Cutting Meat

I’m not entirely convinced that economists know enough to tie their own shoes. Friedrich Hayek won the Nobel prize for his work in economics, but after dipping into The Constitution of Liberty, an influential book he wrote in the late 1950s, it seems pretty clear that I’m smarter than he was.

Rather than read the whole book through from the beginning (I hope to get to it later), I jumped forward to the chapter on labor unions. Hayek was no friend of unions. Though he claimed to see some value in unions as fraternal organizations, he ardently opposed strikes, picketing, boycotts, and collective bargaining. His objections to union activity were both philosophical and practical. To understand why he was wrong, we need to separate the two.

Philosophically, he opposed collective bargaining and the closed union shop on the grounds that an agreement between a union and an employer, to the effect that the employer would only hire union workers, was a restraint of free trade. That is, every potential employee should be free to negotiate individually with an employer, without being required

The Hayek Perplex

I had never heard of Friedrich Hayek until somebody on Facebook dragged his name into one of those off-the-cuff discussions of political ills that seem to be a popular online pastime. By googling him, I learned that he was a Nobel-prize-winning economist, that he was admired by England’s arch-conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and that he was not fond of socialism. I am fond of socialism, at least by my own definition of that term, but I also try to remain open to learning new things. So I decided to read some Hayek. Either he would change my thinking for the better, or I would gain the pleasant feeling that I’m smarter than a Nobel-prize-winning economist. Either way, I could hardly lose. What follows are some notes I took while reading Hayek. I expect to have more notes next week, so don’t touch that dial!

Hayek’s first important book, The Road to Serfdom, was published in 1944. At the time, England and the United States were striving desperately to defeat Nazi Germany, and Hayek loses no time in equating the evils of socialism (as he imagines them — the beginning of the book is vague on that point) with the evils of the Nazi Party. Today it’s almost embarrassingly trite to equate people or ideas that you dislike with Hitler and the Nazis, but in 1944 it would have been a fresh approach, and a more urgently appealing analogy as well, whatever its (doubtful) merits.

He goes on in this vein for a number of pages, never pausing to define his terms. On page 16, however, he trots out a provocative assertion: that the scientific progress so much in evidence in Europe in the nineteenth century was caused

Less Government

According to a story on NPR, this year eleven mayors of towns in Mexico have been murdered by drug gangs. The gangs seem to have felt, and probably with some justification, that the municipal governments were interfering, or likely to interfere, with their personal freedom — in this case, the freedom to earn large amounts of money transporting and selling drugs.

The drug gangs took direct, effective measures to protect their individual liberty from the burden of intrusive government regulation.

I trust my conservative friends will applaud them.

I myself take a slightly different view. In my view, one of the main reasons why we need a strong government is to protect us from the barbarians. When the government is unable to do this, the quality of our lives deteriorates.

Barbarians are far more varied in their pillaging now than in former days, but their activities have the same motivation (rampant greed) and the same result (widespread suffering). By any reasonable definition, BP looted and pillaged the entire Gulf of Mexico this summer. Granted, fewer people died in the Gulf oil spill than in the Viking assault on the British Isles a thousand years ago – but the damage to wildlife was more severe, and the economic damage was far-reaching. BP are barbarians. The movers and shakers on Wall Street are barbarians. The health insurance industry are barbarians. Monsanto are barbarians. And our government is powerless to protect us against them — as powerless as the Mexican government is to protect their citizens from the drug gangs.

Burnin’ Down the House

Today I saw a bumper sticker that said, “Fight Socialism!” That and the Ronald Reagan bumper sticker made it crystal-clear that the owner of the car must be of the conservative persuasion.

My question for this addle-pated individual is this: When your house catches on fire, what private fire company are you going to call to put out the fire?

What? You mean to tell me you don’t subscribe to a private fire company? You’re not planning to call the 100% socialist public fire department, are you? I sure hope not.

I seem to remember that they taught this lesson in history class in high school when I was but a wee sprat. Maybe it’s not in the curriculum anymore. The thing is, we used to have private fire companies in the United States, back in the bad old days. And what would happen was, when a house caught on fire (which happened quite a lot, because lamps and stoves and candles all used open flames), the wagons from two or three local fire companies might show up.

These companies were rivals: free-market capitalism at its finest. So if you weren’t already a subscriber to one of the companies, you’d have to negotiate a price (while the fire was burning) for them to put it out. The price would be exhorbitant, naturally, since the fire chief knew you were in a big hurry, but precious minutes would be wasted while the various companies bid against one another. If you did happen to already be a subscriber to one company, the firemen from another company might engage in various sorts of sabotage so that later they could say, “See, Bob Smith was an XYZ Company subscriber, and they were on the scene, but guess what? His house burned down before they could put the fire out. Their pumper didn’t pump out but a trickle, haw-haw-haw!”

The system was broke. So what happened was a government takeover. Now there’s only one fire department. It’s run by the government. It’s paid for with your tax dollars. It’s socialism, weenie-breath. And it works just fine, and nobody complains about it.

Oh, and in those days there were no regulations on how food could be packaged or labeled. Quite a lot of babies died from being fed stuff that was supposed to be milk, and looked like milk, but wasn’t. So today we have (in theory, at least) intrusive bureaucratic government regulations. The kind of stuff conservatives love to ridicule and whine about. But the number of babies dying from tainted milk dropped dramatically when the regulations were written into law.

Conservatism — a sure-fire recipe for burned-out houses and dead babies. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Talk About It

I’m very concerned about the growth of what I would call the radical right in American politics. (I’m pretty sure these folks don’t consider themselves the radical right. They most likely think they’re the mainstream.)

One of my Facebook friends recently joined a group called “Sarah Palin is a Fucking Retard.” As emotionally satisfying as that might be, I don’t think name-calling is helpful. On the contrary — all we accomplish by name-calling is to insure that the extreme polarization of views will continue. Nor do I think much is to be gained by sitting around with our friends, nodding heavily, and saying, “Ain’t it awful?”

If there is any hope at all, it lies in taking a different sort of action.

I’d like to suggest that starting an open-ended dialog on any and all of the hot-button issues of the day would be a Really Good Thing. I also think it’s pretty clear that the folks who think Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh are insightful commentators are not going to initiate the dialog. For one thing, most of them are ill-equipped for it. For another, they’ve been told over and over that they’re 100% right, which if it were true would render dialog unnecessary.

If there is to be a dialog, it’s up to us to initiate it. Here are my suggestions:

First, be ready and willing to talk about political, social, and moral issues at any time. Make a particular point of seeking out those with whom you’re pretty sure you’ll disagree. Nothing is to be gained, and much is to be lost, by remaining politely silent.

Second, remain friendly and calm at all times. Resist the temptation to raise your voice. Do not wave your arms. Above all, no name-calling! You are permitted to say, “I’m sorry — I find what you’re saying rather upsetting.”

Third, look on all of your conversations on these issues as a way of educating yourself. You may even learn something that will modify your views in some way. At the very least, you’ll learn more about what other people’s views are. When they mention facts (or what they have been told are facts), don’t rush to contradict them, and especially if you’re not rock-solid about your own sources of information. Instead, say, “That’s interesting. Where did you learn that?”

Fourth, do your homework. If you’re going to talk about immigration, education, or health care, take the time to learn what’s actually going on in the world around you. Avoid sweeping generalizations. Rely more on basic research into the facts than on what you read in left-leaning opinion pieces, no matter how cogent or insightful you may think those opinion pieces are. Avoid saying things like, “Everybody knows that’s complete nonsense.” Instead, say something like, “Some of the people I know have other ideas about that. Maybe it would be useful for us all to pool our ideas and learn more about the subject.”

Fifth, begin (and continue) with the assumption that the people you’re talking to are basically kind and decent and want the same things you do. We all want to live in safe, pleasant communities. We all want our children to get a good education. We all value personal freedom. Where we differ is in our view of how these goals are to be achieved. Look for the similarities, not the differences.

If a whole bunch of people engage in this kind of dialog with their friends and neighbors, I predict that several interesting things will happen. Some of the people you talk to will begin to modify their views. You will be modeling for them the always worthwhile process of careful thinking, which is not something they will have learned from Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh. Even if they don’t change their views, they may be less inclined to demonize those who disagree, because they will have seen that you’re a friendly person who shares common concerns, not a rabid monster.

And if they just can’t manage to engage in dialog — if they insist on mouthing hateful slogans and flinging insults, if they’re entirely unable to listen — then they’ll have a good chance to see their own out-of-control behavior for what it is, because you won’t be doing anything to provoke it. They may learn something about themselves.

The Trouble with Conservatism

Dogmatic belief systems are always wrong. They can’t help but be wrong — it’s guaranteed. A dogmatic belief system is one that starts with certain a priori assumptions, or principles. Whatever they happen to be, they are not to be questioned.

Any evidence that arrives from the real world that might throw the a priori assumptions into question must be rejected by those who adhere to the belief system. Such a belief system can only be maintained by rejecting, sooner or later, the evidence offered up by one’s senses.

Conservatism is by definition a dogmatic belief system. The essence of conservatism is the idea that the values we have inherited from our forebears continue to be valid, and therefore need not be questioned. But this cannot possibly be correct. The values and principles that guide our behavior, as individuals and as a society, must continually be subject to examination and questioning. They may need to be refined, amended, or perhaps cast aside entirely.

If for no other reason, this is true because our forebears were not perfect. They were human. Being human, they inevitably erred. If your forebears were Iraqi Shiites, the principles they passed on to you will be somewhat different than if they were Mississippi Baptists or Russian Stalinists. So whose forebears were right? We dare not guide our lives

Us vs. Them

This morning I saw a bumper sticker in a parking lot that said “Liberalism is a Mental Disease.” This made me angry, of course. As the anger subsided, I started to feel sad — and sorry for the poor schmuck. Not too sorry for him; he drives a Cadillac, so he can take it. But still, it must be awful living inside his head.

On the other hand, having posted a couple of months ago, in this very blog, an only slightly tongue-in-cheek essay suggesting that conservatism might be a form of mental illness, I’m hardly in a position to complain. Everybody has a right to free speech, even idiots.

Without, for the moment, trying to figure out who’s right and who’s wrong, is it possible for us to dispassionately analyze the differences that are causing such tension? I think maybe it is.

First, let’s admit that we’re all wrong sometimes. The world is a really, really complicated place, and nobody has