Well, at least I blog more often than Haley’s Comet.  Then again, he only gets Wi-Fi access like what, every 76 years?  Somewhere, there’s a graveyard containing all the brilliant blog ideas I’ve had but never got to write.  And somewhere, kids avoid it, not because it’s haunted—which would be way too cool—but because it’s completely square and boring.

One idea at least I can save from that graveyard, an idea for which I can thank our President (of the United States, not the university).  Several weeks ago—I’m guessing two—I heard our President say on television, “We cannot cut our way to prosperity.”  Being an inveterate smart aleck, my first thought was: Yes We Can!

One of the things that annoy me about politics is the propensity for people to make statements about the world with the apparent belief that their conviction necessarily makes it so.  (In fairness, it irritates me everywhere.)  I mean, I can say a lot of things with conviction that aren’t necessarily so.  And the President’s statement rests on a common delusion among politicians: if the government doesn’t spend money, it doesn’t get spent.

Perhaps this represents a disconnection of macroeconomics from microeconomics, and is evidence of over-specialization in yet another field.  Microeconomics studies individual behavior; macroeconomics looks at the aggregated results of that behavior, the big picture, so to speak.  The President is thinking in purely macroeconomic terms, and as a macro event, the national economy requires an aggregated, macro actor to influence it.  So if the government doesn’t spend the money, it has no effect.

As microeconomics reminds us, though, the economy is actually made up of lots of individual decisions.  When government does not collect and spend money, it remains in the hands of those individual deciders.  (Yes, that’s right: in the economy, we are all the deciders.)  And if recent history is any guide, those individuals have absolutely no problem spending.

Let us assume for a moment the opposite, however.  Say individuals don’t spend their money.  So long as they do not bury it in a can in the backyard, it still serves to stimulate the economy, because they put it in a bank.  The bank doesn’t bury it in the backyard either, but lends it to people who want to do something productive with it (productive enough to pay the bank and you for the use of it, and still have it be worthwhile for them).

Both of these outcomes are superior to government collecting the money and spending it (in most cases), for at least two reasons.  First, the government has a great deal more friction, or deadweight-loss; some of the money is dissipated in the paperwork and administration necessary to collect and spend it.  Second, when the government has the pooled resources at its command, it has the ability to influence behavior—to make, rather than take, prices.  That is, it can drive the market.  Although the aggregated behavior of large groups of consumers, savers, lenders, and borrowers can do the same, they are not organized.  None of the individuals in the group can wield the clout of the entire group.

Obviously, there are some exceptions.  There are times when we want the government to do that.  The independent decisions of all those individuals will not usually produce enough defense, for example, because of free-riding problems.  So we want the government to use the coerced collective clout of tax dollars to cudgel that market a little (though again, since the number of players in that market becomes small—one consumer and few producers—other problems crop up).  Consumers can display herd behavior, rushing lemming-like off the cliffs of Britney Spears albums or collectible dinner plates.

For simply increasing productivity in a market, though, government spending is inferior to private action, because less bang comes from each buck.  Again, this is in a general sense, and the size of the federal budget, deficit, and debt do not encourage the idea that we are asking too little of government.  So, to return to the rebuttal of the President’s claim (with the President’s own slogan), we can cut our way to prosperity, whether as a country or as individuals.  If individuals dispose of their resources directly, cutting out the bureaucratic middle-man as it were, the same amount of resources will usually have more effect.

Even in a macroeconomic sense, though, reducing debt would be a way of cutting ourselves to prosperity.  That is, let us assume that the government does not decrease revenues, but simply decreases expenditures.  If we cut spending to meet revenues, we stop borrowing money (which is more expensive to use than current money).  If we pay off debt, it frees up money going to service interest for other purposes (or to be left in the hands of the laborers who earn it).  Either way, we get more for the same amount of resources.

So yes, Mr. President.  Yes we can.

So long as I am offering iconoclastic interpretations of iconic literature, I thought I might make a brief series out of it. And, in so doing, radically alter the average number of posts this year. Oh, and, uh, people’s perceptions, too. Yeah, definitely those. So just post-date this one to Christmas (and remember that I have dibs on this for my English dissertation).

You have surely read or heard of Ebenezer Scrooge, from Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol. Or seen one of the movie adaptations. Or heard the radio play. Or seen the musical. On ice. Ebenezer Scrooge has become a byword for the justification for wealth redistribution. The lesson, we are told, is that we should all care enough about our fellow man to support welfare programs. Only people who are as hard-hearted as Scrooge would object to welfare programs, would begrudge the honest and hard-working Bob Cratchit a living wage, or Tiny Tim the simple preventative care that will save him.

First, if this were intended as an argument for public policy, it would be the single most egregious example of stacking a deck or manipulating evidence (or for that matter, emotions). Bob Cratchit wouldn’t drink away public assistance down at the pub (and only a Scrooge would suggest the possibility), and he wouldn’t use it to purchase lottery tickets or bet on horse races, or to make food out of questionable animal organs covered in gravy of suspect provenance. (Hey, it has to go in the list of British vices.) Bob Cratchit was a paragon of virtue, unlike most of us (and yes, liberals, “us” includes you).

And therefore no one would suggest that Mr. and Mrs. Cratchit might bear some responsibility for their situation. Bob didn’t make bad career decisions, or spend his time in school vandalizing books rather than reading them. It would be heartless to suggest that perhaps they could have stopped procreating sooner—who would deny them the happiness of another child?

That is to say, if this is evidence to support a policy claim, it is a single case, and a rather exceptional one at that. However, I would argue that Bob Cratchit is not offered as evidence to advocate for a public policy. The focus is indeed on an individual case, but it is not Bob Cratchit. It is advocacy, but not for public policy.

Read the original story. Scrooge’s retort to the men soliciting on behalf of a charity is very telling. “Are there no workhouses?” he asks. For those unfamiliar with history, workhouses were the public welfare system in Victorian England. Those with no other place to stay could check themselves in and out; the workhouses provided barracks-like housing and meals, but those who stayed there were organized into work crews to maintain the grounds and prepare the meals (at least, if I remember the details correctly).

Surely the workhouses were not pleasant places, but Dickens is not making a plea for their reform; he is making a plea to make them redundant. That is, his focus is on Scrooge as an individual, not on public policy. The lesson the ghosts teach Scrooge is about him and the state of his heart. In other words, if men privately, individually, voluntarily took care of the needs of the less fortunate, they would learn to be better people, and we would not need government to coerce charity. As Hayek reminds us, forced charity has no merit.

Indeed, the only lesson Dickens seems to offer on public welfare is that it provides an excuse for the hard-hearted not to change their ways. After all, as Scrooge says, the government has already taken my money to provide for the less fortunate. They are no longer my concern. In other words, public provision of charity crowds out private provision.

That loss of fellow-feeling, that permission to withdraw from society and isolate oneself, is a phenomenon Tocqueville calls individualism. It will, he warns, cause a society to fall apart, and increasing equality only encourages it. It is to combat this that he recommends both associations and religion, which turn the attention away from the self and toward others. Or, to paraphrase Dickens, that teach us to keep Christmas—the season of considering others before ourselves—all year round.

The lesson of Scrooge is that public provision of welfare reinforces the hard-hearted, that only the change of an individual’s heart to produce voluntary action can make a difference in the world. Note that all of Scrooge’s actions, once reformed—the actions that, to borrow from Dr. Seuss, involved his heart growing three sizes—were individual, voluntary sacrifices.

And that may be the very first time Dickens has been accused of promoting classical rather than modern liberalism.

Ah, springtime: when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love, and a middle-aged man’s to thoughts of taxes.

I was recently reading a tax advice column for professors, in which the advisor first professed his own satisfaction at knowing that the taxes he paid went to those less fortunate. At some point, of course, he trotted out the inevitable Robin Hood reference. Somehow, poor Robin has become the patron saint of socialism, enlisted in liturgy and iconography to establish the justice of wealth redistribution. I still have a paperback I bought in the German Democratic Republic: Robin Hood, the Avenger of Sherwood. Even in Communist countries, he was the believable action hero to win the hearts and minds of youth to the cause (after all, Lenin was too short and Marx too hirsute to have been credible action heroes—and most importantly, they were too academic).

This patron saint, however, turns out to have been something of a heretic. A heretic, moreover, who proves that socialists have a poor grasp of either politics, history, or literacy, but a firm one on agitprop. Everyone remembers the tagline: steal from the rich and give to the poor. Those who have bothered to read the legends, however, or who bother to think about the politics or history of the time, know that the implications socialists like to draw from this are simply untrue.

Like the best lies, it begins with a grain of truth. The people from whom Robin took money were wealthy. And the people to whom he gave it were not. What is missing from the picture, however, is how the wealthy got the money. They were not capitalists, who increased productivity so that there was more for everyone. They were aristocrats in the time of aristocracy—they were the government. And the money Robin reclaimed had been extracted in the form of taxes. That’s right: Robin stole from the government and gave to the taxpayer.

So Robin Hood was a tea partier before tea parties were cool, and one who did better than destroy a shipment of tea. He actually returned the money to those whose lives the tax burden was crushing to a fine powder. Robin Hood was…Ronald Reagan?

And Robin Hood was a visionary and rebel. He called those who would be free of the depredations of a paternalist government to form a society of their own, one outside of the boundaries of normal society, hidden to protect it, and based on rugged individualism. Robin Hood was…John Galt?

Robin Hood is a hero of the American Revolution, or should be, and not a hero of the Russian one. It is time we reclaimed this man not afraid to live outside the color of the law when the law became oppressive, who stood up through voluntary organization for self-determination, the right to keep and bear arms, and against extortionate tax rates as the libertarian hero he was, is, and always shall be.

There–you can have the soapbox back now.

Dr. Benjamin Spock is the child-rearing expert, Mr. Spock is the Vulcan science officer from Star Trek. Regardless of how you feel about the good doctor, it appears that Vulcans make lousy sources for child-rearing principles.
I have in mind a story a student relayed to me this past spring. I must admit that I was not present during these events, so what I tell you is hearsay. A second student confirmed what the first said, and I know both to be honest, so I have no reason to doubt the story. What happened is this: in a biology class, discussion led the professor to comment on the advisability—I’d go so far as to say necessity—of regulating research involving human subjects.
I’m not sure what studies the professor discussed to demonstrate the importance of research ethics and regulatory oversight, but I imagine they had something to do with pharmaceuticals, given the response I am about to relate. It seems that a couple of students in the class challenged not the oversight of ethics in research with human subjects, but the ethic which that oversight seeks to maintain: that all participants should take part voluntarily and knowing the risks they will entertain along the way.
The students argued that researchers should be able to use homeless and incarcerated subjects without their knowledge or consent.

Continue reading →

One last entry on social justice (and lessons from international relations), and then I think I will have it out of my system. Honest. I suppose at long last it is time to get to the heart of the matter, with apologies to Don Henley.

In The Twenty Years’ Crisis, E.H. Carr quotes Reinhold Niebuhr from a 1927 Atlantic Monthly article: “There is an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups.”

My mind immediately flashed to a quote from a co-worker here at Belmont. The quote appeared in an article when he was hired, and I have tried in vain to find that article to be sure I correctly quoted him. Instead, I must repeat it to the best of my recollection: We spend too much time focusing on individual sin rather than the great systematic evils in the world.

Now, as a methodologist, my first reaction is to point out that this is nonsense.  There is no great systematic evil apart from a whole bunch of individual sinning. That is, great systematic evil is simply the aggregation of individual acts; it cannot exist apart from them. It is easy to talk about the Holocaust in the abstract, but it consisted of millions of concrete individual acts; had those individual sins not occurred, there would have been no Holocaust.

The only reason to point to the abstraction is to lessen that culpability. To look at a great systematic evil and come to terms with my individual contribution is frightening, uncomfortable; it means admitting to failure, to a debt. No one likes looking at their portrait of Dorian Gray. It is much more comfortable to point to the flaws in other people’s portraits, to ignore the beam in our eye in favor of the speck in someone else’s.

Yet the experience of the two Germanies after World War II points to the importance of looking that portrait full in the face. Western occupiers, especially the U.S., encouraged public discussion that led eventually to catharsis. It led to repentance, and an understanding of how to and why to fight it in the future. One sees the same principle in Truth and Reconciliation Committees in South Africa and Chile.

To Soviet occupiers, however, Nazi atrocities were something Hitler and his cronies and foisted upon the German people, and the Soviet Union had liberated them from that nightmare. Note that this leaves the massive and invasive state apparatus unchallenged—the problem was not the power of the state, but the people who controlled it. They were the criminals, it was they who sinned. But it also absolves the individual of responsibility in that great systematic evil. Those devils made me do it—I am no longer their co-conspirator, but their victim.

And that is the great attraction of social justice. It allows adherents to remove their focus from their own shortcomings, to feel better about themselves. And not just themselves—the system creates the evil, not other individuals. Faith becomes an outcome, not a process. Moreover, since the problem is abstract, the solutions to it can also be abstract. Not only may we omit the painful process of coming to know ourselves, but we can skip the long, hard work of getting personally involved. We can raise awareness. We can advocate.

We may also, then, substitute government action for individual involvement. In fact, we must; because we must address the entire system, we must use a tool of similar scope. We lose something important, however, when we lose the connection that direct personal involvement brings. As Tocqueville points out, encouraging that connection to our fellow man is vital to the continued success of democracy. Increasing equality increasingly alienates us from each other, and abstract interaction through government—the one not knowing whom they help, the other not knowing who helps them—cannot create the necessary fellow-feeling.

As a result, government fiat must replace personal relationships. We come to relate to each other solely through government. Bureaucracies administer welfare programs, courts must settle even the most trivial questions. Only the government can make you a better person, improve your life, solve your problems. Only the government can take care of you. Only government cares for you. Like a big brother.
But then, what is social justice if not progressive?

I have been submitted for re-education! An alert reader of my last-but-one post (on the social disease in justice) brought it to the attention of a member of Senior Leadership. That person felt compelled to email me to correct my flawed understanding of social justice.
Obviously, the most shocking revelation here is that someone read my blog. That I remain unabashedly heterodox and skeptical comes as less of a surprise. But does this mean that I’ve made my dissident “bones”? Certainly the day was nothing like Ivan Denisovitch’s. Neither does it rise to the level of Vaclav Havel’s imprisonment and harassment. Fortunately, I have not yet been baptized in those fires. So a mere crank, grateful to liberty, I remain.

The social justice crowd seem to enjoy expressing themselves on their bumpers slightly more than the rest of us. I’m not sure to which stereotype this plays—poor, bohemian hippie who doesn’t have to worry about resale value (because the car had none originally), or rich, progressive snob who doesn’t have to worry about resale value (either because the BMW dealership takes them off when you trade it in, or because it saves the next owner the trouble of applying the stickers themselves). But I do know that it shows an appalling naivety. Let me explain.
Two bumper stickers I have seen read “No justice, no peace (know justice, know peace)” and “If you want peace, work for justice.” Of course, by justice, they mean social justice—personal justice (getting what we deserve) being something that creates more discontent than peace (because we all think we deserve better than we get). That is, if you want domestic harmony, redistribute resources to groups who have less (and want more).
One does not have to be a very good student of international relations to realize the futility of that tactic.

Continue reading →