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Entrepreneurship Is The One Institution We Can Rely Upon To Maintain A Prosperous And Civil Society.

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In this time of social unrest, Americans’ confidence in our institutions is in decline. A sample from Gallup’s frequent annual poll  includes these selected comparisons between 2019 (latest available data) and 2000.

% Confidence in Institutions (Great Deal + Quite a lot)
2019 2000
Congress 11 24
Big business 23 29
Newspapers 23 37
Banks 30 46
Small Business 68 57

Relatively few Americans declare confidence in political institutions, as represented by Congress. Roughly twice as many – but still less than a quarter of Americans – express more confidence in big business and banks. Newspapers, similarly, command only low levels of confidence. All the poll data from 2019 are lower than those from 2000, indicating across-the-board declines of confidence in institutions in general.

The Institution Of Entrepreneurship

Except for small business. Two thirds of Americans declare confidence in this institution, and that number is higher than in 2000. We can easily look beyond the structural definition of small business – which is, after all, defined by government statisticians gathering employment data – into the institution of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurs are those individuals who shoulder the task of making things better for the rest of society. They are society’s optimists. They recognize current conditions for what they are – and then imagine a future in which conditions are better. Then they sacrifice themselves to bring that future about, expending capital and labor now for the prospects of revenue in the future. That future is uncertain –  entrepreneurs do not know if their initiative will be as well-received by customers as they hope it will. They press on anyway, their goals being discovery and achievement and making a difference, more than profit.

In this sense, entrepreneurs perform the kind of social function that is badly needed in a time of lost confidence in institutions. Having little time for the rear view mirror and gazing intently through the windshield at the road ahead, they substitute sanguine imagination for everyone else’s dissatisfaction and disappointment with the status quo. They don’t dwell on past injustices, as so many young people seem inclined to do today; they’d rather concentrate on what is possible in the future. When they see barriers they dismantle them.

Solving The Problems Of Others

Entrepreneurs are problem solvers – and the problems they solve are those that their fellow citizens (all potential customers) deem most pressing. If you’re looking for a solution to a problem, seek out an entrepreneur rather than an elected official or bureaucrat.

Entrepreneurs’ problem-solving technique combines empathy with rigorous cause-and-effect thinking. Empathy is the entrepreneur’s tool to understand why people – why society – feels a certain way. What does dissatisfaction stem from? Why do people feel uneasy the way they do? Entrepreneurs take society’s pulse  and measure society’s level of pain. From this input, which is largely emotional, they try, as rigorously and logically as they can, to reverse-engineer a cause-and-effect chain. If dissatisfaction and pain are the outcomes, what are the causes? Entrepreneurs are not policy-makers like politicians, whose aim is to appease. They are obliging and accommodating collaborators whose aim is to please.

Entrepreneurial Creativity

Entrepreneurship is a profoundly human, social and creative activity that changes our world for the better. In contrast to the destruction that our current social justice warriors seek to impose, entrepreneurs create new economic value via a transformative act of human imagination. Their ingenuity is limitless.

What are the entrepreneurial actions that result from this creative societal problem-solving disposition? Entrepreneurs start firms, grow businesses, research and introduce innovations, lower customers’ costs and increase customers’ convenience. Their guiding principle is that whatever customers want, customers can have. The responsibility to improve life is given to the customer, in that they are tasked with communicating, as clearly as possible, what needs to be done and what needs to be provided and what needs to be changed to make them feel better. Entrepreneurs put their own private property at risk to create customer benefits that add up to social benefits for all. The customer is sovereign in this exchange – what they want is what is produced. If they stop wanting it, entrepreneurial production ceases.

Contrast this with political action. Politicians put none of their own private property at risk. In fact, they steal property from some citizens, through taxation and debt (which is a tax on future citizens), in order to redistribute it in some new form to a different set of citizens. They appease one group of citizens with the property of another group. Where the entrepreneur’s collaborative deal with customers is win-win (entrepreneurs make profits when customers approve their initiatives), the politicians’ deal always involves loss. The politician achieves office when an opponent loses an election, and makes policy that imposes loss on some part of the population. Politicians deal in losses, entrepreneurs deal in benefits.

Individual Action, Social Benefits

Society would be happier and healthier if we turned to entrepreneurs for all our solutions, and to politicians solely to protect the system of private property and freedom of contract that makes entrepreneurship possible. It would be healthier still if we were to encourage the spirit of entrepreneurship in a larger group: the spirit of service to fellow-citizens through innovative technological problem-solving. The measure of success for this system is what historian and economist Deirdre McCloskey calls “trade-tested betterment”. What she means by that is the customer-determined improvement in the quality of life (i.e., betterment) validated by customers buying or not buying what entrepreneurs offer as potential solutions to their problems and their pain (i.e. trade-tested).

If those who protest and complain today were themselves to adopt the entrepreneurial spirit in their own lives, they would find that they could not only build better platforms for progress, but also introduce more purpose, meaning and autonomy into their own lives. The entrepreneurial life is purpose-driven (solving others’ problems), a source of meaning (solving problems is more meaningful than carrying protest signs or throwing rocks) and the ultimate autonomous lifestyle (discarding dependency on employment wages or welfare payments).

Entrepreneurship is an American institution. Every immigrant who ever came here brought an entrepreneurial spirit: life will be better for me and others if I escape from the limitations of my current situation and join this open, betterment-demanding, property-protecting, innovation-welcoming country and see what I can do. The institutions that grew up with our innovating immigrants and their offspring are now largely decayed and decrepit. But entrepreneurship is one institution that there is no need to abandon. In fact, it’s necessary that we revive it.

 

 

Justice And Social Justice Have Nothing In Common. They Are Opposites.

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Social justice is a political and social ideology that advocates for the equal redistribution of wealth, equal access to economic opportunities, and the reduction of unfair privileges within a society. The central argument used by social justice advocates is that the government has the moral obligation to equalize access to wealth, opportunities, and privileges.

In abstract, to many people, this ideology seems morally right. In practice though, social justice has done more harm to those it intended to help and has hindered society’s advancement as a whole. But to fully comprehend the reason why social justice is a problem; it is helpful to understand its origins.

The Origins of Social Justice

To understand social justice, we first need to define what justice is. Justice is a concept under which wrongs committed against one party by another party are “set right,” either through restitution or punishment. Justice is generally administered by an institution — law courts, for example —  in which a third-party impartially adjudicates a dispute. The purpose of adjudicating this dispute is to determine how a victim might be repaid for a loss or private property or bodily harm. Justice, properly understood, therefore assumes there must be an identifiable victim, and that some third party will ensure the proper steps are taken to repair the harm.

Social justice as a concept arose in the early nineteenth century during the Industrial Revolution and subsequent civil revolutions throughout Europe, which aimed to create more egalitarian societies and remedy capitalistic exploitation of human labor. Indeed, the concept of social justice is rooted in the Marxist theory of man-made exploitation. Advocates of social justice argue that social inequalities are based upon the fact that those who have access to resources, do so because they have deprived the have-nots of these same opportunities. Consequently, social justice advocates argue that the government has the moral obligation to rectify that injustice. Unlike true justice, however, reparations in the name of social justice do not involve a specific victim or a specific perpetrator. Instead, the guilty party is said to be an entire class of people, many of whom have never been shown to have exploited any specific person at all.

In America, social justice has become the new go-to “solution” to alleviate economic inequalities between people and social classes. The current trend of social justice in the United States underlies the misleading premise that the top 1 percent controls all the wealth while the bottom 99 percent produces that wealth. Moreover, this fallacious premise builds upon the myth that most millionaires and billionaires have inherited the wealth that they have today from their predecessors. But, according to a 2017 survey from Fidelity Investments, 88 percent of millionaires in America are self-made. Most did not grow up in exclusive country club neighborhoods. Needless to say, most millionaires started out within the 99 percent then worked their way up by climbing the social ladder. Yet social justice proponents argue that the wealthy — merely by being wealthy — have deprived those from lower social classes of wealth and capital. To fix that “injustice,” policies such as a progressive income tax have been imposed at the national level and in most states.

Note also that the moral system undergirding social justice requires immorality on the part of the state. Since the state produces no wealth of its own, it can only “create” wealth for the less-wealthy by taking wealth and property from the more-wealthy. Thus, social justice is founded on the idea of the state using violence to take from one group and give to another.  Since no specific victim and no specific crime has been identified, this is no case of reparation as exists under real justice. It is simply a transfer of wealth from one group to another based on some sort of general “exploitation.”

So, when a high-income person pays a higher rate of income tax to support a government program designed to increase inequality, we are not transferring wealth from individuals shown to have “exploited” others. Nor is there evidence that every recipient who benefits from these programs has been victimized by some sort of economic exploitation. Instead, it is merely assumed that those who pay more tax are guilty of exploiting others, while those who receive the wealth were exploited. These, of course, are not good assumptions, and are not based on any sort of judicial proceeding or examination of evidence, as would be the case of administering what is properly known as justice.

Germinal G. Van is an author and scholar from Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa.

There Is No Such Thing As Society, And The Ultimate Values Are The Values Of Individuals.

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From “Liberalism, Old Style,” a 1955 essay by Milton Friedman :

The state exists to protect individuals from coercion by other individuals or groups and to widen the range within which individuals can exercise their freedom; it is purely instrumental and has no significance in and of itself. Society is a collection of individuals and the whole is no greater than the sum of its parts. The ultimate values are the values of the individuals who form the society; there are no superindividual values or ends. Nations may be convenient administrative units; nationalism is an alien creed.

Liberalism takes freedom of the individual—really, of the family—as its ultimate value. It conceives of man as a responsible individual who is egocentric, in the sense not of being selfish or self-centered but rather of placing greater reliance on his own values than those of his neighbors. It takes as the major problem of modern society the achievement of liberty and individual responsibility in a world that requires co-ordination of many of millions of people in production to make full use of modern knowledge and technology. The challenge is to reconcile individual freedom with widespread interdependence.

The liberal answer derives from the elementary—yet even today little understood—proposition that both sides to an economic transaction can benefit from it; that a gain to a purchaser need not be at the expense of a loss to the seller. If the transaction is voluntary and informed, both sides benefit; the buyers gets something he values more than whatever he gives up, and so does the seller. In consequence, voluntary exchange is a way to get cooperation among individuals without coercion. The reliance on voluntary exchange, which means on a free market mechanism, is thus central to the liberal creed.

Social Justice Claims Based On Envy Bring On A Siege Mentality.

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If you believe that fairness and what philosophers call “desert,” or deserving the benefits and harms we receive, are the most important features of a society, you’ll spend a lot of time being upset.

My favorite statements of this problem are by F.A. Hayek and J.R.R. Tolkien.

From Hayek (The Mirage of Social Justice, pp. 68-69):

Are we not all constantly disquieted by watching how unjustly life treats different people and by seeing the deserving suffer and the unworthy prosper? And do we not all have a sense of fitness, and watch it with satisfaction, when we recognize a reward to be appropriate to effort or sacrifice? The first insight which should shake this certainty is that we experience the same feelings also with respect to differences in human fates for which clearly no human agency is responsible and which it would therefore clearly be absurd to call injustice. Yet we do cry out against the injustice when a succession of calamities befalls one family while another steadily prospers, when a meritorious effort is frustrated by some unforeseeable accident, and particularly if of many people whose endeavours seem equally great, some succeed brilliantly while others utterly fail….

Our complaints about the outcome of the market as unjust do not really assert that somebody has been unjust; and there is no answer to the question of who has been unjust. Society has simply become the new deity to which we complain and clamour for redress if it does not fulfill the expectations it has created. There is no individual and no cooperating group of people against which the sufferer would have a just complaint, and there are no conceivable rules of just individual conduct which would at the same time secure a functioning order and prevent such disappointments.

From Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring):

Frodo: What a pity that Bilbo did not stab [Gollum] when he had a chance!

Gandalf: Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.

Frodo: I am sorry. But I am frightened; and I do not feel any pity for Gollum.

Gandalf: You have not seen him.

Frodo: No, and I don’t want to. I can’t understand you. Do you mean to say that you, and the Elves, have let him live on after all those horrible deeds? Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death.

Gandalf: Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

Late in the summer of 2018, in anticipation of hurricane season — the time when both the weather and the arguments about “price gouging” are hottest — I wrote a piece on problems with regulating price. In it, I made an analogy to a military siege. A siege, after all, is a tactic to take a fortified city by starving the population into surrender. A number of readers challenged me on this analogy. Here’s what I said:

Anti-price-gouging (APG) laws block [market-based] resupply, as effectively as an enemy army might lay siege to a city. A “siege,” after all, is when a military unit surrounds a city and prevents needed supplies from getting through. APG laws actually require state and local officials to lay siege to cities. That would be an act of war if another army did it, but when we do it to ourselves it’s just “public policy.”

One reader, in an email eerily similar to Frodo’s sentiment saying those who act badly deserve punishment, had this to say:

Munger, you are just a shill for thieves and pirates. What you are missing is that these price-gougers don’t deserve those high prices. There is an undeserved benefit to acting badly and raising price. That’s why people are willing to [give up access to goods they need], because they care about morality. (emphasis original)

What my reader meant was that people are willing to accept the consequences of APGs  — empty store shelves — because the alternative is to give an undeserved benefit — profit — to people who act badly and raise prices in an emergency. I think that might be empirically right, but that doesn’t justify besieging U.S. cities with our own armies.

If you don’t want to reward “price gougers,” just don’t buy their stuff. But why would you feel justified in using force — in this case, literal force, with National Guard units surrounding cities such as New Orleans and blocking supplies from entering on the grounds that “you might sell those!”? There are accounts from across the ideological spectrum, from the Left to the Right, that claim there was a systematic effort to prevent supplies from being brought in after Katrina.

The best explanations I have heard all involve the attempt to control a “black market” in supplies and a desire — bolstered by the state government — to enforce the APGs. One of the clearest and most direct accounts, by Walter Block, raises the question of why there was a “black market” in the first place. After all, if some people need things, and other people are trying to bring those things in and deliver them, why is the government interfering?

I really think the answer is the siege mentality of prioritizing the restriction of “undeserved” profits. The focus on social justice, even ahead of helping the desperate, seems to be something very deep in the human psyche.

But our reason should be able to overcome this passionate delusion. The notion of “desert,” or deserving all of the benefits we enjoy or the harms we suffer, destroys opportunities for cooperation that would make literally everyone better off. The logic of the market system requires that we understand that desert is beyond our control.

The idea that we can achieve such outcomes in complex market systems is simply mistaken; the idea that we should pursue a desert-based patterned system of social justice borders on insane. It’s an empty and destructive distraction; as F.A. Hayek put it in The Fatal Conceit (p. 118): “The whole idea behind distributive justice — that each individual ought to receive what he morally deserves — is meaningless in the extended order of human cooperation.”

It would be better to let us help each other, even if sometimes someone manages to benefit.

The Mirage Of Social Justice – Conclusion: Claims For Social Justice Stand In Opposition To Every Civilized Principle.

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How dire is the problem that confronts us?

Defining the problem as the very survival of the Western Civilization that has sustained us for hundreds of years, F.A. Hayek tells us that our prospects are dire.

Writing in the 1970’s and looking back on two savagely destructive World Wars that human beings fought with each other, he wondered how human beings had ever found a way to live together in peace.

He found the answer in “rules of conduct” by which we could live together to our mutual advantage “without having to agree on common concrete aims”. This is the capitalist system – “the greatest discovery mankind ever made”. (Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 2, Chapter 11.)

The opposite system is totalitarianism – where common concrete aims are forced on citizens from above by a coercive regime.

Crucially, he identified “social justice” as the trojan horse via which totalitarianism enters the system of Western Civilization to destroy it from within. The social justice warriors, as we call them today, actively make the destructive choices about which Hayek warned:

Social Justice versus Reality.

There is no such thing as social justice. It misunderstands the definition of justice, which concerns how individuals behave towards one another in free economic exchange. Justice is breached by individual violence towards another individual, or by failing to keep the promise made in a contract, or by violating another’s private property. Social justice can never be about one group within society, because of a feeling of envy, demanding that another group compensate them for an outcome they don’t like. Social justice, says Hayek, is merely an unjustified claim by one social group on another. It is destructive and divisive.

Social Justice versus Truth.

The left prioritizes social justice over free speech, respect for facts and the marketplace of ideas. Cries of “racism”, name calling, unverified accusations, “politically correct” speech codes, safe spaces, bans on “microaggressions”, and censorship are all evidence of this rejection of truth. Uncorroborated accusations of personal misconduct are merely a political weapon for the social justice warrior crowds.

Social Justice versus Individual Identity.

The left sees people not as individuals, with all the ideas, effort and industry that individuals can collaboratively bring to bear, but as members of groups defined by race, class, income, gender and sexual orientation. The contribution of individuals is de-emphasized (or denied, as in “You didn’t build that”). The left insists that unequal outcomes must be evidence of inherent bias that requires state remediation. Someone must be to blame, and someone must be punished.

Social Justice versus Economic Growth For All.

Social justice warriors prefer redistribution of private property to a growing economy that can lift all boats. In their envious emotional state, they’d rather see others lose than everyone gain. They oppose policies that would unleash the individual effort that will generate greater economic growth. They are against the entrepreneurship, innovation and dynamism that produces the truly just society that only individual economic creativity can bring about.

Social Justice versus Individual Morality.

The modern left is increasingly secular and hostile to concepts of individual morality, whether based on faith or reason. Morality, to Hayek, is a set of unspoken (he called them “abstract”) rules of conduct which have emerged over ages of individual interactions through which humans came to identify and understand the behaviors that enable us to live together in peace, to our mutual advantage, without having to agree on common concrete aims. This emergent system of morality builds social consensus over the very long term. Justice warriors aim to end it violently in the short term.

Social Victimhood versus Personal Responsibility and Self-Reliance.

In their envious refusal to accept the outcomes of the system of individual economics, the warriors insist that someone must be to blame, and that someone (them) must be victims of the guilty parties’ criminal behavior. As victims, they feel that they can justify violent and predatory behavior. They ignore – in fact oppose – the notions of hard work, persistence, and present sacrifice for future return that characterize entrepreneurial capitalism. They promote immediate gratification over deferred gratification, in total contradiction of the first principles of morality, responsibility and self-reliance.

Hayek’s Vision.

Hayek hoped we would reject calls for tribal loyalty – what the politicians and talking heads on TV News broadcasts have attempted to frame as “unity” – and, instead, pursue our individual ends, defined by our unique needs and life circumstances. He conceived of a system that relies on general rules of conduct, rather than special rules serving the needs of special groups. That system was based on personal morality. But many fail to comprehend how such a system works for everyone.

At Center For Individualism, we strive to promote comprehension through education, by producing works like this: summaries of the thinking of our greatest philosophers of everyday life, and of American values, and how to preserve both. We call it “classic content made simple”, and hope you will find it illuminating, and that it will arm you for the kind of informed discussion that can change minds.

The Mirage Of Social Justice, Part 6: The Concept Of Social Justice Is The Trojan Horse Through Which Totalitarianism Has Entered.

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We are reverting to tribal conceptions. Socialism and nationalism represent a reassertion of tribal ethics, the desire for a visible common purpose. This is our inheritance from our tribal past and, every time we think we have defeated it (such as in our defeats of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe in the middle of the twentieth century), it continues to break back through.

Society Is Not An Organization.

Hayek blames what he calls organizational thinking. By this he means that a growing proportion of us work for large organizations, like business and government. These great administrative bureaucracies lead us to believe that their internal structures and processes are the way to accomplish all goals. When we accept employment in an organization, we agree to be bound by the ends of that organization; we become merely a means to that end. We submit to their authority and we suppress our personal goals and instincts. The adoption of effective large scale processes, methods and technologies by these organizations lead us to think that there is nothing they can’t achieve. The administrative bureaucracy keeps on adding more and more rules aimed at achieving the organization’s purpose, and the individual employee can lose sight of the fact that society does not operate in this manner.

Society can never be such an organization. Society operates by a process of trial and error in a network of collaborative units (families and households) joined together in a market. The trial and error process generates experience over decades and ages – more accumulated experience than any living person or organization could be aware of – and from this experience there emerges tried and tested principles for the collaborative life in a society. There is no foreseen purpose in mind. We are not united in a single, shared goal.

Common Law Versus Manufactured Law.

Now, the shared experience that was generated by trial and error and captured as common law is being replaced by public law – the manufactured rules of organization. Individuals become increasingly subject to the commands of authority, with growing technological methods of control. We are told that it is morally superior for us as members of society to serve a single hierarchy of ends. We must be united! The concept of social justice has been the trojan horse through which totalitarianism has entered.

The Threat To The Greatest Discovery Mankind Ever Made.

That people can live together in peace and to their mutual advantage without having to agree on common goals (in fact, because they do not share common goals and therefore pursue their own interests through trial and error), was the greatest discovery mankind ever made. Capitalism is its economic expression.

But the attempt to secure for each person what he or she is thought to “deserve” (i.e. social justice) by imposing upon all a system of common ends towards which their efforts are directed by authority deprives us of the utilization of individual knowledge, and thereby of the advantages of a free civilization. Socialism is based on an intellectual error, with crushing consequences.

To preserve our civilization, it is impossible to enforce the rules of social justice. No particular groups who hold their own common views about what they are entitled to should be allowed to enforce those views on other groups, and prevent those others from operating in a free and open market. This is simply a struggle for power between organized interests in which arguments of justice serve merely as pretexts. Attempts to “correct” the results of the market in the direction of “social justice” produce more injustice in the form of new privileges, new obstacles to mobility and new barriers to the alleviation of poverty.

Any Group That Is Dissatisfied Can Claim A “Social Problem”.

The warriors tend to label as a “social problem” anything which causes dissatisfaction in any group, and suggest that the legislature must “do something”. Social justice is a mere pretext for claims of privilege by special interests. It’s a slogan for all groups whose status tends to decline – farmers, steelworkers, the “middle class”, and so on.

Misfortune for some cannot create a claim for protection against risks which society has to run (i.e. trial and error) to attain the general elevation of living standards and quality of life. The protection of expectations can not possibly be granted to all in anything but a stagnant society. The only just principle is to grant it to none.

Attempts To “Correct” The Market Order Lead To Its Destruction.

Government intervention to “correct” the results of the market result in constant clashes between the demands of some groups seeking protection or special privilege, and the requirements of free collaboration between individuals. The deliberate aim at a concrete common purpose – such as “equality” – will destroy the larger order of the market in which everyone is treated equally but outcomes for special interest groups are not guaranteed. The only rules for society must be universally applicable rules.

Political parties accelerate the destruction of civilization. So long as particular – rather than universal – purposes are the foundation of these political organizations, then the result is the creation of enemies. Society becomes dominated by the friend-enemy relation.

The market does not serve visible needs. Market participants succeed by satisfying the wants of people whom they do not know, through the processes of indirect exchange. Monetary returns to their effort are the indicator of the satisfaction of others. It is better, for example, to work hard at innovation that reduces costs and makes it possible for greater productivity, than it is to redistribute income to the poor. Capitalism caters to the needs of millions of unknown people, rather than provide for the few known neighbors that we know. It is our prime moral duty to pursue a self-chosen end as effectively as possible, without paying attention to the role it plays in the complex network of human activities. We generally do the most good by pursuing our own gain. The invisible hand of the market brings the succor of modern conveniences to the poorest homes that the entrepreneur does not even know.

Tribal Loyalties And The Call For Unity Must Be Resisted.

Tribal loyalty is the greatest obstacle to the application of these universal principles for the good of all. When general rules of conduct rank ahead of special rules serving the needs of special groups, society as whole can progress. The system is impersonal and comprehensive. But many of us are not mature enough to comprehend it. Comprehension requires a degree of insight into the working of a spontaneous order which few persons have yet attained.

We are always told that to live in harmony, people must strive for a common end. We must be “united”. This is the device that has been effectively employed by all dictators. To preserve civilization, we must resist the call to unity and pursue our individual ends.

 

Social Justice Begets Poetic Justice – Be Careful What You Wish For.

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Poetic justice, according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, is “an outcome in which vice is punished and virtue rewarded usually in a manner peculiarly or ironically appropriate” (Webster’s is using the situational definition of irony, not the Socratic or the dramatic meaning). In literature, it is an ideal form of justice. Poetic justice is used by authors to convey moral principles, and they reward or punish their characters in a spontaneous twist of fate, not courts of law. In summary, poetic justice is the consequence of reality. It rewards rational behavior and long-term thinking, ethics being a primary building block for civilization.

Social justice is the opposite. Virtue is sacrifice, reality is different for everyone, and none of it is spontaneous. As Hunter Hastings has written in his Mirage of Social Justice series, social justice is irrational, meaning it “is a dishonest insinuation that one ought to agree to a demand of some special interest which can give no real reason for it.” Instead of self-determination, “the governing elites believe it is in their power to design and determine future outcomes.” And central to social justice is equality – its sacred and surreal, yet it can’t be won. So short of that, the high time preference of immediate gratification must be turned into a right. Or else.

Social justice is top down, forced, and contrived for the benefit of identity groups. Poetic justice is bottom up, organic, and derived. Like English common law, poetic justice is an emergent phenomenon, and about the individual.

Equality and Inequality

Equal justice under the law is a hallmark of western civilization and enshrined in the US Constitution. But for the social justice crowd, this is obsolete, there must be equality of outcomes. As defined by Webster’s, social justice is “a state or doctrine of egalitarianism.” That is further defined as “a belief in human equality especially with respect to social, political, and economic affairs.” One example of social equality is the push for gender neutral pronouns on college campuses. Politically, Cuba is frequently endorsed as an ideal. And certain political elites maintain that “renewable energy” is a necessary solution for the economic well-being of the poor. To prove it, a new system of social economic benefits has been invented.

No conversation about equality would be complete without talking about inequality, a favorite theme of all social justice protest mobs. But the most destructive form of inequality has to do with risk. In his book Skin in the Game, Nassim Taleb refers to inequality as asymmetry, and he identifies several groups of people who either benefit from asymmetry, or suffer because of it. Those who benefit are the ones who assume little risk for their ideas or decisions. They transfer those risks to innocent people who bear the costs while the perps retain all benefits.

Examples of risk inequality (groups of people who don’t suffer the consequences of their bad ideas) include analysts in the media, Keynesian economists, diversity consultants, government funded scientists, politicians, teachers’ unions, and crony corporate executives. At the top of the list for lack of accountability are high level civil servants, tenured professors, and legacy media executives. It makes perfect sense that these last three groups of muckety-mucks are the most powerful thought leaders for the entire social justice franchise.

The Poetic Justice Warrior

The poetic justice warrior engages her capacity for reason, develops a purpose for her life, and is confident in her abilities. While the social justice warrior needs intimidation backed by force to satisfy their immediate demands, the poetic justice warrior is patient and peaceful. In both cases, reality will dispense rewards and punishments, and for the social justice warrior it could be quick. Politics provides a stark example. The most prolific social justice warrior of 21st century America is President Barack Obama; and in an extraordinary example of poetic justice, he handed the keys to the White House over to President Donald Trump.

But President Trump is not a poetic justice warrior, he’s a pragmatist. So who is? Or as Nassim Taleb might ask, who has skin in the game? In Trump’s case, it’s the average citizen who voted for him. People who were tired of being patsies for the political, media, banking, and education elites. People who take care of their families, their customers, and their communities. They think long-term and generally don’t get involved in the activism of politics unless reality beckons. For them, poetic justice is not immediate, only inevitable.

Besides the taxpayer-voter-citizen, those with skin in the game include local governments, field scientists, merchants, artisans, athletes, inventors, investors, and school teachers.  While bureaucracies separate unaccountable decision makers from the consequences of their mediocrity and hubris, decentralization and networks keep risks and rewards where they belong. And the connectivity of technology has the capacity for producing ever more poetic justice warriors – people with a romantic sense of life. Perhaps the finest example of this is the entrepreneur. As Steve Jobs explained:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

The Mirage Of Social Justice, Part 5: The Rules Of The Free Market Wealth Creation Game Give Everyone A Chance, And Both Luck And Skill Have A Role.

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Hayek finds that the errors of the social justice warriors are in their thinking, which is highly influenced by their misuse of language and their misunderstanding of terms. He devoted a lot of his energies to trying to find and introduce better and clearer terms with fully-agreed meanings, but it was a vain pursuit.

Earlier in The Mirage Of Social Justice, he pointed out that there is no such thing as “society”. It does not have shared aims, it does not have needs or opinions, and does not make decisions or wield authority. It doesn’t exist. It is a collectivist mirage.

Similarly, Social Justice Warriors make a mistake when they refer to “the economy”. There is no such thing as the economy of a country or a society. The word “economy” can be applied to a system like a household or a farm or a factory, allocating means among competing ends according to their relative importance. Such an economy can be directed according to a plan based on economic decisions to serve a single set of ends that all participants agree on.

But a society is not an economy. A country is not an economy. What social justice warriors are trying to direct is what Hayek calls the market order, or what we might call the free market system. It is not a system that can be managed according to a single plan or governed by a single scale or a hierarchy of ends. In fact, it’s a network of many interlaced systems, serving the many different ends of all its individual and separate members. It can’t be governed by a single end, such as “equality”. It can not be a complex of deliberately controlled actions serving a single scale of ends.

Hayek Tries To Get Us To Use New Terminology, Since The Old Is Broken.

Hayek attempts to create a name other than economy, and came up with catallaxy. It stems from Greek meaning exchange but also “to admit to the community” and “to change from an enemy to a friend”. That’s exactly what a free market exchange does – welcomes everyone who wants to trade and makes them voluntary collaborators. Social Justice Warriors do the opposite: they change friends into enemies by seeing everything through the lens of envy.

Good luck with getting the word catallaxy to catch on, however.

Catallaxy is the special kind of spontaneous order produced by the market through people acting within the rules of the law of property tort and contract. A free society is a pluralistic society without a common hierarchy of particular ends. That it lacks agreed ends is a merit not a fault – people can live together in peace and mutually benefit each other without agreeing on particular individual aims. Each individual gains from the skill and knowledge of others whom he need not know and whose ends could be wholly different. When two individuals transact, there is no need to agree on the purposes of the transaction, so long as an individual need is satisfied. One might be contributing to the achievements of ends he would disapprove of if he was aware of them. If I buy a tie-died T-shirt from a hippie, I am happy to have the shirt; if the seller spends the dollars from the transaction on marijuana, even though I may disapprove, I am indirectly supporting the behavior. The catallaxy reconciles different knowledge and different purposes.

Unity Is Not A Goal To Strive For.

The market order has nothing to do with “solidarity” or “unity” and is, in fact, irreconcilable with these concepts in the sense of the pursuit of common goals. The two greatest threats to the market order are nationalism and socialism, collectivist arrangements which enforce a common goal or set of goals on all participants.

The relations that hold us together are not relations of solidarity or unity or sentiment, they are purely economic relations. Many people have an emotional negative reaction to this – it sounds cold, impersonal, lacking empathy.

Hayek’s Game Analogy.

Hayek suggests it may help people’s understanding to think of these economic relations as a game we all come together to play. A wealth-creating game. One that leads to an increase in the stream of goods and services and the prospects for all participants to satisfy their needs. “A contest played according to rules and decided by superior skill, strength or good fortune”. (OED)

This analogy probably does not work as well as Hayek had hoped, but let’s play it out.

Like any game, a mixture of work rate, skill and chance will determine the outcome. Wealth is created based on marketplace feedback. The individual plays the game by making an effort to serve others – applies for a job, or opens a store, or manufactures a product – and gets a response in return, either positive or negative: gets the job or makes a profit. A positive signal is the incentive to continue providing the service, or to do more. A negative signal is the necessary information to change course and try something different, or to change pricing, or both.

The rules provide information for all, but can’t determine what use any individual makes of the information, and so do not eliminate uncertainty. The results of any individual’s use of the information from the market also depend on what others do.

Rules determine that everyone has a chance in the game, and luck plays a role. There is no need to try to morally justify specific distributions of income or wealth, or specific outcomes. By analogy, there is no moral implication when Houston beats Boston, or vice-versa (whatever the game they are playing). The rules of the game do not treat people differently and everyone is respected equally. The market signals to everybody when there is an opportunity.

Everyone acts on their own knowledge and for their own purposes to discover if they can be rewarded within this game. They are guided by their own moral beliefs. The aggregate effects can not be judged on some ideal of distributive justice, but as the result of a process which improves the chances of all. There is no guarantee that the goods and services which an individual has to offer will have a particular value, only that he will be allowed to obtain for them what price he can. Trial and error involves constant disappointment to some expectations. Negative feedback is the response to differences between expected and actual results so that these differences will, in time, be reduced.

We Have A right To Our Property, But Not To Its Value.

Nor can individual expectations be based on past positions. If circumstances change and customers or employers find new partners, an individual may lose their job or their profit or their position. Do they have a right to retain their old position? No. Because the change is a result of the same process that rewarded them earlier. The market adapts and changes without regard to the past. Society may benefit as a whole, even though some individuals and groups feel a loss. There are no special privileges for groups threatened with the loss of positions they achieved in the past. Market values are not protected – we each have a right to our property but not to its value.

Winners And Losers.

Rules determine chances, but they don’t determine results. Even in a game with equal chances for all players, there will be some winners and some losers. Undeserved disappointments are unavoidable. They are bound to cause grievances. They may cause a feeling of having been treated unjustly, but no-one has acted unjustly. Those affected will make claims for remedial measures but it is essential that government should not possess the power to accede to such demands. Even if members of a large group share the sense of grievance – and it comes to be called a “social problem” – this is no less true. There is always the opportunity to play the game again.

The Mirage Of Social Justice, Part 4: Social Justice Warriors Are Total Strangers To The Basic Ideals Of A Free Society.

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Hayek has spent 3 chapters of The Mirage Of Social Justice explaining that true justice resides in rules of just conduct which govern individual behavior and the way we interact with other individuals. The rules are negative – they tell us what we must not do. They leave us freedom to be creative and entrepreneurial so long as we abide by the rules of just conduct. None of us can guarantee the results we will achieve as a consequence of exercising our individual freedoms. We simply try our best.

Yet, out of nowhere, the children of the welfare state have developed the feeling that “society” owes them particular things, and that “society” must act to provide them with those things, whether it’s a free education or free healthcare or a job. Hayek insists that the claim that these rights are due to them has nothing to do with justice, and that there is no way such a claim can be satisfied in a free society.

Misunderstanding Of The Term “Rights”.

Firstly, there is a complete misunderstanding about the term “right”. Claims of rights make sense only when they can be directed to an individual or an organization that can act within the rules of just conduct to deliver them. In contract law, a contract declares one party to have rights and one party to have a duty to make good on those rights. This is not an abstract but a specific concept. No-one has the right to a particular state of affairs unless someone else has the duty to secure it. We have no right that our houses don’t burn down, or that our products and services can find a buyer, or that any particular goods and services be provided to us. It is meaningless to speak of a right in the sense of a claim on society.

What about the so-called Bill Of Rights? These articles do not constitute a claim on government. They are a demand that, so far as the power of government extends, it ought to be used justly, i.e. applied the same to everyone. The Articles in the Bill Of Rights could easily be replaced by a single formula requiring government to use no coercion, and to follow rules that apply to everyone equally. The organization for coercion that we call government can not and should not be used to determine the particular material possessions of individuals or groups.

Social And Economic Rights Will Destroy The Old Civil Rights.

Social justice warriors have built on the negative civil right to be free from government coercion a new set of positive “social and economic” human rights, for which an equal or higher dignity is claimed. These are claims to particular benefits to which every human being is presumed to be entitled without any understanding of who is under the obligation to provide them, or how they might be provided. It’s meaningless to describe them as claims on “society” because “society can not act or value or treat anyone in a particular way. The only way this could be accomplished is to replace a free society with a totalitarian organization that can tell everyone in it what to do. The old civil rights and the new social and economic rights are in direct and complete incompatibility with each other. The new social rights can only be achieved by destroying the old civil rights.

A Lot Of It Started With FDR.

One major impetus for all this crazy thinking was the proclamation by the uber-socialist Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the “four freedoms”, which included “freedom from want”, and “freedom from fear”, together with the old “freedom of worship” and “freedom of speech”. No individual, no government, no organization can be given the duty of delivering freedom from want or freedom from fear. One is economically open ended and the other is emotionally open ended. Like social justice, these terms can not be defined, and can not be turned into action, and so they are empty and meaningless rhetoric. Roosevelt set an awful precedent, and worse was to come.

And Then The United Nations Took Crazy Thinking To A New Level.

The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of The United Nations in 1948 adds seven further guarantees intended to express the new “social and economic” rights.

  • Everyone, “as a member of society”, is assured the satisfaction of positive claims to particular benefits, without anyone having the duty or burden of providing them, and without an attempt to define the legal meaning of the words in the Declaration.
  • What, for example, can be the legal meaning that “everyone is entitled to the realization….of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable to his dignity and free development of his personality” (Article 22)?
  • Against whom is “everyone” to have a claim to “just and favorable conditions of work” (Article 23-1)? And to “just and favorable employment” (Article 23-3)?
  • What are the consequences of the requirement that everyone have the right “freely to participate in the cultural life of the community and to share in the scientific advances and its benefits” (Article 27)?
  • “Everyone” is even said to be “entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration are fully realized” (Article 28) – implying that not only is this possible but that there exists now a known method by which these claims can be satisfied for all.

It is clear that all these “rights” assume a “society” that is an organization, run by the UN, in which “everyone” is “employed”. Sounds like a world government. Hayek calls it “totalitarian in the fullest sense of the word”. The UN and their sympathizers have become “total strangers to the basic ideals of a free society”. Hayek terms this “tragic”.

If we wish everyone to be well off, we shall get closest to our goal, not by commanding by law that this should be achieved, or by giving everybody a legal claim to what we think they ought to have, but by providing inducements for all to do as much as they can that will benefit others. What the UN declares as rights are simply aspirations that only a voluntary system can fulfill.

 

International Pronouns Day Is A Thinly Veiled Attack On Individualism And Personal Integrity.

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October 17th was International Pronouns Day, in case you missed it. If zir are wondering if this includes a paid holiday, go back to work. If zir is wondering what a pronoun is, zir may be in trouble. If zir wants to know what this is all about:

According to the International Pronouns Day official website, referring to people by the pronouns they determine for themselves is basic to human dignity. Being referred to by the wrong pronouns particularly affects transgender and gender nonconforming people. Together, we can transform society to celebrate people’s multiple, intersecting identities.

Based on this explanation, we can be break it down into three premises to make it easier to understand. First, it’s basic to human dignity. Second, it’s about transforming society. Third, it celebrates multiple, intersecting identities.

Dignity

This word is defined as “The state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect, a sense of pride in oneself; self-respect.” Accordingly, dignity is something that is internal, and it is achieved by rationally pursuing one’s values. Conversely, for someone to determine for themselves how others are to refer to them is nothing but personal subjectivity. It is based on feelings. It is based on sacrificing other people to satisfy those feelings. It says that truth and morality are a matter of personal opinion. After all, who’s to say what’s right?

However, the exploitation of the dignity angle is even more insidious. According to the definition, dignity entails self-respect. How does one earn their self-respect? It starts with the most basic of human capacities, reason. To think is to process information and form abstract ideas. The second step in the process is purpose, using our concept forming capacity to support life-supporting goals. Self-esteem comes from our confidence in our ability to be productive and achieve happiness.

For someone to think their dignity comes from the personal pronoun usage imposed on others will actually deny them their self-respect. It is not internal, it is not earned, it is not rational. But it does enter the realm of social subjectivity. This is the idea that truth and morality are the creation of social convention. This is the premise of the second component.

Transforming Society

The intellectual foundation for social subjectivism is rooted in the 18th century philosophy of Immanuel Kant, which claims, among other things, that it’s your good intentions that matter. In this case, the feelings of the collective group overrule reason and evidence. According to sociologist Michael Schudson, “From the 1920s on, the idea that human beings individually and collectively construct the reality they deal with has held a central position in social thought.” In other words, truth and morality are derived from social convention, there is no appeal to a higher authority, and the mob rules.

As Jordan Peterson tells us, authoritarianism begins with taking control of the ideological and linguistic territory. In postmodern America, its about abrogating life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and replacing it with a subjective morality that claims rights for as many identity groups as possible. It means that you do not own your identity individually, the group you are assigned to owns your identity. As Hunter Hastings has written;

Society will become fundamentally different if we succumb to the superstitions of the social justice warriors. We will be forced to abandon individual responsibility, self-reliance, and traditional moral values, and replace these principles with dependence, collectivism and the high time preference of instant gratification.

Intersecting Identities

This could be the most insidious of all. This idea will rob each of us of our capacity for reason, determining our own purpose, and the confidence in knowing we’ll be able to achieve our values. Instead, we will be limited by the injustices manufactured in this irrational model. Social commentator John Belushi predicted this most eloquently in National Lampoon’s stage production of Lemmings in 1971: “If you’re not a black, homosexual, working class, woman – you’re an oppressor pig, and you deserve to die!

While the purpose of International Pronouns Day is primarily directed at the transgender and gender non-conforming community, it ignores the greatest minority on planet earth – the individual. It institutionalizes derision against individuals who do not conform, either unknowingly or intentionally, to their life-sapping, subjective morality. And where does it end? The possible combinations of intersectionality, meaning multiple identity groups in each person, are endless, and for what? To inform people that they cannot create and pursue their  own identity without “help” from these newly created social conventions?

Tribalism’s Contradictions

A Google search of International Pronoun Day reveals that it is being promoted mostly on college campuses. As Walter Donway asks in his review of Heather Mac Donald’s new book, The Diversity Delusion, “Do you know that “identity politics,” pressuring academic fields toward obsession with victim groups, and driving out the mission of conveying knowledge, is besieging the American university?”

While the legitimate mission of universities is being sacrificed in favor of tribalism, here is what the pronoun celebration is teaching: Emotion and feelings matter, reason does not. The purpose of your life is to own a group identity and its grievances, and to resist. You have no chance without your group. Your self-respect cannot be earned through productive work and relationships, don’t bother trying. This is no different than the racism of lowered expectations that affirmative action inculcates. In both cases, the end game is to subjugate its victims to servitude to the ultimate collective – the authoritarian state.

 

 

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