There have been huge advances in technology and substantial declines in trade barriers in recent years. While these developments have raised living standards they have been hard on people whose skills were rendered obsolete or uncompetitive. When changes evolve gradually, as when so many people left farming in the last century, the disruption is not so great. Changes are now coming faster and are extending to some high-paid professional jobs. Automated systems can now handle at least the routine aspects of some legal research and medical diagnosis.

Time and time again new doors have opened to workers as old doors closed. Machines replace workers, but they raise productivity and produce new employment opportunities. We can expect this pattern to continue for a long time to come. Still, it is within the realm of possibility that robots and computers could take over so much work that the demand for human workers would shrink drastically. But those very machines would mean higher productivity and thus higher living standards.

A great deal of work can be now be done remotely, providing an advantage to areas with low living costs. Substantial outsourcing of such jobs to foreign countries has occurred (though that trend may be reversing as low-cost areas of the United States become competitive and as customer dissatisfaction and problems with managing offshore workers come up). The benefits of outsourcing and other productivity enhancements are spread across all consumers, but the job losses are concentrated among small and sometimes vocal minorities.

Another theoretical point: Unemployment notwithstanding, it is an empirical fact of life that labor is scarce relative to natural resources, as Murray Rothbard explained. Over time, this gap tends to lessen and could theoretically disappear.

Education Is Key

Problems with education are legion, but two in particular bear on unemployment and underemployment. One is the emphasis on college education over vocational training. Everyone should attend college, says President Obama. Really? What about welders, truck drivers, repair people, retail sales people? These skills are in demand, and for many people the jobs may offer good pay and personal satisfaction. Why not attend a trade school or get an apprenticeship rather than a college degree? Compare four years in school leading to a bachelor of arts in business and a big student debt versus on-the-job learning.

The second problem is that college administrators and instructors lack incentives to prepare students for good jobs. Schools usually have little to say about the jobs their graduates have gotten or the debt burdens they carry.

Even with all the emphasis on college, by 2020 only about a third of the labor force will be equipped with bachelor’s degrees or higher, according to the McKinsey Global Institute. But the glut of dubious business and social “science” degree-holders will continue while STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) degree holders will remain scarce.

Among employers surveyed by McKinsey, a majority expect to hire more part-time, temporary, or contract workers. One reason for this trend is mandated and generally very expensive health insurance for full-time employees. But more sophisticated resource-management systems also contribute to this trend, in addition to telecommuting opportunities.

Unemployment Figures Are Grim, and Yet . . .

As this is written, the widely followed U-3 measure of unemployment stands at 9.1 percent while the broader U-6 is a whopping 16.2 percent. People are also going longer without work. About 45 percent of those unemployed have been out of work for more than 27 weeks. The number of discouraged workers rose sharply during the recent recession. Speaking of the Great Recession, it officially ended in June 2009, and if we had gotten a recovery along the lines of past recoveries, GDP would be booming by now and unemployment, always the last aspect to recover, would be falling noticeably. Not only is unemployment high, but GDP growth for the first half of 2011 was close to zero. There was talk of a slide back into recession, though this diminished in the fall.

Job losses since the start of the Great Recession number about 7.5 million; three million more people have become discouraged. Total payrolls amount to about 130 million, fewer than in 2000, when the population was about 11 percent lower. Seven people compete for each job opening.

Unemployment varies widely from place to place. The U-3 version varies from 3.2 percent in North Dakota to 12.4 percent in Nevada. Among cities the numbers range from 3.2 percent in Bismarck, North Dakota, to 27.9 percent in Yuma, Arizona. There is also wide variation among job classifications. Nutritionists, welders, and nurses’ aides are in short supply, along with computer specialists and engineers.

Aggregate figures always mask important differences. Many employers still find it hard to locate good people. The McKinsey study reports that 40 percent of companies surveyed have had openings for six months, while 64 percent reported positions for which they cannot find qualified applicants, with managers, scientists, and computer engineers topping the list.

Anecdotally, “Now Hiring” signs are not hard to spot. Friends who own businesses tell me they have difficulty filling even a receptionist’s job with someone who is reliable, can write a passable letter, or create a simple Excel spreadsheet. Alas these days one cannot assume that a holder of a bachelor’s degree in business, for example, has these basic skills.

Recent Government Policy

The Fed has been unable to do anything about unemployment in recent years. The massive doses of money inflation, which tripled the monetary base (currency plus bank reserves) from about 2008 until the present, have not produced any significant price inflation, and unemployment remains stubbornly high. Money inflation has not produced price inflation largely because banks are not lending but instead have accumulated massive amounts of excess reserves—above and beyond the levels mandated by the Fed to back deposit liabilities. (The Fed pays interest on reserves held in the banks’ Fed accounts.)

As we have seen, the distinction between U-3 and U-6 hinges on the rather arbitrary classification of some unemployed workers as “discouraged.” Alternately, one could simply count the number of work-age people who do not hold jobs. For example, one-fifth of all men of prime working age are not getting up in the morning and heading for a job either because they’re officially unemployed or excluded from the labor force.

Labor productivity is way up and with it, corporate profits. This is typical of the early stages of a recovery. Employers realize that they may have gone overboard with hiring during the boom and need to pull back. When they need additional help they usually turn first to temporary workers. Employees work harder with the specter of unemployment looming large. Only later does employers’ confidence pick up enough that they’re willing to take the risky step of adding permanent hires.

Productivity increases are a good thing in the long run, but by this stage of the recovery employment should be picking up. Why isn’t it?

What’s to Be Done?

Businesspeople have to predict the future, so they hate uncertainty, especially the kind that comes from government—and there’s plenty of that around right now. What will Obamacare do to them? Will the Bush tax cuts be allowed to expire next year? Will there be another debt crisis? What will happen to the not-so-almighty dollar? Who will win next year’s election? The best way to get the economy on track again is to lessen these vexing uncertainties. Given the performance of the President and Congress in the recent debt ceiling debacle, this seems unlikely to happen before the next election.

Rhetoric matters. By 1937 unemployment had recovered somewhat from its Great Depression peak of 25 percent. But with the failure of the New Deal becoming evident, FDR, needing a scapegoat, turned against businesspeople with new regulations, antitrust action, new taxes, and hostile rhetoric—he called them “economic royalists” at one point. The recovery stalled, unemployment rose, and only the war brought an end to unemployment—good news if you got a job, bad news if it was a job that got you shot at. (But what was being made? Not consumer goods.) President Obama has referred to “fat-cat bankers” but has backed away from inflammatory rhetoric, perhaps because of adult supervision.

Can stimulus programs mitigate unemployment? Sure, they can put people to work, but the projects are politically motivated and do not represent the best use of scarce resources, as market-based projects must try to do. The projects end, the workers disperse, and there has often been little or no lasting benefit. About all we have to show for those programs are massive new debt levels, a weakening dollar, and a feeble economy—and yes, a frightened and angry populace.

The economics profession must lessen its fascination with dubious macroeconomic aggregates. Production of needed and wanted goods and services is what really matters, not just production of any old thing that gets added to GDP. Economists should focus on conditions that generate real jobs, jobs that produce things people really want, not just any activity that draws a subsidized paycheck.

Congress must make serious spending cuts, and proponents should not pretend these won’t hurt short-term. Cuts should be immediate, because promises about cuts ten years from now are all but meaningless. Today’s Congress has little influence over future officeholders.

The Federal Reserve should be relieved of its unemployment mandate (and the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau). Its money-creation powers should be reined in, and ultimately it should be abolished.

There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.

It is astounding to hear Obama invoke the old argument that technological advances create permanent idleness among workers. I haven’t heard that one in years. These days foreigners get the blame for lost jobs. Obama has dredged up a real oldie but not-so-goodie. As Henry Hazlitt wrote long ago, “Destroyed a thousand times, [the fallacy] has risen a thousand times out of its own ashes as hardy and vigorous as ever.”

Does Obama really believe what he said or is it just a convenient way to deflect blame for the jobless “recovery”? Does he assume the average voter will take him at his word? Unfortunately, the state of economic understanding leads one to think he might be right about that.

What’s New?

I surely hope Obama realizes that this process is not new. It has been going on for a long time – roughly since the time of the wheel. In 1900 nearly 40 percent of the American workforce was on the farm. That was down from 90 percent in 1800. By 1990 the percentage shrank to less than 3 percent. Machinery and then computers (and other advances) were major reasons for the change. Similarly, American manufacturing keeps growing, but manufacturing employment has fallen. Mark Perry writes, “U.S. Manufacturing output has more than doubled since 1975 … while manufacturing employment has decreased by about 8 million jobs…, resulting in more than a three-fold increase in worker productivity (output per worker) since the 1970s.” (See employment charts and Perry’s quotation here.)

Again, technology can explain these changes.  More (and better) work can be done by fewer people because of computers and other technological wonders. Yet the declines in farm and manufacturing jobs did not create permanent mass unemployment over the long haul. Why not? Because there was other work to do. Our desire for goods and services (including leisure services) is essentially limitless. New jobs arose to absorb the workforce that had become superfluous in farming and manufacturing. And since the combination of rising productivity and competition (despite government constraints) lowered prices, consumers had more money to buy the things those new jobs produced. Living standards rose. What’s more, because of growing consumer demand, employment increased even in existing industries that adopted the new machines. (See Hazlitt’s article.) Bastiat’s principle of the “seen and not seen” is relevant here. Most people don’t associate the rise of new jobs with the passing of old ones.

A caveat: I am abstracting from any government interventions and privileges, including subsidized or direct R&D and sundry regulations, that artificially hastened the conversion from human labor to machines. Without those interventions, the process might have taken more time and traditional firms with wage labor might have been supplanted by other forms of enterprise. However, that is not relevant to theoretical point here.

Life Is Change

Of course change requires people to learn new skills and to be on the lookout for new opportunities. This can be a hardship, especially for older people set in their ways. But shifting consumer tastes impose the same requirement. Life is change, and the point of an economic system is consumption not employment. If government would get out of the way, people would be better able to adapt and cushion the hardship through mutual aid, contract, and other nonstate methods.

Since the recent financial debacle, companies have been buying new equipment but are not hiring fast enough to lower unemployment. On the surface that seems to support Obama’s statement, but we have to look closer.

Where companies can have the same work done by using machines or hiring people, the government in various ways has tipped the scales toward the machine. Obamacare is a prime example. Anything that raises the cost of hiring makes the case for buying equipment instead (or outsourcing) more attractive. On top of this we see a reluctance to start new ventures that is attributable to the myriad government obstacles to correcting for the malinvestment that occurred during the housing bubble and to what Robert Higgs calls “regime uncertainty” — the chilling effect that unpredictable government policymaking can have on the economic climate. (Lots of rules have yet to be written for medical insurance and the financial industry.) A third factor is the government-banking complex, which is nervous about lending money after all the bad decisions made during the late bubble. (Banks would rather earn 0.25 percent on reserves left on deposit with the Federal Reserve than lend to entrepreneurs.)

Structural Changes

While there are indeed structural changes that interfere with employment, they are not the ones Obama imagines. In so many deep-seated ways government, hand in hand with political capitalists, has squelched the vitality of the economic process. It’s no wonder unemployment has become an intractable long-term problem.

The way out is not more Keynesian “stimulus,” targeted tax preferences, or even mere tax cuts. We need a radical elimination, at all levels, of subsidies, monopolistic privileges, taxes, and regulations, which restrain entrepreneurship, unorthodox forms of enterprise, and self-employment. Then we can have our high-tech machines and employment too.

The governor stands accused of leading a nationwide conservative movement to crush unions, but union officials are not shy about acknowledging their own narrow political interest. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Proposals in Wisconsin and other states have “great ramifications” beyond the damage to union coffers and membership, said Gerald McEntee, president of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the nation’s biggest public-sector union.

Unions have told the Obama administration that the state fights could affect the 2012 presidential election by draining unions’ political resources, especially in states like Wisconsin and Ohio. “I think it can put him in some [political] danger,” Mr. McEntee said of the president.

But let’s forget narrow partisan politics and look at bigger issues. Is the governor’s proposal really an assault on human rights, as advocates of the Wisconsin state employees allege? (Their raucous protests at the state Capitol are compared to rebellions in the Middle East.)

The Freed Market

A few basics: In a freed market – meaning no privileges, no bailouts, no legal barriers to competition (domestic or foreign), no patents, no protected banking cartel, no regulatory impediments to self-employment, no vast tracts of government-held land – workers would be free to form voluntary associations called unions and business owners would be free to deal with them or not. If not, workers would be free to use nonviolent methods to gain recognition for their unions, including strike threats, boycotts, and sympathy strikes, as well as lesser measures. Violence by any party against any peaceful person would be illegitimate. Freedom of association would be complete, and coerced association would be beyond the pale.

Under such circumstances, everyone’s demands would be tempered by two powerful factors: freedom and competition. Pay workers too little, and they would be bid away by rivals or take up self-employment. Pay them too much, and rivals would attract customers with lower prices. Demand too high a wage, and risk losing out to someone else willing to work for less. Market rivalry would protect everyone from abuse, which is why competition — endless hosannas to it notwithstanding — is usually the target of government intervention.

But we don’t live in a freed market. We live in an economy where the market has, from the beginning, been fundamentally compromised by pro-business intervention at all levels of government: contracting, debt, subsidies, guarantees, eminent domain, tariffs, patents, land policies, banking cartelization, and so on. (See this.) The pro-business nature of intervention is often obscured by the window dressing of labor, consumer, or environmental rhetoric, but in fact most intervention either was backed by some significant element of the business elite or the regulatory apparatus was captured by it. In contrast to others, business lobbyists have had superior access to power (some of them used to be legislators or regulators), and their firms (unlike smaller or yet-to-be launched businesses) have legal and accounting departments capable of handling the hassles.

Under these circumstances, employees suffer disadvantages that would not exist in a freed market: among them, fewer firms bidding for their services and formidable (though not insurmountable) barriers to self-employment or to worker-owned firms. Add to this the myriad ways the system raises the price of decent subsistence (taxes, building codes, zoning that separates residences from commercial areas, and other land-use restrictions that subsidize sprawl, for example), and you end up with a mass of people dependent on the employer class, mortgages, car loans, and more. Their lives are made all the more susceptible to disruption by the manipulations of the Federal Reserve and other branches of the government that create bubbles and booms followed by busts and jobless “recoveries.”

Most of us were taught in public school that the labor legislation of the New Deal and beyond shifted power from business to labor. Some rejoice while others despair over this. But on closer look labor legislation appears far more like a program to tame worker organizations, bringing their leaders to the corporatist table as junior partners. (The National Civic Federation and the American Association for Labor Legislation, groups filled with the business elite, had long sought similar laws.) These laws set rules for the formation of unions and the tactics they can use.  When the Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act came along, the wildcat strike, sympathy strike, and secondary boycott became illegal or contractually prohibited. Less formal kinds of pressure, such as work-to-rule, fell by the wayside. Things had to be done by the book or else — and the book was enforced by the union officials themselves. (The Wobblies were consequently hampered.)

More Bargaining Power

The upshot is that repeal of labor legislation – much to be desired – wouldn’t reduce workers’ bargaining power but increase it. True, no law would stop employers from hiring strike replacements, but strikes were not previously, and need not be, the only or most effective form of labor activism. (See more here.) Of course, along with the labor legislation must go all corporate welfare, guarantees, and other privileges.

Finally we get to government workers and the row in Wisconsin. It is a grave mistake to treat so-called public employment like other employment. Governments are monopolies that get their revenue by force, not through voluntary exchange. Thus they don’t face the market test of free competition, and they lack key price information with which to engage in economic calculation. The consequences of this difference are considerable.

As Freeman columnist Charles Baird notes, when government negotiates terms with employees, the parties are coconspirators in the looting of captive taxpayers. (Government employees aren’t taxpayers; they are tax-consumers.) Moreover, government-union bureaucrats and government administrators alike want to build up their fiefdoms. Fundamentally they are not rivals but rather accomplices with a harmony of interests contrary to those of the taxpayers. This is aggravated by the fact that those unions are powerful political actors and rich sources of campaign contributions (the ultimate source of which is the taxpayers) and manpower. A politician negotiating with a government union whose election support he seeks is unlikely to have the taxpayers’ interest uppermost in mind.

Government Education?

Thus even free-market advocates with a natural sympathy for labor in the corporate state find it hard to side with government employees. How can one sympathize with state school teachers when the government should have nothing to do with education? This doesn’t mean teachers are bad people, but they do the work of a bad system, and their unions are among the most powerful lobbies in any state capital.

Would the working conditions of state workers become intolerable if their unions were restricted? Not likely. But if they did, would it really be so bad if state governments had trouble finding employees?

So, does this mean that free-market advocates should side with the governor of Wisconsin? Actually, no. State governments are in trouble because they spent profligately when revenues were rolling in and now can’t meet the pension and other obligations they’ve imposed on the taxpayers. As a result, they face a crisis in legitimacy. Some governors realize this and are trying to save the discredited system by trimming spending (for now) and making political hay by reining in the unions.  The fiscal hawks even tout cutbacks as ways to produce more revenue in the future. Rarely do you hear a governor call for the shedding and demonopolization of functions like education. (I don’t mean the phony privatization of contracting out or tax-funded vouchers.) So this is largely a fight over how to preserve and divide the tax spoils.

Taxpayers may breathe a sigh of relief if the governor of Wisconsin prevails. But they should have plenty of issues to fight with him over tomorrow.

In 1817 the Frenchman Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) published his Treatise on the Will and Its Effects. Thomas Jefferson was so enthusiastic about Tracy’s book that he had it translated, then edited and revised the translation himself. He renamed it A Treatise on Political Economy.

Why was Jefferson so excited about the work? It contains a clear appreciation of the free society that would have excited anyone with Jefferson’s philosophical and political proclivities. Let’s have a look at some of what Tracy had to say.

We should first note that Tracy anticipated (though imperfectly) key insights of the Austrian school of economics, which would come into being a little more than half a century later at the University of Vienna under Carl Menger. The classical school of economics associated with Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) leaned on an objective theory of value; the value of goods was said to be determined by the amount of labor embodied in them. Exchange for Smith consists of the trading of equivalents (measured in labor time). But here’s Tracy, four decades later, stating something very close to the subjective utility theory of value that would mark the Austrian school’s revolutionary approach to economics:

In general we may say that whatever is capable of procuring any advantage, even a frivolous pleasure, is useful. . . . [T]he measure of the utility of a thing, real or supposed, is the vivacity with which it is generally desired. . . . Now, how are we to fix the degrees of a thing so inappreciable as the vivacity of our desires? We have, however, a very sure manner of arriving at it. It is to observe the sacrifices to which these desires determine us. . . . [A]n exchange is a transaction in which the two contracting parties both gain. Whenever I make an exchange freely, and without constraint, it is because I desire the thing I receive more than that I give; and, on the contrary, he with whom I bargain desires what I offer more than that which he renders me.

Thus, contra Smith, Tracy understood that people exchange unequal things on the basis of differing assessments of their utility, or usefulness.

And like a good proto-Austrian who understands that the future is uncertain, Tracy hastens to add:

In truth it is possible that, in an exchange, one of the contractors, or even both, may have been wrong to desire the bargain which they conclude. It is possible they may give a thing, which they will soon regret, for a thing which they will soon cease to value. It is possible, also, that one of the two may not have obtained for that which he sacrifices as much as he might have asked, so that he will suffer a relative loss while the other makes an exaggerated gain. But these are particular cases which do not belong to the nature of the transaction.

As a result of his insights, Tracy has a distinctive way of describing society:

Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges. It is never anything else, in any epoch of its duration, from its commencement the most unformed, to its greatest perfection. And this is the greatest eulogy we can give to it, for exchange is an admirable transaction, in which the two contracting parties always both gain; consequently society is an uninterrupted succession of advantages, unceasingly renewed for all its members. . . .

It is this innumerable crowd of small particular advantages, unceasingly arising, which composes the general good, and which produces at length the wonders of perfected society.

Those are some of the fundamentals of Tracy’s positive economics. From there he moves on to normative economics, or political economy. Given what he has said already, we should not be surprised that he embraces freedom and property: “[S]ociety should have for its basis, the free disposition of the faculties of the individual, and the guarantee of whatever he may acquire by their means; then every one exerts himself. One possesses himself of a field by cultivating it, another builds a house, a third invents some useful process, another manufactures, another transports; all make exchanges; the most skilful gain, the most economical amass.”

Tracy points out that land is a key source of income that in a free society competes with employers for labor, maximizing workers’ bargaining power by providing an alternative to wage employment.

[S]o long as society has not occupied all the space of which it may dispose, all still prosper with care; for those who have nothing but their hands, and who do not find a sufficiently advantageous employment for their labour, can go and possess themselves of some of those lands which have no owners, and derive from them a profit so much the more considerable, as they are not obliged to lease or buy them. Accordingly care is general in new and industrious nations. But when once all the country is filled, when there no longer remains a field, which belongs to nobody, it is then that pression begins. Then those who have nothing in advance, or who have too little, can do no otherwise than put themselves in the pay of those who have a sufficiency. They offer their labour every where, it falls in price.

Curiously, Tracy does not acknowledge that land may become unavailable not because of population density but because the government has seized it and given it to the nobles or cronies. In fact, this happened repeatedly in England. State-sponsored “land monopoly” and the exploitation it made possible were deep concerns of libertarians from the early nineteenth century into the twentieth century.

Tracy understood that through government intervention class conflict emerges, as owners of land and capital seek advantage over those who labor for them:

After the free disposition of his labour, the greatest interest of the poor man is that this labour should be dearly paid. Against this I hear violent outcries. All the superior classes of society—and in this view I even comprehend the smallest chief of a workshop—desire that the wages should be very low, in order that they may procure more labour for the same sum of money; and they desire it with so much fury, that when they can, and the laws permit them, they employ even violence to attain this end,—and they prefer the labour of slaves, or serfs, because it is still at a lower rate. These men do not fail to say, and persuade, that what they think is their interest, is the general interest; and that the low price of wages is absolutely necessary to the development of industry, to the extension of manufactures and commerce,—in a word, to the property of the state. [Emphasis added.]

Thus the State is implicated in class conflict, a theme that originated not with Marx but with early libertarians.

In future columns, I’ll examine Tracy’s views on government spending and borrowing.

UPDATE: Above I attributed to Adam Smith the view that “value was determined by the amount of labor needed to produce” goods. James Ahiakpor has alerted me to the fact that I misspoke. For Smith, labor is a measure of exchange value, not a determinant of individual use value. Ahiakpor has written about this matter here.

People typically become libertarians because they favor individualism and abhor seeing themselves and others abused. Unfortunately, nonlibertarians don’t know this. They think libertarians are simply pro-business (and anti-labor). We can set the record straight by acknowledging that government-business collusion hurts working people.

The rest of TGIF is here.

This proposal was not really all that shocking: Such a program would have been consistent enough with the advertised purpose of certain phases of American land policy from 1776 on. American governments handed out land (however acquired) for over a century to veterans, settlers, land speculators, railroads, timber corporations, mining companies, and other parties. (I’ll give you three guesses which groups made out the best). Governments did so as a source of revenue, for geostrategic reasons, to win favor with voters, or to reward a small class of typically American operators who flat-out deserved to be rich.

In a new, revolutionary, and republican society, there was of course much talk about widespread property as the bulwark of republican freedom. But the talk was so general that Federalists and Republicans could share it, while leaving themselves plenty of room in which to create a small class of owners of a disproportionate amount of the public domain. Overall—from the founding land speculators down to 1893, when the frontier allegedly ran out—American land policy resembled in both theory and practice the kind of “privatization” we see under mercantilist Republican administrations. One landmark in the process was Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v. William M’Intosh (1823). Here, Chief Justice John Marshall undertook to write a long essay on the received theory of how property previously stolen by European kings or their agents is best conveyed. As was his wont, Marshall proved entirely too much, in as clear a case of Albert Jay Nock’s “copper riveting” of narrowly focused property rights as we could want. (See my “Albert Jay Nock and Alternative History,” The Freeman, November 2008.)

Southern agrarian Andrew Lytle noted that from the settler’s point of view the whole frontier process represented an attempt to get away from would-be aristocrats and other aspiring land monopolists. Consistent republican ideologists like Thomas Skidmore and George H. Evans agitated from the 1820s into the 1840s in favor of giving homesteaders first claim on the territories. Generally speaking, other claimants prevailed, while the politics of slavery and antislavery further complicated the matter. In the bigger picture, the Homestead Act of 1862 was the exception rather than the rule, as Paul W. Gates showed in a noteworthy 1936 paper (“The Homestead Law in an Incongruous Land System,” American Historical Review).

I cannot discuss here what an ideal policy based on “mixing one’s labor” with resources might have looked like. Suffice it to say that sales of thousands and tens of thousands of acres to individuals, land companies, and corporations were not especially consistent with any genuine republican ideal. The disappearance of most of the best land in California into the hands of a half-dozen individuals in a few decades comes to mind. But large-scale buyers had mixed their money with federal land officers, and that no doubt counts for something.

Meanwhile, the judiciary—state and federal—busily remodeled the common law and shifted the burdens of industrialization onto third parties, extensively modifying the older law of nuisance. Harry Scheiber finds that “law was often, if not to say usually, mobilized to provide effective subsidies and immunities to heavily-capitalized special interests [under] either ‘instrumentalist’ or ‘formalist’ doctrine.” Even existing doctrines of “public rights” and eminent domain came to serve business interests. Finally, federal judges’ discovery in the 1880s of corporate “personhood” in the Fourteenth Amendment perfected the Federalist Party’s original mercantilist program. All these changes importantly influenced just who would benefit from the American State-system of land tenure (to use Nock’s phrase) and its attendant modes of preemption and exploitation.

Land and Independence

Many writers have seen a special relationship between landownership and personal independence. And here we hit on what is perhaps the truest insight of republican theory—one taken up by many classical liberals. Briefly, this holds that a broad “middle class” of property owners is essential to the maintenance of free societies. The point is as old as Aristotle. On the negative side, in decrying the social effects of England’s fabled land monopoly, radical liberals like Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Paine, Thomas Hodgskin, and John Bright implicitly affirmed the republican axiom.

A typical nineteenth-century American “self-help” book aimed at young men did not say, “Get a job working for wages within an increasingly intricate division of labor so as to enjoy a greater variety of consumer goods.” Instead, it said, “Get yourself a competency”—a vision fraught with republican implications suitably modernized. Working for wages, if one did it at all, was a temporary stage—to be endured while learning a skill or trade and abandoned later in favor of real or potential independence. This independence, derided in our time as “illusory,” left one free (within limits) not just from state interference but also from nineteenth-century employers. And if independence is illusory in our time, it is at least partly because the political activities of well-connected elites long since removed the preconditions of independence deliberately and systematically.

One key (but not the only one) to this much-sought-after independence was access to land, a theme taken up by Catholic writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton in early twentieth-century England. Sociologist Robert Nisbet commented that never, after reading Belloc, did he “imagine that there could be genuine individual liberty apart from individual ownership of property.” In any case, as historian Christopher Lasch put it, “Americans took it as axiomatic that freedom had to rest on the broad distribution of property ownership.” Perhaps Americans were wrong to believe such a thing. But let us examine the matter a bit more.

This American axiom receives support from those political economists who believed that the land/labor ratio importantly determines social structure. Edward Gibbon Wakefield somewhat gave the game away in the 1830s by opposing easy access to land in Australia, lest potential wage-earners try for self-sufficiency before spending “enough” years working for others. Marx chided Wakefield for letting this “bourgeois secret” out and was in turn chided by Franz Oppenheimer, Achille Loria, and Nock for not learning the right lesson from Wakefield’s recommendations on rigging the market.

H. J. Nieboer argued (1900) that where resources are “open,” few will work for big enterprises, and the latter will (if they can) institute some form of slavery. Evsey Domar writes (1970) that one never finds “free land, free peasants, and non-working owners” together. Why? Because where political leverage allows, aspiring lords and (literal) rent-seekers will eliminate the free land, the free peasants, or both.

Colonial Policies

With this theorem in view, let us survey some colonial evidence. Enterprisers in colonies have always wanted regular supplies of cheap labor for their projects. Although there is no evidence in favor of a “right” to such a thing, these prospective employers were never discouraged. Aided by colonial administrators with the same assumptions, they gradually overcame native economic independence. Land was the key, and neither the colonizers nor the natives doubted it. No matter how hard natives worked on their holdings, colonialists decried their “idleness”—and their uncivilized failure to work for wages.

We may therefore give the overworked English Enclosures time off (for now) and look at some other cases. Consider the Japanese colonial administrator in Okinawa who complained in 1899 that the typical Okinawan held land and therefore had low expenses and few wants. For these reasons, the native saw “no need to undertake any other business, nor to save money.” Since native lands were held informally, they could not be capitalized. Such people and properties did little for the great cause of development and, shortly, the Japanese government (!) denounced Okinawans’ customary arrangements as “feudal” and set out to modernize the island. American occupation later perfected this anti-agrarian revolution. Doubtless, however, much “employment” was created in the post-World War II Okinawan service economy dominated by the U.S. military.

Turning to English colonies in the Caribbean and Africa, we find comparable phenomena. England abolished slavery in the colonies in the 1830s. (Never mind that, as historian Eric Foner comments, “Through a regressive tax system, the British working classes paid the bill for abolition.”) By this time, English policymakers had embraced Adam Smith’s view that positive incentives motivated labor better than fear of starvation or draconian punishments did. But an ocean made all the difference, Foner observes, and new peasantries made up of former slaves were “seen in London, as in the Caribbean, as a threat not simply to the economic well-being of the islands, but to civilization itself.” John Stuart Mill’s famous defense of peasant proprietors “did not extend to the blacks of the Caribbean; their desire to escape plantation labor and acquire land was perceived as incorrigible idleness.”

And so Britain’s former slave colonies put vagrancy and other laws to work and crafted taxes aimed at restricting “the freedmen’s access to land.” As Foner puts it, “Taxation has always been the state’s weapon of last resort in the effort to promote market relations within peasant societies”—that is, to force people into markets in which they were not eager to participate. In Kenya the problem was one of “dispossessing a peasantry with a preexisting stake in the soil,” but colonial legislation proved up to the task. Foner concludes that in “the Caribbean and southern and eastern Africa . . . the free market [was] conspicuous by its absence”—its workings restricted “as far as possible” in the interest of the well-off and powerful.

Historian Colin Bundy has studied the economic rise and political-economic fall of a class of independent African farmers in the Eastern Cape Colony and other parts of South Africa. Various Cape Location Acts (1869, 1876, and 1884) sought to lessen “the numbers of ‘idle squatters’ (i.e., rent-paying tenants economically active on their own behalf) on white-owned lands.” Such peasant farming “conferred . . . a degree of economic ‘independence’: an ability to withhold, if he so preferred, his labour from white landowners or other employers.” Further: “Both the farmer and the mine-owner perceived . . . the need to apply extra-economic pressures . . . to break down the peasant’s ‘independence,’ increase his wants, and to induce him to part more abundantly with his labour, but at no increased price.” In their view, “Africans had no right to continue as self-sufficient and independent farmers if this conflicted with white interests.”

Bundy observes that “Social engineering on this scale took time and effort, but the incentives were powerful.” By way of a “one man one lot” rule under the Glenn Grey Act of 1894, legislators sought to keep African farming within “certain acceptable bounds.” (Here, finally, was a use for John Locke’s famous “proviso” about leaving enough resources for others!) Evictions increased after the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1903). Rents rose (Enclosure defenders, take note), and former tenants stayed on as laborers. Tax pressure on African farmers increased. This “employers’ offensive” from 1890 to 1913 ended successfully in the South African Natives Land Act of 1913, which effectively outlawed the practices under which a particular African peasantry had shown much success.

One supposes, in standard libertarian fashion, that agricultural employment increased thereafter along with land values. But that was the whole point: to proletarianize independent peasants by leaving them no option but to work for wages for Boers and Brits on farms, in mines, and elsewhere. Whether more “employment” was good in itself seems unclear. We can, at least, impute the outcome back to specific political intentions and levers. So much for the colonies, then—and all this without even mentioning the two greatest monuments to England’s defense of free markets: Ireland and India.

Telescopic Land Reform

Colonial bureaucrats and employers saw a definite connection between small-scale landownership and independence, and resolved to cut that independence short. By now we begin to see that “the subsidy of history”—to use Kevin Carson’s useful term—has been very large indeed. A number of libertarians have understood the problem at hand in pretty much these terms. They have tended, however, to dwell on instances far away from our own shores, writing about land reform in Latin America, South Africa, Asia, and other places. In the mid-1970s Murray Rothbard, Roy Childs, and others addressed the matter.

Rothbard wrote that “free-market economists . . . go to Asia and Latin America and urge the people to adopt the free market and private property rights” while ignoring “the suppression of the genuine private property of the peasants by the exactions of quasi-feudal landlords. . . .” In this vacuum, only the local communists appeared to support “the peasants’ struggle for their property. . . .” And so libertarians “allowed themselves to become supporters of feudal landlords and land monopolists in the name of ‘private property.’”

Decades earlier, that very conservative German liberal economist Wilhelm Röpke wrote that German history would have gone better had Prussia undergone “a radical agrarian reform breaking up the great estates and putting peasant farms in their place.” He adds: “Influential Social Democratic leaders opposed the transformation of the great estates in Prussia into peasant holdings . . . as a ‘retrograde step.’” Röpke called for freeing Germany from “agrarian and industrial feudalism” and the ills “of proletarization, of concentration and overorganization, of the agglomeration of industrial power and the destruction of the individuality of labor. . . .” In his view, the typical proletarianized worker or clerk wanted “a small house of his own with a garden and a goat shed, an undisturbed family life without training courses, mass meetings, processions, and political flag days; dignity and pleasure in his work, an independent if modest existence. . . .”

Why Go Abroad?

For Enclosure-like pressures on small-holders closer to home, we need look no farther than states like Kentucky, where courts vigorously enforced the full feudal rigor of the “broad form deed,” thereby ensuring the strip mining of many a mountaineer out of productive existence down to the early 1990s. With the system so long stacked in favor of big landholders and bankers, well subsidized by history, one begins to understand the popularity of those New Deal programs that promoted individual home ownership.

Economist Michael Perelman has confirmed a direct relationship between rural labor without independent means of support and the applied politics of English classical economists. The latter preached a great gospel of “work,” mainly for others, who ought to be doing this work. Except for a narrow class of Dissenting Protestant factory owners, those most vigorously espousing this gospel were not themselves noted for doing a lot of work. Together, however, owners and economists said in effect, “Work for us, join the armed forces, or emigrate, ye doughty Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Scots.” And emigrate they did, leaving us with an American folk wisdom in which old times in England, Scotland, and Ireland were not that great. (This folk memory may have at least as much heuristic value as latter-day econometric claims that everyone became better off in the new division of labor.)

And so we return to Henry George’s problem: How did Americans manage as a society to seize so much land, incur whatever moral guilt goes with the seizures, and then not bloody have any of it? The chief mechanism was precisely the political means to wealth that Oppenheimer and Nock analyzed. The reason Brisco County Jr.’s “Robber Barons” struck the right note is that there were such individuals. California was a laboratory case, as George well knew, of the successful primitive accumulation of land by a microscopically small class of state-made men. As with ontogeny and phylogeny, Western accumulation recapitulated Eastern accumulation. From such causes arose the famous “end” of the frontier circa 1893. But open land did not so much disappear naturally as succumb to preemption. And then, with perfect timing, the conservation movement put enormous quantities of land beyond the reach of actual settlers.

As for those Americans who currently own property, they typically own it after 20 or more years of bank payments. Is land so genuinely scarce that a bank must always be in the middle? This remains our central question. Certainly, nineteenth-century allocations played a lasting role, and later political interventions added to concentrated property ownership.

And what of the promotion of “easy” home ownership in recent years? It is a product of 1) the widespread delusion, in the wake of Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s inflationary financing of the Vietnam War, that real estate constitutes the ultimate inflation hedge, and 2) the specific dynamics of the expansionist fractional-reserve banking under new rules (“deregulation”) increasing moral hazards for bankers.

There is also the unhappy fact of property taxes—our chief surviving feudal due. Fail to pay those, and the state enrolls a new owner on your former property. This reduces somewhat the fact of private property in land.

Independence, Republicanism, and Liberty

Some classical liberals and libertarians downgrade personal independence. Better to participate in the going order and enjoy a wider array of comforts, they say. But socialists and corporate liberals can play the same game—and have for over a century. It seems to me that those libertarians who join in this refrain rather willfully misconstrue a very simple point: They hail the joys of the division of labor, the higher degree of civilization (that is, more stuff) to be gained from dependence, interdependence, and sundry trickles of income and utility down and up. But already in 1936, Southern agrarian John Crowe Ransom noticed a flaw in this reasoning, writing, “[I]ncome is not enough, and the distribution of income is not enough. If those blessings sufficed, we might as well come to collectivism at once; for that is probably the quickest way to get them.” If greater choice among consumer goods makes up for lost independence, then the case for socialism (or X) would be clinched, provided socialism (or X) could deliver the economic goods (where “X” stands for any political ideology offering us the same stuff/independence tradeoff.)

I doubt we are necessarily “better off” merely because of employment. We need to know more, including why particular sets of choices exist in the first place. Back in the ’60s, Selective Service used to “channel” us into the “right” occupations by threatening to draft us. Given the parameters, our choices were “free.” If it’s that easy, then we are always free, no matter the historical and institutional constraints. Similarly, “To Hell or Connaught” was a choice, and never mind that Oliver Cromwell and his army arbitrarily created this particular prisoner’s dilemma. But perhaps I have leapt from choices among goods to choices between ways of life. Why? Let us look into this.

What if proletarianization is not the ideal form of human life? What if a complex division of labor is merely useful or convenient, but not a moral imperative? What if most of us are hirelings, well paid or otherwise, and then we learn what that status amounts to? The post-Marxist socialist André Gorz writes, “Capitalism owes its political stability to the fact that, in return for the dispossession and growing constraints experienced at work, individuals enjoy the possibility of building an apparently growing sphere of individual autonomy outside of work.” Our interest here is the “autonomy” mentioned, which sounds like a near cousin of “independence.” The sentiment seems sound enough, and the partial convergence of Röpke and Gorz is eye-opening.

Now in the view of Quentin Skinner (a modern republican theorist of note), unfreedom arises both from direct, forcible coercion and from institutional arrangements that make people dependent, since the latter always contain the possibility (realized or not) of arbitrary interference and coercion. Such discussions usually center on the form of state. Utilitarian liberals like Henry Sidgwick did not care about forms. If the Sublime Porte, Tsar, or King of England leaves us substantially alone, we are “free,” and that is that. In Skinner’s view, if those worthies can on their own motion change their policy of leaving us alone, we are not free, no matter what they are doing right now. Freedom requires that we not be menaced by latent unknown powers.

Freedom in this sense is liberty—a shared civic or public good. Like many real public goods it is not provided by the state, indeed the state may be its chief enemy. Law and settled custom may provide this public good, and consumer goods—the people’s pottage—do not compensate for abandoning such an order, where it exists. Today, people often work long hours to buy some independence. In another time, they began with some independence, and then chose how hard to work. Now we see, perhaps, the difference between choices among economic goods and past choices between systems structuring our choices.

Widespread landownership long supported a kind of liberal-republican independence. Perhaps we should reexamine the nexus and ask ourselves how, in Donald Davidson’s words, we “let the freehold pass,” and whether that was really for the best.

So how did the famous 1953 quotation from the former General Motors president Charles E. Wilson — that what was good for our country was good for G.M., and vice versa — become a dated notion to so many people?

The answer?

The carmakers, for example, fought hard in recent years against two Congressional efforts to raise fuel economy standards, at a time when Americans were struggling with more expensive gasoline and had become more environmentally conscious.

Regardless of your position on CAFE standards, it’s hard to believe Americans are somehow angry at GM because of them. This is a case of journalistic “projection,” in which the journalist projects his or her personal feelings onto the public at large.So why has a GM lost its clout? I don’t know the answer, but one guess would be the unions. A poll in February found 51 percent of voters thought unions were too powerful, and no industry is more associated with unions than the auto industry.It might also be simple economics. Fewer people own American cars and are financial invested in the industry, financially or otherwise. The nostalgia attached to American cars has less power over the public than it did.I’m sure there are dozens of other reasons GM is no longer popular in American eyes, but their environmental track record surely is at the bottom of the list.

In view of our long experience of near-perfect freedom to move about as each might choose, some of us may not realize the limitations that confront people in many other parts of the world who might like to move toward something better. Many who might choose to enter the United States , peacefully observing our laws and paying their own way, are denied entry. Our community slogans now seem to read: “Welcome to all peaceful and productive newcomers—except foreigners.” And a foreigner here is an individual who has crossed a special political line, supposedly which bounds “the land of the free”! 

If it is sound to erect a barrier along our national boundary lines, against those who see greater opportunities here than in their native lands, why should we not erect similar barriers between states and localities within our nation? Why should a low-paid worker—“obviously ignorant, and probably a Socialist”—be allowed to migrate from a failing buggy shop in Massachusetts to the expanding automobile shops of Detroit? According to the common attitude toward immigrants, he would compete with native Detroiters for food and clothing and housing. He might be willing to work for less than the prevailing wage rate in Detroit, “upsetting the labor market” there. His wife and children might “contaminate” the local sewing circles and playgrounds with foreign ways and ideas. Anyhow, he was a native of Massachusetts, and therefore that state should bear the full “responsibility for his welfare.” 

Those are matters we might ponder, but our honest answer to all of them is reflected in our actions—we’d rather ride in automobiles than in buggies. It would be foolish to try to buy an automobile or anything else in the free market, and at the same time deny any individual an opportunity to help produce those things we want. 

Our domestic relationships would be harmed seriously by restraints upon man’s freedom to migrate. But why shouldn’t the same reasoning hold for our foreign relationships? 

Fear No. 1: The “melting pot” might fail to assimilate newcomers. This notion has as little merit as the idea that a third-generation Yankee’s digestive tract isn’t capable of assimilating a bunch of carrots grown by a foreign-born Japanese or Italian vegetable gardener. The assimilation of a foreign-born person is accomplished when the immigrant willingly comes to America, paying his own way not only to get here but also after he arrives, and peacefully submitting to the laws and customs of his newly adopted country. Freedom to exchange goods and services voluntarily in the market place is the economic catalyst of the American “melting pot.” Christian-like morality is the social catalyst—and if it has come to be in short supply among native Americans, the blame for that shortage should not be laid upon our immigrants. 

Fear No. 2: The “wrong kind” of people might come to America. The danger that “a poorer class” might come from Asia or Africa or Southern and Eastern Europe and contaminate our society undoubtedly seems real to any person who thinks of himself as a member of a superior class or race. Such a person, like any good disciple of Marx, is assuming the existence of classes and is convinced that he is qualified to judge others and to sort them into these classes. 

Perhaps what is feared is the importation of a new idea of the relationship between the individual and his government. If that has been our fear, it very well might have been justified. For America has been rapidly substituting a socialistic State control for the traditional system of private enterprise. But let us not mistake persons for ideas; the ideas are the root of the problem. Migration of persons is not a reliable measure of the flow of ideas. 

Fear No. 3: Immigrants might deprive our own workers of jobs and depress the wage scale. The fear that immigrants might take the jobs of American workers is based on the fantasy that the number of jobs to be filled within our economy is strictly limited. Individuals still do—and undoubtedly always will—entertain unsatisfied desires for more and more goods and services, which industrious and ingenious individuals constantly are producing in response to opportunities. If there is freedom to think, to trade, and to move, then opportunities for new, creative jobs are not limited to the wilderness or a spot of idle land.

The fear that heavy immigration of workers would depress the wages of native workers is an outgrowth of socialist doctrine. Socialism is so concerned with consumption and “equitable distribution” that it neglects the source of production. It fails to recognize that there can be more and more to consume only if capital and tools are first produced to give leverage to the productive power of man. 

Can we hope to explain the blessings of freedom to foreign people while we deny them the freedom to cross our boundaries? To advertise America as the “land of the free,” and to pose as the world champion of freedom in the contest with communism, is hypocritical, if at the same time we deny the freedom of immigration as well as the freedom of trade. And we may be sure that our neighbors overseas are not blind to this hypocrisy. 

A community operating on the competitive basis of the free market will welcome any willing newcomer for his potential productivity, whether he brings capital goods or merely a willingness to work. Capital and labor then attract each other, in a kind of growth that spells healthy progress and prosperity in that community. That principle seems to be well recognized and accepted by those who support the activities of a local chamber of commerce. Why do we not dare risk the same attitude as applied to national immigration policy? 

Our collective abandonment of the economic system of the free market leaves for us the controlled communal life, where everyone wants to be a consumer without producing anything. 

The Basic Problem 

Our immigration policy merely reflects the existence of this serious internal problem in America . Our present policy toward immigrants is consistent with the rest of the controls over persons which inevitably go with national socialism. But the controlled human relationships within the “welfare state” are not consistent with freedom. Great Britain once thought she could deny freedom to American colonists. And now, her own people have traded their freedom for nationalized austerity. Even a “prosperous” modern America can ill afford traveling that same course. If we do, our community, too, will lose its capacity to attract newcomers. Then we wouldn’t need an immigration policy. But who among us would want to remain in a community where opportunities no longer exist?

The economic fallacy MacKinnon commits, familiar to many readers of this magazine, is the failure to acknowledge that prices for anything, including the cost of buying someone’s labor power, depend not only on aggregate supply and demand, but also on the economic priorities (“values”) of individual buyers (and sellers). In other words, “demand” refers not only to the number of people who desire something, but also to the (variable) intensity with which a particular buyer desires it. Based solely on aggregate supply and demand, I could have someone else mow my lawn for around $30, but for the most part I am content to mow my own lawn. If it cost 30 cents, however, I would surely hire someone else to do it. The act of mowing my lawn has no fixed, predetermined “worth.”

All prices are like that. A good or a service is worth, in economic terms, whatever someone is willing to pay for it. In other words, if someone is forced to pay more for something than he thinks it is worth, he will be less likely to buy it. I like chocolate, but if the price were $20 an ounce, I would surely buy a lot less of it. If a storekeeper finds it is worth $50 a day to have someone sweep in front of the store, he will pay it. But if he were told that it must cost $60 a day, he might decide it is not worth it, or not worth it as often. That is why forced increases in wages (meaning legislatively imposed increases as opposed to increases due to supply and demand) lead to layoffs at the margins. MacKinnon asserts that this is false, on the grounds that many employers already pay more than the minimum wage. But that’s a non sequitur. It is precisely the ones who do not (the ones “at the margins”) who will be forced to reduce their purchases of labor.

Economic logic aside, MacKinnon is also not reasoning well in terms of moral philosophy. One moral objection is that forcing a purchaser (in this case, the purchaser of labor power) to pay more than he feels something is worth is what we would call in any other context “extortion.” That’s immoral in a straightforward way, although this is perhaps obscured because the purchaser “obviously” can afford it.

But perhaps I won’t impress anyone by urging compassion for the bosses. MacKinnon’s main theme is that we must have compassion for the workers, so let’s examine that aspect more closely.

He claims that compassion dictates that we care most about those most in need, and that’s why it is imperative to raise the minimum wage. But since a forced increase in the cost of something means that less of it will be purchased, and therefore minimum-wage increases mean layoffs at the margins, it is precisely these “most in need” who will be unable to find work; they will either get laid off or be unable to find entry-level positions, of which there will be fewer. So MacKinnon’s attempt to be compassionate (paying Smith more money so he can get out of poverty) has a tradeoff: Jones is unemployed and sinks deeper into poverty. From Jones’s point of view, this is hardly compassionate.

MacKinnon is right when he says that most employers actually pay more than minimum wage anyway. So maybe it’s only a small number of workers who will be laid off as a result of the increase. But so what? Is there some number of Joneses who can be made to suffer to help any number of Smiths? That is the crudest form of utilitarianism, an approach to moral philosophy that fails to take seriously the dignity and self-worth of each individual person. In this context, it would mean it’s moral to make some poorer so that some others can make an extra dollar an hour. That’s not my idea of compassion.

Compassion Only for Some

MacKinnon makes the (essentially correct) point that the poor have hopes and dreams, that they have integrity, that all they lack is enough money to care for their children and themselves. Are such people deserving of compassion? Of course, but all of them are, not just some of them. MacKinnon’s solution shows compassion to some, but at the expense of others. Don’t the ones who get laid off also have hopes and dreams?

Ethics quiz: is it better to have ten people making $5.15 an hour, or nine people making $6.65 an hour and one person making nothing? Answer: it’s not up to you, and it’s not up to MacKinnon. The way to respect the equal dignity of all is not to treat some as dispensable for the sake of others.

Speaking of poor reasoning, MacKinnon commits common logical fallacies as well as economic and moral ones, and this is worth noting because they are the sorts of fallacies that proponents of minimum-wage laws typically make when framing their arguments. MacKinnon commits the “ad hominem” fallacy when he claims that the senators won’t pass the increase because they don’t know what it’s like to be poor. Whether that’s true or not, it’s neither here nor there with respect to whether it’s sound public policy.

The bulk of MacKinnon’s argument commits what logicians call the “ad misericordiam” fallacy: he expounds on the fact that he himself used to be poor, that it is terrible to live in poverty, that it is hard for the working poor to make ends meet, that many poor people are poor from birth, and that the poor are people too, equally deserving of dignity. All the things he says on these subjects are true. But they don’t constitute a refutation of the economic principle explained above. (It is as if one tried to refute the law of gravity by describing how awful it feels when a piano falls on one’s head: it is indeed awful, but that’s what falling pianos do.) And they don’t address the real suffering of the real people who will be made worse off by these misguided attempts to help people.

—Aeon J. Skoble

Department of Philosophy

Bridgewater State College