When prepping for a recent presentation about my book, Faulty Premises, Faulty Policies, it struck me that it can help explain why those committed to liberty often have a hard time winning others over to our understanding of the potential of free people.
Regardless of the details of a particular policy, faulty underlying premises about the nature of markets and governments add a heavy thumb to people’s evaluation scales on the side of the state. Yet most seldom question such fundamental beliefs, absorbed with little thought from statists throughout the culture.
Those faulty premises can persist as unexpressed but crucial factors in virtually every policy discussion. They, in turn, can explain why many continue supporting government “solutions” over reliance on voluntary arrangements, despite far-inferior results.
Say you and I were doing a benefit-cost analysis of the consequences of some new government interference with voluntary market interactions (though it is hard to imagine any such possibilities are left). If we were being intellectually honest, we would do our best to identify and estimate the magnitudes of all the beneficial and adverse consequences. Then we would evaluate whether the benefits justified the costs according to our value judgments.
Suppose further that you and I agreed that a particular proposal for government to override voluntary arrangements imposed costs that outweighed benefits by $1 million in monetary terms. We should agree in opposing that intervention. But that would not necessarily follow if everything else was not equal.
What if you thought that the process involved in market mechanisms also harmed society? You would add that supposed harm to your evaluation. If you considered the harm from the process as imposing a $2 million added cost on those in society, that sizeable thumb on one side of the scale would override other considerations and government intervention would “win” your endorsement even when it “loses.”
In fact, by attributing a great enough weight to supposed harms from market processes, almost any government intervention could be argued to be justifiable. And even convincing demonstrations of government inadequacies and policy failures would do little to dent support for foolish interventions.
What could cause such costly damage? The large number of statist calumnies against markets. What if you had absorbed the belief that unlike government, markets involved “dog eat dog,” Darwinian “survival of the fittest”? What if you believed markets are meanly competitive (even “cut-throat”) and miserly, but government are cooperative and generous? What if you believed that market relationships use people and encourage greed and misbehavior because they make everything about money? Such beliefs would add a very heavy thumb to people’s judgment scales. If government was considered to have wisdom for every question and balm for every hurt, the biased scales would only get more so.
When those crucial difference-making beliefs remain in the shadows, unaddressed, they can persist across a vast range of government violations of liberty. And if it defenders of liberty don’t disinter those buried confusions that have hardened into unquestioned beliefs and analyze them, little headway against the government juggernaut can be made.
For example, think about accusations that market behavior involves “dog eat dog,” Darwinian “survival of the fittest.”
With the sustainable population of the earth and their real incomes starting to accelerate only after the idea of respecting individuals’ property rights, deriving from their self-ownership, and the industrial revolution began to take hold, such claims should be seen as preposterous. Markets, in fact, made far more people far more fit.
The “dog eat dog” imagery is also preposterous. Dogs don’t eat other dogs. Relying on an analogy to something that doesn’t happen should also be laughed out of court.
The imagery also ignores production and exchange. As Adam Smith noted, dogs do not produce for and exchange with one another. That zero-sum that remains could produce vicious behavior. But in a world of freedom, we must first benefit others by attracting their voluntary consent in order to then procure more of what we want. That voluntary production and exchange turns a zero-sum game into a massively positive-sum game, where benefiting me entails benefiting you as well.
Further, all those not absolutely the best at something in free markets don’t die. We all continue to benefit from markets’ superior production and exchange results, while their flexible prices direct each of us toward what we do relatively better for others. What dies are products and services consumers find inferior to alternatives. So do organizational forms that are less effective for the productive circumstances at hand. Both sorts of deaths are essential parts of improving consumers’ lives.
Addressing basic premises is too-seldom done, because once ingrained, they get ignored. But to effectively make the overwhelming case for liberty, perhaps we should address those false premises more consistently and systematically. That might make us better able to educate people to can fend off the continual onslaught of false claims that are repeated endlessly by knowing dissemblers and unknowing statist sheep. For those who are committed to non-coercion, that might be the best way to win more policy debates. The more clearly we communicate and live out that commitment, the better others will recognize that what we advocate is in fact the opposite of a “dog eat dog,” Darwinian “survival of the fittest” world, which only coercion can create.
