From the remote but fascinating country of Mongolia comes an ownership story told to me by the country’s current president (as of 2015), Elbegdorj Tsakhia, known by his friends as “EB.” He earlier served as Prime Minister twice, and visited me in Michigan between those terms. I asked him during that visit what he was most proud of having accomplished as PM. He said, “I privatized Mongolia’s 25 million yaks.”
Yaks are large, furry cattle. For decades under communist rule, the poor creatures were owned by the government, which claimed they were “the people’s property.” Their total population hardly budged from the 1920s to the 1990s. E.B. decided that yaks were not a core function of government so he worked up a formula whereby all of them would be sold to the individual herdsmen. Three years later he was Prime Minister the second time. I visited him in his office in the capital of Ulan Bator and asked him, “What’s the latest on the yaks?” Excitedly, he replied, “Remember when I told you we had 25 million for seven decades? Well, now we have 32 million!”
When it’s your personal yak, not “everybody’s” yak, wonderful things happen. You have a personal interest in the investment, in the capital value of the asset. You take care of the yak and make more yaks, which you then “share” with more and more people in an endless stream of peaceful, mutually beneficial trades of yak products.
Progressives yak a lot about sharing but you can’t share it if you don’t produce it and take care of it in the first place. Private, personal ownership of material things we create and trade for is unsurpassed as a source of the wealth that progressives want to take and “share.”
Moreover, we should ask ourselves, “Is it really ‘sharing’ if I have to do it at gunpoint?” I was always taught that sharing was an act of free will. When you give half your sandwich to a friend who forgot to pack his lunch, you’ve shared it. If he threatens to beat you up if you don’t give it to him, “sharing” is no longer the operative term.
So when it comes to this thing we call “ownership,” it’s either you or somebody else. Who should own your retirement savings—you or the government? Who should own your health-care dollars—you, the government, or some third-party payer you’d prefer to avoid? Who should decide where your child goes to school—you the parent or a handful of other parents different from you only by virtue of the fact that they work for the government? Who should decide what charitable activities you support—you or some congressman or bureaucrat who prefers the social welfare department over the Red Cross or your local church?
Those questions should not be answered solely on utilitarian grounds. In a free society, Person A might choose a better school or make a better investment than Person B—a fact that can’t be known for certain in advance. But in any event, that does not mystically grant Person B the right to make Person A’s choices for him. If freedom means anything, it means the right to make your own choices even if you make what others regard as mistakes. When someone argues that we cannot allow people more choices over their retirement, health care, or schools, we should demand they tell us by what right do they make these decisions for us?
Make no mistake about it: the more someone else controls you or the important decisions that govern your life or the material things that sustain it, the more they own you. We used to call that slavery and no gauzy, self-righteous calls to “share it” made it any less inhumane.
If you’re a principled and articulate defender of private ownership of property, be ready for some progressive social engineer to lay a guilt trip on you if he thinks you’re not “sharing” enough. I suspect that the preponderance of progressives will not be satisfied until their coercion-based policies effectively own the rest of us lock, stock, and barrel.
Own or be owned. Take your pick.
(Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this essay appeared in the July/August 2005 issue of The Freeman under the title, “To Own or Be Owned: That is the Question.”)
SUMMARY
•Progressives are two-faced when it comes to ownership. They are suspicious of it when it’s private and personal but supportive when it’s politicized and centrally-directed
•Whether it’s people or property, it will be owned. It’s just a matter of whether it’s owned by those to whom it belongs or those who simply want to claim it for some alleged higher cause
•Private ownership of property is both a virtue and a necessity. Get rid of it and you flush civilization down with it
•“Common ownership” is largely impractical and meaningless, even destructive
#17
“ALL WE NEED IS THE RIGHT PEOPLE TO RUN THE GOVERNMENT”
BY MELVIN D. BARGER
IT’S BEEN A TIME-HONORED PRACTICE IN AMERICA TO “THROW THE RASCALS OUT” when things go wrong in government. Supposedly this is merely the political version of what happens when the manager of a losing baseball team is replaced, or the chief executive officer of a failing corporation gets the axe.
Nobody should dispute the fact that government operations require capable, experienced people who know how to do their jobs. We’ve all probably had unpleasant bouts with incompetent public officials and clerks, and we wish they could be replaced.
But when government expands beyond its rightful limits, problems arise that have little to do with the competence and abilities of its officials and employees. The delusion that these problems can be solved by replacing officials only delays the day when people face the hard questions about what government should do and should not do.
Thanks to the relentless expansion of government, however, these questions are being asked the world over, with surprising solutions in some cases. There is growing criticism of government operations and regulations. There is also a rush to “privatize” many services. Though privatization moves are being made for economic reasons rather than to restore liberty, they still appear as hopeful signs.
The most important reason for limiting government to its rightful peacekeeping functions is to preserve and promote liberty. If this is done, people working singly or in groups will eventually find wonderful ways of dealing with the many human problems that government promises to solve, and meeting the human needs that government promises to meet. But as we now know, problems and needs continue to grow while the government colossus has created dangers, such as mountainous public debt and group conflicts that threaten us all and seem beyond solution. These problems worsen no matter who seems to be running things in government. Even people who used to have almost religious faith in the powers of government are becoming disillusioned as its clay feet become more exposed.
A second dilemma with excessive government is that it must always be run bureaucratically. Bureaucracy can be a maddening thing for people who have been accustomed to the speed and efficiency of market-driven services. When confronted with bureaucratic actions that displease us we tend to blame the officials in charge and call for their replacement.
But unless the officials we want replaced are completely incompetent, rooting them out is usually a waste of time and effort. As Ludwig von Mises explained many years ago, bureaucracy is neither good nor bad. Bureaucratic management is the method applied in the conduct of administrative affairs the result of which has no cash value on the market, though it may have other values to society. It is management bound to comply with detailed rules and regulations fixed by an authoritative body. “The task of the bureaucrat is to perform what these rules and regulations order him to do,” Mises explained. “His discretion to act according to his own best conviction is seriously restricted by them.”
Thus bureaucracy is good (and inevitable, but easily excessive, and even ridiculous and unresponsive much of the time) when it is applied in public operations such as police departments, military forces, and records bureaus. But it becomes oppressive and deadly when it is imposed on business enterprises and other human activities. As Mises shrewdly saw, the evil in bureaucracy was not in the method itself. “What many people nowadays consider an evil is not bureaucrac
y as such,” he pointed out, “but the expansion of the sphere in which bureaucratic management is applied.”
Mises then contrasted this bureaucratic system with business management or profit management, which is management directed by the profit motive. Managers, driven by the need to stay profitable (which is to say, to keep costs below income), can be given wide discretion with a minimum amount of rules and regulations. And customers will quickly let them know whether the business is providing proper goods and services and prices which customers consider favorable.
This profit-driven system has its opponents, of course, and this creates problems and frictions for entrepreneurs who want to compete for our business. Some opponents fear the new competition, while others deplore the entrepreneurs’ use of resources. And one of the most effective ways of hampering entrepreneurs is to put them under either limited or total government regulation and control—that is, replacing profit-driven management with at least some degree of bureaucratic management.
So what we have in today’s world is a great deal of government with additional regulation and control of private business. There is lots of grumbling about the fact that “the system doesn’t seem to be working,” but nobody is likely to fix it. At election time, glib office-seekers promise to reform the system and “get the country moving again.” This doesn’t happen, and general dissatisfaction is growing.
And there still seems to be a persistent delusion that “putting the right person in charge” will fix the problem. One favorite government response, when conditions worsen in an area, is to appoint a “czar” with special powers to bring everything together with businesslike efficiency. We have had numerous “czars” to control energy and prices, and one was recently named to deal with health reform. However highly touted, these czars soon turn out to be no more effective than the Russian rulers who gave rise to the term.
Another common fallacy, a favorite idea with pro-business political administrations, is that government operations will work better if capable business executives are found to head them. But as Mises perceptively noted, “A former entrepreneur who is given charge of a government bureau is in this capacity no longer a businessman but a bureaucrat. His objective can no longer be profit (generating more value than cost), but compliance with the rules and regulations. As head of a bureau he may have the power to alter some minor rules and some matters of internal procedure. But the setting of the bureau’s activities is determined by rules and regulations which are beyond his reach.”
Some people thrive in this sort of work and turn out to be excellent bureaucrats. They are the right people to run government operations when government is limited to its rightful peacekeeping functions. But if our purpose is to preserve and promote liberty while seeking the benefits of a market-driven economy, we’ll look in vain for reasonable answers and solutions from government—no matter who runs it. We are slowly learning this lesson, though at great cost. We should, of course, continue to follow the time-honored American practice of “throwing the rascals out” when elected officials are performing badly. But in today’s world, the officials we’re criticizing might not be rascals at all, but just conscientious people trying to do jobs that shouldn’t have been created in the first place.
(Editor’s Note: This essay by Ohio-based businessman and writer Melvin D. Barger appeared in the 1994 edition of FEE’s book, Clichés of Politics, edited by former FEE trustee Mark Spangler. His citations of Ludwig von Mises all come from Mises’s 1945 book, Bureaucracy.)
SUMMARY
•As government grows, it creates more and more problems that are systemic and intractable
•Profit management and bureaucratic management are two very different things. The former seeks to generate more value than cost while the top priority of the latter is the promulgation and implementation of rules and regulations
•The bigger government becomes, the more calls you hear endlessly for “reform,” which may suggest there’s something inherently defective about the political system that prevents its practitioners from ever getting things right from the start
•Running government “like a business” is a popular rhetorical point but essentially an illusion that fails to recognize the deep differences between profit-driven business and rule-driven government
#18
“HUMANITY CAN BE BEST UNDERSTOOD IN A COLLECTIVE CONTEXT”
BY LAWRENCE W. REED
THERE ARE TWO BASIC PRISMS THROUGH WHICH WE CAN SEE, STUDY, AND PRESCRIBE for human society: individualism and collectivism. These worldviews are as different as night and day. They create a great divide in the social sciences because the perspective from which you see the world will set your thinking down one intellectual path or another.
Advocates of personal and economic freedom are usually in the individualism camp, whereas those who think of themselves these days as “progressives” are firmly in the camp of collectivism.
I think of it as the difference between snowstorms and snowflakes. A collectivist sees humanity as a snowstorm, and that’s as up-close as he gets if he’s consistent. An individualist sees the storm too, but is immediately drawn to the uniqueness of each snowflake that composes it. The distinction is fraught with profound implications.
No two snowstorms are alike, but a far more amazing fact is that no two snowflakes are identical either—at least so far as painstaking research has indicated. Wilson Alwyn Bentley of Jericho, Vermont, one of the first known snowflake photographers, developed a process in 1885 for capturing them on black velvet before they melted. He snapped pictures of about 5,000 of them and never found two that were the same—nor has anyone else ever since. Scientists believe that changes in humidity, temperature, and other conditions prevalent as flakes form and fall make it highly unlikely that any one flake has ever been precisely duplicated. (Ironically, Bentley died of pneumonia in 1931 after walking six miles in a blizzard. Lesson: One flake may be harmless, but a lot of them can be deadly.)
Contemplate this long enough and you may never see a snowstorm (or humanity) the same way again.
Dr. Anne Bradley is vice president of economic initiatives at the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics. At a 2013 seminar in Naples, Florida, she explained matters this way:
When we look at a snowstorm from a distance, it looks like indistinguishable white dots peppering the sky, one blending into the next. When we get an up-close glimpse, we see how intricate, beautiful, and dissimilar each and every snowflake is. This is helpful when thinking about humans. From a distance, a large crowd of people might look the same, and it’s true that we possess many similar characteristics. But we know that a more focused inspection brings us nearer to the true nature of what we’re looking at. It reveals that each of us bears a unique set of skills, talents, ambitions, traits, and propensities unmatched anywhere on the planet.
This uniqueness is critical when we make policy decisions and offer prescriptions for society as a whole; for even though we each look the same in certain respects, we are actually so different, one to the next, that our sameness can only be a secondary consideration.
The late Roger J. Williams, author of You Are Extra-Ordinary and Free and Unequal: The Biological Basis of Individual Liberty, was a noted biochemistry professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He argued that fingerprints are but one of endless biological characteristics unique to each of us, including the contours and operation of our brains, nerve receptors, and circulatory systems.
These facts offer biological bases for the many other differences between one person and the next. Einstein, Williams noted, was an extremely precocious student of mathematics, but he learned language so slowly that his parents were concerned about his learning to talk. Williams summed it well more than 40 years ago when he observed, “Our individuality is as inescapable as our humanity. If we are to plan for people, we must plan for individuals, because that’s the only kind of people there are.”
Proceeding one step further, we must recognize th
at only individuals plan. When collectives are said to “plan” (e.g., “The nation plans to go to war”), it always reduces to certain, specific, identifiable individuals making plans for other individuals. The only good answer to the collectivist question, “What does America eat for breakfast?” is this: “Nothing. However, about 320 million individual Americans often eat breakfast. Many of them sometimes skip it, and on any given day, there are 320 million distinct answers to this question.”
Collectivist thinking is simply not very deep or thorough. Collectivists see the world the way the nearly-blind cartoon character Mr. Magoo did—as one big blur. But unlike Mr. Magoo, they’re not funny. They homogenize people in a communal blender, sacrificing the discrete features that make us who we are. The collectivist “it takes a village” mentality assigns thoughts and opinions to amorphous groups, when, in fact, only particular people hold thoughts and opinions.
Collectivists devise one-size-fits-all schemes and care little for how those schemes may affect the varied plans of real people. Any one flake means little or nothing to the collectivist because he rarely looks at them; and in any event, he implicitly dismisses the flakes because there are so many to play with. Collectivists are usually reluctant to celebrate the achievements of individuals per se because they really believe that, to quote President Obama, “you didn’t build that.”
Take individuals out of the equation and you take the humanity out of whatever you’re promoting. What you’d never personally inflict on your neighbor, one on one, you might happily sanction if you think it’ll be carried out by some faceless, collective entity to some amorphous blob on behalf of some nebulous “common good.” The inescapable fact is that we are not interchangeable. Cogs in a machine are, but people most emphatically are not.
Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism Page 7
