which is why there has been a decades-long immigration crisis. We say: Open the borders to the free movements of goods, people, and services, just as we have open borders between the states. A genuinely free society necessarily presupposes open borders.

Social Security and Medicare. Conservatives, like liberals, believe in these two socialist programs, the crown jewels of the welfare state. And like liberals, they are committed to reform, so long as both programs are left intact.

Not libertarians. We understand that a system of coerced charity is incompatible with the principles of a free society. In a genuinely free society, people are free to keep everything they earn and decide for themselves what to do with it. No mandatory charity whatsoever.

Drug laws. Conservatives believe in putting people into jail and fining them for ingesting what some consider to be harmful or destructive substances. At best, they support minor reforms of drug laws, such as lowering sentences for possessing marijuana or reforming asset-forfeiture laws.

Not libertarians. We hold that a free society necessarily presupposes the right to ingest whatever a person chooses to ingest, no matter how harmful or destructive. If the state can punish a person for ingesting something in the privacy of his own home, that’s definitely not a free society.

Thus, once he discovers libertarianism, every American is faced with a choice: Go with conservatives and liberals and their reforms of the welfare-warfare state way of life, or join up with us libertarians in our quest to achieve the genuinely free society on our lifetime.

 

Jacob G. Hornberger via fff.org

Do We Fear That Innovation From China Will Hurt America? Heck No! Let’s Hope They Find The Cure For Cancer.

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In its March 25th edition, the New York Times estimated that more than 1.7 million people were given a cancer diagnosis last year. Think about that for a minute.

Think about the agony that fathers and mothers suffered in hearing the bad news, not to mention how excruciating it must have been for some who had to relay the bad news to worshipful children. All of this leaves out the brutality of being sick in the first place, the sleepless nights, the physical pain, the emotions, etc.

So let’s ask a simple question. What if Chinese scientists come up with a cure for cancer? Will Americans shun the cure for it somehow signaling “the fading of American pre-eminence on the world stage”? The previous question is rhetorical, but the words are real. They’re the musings of University of Pennsylvania academics Ezekiel Emanuel, Amy Gadsden and Scott Moore.

The Penn trio view “China” as a threat in consideration of the “research areas that will determine military and economic superiority in the coming decades.” That those who can predict the source of future economic growth are generally billionaires in the investment world doesn’t seem to concern these rather self-serious professor types, but that’s a digression. For now, their so-called solution so that the U.S. “can compete and win in the century ahead” is for the U.S. to “meet strength with strength, and the best way to do that is to renew a longstanding American advantage: innovation.” As readers can probably imagine, the financial fix for the alleged Chinese threat is more government spending on technology research. They believe $66.5 billion isn’t enough; that the feds need to increase the previous number by many multiples.

Actually, the federal budget for technology research is $66.5 billion too high, but that too is a digression. For now, let’s first consider this needless fear of “China” causing the U.S. to fade. It’s a laugh line.

Again, would anyone at death’s door due to cancer really care where the cure came from, and in particular with the U.S.’s future prominence in mind? Let’s be serious. To quote Deng Xiaoping, “it doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.”

The simple truth is that the origin of an innovation doesn’t matter one bit. What matters is the advance, along with the profit motive that would precede an advance. No one developing that which will make us more productive (5G) or healthier (a dreamed for cancer cure) would limit its use. Nor could anyone. Particularly with products, there’s no accounting for their final destination. Assuming yet again a cancer cure developed in China, short of its creators literally hiding the advance from all would-be buyers, it would eventually reach desperate Americans. And save lives.

Would such a development cause the U.S. to fade? Certainly not. Humans are the drivers of progress, so imagine if cancer deaths kept more humans on this earth? And in a country like the United States where free minds so often prosper. With one global problem having been solved, the living Americans could focus their live minds on new problems to fix, or technologies to improve on. Chinese achievement won’t push the U.S. down as much as the U.S. isn’t nearly as prosperous as it should be precisely because the Chinese weren’t innovating for so long.

Interesting here is that billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong became a billionaire largely due to his development of a drug (Abraxane) that gives those suffering from Pancreatic cancer a fighting chance. Soon-Shiong is an American citizen based in Los Angeles, he was born in South Africa, but he’s the son of Chinese parents. Are we Americans shrunken because someone of Chinese origin developed Abraxane? Would the American users of it cease doing so if it had been created in Shanghai?

Implicit in the economically illiterate notion that location of innovation matters is that we’re somehow weakened when it doesn’t happen near us. But when trade is free, it’s as though all giant leaps take place next door, regardless of where they’re conceived. Most of us don’t live in Seattle or Cupertino, but we benefit from the genius of Amazon and Apple as though we do. Why would progress made in China make any difference?

As for the call for more federal spending by Ezekiel, Gadsden and Moore on “innovation,” can they really be so naïve? Missed by them is that there’s no such thing as federal investment. Figure that the wealth which enables federal largess was first created in the private sector (if anyone doubts this, just consider why Haiti’s national budget is so small relative to the U.S.’s $4.7 trillion annual outlays), and all researchers in federal employ (or reliant on federal funds) who seek answers used to not be in government.

The crucial difference between “federal” or “public” investment and private investment is that market signals govern the latter, and don’t the former. Basically bad ideas on the federal level can sometimes last forever in the figurative sense, while in the private sector bad ideas are quickly realized as profit-motivated investors cut off funds. Good. Failure that’s realized doesn’t suffocate progress as much as it’s a necessary ingredient of it.

Failure brings answers without which there can be no innovation. And what’s apparent is that the best and brightest of American companies are spending with abandon on tomorrow’s ideas despite being aware that many ideas will be expensive duds. As Andy Kessler recently put it in the same newspaper (Wall Street Journal) in which Emanuel, Gadsden and Moore placed their own monument to trite thinking, companies like Apple “spend more than $10 billion a year on research and development.”

The difference with Apple, along with relentless experimenters like Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet and Microsoft, is that they’re not so foolish as to presume to know what the future looks like. They’re not certain about the “research areas that will determine military and economic superiority in the coming decades,” and that’s why they’re spending tens of billions each year on new concepts. They experiment, and they learn from countless mistakes. Logic says to trust them, rather than academics eager to siphon precious resources out of the market-disciplined private sector, and into a public sector that isn’t required to abide the market truths so essential for progress.

So while history very much suggests that Ezekiel, Gadsden and Moore are naively parroting the same things said about “Japan” 20-30 years ago, that’s really not the point. The bigger one is that they’re not calling for innovation with their plea for more federal spending; rather they’re unwittingly seeking to hamstring it through waste of the resources without which there can be no innovation.

John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets, and Director of the Center for Economic Freedom at FreedomWorks.

Rational Philosophical Ideas Are The Root of Human Flourishing, Irrational Philosophy The Root Of Misery.

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The purpose of the Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight series is to educate and prove convincingly that the economic way has always worked whenever and wherever it has been allowed. Personal liberty is responsible for the prosperous human condition we enjoy today, and it’s an extremely rare occurrence in human history. We are dedicated here to spreading the wealth through self-creation, not confiscation.

To do this, we must focus on concretes, meaning the philosophical root causes of human flourishing and its alternative, collectivism. Human life on planet earth originated about 400,000 years ago, yet it was only about 400 years ago that individual rights were discovered. This achievement is impossible without reason and the printing press, and is unsustainable without America. It is with gratitude that we honor The Philosophers; here is an excerpt –

Like the marvelous achievements of The Inventors, philosophy is largely unappreciated. For most people, their philosophy is a random collection of slogans that have been acquired from popular culture. It is not grounded in rational core principles. The first tenet of our Manifesto alludes to the philosophical core these individuals profess – reason, purpose and pride.

Download The Philosophers, part 2 of 4 in our Poetic Justice Warrior Society series.

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Fortunately, there is a movement in academia to integrate the core principles of politics, philosophy and economics – the PPE movement. For years these subjects had been siloed into separate disciplines. This is unfortunate because the integration of core philosophical principles into abstract concepts is essential for human flourishing. In fact, the lack of rational core principles and the inability to integrate them into abstract ideas is the root cause of all political, economic, and social problems.

For example, America has been producing a high incidence of young dope users and fatherless children. This is a philosophical problem, and the social repercussions are manifest. One root cause is the progressive American schools inspired by John Dewey; his educational philosophy was short on content and long on social interaction. His creed was straight out of Rousseau’s Social Contract: “personal interests must be subordinated to the general will.” For that to work, compulsory schools were essential to reconstruct society, and to enforce a fully formed public opinion for its designated citizens, experts, and politicians.

Dewey believed that “There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.” This destructive philosophy tells us that there is no intrinsic value in knowledge, that our life’s value is a function of our self-sacrifice, and that we need government experts to survive. This negates aspiring to a life of reason, purpose and pride, and this is no accident. The nihilistic underpinnings of our postmodern world can be attributed to the likes of philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel. To quote Ayn Rand in 1971’s Return of the Primitive:

Intellectually, the activists of the New Left are the most docile conformists. They have accepted as dogma that the merging of one’s self with a tribe or a community is the noblest way to live. Far from being rebels, they embody the philosophic trend of the past 200 years: the mysticism-altruism-collectivism axis, which has dominated Western philosophy from Kant to Hegel to James.

And this rejection of The Enlightenment and The Age of Reason is not limited to 19th century European philosophers. On May 14, 1911, future US President Woodrow Wilson addressed the Jefferson Club in Los Angeles and declared:

The business of every true Jeffersonian is to translate the terms of those abstract portions of the Declaration of Independence into the language and the problems of his own day. If you want to understand the real Declaration, do not repeat the preface. We are not doing this thing in the spirit of insurgents but in the spirit of free men, men who have the true interests of humanity at heart.

So what is Wilson saying here? First, cancel the abstract concepts of natural law and declare martial law. Next, dismiss the gifted political philosophers of America’s founding as mere insurgents. And lastly, declare that freedom must be earned through self-sacrifice. To progressive political science professor Wilson, freedom means submission – individualism and the consent of the governed are quaint and obsolete abstractions. Wilson is pathetically declaring himself a Jeffersonian by denying Jefferson the mantle of expert in human nature, the one who predicted the likes of Wilson with his preface in the Declaration.

In essence, the collectivist philosophy of the progressive left avoids reality. It denies that the great American experiment is the most magnificent petri dish for individual self-creation in all of human history. Today’s political elites, humanities departments, public education unions and legacy media can’t have that, it would render them irrelevant. Our goal is to expedite their irrelevance.

Our first philosopher resurrected Aristotle’s reason to bolster Christianity’s equality. The second one discovered universal human rights. Next, we highlight the authors of the world’s greatest edifice to reason, equality, and freedom. And last, the author who romanticized the human ideal, predicted today’s decivilization, exposed its philosophical root cause, and most importantly, the antidote.

Think of this as you listen to the self-styled political philosophers, the ones who have declared themselves candidates for the US Presidency, and ask, are their philosophical core principles integrated and compatible with self-creation or are they incoherent and promote self-abnegation?

What Is Capitalism? These Three Elements Explain It All.

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I teach several different “capstone” courses, courses for students about to graduate and go off into the world. One of the most surprising things about these otherwise well-educated students is that they cannot summarize the basic argument for capitalism.

It’s fine that they might not be persuaded by the argument; that’s a matter of personal conscience and understanding of how the world works. What I find bizarre is that they cannot even summarize the argument coherently. At best, they might say something about self-interest, or freedom. That’s even the ones who like capitalism, mind you. The opponents will say something about greed, and inequality, and maybe exploitation.

I have found it useful to summarize the argument for capitalism briefly, and in some ways superficially. First, wealth is stuff that is useful to us. It can be food, drink, or more convenient ways to obtain food and drink. It can be clothing, housing, transportation, or video games or movies that are delivered to our homes or to theaters, to be available in the event we decide to avail ourselves of the opportunity.

These things are being provided almost constantly, in the background, without any of us really noticing. Ships, airplanes, and trucks are operating on tight schedules to deliver remarkably fresh food products to stores. But we only notice those avocados, or MP3 players, when they are already in the bins, ready to be purchased, or not purchased if we decide we don’t want them. In other words, consumers get a lot of inexpensive, high-quality stuff, but all the risks are borne by the system, not by the consumer.

That’s wealth.

There are three elements to the argument for capitalism, and while they connect in crucial ways they can be separately defined. Those three elements are (a) division of labor; (b) impersonal exchange based on prices; and (3) economies of scale based on knowledge.

A. Division of labor

It is only a slight simplification to claim that all the increases in wealth, all of them, since the beginning of time, have been the result of division of labor. If four of us all individually produce everything each of us needs, we don’t have much stuff. We will stagger along on the edge of subsistence, and some of us may not survive.

If the four of us make a deal, and one produces clothing, one shoes, one food, and one housing and water supplies, each of us will get better at doing the one thing we specialize in. The result is that, instead of subsistence, the population can grow. The group can now support more people. Each person faces a “make or buy” decision, and if you can buy something more cheaply than you can make it, you specialize in what you are good at and buy everything else.

This feeds back on itself: instead of one person specializing in each activity, there are now 24 people and 6 people working at each activity, dividing the making of shoes into six different stages, with the consequent increases in productivity in each stage now multiplying the amount of wealth available.

And new activities become possible, with some of the population now providing artistic accomplishment or entertainment. Before, with the small, unspecialized population, music was provided by one guy beating on a hollow log with sticks.

Now, with the larger population and division of labor, we reach a population of 10,000 in our city, and we have a string quartet, or maybe even a chamber orchestra. A few people may be spending their time writing new musical compositions (wealth can be culture, not just shoes!).

B. Impersonal exchange based on prices

At some point, the city walls cannot contain the exuberant wealth creation of capitalism. For centuries, city-states were the limiting factor on the division of labor, because institutions of transportation and finance hindered regional trade and made global trade impractical. Trade and exchange took place within the city-state, and larger city-states were more wealthy because they could support more division of labor.

But capitalism wants to be global, because division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. In a larger “market,” more different people are working for you. That means that the diversity and quality of products simply explodes, and prices fall. Of course, just as local division of labor meant individuals had to specialize, now cities and regions begin to specialize. Now, cities and regions face the “make or buy” decision, and they become wealthy precisely to the extent that they can focus on what they do best, and buy everything else.

This pressure to expand the extent of the market has some surprising effects. To consumers, all costs are transaction costs. So entrepreneurs turn their creative energies to devising institutions to reduce transaction costs. Transportation, finance, accounting, futures markets, and insurance all become activities that both create value for consumers all over the world and create good livelihoods for their practitioners. The need for an ability to raise and redirect liquid capital, quickly and across great distances, gives rise to an entire financial sector.

The result is that huge and impossibly complex arrays of information are summarized in simple parameters called “prices.” Prices signal the relative scarcity of products, inputs, and commodities, and create systems of dynamic adjustment that are breathtakingly efficient.

If there is a shortage of something, for a variety of reasons that may be hard to summarize, prices send out the signal of scarcity by rising. Then, almost miraculously, the problem of the shortage is quickly solved, by the three consequences of price increases: (i) consumers buy less, leaving some of the scarce item for others; (ii) producers make more, providing more of the scarce item; and (iii) entrepreneurs devise substitutes, easing the pressure of the shortage.

Folks who don’t understand capitalism always want to manage prices. But freely adjusting prices ensure that shortages will always be quickly mitigated, even if no one knows what the cause of the problem is. Prices are signals for all the decentralized actors, in myriad places and without any communication among them, to all cooperate in solving shortages.

The result is that each of us buys things from thousands of other people we don’t know, will never meet, and yet can trust completely to work for us and make the things we need.

C. Growth based on economies of scale

When someone discovers a better way to do something, or a new way to serve consumers, the results are communicated rapidly through the system. On millions of dimensions, some large and some small, right now entrepreneurs are beavering away looking for knowledge. An improvement in technology or an expansion in the ways we can use liquid capital to create physical capital immediately improves the welfare of the whole world. Economists call this an “economy of scale,” which means that specialization and increased social capital in the form of discoveries quickly spread around the world as force multipliers for labor and entrepreneurs.

Where once we lived in a world where there was a relatively fixed amount of stuff, the division of which meant the only way for me to get more is for you to have less, in a world of global capitalism we can all have more, at the same time. Much of the new “wealth” is digital, and takes the form of music, movies, or other entertainment, or software, code that once written down can be reproduced at no cost and transmitted worldwide essentially for free. Products or computer code devised for one purpose can be redirected and reused for new activities that at this point we can’t even imagine.

As I said at the outset, I understand that this discussion, with three separate facets of capitalism, is superficial and inadequate. But if our seniors, attending their thousands of graduation ceremonies at all those different colleges and universities, had even this level of understanding of the argument for capitalism it would be a big step forward.

Michael Munger is Professor of Economics at Duke University and Senior Fellow of the American Institute for Economic Research. 

Should We Remove Trump’s Citizenship Question From The Census? Yes, Along With All The Others.

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The Census Bureau has long known more about my family history than my family does. For instance, it was through old census forms that I discovered my grandmother changed her name from “Paula” to “Pauline” at some time after 1930. This was news even to her children. The 1930 census form also reported her place of birth — Mexico — and her native language — Spanish. Her occupation is listed as “cashier.”

But the nosiness doesn’t stop there. Completed forms from both 1920 and 1930 show the census taker apparently prodded the family for information on all household members’ names, their citizenship status, year of immigration, and ability to read and write. In 1930, the census taker would have been instructed to ask if the householder rented the family home, the householder’s salary, and “marital condition.”

Looking at these forms, those who bring a skeptical mind to government forms and government programs might wonder why the government needs to know all this information. Many have said so publicly. This is why some politicians, pressured by voters, suggested people refuse certain census questions. At the time of the 2000 census, both Senate Majority leader Trent Lott and presidential candidate George W. Bush advised Americans not to answer questions “they believed invaded their privacy.” That may have been good advice, especially since the Census Bureau recently admitted it failed to protect the personal data collected on 100 million Americans.

Trump’s Citizenship Question

On most days, though, the consensus among politicians, lobbyists, and activists is that it’s very important to know this information. But what exactly must be known depends on one’s political agenda.

For example, the US Supreme Court today heard oral arguments as to whether or not the 2020 census will include a question about each resident’s citizenship status.

NPR reports that the court is “split along ideological lines on whether a citizenship question can be included on forms for the upcoming 2020 census.”

The basic narrative as to the ideological split is this: the Trump administration has requested a new census question to help identify how many non-citizens there are in the United States. And where they are. (The questions on citizenship were abandoned after 1950).

In contrast, the ideological left vehemently opposes the inclusion of a citizenship question for two main reasons:

First, it is claimed that a citizenship question would cause many immigrants to not fill out their census forms at all. Thus, the census would become more inaccurate, and be less reliable as a source of statistical information.

Second, a more inaccurate count would impact public policy because the census data is used to distribute welfare-state funds. As the ACLU puts it:

The federal government will use 2020 Census data to decide how to allocate $900 billion in funding for social service, health, and education programs. This money goes to everything from Medicaid to school-lunch programs to veterans’ assistance.

If the citizenship question results in a sizable undercount, states with large immigrant populations could lose funding for programs they need.

One follows from the other. They want a census count they can call “accurate” and then use it to push certain government programs.

A Rising Tide of Census Questions

The US census — which is one of only a handful of federal programs written into the US constitution — has always relied on the justification that it was needed for Congressional apportionment and redistricting. But to do this, the census need only collect information on where people live, and how many of them there are. The very earliest census forms don’t collect much information beyond the total number of people, whether they are male or female, how old they are, and whether or not they are slaves.

Yet, by the 1870 census, the government was asking questions about birthplace and citizenship. Questions about occupation, literacy, and disability began even before then. In 1860, it was apparently essential for the federal government to know if a person was “deaf and dumb, blind insane, idiotic, pauper, or convict.”

The fact that citizenship questions began is 1870 is significant. Prior to the 1870s, it was widely believed that the regulation of immigration was not a responsibility of the federal governments. Some state governments — especially New York and Massachusetts — enacted immigration restrictions in the mid-nineteenth century. But both Congress and the Supreme court balked at the idea of imposing federal limits on migrants.

This changed with sweeping new federal immigration laws passed in 1882.

At roughly the same time, federal policymakers started instructing the census takers to keep track of matters related to birthplace, immigration, and citizenship.

As the role of government expanded even further, more questions were added. These included questions on employment, housing, ethnic group, and more.

In the 1920s, Herbert Hoover, who support expanding the statistical-date role of the census bureau, became head of the U.S. Commerce Department. According to a history of the census by Robert Jenkins,

[Hoover] encouraged the systematization of business and economic statistics and their orientation toward use by business. Among other activities, Hoover directed the Census Bureau to compile the various series of business data and publish them as the monthly Survey of Current Business.

Not all of this information relies on the decennial census. But the regular census remained the cornerstone of federal data collection.

The role of census data expanded even more with the New Deal. Jenkins continues:

The [New Deal] legislation established new programs in many fields, including industry, agriculture, welfare, securities and exchange, banking and home mortgages. Corresponding to this expansion of government there developed a need fo rstatistical information to aid in the administraiton of the recovery program.

In other words, policymakers needed more and more statistical information to justify new federal programs, and to claim that resources were being distributed equitably and rationally.

Murray Rothbard said as much in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1960. He noted the price system provided market information to firms in a marketplace. But government organizations don’t use market prices, and thus:

Government intervention … whether piecemeal or fully socialist, could do literally nothing without extensive ingathering of masses of statistics. Statistics are the bureaucrat’s only form of economic knowledge, replacing the intuitive, “qualitative” knowledge of the entrepreneur, guided only by the quantitative profit-and-loss test. Accordingly, the drive for government intervention, and the drive for more statistics, have gone hand-in-hand.

It is thus not surprising that opponents of the “citizenship question” oppose only the question on citizenship while also insisting that the census continue to collect myriads of other information.

This is unfortunate. After all, if the left is concerned about both the integrity of the total resident count — and the possibility of using citizenship information for anti-immigrant purposes — the solution is simple: abolish most of the census questions in favor of getting as accurate a count as possible of the total number of residents. Given that the constitutional mandate makes no mention of counting only citizens, this would make perfect sense.

The left, of course, finds this solution unacceptable because the census exists for so much more than getting an accurate count of residents. Nowadays, it’s there to help plan and justify the welfare state. It’s there to argue for more free-lunch dollars in City X or County Y. It’s there so ideologues can claim ethnic group A is “underrepresented” in Congressional district B. (But, if Trump-style ideologues get their way, they can use census data to argue welfare dollars ought to go to cities where the poor are citizens rather than fresh immigrants.)

Are The Data Any Good?

All of this, however, assumes the data are reliable. That’s not necessarily a great assumption.

Once a census taker gets beyond the simple questions of how many people live in a household, things get iffy. As we go down the road of asking people about their ethnicity, income, and living standards, we have good reason to believe people fudge their responses. Or they get confused. Many people, to this day, are unaware that “Hispanic” — as far as the census is concerned — is not a racial designation.

Even the relatively simple census forms of old were prone to errors. For example, on the 1920 census form, my grandmother is listed as a “son” named “Paul.” No male family member named Paul ever existed in that family. Who knows what other errors were recorded in other households?

Census takers themselves might also be biased as well as incompetent. For example, in both the 1920 and 1930 census, for example, my grandmother is listed as a resident alien. Yet, her children tell me she always claimed to have been born in the United States. Was she actually born in Mexico? Did she change her story after 1930? Or did the census takers in those days just mark down every Mexican-looking person with an accent as “born in Mexico.” We may never know.

And yet, aggregates of this sort of data are used to justify and plan a nearly endless array of government programs, plans, and schemes. It’s all done at our expense, and exists to favor certain interest groups. Yes, the citizenship question should be eliminated — along with nearly every other question as well.

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute.

Beware Of The “Anointed”. To These Self-Appointed Guardians Of Our Collective Morality, You’re An Irredeemable Sinner.

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In his, 1995 book The Vision of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell observed that an elite cadre of Americans, without having been appointed by anyone, declared their superior morality and their critical role in correcting society’s wrongs.

Sowell’s description was quite prescient and is still relevant today, more than two decades after the book’s publication. Today’s anointed continue to have the hubris to believe it is their role, with their superior vision and ideas, to rescue the victims of society’s “oppression” by imposing their collective will onto others.

As Sowell explained, the anointed—a loose class consisting of members of elite media institutions, academics, and progressive politicians—believe it is their role to rescue victimized and underprivileged classes. Their default mechanism for correcting perceived injustices is invariably the state.

Monopoly on Morality

Paramount for the anointed is their sheltering of themselves from scrutiny about facts and policy with the veil of “moral certitude,” which likewise makes them heavily resistant to evidence.

For a recent example, witness Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who recently said,

I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.

Ocasio-Cortez’s statement perfectly demonstrates the anointed’s  tendency to see themselves as “morally on a higher plane.” Sowell said it’s often futile attempting to correct those who embrace such a mindset, since “those who disagree with the prevailing vision are seen not merely as being in error, but in sin.”

Furthermore, the anointed must refuse to accept that their ideological opponents share compassion for marginalized groups. If the anointed acknowledged that compassion and caring are shared by both sides, those emotions would lose their political potency. A monopoly on compassion is the platform upon which they place their moral superiority.

Indeed, the anointed go to great lengths to silence or otherwise ignore reason and evidence, instead focusing on accusations of sinister intentions on behalf of their opponents. “What is remarkable is how few arguments are really engaged in, and how many substitutes for arguments there are,” Sowell observed.

Perhaps most concerning is that the anointed have infested society’s most significant power centers. Sowell described the anointed as the “elite intelligentsia,” including “mass media, mass politics and massive government” that have “great leverage in determining the course taken by a whole society.”

False “Privilege”

Perhaps today’s rhetorical weapon of choice for the anointed is the assignment of blame to “privilege” for people’s station in life.

Yet again, Sowell anticipated this by decades and reduced that argument to rubble.

The anointed’s use of such language suggests that things simply happen to people rather than being caused, at least in part, by their own choices or behavior.

The anointed’s vision requires that the victims’ own behavior, performance, and choices be swept aside and ignored.

In so doing, the anointed reveal their own bigotry. By denying any agency on the part of so-called victims, the anointed show they feel such groups are unworthy of having agency. The anointed rarely view ordinary people as autonomous decision-makers free to decide for themselves the path to their well-being.

The anointed’s vision requires that the victims’ own behavior, performance, and choices be swept aside and ignored as factors contributing to their circumstances.

Sowell noted,

People are often said to lack “access” to various jobs, educational institutions, or credit, when in fact they may not have behaved or performed in a way that would enable them to meet the same standards that others meet.

Moreover, people choose different professions that pay differently. They are in those careers by choice, not because they lack access to those better-paying jobs. There are often non-income factors that help attract people to various career tracks.

Similarly, Sowell cites the example of millions of people (in 1995) with incomes over $50,000 who lack health insurance not because they lack “access” to insurance but because they chose to spend their money on other things.

Sowell wrote,

With these three inconvenient complications out of the picture, results after the fact can then be equated with conditions existing before the fact. Success thus becomes “privilege” and failure “disadvantage” – by definition.

Creating Mascots

The anointed think of victims as helpless pets, inferior to the anointed and as such needing to be adopted as mascots for the anointed to rescue.

The anointed, Sowell wrote, believe their role is “to preempt other people’s decisions for their own good,” and to “define for these citizens what is better” for them, all the while enhancing their own power.

The state is seen by the anointed as the great “equalizer,” the wise and benevolent institution that can right society’s wrongs—through policies drafted and approved by the anointed, of course—with little to no mind of those policies’ potential negative impact on others in society.

As Sowell wrote,

Yet, increasingly, government has come to be seen as a way of benefitting particular groups adopted as mascots, often without much regard for what that does to other groups or to the integrity of the system as a whole.

A Better Path

To the anointed, the aim of “social justice” justifies policies that put citizens at odds with each other, openly advocating for “the rights of particular mascot groups overriding the rights of others.”

But delegating solutions to a third party like the state is highly problematic.

Sowell concluded that,

At the heart of many of these schemes is third-party decision making. Third parties typically know less, even when convinced that they know more, in addition to lacking the incentives of those who directly benefit from being right and suffering from being wrong.

Instead, a free society that radically decentralizes decision-making and charity creates greater social harmony compared to the polarizing intervention of the state. When decisions are made by those who will actually bear the cost or reap the reward from said decisions, more informed decisions are made, and the results tend to generate greater human flourishing.

More localized, voluntary charity for the less fortunate enables givers to not only be better in tune with the needs of their recipients but empowers them with the exercise of their conscience that comes with freely chosen virtuous acts.

Advocates for liberty have no reason to cede the moral high ground to the self-styled anointed.

Freedom, personal responsibility, and voluntary interactions are a far better, and just, means of uplifting the least among us.

Bradley Thomas via fee.org

 

 

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