By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, September 23, 2024
Barbara Lee should spend some time with Magatte Wade.
“Poverty just doesn’t happen,” Rep. Lee, a California
Democrat, declared
at the launch of the “Children’s
Budget,” a kind progressive wish-list, last week. “It’s a policy choice.”
Rep. Lee has run up against a kind of metaphysical limit there: She is as wrong
as it is possible for a human being to be.
As practically every serious thinker about the issue has
understood for a few thousand years at least, poverty does just
happen—it is, in fact, one of the few things that does just happen.
Poverty is the natural state of the human animal. Do nothing, and you will have
poverty. Thomas Hobbes knew it. Aristotle knew it 2,000 years before Hobbes.
Hesiod knew it centuries before Aristotle. The authors of the Upanishads knew
it centuries before Hesiod. “Throughout history, poverty is the normal
condition of man,” the American sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein observed. Or, as
Thomas Sowell spent a lifetime explaining to an apparently impenetrable public,
poverty has no causes—the absence
of poverty has causes. Rep. Lee’s error is not novel. Her mistake repeats—nearly
verbatim—the error of Rep. Ayanna Pressley: “Poverty is not naturally
occurring; it is a policy choice.”
“Poverty
isn’t the problem,” Sowell wrote. “Creating wealth is.”
In another sense—not the one she intended, of course—Rep.
Lee is correct: Poverty is a choice. Providence has seen the world abundantly
supplied with the necessary physical inputs, a condition that one would expect
from an intelligent reading of Christian theology or of the facts of evolution
(the cultivated imbecilities of Paul Ehrlich et al. notwithstanding). The 19th-century
economist Henry George had an idea of how the world works:
In soil and sunshine, in vegetable
and animal life, in veins of minerals, and in pulsing forces which we are only
beginning to use, are capabilities which we cannot exhaust—materials and powers
from which human effort, guided by intelligence, may gratify every material
want of every human creature. There is in nature no reason for poverty—not even
for the poverty of the crippled or the decrepit. For man is by nature a social
animal, and the family affections and the social sympathies would, where chronic
poverty did not distort and embrute, amply provide for those who could not
provide for themselves.
But if we will not use the
intelligence with which we have been gifted to adapt social organization to
natural laws—if we allow dogs in the manger to monopolize what they cannot use;
if we allow strength and cunning to rob honest labor, we must have chronic
poverty, and all the social evils it inevitably brings. Under such conditions
there would be poverty in paradise.
Which is to say, if you desire to inflict poverty on the
world, then you must proceed in two ways: 1) Do nothing; 2) Prevent others from
using their own creativity, energy, intelligence, and labor to use that most
valuable of all commodities—human action—to leaven the physical world, turning
atoms and particles and energy stored up in them to bring life and life’s
blessings out of the sterile world.
It is not for nothing that the Biblical account of the
beginning of all things starts with physical creation and continues with man’s
role as a participant in that creation, as a cultivator of the created world
who eats his bread by the sweat of his brow. There was no scarcity in Eden and,
though we must understand scarcity as a consequence of our exile from that
paradise, we may also understand scarcity as a sign of the Creator’s love and
providence that it was precisely in adapting himself to the consequences of his
disobedience that man learned to become, gloriously, himself. Human beings have
our physical needs in common with the other animals and the divine spark of our
intelligence and creativity in common with God—that is the nexus that we, alone
among all the creatures in the known universe, are privileged to occupy.
Perhaps the judgment on us was not as harsh as it may have seemed on a first
reading of Genesis.
Magatte Wade is better positioned to understand that than
most of us.
Wade, a Senegalese American entrepreneur and author
raised in France before immigrating to the United States, will sometimes tear
up—and make you tear up—when she tells her story, as she did on Friday evening.
Her parents, she says, initially left her behind in Senegal not because they
did not love her but because they did—they had to leave their home, and their
beloved child, to go to Europe to find work. Why? There was no work to be done
where they were, no opportunity even to achieve a decent life, much less to
thrive and to provide their gifted daughter with the resources she needed to
make for herself a life fitted to her own abilities. Theirs was the story of
millions of immigrants like them.
“All you do is work and send money home,” Wade said on
Friday, accepting the Julian L. Simon Award from my colleagues at the
Competitive Enterprise Institute. Simon wrote a very famous book in 1981, The
Ultimate Resource, the thesis of which is that while there are limits on
natural resources and physical inputs, human flourishing does not depend on
these but on the ultimate resource: human action enabled by human creativity
and human ingenuity. Market prices do the work of rationing those scarce
physical resources, which, as everybody learns on the first day of Econ 101,
become more expensive as they become more scarce relative to demand. Learning
to adapt to changes in scarcity is where that ultimate resource shows its real
value as we create substitutes, improve existing products and process or invent
new ones, dream up new modes of human flourishing, and do that necessary
Hayekian work of discovering the most valuable ways to serve each other.
Wade learned the basics of her political economy from the
two greatest professors in the field: hardship and anger. Her parents left her
with her grandmother to raise her. And then, when they were able to do so, they
sent for her to join them—an occasion for great joy, to be sure, but it also
meant that she would never see her beloved grandmother again.
That was the hardship. She found anger in the
shower.
At home in Senegal, she announced ahead of time when she
wanted to take a warm shower, at which time her grandmother would do what one
does—of course!—when a child wants to take a warm shower: She put a pot of
water on to boil, mixed that boiling water with some cooler water to get it to
the right temperature, put it into a large bucket, and then handed her
granddaughter a ladle. When Wade was reunited with her parents (in Germany at
first), she encountered her first shower with hot running water. She remembers
thinking, “What kind of juju is this?” And then there were the streets and the
cars and the trains, and the shops full of every kind of thing that a person
could want—things that her parents could buy, though they were by no means
rich. And that’s where the anger came in.
Unless one were to simply accept what had been accepted
around the world, including in Africa, for many generations—the idiotic and
superstitious belief that Africans are inferior—then there must be another
explanation for African poverty. Africans were not born to be poor any more
than Europeans or Americans were. Yes, poverty is man’s natural state—but the
fact that so many Africans were being kept in that natural state was a choice.
African poverty was and is something that was and is being done to Africans.
Wade has made it her life’s work to discover and understand what that something
is, and she has come to something very much like Henry George’s conclusion
above.
Wade offers a two-part prescription for human
flourishing: 1) economic liberty; 2) access to an abundant and reliable source
of energy. As she learned about the world through her own
entrepreneurship—among other ventures, she has started a soft-drink company and
a cosmetics company, with operations both in the United States and Senegal—she
learned that poor countries tend to be excessively and badly regulated. Setting
up a new business in the United States was a matter of a few minutes’ work
filling out some paperwork and paying a small filing fee; in Senegal,
it took years. In the United States, she could hire and fire workers as
necessary; in Senegal, she needed government permission to do either. She also
came to learn that rich countries tend to be relatively high consumers of
energy, while poor countries consume relatively little. Energy, and human
energy: These explained why resource-poor places such as Hong Kong, Dubai, and
Singapore became enormously wealthy while many resource-rich African countries
remained terribly poor. Wade speaks movingly of the shame this
poverty inflicted on many Africans.
Magatte Wade and Barbara Lee have some things in common.
Both are black women, both have accomplished difficult and impressive things in
their lives. Rep. Lee’s politics are not mine, but I admire her perseverance.
She is a black woman born in El Paso in the 1940s who had endured a great deal
of suffering and privation before she was 20 years old, by which time she had
been through divorces—her parents’ divorce and one of her own—an abusive
marriage, an abortion in Juárez when she was 15 years old, homelessness, and
much else. But while Rep. Lee no doubt has acquired a kind of hard-won wisdom
along that road, she would benefit from sitting down with Wade and taking in
the lessons of a different kind of hard-won wisdom—even as she approaches 80,
it is not too late to learn.
No, the heavy-handed economic and regulatory ideas that
Rep. Lee has advanced over the course of her political career are not going to
turn the United States into Senegal. However, they are not conducive to
the kind of long-term profound flourishing that will continue to make the
United States the beacon it has been to the Magatte Wades of the world, nor
will they ensure that the country continues to be the grand nursery and great
garden it has been to homegrown entrepreneurs. We can push one way or pull in
the other, and Rep. Lee and her allies are, still, after all these years and
with no intellectual excuse for failing to know better, pushing in the wrong
way. Perhaps another black woman, one with an immigrant background, would do
herself the favor of sitting down with Magatte Wade and listening to her
story—Kamala Harris should make the time.
A world that would have wasted one Magatte Wade is a
world that should be ashamed of itself. What can be said about a world that
wastes millions—and billions—of women and men, each of them a blessing, each of
them created in the image of the Creator, each of them with something to offer.
Not everyone has the particular gifts of Magatte Wade, but not everyone has to.
That, too, is part of the genius of economic liberty: It is the only way to
accommodate and to honor the genuine diversity of the human race, which is
above all a diversity of talents, interests, and sensibilities rather than
merely the dreary litany of race, sex, etc. in which the campus grievance
merchants specialize.
We cannot afford to waste one Magatte Wade. Where would
we be without such heroes?
And Furthermore
After honoring Magatte Wade, CEI gave out its Prometheus
Award for Human Achievement—only the second time it has given the award in 40
years—to one of the great champions of liberty and human flourishing: George
Will. I had the honor of introducing him and presenting the award, and, if
you’ll indulge my repeating one remark: When I was a teenager, I wanted to grow
up to be George Will.
And I still do.
Words About Words
“Dog in the manger?” Well, get ready for some Words about
Words running headlong into Economics for English Majors.
The metaphor of the dog in the manger refers to someone
who jealously guards and keeps for himself something he cannot use, preventing
its use by those who might benefit from it. This is a situation we might
describe as Pareto non-optimal.
“Pareto non-optimal? What happened to the dog?” We’ll get
back to the dog in just a sec.
A situation is “Pareto optimal” if every possible “Pareto
improvement” has been made. A Pareto improvement is a reallocation of resources
that harms no one and benefits at least one person. When you donate clothes you
don’t want anymore to Goodwill, you’re making a Pareto improvement. That old
coat isn’t doing you any good, selling it would be more trouble than it is
worth, and it would be valuable to somebody who doesn’t have a coat and who
cannot afford one. Add the idea of Pareto optimality to the notion of
diminishing marginal utility and you have the most rigorous argument there is
for redistributive economic policies: Elon Musk’s second $130 billion
doesn’t do anything for him that his first $130 billion didn’t do in any
meaningful personal well-being terms, so why not go stick a gun in his face and
take that money by force and give it to somebody we think would benefit from it
more? (You should never leave out the gun in the face—that is what government
ultimately is, brute force even where it is entirely legitimate brute force.)
There are lots of arguments against this, of course.
There’s the moral one (it’s his money and he has a right to do with it as he
pleases), the practical one (government programs cannot be relied upon to put
the funds to a genuinely good use), the business one (Musk may not need a new
pair of shoes, but he might want to buy a company that costs $130
billion and muck it up as badly as he has Twitter), etc.
So, the dog in the manger, being a dog, doesn’t eat
barleycorn. (I suspect Pancake, the world’s hungriest dachshund, would eat the
barleycorn, but never mind that for now.) But he chases off the oxen and the
other animals who would eat the barleycorn. The story of the jealous dog (de
cane invido) has been around since at least the first century and shows up
everywhere from Lucian to the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas to medieval writers
such as Heinrich Steinhöwel.
The metaphor of the dog in the manger is related to the
idea of usufruct, an idea from Roman law holding that a person may enjoy
the right to use and benefit from the property of another person as long as
doing so does not harm the other party. A usufruct may be granted voluntarily,
as in a life estate (and, boy, do
I hate life estates), or (not usually the case in the United States) simply
recognized, often in cases in which property ownership is contested or
unresolved. For example, a little farmer who is growing some crops on a corner
of land claimed by a very large landowner who isn’t currently using it may be
granted usufruct, the right to enjoy the fruits of his labor, while the
ownership issue is being worked out.
Usufruct outside of its strictly legal meaning touches on
a broader moral principle: “that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living,”
as Thomas Jefferson put it in a letter to James Madison. The idea there is that
you don’t want to be the dog in the manger, that those who can benefit from
something have a kind of moral claim superseding the formal claims of those who
may have technical title (or simply effective control) over an asset from which
they can derive no benefit.
And that takes us back to good ol’ Henry George.
George was most famous for his advocacy of funding
government through a single tax, a tax on the value of land in its unimproved
state. As George reasoned, land is one of the few genuinely finite commodities
widely held as a form of wealth and one that nobody—no mere mortal!—could claim
to have created through his own effort. All land ownership begins with somebody
saying, “This is mine.” Doing so was the “Origin of Inequality,” according to
that godfather of tyranny, Rousseau:
The first man who, having enclosed
a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found
people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.
From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes
might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up
the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “Beware of listening to this impostor;
you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us
all, and the earth itself to nobody.”
George’s argument (which found admirers everywhere from
socialists to radical libertarians to William F. Buckley Jr.) was that the
single tax would encourage a usufruct mentality: People would, if taxed
according to his model, have incentives to improve land, or sell it to somebody
who could improve it and make good use of it, rather than hoarding it as a
nonproductive asset functioning only as a store of wealth, as a kind of big
pile of gold sitting in a treasury doing nothing. (Of course, gold that is storing
wealth isn’t doing nothing. But that was the idea.) George believed that
his tax model would relieve entrepreneurs and traders from tax burdens while
encouraging the widespread redistribution of land and, hence, of the wealth
that comes from owning and using land.
Many modern Georgists note that many modern evils—such as
exurban sprawl and the environmental problems associated with it—would have
been discouraged by a Georgist tax system in that taxes on the unimproved value
of land would encourage dense development. You can get more economic value out
of a few acres of land if you build a 60-story building on top of it than if
you build one of those faux-Tuscan suburban horrors that we Americans are for
some reason so fond of living in.
Big landlords sitting on idle acres were, in George’s
view, the big dogs in the manger, scheming “to monopolize what they cannot
use.”
While the Georgist tax is not the worst idea in economic
history, the moralistic notion that we have a right to seize unused assets if
we think we know better how to dispose of them is, in my view, an
extraordinarily dangerous idea, the source of much mischief around the world
over many years. Secure property title and a rigorous legal system for
maintaining and transferring such title is one of the things essential to a
free and prospering society. People who stage protests and wave placards like
to rave about justice and equality and that kind of thing, which is all good
and fine. But if you want to create a free, decent, secure, and prosperous
society, you really have to start with property rights.
And I would advise Donald Trump and J.D. Vance that property rights include the right to exchange property with others as you see fit—even if they are foreigners, even if they are nefarious Canadians.
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