Statism

As discussed previously, most of today’s so-called liberals are really statists. Maybe we should discuss statism, the idea of strong government control. What are its advantages and disadvantages?

The statists point out that true liberalism allows inequalities. Those who have more ability and work harder will have more, as will their descendants (until they become wasteful or lazy and lose it). In fact some will have more simply due to luck. They also point out that in a liberal society the poor often lack good medical care and similar benefits. While those accusations are true, we must be careful about the proposed solution. It is easy to find problems and nearly as easy to propose solutions. The difficulty comes in making those proposed solutions effective without causing more serious problems.

Indeed one of history's most colossal failures was the result of well-intentioned solutions to the problems mentioned above. Communism, the ultimate form of statism, was supposed to fix inequality, poverty, lack of medical care and the other problems allowed in a liberal society. The results were the exact opposite of the intentions. Poverty was rampant, the government class was "more equal than others," medical care was abysmal for most of the people. Why? Why was statism such a failure?

The problems with statism start with the assumptions one must accept in order to believe in it. Implicit in statism is a belief that government is somehow wiser and more moral than the average citizen. Unless it possesses that wisdom and integrity there is no reason to trust government instead of average citizens.

Communism demonstrated that, contrary to statist assumptions, government has no special wisdom, nor is it less subject to temptation to abuse of power than is the average person. Good intentions may be comforting but they make a poor supper.

The communist state attempted to be all things to all people. It gave quotas to farms and factories, telling them what to produce and how much of it. It even assigned people jobs.

The result was one of the most spectacular failures in human history. The five year plans failed. The factories and farms did not their quotas and what they did produce was often shoddy. The people were held captive in an unworkable system. Communism produced shortages of nearly everything except misery.

We must now ask, where would government get the wisdom and integrity statists think it has? It must come from one of two sources:

1. Divine wisdom. Monarchists claimed that the king was God's anointed. If one accepts that, he could also accept that the king has some special, God-given wisdom. However most statists in the U.S. today seem to deny that God should have any voice in government. With few exceptions, U.S. citizens will reject the divine right of kings, and with it any divine wisdom or integrity for government officials.

2. The second possible source of special governmental wisdom is the wisdom of the majority. If we believe that the majority is always right or at least right more often than the average person, then we can believe that leaders elected by the majority are wiser than that average person. However, the beliefs of the majority will inevitably be the beliefs of the average person. Majority rule is, after all, essentially an averaging process.

Integrity is even worse. Majority integrity suffers from a mob effect. People will do as a group things they would not think of doing as individuals. People who agree theft is wrong may think it is somehow just fine to vote themselves benefits at the expense of others.
(cf http://hallillywhite.blogspot.com/2009/07/mob-rule-part-1.html)

One of the more pernicious aspects of statism is its tendency to turn social theory and personal preference into law. Be it the old official state church or modern political correctness, this tendency leads to silliness at best and institutionalized idiocy at worst. For example, the mayor of Portland, Oregon once proposed outlawing "snout houses," houses on which the garage projects out in front. What business did she have forcing her architectural preferences on everybody else? If people want to avoid those houses they can buy a different style. They can even live in neighborhoods where voluntary covenants prohibit them. However it is a serious infringement on liberal freedom for government to decide what kind of house everybody should live in.

Clearly there are problems with classic liberalism and freedom. However those problems are not nearly as serious as those we cause when we allow a statist government to rule our lives, whether we call that government "progressive," "positive," "modern" or anything else. Freedom leads to more production and more goods for everyone. Statism leads to less for everyone except the ruling class.

The goal should not be elimination of inequality but enhancing life for everyone, even if the rich still have more than the poor

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I Am a Liberal

If you've been reading my blog for a while here's some surprising information for you. I am a liberal. Yes it's true. Have been for years, not even realizing it for many of those years.

Now before you faint you might ask just what kind of liberal I am. After all, I have criticized many today who call themselves liberal. The answer is that I am a classic liberal which is almost the polar opposite of what passes for a liberal today.

I believe in liberty and individual responsibility. Furthermore I believe our liberty is a God-given right, not something government doles out to us. I believe strongly in the principles set out in the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...”

Now if each of us has inalienable rights it follows that government should not take away those rights. That is true if government is a monarchy, a democracy, or a republic. Even if 99% of the people want to restrict the rights of the other 1%, they have no justification to do so.

That is liberalism in its true sense. It is the historic meaning of the term. Any political philosophy that unduly restricts liberty is not liberal, it is statist. The appropriation of the word by today's statists is Orwellian newspeak, a triumph of public relations but a detriment to our supposedly free society. Some call themselves “modern liberals,” “positive liberals,” “progressives,” etc. but the fact remains that they want increased government and less individual freedom. They are statists.

Sadly, the real liberals did not step up and point out the fact that "positive liberalism" is in many ways the opposite of true liberalism. Rather than being "progressive," it is in fact a regression to the days when government was regarded as having divine wisdom to which the people should defer.

One example happened recently in Oregon. A farm in the eastern part of the state hosted a wedding. I confess that I fail to see who was harmed by that event. My liberal attitude says that we should allow them to use their property as they see fit. It is their property after all. However the statists who call themselves liberals have created a law that governs how people use property. Farmland must be used for farming until the government blesses some other use. The owners of that farm had to pay a fine for their horrible crime.

The whole thing is reminiscent of the children's game, “Mother May I” in which each child must do exactly as instructed by the child playing the part of the mother. However in this case I would call it “Big Brother May I.” The statist attitude is that Big Brother, that is government, knows best and we all better obey. If we want to do something out of the ordinary we darn well better ask permission first. That is the opposite of the liberal attitude that allows us freedom to do whatever does not infringe on the rights of others.

This newspeak also creates confusion when we read literature written before it came about. I've recently read Hayek's book, “The Road to Serfdom” written during World War II. He continually talks about liberal ideas as opposed to various forms of socialism. What he means by liberal is freedom and individualism. However today's “liberals” tend towards exactly the socialism he was opposing.

We should not fall for the linguistic tricks of the statists. Instead any discussion of the topic should focus on the ideas themselves and how effective they are in benefiting humanity. A start is to use correct language which means we must insist that they are properly called statists. Webster defines statism as, "The principle or policy of concentrating extensive economic, political and related controls in the state at the cost of individual liberty." That obviously fits today's "liberals." In fact it fits many politicians of either party in the U.S., though the parties differ in how they apply their statist ideas.

Today's “liberals” are illiberal statists, not liberals. Our “progressives” are regressive statists, not progressives. They believe in big government, not freedom and individual responsibility. Let's call them what they are.

Next time I plan to discuss some of the problems statism creates.

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The Parable of the Pigs

One night a dozen hogs escaped from a farm. The farmer was busy and didn't have time to go after them for two days by which time they had found a nice swampy area near the river and decided that they liked their freedom. The farmer could only catch three of them. The rest soon established themselves in their new home where they did what came naturally. Within a couple of years they and their offspring became a potentially valuable amount of pork on the hoof. Hunters and trappers converged to claim that prize.

The hogs, however, refused to cooperate with the hunters and trappers. They had become wise to the ways of their enemies, to the point that it was a lucky hunter who managed to take even one of them. After a few months of that, word got around and few even tried.

Then one day a stranger came to town. He got a local lad to show him the area where the hogs lived, then went to a trucking company and reserved a large cattle truck for two months later. Everybody laughed. If he wanted to waste his money on a truck reservation that was OK with them.

The stranger hung around town for two months, leaving every day for some errand unknown to the locals. Then he told the truck driver to go to a certain location the next day. The truck made two trips to the slaughterhouse. The stranger turned a nice profit and there were no more hogs running loose, he had captured every one.

As the stranger was celebrating with a thick steak someone asked him how he did it. “It's no big secret,” he said. “I just went and put some corn on the ground in the area. For a couple of days the hogs ignored it, then a young pig approached and timidly ate some corn. The next day there were three young pigs eating my corn. Within a week some of the older hogs started taking advantage of the free lunch. Finally after a month I had every hog in the area eating my free meals every day. In fact they started to get used to me.

The next step was to build my pig pen. First I put posts in the ground, but only along one side of the food and with several feet between posts. The hogs were nervous but within a day they were used to the posts. Then I put in more posts, all around the area. I made sure to put some gate posts where I wanted the gate. They got used to that so I put poles on the ground between some of the posts. After another couple of days I added more poles, all around the food except for the gate. Then I started adding another layer of poles each day so the fence height grew slowly. The hogs got used to going in and out of the gate.

Day before yesterday the fence was high enough and strong enough to hold the hogs. I let them eat and leave that day. Then yesterday I just put more poles in to close the gate and I had myself a nice herd of swine. The interesting thing is that they didn't really try very hard to escape, just made themselves comfortable like regular domestic hogs. In fact when the truck came it was pretty easy to put down a ramp with barriers on each side. I had baited the truck with more corn and they just walked up the ramp into the truck.*

That story has obvious applications to our lives today, from politics to borrowing money. How often are we tempted to take the easy way, the free lunch or other shortcut, especially when we see others doing it? That way lies danger and it matters little if the provider of the free lunch has our best interest at heart or is laying a deliberate trap. What matters is the result, what happens after we become complacent and dependent. And I'm not talking only of going to the slaughterhouse here. Even if the hogs in the story had been kept as pets they would have lost their freedom. Likewise becoming dependent on others saps our freedom and humanity.

That is the most obvious lesson, we should not become dependent on others as long as we are able to care for ourselves. However we should also consider how to avoid that dependence. The pigs in the story were suspicious but still fell for the trap. That was because the trap was constructed gradually so they became accustomed to the fence little by little. Even then the older, wiser hogs might have stayed away except that they saw others taking advantage of the free corn. “Everybody is doing it” was the apparent perception. Well, everybody went to the slaughterhouse.

Businesses seek to sell us something on time. Lottery agencies seek our money on the implied (and very false) premise that we have a reasonable chance to win. Governments seek to help us at taxpayer expense. All make their promises look very attractive, just like the corn looked attractive to the hogs. And in all those cases it is easy to think that everybody is doing it. However all can lead us down the path to loss of freedom and sometimes worse.

*This is based on a story I read long ago. Unfortunately I cannot remember the source so cannot give credit where credit is due.

Rationing

Should we have health care rationing? That is the wrong question; we will have rationing of health care and nearly everything else. The question is how will things be rationed? The fact is that, with few exceptions, we do not have enough of anything for everybody to have as much as they want. We have plenty of air and no reason to ration breathing, but that is the exception. For nearly everything else the sum of human desires far exceeds availability.

Take housing for example. What kind of house would you like? Where do you want it to be? Maybe you want a beachfront mansion, a penthouse atop a skyscraper, or a mountain lodge with all the amenities and a great view. Such desires are natural but now think of what it would take to provide every human, or even everybody in the U.S., with the home of his dreams. How much lumber would it take? How many workers to build it? What would it take to furnish it?

Or consider something as basic as drinking water. Earth is plentifully supplied with water, but not with pure, fresh water. Most of this water is too salty to drink and the rest is mostly contaminated with disease-causing microbes. Good drinking water is a rarity in nature. To avoid disease we have to purify our water before we slake our thirst. Billions of people are ill because they lack safe drinking water and must drink from contaminated sources.

Food is also a common shortage item throughout the world with millions regularly malnourished. Even most U.S. citizens, though not hungry, do not always have the food they would prefer. We eat hamburger instead of filet mignon, tuna instead of lobster tail, green beans instead of asparagus tips. There just isn't enough to go around of the foods we prefer, and in some places there is not enough food of any kind to go around.

I could describe similar problems with clothing, cars, books, and on and on and on. For most commodities there simply is not enough to provide everybody with everything he wants. That is why Sowell describes economics as the study of scarce resources which have alternative uses. We have limited amounts of prime beachfront property. That property could be used for your dream house, for a hotel, for a restaurant or other purposes. Not everybody will have all the beachfront property he wants because there just isn't enough of it to supply all those wants.

Why do we have these shortages? There are different reasons, some we can somewhat control, some beyond our control. There is, for example, only a limited amount of beachfront property and we are unlikely to create more. However many of these limitations are due to human factors. For example (and contrary to popular perception), Earth has a plentiful supply of oil for the foreseeable future. The problem is not an absolute shortage but that (a) much of that oil is in the hands of tyrants who control the flow from their oil fields, (b) much of the oil in the western world is either very deep or tied up in shale or tar sands which make it difficult for humans to extract it with current technology, and (c) political restrictions have placed many potential oil fields off-limits. The resources required to extract much of that oil can be used for other things which is one reason we have not been more aggressive in developing newer sources.

Human skill is another limited resource, in fact the most important limited resource. For example, consider what it takes to produce a physician. The prospective physician must first have a great desire, drive and ability; otherwise he will not qualify for medical school nor will he survive the six to ten years of training required after he graduates from college. In addition to the talent and drive he must bring to the training, we must provide the opportunity for him to learn what he needs to know. That means medical schools and teaching hospitals – both of which are expensive. We must divert resources from other uses in order to train a physician and he must divert years of his life to the training – time he might spend in other profitable pursuits.

The other facets of medicine also demand resources that might be useful elsewhere. Nurses and physicians' assistants do not require the arduous training demanded of physicians, but their training is still time-consuming and expensive. Medications and medical instruments also require both human talent and natural resources. The engineering skills used to develop things like magnetic resonance imaging could have been used to develop things like computers or more efficient automobiles. Somebody had to decide to use that talent for medical equipment instead of other, probably equally lucrative, purposes.

In fact I believe that the main limitation we have is the fact that we have only so many highly skilled people. Engineers, scientists, technicians, plumbers, farmers, all are necessary to supplying our needs and wants but nobody can know it all. Time spent studying medicine cannot be devoted to studying agriculture. Worse, not everybody has the drive to develop and use their talents to the fullest. Humans tend to be naturally lazy and to take the easy way. For every Edison who is driven to improve the human condition there are probably a thousand people who prefer to sit on the couch and watch TV.

The result of all this is that we do not have, and in the foreseeable future will not have, as much of anything as people want. Even if everybody worked his hardest we would not have that, and not everybody works his hardest. That means that there must be some way of rationing what we do have. There are two primary ways of doing this, with of course a continuum of intermediate methods. The pure capitalist way is to simply let everybody earn what can or wants to earn, then spend it as he pleases. Those who fail to earn enough for their needs fall by the wayside as the victims of survival of the fittest (though many capitalists have been at the forefront of providing voluntary assistance to those in need). This has the advantage of encouraging people to work hard in order to meet their needs and desires.

The other extreme is socialism, especially communism. In that system, at least in theory, everybody's needs are met. All production is put into a common pot and doled out as appropriate. This has the advantage that it tends to meet people's needs. However it has the disadvantages of encouraging sloth and of susceptibility to manipulation by those who dole out the resources. Communistic societies tend to share the misery rather than the wealth.

Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. However the capitalistic system seems preferable. If we allow people to benefit from their production, we encourage production and independence. If we take from them the fruits of their labor, we encourage laziness and dependence. That is why I do not believe in government-provided (read taxpayer funded) health care. It encourages dependence and sloth. It also helps people self-justify in not taking care of their health. If they think the government will pay the medical bills, why not watch TV and eat French fries? If the heart attack comes, those nice tax-funded doctors will fix you up – at least until they are forced to ration care because there isn't enough to go around.

So it is with other needs and wants. If we hand them over on the dole, people will not work for them but will become leaches on society. That will increase demand while decreasing production. However if people get what they earn, production will increase and demand will be only what people can afford, based on what they earn. That is a result of rationing by ability to pay, which also means rationing by productivity. Combined with charitable aid for the less fortunate, I believe that will provide enough for everyone. Not all people want, but enough.

Rationing should be done by the market, not by government.

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