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The Trouble With Liberals
by Jacob G. Hornberger
The trouble with liberals is twofold: They have a
horrible blind spot with respect to moral principles
and they have an abysmal understanding of economic
principles. Of course, I'm referring to "liberals" in
the corrupted "big-government" sense of the term
rather than in the classical libertarian meaning of
the word.
We begin with a basic moral principle: It's wrong to
take what doesn't belong to you. This principle, of
course, is codified in the Ten Commandments: "Thou
shalt not steal," which connotes a way of life based
on privately owned property. It is a violation of
God's law for a person to take the property of another
person without his consent.
Most liberals have no difficulty understanding that
basic moral injunction against stealing. Their problem
arises when they begin thinking about the role of
government in society. That's where their moral blind
spot enters the picture. The liberal mindset is that,
while it's immoral for one person to take another
person's property against the will of the owner, the
same act is automatically converted into a moral deed
when it is done by the government.
Consider the following example. Suppose I hold a gun
to a liberal and force him to extract $10,000 from his
bank account. I explain to him that the money is for
my elderly widowed mother, who has no savings. As soon
as I get to my mother's home, I give all of the money
to her, and she plans to use it for food, rent, and
clothing in the year ahead.
How would the liberal respond? He would cry, "Thief!"
and immediately call the cops. In his mind, I would
have been committing an immoral act - stealing -
because I don't have the right to take what doesn't
belong to me, not even to assist my mother.
Let's assume though that instead of robbing the
liberal, I travel to Washington, D.C., to visit my
congressman and senators. After placing a few bricks
of $1,000 donations from well-heeled friends and
supporters on their desk, I ask them to enact a law
that entitles me (and others) to take money from
liberals (and others) to assist my destitute mother
(and other elderly people) with living expenses. The
law is passed, the IRS begins collecting the money,
and the Social Security Administration sends a $10,000
check to my mother.
For the liberal, this changes everything. What the
government has done is now considered moral. Moreover,
it reflects not only my goodness but also the goodness
of everyone else who lives in American society,
including those who don't even vote. In the liberal
mindset, the government becomes the engine of moral
transformation, converting what would ordinarily be a
thief into a caring and compassionate benefactor of
society.
That's in fact why liberals oftentimes sympathize with
Cuba's president, Fidel Castro. While Castro's
violations of civil liberties make liberals
uncomfortable, his use of government to take from the
rich to give to the poor pulls on liberal
heartstrings.
In fact, the socialist economic system that Castro
implemented in Cuba is the logical extension of
liberal principles. For example, soon after Castro
took office, the Cuban government took possession and
ownership of large mansions in which rich people were
living. Castro let the poor move into them. The
government did the same thing with large farms and
companies, redistributing them to the poor.
Obviously, Castro was a very popular man, not among
those whose property was being taken from them but
among those who were gaining the benefits of the
booty.
Of course, Castro took everything from the rich, while
American liberals favor taking only a certain
percentage from the rich and giving it to the poor.
But isn't that only a difference in degree, not in
principle?
Ignorance of economic principles
The Cuba situation brings us to the other trouble with
liberals - their abysmal ignorance of economic
principles. Liberals don't realize that the
tax-and-welfare role they favor for government hurts
the very people they presumably want to help - those
at the bottom of the economic ladder. That's why they
limit their blame for the horrible economic plight of
the Cuban people to the U.S. embargo against Cuba,
totally ignoring the adverse effects of Castro's
socialist economic policies.
Imagine that 10,000 penniless people were suddenly
stranded on a deserted island, with no chance of being
rescued. What should they do to survive? A liberal
would say, "Immediately enact a welfare state, so that
the poor don't starve to death."
They fail to see the fundamental fallacy in their
reasoning: the welfare state presupposes wealth to
confiscate. If there is no wealth, there is nothing to
confiscate and, therefore, no welfare to distribute.
In order to have a welfare state, wealth must first
come into existence. Thus, the only reason that Castro
was able to confiscate those houses, farms, and
businesses is that they had already come into
existence for him to confiscate.
Thus, liberals always ask the wrong economic question.
They ask, "What are the causes of poverty?" when the
right question is, "What are the causes of wealth?"
The lesson of Thanksgiving
The history of Thanksgiving in the United States can
provide a valuable lesson for liberals. When the
Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock and began planting
their crops, Gov. William Bradford implemented a type
of "share the wealth" system favored by liberals.
Everyone was required to deposit his crops into a
common pool, whereupon the government would have the
responsibility of distributing the proceeds on the
basis of relative need.
The result? The same result we see in places like Cuba
and Africa, whose societies are based on that same
"share the wealth" principle - abject poverty, even
famine and starvation.
After a few years of harsh privation and starvation,
Governor Bradford issued a new decree changing the
colony's economic system. From that day forward, every
family would keep its own crop proceeds and would not
be forced to share them with others. It was a system
based on private property and free enterprise.
The result? Bounty and plenty! No more famines or
starvation! Moreover, people noticed an unusual
phenomenon: When families had the right to keep
everything they earned, members of the family worked
harder and longer than they had been working when
living under welfare-state conditions.
Thus, it was Plymouth Rock's implementation of a
private-property system that was the genesis of the
first Thanksgiving.
The Industrial Revolution
Jumping ahead in U.S. history, liberals love to point
to the horrors of the Industrial Revolution. They
implicitly claim that American parents living during
that time were guilty of horrible child abuse because
they forced their children to work long hours in
"sweatshops." The accusation is based on liberals'
abysmal ignorance of both history and economic
principles.
When considering the 1800s, it's important to compare
that century not with the 20th century but rather with
the centuries that preceded it. During the preceding
eras, life and living standards were horrible. The
average life span was in the early 20s, which is one
reason that many people got married in their early
teens. It is impossible to describe adequately how
nasty life was in terms of living standards,
especially considering the quality of the food,
clothing, water, sewage facilities, medicine, and
transportation. The child mortality rate was so high
that most couples would have many children, knowing
that only a few would make it to adulthood.
Along came the American people and established the
most unusual society in history: No income taxation,
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, economic
regulations, immigration controls, or welfare. For the
first time in history, people were free to open up
businesses without government permission or
interference. They were free to keep everything they
earned and to decide what to do with it. Charity was
entirely voluntary.
The result? The most prosperous - and the most
charitable - society in history, despite what liberals
claim. Parents didn't send their children into the
factories because they hated them but rather because
this was the only way to save them. The Industrial
Revolution, while harsh, gave parents the chance to
save children who otherwise would likely have met an
early death.
Families gradually began accumulating the capital
savings that provided them with increasing financial
stability. Thus, it wasn't laws that took children out
of the factories but rather the increased financial
ability of families to keep children - and later wives
- out of the factories.
Moreover, it was the enormous pool of productive
capital - savings - that financed the production of
better machinery and tools, which made workers more
productive, which in turn raised real wage rates. It
was capital - not government - that was the foundation
of the soaring standard of living of the American
people in the late 1800s and into the 1900s.
It was that pool of enormous wealth that attracted the
socialists - the welfare-statists - the liberals.
Seeing all the wealth that an unhampered market
economy had brought into existence was too much for
them. Permitting envy and covetousness to take control
of their mindsets, their quest became to use
government to confiscate the wealth and redistribute
it. What they failed to comprehend was that as they
confiscated capital, they were dooming the very people
they were claiming to help to lower standards of
living.
The regulated economy
Unfortunately, liberals didn't stop with
welfare-statism. They also turned to economic
regulations, not understanding that such
interventions, again, harmed the very people they were
supposedly trying to help - the poor and destitute.
Consider, for example, minimum-wage laws, which every
liberal absolutely adores. Keep in mind that
minimum-wage laws don't require anyone to hire anyone
else. They simply say that if a person does choose to
hire someone, he must pay the legally established
minimum to his employee.
Let's say that Congress sets the minimum wage at $100
per hour. Liberals would say, "Yes, that would be
great! Finally, everyone would be wealthy!" They're
wrong. It would doom millions of people to poverty.
Why? No one whose labor is valued by prospective
employers at less than $100 per hour would be hired.
That large group of people would remain unemployed.
How would they survive? You guessed it: By the
government's confiscating wealth from the citizenry
(including business owners) and giving welfare to the
unemployed.
"Okay," the liberal might respond, "then the mistake
would be in setting the minimum wage at $100 an hour.
Let's change it to $5 an hour." The principle is no
different. All that has changed is the number of
people who are unemployed. That is, all the people
whose labor is valued at $5 to $100, who previously
were unemployed because of the $100 minimum-wage law,
will now be able to find jobs. But those whose labor
is valued at less than $5 an hour will remain
unemployed.
Liberals have never been able to understand that the
results of government programs are not determined by
good intentions but rather by economic principles.
Vetoing a welfare bill to assist drought-stricken
Texas farmers, Democratic President Grover Cleveland
in 1887 expressed the philosophy of the American
people when he declared, "Though the people support
the government, the government should not support the
people." Too bad modern-day liberals, with their moral
blind spot and their lack of economic understanding,
have led our nation in the opposite direction.
July 20, 2006
Jacob Hornberger [send him mail] is founder and
president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Copyright © 2006 Future of Freedom Foundation
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