Real Problems, Imaginary Problems

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, February 1, 2016

If you’ve ever spent much time around addicts, criminals, political consultants, or other groups of people with serious difficulties in life, you’ll notice that a great many of them have a remarkable capacity for inventing imaginary problems for themselves. Imaginary problems perform a critical psychological function: They give us an excuse not to think about real problems. If you think that your big problems in life are that your boss is a demanding jerk and your wife is a nagging shrew, then you don’t have to think so hard about the fact that you drink too much.

As the first real electoral contest gets under way in Iowa, we should spend a minute thinking about real problems vs. imaginary problems. More specifically, we should think about which candidates are using imaginary problems to avoid talking about the real problems, and the extent to which they are doing so.

Senator Bernie Sanders is, it goes without saying, the leader of the imaginary-problem caucus. His “On the Issues” page begins with wealth inequality, followed by tuition-free college, proceeds through the so-called living wage and racial justice (whatever that means), climaxes around Medicare for all, and then performs a sort of fading coda of interest-group appeasement. If you’ve seen Sanders in action, it’s pretty clear that he’s not really very interested in global warming or abortion rights; it’s not that he has anything other than sincerely held conventional progressive views on those subjects, but they are not what fires him up. His thing is inequality.

Income and wealth inequality, as I have argued at some length, is partly a statistical mirage (there’s a $0.00 floor on income but no ceiling, and what we measure isn’t changes in actual household income but in how many dollars it takes to land at a certain income percentile, disregarding turnover) and partly a triviality. The economic analysis of income inequality alternates between the patently false fairy-tale version (if that rich bastard made less money, you’d make more) and the tautology (if poor people made more money, then poor people would make more money), intersecting only occasionally with anything resembling economic reality.

That isn’t by accident: If we start talking about the underlying realities, then conservatives have by far the better case. Stronger labor markets and higher wages come mainly from sustained economic growth and significant capital investment, which multiplies the value of labor. (Remember the sharecropper.) The United States has the highest corporate taxes in the developed world, a heavy regulatory corpus, a corrupt and ineffective public sector that interferes in the marketplace in the service of politically connected economic interests while failing to provide ordinary public goods and services, a monopolistic education system that performs poorly across the board but radically fails poor students and those not oriented toward higher education, and more.

That’s enough to keep a cadre of Reaganite reformers busy for a generation: For God’s sake, let’s talk about secret cabals of libertarian billionaires instead!

I do not think it is very likely that Carly Fiorina will be the next president of the United States, nor do I think she should be. But ask her a question about U.S. military preparedness, and she’ll answer with a grocery list of specific proposals for personnel and matériel.

The first issue on Mrs. Clinton’s “Issues” page is Alzheimer’s disease; ever eager to be all things to everyone, she made her list alphabetized rather than prioritized, so that nobody has to be last in line.

Compare these blandishments with Marco Rubio’s plan to defeat ISIS. Or Ted Cruz’s remarkably detailed argument about ethanol. Or Rand Paul on criminal-justice reform. Set aside, for the sake of the immediate discussion, whether you agree with any of those programs, or even whether you find them plausible. In each case, an actual problem has been addressed in a serious way, as opposed to imaginary problems being addressed in fanciful ways.

One sees a great deal of superstitious thinking in politics, particularly the assignment of agency to abstract entities. No one in the United States is unemployed because of inequality, or poor because of inequality, or not making as much money as he would like because of inequality. Inequality is not a malevolent fairy that flits around the economy doling out suffering. It isn’t the cause of anything; it’s just a shorthand (and generally useless) way of talking about the aggregate effects of certain conditions in the real world.

ISIS, on the other hand, is a real gang of fanatics that goes around sawing the heads off people.

It is difficult to get inside other people’s heads, especially if they are very different from you in some way. I find it difficult to imagine that the ancient Greeks really thought that the sun’s transit across the sky was actually Helios in his shining chariot. (Contrary to the received version, many of the basic facts about our planet and its sun had been known since ancient times.) But we deal in simplification as a matter of necessity, especially in politics. Getting a non-trivial understanding of Islamic radicalism or the workings of international trade is laborious and time-consuming.

But one possible time-saving device is asking ourselves — before we get too deep into the particulars of policy — whether the problem being addressed is a real problem or an imaginary one.

It’s awfully cold and snowy in Iowa today to be out chasing figments of the political imagination.