TGIF: The Unfortunately Forgotten Sumner

Some things haven't changed since 1883. In that year Yale University professor William Graham Sumner, the anti-imperialist laissez-faire liberal and pioneer of American sociology, noticed that "we are told every day that great social problems stand before us and demand a solution, and we are assailed by oracles, threats, and warnings in reference to those problems." Then, as now, self-styled progressives announced that the sky would fall unless the problem that had most recently caught their fancy was addressed once by the government. Adam Smith's observation that "there is a great deal of ruin in a nation" was too complacent for these world-savers.

In What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, Sumner continued his description: "There is a school of writers who are playing quite a rôle as the heralds of the coming duty and the coming woe. They assume to speak for a large, but vague and undefined, constituency, who set the task, exact a fulfilment, and threaten punishment for default." Sumner thought it was about time someone asked some penetrating questions:

After reading and listening to a great deal of this sort of assertion I find that the question forms itself with more and more distinctness in my mind: Who are those who assume to put hard questions to other people and to demand a solution of them? How did they acquire the right to demand that others should solve their world-problems for them? Who are they who are held to consider and solve all questions, and how did they fall under this duty?

Who indeed? What did his searches unearth?

So far as I can find out what the classes are who are respectively endowed with the rights and duties of posing and solving social problems, they are as follows: Those who are bound to solve the problems are the rich, comfortable, prosperous, virtuous, respectable, educated, and healthy; those whose right it is to set the problems are those who have been less fortunate or less successful in the struggle for existence. 

Of course, the state—the agency rooted in aggressive force—never is far from the scene. The world-savers are ever-ready to call in the cops to impose their humanitarian solutions.

During the last ten years I have read a great many books and articles, especially by German writers, in which an attempt has been made to set up “the State” as an entity having conscience, power, and will sublimated above human limitations, and as constituting a tutelary genius over us all.

Does that sound like any state you've encountered? It did not to Sumner either.

I have never been able to find in history or experience anything to fit this concept....  As an abstraction, the State is to me only All-of-us. In practice—that is, when it exercises will or adopts a line of action—it is only a little group of men chosen in a very hap-hazard way by the majority of us to perform certain services for all of us. The majority do not go about their selection very rationally, and they are almost always disappointed by the results of their own operation. Hence “the State,” instead of offering resources of wisdom, right reason, and pure moral sense beyond what the average of us possess, generally offers much less of all those things.

That sounds like Wizard of Oz, in reality, the little snake-oil salesman who instructed Dorothy to ignore the man behind the curtain and remain intimidated by the blustering apparition.

The little group of public servants who, as I have said, constitute the State, when the State determines on anything, could not do much for themselves or anybody else by their own force. If they do anything, they must dispose of men [emphasis added], as in an army, or of capital, as in a treasury. But the army, or police, or posse comitatus, is more or less All-of-us, and the capital in the treasury is the product of the labor and saving of All-of-us. Therefore, when the State means power-to-do it means All-of-us, as brute force or as industrial force.

In other words, those who blithely propose to wield the state apparatus (force) to solve the world's problems mean to commandeer some people and their property to ostensibly help the chosen beneficiaries.

If anybody is to benefit from the action of the State it must be Some-of-us. If, then, the question is raised, What ought the State to do for labor, for trade, for manufactures, for the poor, for the learned professions? etc., etc.—that is, for a class or an interest—it is really the question, What ought All-of-us to do for Some-of-us? But Some-of-us are included in All-of-us and, so far as they get the benefit of their own efforts, it is the same as if they worked for themselves, and they may be cancelled out of All-of-us. Then the question which remains is, What ought Some-of-us to do for Others-of-us? or, What do social classes owe to each other?

Sumner asked what few people were willing to ask when the Progressive Era came along:

I now propose to try to find out whether there is any class in society which lies under the duty and burden of fighting the battles of life for any other class, or of solving social problems for the satisfaction of any other class; also, whether there is any class which has the right to formulate demands on “society”—that is, on other classes; also, whether there is anything but a fallacy and a superstition in the notion that “the State” owes anything to anybody except peace, order, and the guarantees of rights.

Around the same time, Sumner wrote an article titled "The Forgotten Man" to demonstrate that the world-savers were not satisfied with personally shouldering the responsibilities that they claimed to have discovered for others. No, they intend to impose them without consultation and consent. But on whom?

It is when we come to the proposed measures of relief for the evils which have caught public attention that we reach the real subject which deserves our attention. As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X or, in the better case, what A, B and C shall do for X. As for A and B, who get a law to make themselves do for X what they are willing to do for him, we have nothing to say except that they might better have done it without any law, but what I want to do is to look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is.

So Sumner took on the task of shining the spotlight on the one whom the world-savers would conscript for their grand crusade.

I call him the Forgotten Man. Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. He is the man who never is thought of. He is the victim of the reformer, social speculator and philanthropist, and I hope to show you before I get through that he deserves your notice both for his character and for the many burdens which are laid upon him.

He began by laying down a premise that should be of interest: "For my present purpose I ask your attention for a few moments to the notion of liberty, because the Forgotten Man would no longer be forgotten where there was true liberty."

Now on with the show.

Now who is the Forgotten Man? He is the simple, honest laborer, ready to earn his living by productive work. We pass him by because he is independent, self-supporting, and asks no favors. He does not appeal to the emotions or excite the sentiments. He only wants to make a contract and fulfill it, with respect on both sides and favor on neither side.

Today we often hear about the person who "plays by the rules." Unfortunately, that doesn't get him exempted from the world-savers' impositions. It didn't in Sumner's day either.

But we stand with our backs to the independent and productive laborer all the time. We do not remember him because he makes no clamor; but I appeal to you whether he is not the man who ought to be remembered first of all, and whether, on any sound social theory, we ought not to protect him against the burdens of the good-for-nothing.

It's the same today. The "needy" are seen as worthy of unending attention because of their need (both genuine and often self-inflicted), while the productive, especially highly paid producers, reap only scorn—although they earn their living by creating useful products. (A CEO can be gunned down in the street, and more than a few people celebrate.)

Sumner did not object to private charity for those who suffer misfortune. But he understood that some people would rather have other people support them.

In these last years I have read hundreds of articles and heard scores of sermons and speeches which were really glorifications of the good-for-nothing, as if these were the charge of society, recommended by right reason to its care and protection, We are addressed all the time as if those who are respectable were to blame because some are not so, and as if there were an obligation on the part of those who have done their duty towards those who have not done their duty.

Sumner was putting in a plug for self-responsibility, without which society, even if it starts out free, declines. Why should the conscientious pay the price for the shirkers?

Every man is bound to take care of himself and his family and to do his share in the work of society. It is totally false that one who has done so is bound to bear the care and charge of those who are wretched because they have not done so. The silly popular notion is that the beggars live at the expense of the rich, but the truth is that those who eat and produce not, live at the expense of those who labor and produce.

Sumner had in mind that when money was diverted from saving to consumption by the unproductive, the community was less rich than it would have been. Everyone suffered

Now, if we have state regulation, what is always forgotten is this: Who pays for it? Who is the victim of it? There always is a victim.... The whole system of social regulation by boards, commissioners, and inspectors consists in relieving negligent people of the consequences of their negligence and so leaving them to continue negligent without correction.... Now, if you relieve negligent people of the consequences of their negligence, you can only throw those consequences on the people who have not been negligent....

Is that just?

[W]hat I want to show is that all this is unjust to the Forgotten Man, and that the reformers and philosophers miss the point entirely when they preach that it is his duty to do all this work. Let them preach to the negligent to learn to take care of themselves.... [The Forgotten Man] is always the man who, if let alone, would make a reasonable use of his liberty without abusing it. He would not constitute any social problem at all and would not need any regulation. He is the Forgotten Man again, and as soon as he is brought from his obscurity you see that he is just that one amongst us who is what we all ought to be....

All the burdens fall on him, or on her, for it is time to remember that the Forgotten Man is not seldom a woman....

It is plain enough that the Forgotten Man and the Forgotten Woman are the very life and substance of society.... If it is desired to bring about social improvements, bring us a scheme for relieving the Forgotten Man of some of his burdens. He is our productive force which we are wasting. Let us stop wasting his force. Then we shall have a clean and simple gain for the whole society....

The bottom line for Sumner was individual liberty, private property, and free trade with the world. "What the Forgotten Man needs, therefore, is that we come to a clearer understanding of liberty and to a more complete realization of it. Every step which we win in liberty will set the Forgotten Man free from some of his burdens and allow him to use his powers for himself and for the commonwealth."