Clear But False

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, July 08, 2025

 

“Winning the fight against hunger starts here,” reads the notice at a local restaurant, advertising a campaign against food waste. This is an example of something that Jonah Goldberg talks about from time to time, citing the political scientist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: the “clear but false idea.” It makes superficial sense: If there were less waste, there would be more food available to eat, which would make it easier to feed hungry people. That’s the idea, anyway.

 

The truth is that waste makes food less expensive rather than more expensive. The optimal amount of food waste in a restaurant or a grocery store is not zero, which may seem counterintuitive until you consider the fact that it costs money to reduce waste: You have reached the optimal amount of waste when the cost of preventing $1 in waste equals $1. The people who run Whole Foods and McDonald’s and Starbucks are logistically sophisticated, and they keep a hard eye on expenses—their goal is not to end waste for the sake of ending waste, but to reduce waste to the extent that doing so makes good business sense. The kind of enormously sophisticated, detailed planning and extremely precise execution necessary to radically reduce food waste in a restaurant chain would be very, very expensive. Eliminating waste would be—perverse though it may seem—wasteful.

 

To reiterate a frequent theme of mine: Serious policy discussions are generally focused on things such as tradeoffs, incentives, and transaction costs; unserious policy discussions are almost always moralistic. The anti-waste stuff is moralistic in a classically American and puritanical way—as Benjamin Franklin wrote: “All things are cheap to the saving, dear to the wasteful.” As with a great many things that the witty Founding Father wrote and said about a great many subjects, that is persuasive, clear, and false. It is a moral sentiment masquerading as an economic observation.

 

The moralistic stuff is easy—provided you don’t think about it too hard. For example, ask yourself: What is the optimal level of illegal immigration in a society? Or, even easier: What is the optimal level of child abuse? Of murder? The moralistic answer to each of those questions will be “zero.” But that answer stands only as long as you are using a one-sided ledger. We could radically reduce child abuse and murder in our society, if we desired to, but the means of our doing so would be invasive, coercive, and authoritarian—we would be fighting crime by, in effect, putting everybody in prison. We could reduce child abuse by putting cameras inside private homes, we could reduce drug abuse by introducing lethally tainted drugs into the marketplace, we could reduce illegal immigration with landmines and guillotines. But these would be moral horrors—and one of the most reliable ironies in the world is that people with very urgently moralistic views often overlook the moral costs associated with the crusades they wish to launch.

 

This comes up in practical policy challenges all the time. Most of us (including most pro-choice people, I think) would like to see fewer abortions—ideally none, from my point of view, but see above about why that probably isn’t the optimal number. There are also those among us who prefer anti-abortion policies that are vindictive or extreme because they are vindictive or extreme, irrespective of the practical effect these might have on the incidence of abortion. The more charitable reading of that familiar tendency is that the law is a teacher as well as a judge, communicating shared priorities and expectations, and, as such, a more stringent approach might pay long-term dividends by influencing public attitudes. The less charitable account is that vindictiveness and extremism are emotionally satisfying to the intellectually immature and the emotionally deformed.

 

I recently heard the story of an Afghan immigrant who may be sent back to his home country—where the Taliban chopped his hands off before he escaped to the United States and where he will probably be murdered shortly after arrival if he is repatriated. Regardless of any problems he may have with his immigration paperwork, it is difficult to believe that his case supports the argument for exceptionlessly perfect formal compliance. The ideal number of illegal immigrants is zero; the ideal number of immigrants granted refugee status without entirely complying with the necessary procedures is zero; the ideal number of poor and vulnerable people to be sent back to Afghanistan to be tortured and butchered in the wake of our national failure to reform that country under armed occupation is also zero.

 

“Here, the people govern,” Alexander Hamilton is supposed to have said. To govern is to choose, and the American people, in choosing, may need to be reminded from time to time that not every desirable outcome is compatible with every other desirable outcome.

 

But, then, a lot of these idiots simply like the sound of “Alligator Alcatraz.”