Myths about Economic Conservatism

Unfortunately, the politics of economic conservatism and its sibling libertarianism have been influential in influencing the past few decades of United States government policy, mainly through the Republican Party. This FAQ describes and debunks various myths pertinent to these political philosophies.

Please note that in this essay, for the sake of simplicity the term "government" is used to refer to any form of collective action by the people.

Myth: Economic conservatism is the only political philosophy favoring reason.

This is perhaps one of the most outlandish claims of much libertarian rhetoric: That the step-by-step application of reason leads inexorably to their beliefs. This is hardly the case. In most cases libertarianism is a simplistic and absolutistic philosophy, purporting to “solve” most problems by simply eliminating laws, as if the government were the only reason anything ever went wrong in the world or the only force capable of exerting coercion. Somehow, to the libertarian mindset, the best possible state of affairs for a society will be automatically created by the activities of people doing whatever they would have done anyway. If shown that the application of laissez-faire to a particular situation is clearly less than ideal, libertarians tend either to rely on the tenuous assertion that the people involved in the problem deserve to experience the negative consequences, or to assert a priori that the results of eliminating the law, however unpleasant, constitute the best of all possible worlds. Yet if our goal is to create freedom, equality, and/or happiness for a majority of people, either claim is patently ridiculous. While obviously many laws do not accomplish especially desirable purposes, others are extremely useful. And better results are often possible if we are willing to search for causes and work pragmatically to create desired changes.

Does this mean that libertarianism is inherently irrational? Not exactly. Reason is a tool, and like other tools, it can’t tell you how to apply it. A hammer is good for pounding nails, but it won’t tell you whether you should build a house. Before you use reason to accomplish something, you need to know what you want to accomplish. And different beings have different goals. This means that libertarians are only irrational to the extent that they believe their principles will create a free society. So if you are rich, and you have decided that the happiness of most others (except perhaps those closest to you) is mostly irrelevant and they can suffer and die for all you care, then you may well be quite reasonable in your advocacy of libertarian ideals. If, on the other hand, your goal is egalitarianism, happiness, and/or freedom for a majority of people, libertarianism would appear to be an extremely irrational philosophy.

Myth: Libertarians believe in independence and self-reliance. Under libertarianism, people can more effectively take control of their lives.

Many libertarians talk a lot about values such as independence and personal choice. However, their professed commitment to these notions is close to meaningless, because it consists of little more than a demand for self-reliance with no acknowledgment of the experiential factors required to produce it. In other words, even as libertarians extol the virtues of independence, they oppose creating the kind of environment in which most people are likely to develop or maintain independence. It’s as if in their view, people simply spring into existence as fully developed, autonomous beings fully capable of understanding the world and how to exist within it. In fact, however, people must learn the skills to take care of themselves, as well as the desire to do so. If they don’t, they simply aren’t going to be independent — no matter how much we repeat our mantra of self-reliance or stigmatize their failure to do so as lazy and weak. If, on the other hand, people know how to be self-reliant and they perceive it to be in their best interests to do so, they will be.

A reasonable perspective on independence demands that rather than merely insisting that reality give us the result we wish, we act to ensure that it does. For an example of ineffective insistence as it compares to an effective response, consider a libertarian who opposes the development of a program that aims to prevent juvenile delinquency resulting from lack of parental involvement. This libertarian would likely oppose setting up this program on the grounds that parents should be more involved with their children. For an effective response, however, we must think about how to actually create the desired result (i.e., reduced delinquency), asking the question: How can we create more involved parents? We know that they’re not likely to spontaneously materialize just because we wish it. If delinquency really is a problem and lack of parental involvement is our best guess as to its cause, we need to do research to verify our hypothesis. If it is correct, we then need to determine the reasons for lack of parental involvement and address these reasons. The trouble with this libertarian’s solution (that parents should be more involved) is that by itself, it isn’t a solution at all. It’s just a hypothesis for what the problem might be, and probably a way of stigmatizing parents with delinquent children.

Libertarians are right on one point: Self-reliance and personal responsibility are important values. What they fail to consider is that to produce a result, you have to create its cause. In other words, by demanding personal responsibility while systematically removing the means by which it is created, libertarianism actively discourages self-reliance.

Myth: State-sponsored welfare programs and the like foster dependence and increase poverty.

First, it’s good to remember that independence will probably always have some reward no matter how we structure society, simply because most people seem to find it more pleasant, in general, to be capable of taking care of themselves. Research indicates that most people don’t like receiving “handouts.” This suggests that many people accept welfare benefits either because no other decent options exist or because they are unable, for some reason, to use those that are. It also suggests that we could easily overstress the probability of creating overdependence with welfare programs.

Now, it certainly stands to reason that if you don’t give people any motivation to depend on themselves, or if you take away most or all of the consequences for negative behavior, people are probably going to be less self-reliant. This is why effective systems hold people accountable for what they do to some extent, and why effective systems empower people to take care of themselves. A system might, for example, provide the basic needs of all individuals (shelter, food, education, and health care), but make benefits beyond this contingent on their doing whatever is within their means to be productive.

However, systems that require people to be far more capable than they are in order to be successful destroy motivation and breed desperation. By demanding that people pull themselves up by their bootstraps regardless of whether this is physically possible in principle — and regardless of whether they have bootstraps, boots, or even arms of their own — we vastly reduce their probability of success and rob ourselves of what they might have contributed to society. Ask yourself: What happens to crime when all people have what they need to survive? What happens to abuse and violence? What happens to extremism and fundamentalism? It’s unlikely that they would go away entirely, as these are complex problems — but surely this would make a significant positive difference. This suggests that rather than abolishing social programs, we should work to create effective ones, and we should refine and improve those we have.

Myth: Laissez-faire capitalism distributes wealth; other systems redistribute wealth.

The premise implicit in this claim is that laissez-faire is automatically the default system for the economic operation of any society, and that any variation from this constitutes an affected change to the natural order of things. This is false.

It is true, of course, that some systems may be the result of a series of continuous and often-unconscious changes made by many people over a long period of time, whereas others may be the result of conscious changes by some organized body. Other systems are a combination of both. The way a system develops, however, in no way guarantees its effectiveness or fairness; one need only consider human evolution for an example of organic development leading to results that are wasteful, inefficient, and even downright vicious in terms of the cost to well-being and happiness. Capitalism’s history has many of these same issues. Just as human health has benefited from scientific interventions such as vaccination, surgery, and medications, our health as a society can improve with the use of scientifically based social programs. Our current form of capitalism evolved semiconsciously over time as a result of the self-interested impulses of countless individuals. It stands to reason that, just like with the evolution of the human body, a system in which research and conscious thought were applied by those without a disproportionate personal stake in the outcome could produce more desirable results for almost everyone involved.

Another reason laissez-faire is not automatically the “default” is that any possible system, including laissez-faire, must continually distribute and redistribute wealth in one manner or another. Allowing whoever happens to have a resource at a given time to have absolute control over where to put it is obviously a form of wealth distribution, and one that distributes wealth disproportionately to the already wealthy. While there are undoubtedly less fair ways of distributing resources, the idea that this one must always be the most fair and the most efficient is absolutely arbitrary.

The real problem with laissez-faire — as well as with our current system — is that many decisions about how wealth is to be distributed are made by individuals between whom there are vast power imbalances (e.g., workers and employers), all of whom have a vested interest in the outcome. In terms of ensuring a fair negotiation for resource distribution, this is not much different from how it has been historically under some corrupt statist governments, in which individuals running the government have had comparatively greater power than employers and workers, as well as minimal systems for placing checks on their self interest. However, we need not rely on systems — be they statist or laissez-faire — that require people to make fair decisions in situations in which there are clear conflicts of interest. Surely it makes more sense to ensure that those who make decisions about a given instance of wealth distribution are not those who benefit from certain outcomes of it. This would almost certainly lead to more impartial decisions, and most likely much fairer, results.

Myth: Wealth distribution in our society is relatively balanced.

Actually, the wealth disparity on our planet is immense. Just a few people have an absolutely overwhelming share of the existing wealth and income, and most people in the world are living in poverty. In the United States alone, one percent of people own more than the whole bottom 95% of the population. Don’t just let that statistic go in one ear and out the other — think about it for a moment. One percent of the population owns more than the entire bottom 95%! And this disparity between the wealthy and not wealthy continues to rise.

In the United States
Wealth: In 2004, 1% of the U.S. population owned 33% of the wealth, while the next 9% owned 36%, and the entire bottom 90% owned 31%. [Source]

Income: In 2001, the richest 20% of the U.S. population gained over half of the income, while the poorest 20% gained about 3.4% of it. [Source]. In 2006, 36.5 million Americans (12.3%) lived in poverty. [Source]

Worldwide
Wealth: In 2006, the richest 2% of people in the world owned more than half of the wealth, and the bottom half of the population owned about 1%. [Source]

Income: In 1997, the poorest 20% of the world's earned 1.1% of the world’s wealth, an amount that is falling as time goes on. In 2004, half of the world’s population lived on $2 or less per day, while a fifth lived on less than $1 per day. Over the next thirty years the world's population will increase by about two billion people — and most of them will be born into poverty.[Source]

Yes, more than thirty-six million people in the U.S. live in poverty, and this doesn’t even consider that these standards for poverty are pretty out of touch with reality. The 2006 standard defining poverty made the dubious assumption, for example, that a family of four living on over $20,614 per year wasn’t poor. [Source]

There is no reason it has to be this way.

Myth: People are able to buy expensive things like cars and cable television, so they must not be suffering from poverty.

Many of the greatest costs associated with modern living, such as housing and food, are nonnegotiable. Other costs are so deeply integrated into our society that living without paying them is extraordinarily difficult. We have, for instance, few real choices about whether to keep a phone line, electricity, and a car. After all, without these things, how would you get and keep a job, prepare your food, or stay connected with a social network? Neither having friends, using the internet, nor getting cable television may be absolutely necessary in an immediate survival sense, but people who forsake most social experiences and forms or entertainment and education tend to become depressed or cut off from their culture, making it harder to relate to other people and meet their own needs. In some past cultures, connecting with other people in meaningful ways may have been as simple as walking a short distance and having a conversation. Today, however, if most of the members of your community are online, watching TV, or going out clubbing, this is not necessarily realistic, and technologies become necessary in order to fully participate in life. It is neither fair nor realistic to expect people to do without such things because they are poor, and if they try, they are more likely to exacerbate the direness of their situation than they are escape from poverty.

What economic conservatives fail to consider here is that as technology evolves, culture acclimates. Yesterday’s luxuries increasingly become necessities. People living in past cultures could do without many of the things we think of today as basic to living because (to the extent that their societies were functional) societal structures compensated for the absence. The citizens of past cultures living in cold climates weren’t forced to live alone in cardboard boxes on the street because they lacked the convenience of the modern furnace; they had other methods of dealing with the cold. People from some cultures likely lived in closer quarters and stayed close to each other for body heat, or maybe they gathered in community areas that were heated via other means. Neither of these solutions is generally feasible today, making so-called luxuries of technology that spare people from the cold absolutely necessary. Similarly, people living in cultures without automobiles or telephones tended to live closer to their loved ones and to their means of providing for themselves. The more technology integrates with society, the less it can be considered a luxury the poor do not need.

When it is applied well, technology can be a powerful tool for addressing people’s needs and giving them more options. However, a failure to acknowledge that technology can also create new needs and reduce choices is a failure to acknowledge the complex relationship between technology and quality of life.

Myth: It’s always wrong to take property or wealth from people who have it.

This statement assumes, wrongly, that wealth is presently distributed in a maximally fair manner and that deviating from this distribution system necessarily will be less fair. Given the radically different places from which people begin in life, this is clearly not the case. Further, it neglects to consider that although all substantial quantities of wealth are collaboratively produced, they are allocated disproportionately to certain individuals. There are two basic components of this, the first having to do with the reward producers receive for their efforts, and the second with the root causes of the ability to produce in the first place.

The first point is well summed up by the words of Albert Einstein, who observed, "it is important to consider that even in theory, the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product” (emphasis added). In other words, workers under capitalism are not compensated for what they produce in a manner proportionate to their role in producing it. A person who produces millions of dollars worth of resources cannot do all the work involved alone; others are almost invariably involved, contributing thought and labor to the realization of some product or result.

By virtue of their preexisting wealth and the capitalistic laws governing income distribution, a small number of individuals have the social leverage to demand disproportionate shares of the income that results from productive activity. Surely, however, it makes more sense to share the results with all those involved in a manner proportional to their role in creating the wealth. We have a choice about where to allocate the results of their effort, and rationality and fairness demand that we put these resources where they will have the most beneficial results and most benefit their producers.

The second point, which is even more frequently ignored than the first, is that individuals are not productive in isolation. All productivity takes place in the context of some kind of community, historical context, and (more generally) environment that may make their tasks easier or harder (or even impossible). Ultimately, this means that all wealthy people possess their wealth exclusively by virtue of having previously received resources for which they have not expended effort. While many of the resources they do possess may certainly be a result of their efforts in an immediate sense, tracing the causes of these efforts back to the beginning reveals that those efforts themselves would not have been possible without some previous resource which was itself unearned. In the case of the independently wealthy, such resources may consist mainly or partially of inherited (and therefore unearned) income, but this is only the most literal application of the above. Other wealthy individuals instead (or additionally) possess their wealth ultimately not only as a result of an absence of traumatic and disenfranchising experiences, but also as a result of some combination of social class, race, education, inherited social connections, background and informative experiences, arbitrary circumstance, genetic capacities, and similar. It is impossible to earn any of these things to start with; possessing all of them is ultimately a matter of luck. Yet without some combination of these resources, success and productivity are impossible.

Myth: Under pure capitalism, people must earn their incomes.

If “earning” simply means to obtain a financial reward in exchange for a service, then provided we ignore the conspicuous and massive exception of inherited wealth, this is more or less true. However, most people associate the concept of “earning” with acquiring rewards proportional to the effort involved in attaining them. For example, if two people sign a contract under which one will shake hands with the other in exchange for seven and a half million dollars, ordinarily we may not say that the hand shaker has “earned” that money. Similarly, if one person has access to all the food in an area and demands that everyone else pay their entire income in order to eat, we could not with any sense of fairness say that this food-wealthy individual has earned that income.

In the interests of motivating productivity, presumably it makes sense to allot somewhat larger quantities of status and income to jobs that are most universally regarded as unpleasant or that are difficult to get people to perform. For instance, jobs that demand greater effort, ingenuity, educational background and personal risk, or those that take place under dirty, tedious, or demeaning conditions, probably merit greater pay. Conversely, jobs with other significant benefits, such as social status, need not be paid as much. Yet even a cursory look at pay scales shows a minimal relationship between these factors and pay.

Many low-status, low pay jobs (housekeepers, factory assemblers, and construction workers, to name a few) pay relatively low amounts. Such jobs are often extremely effort intensive, and may involve juggling many tasks under relatively filthy conditions. Circumstances are demeaning, and managers often keep close watch over employees in an effort to prevent theft, drug use, or a moment of idle time in an effort to maximize worker productivity, with little or no regard for the effect on job satisfaction. The work is often tedious and difficult to find personally meaningful.

Now, there is something to be said for motivating people to be productive, and financial reward is one reasonable means of providing motivation. However, surely people will continue to produce even without the potential for such vast financial rewards that they utterly dwarf the average income — so long as they are increasingly compensated in a manner proportional to their efforts. In a society where productivity is defined by the ability to benefit society as well as oneself, and where all people are starting initially from a roughly equivilant position, a reputation as a resourceful and compassionate person would doubtless have a motivating effect as well.

Myth: People who make bad decisions deserve to suffer.

This is a brutal notion, and one totally unsupported by evidence or reason. In fact, the very concept of “deserving” is a creation of thinking beings, not a part of the structure of reality. It does not follow that the consequences for certain kinds of behaviors “should” come to pass, only that they do. In other words, nothing about what is can possibly imply how things ought to be, no matter how much we may prefer certain states of affairs.

Therefore, when someone says that people who engage in certain kinds of behavior deserve, should, or ought to be punished or rewarded for an action, what they really mean (if they mean anything coherent at all) is that some people must be punished or rewarded in order to bring about some particular consequence, the nature of which is often left unspecified. In other words, when people say that X should occur, what they probably mean is that for Y to occur, X must first happen. If Y is a reasonable goal, this may be a legitimate assertion. When a person claims that a homeless person should be cold during the winter, for example, they may mean that she needs to be cold for a while in order to be motivated to improve her situation, or they may mean that this person is not a good person and therefore deserves to suffer. Now, given the goal of maximizing human happiness, it is probably true that people should sometimes be allowed to feel pain in order that they might learn from their mistakes and thereby improve their prospects for future happiness. Similarly, individuals who kill psychopathically or politicians who lie to achieve political ends may have to give up some of the pleasure afforded by their freedom in order to protect that of others, and perhaps in order to serve as a deterrent to others who may act similarly. It does not follow from this that the suffering of some people is deserved; merely that it is sometimes necessary in order to maximize happiness, or simply unavoidable.

Much of the time, however, people making claims about what others deserve are referring to consequences which have little or nothing to do with maximizing happiness. The Y variable left unspecified by the “ought” in the situation may simply be the speaker’s satisfaction. This sensation may be described as justice being served, or as doing the right thing. It is hard to argue, however, that there is anything positive about increased amounts of suffering unless it somehow results in increased happiness for that person in the long term or increased societal happiness generally, and even in this case it is really just a necessary bad. While it is true that sometimes people get pleasure from making others suffer, it seems highly unlikely that encouraging this with legislation is the best way to maximize happiness.

Myth: Freedom is simply lack of coercion.

A meaningful definition of freedom needs to take into account not merely the freedom from actively being restrained or coerced, but also the freedom to make choices that influence the course of one’s life. Only in a very trivial semantic sense is a person who can choose between twenty jobs, none of which pay enough to afford basic needs, ‘free.’ If an unexpected earthquake results in my falling into a hole from which I cannot escape, I am no longer really free, even though no one is coercing me. This is the difference between negative and positive liberty; both are crucial components of real freedom.

Myth: Freedom opposes equality as a value.

Actually, the opposite is true; true liberty requires equality. The extent to which a society promotes equality is the extent to which individuals have the power to shape the course of their own lives, which is itself the very definition of freedom. For a society to be free in any meaningful sense, everyone must be free, not merely the privileged. Only a small elite is free in a society that fully embodies economically conservative values.

Myth: The government that governs best governs least.

Some economic conservatives talk as if government were the real problem behind most of the problems in society. But if laws were the basic cause of restricted freedom, helping people to be free would just be a matter of getting rid of laws. It’s not hard to see why a lawless society is not one where more people are free. Notably, most libertarians prefer to get rid of as much government as benefits them; they are rarely in favor of abolishing social programs that defend the interests of the wealthy, such as the military and the police force.

The grain of truth to this slogan is that an ideal government is no bigger than it needs to be in order to meet societal needs; but of course, this is merely to say that waste is undesirable.

The real point of privitizing systems for meeting human needs — in other words, removing such systems from the public sphere — is to make accountability impossible. It's fairly clear who benefits from this, as well as who loses.

Myth: Central planning never works.

Which is why all businesses internally are run like little markets, with no centralized leadership. (Quoted from Critiques of Libertarianism: Libertarianism in One Lesson here.)

Myth: Government is more wasteful than institutions motivated by profit.

Although government may indeed often be wasteful, institutions motivated by profit are far from models of efficiency themselves. It may be reasonable to assume that in the balance, profit-motivated institutions are naturally more inclined to search for and eliminate wasteful internal systems when no one stands to benefit from . However, such institutions are extraordinarily inefficient in numerous additional and often ignored ways. First, many private institutions lose extraordinary amounts of money paying exorbitant salaries to executives and shareholders. They spend considerable effort and funds duplicating services already offered by other businesses, and then devote tremendous resources to pull customers away from other business which offer similar or identical products. Addtionally, they focus much of their effort on what will attract new customers rather than on productive ends (for instance, car companies spend considerable sums on redesigning the structure of their automobiles' bumpers merely to lure potential buyers away from older designs). All of these resources might be applied instead to efforts which actually produced tangible results. Public institutions rarely face such threats to effeciency.

For that matter, an institution financed by the government may be highly motivated to eliminate waste if the resources they are provided are finite. Further, even in the worst of situations, wasteful government is a problem we can all agree to develop systems to address. After all, when no one stands to benefit from it, no one is in favor of waste.

Myth: Government Program X, Y, or Z doesn’t work very well, so no government run or funded programs work.

It may seem hard to believe that someone might try to argue this point in seriousness, but it is made with surprising frequency by ‘free market fundamentalists.’ It is of course possible to point to innumerable instances where businesses and corporations have failed, but this does not seem to persude libertarians that these institutions cannot function.

That government is sometimes ineffective or that it can be used for unethical purposes is not in dispute. Contrary to what some libertarians imagine, socialists as a rule do not automatically favor any form of collective intervention regardless of costs or benefits. There are many more forms of bad government intervention than there are good forms. By the same token, the number of possible socialist governments is so vast as to be totally uncountable; far more than the number of possible libertarian governments. The number of possible governments decreases on the road to anarchy the closer we get to laissez-faire.

However, claiming that government ineffectiveness suggests that government programs cannot work is like saying that because there are innumerable nonfunctional variations on the engine of an automobile, it is impossible to produce different kinds of functional engines. Like most imaginable attempts at engine design, most socialist systems aren’t good ones, and should be opposed with the same fervor libertarianism should be opposed. When government is ineffective, we have grounds for changing and improving it in ways supported by research, not eliminating it or reducing to an ineffective size, thereby allowing people of fewer means to go without, for example, health care, education, or clean air.

Myth: Capitalism is the only system that provides a motivation for people to engage in productive activity.

Although the value of productive work can be overstated, it is indeed true that it is often useful and necessary, and it is also true that people usually do need to be motivated to work for reasons other than the sheer pleasure of the activity. One might ask, however, whether these facts really justify the income disparity between someone who makes $17 thousand dollars a year and someone who makes $17 million, or even the difference between someone who earns $20 thousand and someone who earns $200 thousand. More generally, it seems highly unlikely that people will stop working without the ever-present threat of losing (for instance) their homes or their ability to provide food. Similarly, it is doubtful that people need to feel as though they have the capacity to earn millions of dollars more than they need to buy exorbitant luxuries in order to motivate them to continue to be productive.

It is also worth noting that although motivating productivity may be one important thing that we do with our wealth as a society, it is far from the only valid use for it. Just a few examples of alternative useful places to invest wealth which have nothing to do with motivating work include preventing domestic violence, educating people who can’t afford to pay for private schools, or curing lethal diseases which are ignored by the free market because there is minimal profit in healing poor people.

Myth: People are usually poor because they made bad choices.

If choice were the primary factor in determining financial success, we would expect that the average level of wealth and income in every identifiable societal group of significant size would be more or less the same. This is obviously not the case; quantifiable background factors continue to exert a tremendous influence over income level. For example, people of color continue to make significantly smaller incomes than whites.[For example]

Obviously, there’s a reason why so many members of each of these groups are not participating in higher paying careers. This means that some combination of inherent (genetic) characteristics and experiences (such as discrimination, culture, and initially low socioeconomic status) is at work. Science tells us that genetics are not a factor with race, and indeed there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that getting involved in most high-paying careers is more difficult for minorities.

No such statistics would exist in a pure meritocracy, where everyone earned an income proportional to the productive effort she or he exerted. This shows just how powerful our backgrounds are, and just how much our lives are shaped by factors beyond our control.

Notably, there are many more factors besides race which also have nothing to do with inherent ability, including but not limited to: financial background, quality of schooling, quality of parenting/caretaking, sexual orientation, religion, birth order, ethnicity, height, weight, gender, dispositions of peers and siblings, language(s) spoken, immigrant status, availability of role models, and many more. Even wealthy conservatives know it — their insistence on bequeathing large inheritances to their relatives and loved ones, as well as on sending their children to private rather than public schools in order to improve the quality of their education, betray this assumption.

And none of this even begins to address the poverty which exists outside of the developed world, where it would be lunacy to claim that people's bad choices were the cause of their problems.

Myth: There’s no reason we shouldn’t allow people to get extremely rich.

There are two problems with allowing people to get extremely rich, or in other words, with institutionalizing social systems which distribute wealth in an unequal manner, thereby allowing relatively few people to have most of the resources.

First, with wealth comes power, and people with power very often use it in a manner which harms others.

Second, the resources currently allotted to those who are already wealthy can be put to much more effective use. Research shows people aren’t able to benefit very much from wealth beyond that which meets their basic needs. [http://www.psychologymatters.org/happiness.html]. In economics, this is called the law of diminishing marginal utility. One glass of water in the desert saves your life, and the next two or three glasses are enjoyable, but one hundred additional glasses are not particularly useful to you. They almost certainly will be useful to others, however.

So if a super-wealthy person’s life isn’t of a much higher quality than my own, even though s/he may have hundreds of thousands of times as much income as I do, it stands to reason that there are better things to do with the income we currently choose to distribute to her or him.

Myth: As stated above, people can be happy without a lot of money, so there’s no reason to make sure everyone has some.

It’s true that money certainly doesn’t guarantee happiness, and increasingly large quantities of money have little to do with increased happiness. However, to the extent to which it is effectively applied, it can be used to create the resources that make happiness possible. It is hard to be happy when you are homeless, starving, and surrounded by mental illness. For that matter, a lot of our resources and wealth can be used to increase lifespan and quality of life by applying them toward collective purposes, such as fighting deadly or incapacitating diseases, reducing criminal behavior, or improving infrastructure.

Myth: If we fund some government programs, government will continue to expand indefinitely.

If an archer is aiming wide to the right of the target, we could advise her not to adjust her aim to the left for fear that she might miss the target by going wide in the other direction. On the other hand, if we keep thinking this way, we’re never going to get any closer to hitting the target.

It is probably true that so long as a significant amount of people’s needs are not adequately met by businesses and other private interests, they will continue to lobby government to find ways to have those needs met. However, there’s no evidence that continued involuntary government expansion is inevitable. A happy population has no need to clamor for government intervention or political change, and an unhappy population is as likely to advocate for an end to nonfunctional or harmful government programs as they are to advocate for additional programs to help themselves.

Myth: All (or virtually all) important goals in society can be addressed by the profit motive.

While it does do some things well, there are a lot of things the profit motive does rather poorly. For instance, it tends not to manage natural resources, such as water, air, oil, coal, land, and forests, very well. Not only are institutions motivated by profit unlikely to think ahead much beyond the next fiscal year or so (despite the fact that most natural resources are needed indefinitely), the consequences of their actions can affect people everywhere in the form of pollution. The profit motive is also notoriously awful at taking care of disadvantaged groups (the poor, the physically sick, the mentally ill, orphans, people with traumatic brain injuries, and the elderly, to name just a few). People who lack the resources to pay for a service are generally out of luck in a capital-driven society. The profit motive prioritizes issues based on the desires of wealthier people, ignoring the much more fundamental needs of those without as many resources.

For instance, in 1998, spending on ice cream in Europe was about $11 billion, spending on perfume in Europe and the U.S. was about $12 billion, spending on alcohol in Europe was about $105 billion, and world spending on the military was about $780 billion. Providing basic education for everyone in the developed world would have cost about $6 billion, providing water and sanitation for all people in developing countries about $9 billion, ensuring reproductive health for all women in the developed world about $12 billion, and taking care of the basic health and nutrition needs of people the developed world about $13 billion. The profit motive is clearly not addressing these needs in any manner which approaches adequacy. [Source]

Myth: Rich people don’t use the power of their wealth to hurt others.

In fact there are many ways the rich can and do use their wealth to harm others. For instance, they:

• lobby government for preferential treatment, changing the law to give themselves special benefits;
• fund politician’s campaign in exchange for benefits or a hand in shaping social policy (e.g. invading other countries);
• hire better lawyers and win legal battles about which they are in the wrong;
• destroy living habitats and use for themselves resources which might otherwise have been used to enhance the quality of life for everyone;
• sell unsafe products;
• lie and mislead about the products they’re selling or use manipulative sales strategies such as adding undisclosed fees after the fact that increase the price of what they’re selling;
• refuse to serve or employ members of unpopular groups;
• pass their wealth and power to others unfairly to those who did nothing to earn them (e.g. through cronyism, the “old boy network,” and inheritance);
• use advertising to create or encourage unrealistic ideas and harmful aspects of society (e.g. violence, materialism, discrimination);
• pay non-living wages;
• dictate unreasonable terms to employees under threat of firing or legal action;
• create monopolies to drive competitors out of business and raise prices beyond the ability of people to pay;
• collude with other businesses to eliminate competition and raise prices beyond the ability of people to pay;
• engage in extortion or other illegal means of driving competitors out of business;
• create bureaucracies to stop customers from using their services after they have the customers’ money;
• pay or manipulate the media into not exposing their unethical activities.

Some of these actions would be illegal, even in a libertarian society. However, corporations are able to hire expensive lawyers and may use their wealth to influence the courts, and the average consumer typically lacks the time or resources to win such battles. It is also notable that one significant reason governments tend to expand (and usually not in positive ways) is because of lobbying by corporate interests.

It might be fairly argued that governments are also capable of a few of the above behaviors. This is true, but unlike businesses under laissez-faire capitalism, we can design government to be held accountable through elections, transparency, and through individuals or institutions whose sole responsibility is ethical oversight, as well as build in other systems to prevent corruption. Without some form of collective action, accountability is impossible.

Myth: Unethical behaviors perpetrated by rich corporations are rare.

Setting aside the instances mentioned in the previous myth for the moment, many unethical activities performed by companies are not only not rare, they are actually standard practice — so commonly accepted that many people never even think to evaluate them on ethical grounds.

Take the payment of employees, for instance. Most employees are paid an hourly wage or a set salary, and very few companies pay their employees an amount of money that approaches a proportional compensation for their role in creating that income. They are strongly motivated, in fact, to pay their workers as little as possible, and will often hire them for less than minimum wage if they can get away with it.

Another example of pervasive unethical behavior is advertising. It’s hard to know just how often companies lie outright in their ads, although it almost certainly happens. However, perhaps even more insidious than these outright lies is failure to disclose disadvantages or limitations of their products except as required by law. For example, when a restaurant wishes to market an unhealthy food, it is standard practice to play up the taste and sensory appeal of the food while doing everything possible to call attention away from the health risks. These kinds of deception and emotional manipulation are nearly omnipresent in advertising, with companies employing barrages of illogical arguments in order to manipulate you into purchasing their products. When advertisers attempt to persuade you on the basis of a celebrity recommendation, a catchy jingle, a funny story, or an appeal to your insecurities, they are knowingly using implicit logical fallacies to persuade you. This is deceptive, clearly not in your best interests, and despite its subtlety, it is not in principle any different from other forms of fraud.

Corporations often use the desperation of the poor to exploit them by charging exorbitant rates for basic services. This is evident from predatory lending, check cashing stores, financial institution fees, layaway payments, incomprehensible legalese that traps consumers into contractual obligations, and many other ordinary and relatively uncontroversial facets of capitalism.

Even without any specific unethical actions on the part of the rich, being poor simply means that living costs more. For example, for a poor person, it is more difficult to buy more cheaply in bulk, harder to buy higher quality goods that are likely to last longer, and it is often necessary to rent rather than buying when attaining fundamental needs (such as housing).

Myth: Liberals think that society’s problems will go away just by throwing money at them.

It is doubtful that many people think this. What many progressives do believe is that government can thoughtfully apply resources toward carefully chosen goals, with research and past experience as guides.

Myth: Statistics posted by advocacy groups or polls done by organizations are inevitably biased, so no statistic quoted by a socialist can be considered valid.

Of course any group with a vested interest in a political position (left, right, libertarian, or otherwise) may sometimes use statistics to lie or mislead. That’s a good argument for understanding the biases of statisticians, considering the source of your information, and looking at how statistics are compiled — and postponing judgment when you don’t know this information — rather than just accepting any statistics that you’re told. But there’s a fine line between this and suggesting that because it’s possible to lie or exaggerate with statistics and sometimes people who you disagree with do this, you should disregard any stats that don’t mesh with your previously defined opinions. Just because people are fighting for a cause doesn’t necessarily mean they’re willing to falsify data. This usually hurts a campaign more than it helps, and some advocates do realize this. So you can’t assume that statistics are wrong just because they don’t fit with your previous assumptions. This is exactly what people who falsify statistics are doing — changing the data to fit with their ideology.

Myth: Libertarians are opposed to tyranny.

Libertarians are opposed to government tyranny. They appear to be perfectly comfortable with other forms of it. Indeed, unregulated private interests are necessarily totalitarian, as by definition they lack a system for accountability to the public. Obviously, any unchecked powerful group can become tyrannical. In functional societies, people use government to hold institutions and individuals accountable, and the government itself is held accountable by the people.

Myth: Socialism neglects to consider that a fool can put on his coat better than a wise man [sic] can put it on for him.

A witty expression, to be sure, but it really doesn’t have anything to do with real socialism. Good social policy isn’t about putting people’s coats on for them —indeed, no one would seriously argue that the purpose of government is to do things for people that they are already perfectly capable of doing. To continue the coat analogy, good social policy is about providing methods of making or finding coats for people who don’t have them and finding alternatives to coats for people who can't wear them. Sometimes it may also give coats to people who need them, either because some people are severely disabled and incapable of getting their own, or because they need temporary help until they can find their own. When it comes to helping those in need, good social policy is primarily about empowering people to make decisions about their own lives — not about making decisions for them.

Myth: We don’t need government to create social change or counter unethical business practices. If a change is really important, it shouldn’t be very hard to motivate a substantial portion of the population to fight for that change themselves.

Not so — and all the more so not so under laissez-faire capitalism. Without government, the only way we really have to counter unethical behavior on the part of the business community or to accomplish the many goals that aren’t addressed via the profit motive is community organizing. Once lobbying government is no longer a part of our toolbox for change, community organizers’ options are limited to convincing institutions that behave unethically of what they should or shouldn’t do, or changing the social environment such that what they’re doing is no longer profitable (e.g by persuading people to boycott said institution). Because it is well-nigh impossible to create significant social change by convincing people not to do what’s in their own best interests, organizers would be left mainly with the option of changing the social environment. But community organizers face many challenges in doing this:

1) Community organizing costs money, and the ones who most need to get the word out are the disenfranchised and the poor — i.e., not the ones who have the money.

2) The media, our basic means of communicating with large numbers of people, is largely owned by corporate interests, who will do everything in their power to stop the word from getting out if it conflicts with their interests (not giving voice to people with a message, and running their own much better funded campaigns to convince people otherwise).

3) Related to point two, the companies that stand to lose in these situations are going to do everything in their power to stop community organizers from getting the word out, using methods including (but not limited to) well-funded propaganda campaigns which counter ideas inconsistent with their interests. Few community organizers would be able to compete with their resources.

4) Very often the people who suffer as a result of unethical business practices are not the ones using the product or service. The people who are experiencing the negative consequences could be people in a different geographical area, future generations, people or nonhumans whose interests are not widely believed to be important, or any number of other individuals. It could also be a significant minority of the people who are using the product or service, but of whom there are insufficient numbers to make the change. In such situations, community organizers can only appeal to the altruism of the corporation’s customers.

5) It takes effort to change one’s behavior; people are rarely able to simply make a change as soon as they identify what’s in their best interests. They must be reminded and enticed. We are feeling machines that think, not thinking machines that feel. Advertisers know this. That’s why advertising isn’t primarily informative; it’s designed to get past your intellectual defenses with emotional appeals and frequent repetition.

6) Relatedly, many of the people who a community organizer might want to persuade will be short-term thinkers, and will ignore severely negative long term consequences in favor of short-term gratification. This is a trait that becomes increasingly exacerbated in later capitalism as people are taught not to delay gratification. It is also a major facet of the culture of poverty; it becomes very difficult to think ahead when the future is not likely to be any better than the present. Of course, even if we completely disregard the feelings of these fallible people, the decisions of these short-term thinkers also has a negative effect on the longer-term thinkers who make the harder but ultimately better decision.

7) Unable to tackle many of the root causes of social problems, community organizers would be faced continually with new issues. Solving the problem in one respect (i.e. with regard to one specific issue or company) still leaves other similar problems. Organizers can raise awareness about how ABC Corporation is dumping carcinogen Q into the air, but when XYZ Corporation decides to dump carcinogen P into the water, they’ll have to start again.

All these problems would be exacerbated in a society where minimal social systems existed to educate and inform people. People without the wealth and healthy upbringing necessary to educate themselves would be less informed and less capable of thinking critically about issues. Left to face poverty, discrimination, and an increasingly crime-ridden society without assistance, they would have less time to devote to the betterment of society or to participate in boycotts, protests, letter-writing campaigns, or whatever other limited means are at their disposal. Those who did find the time would have a reduced knowledge base with which to respond intelligently, would be less likely to believe that change is possible, and would be less likely to believe they are capable of it. Of course, for the same reasons there would be fewer people to listen to the community organizers, there would be fewer community organizers, and the ones who did exist might be more likely to be uneducated fanatics.

Myth: Economic disparities wouldn’t increase in an atmosphere of radically reduced government.

A society governed by laissez-faire principles would be vastly poorer as a whole.

Let’s examine what would happen if we eliminated public schools, to say nothing of what would happen if we also got rid of other supportive tax-financed resources (e.g., case management, supportive housing, libraries, workforce centers, etc.). Without public education, many people would no longer receive education, which would, obviously, lead to fewer educated people. This would of course mean that fewer people would exist to perform jobs that require an educational background — but this would be only the beginning of the problem. Fewer educated people would also certainly be associated with a decline in the ability to think critically, delay gratification, act responsibly, and understand and address social problems. That means fewer people would have the skills necessary to get even menial jobs, and crime would significantly increase as these people searched for other ways to meet their needs. We would have an increasing need for police officers, and jails would fill up, draining valuable societal resources.

In other words, fewer people would have jobs, so we would have fewer overall resources, and more people would be involved in activities that drained societal resources.

Myth: Government regulations and other rules decided through collective action end up treating all people the same.

It’s true that some government regulations do treat people as if they were the same. In general, these aren’t good regulations, and we would be well served by coming up with better ones.

Of course, sometimes, such as when we’re talking about basic human needs, people do have pretty much the same needs. For instance, just about everyone needs good health, safe shelter, and quality food.

However, this is really beside the point, because treating people equally just doesn’t mean treating them the same. Collective action can be used to assess needs and meet them in a way that respects the individuality of all people. We can, for instance, work together to make sure everyone has shelter without telling people what kind of shelter they must have or where they should live.

Myth: Socialism puts too much trust in government to be benevolent.

George Washington once observed that government, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearsome master. It is unlikely, however, that Washington meant by this that we should stop using government, any more than he would have advocated for an end to the use of fire.

One fundamental problem with which societies often grapple is how to prevent powerful people from exerting oppressive influences over those who have less power. Given that individuals and institutions with power tend to abuse it, if society contains powerful institutions, there is little or nothing to prevent them from using that power to exploit others. Society might be more equitable if all power were shared equally. However, the most simplistic application of this idea is not really feasible, because if no one has an appreciable amount of power, there is nothing to prevent some individuals from gaining disproportionate amounts of it and using it abusively.

If we have any interest in equality and freedom for more people than just an elite, we need to hold everyone accountable to a standard of fairness. The only way to do this appears to be by using some form of collective action. The people can hold powerful individuals and institutions accountable through some system of collective action, and that system itself can then be held accountable using a transparent system of oversight, checks, and balances.

Socialists tend to trust government more than private organizations in principle because of the possibility of holding government accountable, something we can’t do to corporations or individuals — unless we use government.

Myth: It’s bad for us to make collective rules about what kinds of values to teach people.

Unfortunately, the absence of some values makes survival and happiness significantly less likely. In any culture, simple coexistence requires a certain amount of agreement on values (e.g. “don’t kill” or “don’t steal” at the very least), as well as a value-based system for handling instances where individuals violate these rules. This even more the case in a global culture in which the lives of all people are entwined to some degree regardless of location or culture, due to advanced technologies and complicated sociopolitical systems.

It is important to remember as well that whether we teach people consciously or simply allow them to absorb ideas from the culture at large, they are going to learn values. We might hope that parents teach their children positive values, but the simple fact is that parents are only capable of doing this if they themselves have learned such values. This means that many children never have the chance to learn the values they need to survive and be happy, and children growing up under such conditions are unlikely to know how to teach positive values to their own children, perpetuating an unending cycle.

Of course, even excellent parents are often unable to prevent other forces from teaching dangerous values to their children. Perhaps the most pervasive and obvious examples of this are market forces. Increasingly in our own society (and much more so under unregulated capitalism), people experience a nearly constant assault of often-destructive ideas. Unchecked market forces will happily teach children to smoke, eat large quantities of cheap unhealthy food, and grow up to purchase homes they cannot possibly afford. People living in capitalist systems tend to absorb the value that immediate gratification is more important than taking care of one’s physical or mental health, and that one’s personal value is based on one’s ability to collect material things or to be attractive by certain standards. As people find it increasingly difficult to satisfy their desires and find happiness, it seems a small comfort that the government did not intervene.

Given that we need values and that it takes more than simply one or two people to teach them, then, it would behoove us to those values that enhance our ability to survive and prosper rather than those that result in more suffering. This means teaching values which are demonstrably based in reality and that consider the well being of all people. For instance:

• Self-esteem
• Survival skills (e.g. math and language skills)
• Ability to cooperate with others
• Ability to delay gratification
• Civic responsibility (e.g. history, politics)
• Career options
• Career skills
• Tolerance, respect, and compassion for others
• Self-awareness

Everyone benefits from a society where people know how to take care of themselves, where everyone is able to find a meaningful career, and where everyone knows how to be compassionate.

An Alternative to Capitalism

People are by nature self-interested, and creating real change is not easy. Despite this, believing that a better society is possible if we are willing to do what it takes to create it is in no way mere wide-eyed idealism. Self-interested or not, people can learn to meet their own needs in compassionate ways, and even to value compassion so much that some of their own needs are met just by helping others. Further, life is not a game where some people win and everyone else loses. Cooperative effort can result in a scenario where everyone wins.

We create this society by applying the vast amount of wealth we have to scientific, research-based initiatives toward compassionate ends. By using the wealth that is currently doing little more than making extremely rich people even richer, we remake society in a way that helps everyone. Ultimately, through this process, we also free up a tremendous amount of additional resources. For example, people who once lacked education become capable of getting jobs, and resources once devoted to prison systems, rehabilitation, police work, and countless other short-term societal fixes become much less necessary. At the same time, people who would otherwise be using up resources within these systems will be increasingly likely to be creating resources of their own.

Here are some places we can start:

• We can eliminate or virtually eliminate poverty and create a society where income disparities exist only to the extent to which they are required in order to get people to perform tasks that are difficult or less pleasant to perform. Ask yourself what happens to phenomena like violence, theft, abortion, and murder in a society where everyone has what they need to survive.

• We can research the causes (other than poverty) of abuse, domestic violence, assault, and crime in general, and then systematically undermine them. In the meantime, we can take care of people who have had to experience these things.

• We can educate people to be more capable of taking care of themselves, take more responsibility for their lives, delay gratification, think rationally and solve problems effectively, regulate and manage their emotions, make smart financial choices, have healthy self-esteem, communicate effectively, find (and excel in) careers, understand themselves and the world, and respect others. We can even teach them to find value in helping others such that they are capable of meeting their own needs by doing so.

• We can save lives. We can fight (and cure) diseases, invest additional resources in other medical problems, make sure that people who are currently incapable of receiving health care are able to get it, and create better transportation systems (imagine if cars were computerized and programmed to decelerate automatically when approaching another car too fast). Imagine an efficient infrastructure, where our bridges don’t collapse because we fund systems that maintain them, where that our cities are protected from natural disaster, and where there are programs to seek out and address problems before they happen.

• We can continue to improve the efficiency of our systems for ensuring that there are minimal conflicts of interest in government and society as a whole. We can identify problems from politicization and irrational legislation to poverty and crime work ways of preventing them.

It’s not really all that radical a notion. People who are physically and emotionally healthy are more productive. People who have good problem-solving skills are more successful at things they attempt to accomplish. People who feel empathy for others are more likely to work together with other people and treat them with respect.

Something better is possible.

Why People Are Economically Conservative

Given all of the above reasons not to be economically conservative, one might reasonably ask why people think this way. As with nearly any complex question, of course, there are many often interrelated facets to this. Here are some of what we hypothesize are some of the most common:

• People make honest errors of judgment.

• People simply lack of exposure to facts about the effects economically conservative philosophies have had on our world. It is generally not in the interests of the powerful for us to know about the vast amount of poverty and the sheer scope of inequality and injustice in the world, and it is to a very large extent the powerful who control the way information is distributed in our society.

• Even when presented with evidence to the contrary, people tend to believe that the world is fundamentally a fair place. The facts may seem far away, or divorced from our everyday experience, making them easier to deny. This is called the Just World Effect.

• People have a tendency to assume that personal characteristics, rather than situations and environment, are usually the primary cause of other people's actions. This is called the fundamental attribution error.

• It's a way of justifying your own wealth and privilege. If you believe it's perfectly ethical to live in excess when others lack the resources to meet their basic needs, you can eliminate uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. It's very convenient to believe that what's moral also happens to be what one wants to do anyway.

• It's a justification for why you're better than other people. If you believe that wealth and privilege are rewards from god, karma, the nature or reality, or something similar, you can believe that you deserve these things simply by virtue of having them. This is especially likely to be a cause of economically conservative beliefs among those who were once poor or miserable (or perceived themselves this way) and have since become successful.

• Most people have had been inundated all their lives with conventional concepts of ethics which emphasize caring about other people. No matter how neglected these ideas may be in practice, it's easy to tire of hearing them repeated, causing people to rebel against them.

• Even if you aren't particularly successful, it feels good to think of yourself as such. Even when you know you're neither prosperous nor powerful, it can be exciting to align yourself with those who are.

• It's tempting to believe that good politics boil down to a fairly simple set of principles, namely that there's one villain responsible for most of society's problems (government) and a simple solution to them (deregulation).

• People tend to resist change. Once you believe something, no matter what it is, it takes courage to reevaluate it in light of new evidence, and few people are willing to do so.