Blame The Passive Victims

Who is to blame for the existence of harmful government policies? The most obvious answer is that the formulators, implementers, and supportive beneficiaries of these policies are the ones to blame. However, I would not blame these people for the simple reason that I could not, without trying to bamboozle them, honestly advise them to do anything different. If someone is a true beneficiary of a government policy, how can I credibly advise them to cease their support for that policy? If I were a true beneficiary of a government policy, I would support it too!

The group of people who can be more fruitfully blamed for the existence of a generally harmful government policy are the victims of the policy who take no steps to effectively oppose it, the passive victims of the policy. It is these people who, out of ignorance and/or inertia, fail to defend their interests against government policies which will result in their victimization. These people I have no problem enthusiastically and honestly advising to speak out against the government policies that are harmful to them. The voices and resistance of the victims is most likely the only thing that can result in a change in these kinds of policies. It would be foolish to expect the beneficiaries of the policy to self-sacrificially do this work instead.

Let us consider some examples. I favour the liberalization of the medical profession and the removal of the monopoly status of the Medical Associations. In pursuit of this aim, am I going to try to convince established doctors and Medical Association brass to support my cause? No, that would be a fool’s errand. Rather, I will bring my case to the medical consumer who is frustrated with the high prices and scarcity of doctors. If the policy remains unchanged, I will not blame the established doctors and Medical Association brass for opposing it, they are only doing what is natural. Rather, I will blame the passive medical consumer who refuses to recognize that this policy is victimizing them and who refuses to effectively stand up for their interests.

I favour full free-trade between nations. Will I try to convince tariff-protected, relatively inefficient domestic producers to join my cause? Banish the thought! Rather, I will try to get support from general consumers and from competitive businesses who don’t need tariff-protection and who would benefit from cheaper imports. If tariffs remain, I would assign the blame to the latter groups, not the former.

This perspective makes it easier to see the futility of the ‘good politician’ strategy. Many people argue that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with our political process, we just need to get the right people into political office and then all will be well. These ‘good politicians’ will allegedly selflessly pursue the ‘general interest’ and will have the intelligence and knowledge necessary to do so effectively. They will know when the government should intervene, and when they should let the free-market run its course unhampered. With such people in power, proponents of this strategy maintain, libertarian complaints about the evils of State power will no longer apply.

The problem is that the likelihood of this kind of person taking and maintaining power is almost vanishingly small. This is because being a ‘good politician’ is generally not in the interests of an individual politician. To become a ‘good politician’, an individual would have to be both foolish enough to self-sacrificially pursue the ‘general interest’ at the expense of their own interest, and smart enough to know what policies would effectively advance this ‘general interest’.

If such a rare mixture of fool and sage managed to get into power, what would be the result? They would perhaps manage to ram a few good reforms through the political process, but then what? Their elite (rich and influential) supporters would soon abandon them, most special interest groups would shun them, the media and the press would turn on them. In the next election, their political party would be obliterated and their political career would be ruined. The succeeding government would either immediately repeal or start gradually eroding the reforms that were passed. Is it really plausible to maintain that a person who had the cunning and savvy to claw their way to the top of the political ladder would, as soon as they took power, turn around and rapidly precipitate their own downfall like this for the sake of a few ephemeral policy victories?  It seems foolish to put our faith in such a rare bird.

Most politicians will just go with the political flow and will be rewarded for it. There is no reason to believe that they will go out of their way to pursue knowledge that would point to the general harmfulness of the general ‘political consensus’. Why pursue knowledge of real free-market economics and libertarian political theory if there is no realistic way of putting these ideas into practice? Doing so would just be a kind of intellectual self-flagellation.

I do not blame this kind of politician for acting the way that they do; it is only natural after all. It is the victims who suffer from the delusion that most politicians have their best interests at heart that I blame. If these people do not wake up to the realities of political life, then the sociopolitical elites will just carry on privileging themselves at the expense of political outsiders. Only a change in the mindset of these political victims will be able to change the political world.