Paul Marks responds to David Carr’s article Boiling Mad
I accept that some politicians have evil motives and are statist out of envy and/or power lust. However, I think most politicians are fairly normal people (not particularly evil).
The trouble is that that most people go in to politics to ‘help people’. If one does not have a good understanding of political economy one will ‘do something’ when confronted with a problem – for example, if people need better health care (‘look there are people dying over there’) the least difficult thing to do is to increase government spending on health. It is the same with all other human wants (so government spending tends to rise). It takes a good understanding of political economy to realize that increasing government spending is a bad thing.
It is the same with regulations. There is a problem – for example rents are high, so one imposes rent control. One wishes to help improve the environment – so one imposes more environmental regulation (and so on, and so on). It takes a good understanding of political economy to realize that government regulations are a bad thing.
As centuries of free market folk have pointed out, the seemingly good effects of government spending and regulations are obvious – but seeing the real effects of such things takes thought.
Many free market people put their faith in education to enable people to understand the effects of statism. Now here we have the real problem – the vast majority of education (in Britain or any other country) is statist. Whether one goes to a private school or a state school. whether one goes to a private university or a state university the concepts one will be taught (as regards political economy) will most likely be wrong.
It is even possible that someone may be better off not going in for say “higher education” at all. If a person sees that his line of policy seems to be have bad effects the person may change their policy. But if this person has been educated into believing that bad policy is good policy a change of mind is much less likely.
One must also remember that ‘education’ does not just cover school and university, such things as television and radio (at least the ‘serious’ programs) are also part of education – and the ideas of political economy that the television and radio spread are also mostly false. So even a person who is not formally educated is still more likely than not to be filled with false ideas – but it is not as bad as if this person had gone through the formal education process as well.
Of course there are such things as free market books in the world and one can encounter them in such places as university libraries. However, I believe that the vast majority of people who read these works were LOOKING FOR THEM (or at least had their minds open to this sort of work).
Take my own case. I often present myself as a conformist, however the objective evidence shows that I am in fact a pathological rebel.
Even in junior school (i.e. before I was 11 years old) I was already in revolt. The teachers asked us to bring food for a party to ‘share with out friends’, so I strongly objected when they stole the food I brought (they had tried to make me share the food with my enemies).
Nor was this an isolated incident. I disliked the way that lies and brutality were encouraged by people of power – they played lip service to being against bullying, but did nothing to fight it and did their best to work against people who did try and fight it (such as myself). Many (perhaps all) of the teachers where nice people – but they did not do their duty, the system did not work.
Nor was this just a matter of school. I remember going through reference works as a young child looking for countries that did not have Welfare State programs (and feeling great pain when I found out that nations that appeared not to have such programs really did have them). I also went through history books about various nations with almost the sole intention of finding out when and how various “reforms” (i.e. crimes) had happened.
To take one example. I was not convinced by E.G. West‘s book Education and the State (1965) that the idea that without government action most people would not be able to read and write was a false idea. No, I thought that already – and spent ages trying to find a book that would agree with me.
To take another example. When I read Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose (1980) it did not convince me that such things as rent control were wrong (I already thought that), no it just upset me that even this proclaimed “free market” book seemed to be in favour of such things as government fiat money (such a concept being clearly evil, you see).
I do not claim that all libertarians are as mad as I am. However, I told hold that (in the present intellectual environment) to reject statism someone must have a mind with something odd about it. To be told (endlessly) by nice well read people that (for example) ‘anti monopoly’ laws are a good thing and to think “this is all nonsense, everyone is a fool – apart from me” indicates an odd personality type. It is not to be expected that most politicians (who I repeat tend to by rather ordinary people) would have this personality type – and it might not be a good thing if they did (as not everyone with this personality type is likely to be a libertarian – they might be the very power mad types that people are concerned politicians are).
Of course libertarians will not tend to like the above. I think that is why (for example) one gets so many silly ‘libertarian tests’ – you know the sort I mean, they have questions like ‘are you against a police state?’ or ‘do you think freedom is a good idea?’ and if you say ‘yes’ to such question (or ‘no’ to certain other questions) you ‘must be a libertarian’. I believe that such tests are created so that libertarians can think that there are more of us than there really are.
If the questions were things like ‘are you in favour of the abolition of Old Age Pensions [or ‘Social Security’ if it was an American test]?’ without loading the question by talking about Cato Institute style ‘Individual Retirement Accounts’ (or other such attempts to have free market reform, whilst pretending that no one will lose), then our true numbers would be revealed. It is not to be expected that politicians would think in the same way as a small minority of the population.
There really are no clever ways one can have reform. There are no painless options when statism is as advanced as it is in the world today. I would recommend Lew Rockwell’s recent article Freedom is not “public policy”, which explains this better than any other work I know of.
Paul Marks
