A reader of mine recently made some very interesting comments, via Facebook:
Well, Michael, as I am sure you know, the human brain evolved for survival on the African savannah, a place of extreme scarcity. As a result, we still retain the basic programming to consume as much as we can, and it takes a direct intervention from our rational mind to say, “No, that’s enough,” or “No, I don’t need that.”
Most people still live in fear of scarcity. To them, it seems rational to employ the government, an agency much larger and more powerful than themselves, to insure them against scarcity.
Even though they rationally know that it is impossible for everyone to be a “winner” in the game of handouts, they still prefer to gamble. The lottery will never go broke because gambling, even at long odds, makes people feel more secure, even though they are more likely to be losers than winners in such a system.
I don’t know how much role the evolution of the brain plays in human emotions. I do know that underlying ideas, absorbed individually starting in childhood and young adulthood, are crucially important. I also know that different individuals possess different ideas, different attitudes and different temperaments. There’s a whole lot that goes into what we label, for the sake of conceptual simplicity, a “personality.”
I do agree that a lot of people fear scarcity. Most of us born in the United States have no concept of what scarcity is. Yet most of human history — long after the African savannah — and even much of the world, up through and including the present time, faces scarcity on a daily basis.
Scarcity is an objective, but also a relative, concept. If you’re in a third world nation with no marketplace to handle production and rational redistribution of goods and services, then you’re concerned about your next meal. If you’re in the United States or a similar nation already past the industrialization era, you might consider scarcity the inability to buy the kind of car you want, or all the clothes you want, or to be able to take your ideal vacation. In that sense, “scarcity” is relative and personal.
Here’s the issue: Most people don’t have a concept of where goods, products or services come from. This is because they haven’t thought the issue out all that much. They tend to rely on the proclamations of those who think on that level, who think about such deeper matters. Most of the intellectuals and others who think on that level tell us that production basically arises from distribution. In other words, America has plenty and (it’s implied) always will have plenty. The question is never production or supply; it’s always fairness of redistribution. Those who focus on the need to redistribute wealth never show much concern for where that wealth comes from; they seem to take it for granted, as if it always will exist, even though wealth on the scale of America has never existed in human history before the last century or two. By the standards of real scarcity, and most of history, we are all wealthy in America beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
Based on the standard of fairness that most intellectuals hold, and the vast majority of the population has internalized, equality of distribution is the central purpose of any social system (including that system’s government). People differ only in how far they believe that principle or standard should be extended; but in most people’s minds, consciously or subconsciously, that’s the standard. Some go for all out socialism, and some for watered down versions of it (i.e., Democrats or Republicans).
The error here is tremendous. The error lies in the fact that the fundamental economic question of human survival is not distribution, but production. Even if you hold that socialized (i.e. government determined) redistribution is the only moral way for humans to exist, this standard presupposes that there’s enough (or more than enough) food, goods and services/wealth to redistribute. Wealth redistribution is an ever-present concern of Obama and those who support him; but wealth, even to be distributed by some standard, must first be created. And it won’t continue to be created (at least as much) once people are told they must create it for the sake of others, and they will not be able to keep much, most (or even any) of it once it has been created. This is not an unfortunate or flawed aspect of human nature; it’s simply honest logic and justice.
Economic plenty is present only where minds (most importantly, the best minds) are free to think, and where people are physically free to plan, meet customer needs, make profits and do all kinds of things that no public, centralized system could ever hope to perform. Yet fear and yearning for security lures people not towards economic freedom, but away from it. America is simply the latest — and, because of all it had to lose, the most tragic — example of this long-standing psychological and ideological trend.
While it’s true that on some level most people fear scarcity, they’re both morally and economically mistaken to place their hope and trust in what they consider proper distribution.
Throughout history, scarcity has existed the most in civilizations where production is the least. This makes sense, to the point of being common sense. In Soviet Russia and Communist Cuba, to name only two examples, people were not free to produce, own their earnings or make a profit. Those societies stagnated and the economy ultimately collapsed. In the United States, where private ownership and economic freedom predominated, experience has been precisely the opposite.
What most people don’t take the time to consider is that the only way to alleviate scarcity is to do what nations like the United States — more than any other in history — have done: Create and permit the conditions where production is maximized. Economically free societies create the most, because production requires the ability to make and keep a profit; the ability to think and experiment or innovate unhampered by edicts, regulation or hampering by third parties who don’t know what they’re regulating; and the ability to trade freely with willing and interested customers, whether it’s for food or more high level products and services that a free society inevitably produces.
A lot of people are afraid, like my reader suggested, in a way that’s reminiscent of living in a wild state of nature where scarcity is the constant, very real concern.
Because of their fear, they tend to vote for politicians who reassure them on the issue of redistribution. “Not to worry,” these politicians say, in one form or another. “We’ll make sure that safety net is always there for you.” People consistently vote for this, and it’s not really a Republican-Democrat issue. Why? Because of a perfectly understandable and reasonable fear of scarcity. They also can vote for socialism for other reasons — e.g., a desire to mooch or live off others through the government. However, I maintain that this isn’t an overwhelmingly dominant view; if it were, and if that many people were that depraved, society would have already reached its total collapse, and while that could eventually happen, it has not happened yet. I honestly don’t think most Americans are depraved by a standard of self-responsibility; I think they’re afraid, and for the wrong reasons with precisely the wrong solution in mind.
The thing people have to be convinced of — to fight that “savannah-like,” fear-based brain, or the fearful, childlike mentality so fostered and exploited by politicians like Obama and many others — is that scarcity can only be defeated by production. And the only route to production is continuing (and expanding) economic freedom. You read that right: Greedy, unfettered, life-loving, experimental, always evolving and always expanding capitalist freedom, checked only by private property rights, the right to be free from coercion, and the right to be protected from fraud.
It’s interesting that in the United States, way back in the beginning, the nation was not yet a developed economy, not even on the level of established European countries at that time. The fear I’m describing here was not relevant, because people at that time had nothing to lose. The kind of people who immigrated to the United States — by definition — wanted to fend for themselves and be left alone. Why else would anyone leave civilization for the completely unsettled and unknown? No other type of immigrant was possible, because the United States was a wilderness with nothing to offer other than what you made of it.
In a strange way, the United States became a victim of its own unprecedented success, i.e., a level of material production, prosperity and expansion incomprehensible to anyone living on earth at that time. As America grew to the scale of material wealth we know today, there was much more to lose. And that’s when fear took over, successively, generation by generation.
Fear, in itself, need not ruin a country, nor bring down its economy. In fact, rational fear of scarcity is even a good thing. But when that fear is based on the wrong understanding of what creates wealth and what’s required to sustain it — you’re in for a difficult ride.
That’s precisely where we are today.
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