We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day Speaking personally, I can’t help wondering why the Left are so ready to believe that everyone who gets a tax bill for £50,000 will just grit their teeth and pay it, but putting 20p on a pint of beer will force average Joes like us to quit drinking. Either incentives matter, or they don’t.
– a throwaway thought in brackets in a long Britblog roundup from Mr Eugenides
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The simplest answer that makes the most sense, and fits with other observations, is that leftists don’t believe in economics. In their world-view money, goods, and services are all orthogonal to each other, each existing in a separate and unrelated world, each distributed to individuals in a mostly random fashion.
Robin: If this is the case, why pursue a policy that is explicitly based on demand curve principles in order to reduce the amount of alcohol consumed?
My own view is that the leftists seem to believe the entire purpose of policy to be the symbolic expression of moral axioms.
They consider both excessive drinking and excessive personal wealth to be social ill and they therefore want to use the tax system to discourage both, and more importantly make a public statement of to ‘Our’ (Society/The State) disapproval. The fact that in doing so they run into an essential contradiction doesnt even occur to them.
To Robin Goodfellow,
I agree and will put it this way. Leftists believe manna falls from Heaven. Rich people are unusually sneaky and effective at gathering up most of the manna. So, they should give it to others and keep only their fair share.
More “realistic” leftists follow Marx’s recognition that the wealthy created the machinery of production, but it is not necessary to keep them around to collect the proceeds. Just take the machines, press the buttons, and divide the wealth.
Richard Epstein discusses Barack Obama
Richard Epstein is the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1972. He was a colleague of Barack Obama when Obama taught as an instructor. Epstein had mutual friends with Obama, and talked to Obama about some issues. His main description is that Obama is under complete self-control
“Obama worked as a community organizer and was in many cases very constructive. He organized public/private partnerships to help the homeless and downtrodden.”
“But, the difficulty you get, for someone who has only worked in that situation, is that he believes the creation of private wealth is something the government cannot influence or destroy. He has many fancy redistribution schemes, in addition to his health plan and new labor laws, which are all wealth killers.”
IMO, you’re giving them way too much credit. The answer is that it doesn’t matter if the 20p on the beer leads to healthier lifestyles or not, it brings in tax money which is the only point of the exercise. The “healthier lifestyle” part is the candy coating to fool the rubes.
@Jay before Newton there was a disconnect between the laws of nature that held on Earth and the laws of the heavens that held for the stars and planets. Newton erased this and connected the laws of the Earth with the laws that governed the objects in the sky. He established that the same forces that cause rain to fall on Earth dictate the motion of the Moon.
Leftists do not appear to believe in economics. There is a chasm of understanding between the man on the street buying groceries (or cigarettes) at the corner store and the wealth of a business owner. Just as Andrew said, they believe that wealth falls like manna from heaven and the rich acquire it only through luck and trickery. Otherwise, the contributions of all individuals are nominally equal.
I imagine they do indeed want to discourage the existence of wealthy individuals, but to them there is no downside to this because there is no downside to discouraging the activities that the wealthy use to become that way (trickery and luck).
“Leftists do not appear to believe in economics. ”
You can straw-man us to death, but be aware there are entire schools teaching labour and left-perspective economic theory. I know at least one person with an econ degree who is even further on the left than I am — you, me, and him may disagree on particulars, but we are probably all past the point of ‘believing in economics’. Give us some credit, would you?
Quite so even some “free market economics” is actually a confused mess.
And most of what is taught in the universities as “economics” is actually utter nonsense (such as the doctrien that more government spending being good in a recession).
As such most trained economists actually know less about economics than a person chosen randomly off the street (for example such a person is unlikely to believe that printing more money and spending it will increase real incomes via a “multyplyer effect” – supposedly most economics students even at “free maket” Univerity of Chicago are taught that it would do this).
So when we say “the left do not believe in economics” it might be better to say “the left believe in university economics”.
Jay is partly correct: it is an expression of their view on morality. What I disagree with is any notion of it always being explicit. I am sure that some of them know very well they’re promoting contradictory ideas and are just perpetrating a racket. For most others, who are sincere, I think it more a case of a disintegrated worldview just as Robin suggests. Morality comes into it in that each individual fragment of that economic worldview is that which conveniently fits with an underlying implicit idea of what is morally right and wrong. They think they’re being merely pragmatic, but their implicit moral codes determine what they deem to be practical in any given circumstance. The economic points clash because the moral points clash. This is why cognitive dissonance can be so soul-destroying for them and why they’re often so desparate to shut down debate: it is not solely an issue of dissent changing others’ view and interfering with their grand plans (which is a real point in its own right), the dissent is also bringing their own internal moral contradictions to their attention and telling them in the deepest and unavoidable way “your moral worldview is wrong.” Naturally, they don’t like that one little bit.
The left is not alone in this. Conservatives can be just as much guilty of it, though they tend to exhibit it more strongly in the realm of personal freedoms and religious belief (but it is there in economics as well). For instance, the existence of multiple religions that cannot possibly be all true either has to
a) lead them to think themselves the right ones and everyone else tricked by or following the forces of evil; or
b) lead them to questioning the validity of religion at all because of the practice of relying on even the strongest of feelings to determine truth being brought into question.
There is thus an inherent clash within the conservative civilised religious man between his reasoning civilised part and his faith-driven religious part. He is only both to the extent he can stave off recognition of that clash in his internal thoughts and not let the clash be too blatant in his external practice. Like the leftist on economics, that is achieved by concocting all manner of rationalisations, apologetics, and denunciations of others. He, like the leftist, has to “maintain the rage”.
In the mean time, to the extent that reason wins out, he can produce immense values that are coloured by his religious element, just as the leftists can make a variety of valid observations and champion valid causes that are then equally coloured by their warped moral view. Both then claim the value of the first part as caused by the second part. In the end, the clash does come to a head: contradictions do not exist, full stop. The reason why both the very religious and the very leftist hate logic is one and the same, differing only in how the conflict comes to a head. The economic points as per the QOTD are examples of that for the left.
JJM
I think Milton Friedman’s Monetary History of the US book has had a pernicious influence, as I keep reading supposed ‘free marketeers’ using the book to justify mass inflation as a solution to the world’s economic troubles.