On the Worst—and Best—Rising to the Top

When initiated coercion is legalized, it attracts those who are willing to use it.*

Those who are more willing to use legalized, initiated coercion than those who are hesitant will advance faster in the system. Eventually, the more willing rise to the top. The more willing, then, use the initiated coercion against those they have bypassed and anyone else who gets in their way.

This in essence, though not his words, is the identification made by F. A. Hayek in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom (chapter 10, “Why the Worst Get on Top”).

The identification explains how and why an interventionist, increasingly bureaucratized government becomes a dictatorship.

The way Hayek put it is that “democratic statesmen” expect citizens to approve of their coercive policies peacefully through discussion and majority vote. As this does not work, and leads to chaos, those with “lower moral and intellectual standards” step in to take over. They appeal to the “docile and gullible,” uniting them with a “hatred of an enemy” and “envy of the better off.”

A casualty along the way is language, meaning the rise of Goebbelsian propaganda, with the word “liberty” being the first to go, or rather, turned on its head, Orwellian fashion, into its opposite.

By “democratic statesmen,” Hayek means the democratic socialists who thought they could avoid a Marxist violent revolution by voting their brand of initiated coercion into power. Instead, they paved the way for the Lenins, Stalins, Mussolinis, and Hitlers of the twentieth century.

The “docile and gullible” in today’s political climate are the patsies of the socialist/fascist left. They are those alleged victims who in reality are beneficiaries and opportunists of our entitlement culture. They are the ones who clamor for coerced handouts and privileges in the name of reparations for past discrimination and in the form of protections and other initiated coercions against the hated enemies, their alleged current persecutors.

The “hated enemies” of today have congealed around several targets. Historically, ever since the rise of the early Progressives from their democratic socialist beginnings, and continuing in the present, the favorite Marxist whipping boy has always been, and still is, big business—“America’s Persecuted Minority,” as Ayn Rand so aptly put it.

Other hated targets include white straight males and, of course, our current president, and anyone who dares to disagree with the socialist/fascist left’s mantra.

Envy of those “better off” targets is the motivation of our contemporary “democratic statesmen” and their “docile and gullible” followers.

Envy—not a self-confident, self-responsible, and independent psychology.

The way, indeed, is being paved for a modern-day . . . well, who knows what.

In contrast to the upward mobility of the worst in government, the most competent and able, self-responsible, and independent individuals—the best—rise to the top in free-market businesses.

When ability is recognized and rewarded, as in a private, profit-making business in a totally free market, which means where there are no interfering regulations imposed as a result of initiated coercion, the most competent at identifying what will improve human life and most able to deliver created goods and services to their customers will advance.

In business, competence and ability are rewarded. In a bureaucratized government, willingness to develop new laws and regulatory rules and the desire to execute them, which means more opportunities to coerce, is the criterion of advancement.

In business, the criterion and means of success, and therefore the means to high profits to sustain and grow the business, is customer satisfaction, that is, making products better than the competition to meet the objective needs (the requirements for an improved life) and wants (optional tastes) of the customer.

The day to day work, whether by employee or entrepreneur, entails a myriad of detailed communications, both outside the company, with customers and suppliers, and within the company, to employees in the various departments necessary to run the business. All of this “myriad detail,” then, must be coordinated to produce and deliver the product in a timely, need- and want-satisfying manner.

Those who possess the greatest ability to communicate with others and to motivate them in a positive way, and who can retain the greatest detail, which includes surveying the company for means of improvement and, especially, the market for opportunities, will be the ones to advance.

Today, however, we do not have the kind of freedom I have described above. Today, we live in a “mixed economy,” which means a mixture of freedom and dictatorship.

Business people today are harassed by thousands of regulations—legalized, initiated coercion—that deflect attention from the proper operation of their companies.

As a result, the incentives become mixed. Some incentive of customer satisfaction remains, but much of the time today is spent on compliance with the regulations, many of which conflict with customer satisfaction.

Increased prices is the most obvious conflict, but reduced supply and elimination of some products from the line also follow the increased regulation.

In heavily regulated industries, the “best” who rise to the top are likely to be the ones who are good at working with regulators, complying with the rules. In such industries, the business has become so bureaucratized that it operates much like a government bureau—meaning incompetent and indifferent to customer needs and wants.

It’s not uncommon for “successful” bureaucrats in these businesses to join government agencies to become regulators themselves and administrators of legalized, initiated coercion.

This is where we are today. Only time will tell how far the socialist/fascist left pushes us.


* “Legalized, initiated coercion” is the pernicious opposite of the constitutionally valid and rights-based self-defensive use of force.

Who Are We Going to Coerce Today?—Also Known As: Politics Is a Bore2016 Version

In November 2012, I published a paean to our national elections titled “Politics Is a Bore.” Some months afterwards I changed the title to the more apt “Who Are We Going To Coerce Today?,” because coercing innocent people is what contemporary politics is all about.

Below is a lightly edited and updated version of the 2012 tribute.


The term “political junkie” is familiar to all of us today, but when I first heard it years ago, used by a news reporter to describe herself, I was puzzled. Why, I thought, would anyone be so obsessed with politics to spend every waking minute following every conceivable tidbit of information coming out of the political arena?

Perhaps the reporter’s interest in politics was strictly professional, to cover what was going on, but I suspect that many in her position, as well others who follow political news closely, admire the entire system and consider it important to support. Many political junkies, I fear, are those who admire the coercive apparatus of the state and relish the thought of being in a position of political power to make political decisions.
   
To me, politics is a bore—precisely because it is all about coercion, the government-initiated type; it’s seldom about reducing government involvement in our lives. And following politics closely, as many do, means their interest really comes down to: who is going to be coerced today? Let’s see who’s going to be told by the anointed authorities what they can and cannot do. Protecting individual rights has long since disappeared from our political landscape such that decisions in today’s government-by-lobby mixed economy invariably constitute violations of innocent victims’ rights for the sake of someone else’s rent-seeking benefit.

Just look at the disgraceful shakedown of Gibson Guitar [in 2011], carried out in the name of the environmental lobby. Flimsily suspected, but never charged, of illegally importing wood from Madagascar and India, the company was twice raided with Gestapo-like tactics by armed, bullet-proof clad SWAT teams. At a 2011 press conference, Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz courageously called the Justice Department on its flagrantly unjust laws and tyrannical procedures. Because of the outcry that followed, the Department compromised by allowing Gibson off the hook with a settlement: $350 thousand in fines and censorship (a gag order) not ever to do again what Juszkiewicz did at his press conference, namely to contradict the alleged facts claimed by the government (1, 2, 3). If this is not coercion in politics—the initiation of the use of physical force against innocent victims—what is?

Now I suppose one could say that some politicians are trying to do good things in Washington and the state capital. And I will grant that maybe one or two may be trying to roll back government intrusions into our bedrooms and board rooms. Ron Paul’s two presidential runs have certainly given a hearing to new ideas and Paul Ryan has put Ayn Rand’s name in the news [in 2012, not 2016!].*

But, seriously, what have Democrats and Republicans done in the last hundred years to increase the protections of individual rights? Democrats make no pretense at rolling back government interventions; they are only too eager to pass more laws increasing the state’s size and power. Republicans, on the other hand, are notorious for paying lip service to the free market and capitalism, but when in office they end up increasing the government’s coercive powers more than the Democrats would have done. Look at the two previous Bush administrations.

“Passing a law” for over a century has almost always meant increasing coercion against an innocent party for the gain of a pressure group. The “squeakiest wheel,” of course, gets the grease in a mixed economy; that’s the fundamental theory of the system because there is no just way to determine who gets the favors, or should I say, rents. But the laws are democratically passed by vote, one might object? Democracy, as the Greeks taught, can be a form of dictatorship and Hong Kong survived quite well for decades under the British common law without general elections.**

That’s not to say that I don’t believe in voting, though not voting is just as valid a participation in the system as pulling a lever. In the current political season, I will vote against the many California tax propositions and probably vote for the lesser of two evils for president. [Not in 2016. I’m voting for Gary Johnson.] I was going to write in Ron Paul’s name, as I did four years ago, but I think a statement does need to be made in this election. I realize that my vote in this very blue state is virtually worthless and, after the election, politics will resume its usual games of playing “who are we going to coerce today”?

Yawn! Wake me up when something really good and important happens.

Altering a bit what I have said before, “I do not expect life to improve much, if at all, in the next four years of the [next] presidential administration. I do not expect the [next] (or [current]) administration to be the indicator of the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it.” Life goes on. Cultural and political systems change slowly. Political junkies can continue to obsess over every coercive decision that is made in positions of power. I will read and write about other topics.


*A recent informal search of The NY Times produced these mentions of Ayn Rand’s name: 97 for all of 2011, 10 for the first quarter of 2012, 68 for the second quarter, and 147 for the third. Paul Ryan seems to be doing some good, though most comments about Ayn Rand in the Old Gray Lady remain smarmy, snarky, ignorant, and hostile. Perhaps after I am dead, these Times writers will also be dead and younger ones will take their place, ones who have actually read Rand’s works and are capable of separating her personality and followers from her ideas.

[Update: 38 mentions for all of 2015, 6 for the first quarter of 2016, 8 for the second quarter, and 6 for the third. A few mentions in the past five years have seemed a little more neutral. Most recently, in a book-review-page author interview, mystery writer Otto Penzler said he has “virtually all the books written by Ayn Rand, several read more than once” and his favorite fictional hero is Howard Roark. Are times (or The Times) changing?]

**I’m not convinced that the vote is fundamental to a genuine liberalism. The classical liberals saw it that way, but Hong Kong has shown us that a constitution and legal system that are adhered to do not require voting to keep the system going. When African Americans and women attained the right to vote, that did not guarantee them the protection of other, more important rights to liberty and property. [See section 8, chapter 1, of Ludwig von Mises’ Liberalism. The primary purpose of democracy, he says, is to avoid civil war by ensuring a peaceful transition of leadership.]


Postscript, 2016. It seems I used the phrase “politics bores me” in my September 2008 hymn to our political system. I was talking about the two liberalisms, the left’s version and the Misesian one. In September of this year, Jeffrey Tucker wrote at fee.org urging us all to take back the Misesian word. Why? Because the left is tending not to use liberalism to describe their brand of politics, preferring to call themselves progressives. To those who know what is happening on college campuses, it is obvious why the left is abandoning the word: they no longer pretend to be advocates of freedom. In July I used the f-word (fascist) to describe the early progressives; the shoe seems to fit. And Tucker, in this recent piece, implies that the premise of a total state began with the early progressives.

From the Stick Motivation Department, Part Two: Class Participation

In last month’s post I discussed the coercive parenting technique of assigning chores to children. The alleged lesson of such coercion is to teach children the value of work, though it likely teaches them to hate it.

Coercive teaching contributes a number of techniques to the stick motivation department. Let’s take a look at class participation.

For middle and high schoolers, and even college students, teachers feel obliged—and claim the unquestioned right—to coerce quiet members of the classroom to “come out of their shells” lest they fail to succeed in life or live up to their potential; grades based on class participation, by as much as fifty percent, I have heard, is the brass knuckle approach to teaching this lesson.

Five to ten percent, perhaps as extra credit, may have some instructional value. But fifty percent? These classes of twenty to forty students are not courses in public speaking.

And grades, after all, are the carrots and sticks by which teachers maintain control of their charges. I’m not the first to suggest that grades be dumped from the classroom entirely.

In the old days, the traditional (and coercive) recitation technique of class participation required students to summarize the content of their reading assignment, or, frequently, to recite something from memory. If not accomplished to the liking of the teacher, the kids would have their knuckles rapped with a ruler, or worse. In ancient Rome, they were beaten with a stick.

The modern version is a mixture of old-style recitation and analysis. The former, as the new schoolmarms are wont to say, should be kept to a minimum, because “we have all read the assignment.” Memorization, of course, is scorned as authoritarian and having no place in school. The latter, analysis, can include putting the reading material into different words, evaluation, and, too often, the spewing of undefended opinion.

According to ed school edubabble, such discussions will help teach students how to think. It usually degenerates quickly into BS sessions. And some of the more talkative students have mastered the technique of impressing teachers by their glibness; the quiet ones are then marked down.*

In recent years, some class participation teachers have discovered—and have experienced revelations when discovering—that their heavy-handed approach to getting those pesky and resistant-to-talking quiet kids to speak up in class may not be the best thing for them.

This has come about largely due to Susan Cain’s 2013 book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking and her subsequently established website Quiet Revolution.  (See my related posts here and here.)

Jessica Lahey is one such reformed class-participation tyrant. Writing in The Atlantic, she firmly defended her conviction that quiet kids must be forced to speak up. When she received an “avalanche of angry comments,” many of which, to put it mildly, declared her “uninformed,” she wrote a softened article on Cain’s website. Lahey acknowledges that she was influenced to alter her teaching by Cain’s book and other articles on the topic (See especially Schultz and Cain for examples of teaching quiet kids without putting them on the spot.)

The upshot of “class participation reform” is that introversion and shyness are not the same and that any behavior can be motivated by multiple causes, not just what the extroverted teacher assumes is operating in the quiet kid.

“Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating” (Cain, p. 12). A room filled with twenty to forty classmates can produce considerable overstimulation for an introvert. Extroverts prefer the stimulation.

And most extroverted teachers assume shyness and introversion are identical. They also do not recognize that quiet kids may be actively listening to the other talkers, waiting for the moment to speak up when they have formulated what they would like to say. They also might be taking notes, say, for a subsequently required paper. Or, something extroverted teachers usually do not want to hear or acknowledge, the student may not like the teacher or the class, or both.** Certainly, there are other motivations.

But just as not voting in an election is participation in the political process, so also is not speaking up in class a form of participation. Teachers need to respond to, and find techniques of, reaching all personality types sitting in their desks.

A “one size fits all” approach to teaching, such as the assumption that speaking up in class is good for everyone, invariably brings out the specter of stick motivation.



* I must point out one more time that John Dewey, the alleged father of progressive education—“alleged” because he gave the epithet to Francis W. Parker—lectured when he taught, expected excellent memorization from his students, and wrote a book in 1938 to repudiate many progressive techniques used in his name, such as the necessity of class discussion to teach students how to think. For Dewey, subject matter was fundamental, because it is the “working capital” of thought.

The premise of many teachers today, as one colleague said to me years ago, is that “we teachers talk too much as it is. We have to get the kids talking.” I took that to mean less work for the teacher, something that was explicitly stated by my grad school classmates as justification for group projects: one paper to grade instead of four or five.

** Yes, I know there are teachers who brag about how they don’t care whether or not students like them or their courses. But they should.

The Not-So-Visible Gun: Government Is Not Our Friend

A relative in years past would frequently tell his children, when coming upon a representative of law enforcement, “See that policeman? He is our friend!”

The militarization of police forces in recent years notwithstanding, and trigger happiness of some cops aside, the police by and large are our protectors against the bad guys. They use self-defensive force to protect us from those who initiate its use.

But government per se? The 22 million or so elected and unelected members of federal, state, and local governments still hold the legal monopoly on the use of physical force. They can initiate coercion against the rest of us to do what they say, or what the law says, we ought to do, supposedly for our own good or to protect us from presumed bad guys.

Some writers have contrasted Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the marketplace with an alternative metaphor: the visible fist of government. While fists can do damage, the symbol of the fist usually indicates intimidation.

Governmental coercion is much more than intimidation.

 “Who Are We Going to Coerce Today?” is how I recently retitled a previous post, because coercion is the essence of governing in our mixed economy. A gun—initiated coercion—backs up every decision of the bureaucrats and law that they enforce.

The problem today is that not many citizens see or acknowledge the presence of the gun.

Special interest groups—and by that I mean not just “crony capitalists” but most significantly leftist intellectual organizations and their leaders—lobby hard to pass laws in the name of the “public good.” In fact, however, they are unabashed rent-seekers whose laws benefit the lobby at the expense of everyone else, often to the detriment of the very groups they claim to benefit.

There are too many examples to cite, but the supposed Robin Hood (redistributionist) principle of taking from the rich to give to the poor usually enriches the better off at the expense of the less well off. Wage controls cause unemployment and enhance the incomes of those who manage to keep their jobs. Price controls of the ceiling type cause shortages and price floors cause surpluses; they benefit the first dwellers, such as existing renters and farmers.

“But we are the government and we can change it,” the naïve might say. No, only the army of 22 million, mostly unelected bureaucrats constitute the government. And change? Maybe a tiny bit can be changed every two, four, or six years when we vote, but that often is for the worse.

Fight City Hall? Not easily, and with extremely rare success. Government prosecutors (1, 2) are often powerful and unaccountable.

The attitude and battle cry of many bureaucrats, unfortunately, seems to be: “We have the power. You don’t. So Get lost!”

That is the gun talking. And that is why government is not our friend.

Nutrition and the Argument from Uncertainty

The fallacy of the argument from uncertainty, or at least one form of it, might also be called the “it’s better to be safe than sorry” argument. For example, the European Union among other inanities recently ruled that children under eight must be supervised while blowing up a balloon, lest the children swallow or choke on part or all of the dangerous inflatable. How likely is this to occur? “Well, we don’t really know for sure,” the reasoning apparently goes. “We can’t be certain, so it’s better to be safe than sorry. An adult must be present.”

The problem with this reasoning is that it is asking opponents to prove a negative. “The balloon might cause choking. Prove that it won’t.” In logic proving a negative cannot be done; the burden of proof is on the one who makes the positive assertion. All that can be said accurately here is that the probability of choking is minuscule and parents must choose their own levels of risk tolerance. When pressure groups and their legislators tell us what to do, our freedoms and possibly our health become endangered.

This last is meticulously demonstrated in the exhaustive investigations of science writer Gary Taubes. In his two latest books, Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat, Taubes reviews over one hundred years of research on the causes of several diseases of civilization, especially heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. His finding is that not only is the consensus of the past thirty to forty years wrong, but that it also was generated and is today still maintained by the argument from uncertainty (my terminology, not his).

The litany of contemporary nutrition says that we should eat a high carbohydrate, low fat—low saturated fat—diet in order to maintain our heart health, remain trim, and fend off diabetes. If overweight, we should of course exercise and cut back on the calories. Taubes found little sound evidence in the scientific literature to support these claims and indeed uncovered a wisdom that was conventional for over a hundred years, until after World War II, that said good health, including trim weight, is achieved by eating a low carbohydrate, high meat, fish, and fowl diet. That is, cut out the sugars and starches and eat as much of the rest as you want. Exercise? It makes us hungry, something from the foggy distant past that our mothers and grandmothers used to say; it does not cause weight loss. Cholesterol and saturated fat? No causal relation to heart disease. Go low carb for all three diseases.

What gives? Are today’s nutritionists lying? No, just “better to be safe than sorry,” so they seem to be saying. During the 1950s and ‘60s, the more rigorous scientific researchers said that data on fat and cholesterol in relation to heart disease were inconclusive, in particular the data of the Seven Countries Study, a project notably omitting France and other countries that would have contradicted the study’s findings. This study, the rigorous researchers said, was at most associational, not causal.

The promoters of the Seven Countries Study, however, said that lives were at stake. We can’t wait for “final scientific proof” (Taubes, p. 23). We must inform the public and have them change their diets. This attitude partnered with the ‘60s hostility to McDonalds and other high-fat fast food diets and culminated in the McGovern report of 1977 that made the litany virtually gospel. In the meantime, well-controlled experiments, right up to the present, continued and still continue to disconfirm the creed. Selection bias, the omission of anomalous data, is a term Taubes uses to help explain the championing of the litany.

In the course of his investigations, Taubes most importantly has liberated obese people from the tyranny of the “gluttony and sloth” argument. “You’re overweight because you eat too much and exercise too little.” Implication? Weakness of the will, bad character. Taubes and the more rigorous researchers? Clearly there is a genetic component to growing wide, just as there is a genetic component to growing tall. Causation indeed likely runs in the opposite direction. That is, we are not necessarily fat because we overeat and underexercise. Rather, we eat more because we are growing and become sedentary because we are fat.

The mechanism of obesity, writes Taubes (pp. 118-21), operates through the hormone insulin. The more carbohydrates we eat, the more insulin our bodies secrete, the more fat—for obese people, at any rate—is taken out of our bloodstream and stored in our fat cells. “Insulin,” as Taubes puts it, “works to make us fatter.”

Coercion in the public schools to make children eat “right” or less has become common, just as the European Union is now making sure children are not unduly exposed to those allegedly dangerous inflatables. Aside from the issue that governments have no right to tell us what or how much to eat, or how we should micromanage our children, how fallacy-proof is the scientific evidence that has led to these policies and near dogma about health and safety? How long before we’re all compelled to eat “right” or less?

Taubes has shown us how bad science can become a new consensus and lead to policy. I hope my attempt to condense his seven hundred pages into a few paragraphs is clear and correct. Why We Get Fat is only two hundred pages. I enthusiastically recommend that you read it. Taubes’ writing is sparklingly clear. His website is garytaubes.com.

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This now completes five years of blogging. January 2012 begins the next five. Here are a couple of follow-ups on previous posts.

On Hitting . . .  Dogs and Children. “With the popularity of The Dog Whisperer television show, books and products, the controversy over which methods are the most humane and effective ways to address behavior problems in dogs is dividing dog lovers all over the world.

“While animal behaviorists, trainers and other dog professionals recognize that the show is exposing dog owners to the possibility that their dogs’ behavior can be changed (and indeed, business is booming), the concern is that the show gives the false impression that behavior can be changed within a matter of hours and that the methods used are known to incite or increase aggressive behaviors.” Read more (1, 2).

Should Spanking Be a Felony? “Is it right or wrong to spank? It is not a question of right or wrong; in a way it is a case of cowardliness, for you are hitting someone not your own size. I don’t suppose you hit your husband when he is being a nuisance. Is it because you wouldn’t dare? He might strike you back. Of course, you’re perfectly safe hitting your child of three. She can’t strike you back.

“Spanking is an outlet for adult rage and frustration and hate. . . . Happy mothers do not spank . . .”

--A. S. Neill (pp. 99-100), Freedom—Not License!