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November 26, 2006

The Open Invitation

As I mentioned when I first addressed the topic of the minimum wage last week, there was a particular turn of phrase in the post which I wanted to address in more detail. As part of her closing arguments after spooling off an impressive assortment of unhappy anecdotes, hilzoy commented "these stories should not exist in one of the wealthiest countries in the world".

That's a great argument, isn't it? I say that because it is wholly unbounded; it's a license to do anything you want without the slightest constraint, and it encapsulates what scares me about modern liberalism. I suspect that, if asked, hilzoy would concede that even if her desire for a minimum wage increase indexed to inflation was passed into law, such stories would still occur. In a country of 300 million people, such stories are guaranteed to occur, in fact. Some people are just going to be unlucky and others are going to make bad choices that put them in such situations. Which is what makes the argument so brilliant: if we accept that premise, it's a license for ever-increasing government interference.

Of course, it's fair to argue that we're already at that point, at a time when one dollar in three in this country is spent on some kind of government program. But there's plenty of room for government expansion as far as our two major political parties are concerned. This argument is just one of many deployed to justify such expansions. (I should note that, for the most part, I don't think either party is necessarily interested in government expansion for the sake of expansion; they just have myriad issues they think government should address, and massive expansion of government is just a side-effect of their quest for social justice or whatever they'd like to call it.)

There are a lot of unfortunate things that occur in this country. Every day, people are murdered, robbed, raped, they go hungry, children go without the kind of schooling that might give them some hope of rising above the circumstances of their birth...the list goes on and on and it's a horrible one. I can certainly empathize with those who want to see those things stopped. But arguing that such things shouldn't happen in America is an invalid argument, and one I'll fight at every opportunity. A valid argument would have to offer some hope that adopting the proponent's views would solve the problem raised in their argument, and that isn't the case here. We've had government trying to solve the problem of crime since the inception of government, and even in countries with markedly fewer civil rights and much harsher methods of punishment, crime still exists. So it will be with poverty. Government isn't going to solve the problem, unless it is by making everyone equally impoverished, and I'm pretty sure that isn't the goal of more than a vanishing fraction of the modern left.

It's lovely to believe that, because the United States does possess great wealth in the aggregate, sad stories about poverty never should become reality. But they do, and they will continue to do so as long as we live. That is how the world works: most things will end up scattered along a bell-shaped curve, and that means that some people are going to end up on the left of that curve. Complaints that such things shouldn't happen in America are akin to laments that the laws of physics ought to be repealed, and should be treated similarly.