Welcome friends!
A couple of posts ago I was talking about Brexit and I mentioned I noticed something a bit odd about how conservatism reared its ugly head in that context so I thought I’d take another look at that this week. If you read my blog at all you’ll know I’m always interested in sorting the odd bits. I don’t really have the time or inclination to do any intellectual heavy lifting in my little blog. I mentioned I have a day job, right? But I consider clearing up this sort of confusion whenever I can my humble contribution to the common good; my way of helping those who want to think seriously about real issues. And believe me in our culture those people need all the help they can get. The prevailing mode of discourse here in the USA and I suppose other western democracies tends toward a combination of one-sided advocacy derived I suppose from our adversarial judicial system and idiotic infomercial-style political marketing designed to manipulate people into doing things. To state the obvious this mode of discourse is not at all addressed to clearing up confusion. Indeed, if the various proponents of this mode of discourse feel confusion might help them get what they want then confusion is what they will peddle. Seems quite often the case from what I can tell. Well, OK, I suppose addressing the confusing bits helps me as well. I’m not just doing it for other people. My brain just feels better when it’s not tied up in knots. Always sets me a little on edge when someone says something that doesn’t really make sense and everyone else carries on as though nothing happened. That’s usually when people start talking past one another, which is something that always annoys the hell out of me. I mean really what’s the point? There’s already too much meaningless noise in the world. Let’s not add to it. If you suddenly find you no longer understand what the other fellow is talking about don’t get angry and start insulting people like some conservative hothead, just back it on up until you figure out what happened. Probably just a bit of confusion involving some ambiguous language or something like that. But people are so impatient these days. I know our time in this world is limited but isn’t it better to clear up one little issue at a time so those who come after us have something solid to build upon than to tell the tale of all humanity only to find out we got a little mixed up on page one and someone else has to do the whole thing over again? Show a little humility for goodness sake. Case in point. Conservatives and distributional issues. What’s their position? Clear as mud. Doesn’t stop them foaming at the mouth about it, does it? Let’s see if we can shed a little light on the subject.
First let me just say the conservatives I’m talking about this week are economic conservatives so if happen to just say just conservatives later on keep that in mind. I’ll think a bit about social conservatives and distributional issues another day but you know I think social conservatives are generally more concerned with other issues like forcing other people to follow their religious precepts and getting one over on minorities and bashing gay people and fretting about immigrants for cultural as opposed to economic reasons and so on. As far as distributional issues go they’re probably fine with whatever they think we have now or had before depending I suppose on how well they’re doing. No, when it comes to distributional issues economic conservatives are the more interesting case to me because they typically profess to have some substantive views on the subject although usually it turns out they don't or at least none they’re willing to share.
Now when one thinks about economic conservatives and distributional issues the preeminent intellectual construct that comes to mind must be the so-called “free market.” I say so-called because I suppose what most conservatives have in mind when they talk about the free market is the model of a perfectly competitive market from the neoclassical economic theory they most likely vaguely remember from their freshmen year in college. My impression is people who think more seriously about such things, such as most but by no means all economists, consider the term “the free market” hopelessly vague, anachronistic, and politicized. Real markets can have all sorts of characteristics that cause them to diverge more or less dramatically from the theoretical model of a perfectly competitive market so the question of what really happens when one doesn’t regulate real markets, which I suppose must be one common interpretation of the word “free” in the phrase “the free market,” is very much an open question. Nor is it the case that left to their own devices most real world markets will tend over time toward the perfectly competitive end of the spectrum. Nor are such markets “free” in the sense they allow everyone to do whatever he or she wants. One still needs property rights and contracts and cops and prisons and so on. I suppose one could say one is free to do whatever one is allowed to do under that system but then again I suppose one can say that about any distributional system. Indeed, I suppose it must be the case some people at the bottom of the wealth spectrum would experience more practical economic freedom under a different sort of distributional system. Other people too maybe. (If you like to think about such things you may want to glance at my musings on some of the more ambiguous elements of the concept of freedom in my posts Freedom I and II from November 1 and 28, 2013, respectively.) Let me put in this way. In my rather too many years of graduate study in economics I don’t really recall hearing anyone use the phrase “the free market.” I’ll go ahead and use it here to keep the authentic flavor of conservative discourse. Just keep in mind that what I’m actually referring to and what I think economic conservatives are actually referring is the theoretical model of a perfectly competitive market from neoclassical economic theory. We can just assume for purposes of this discussion that model is a close enough approximation to enough real world markets we can just discuss that model and “the free market” interchangeably. (Just to be clear, I don’t actually think that’s the case at all but I’m not sure it matters for what I’m trying to say this week so let’s play a little game of the imagination and say we can to keep things moving.)
So, as I was saying, most of the relatively serious economic conservatives I’ve met believe all distributional issues will be adequately addressed as long as we have a free market including of course that important and rather distinctive portion of the market governing labor. My impression has long been these people believe under the conditions discussed in the neoclassical model of perfect competition everyone will get what he or she deserves. Those who should be rich will be rich, those who should be poor will be poor, and those old hobos who should starve to death in the woods will starve to death in the woods. If we have a free market then all will be right with the world as far as distributional issues go anyway. My understanding is most conservatives believe any further discussion of distributional issues would place one firmly in the despised (by them) “socialist” camp with the moochers and takers who are trying to upset the natural order of things and get something other than what they really deserve.
However, although I’ve found pretty much all economic conservatives profess to base their ethical thinking about distributional matters on neoclassical economic theory I’m not sure they’re all on the same page about how that is actually meant to work. One must keep in mind academic economists have long given up pretending they have a coherent ethical theory about distributional issues and how such issues relate to the model of perfectly competitive markets. Indeed, the branch of economic theory dealing with such matters, so-called welfare economics, has eschewed such overt ethical arguments since at least the middle of the last century. However, I think it’s fair to suppose many economic conservatives never got the memo. As I’ve pointed out in a number of other posts modern welfare economics takes an entirely different approach to supporting policies designed to produce and maintain “the free market” that purports to imply nothing about the ethics of distributional systems including those associated with a free market for labor. Of course some confused people (including some confused economists) believe they can use neoclassical economic theory to establish the ethical superiority of “the free market” based solely on what they call “efficiency” in the context of the model of a perfectly competitive market (not to be confused with the “efficiency” you and I use in everyday speech) and setting aside distributional issues entirely, which they suggest we can handle as a second step some old way or other later on. Doesn’t really work of course, as I’ve also pointed out in many previous points. If distributional issues matter, which of course they do, they render it impossible to say anything definitive about the desirability of any given free market / perfectly competitive market outcome using modern welfare economics because any given free market outcome will necessarily come bundled with a distribution. Free market outcomes with no associated distributions are theoretical constructs that exist and can only exist on paper. It’s true neoclassical economic theory demonstrates if one has no unresolved distributional issues then a perfectly competitive market looks pretty good but that’s not the same thing at all. And of course fixing a distribution once one is in place without “interfering” with “the free market” for either products or labor is basically a logically impossible task. The result of this confusion is that some economic conservatives support the distributional system associated with “the free market” in exactly the same way as their nineteenth century predecessors. The only difference is that because they profess to have not taken up the ethical issues associated with the distribution of economic power they can’t be bothered to explain their reasoning to anyone, which has the convenient attribute for conservatives that no one is in a position to refute them or even engage them in conversation on the topic. It’s an intellectual sleight of hand I’ve discussed in many other posts so I won’t go into it again here. My point is it’s not serious stuff for serious people. Just a little mind game some conservatives have long been satisfied to play amongst themselves.
In the domestic context most conservatives have long believed if one is not getting what one thinks one should be getting the problem cannot involve the free market itself since that always leads to socially optimal outcomes but from someone interfering with the free market. Indeed, I read an article just the other day that discussed a recent poll that estimated seventy-one percent of US citizens feel the economy is “rigged.” The language is noteworthy because instead of attributing their economic woes to the essential dynamics of our free-ish market system and thinking of serious solutions the idea the economy is rigged leads them to suppose the solution lies with a purer form of the free market that will eliminate the rigging. I get the idea. If only we could get the free market free enough then everyone would finally get what they truly deserve. But why do people think that? I don’t know. It’s certainly not in modern economic theory as I just explained. I know. I’ve looked. Surely it can’t be from a study of history. When we actually had a purer form of the free market back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries we had all manner of labor unrest and lots of people who certainly didn’t feel they were getting what they should be getting. So I don’t know. And how exactly do these people think the economy is being “rigged” anyway. I mean rich people rule market systems. That’s the nature of the beast. They can start businesses, they can take chances, they can invest in stocks, they can relocate and retrain and switch field and whatever the hell they want to do, they can buy what they want, they can live where they want, they can contribute to politicians to get their way, and they can buy and manipulate the media or a good portion of it anyway. Is that what people mean when they say the economy is rigged? Because a purer form of the free market would not prevent any of those things happening. Nor does the free market have any internal mechanism to address things like producing enough jobs to go around or generating fair wages or keeping a lid on unjustified inequality or anything like that. It might do that under some conditions. Might not under others. Indeed, increasing concentration of wealth in a select few and the corresponding impoverishment of the majority is perfectly consistent with a free market under certain conditions relating to the initial distribution, technology of production, and labor and product market characteristics. So why this unshakable conviction on the part of conservatives that the tantalizing but apparently never fully attainable free market will solve all economic issues? If you ask me it’s because we don’t talk seriously about such matters and people cling to what they think they know even when what they think they know has no real basis in either fact or theory.
However, and this is the interesting bit to me and the part I really wanted to talk about this week, Brexit in the UK and the remarkable popularity of the comic stylings of Trumpo the Clown here in the USA have demonstrated the existence of a rather large group of nominally economic conservatives who profess to relate their thinking on distributional issues to free market ideology in a domestic context but rather confusingly not in an international context. These conservatives are more than happy to call anyone who talks about distributional issues relating to market systems in a domestic context socialists or communists but they themselves oppose the free market in the form of free trade deals and the free movement of labor or jobs in an international context based on what would appear to be distributional concerns. It doesn’t really make sense to do both of these things at the same time, which I suppose must be what annoys the hell out of the first group of economic conservatives who take their market worshipping seriously or at least want to use that as their story. Indeed, I don’t really know what to make of this new group myself. They don’t seem to fit cleanly into any of my previously delineated categories. Not even sure what to call them. Given their apparent domination of the conservative Republican Party here in the US should we think of them as the real economic conservatives and consider the group who talks up the free market as a panacea for all that ails us a bunch of out-of-touch or perhaps intellectually dishonest windbags? Or are the logically consistent market worshippers the real economic conservatives and the group that supports free markets in a domestic context but opposes them in an international context a bunch of populist wooly headed know nothing pseudo-conservatives? I don’t know but they all sound like conservatives of one sort or another to me. I think what’s going on with this new group of conservatives is they’re paying attention to their self interest and are convinced people talking about distributional concerns relating to the free market in a domestic context implies domestic poor people picking their pockets and taking their jobs while conversely people not talking about distributional concerns relating to the free market in an international context means foreign poor people picking their pockets and taking their jobs. One infers these people are not expressing their distributional views honestly, similar to what I suspect other conservatives are doing but even more obviously and egregiously. I get that they feel they deserve better paying jobs and more money but why exactly?
Basically the distributional effects of implementing free market ideology in the international context has split the conservative intellectual elite if one wants to think of them in those terms of business tycoons, rich people, old school Republican Party elites, certain academics and amateur social philosophers from their more plebeian supporters who apparently never really gave a second thought to what the first group was actually saying but were convinced they would come out ahead if they went along with whatever it was. The conservative elite has continued on with their same old story but it has apparently finally dawned on their rank and file supporters that at least as far as importing cheap labor and moving manufacturing overseas they’re getting screwed. I suppose it’s mostly a positive development. A little more thinking and it might dawn on these people the free market solves everything story isn’t as strong as they’ve been led to believe even in a domestic context and for the same reason: distributional issues matter. We’ll all be liberals at that point and we can move on to actually solving some things. Of course in the short term we have to put up with the awkward growing pains of this portion of the conservative base in the form of characters like Trumpo the Clown belching out an incoherent mishmash of contradictory ideas no reasonable person can decipher. But how much damage can the guy really do in four years? Oh. A lot? Well never mind; life goes on. Two steps forward and one step back. That’s the way of the world.
We liberals also have our share of disagreements but we don’t really have this particular problem because in general we’re just willing to talk about distributional issues a lot more openly and honestly than are most economic conservatives. We know distributional issues matter. I say it all the time. We know simply having a market system doesn’t necessarily address all distributional issues. I say it all the time We know talking about things like freedom and liberty is a red herring if we’re really talking about distributional issues and resolving interpersonal conflicts of needs and desires. I say it all the time. We’re not surprised at all some conservatives have thoughts on distributional issues that aren’t captured in free market ideology. How could it be otherwise when the whole argument ostensibly relating the two is nothing but an intellectual sham? We should sit down and discuss distributional issues some time. No, it’s not class warfare. Ignorance never solves anything. It might hold something at bay for a little while but that’s not the same thing at all. If only the conservative elite would give up their program of obfuscation and misdirection and start talking seriously about such matters we might actually get somewhere. You’d think they’d start doing that now to close ranks if for no other reason but maybe their shared hatred of liberals and humanists will be enough to keep them together for now. Who knows? Only time will tell. Here’s a happy thought. If the conservative Republican Party loses yet another presidential election here in the USA maybe future conservatives will be more willing to discuss distributional matters openly and honestly. Wouldn’t that be a breath of fresh air? Say it with me now! I’m with her! I mean, I sure as hell can’t be with him, can I? Let’s not be ridiculous.
References
71% of Americans believe economy is ‘rigged.’ Heather Long. CNN. June 28, 2016. http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/28/news/economy/americans-believe-economy-is-rigged/index.html?iid=EL.
71% of Americans believe economy is ‘rigged.’ Heather Long. CNN. June 28, 2016. http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/28/news/economy/americans-believe-economy-is-rigged/index.html?iid=EL.
