Instapundit reader Dave Ivers almost gets it:
“Having just had a discussion with a close friend on the Left, I truly believe that Obama and probably all of the Left think that 3.5% GDP growth year on year is some sort of natural phenomenon and that no matter what they do it will happen. They then proceeded to trash the things that make that 3.5% growth happen.”
It’s not a case of thinking that “3.5% GDP growth year on year is some sort of natural phenomenon”. It’s a case of thinking that nothing people can do affects the existence of wealth. It’s the worldview of the hunter-gatherer-scavenger tribe: food (wealth) exists Out There Somewhere and can be found, but nothing they can do will change what is available to a sufficiently alert and diligent searcher.
You can’t even call it “belief” as we generally use the word. Even the most rock-solid believer has his/her belief in the conscious or semiconscious support of his/her mind, and can be induced, de minimis, to assert that it exists. Nobody “believes” in gravity in that sense. Things fall down, and our every conscious moment is underlaid by that assumption. Belief, as such, requires thinking about it. We don’t think about gravity when we take a step, or lay an object on a table instead of simply releasing it.
Leftoids take production for granted in the same way. It happens out of sight and out of mind, by processes and under the influence of forces that are not comprehended, not comprehensible, and in any case not affected by anything they do. They are therefore free to make whatever changes they care to make in the processes and forces that they can see and affect, because since nothing they do affects the existence of wealth, by definition if they can do it it doesn’t change anything important.
The hunter-gatherer-scavenger tribes of North America had a large hand in exterminating the woolly mammoth. They set up plunges where they could drive herds of animals over a cliff, kill the ones that were only injured, and feast on the abundance, because it didn’t matter — mammoths came from somewhere beyond their control, and nothing they did could affect that. Autoworkers are free to demand higher pay and play silly tricks on the production line, because the Company has money and nothing they can do on the shop floor affects that. Woolly mammoths reproduced slowly, so killing off whole herds of them reduced their population below replacement levels and increasingly desperate hunts for the few survivors finished them off; auto companies get money by selling cars, so making the product increasingly expensive and of lower quality eventually means consumers go elsewhere and the Company has no money.
It’s at least possible that a sufficient number of sufficiently diligent time travelers could convince the tribes of North America that their hunting techniques did, in fact, affect the supply of woolly mammoths and should be changed. I see no prospect of convincing modern leftoids that they’re shitting in their own messkits; so long as there are herds of “the rich” or even a few lonely survivors they’ll continue to hunt them down and feast. If they were the only ones affected I, personally, would be pleased to let them go about it and suffer the resulting famine. Unfortunately the rest of us are in it for the duration as well.
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5 August 2011 at 8:03 am
gggg
You see the same thing in management as well, not just unionists on the shop floor: People who think the business is a magic profit fairy that always existed and always will, and act utterly without regard for serving customers. That appears to be what happened to Borders. It’s funny you mentioned the mammoths, too; I was thinking of buffalo jumps before I got to that part.
It’s a strange sort of infantilism. Or as I put it, a lefty is somebody who made it to adulthood without finding out where goods and services come from. It turns out Thomas Sowell said pretty much the same thing in slightly different terms, years earlier.
5 August 2011 at 10:34 am
Kyle Haight
Ayn Rand said it even more tersely: “The goods are here. How did they get here? Blank out.”
5 August 2011 at 5:10 pm
Ric Locke
Rand was wrong. It’s not a puzzle how the goods got here; leftoids don’t believe anything they do affects the process for good or ill, so they’re free to meddle in any step of it. In particular, they’re free to declare the guardians of the precursors of the goods “rich” and grab the goodies.
7 August 2011 at 9:49 am
The Monster
Rand was absolutely right about that. The Left does not want to know (consciously) the complex chains of events that converge upon a stock clerk putting merchandise on a shelf in a store. The pithy “blank out” exactly captures the deliberate arrest of cognitive ability so as to not know.
It wasn’t until I saw Evan Sayet’s first Heritage lecture that I understood why they do it. As a recovering leftist, he was able to explain it perfectly: Leftism deliberately arrests thinking at the Kindergarten level (which I think fits in at about the economic understanding of a hunter-gatherer) because to think more maturely is to risk committing the ultimate crime of discrimination.
Rand also talks about the archetypes of Attila (the tribal chief) and the Witch Doctor (shaman), which pretty much every hunting-gathering society has. It’s as if our species existed at the H-G level long enough for our brains to be pretty much hard-wired to function there, while any higher level of economic progress requires us to do the mental work to figure out that those mammoth will not always be there in large numbers, so if we can domesticate the beasts, and do controlled slaughter that keeps the numbers of the herd up, we really can have even more meat to eat, hides to wear, etc.
Domestication of animals and agriculture support roughly 30x the population density of H-G. But there’s a price to pay. You have to recognize that the herdsman who tends to those animals every day has earned the right to prevent others from killing his animals. For hunters, the idea that someone “owns” an animal is weird. It takes mental effort to grasp the necessity of a moral code that recognizes that herdsman’s rights over his animals, and strength of character to hunt wild animals instead of his domesticated herd, even though “hunting” his herd is so easy.
Similarly, the farmer who tends and nurtures his crops until they’re ready to harvest has earned the right to prevent others from “gathering” them. The mental effort is analogous, and therefore ought to be easier to do, because some of it has already been done in grasping the rights inherent in animal husbandry. But there’s a difference. Herdsmen can lead a nomadic existence, letting their animals graze over different lands as they move about, but a farmer has to be able to benefit from the produce of a particular piece of ground for at least a full growing season. If the ground wasn’t well-suited for farming at first, the farmer had to invest a great deal of effort in making it so. He needs the confidence that he can benefit from that effort over a prolonged time span, or he won’t do the work, and the crops will not exist.
A mature market economy depends on a moral and legal system that recognizes the rights of the producer to the product of his efforts, and to trade that product with other producers upon mutually-agreed terms, with no element of coercion in the negotiations. Whenever such transactions occur, each party leaves with more value than it had before. But once coercion is allowed into the equation, it’s possible for one or more parties to be poorer as a result. Maybe even everyone in the transaction other than the guy doing the coercing. That’s called “robbery”, unless the coercer’s wearing a badge or the King’s livery. Then it’s called “taxation” or “fairness”.
19 August 2011 at 7:11 pm
Tom on the rez
Ric & Monster, you’ve got it, spot-on. Slightly off-topic, I wrote an essay in college about the loss of North American mega-fauna. My premise was that people are people and will take whatever they can get away with. Our (precursor) tribes killed off the N.A. horses, camels, and elephants. I got an A, but it still rubbed the professor the wrong way. She didn’t like the idea that there ain’t no such thing as a “Magic Indi’n.”
21 November 2011 at 8:54 pm
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