Class versus Identity Politics?

Parts of the "left" and "right" often lament that class politics has given way to identity politics. I don't get that. Class was the original modern political identity, and state privilege was part of the cause. Libertarians and classical liberals long warned that lethal and impoverishing social disintegration would result from an ideology -- socialism-- based on Marxist class conflict, which pits business people against working people (as if business people don't work).

We need to abolish politics, not reform it because it's toxic. That won't eliminate classes, or useful social categories. We'll always have people who own businesses, people who manage them, and people employed by them. But those are not and won't be pure categories. Owners work. Managers work. And workers own -- shares in corporations. (Check your retirement account.) Ultimately, in the free market everyone has the same boss: the consumers.

What we must strive for is, to coin a phrase, classes without borders. That is, mobility. To get it we need free markets, which would end: occupational licensure, home-bulding restrictions, business permits, the minimum wage, immigration control, and so much more.

TGIF: The State Fuels Identity Politics

Anyone with an ounce of good sense knows that destructive identity politics is run amuck in America and elsewhere. All incentives these days seem to go in one direction: toward identifying oneself as a member of an aggrieved group supposedly due compensation through government action -- of course at the expense of people who had nothing to do with the grievance. The actual perpetrators (if any), like the actual victims, tend to have long departed this world.

Where real victims and perpetrators are still on the scene, grievances ought to be handled on an individual basis with due process, rather than through pressure-group pandering.  But we may justifiably wonder why innocent taxpayers should bear the consequences for offenses their rulers committed.

Like so many things, identity politics, as the name itself tells us, would be little more than an annoyance if the U.S. government didn't have nearly plenary power over society. But it does have it, and so the politicians and bureaucrats and their pressure groups have profited immensely from dividing us into racial, ethnic, national, and other sorts of groups. This sows the ground for social strife that harms us all.

At different times and places, such classification has been used to enslave, otherwise harm, and even exterminate despised groups; at other times, like now, it's been used to distribute taxpayer money and other benefits to politically favored groups. This stimulates people outside the government to game the system in order to win advantages at the expense of others. Incentives have consequences.

Another potential effect is to provoke a backlash from the majority that bears the burdens of favoritism. This adds yet another layer of resentful identity consciousness to the volatile mix. No one should want to see a society torn apart by racial, ethnic, or similar conflict. Too much depends on social cooperation and the benevolent toleration that underlies it.

Identity politics should be especially objectionable in a country ostensibly founded on freedom and individualism. Treating human beings as interchangeable members of racial, ethnic, or other groups is execrable collectivism.

Now imagine that the government's categories constitute a crazy quilt of arbitrariness, caprice, and pressure-group pandering. Wait -- you don't have to imagine it. You can see it in contemporary America.

What began in the late 1970s as an effort to make record-keeping consistent across government departments has since morphed, contrary to stated policy, into a political device to treat Americans differently according to their race and ethnicity. The goal was to distribute such favors as government loans, contracts, hiring, and college admissions to aggrieved group members. Differential treatment was even applied during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was all justified in the name of righting past wrongs, that is, using discrimination to counteract previous earlier discrimination, real and imagined. (As Thomas Sowell has demonstrated, statistical disparities are not in themselves evidence of discrimination.)

Because of the government campaign to define those groups, it's now impossible to fill out any kind of form or application without being asked to identify one's race, ethnicity, "gender" (whatever that may mean today), and "sex assigned [sic] at birth."

Thus we should thank David Bernstein of George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School, author of Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classifications in America, for ripping away the veil of this horrendous and ridiculous system. The story he tells would be hilarious if it weren't pernicious and illiberal. As he points out in this lecture, although the government warned decades ago that the categories had no scientific foundation and were not to be used to determine "eligibility for government programs," that is exactly what happened. The obsession with these arbitrary categories extends even to medical research, which is crazy, not to mention dangerous.

In his talk Bernstein provides lots of examples of absurdity. For example, the category Asian includes Americans descended from national groups that have very little in common, such as Filipinos, Japanese, and Pakistanis. While Indians (from the subcontinent) are classified as Asian, the related Afghans are classified as white, as are Arabs and Iranians. (You can see how this could wreak havoc with medicine.)

One might think that the classification black or African American is justified for government consideration because many black Americans are descendants of American slaves and victims of Jim Crow. But how would that justify including Nigerians who freely immigrated more recently and who are doing quite well?

The category Hispanic also makes little sense. By what standard does an American directly descendant from Spaniards qualify for government favors? Americans with roots in other European countries get no favors. The Spanish came to the New World not as victims but as conquerors, so whence the victimhood? You might think that Hispanic was meant to designate the mixed Spanish and Portuguese Indians from south of the border. But if that's the case, why aren't they simply classified as Indian? Bernstein explains: that category was reserved only for Indians with roots in North America above the Rio Grande, including Canada. Expanding the category further would have unacceptably spread the benefits too thin. So pressure groups opposed it.

If the government was forbidden to dispense benefits to particular individuals and groups, it would lose the opportunity to use the arbitrary classifications that Berstein documents. On the other hand, if some reasonable classification is useful to document government mistreatment of particular groups, I'm confident that civil liberties watchdogs will find a way to handle it.

Racial and ethnic classification is a territory best kept off-limits to the state. Have we learned nothing from history?

 

TGIF: Reject Both Identity and Egalitarian Politics

The push-back against identity politics by disillusioned leftists is welcome, but the striving to replace identity with economic equality as the guiding political principle? Not so much.

I won't spend time on the problems with identity politics, a zero-sum game if ever there was one. The virtue of universalism extolled by classical liberalism seems indisputable. Why wouldn't everyone begin with the same entitlement to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness free of government impediment?

As a general matter, past crimes committed by some long-dead people against other long-dead other people cannot be rectified without creating new crimes and instigating an unending chain of grievances. That's no recipe for the liberty, cooperation, and peace that our individual and social welfare require. Identity politics is founded on collectivism, according to which people are judged by their membership, typically involuntary, in a racial or ethnic group. The obsession with identity has now gone from the ridiculous (skin color) to the absurd ("gender"), but that's a topic for another day -- perhaps. It's a minefield.

So let's turn to the proposed replacement: economic equality, sometimes called class-based politics. A contingent of people, including but not limited to some orthodox Marxists, have pointed out that identity politics has tragically taken our eyes off the ball. Instead of focusing on something that can unify all "oppressed" people -- the wealth and income gaps -- we have been misdirected toward something that needlessly divides them and reduces or obliterates their ability to resist and to make things better. One proposal is to replace race-based government programs like affirmative action with class-based versions that give preferences to people with less-affluent upbringings. (One finds this view expressed in a heterodox publication I like quite a bit, Spiked Online.)

Why is that not a promising alternative? Because it is riddled with fallacies. I'm not saying we have no good way of talking about class; many classical liberals have done so. Karl Marx himself, who is dubiously credited with creating class analysis, acknowledged his debt to the early French laissez-faire liberals for their pioneering work in the field -- before he proceeded to mangle it because of his fallacious economics. According to the classical liberal view, the state creates class antagonism by appropriating wealth from the industrious people (the tax-producers, who include, along with nonmanagement workers, the creators of businesses and employers) and giving it to their cronies (the tax-consumers). This sets in motion a social conflict with wide ramifications.

Needless to say, most contemporary class analysts are not of the classical liberal variety even those who are increasingly suspicious of state power. They still suffer the fallacy that economic inequality is an inherent bug in market-oriented societies that requires force-wielding enlightened rulers (Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez perhaps) to intervene.

I think that the pursuit of economic equality is doomed to fail because it clashes with immutable reality. I emphasize, though I shouldn't have to, that I am not talking about legal equality, equality of liberty, or what Roderick Long calls "equality of authority." (Equality of opportunity is a slippery term if it means more than freedom from government impediment.) I mean only income or wealth equality.

Why would the quest for that kind of equality clash with reality? It must do so because individuals will never be the same in many key respects. They differ vastly in talent, drive, energy, ambition, entrepreneurial intuition, and more. These things are clearly relevant to their degree of ability to create wealth and earn income through voluntary exchange in the marketplace. We all know that not everyone is equally endowed with the ability to produce value for consumers, say, by organizing a business. That would be the case even if everyone had a good upbringing and no one was forced to attend a decrepit government school. That's just the way it is.

A serious attempt to create economic equality, or even something close, would create the nightmare world envisioned in Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron." The philosopher Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia set out a scenario that is only slightly less dystopian. He pointed out that even if everyone started the day with the same amount of money, they wouldn't finish the day that way because some would have been better at pleasing consumers than others. So what now? If the goal remained perfect equality, government officials would have to start each day by redistributing the money evenly again. What would that do to people's incentive to produce? The policy might lead to equality, but it would be at an abysmally low level. Only the envious would be satisfied, but envy is no basis for a prosperous or pleasant society. So which do we prefer: equality of poverty or inequality in which the lowest living standard is higher than it would be in the egalitarian dystopia?

The connection between inequality and actual living standards is illusory. Imagine a rising elevator: the ceiling goes up, but so does the floor. Now imagine a rising accordion-like elevator that rises: even as the distance between the ceiling and floor increases, the entire unit goes up. This demonstrates the distraction of focusing on inequality.

The vast difference in incomes and wealth among people in the United States, which defines classes, obscures the more-important shrinking of the gap in consumption. For decades now, lower-income people have had progressively easier access to life-improving conveniences and necessities that the upper class once had only at enormous expense -- if at all. (Not long ago, no rich person walked around with a powerful computer/communications device in his pocket.) One-time luxuries have become commonplace necessities and affordable for virtually everyone even as they have greatly improved in quality.

In fact, if you measure this increasing access to products, not according to money prices (which are confounded by inflation and other things), but according to how long the average employee must work to earn the necessary money (time price), the picture that emerges is astounding. This is a good measure because we ultimately pay for things with our effort.

Average working people today toil a fraction of the time their parents and grandparents did to earn what it takes to buy not just the same products, but much better ones. In other words, we all get more and more utility for free. Think about it: if today you can buy something with only 15 minutes of work instead of the hour you had to spend before, you obtain three-quarters of the product's utility gratis. You have money left over for other things that you previously could not afford.

How does that happen? It happens through dramatic increases in productivity, which are made possible through investment (of savings and profits) in innovative technologies, which in turn are made possible by human ingenuity. ("The ultimate resource," the great Julian Simon called it.) Better machines, computers, tools, and other inputs vastly increase the power of unaided labor, enlarging the volume of goods that can be produced in an hour. When that happens, wages go up and time prices fall. That is called progress, though I don't mean to imply that money is all that's required for happiness. (We also ought to pay tribute to fossil fuels and their producers, without which this could not have happened.)

One more ingredient is needed: competition among producers and employers free of government fetters. Without it, the potentially improved terms of trade won't be converted into consumer welfare. 

These insights are is central to a new book, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet by Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley. But I first encountered this insight in Myths Of Rich And Poor: Why We're Better Off than We Think (2000) by Michael W. Cox and Richard Alm. (Listen to Keith Knight's interview with Tupy.)

What ought to matter, then, is not the differences in living standards but the absolute levels. The change at the lowest level alone is a good proxy for the general condition. Equality is a chimera and a destructive one at that. What we should want to see eradicated is real poverty, not inequality. Poverty is a comparative matter as well, however, since no matter how affluent the lowest income group is, it is still at the bottom. So the focus on (relative) poverty can also be an unfortunate distraction. We must keep our eye on the ball: real poverty.

America's lowest-income population is better off than even their recent ancestors, not to mention many people around the world today. But that doesn't mean it couldn't be even richer. The way to bring that about is to eliminate every government impediment to wealth creation, business formation, entrepreneurship, and labor mobility. That means eliminating everything from business regulations and subsidies to occupational licensing to home-building restrictions to intellectual property to taxes and much more. That's a large enough agenda to keep any politician busy for a while.