A supernova about to blow: Wolf-Rayet star WR 124, 15,000 light years from Earth
Wikimedia Commons / NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

Following last Tuesday’s elections, the recriminations and accusations are flying thick and fast, especially among progressives. Since they are the ones who suffered the devastating defeats, that is only natural. However, many of these reactions lack a certain — what shall I say? — introspection, which I find very disturbing. 

The Precarious Position of Progressive Ideology

Among the excuses for progressive defeat  up and down the ballot is that the American people are basically racist, xenophobic, religiously bigoted, homophobic and misogynistic, rather than defeat being due to a working class revolt. Rather than the reason for defeat being some fault in progressive ideas, progressives howl that Americans are a very awful people, hardly fit to be called human! The attitudes progressives betray by making these kinds of excuses are the same kinds of feelings and beliefs that could lead to civil war.

One of the few introspective reactions from a progressive I have seen to date was written by a Ph.D. student in political science at Stanford University. Artemis Seaford, in her post Liberal Academia in Donald Trump’s World on the American Interest website, does not admit to any great error on the part of progressives’ ideology. She does however admit to an uneasiness about many of progressives’ reactions. She writes:

A popular knee-jerk reaction has been to attribute the outcome exclusively to bigotry, misogyny, the Electoral College, uneducated white males, and voter identification laws. This is usually followed by a vow to “fight sexism and racism in all its forms.”

There is nothing prima facie objectionable with such a reaction. However, just below its surface lies the proposition that nearly half American voters have finally shown us their true bigoted, misogynist colors, and the implication that it is up to us, liberal savants, to show them why they are wrong. Going down this route means going about liberal “business as usual.” It means digging in our heels in the face of an external threat and doubling down on our positions, taking them even more for granted than before.

She goes on to suggest the manner in which progressives (she calls them liberals, and their ideology liberalism, which of course is a misnomer) explained their beliefs has had the effect of alienating the working and middle class. She then counsels that to correct the situation would “require recognizing that tens of millions of Americans voted for Trump despite his bigotry, not because of it.” She goes on to note that progressive academics have been intolerant of other views, that “We have dismissed our conservative peers in the classroom and taunted them on social media all while refusing to seriously engage their views.”

While Seaford’s recommendation that progressives respectfully engage people with opposing views is refreshing, coming from a progressive, she still can not see why so many have rejected progressive policies at the polls. Progressive economic and social policies have consistently failed, and trying to force the American people to follow government policies that consistently generate failure can only rouse the electorate to anger. Most Americans may or may not be able to see the underlying reasons for these failures, but they can painfully feel their results. They can see the requirements of Obamacare eating away at their families’ scarce resources. They can see the economy is not providing them with the jobs they want and need, and that their incomes have generally been stagnate for approximately a decade. They can see how ISIS has inspired terrorism that has killed Americans within the homeland. They may not yet see the threat of the Russia, China, Iran Axis, but when they do that will be just another reason to doubt the progressive approach to national security.

The myopia of progressives has led them to believe that racism and misogyny continue to be THE fundamental problems in the United States. However, the fights for civil and equal rights were basically won long ago during the 1960s and 1970s. This statement does not mean there are no longer civil and equal rights problems, but those remaining problems are not ones that can be solved by promulgating and enacting new laws. As in any chaotic system (see also How is the Weather Like a Country’s Economy?), what remaining problems continue to exist will only be solved by interactions between individuals and groups of individuals. Blatant discrimination is now addressable in courts of law.

What progressives have yet to realize is that the state itself has become the most potent enemy of public well-being. The accumulation of economic power by government is leading us in a fascist direction by enabling crony capitalism. It is also misallocating increasing fractions of the GDP to throw us into perpetual secular stagnation. If progressives want to continue to be relevant, they need to engage their ideological opponents in a discussion on these problems.

Analysis of What We Know About Reality Can Be Liberating!

After such a long string of failures, progressives would be well advised to go back to basics to question fundamental assumptions about reality. In particular, they should ask themselves the following very basic questions:

1. How is the most fundamental economic problem — how to get the price and quantity of goods supplied by producers equal to the price and quantity of goods consumers are willing to buy — best answered? In periods of economic hard times, their answer in the past has been to substitute government demand for private demand. Yet to attempt this for all goods and services is manifestly impossible due to the vast complexity of the economy. Instead, progressive governments have tried supplying demand for a small subset of all goods and services. Favorite choices have been public infrastructure projects building and repairing roads, bridges, public sanitation, electric power generation and distribution, etc. Also, favored has been the subsidization of  state government, especially for local school districts and law enforcement. Nevertheless, however a government decides to structure its Keynesian stimulus program, the injected government funds will necessarily be into  just a fraction of the entire economy. Would this not allocate resources into a small part of the economy, which would deny those same resources to possibly more vital parts of the economy? Progressives should ponder the differences in outcome between the depression of 1920-1921, which lasted for about a year-and-a-half, and the Great Depression, which lasted for about a decade. In the first case, the depression was particularly sharp with consumer price deflation being between -13% and -18%, wholesale price deflation at -37%, and unemployment raging from 9% to 12%. Yet the government did absolutely nothing and the economy recovered to vigorous growth after 18 months of recession. This is a significantly shorter duration than that of the Great Depression of 108 months, during which the federal government had extensive “stimulus” programs. It is a sobering reflection that our current economic problems, both in government response and duration, have a greater similarity to the Great Depression than to the depression of 1920-21.
   
   
2. From all we can observe, not only the economy but human society in general are chaotic systems. Chaotic systems with a huge number of degrees of freedom that interact strongly locally between pairs of components (in this case pairs of human beings or relatively small groups of individuals) can be stable only through local microbalances. Does not a government program affecting the system globally upset all those microbalances to create instability?
   
   
3. Given the history of the Soviet Union, as well as of China and India before they began to evolve away from socialism, is it not true that government intrusion into the basic mechanisms of the economy  tends to suppress economic activity?
   
   As it turns out, we have actual data on how well economies perform with varying degrees of government control of the economy, courtesy of the World Bank and the Heritage House Foundation. The WSJ/Heritage House Index of Economic Freedom is a simple arithmetic average of 10 subindices, each one of which can vary from zero to 100, zero if the country in question has total despotic control of the economy and 100 if the country has absolutely no control of that aspect of the economy. The average of these indices then gives an effective, if not ideal measure of how much a government controls its country’s economy.
   
   The World Bank on the other hand provides economic data for most countries on Earth, including each country’s per capita GDP and Gini index. The Gini index is a measurement of how equally a country’s GDP is distributed among its population. If it is zero, absolutely everyone in the country gets exactly the same share of the GDP; if it is 100 only one person in the entire country gets the entire GDP and everyone else gets nothing. Therefore zero is the ideal value, especially from the perspective of a progressive.
   
   If I were to plot every country’s per capita GDP versus its index of economic freedom, I get the following plot below.

   

   
   The red curve is a least squares fit of a quadratic polynomial times an exponential function. Nevertheless, due to the wide scatter of the points, the fit with an R²=0.394 is not especially good. This means that the least squares fit explains only 39.4% of the variation of the individual country points. Nevertheless, the plot does demonstrate strong exponential growth of GDP with increasing economic freedom and declining government intrusion into the economy. When I make the same sort of plot of the Gini index versus economic freedom, I get the result below.

   

   Notice the linear fit trending downwards with increasing economic freedom. As economic freedom of a country increases, the Gini index trends downward, i.e. the distribution of income tends to become more equal as the intrusion of the state into the economy grows less. This is exactly the opposite trend from what progressives would expect. The two plots above are together a mighty argument to get a country’s government as much out of economic affairs as possible.

4. Also, is it not the purpose of American democracy to maximize the freedom of the individual to order and determine the direction of his/her own life? How is this purpose served by limiting their economic and other freedoms through micromanaging government regulations? Everyone realizes a certain amount of regulation is necessary and required for society to exist, but in recent decades economic regulation  appears to be exactly like entropy: it always increases globally and local decreases are possible only with larger global increases. Is there a limiting principle?

When reality kicks you in the butt, you better pay attention before she really gets nasty!

Oh! And the theme image at the top of this post? Think about it while you still can.

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