25. Do not hesitate too much to recommend the substitution of
a better policy for a worse one just because the people who had benefited from
the bad policy must adjust upon its repeal:
Time and
time again, proposals for a reasonable change in social policy are met with
objections that fixate on the difficult adjustments that will have to be made
by some people as a result of the change in policy. A common example of this
has been one strain of objections to a cutting of the United States’ military
budget. The objection goes something like this: ‘Granted that perhaps the
current level of spending on the military is excessive and unnecessary.
However, cutting the budget just like that is not so simple. Many regional
economies in the country are heavily dependent on military activities. Also,
this country currently has a difficult unemployment problem. Throwing people
employed by the military industry out of work via budget cuts is thus not
advisable.’
While this
objection is superficially plausible, it is actually strewn with fallacies. The
first is that it violates tip #10 by focusing only on the seen benefits and neglecting
the unseen costs of the policy. The government does not just create resources
out of thin air. Either it takes resources directly from taxpayers or indirectly
through deficit spending, which sucks up resources either through inflation or
by diverting investment capital from the private sector to the government.
These resources include labour. The employment and benefits generated by the
military industry constitute the seen benefits of the policy of having a large
military budget, but the employment and benefits that could have been generated
had the resources been left in the hands of the private sector are the unseen
costs of the policy.
The reason I
have created this tip is so that you can avoid another fallacy of this
objection, even if the objection is modified so as to take into account unseen
costs. The modified objection could run as follows: ‘Ok, I will grant that in
the long-run, the private sector could probably make more productive and humane
uses of resources and personnel currently dedicated to the military.
Nevertheless, this does not change the fact that a great many people who have
become dependent on the military industry for their livelihood will suffer.
Hence, we cannot be too rash when advocating such cuts.’ It is true that people
who have geared their economic activity towards the military industry will have
to bear some adjustment costs, sometimes painful ones, if that industry should
become less important. It is not true, however, that this fact constitutes a
valid objection against changing a bad policy for a better one. Adjustment
costs could well enter as a cost on your cost/benefit analysis of the policy
change, but this does not mean that they should be the overriding consideration
when the policy change is evaluated. People do not have an inalienable right to
an unchanged, ‘stable’, economy. If short-term adjustment costs are the only
objection that someone can raise against a policy change, it is generally safe
to assume that their position has been defeated intellectually.
Proponents of slavery in the US South
actually fell back on this objection when they had nothing else to say. They
argued that it would be hard for slaves and slave-owners alike to adjust to a
slave-less world. But this is a rather weak argument for slavery indeed,
considering the wide array of arguments against slavery, ranging from the lower
productivity of slave labour to the protection of a man’s right to pursue his
own desires as an end in its own right to the monstrosity of the general
principle that one man may lawfully subjugate another completely to his arbitrary
will.
Thus, next
time you hear the difficulty-of-adjusting argument to defend retaining a
policy, ascertain whether this is one of many arguments presented against
changing the policy or is one of the only ones. If the former, it is probably
best to consider it as a small to moderate cost of changing the policy. If the
latter, know that the supporters of the policy are intellectually bankrupt, and
don’t accept this argument as a trump card to block reasonable policy changes.
26. Don’t let the argument from restitution serve as a
justification for perpetual bad policies:
Another
argument that is commonly used as a trump card to block reasonable policies is
the argument from restitution. Proponents of programs such as affirmative
action, welfare, ‘community development policies’, and foreign aid policies use
and abuse this argument the most. Thus, a common argument for affirmative
action policies goes something like this: ‘Affirmative action programs do not
resemble discriminatory or racist policies and practices of the past at all,
though they share some superficial resemblances. This is because affirmative
action addresses structural inequalities in society and is a corrective measure
for wrongs done to the group in question in the past. Because the group had
been denied opportunities in the past, they have not been able to achieve the
income level and educational achievements of more favoured groups. Thus, even
though they are not actively and overtly discriminated against in the present,
in practice they still are, thus affirmative action is a way of righting this
wrong and making the economy fair to all.’
There is
something to this argument, namely that it is indeed true that those from
wealthier families typically have more opportunities to educate themselves well
and thus may have a better chance of landing themselves more desirable jobs. This core of truth to the argument
does not serve as an overriding justification for affirmative action or other
‘compensatory’ policies for the following reasons though: First, from the
standpoint of satisfaction of the consumer’s desires, the market economy does
not resemble a game where everyone must ‘compete on a level playing field’ in
order for it to be ‘fair’. Unless they manifest this desire voluntarily through
their decisions to patronize or not patronize certain firms that they deem
‘fair’ or ‘unfair’, it cannot be assumed that the consumers particularly care
about how ‘fair’ the market economy is. They typically want to satisfy their
desires that are linked to exchangeable goods in the cheapest and most high
quality manner possible. Forcing businesses to hire workers who they deem to be
less value-productive than other available workers in the name of ‘fairness’ is
not a path to economic efficiency in the eyes of the consumers.
Secondly,
‘structural inequality’ arguments tend to violate the tenets of methodological
individualism, dealing with aggregated ‘social groups’ instead. Thus, it is
said that because groups such as women and black people were discriminated
against in the past, they should be compensated in the present, at the expense
of those groups who were favoured in the past such as white men. But a young
white man growing up in an affirmative action environment actually received few
of the benefits of ‘white men’ being favoured in the past and is saddled with
all the costs of being discriminated against by affirmative action policies. It
is assumed that somehow the fact that ‘white men’ benefited in the past
is a benefit to the white man hit with affirmative action policies in the
present (thus violating tip #21: assuming special interpersonal bonds between
individuals that may not exist, in this case the racial and gender solidarity
of white men.) I can imagine that a great number of young white men in the
present do not feel greatly comforted by the fact that ‘white men’ as a group
were favoured in the past (it is not even guaranteed that the parents of every
young white man directly benefited from this past state of affairs). Rather,
the individual white man is generally looking to do well for himself, and he is faced with onerous affirmative action discrimination.
Thirdly, and
most importantly, how do we know when all the ‘structural inequalities’ have
been rectified and we can return to letting the employer hire and fire as he
judges best? The ‘equal pay for equal work’ criterion is not a good standard
because it is impossible to non-arbitrarily designate the work done by two
different employees as ‘equal’ in the minds of their employers. Also, even if this
criterion held to the arbitrary satisfaction of the observer, there could still
be ‘structural inequalities’ preventing people of certain groups from even
performing work that is ‘equal’ with that of other groups. Whenever a
supposedly temporary compensatory policy such as affirmative action is
proposed, it should be accompanied by clear criteria for when this policy, that
would be unsatisfactory if kept permanently, can be ended. No such criteria has
or could be suggested for these ‘structural inequality’ policies, except for
perhaps a statistically-clear reversal of the relevant social groups’
socio-economic statuses, at which point it is possible that the newly
‘structurally unequal’ group could petition for affirmative action or other
such policies for themselves. In practice, the ‘structural inequalities’
argument ends up providing justification for an endless series of
redistributionist policies that will never reach their goal of ‘fairness’ and
hence will never be repealed. Like the adjustment cost argument in the last
tip, the ‘structural inequality’ argument or argument from restitution tends to
be used as a fall-back argument for those who can’t justify their desired
redistributionist policies with a more varied set of arguments.
Thus, beware
of arguments from restitution that try to justify otherwise bad policies
‘temporarily’, that actually have no criteria for ever ending these bad
policies. Even if you care greatly about making the market economy ‘fair’ and
righting historical wrongs, and don’t particularly care about economic
efficiency in the eyes of the consumers or freedom of association between
employers and employees, the argument from restitution still should not be
used, on its own, to justify an endless series of otherwise unsatisfactory
redistributionist or discriminatory policies.
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