Three Poor Assumptions Behind Liberalism
One of the things (among many) that bugs me about liberalism is that many of the essential arguments liberals make are rooted in poor or disempowering assumptions. So I thought I’d go through some of these assumptions to try and explain this.
Poor assumption #1: You are not enough.
Not every liberal believes that the government should totally run our lives, but many liberals do seem to often believe that the government’s job is to compensate for your individual weakness.
What is social security but mandated retirement planning, or the Department of Education but the assumption that people can’t find education in the private market or from themselves?
It’s easy to chalk up many government programs and institutions to compassion, but to demand a quality of life for everyone is simply to tell strangers that they do not meet the standards you’ve drawn up for them. In real life, a good way to deal with strangers who don’t behave the way you’d like is to walk away.
When you can govern strangers, why do you suddenly need to change the way they behave, except to protect basic liberties?
But if trying to help people means that you assume bad things about them, wouldn’t charity be pointless? Funny you should bring that up.
Poor assumption #2: Compassion comes from the state.
George W. Bush felt the need to brand himself as a “compassionate conservative” during the 2000 campaign, as if being a conservative somehow implies that you’re not compassionate. But real conservatives simply know that there is a significant difference in the big-spending, entitlement-without-consequences compassion of the state and the true compassion of the individual.
I pay taxes because if I don’t, the government will come after me – any benefit these taxes have to others is simply a bonus. Pretending I’m compassionate because I pay taxes I’m forced to pay would be disingenuous. No one holds a monopoly on compassion simply because they want to play Robin Hood.
If you’re asking how we help people without the government, you’re a bit locked in some of these poor liberal assumptions. Let’s see if we can help you out with a few points about actually helping people.
- First, no help lasts unless it somehow inspires personal responsibility and development. (Note: there are exclusions for people who literally can’t take care of themselves.) Consider the fate of the homeless man who received $100,000. He turned down the offer for free financial guidance and ended up broke again. Or consider many “lucky” lottery winners who end up going bankrupt. Without inner transformation, it’s hard to do enough on the outside to actually change a person’s lot in life.
- Second, if it’s this difficult to change peoples’ lives for the better when you can give them money directly, is it really so hard to see how entitlements can become disempowering? I know that if I was paid $100,000 a year to sit and do nothing, I wouldn’t feel particularly inspired to find a job that paid $100,000 a year. Combine this with typical bureaucratic inefficiencies and frequent corruption and you see how someone can be skeptical of big-government “compassion.”
- Third, true help often comes in addressing the root of the problem, not treating the symptom. A government check can be useful to someone who needs it and uses it properly in the short-term, but it doesn’t address the underlying causes of poverty. In many cases, this is like giving an audio book to someone who can’t read: you can help them enjoy a book but you can’t help them enjoy books. So what about poverty? Well, tell me how many classes you’ve taken that address personal finance before, or if you’ve ever learned any principles for financial success in school.
I’ve heard it a million times: “but what about the person who really needs money, and couldn’t get access to it in Dan’s Government?” If you are truly, physically or mentally incapable of earning money, then you’d qualify for a social safety net – but that should only apply to the truly handicapped. If you have trouble earning money for another excuse, like that you’ve always been poor or that your daddy didn’t love you, you don’t have a right to other peoples’ money. Many of them earned it despite hardships that may be worse than yours.
Poor assumption #3: Fairness and freedom go hand-in-hand.
Many people would consider it “fair” that there’s a such thing as a minimum wage. So many people make so much money in this country that it’s only fair that there should be a basement wage so no one is left out to dry!
But with that bit of “fairness” come a lot of hardships – sometimes in the very same people a policy like minimum wage seeks to protect. According to the Employment Policies Institute,
In our view, the combined evidence is best summarized as indicating that an increase in the minimum wage largely results in a redistribution of income among low-income families, with some gaining as a result of the higher minimum wage and others losing as a result of the diminished employment opportunities or reduced hours, and some likelihood that, on net, poor or low-income families are made worse off.
Such is the frequent folly of legislated “fairness.”
Yes, the wealthiest such-and-such percent own such-and-such percent of the wealth. I have news for you: human life has always been like that. Get used to it.
Redistributing income and trying to make life more fair for everyone doesn’t only not work, but it often comes with unintended consequences like the minimum-wage-is-often-bad-for-the-poor source listed above.
Poor assumption #3 also looks at money in a vacuum: you have more of it, so you should give it to this guy, who has less of it. Poor assumption #3 doesn’t consider my coconut business, and how I make $1.00 in profit for each coconut I sell. It doesn’t look at the people I pay to box, label, and ship my coconuts – keeping them employed and feeding their own families. It doesn’t look at the fact that if I want to earn more money, I could simply make more people happier and produce more coconuts. It doesn’t consider what it’s like for me to realize that if I avoid producing a certain amount of coconuts, I avoid hitting a new tax bracket and earning only $0.75 profit for each coconut, causing me to raise prices on the same people you originally gave my money to.
Consider affirmative action. Is it “fair” to give a black person a job that a white person is more qualified for? Some might say it is because black people have suffered greatly in the past. But that fairness comes at the expense of fairness to that white individual, who never owned a slave. You can’t give fairness to two people in that situation, can you?
True fairness comes when you treat yourself and your life a certain way in order to produce a certain result. Fairness can’t be given to you, because when it is, it often means that something was taken away from someone else.
I disagree wholeheartedly with this article for several reasons, not because I am a raving liberal but because there are fundamental beliefs that I do not agree with. The first assumption that is made in this article that irks me is the fact liberals do not assume the government will simply take care of everybody because as we know in a capitalist society this is impossible there will always be the really wealthy and the really poor. The point of government reforms is to provide so there is less disparity between the insanely wealthy and the poor. Making sure there is a smaller disparity makes it so there is a fairer say in government policies because if not the wealthy voters are more able to control the political atmosphere. The second assumption made that the government provides compassion is ludicrous, most government policies that hand out money only favor the poor. While it does seem unfair that hard working individuals have to pay more money in taxes in order to help the poorer people, it is a necessary function of government. It is necessary for government to supplement some people’s incomes in order to maintain the general well-being of the country, not just the top 25%. I also think that assumption three is completely heartless and without people who decided to give to others that our country would for certain be headed to the grave. The world needs people that will give, and is it really wrong that people should give to people who have less than them. I understand that some of the people who are poor simply choose not to work, but there are many that work hard and do not get the same opportunities as the upper middle class and wealthy get. Is it really fair to say that life is unfair, “get used to it”. I feel that this is an extremely callous remark and that it deserves some deep thought, some people make stupid decisions, and they get burned for them. Although if you are wealthier you have more chances to make mistakes whereas if you are poor you have less chances to make mistakes as mistakes are more costly in proportion to your lifestyle. I believe it is the government’s duty to help subsidize the people that this occurs to even though some may take a free-ride on the government policies the general ideaology of liberalism is good in nature and makes life fairer than that of a colder conservative ideaology.
Hi Adam,
“Making sure there is a smaller disparity makes it so there is a fairer say in government policies because if not the wealthy voters are more able to control the political atmosphere.”
Actually, that’s one reason to limit government – the less it can do, the less it can respond to people who want to influence it. It’s when the government has the power to regulate that things get muddied, because rich people WILL buy up political influence.
“Is it really fair to say that life is unfair, “get used to it”.”
No it’s not fair, that’s precisely the point.
“The world needs people that will give, and is it really wrong that people should give to people who have less than them.”
Of course it’s not. But you’re making poor assumption #2!
“I believe it is the government’s duty to help subsidize the people that this occurs to even though some may take a free-ride on the government policies the general ideaology of liberalism is good in nature and makes life fairer than that of a colder conservative ideaology.”
Let’s say I was given a country to run and you were given a country to run. I embraced free market principles, keeping taxes low on the wealthy and regulations low, as well. You embrace liberalism, so you have more programs for the poor.
I still think poor people would flock to MY country, following the rich people, because the rich people would bring jobs with them. Rich people would generally move from your country to mine because I’d have low taxes on them. Most poor people wouldn’t be able to get government aid, but they would be able to get more jobs (with more companies around and less regulations getting in the way of hiring), which Ronald Reagan called the best social program there is. Oh, and by the way, that would ultimately be better for the country, because in order to earn the money from those jobs, people would have to provide something of value to their employers, and POOF – into the economy it goes.
I appreciate the effort here to try and carefully delineate the assumptions behind “liberal” political thought, but I think it is also valuable to delineate the assumptions behind the post itself.
Assumption #1: The Free Market optimizes social welfare.
I think this is a very dangerous, Econ 101 sort of argument to make. The free market may, theoretically, maximize economic efficiency, but has no bearing at all on social welfare. In fact, from many liberals’ (most of whom are not anti-free market) point of view, the need for government is precisely to check for deficiencies of the free market. In a sense, therefore, the market and that state are not at odds with each other, they are complementary.
Assumption #2: If some people can live the American dream, everyone is capable of living the American dream.
I agree that many Americans are, in fact, living examples of the American dream. I don’t agree, however, with the argument that since some people have done it, everyone can. I think this assumption relies on 2 further faulty assumptions. 1. That we live in an equal society and 2. that people have equal abilities. In my opinion, the true measurement of societal mobility is not whether the exceptional can find success, but whether the mediocre can. The exceptional will find success in most societies. I don’t think the American dream applies to mediocrity, and hence I think this assumption is deeply flawed.
Assumption #3: Not addressing a problem fixes the problem
Here, I am in complete agreement with you, that just throwing money at a problem doesn’t fix it. Moreover, I also agree that addressing the symptoms of problems doesn’t fix their root causes. Yet I disagree with your unsaid assumption that somehow doing nothing about a problem will solve it (see: Assumption 1: the free market will fix all problems). It seems to me, the solution is rather to implement more comprehensive, empowering policies, rather than allowing social problems to fester.
Hey Naya, thanks for the comment.
In your “Assumption #1″ point, you say that the government should address the inefficiencies and holes in the free market. But it is precisely through trying to “fix” things that many problems with government regulation occur. In the free market, flaws can at least be corrected by failure; when the government gets involved, failure can be propped up in the name of correcting deficiencies.
To your “Assumption #2″ point: No, people don’t have equal abilities, but abilities are not static things. They’re dynamic; they can be evolved, developed, improved.
Also, if your definition of social mobility is whether or not the mediocre can succeed. Do you really think that in America, only exceptionally talented people have found success?
To your “Assumption #3″ point: Who said anything about doing nothing? America is a liberal country; if I was in charge, I’d have a lot to do to make it conservative. I never said that the free market would fix all problems, but YOUR assumption here seems to be that “comprehensive, empowering policies” are a silver bullet, while you don’t actually detail what these policies might be.
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