The Mindset of the Left
by Thomas Sowell
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When teenage
thugs are called "troubled youth" by people on the political left,
that tells us more about the mindset of the left than about these
young hoodlums.
Seldom is there
a speck of evidence that the thugs are troubled, and often there
is ample evidence that they are in fact enjoying themselves, as
they create trouble and dangers for others.
Why then the
built-in excuse, when juvenile hoodlums are called "troubled youth"
and mass murderers are just assumed to be "insane"?
At least as
far back as the 18th century, the left has struggled to avoid facing
the plain fact of evil – that some people simply choose to do things
that they know to be wrong when they do them. Every kind of excuse,
from poverty to an unhappy childhood, is used by the left to explain
and excuse evil.
All the people
who have come out of poverty or unhappy childhoods, or both, and
become decent and productive human beings, are ignored. So are the
evils committed by people raised in wealth and privilege, including
kings, conquerors and slaveowners.
Why has evil
been such a hard concept for many on the left to accept? The basic
agenda of the left is to change external conditions. But what if
the problem is internal? What if the real problem is the cussedness
of human beings?
Rousseau denied
this in the 18th century and the left has been denying it ever since.
Why? Self preservation.
If the things
that the left wants to control – institutions and government policy
– are not the most important factors in the world's problems, then
what role is there for the left?
What if it
is things like the family, the culture and the traditions that make
a more positive difference than the bright new government "solutions"
that the left is constantly coming up with? What if seeking "the
root causes of crime" is not nearly as effective as locking up criminals?
The hard facts show that the murder rate was going down for decades
under the old traditional practices so disdained by the left intelligentsia,
before the bright new ideas of the left went into effect in the
1960s – after which crime and violence skyrocketed.
What happened
when old-fashioned ideas about sex were replaced in the 1960s by
the bright new ideas of the left that were introduced into the schools
as "sex education" that was supposed to reduce teenage pregnancy
and sexually transmitted diseases?
Both teenage
pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases had been going down
for years. But that trend suddenly reversed in the 1960s and hit
new highs.
One of the
oldest and most dogmatic of the crusades of the left has been disarmament,
both of individuals and of nations. Again, the focus of the left
has been on the externals – the weapons in this case.
If weapons
were the problem, then gun control laws at home and international
disarmament agreements abroad might be the answer. But if evil people
who care no more for laws or treaties than they do for other people's
lives are the problem, then disarmament means making decent, law-abiding
people more vulnerable to evil people.
Since belief
in disarmament has been a major feature of the left since the 18th
century, in countries around the world, you might think that by
now there would be lots of evidence to substantiate their beliefs.
But evidence
on whether gun control laws actually reduce crime rates in general,
or murder rates in particular, is seldom mentioned by gun control
advocates. It is just assumed in passing that of course tighter
gun control laws will reduce murders.
But the hard
facts do not back up that assumption. That is why it is the critics
of gun control who rely heavily on empirical evidence, as in books
like More
Guns, Less Crime by John Lott and Guns
and Violence by Joyce Lee Malcolm.
National disarmament
has an even worse record. Both Britain and America neglected their
military forces between the two World Wars, while Germany and Japan
armed to the teeth. Many British and American soldiers paid with
their lives for their countries' initially inadequate military equipment
in World War II.
But what are
mere facts compared to the heady vision of the left?
The political
left has long claimed the role of protector of "the poor." It is
one of their central moral claims to political power. But how valid
is this claim?
Leaders of
the left in many countries have promoted policies that enable the
poor to be more comfortable in their poverty. But that raises a
fundamental question: Just who are "the poor"?
If you use
a bureaucratic definition of poverty as including all individuals
or families below some arbitrary income level set by the government,
then it is easy to get the kinds of statistics about "the poor"
that are thrown around in the media and in politics. But do those
statistics have much relationship to reality?
"Poverty" once
had some concrete meaning – not enough food to eat or not enough
clothing or shelter to protect you from the elements, for example.
Today it means whatever the government bureaucrats, who set up the
statistical criteria, choose to make it mean. And they have every
incentive to define poverty in a way that includes enough people
to justify welfare state spending.
Most Americans
with incomes below the official poverty level have air-conditioning,
television, own a motor vehicle and, far from being hungry, are
more likely than other Americans to be overweight. But an arbitrary
definition of words and numbers gives them access to the taxpayers'
money.
This kind of
"poverty" can easily become a way of life, not only for today's
"poor," but for their children and grandchildren.
Even when they
have the potential to become productive members of society, the
loss of welfare state benefits if they try to do so is an implicit
"tax" on what they would earn that often exceeds the explicit tax
on a millionaire.
If increasing
your income by $10,000 would cause you to lose $15,000 in government
benefits, would you do it?
In short, the
political left's welfare state makes poverty more comfortable, while
penalizing attempts to rise out of poverty. Unless we believe that
some people are predestined to be poor, the left's agenda is a disservice
to them, as well as to society. The vast amounts of money wasted
are by no means the worst of it.
If our goal
is for people to get out of poverty, there are plenty of heartening
examples of individuals and groups who have done that, in countries
around the world.
Millions of
"overseas Chinese" emigrated from China destitute and often illiterate
in centuries past. Whether they settled in Southeast Asian countries
or in the United States, they began at the bottom, taking hard,
dirty and sometimes dangerous jobs.
Even though
the overseas Chinese were usually paid little, they saved out of
that little, and many eventually opened tiny businesses. By working
long hours and living frugally, they were able to turn tiny businesses
into larger and more prosperous businesses. Then they saw to it
that their children got the education that they themselves often
lacked.
By 1994, the
57 million overseas Chinese created as much wealth as the one billion
people living in China.
Variations
on this social pattern can be found in the histories of Jewish,
Armenian, Lebanese and other emigrants who settled in many countries
around the world – initially poor, but rising over the generations
to prosperity. Seldom did they rely on government, and they usually
avoided politics on their way up.
Such groups
concentrated on developing what economists call "human capital"
– their skills, talents, knowledge and self discipline. Their success
has usually been based on that one four-letter word that the left
seldom uses in polite society: "work."
There are individuals
in virtually every group who follow similar patterns to rise from
poverty to prosperity. But how many such individuals there are in
different groups makes a big difference for the prosperity or poverty
of the groups as a whole.
The agenda
of the left – promoting envy and a sense of grievance, while making
loud demands for "rights" to what other people have produced – is
a pattern that has been widespread in countries around the world.
This agenda
has seldom lifted the poor out of poverty. But it has lifted the
left to positions of power and self-aggrandizement, while they promote
policies with socially counterproductive results.
The fundamental
problem of the political left seems to be that the real world does
not fit their preconceptions. Therefore they see the real world
as what is wrong, and what needs to be changed, since apparently
their preconceptions cannot be wrong.
A never-ending
source of grievances for the left is the fact that some groups are
"over-represented" in desirable occupations, institutions and income
brackets, while other groups are "under-represented."
From all the
indignation and outrage about this expressed on the left, you might
think that it was impossible that different groups are simply better
at different things.
Yet runners
from Kenya continue to win a disproportionate share of marathons
in the United States, and children whose parents or grandparents
came from India have won most of the American spelling bees in the
past 15 years. And has anyone failed to notice that the leading
professional basketball players have for years been black, in a
country where most of the population is white?
Most of the
leading photographic lenses in the world have – for generations
– been designed by people who were either Japanese or German. Most
of the leading diamond-cutters in the world have been either India's
Jains or Jews from Israel or elsewhere.
Not only people
but things have been grossly unequal. More than two-thirds of all
the tornadoes in the entire world occur in the middle of the United
States. Asia has more than 70 mountain peaks that are higher than
20,000 feet and Africa has none. Is it news that a disproportionate
share of all the oil in the world is in the Middle East?
Whole books
could be filled with the unequal behavior or performances of people,
or the unequal geographic settings in which whole races, nations
and civilizations have developed. Yet the preconceptions of the
political left march on undaunted, loudly proclaiming sinister reasons
why outcomes are not equal within nations or between nations.
All this moral
melodrama has served as a background for the political agenda of
the left, which has claimed to be able to lift the poor out of poverty
and in general make the world a better place. This claim has been
made for centuries, and in countries around the world. And it has
failed for centuries in countries around the world.
Some of the
most sweeping and spectacular rhetoric of the left occurred in 18th
century France, where the very concept of the left originated in
the fact that people with certain views sat on the left side of
the National Assembly.
The French
Revolution was their chance to show what they could do when they
got the power they sought. In contrast to what they promised – "liberty,
equality, fraternity" – what they actually produced were food shortages,
mob violence and dictatorial powers that included arbitrary executions,
extending even to their own leaders, such as Robespierre, who died
under the guillotine.
In the 20th
century, the most sweeping vision of the left – Communism – spread
over vast regions of the world and encompassed well over a billion
human beings. Of these, millions died of starvation in the Soviet
Union under Stalin and tens of millions in China under Mao.
Milder versions
of socialism, with central planning of national economies, took
root in India and in various European democracies.
If the preconceptions
of the left were correct, central planning by educated elites with
vast amounts of statistical data at their fingertips, expertise
readily available, and backed by the power of government, should
have been more successful than market economies where millions of
individuals pursued their own individual interests willy-nilly.
But, by the
end of the 20th century, even socialist and communist governments
began abandoning central planning and allowing more market competition.
Yet this quiet capitulation to inescapable realities did not end
the noisy claims of the left.
In the United
States, those claims and policies reached new heights, epitomized
by government takeovers of whole sectors of the economy and unprecedented
intrusions into the lives of Americans, of which ObamaCare has been
only the most obvious example.
At the heart
of the left's vision of the world is the implicit assumption that
high-minded third parties like themselves can make better decisions
for other people than those people can make for themselves.
That arbitrary
and unsubstantiated assumption underlies a wide spectrum of laws
and policies over the years, ranging from urban renewal to ObamaCare.
One of the
many international crusades by busybodies on the left is the drive
to limit the hours of work by people in other countries – especially
poorer countries – in businesses operated by multinational corporations.
One international monitoring group has taken on the task of making
sure that people in China do not work more than the legally prescribed
49 hours per week.
Why international
monitoring groups, led by affluent Americans or Europeans, would
imagine that they know what is best for people who are far poorer
than they are, and with far fewer options, is one of the many mysteries
of the busybody elite.
As someone
who left home at the age of 17, with no high school diploma, no
job experience and no skills, I spent several years learning the
hard way what poverty is like. One of the happier times during those
years was a brief period when I worked 60 hours a week – 40 hours
delivering telegrams during the day and 20 hours working part-time
in a machine shop at night.
Why was I happy?
Because, before finding these jobs, I had spent weeks desperately
looking for any job, while my meager savings dwindled down to literally
my last dollar, before finally finding the part-time job at night
in a machine shop.
I had to walk
several miles from the rooming house where I lived in Harlem to
the machine shop located just below the Brooklyn Bridge, in order
to save that last dollar to buy bread until I got a payday.
When I then
found a full-time job delivering telegrams during the day, the money
from the two jobs combined was more than I had ever made before.
I could pay the back rent I owed on my room and both eat and ride
the subways back and forth to work.
I could even
put aside some money for a rainy day. It was the closest thing to
nirvana for me.
Thank heaven
there were no busybodies to prevent me from working more hours than
they thought I should.
There was a
minimum wage law, but this was 1949 and the wages set by the Fair
Labor Standards Act of 1938 had been rendered meaningless by years
of inflation. In the absence of an effective minimum wage law, unemployment
among black teenagers in the recession year of 1949 was a fraction
of what it would be in even the most prosperous years of the 1960s
and beyond.
As the morally
anointed busybodies raised the minimum wage rate, beginning in the
1950s, black teenage unemployment skyrocketed. We have now become
so used to tragically high rates of unemployment among this group
that many people have no idea that things were not always like that,
much less that policies of the busybody left had such catastrophic
consequences.
I
don't know what I would have done if such busybody policies had
been in effect back in 1949, and prevented me from finding a job
before my last dollar ran out.
My personal
experience is just one small example of what it is like when your
options are very limited. The prosperous busybodies of the left
are constantly promoting policies which reduce the existing options
of poor people even more.
It would never
occur to the busybodies that multinational corporations are expanding
the options of the poor in third world countries, while busybody
policies are contracting their options.
Wages paid
by multinational corporations in poor countries are typically much
higher than wages paid by local employers. Moreover, the experience
that employees get working in modern companies make them more valuable
workers and have led in China, for example, to wages rising by double-digit
percentages annually.
Nothing is
easier for people with degrees to imagine that they know better
than the poor and uneducated. But, as someone once said, "A fool
can put on his coat better than a wise man can put it on for him."
July
5, 2013
Thomas
Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other
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