Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism

  PRAISE FOR

  EXCUSE ME, PROFESSOR

  “In an era of economic stagnation for the vast majority of Americans, and at a time when opportunities for upward social mobility are disappearing, careful, critical thinking about economic reality and economic policy are indispensable. It is long past time to dismiss the clichés and restore economic literacy. That is why I welcome this collection of essays.”

  —Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Department of Politics, Princeton University

  “An indispensable guide to confronting the socialists among us who disguise themselves as ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives.’”

  —David Horowitz, President, David Horowitz Freedom Center

  “This is just the book today’s college students need to understand the world in which they live and will, soon enough, lead. I encourage every parent, grandparent, and concerned citizen who cares deeply about America’s future to give copies to all of the young people they know. It may be the only time these students ever learn the truth about the way the world works.”

  —Christopher Long, President, Intercollegiate Studies Institute

  “Larry Reed is one of the sharpest thinkers and clearest communicators in the free-market movement. His well-organized book refutes the widespread collectivist mythology that chomps away daily at America’s liberty and prosperity. Reed and his co-authors lead us through the socialists’ rubble and then chart a common-sense path to good times. I learned plenty from this book, and so will you.”

  —Deroy Murdock, Fox News Contributor, Senior Fellow, Atlas Network

  EXCUSE ME, PROFESSOR

  Copyright © 2015 by Foundation for Economic Education

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, website, or broadcast.

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  First e-book edition 2015: 978-1-62157-466-8

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the paperback edition as follows:

  Excuse me, professor: challenging the myths of progressivism / edited by Lawrence W. Reed ; introduction by Ron Robinson.

  pages cm

  1.Free enterprise--United States. 2.Progressivism (United States politics) 3.Capitalism--Political aspects--United States. 4.United States--Politics and government--21st century.I. Reed, Lawrence W., editor of compilation.

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  2015021727

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  Excuse Me, Professor is a joint project of

  The Foundation for Economic Education

  Young America’s Foundation

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  #1“Income Inequality Arises from Market Forces and Requires Government Intervention”

  #2“Because We’re Running Out of Resources, Government Must Manage Them”

  #3“Equality Serves the Common Good”

  #4“The More Complex the Society, the More Government Control We Need”

  #5“Income Inequality Is the Great Economic and Moral Crisis of Our Time”

  #6“Capitalism Fosters Greed and Government Policy Must Temper It”

  #7“The Free Market Ignores the Poor”

  #8“The Economy Needs More Planning—Central Planning, That Is”

  #9“Human Rights Are More Important Than Property Rights”

  #10“I Have a Right!”

  #11“Rich People Have an Obligation to Give Back”

  #12“I Prefer Security to Freedom”

  #13“Cooperation, Not Competition!”

  #14“Healthcare Is a Right”

  #15“We Are Destroying the Earth and Government Must Do Something”

  #16“Ownership Must Be Tempered by Sharing”

  #17“All We Need Is the Right People to Run the Government”

  #18“Humanity Can Be Best Understood in a Collective Context”

  #19“Big Government Is a Check on Big Business”

  #20“Government Can Be a Compassionate Alternative to the Harshness of the Marketplace”

  #21“Capitalism’s Sweatshops and Child Labor Cry Out for Government Intervention”

  #22“Voluntary, Market-Based Arrangements ‘Use’ People”

  #23“The Balance of Trade Deficit Requires Government Action”

  #24“Americans Squander Their Incomes on Themselves While Public Needs Are Neglected”

  #25“If Government Doesn’t Relieve Distress, Who Will?”

  #26“Historical Preservation Won’t Happen Unless the Government Takes Charge”

  #27“Government Must Have the Power to Make People Take Better Care of Themselves”

  #28“Government Spending Brings Jobs and Prosperity”

  #29“Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle Proved Regulation Was Required”

  #30“Capitalism’s Industrial Revolution Cursed the World with the Horror of Child Labor”

  #31“Labor Unions Raise Wages and the Standard of Living”

  #32“FDR Was Elected in 1932 on a Progressive Platform to Plan the Economy”

  #33“The Great Depression Was a Calamity of Unfettered Capitalism”

  #34“Government Must Subsidize the Arts”

  #35“Government Is an Inflation Fighter”

  #36“Outsourcing Is Bad for the Economy”

  #37“If FDR’s New Deal Didn’t End the Depression, Then World War II Did”

  #38“The Minimum Wage Helps the Poor”

  #39“Free Markets Exploit Women”

  #40“The Rich Are Getting Richer and the Poor Are Getting Poorer”

  #41“Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company Proved We Needed Antitrust Laws to Fight Market Monopolies”

  #42“Jesus Christ Was a Progressive Because He Advocated Income Redistribution to Help the Poor”

  #43“The Free Market Cannot Provide Public Education”

  #44“Warren Buffett’s Federal Tax Rate Is Less Than His Secretary’s”

  #45“Profit Is Evidence of Suspicious Behavior”

  #46“Robots and Computerization Cause Unemployment”

  #47“Statistical Disparities between Races Prove Discrimination”

  #48“The Solution to Over-Population Is Population Control”

  #49“Resource-Poor Countries Need Strong Central Planning to Develop”

  #50“People Love the Robin Hood Story Because He Took From the Rich to Give to the
Poor”

  #51“Greedy Capitalists Take Advantage of People in Natural Disasters; Price Controls Are the Answer”

  #52“Progressives Have Good Intentions, So What Else Is Required?”

  About the Editor and Co-Author

  Contributing Authors

  Suggested Reading List

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  CLICHÉS ARE TIRED, SHOP-WORN AND OFTEN MISLEADING. SO WHY COMPILE A book of them? Because when they are deployed in the service of a flawed ideology, dressed up to appear new and refreshing, they lead well-meaning people down dead-end paths.

  Though it often emanates from the ivory towers of academia, progressivism is a dead-end philosophy. Its central notion is that an educated elite should plan and engineer societies by the use of centralized power. Progressives reject many of the principles upon which America was founded, including small and limited government, individual liberty and choice, the sanctity of contract and private property, and a free market economy.

  In many respects, there’s little that’s truly “progressive” about progressivism. One of the crucial lessons of history is that human progress happens when humans are free, yet the progressive agenda would substantially diminish freedom while promising the unachievable—a gargantuan but somehow wise and compassionate State. Because progressives can’t succeed if they level with people in clear and accurate terms, they resort to an endless stream of half-truths. They’ve been at it for so long—more than a century—that many of those half-truths are now clichés that are widely familiar but often ineffectively answered.

  Think of this collection as a handy reference guide no matter what your level of education or choice of profession may be. You don’t need to be an economist or philosopher to understand what’s written here. Progressive clichés are presented, then stripped of their deceptions with compelling arguments for a broad, lay audience. For people who are actively engaged in advancing liberty and combatting the fallacies of progressivism, this will be an indispensable addition to your arsenal of intellectual ammunition.

  It is more than a happy coincidence that the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) should collaborate with Young America’s Foundation (YAF) in this important project. The antecedents to this book are two classic FEE publications that YAF helped distribute in the past: Clichés of Politics, published in 1994, and the more influential Clichés of Socialism, which made its first appearance in 1962. Indeed, this new collection contains a number of chapters from those two earlier works, updated for the present day. Other entries first appeared in some version in FEE’s magazine, The Freeman. Still others are brand new, never having appeared in print anywhere.

  This anthology of essays, with the exception of #52, appeared under the online series title, “Clichés of Progressivism” from April 2014 to April 2015 on the YAF and FEE websites. Our two organizations are delighted to provide this book to a large audience of both newcomers to the ideas of liberty and older friends who want updated answers to the evolving deceptions of the statist Left.

  The FEE/YAF connection takes on a personal perspective with FEE’s president, Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed as the editor of this project. At the age of 14, Larry was deeply affected by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Within weeks, he participated in a YAF demonstration against that invasion in downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He joined YAF and devoured the information packet provided to new members, including a subscription to The Freeman, Frédéric Bastiat’s The Law, Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, Henry Grady Weaver’s The Mainspring of Human Progress, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and yes, an early edition of Clichés of Socialism. As Larry himself has put it, “The message was, ‘If you want to be an anti-communist, you had to go deeper than just being against tanks and guns used on innocent people. You have to know economics and philosophy too, backwards and forwards.’ YAF introduced me to FEE and now almost half a century later, we both are introducing our shared values to new generations of young people.”

  At about the same time Larry was getting his start in the “movement” for liberty, I was doing the same, working my way up from chapter founder to leadership positions within YAF. I can attest to the power of the publications and seminars FEE produced then and still does today, for they were instrumental in the evolution of my thinking too. It’s been a pleasure in recent years to work with Larry to rekindle our association and thereby magnify the influence of both FEE and YAF.

  Excuse Me, Professor is not meant to be the final, definitive response to a harmful ideology. Progressivism, if nothing else, has proven to be a slippery, clever beast. It’s like the arcade game, “Whack a Mole.” Smack one myth and another one rears its head. And the one you smacked never really vanishes; when people forget its underlying falsehood or a new generation comes along, it just reappears. This is a project that will require our attention as far into the future as the best eyes can now see.

  Finally, I want to thank Rick and Jane Schwartz for inspiring and making this publication possible. Rick always seeks to have the most persuasive answer available to his employees and friends. Rick and Jane’s insights help freedom’s cause in so many ways.

  Ron Robinson

  President

  Young America’s Foundation

  Reston, Virginia

  #1

  “INCOME INEQUALITY ARISES FROM MARKET FORCES AND REQUIRES GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION”

  BY MAX BORDERS

  INEQUALITY IS EVERYWHERE. IN A RAINFOREST, MAHOGANY TREES TAKE UP MORE water and sunlight than all the other plants and animals. In our economic ecosystems, entrepreneurs and investors control more of the assets than the rest of us. No one worries about the mahogany trees and yet there is terrible fretting about the wealthy. In the case of ecosystems and economies, however, there are very good reasons for an unequal distribution of resources.

  The sources of some forms of inequality are better than others. For example, inequality that is a consequence of crony capitalism—or what Barron’s editor Gene Epstein refers to as “crapitalism”—is surely undesirable. Therefore, it’s important for us to make a distinction between economic entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs: the former create value for society; the latter have figured out how to transfer resources from others into their own coffers, usually by lobbying for subsidies, special favors or anti-competitive laws.

  If we can ever disentangle the crapitalists from the true entrepreneurs, we can see the difference between makers and takers. And inequality that follows from honest entrepreneurship, far from indicating that something is wrong, indicates an overall flourishing. In a system where everyone is made better off through creative activity and exchange, some people are going to get wealthy. It’s a natural feature of the system—a system that rewards entrepreneurs and investors for being good stewards of capital. Of course, when people are not good stewards of capital, they fail. In other words, people who make bad investments or who don’t serve customers well aren’t going to stay rich long.

  Whenever we hear someone lamenting inequality we should immediately say “So what?” Some of the smartest (and even some of the richest) people in America confuse concerns about the poor with concerns about the assets the wealthy control. It’s rooted in that old zero-sum thinking—the idea that if a poor guy doesn’t have it, it’s because the wealthy guy does. But one person is only better off at the expense of another under crapitalism, not under conditions of honest entrepreneurship and free exchange.

  Except for those who made lots of money hiring lawyers and lobbyists instead of researchers and developers, wealthy people got rich by creating a whole lot of value for a whole lot of people. Thus, the absence of super-wealthy people would actually be a bad sign for the rest of us—especially the poor. Indeed, it would indicate one of two things: either that not much value had been created (fewer good things in our lives like iPhones and chocolate truffles) or the government had engaged in radical redistribution, removing significant inc
entives for people to be value creators and stewards of capital at all.

  Let’s face it. When resources are sitting in investments or in bank accounts, they are not idle. In other words, most rich people don’t just stuff their millions under mattresses or take baths in gold coins. In conditions of economic stability, these resources are constantly working in the economy. In more stable conditions, a portion finds its way to a creative restaurateur in South Carolina in the form of a loan. Another portion is being used by arbitrageurs who help stabilize commodity prices. Another portion is being loaned to a nurse so she can buy her first home. Under normal circumstances, these are all good things. But when too many resources get intercepted by Uncle Sam before they get to the nodes in these economic networks, they will be squandered in the federal bureaucracy—a vortex where prosperity goes to die.

  We should also remember that, due to our productive markets, most of us live like kings. Differences in assets are not the same as differences in living standards, though people tend to fetishize the former. Economist Donald Boudreaux reminds us that Bill Gates’s wealth may be about 70,000 times greater than his own. But does Bill Gates ingest 70,000 times more calories than Professor Boudreaux? Are Bill Gates’s meals 70,000 times tastier? Are his children educated 70,000 times better? Can he travel to Europe or to Asia 70,000 times faster or more safely? Will Gates live 70,000 times longer? Today, even the poorest segment in America live better than almost anyone in the 18th Century and better than two-thirds of the world’s population.

  When we hear people fretting about inequality, we should ask ourselves: Are they genuinely concerned for the poor or are they indignant about the rich? Here’s how to tell the difference: Whenever someone grumbles about “the gap,” ask her if she’d be willing for the rich to be even richer if it meant improved conditions for the absolute poorest among us. If she says “no” they are admitting their concern is really with what the wealthy have, not what the poor lack. If her answer is “yes,” then the so-called “gap” is irrelevant. You can then go on to talk about a legitimate concern—e.g., how best to improve the conditions of the poor without paying them to be wards of the state. In other words, the meaningful conversation we should be having is about absolute poverty, not relative poverty.