ONE WEEK ago today, a large audience gathered in Rouss Hall at an event featuring Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of the New York Times best-selling book, "Nickel and Dimed." Ehrenreich is an impressive writer and a powerful social critic who, like so many starry-eyed college students throughout the country, is a true believer in the power of big government to cure the diverse maladies of America's working poor. In the course of her distinguished political career, she has served as co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, staunchly supported Ralph Nader for president in 2000 and recently proclaimed her preference for the dashing Dennis Kucinich in the upcoming presidential election. Given Ehrenreich's politics, the title of the event at which she spoke was as ironic as it was informative: "Rally Against Poverty, Rally for Justice." I say this title was ironic because Ehrenreich, as a leading proponent of large-scale government-directed redistribution of wealth in America, has spent the later part of her life expounding a political philosophy that is the surest known method of committing injustice, destroying wealth and creating widespread poverty throughout society.
The old argument for establishing extensive government programs to help the poor is so simple that any idiot could understand it, as is evidenced by the fact that many do. There are people in our society who are hungry, sick, uneducated and unlikely to improve their condition on their own. At the same time, huge piles of wealth sit idly by, awaiting disposal at the whims of the opulent rich. Surely, the argument goes, anyone with a heart must admit that a large portion of this wealth should be taken from the privileged rich and given to the needy poor.
At the risk of damaging the electability of Ehrenreich's political favorites, I submit that this argument is exactly wrong. Worse, it's mired in a fanciful brand of blind-faith idealism that ignores the tragic consequences of wealth redistribution while obsessing over its advertised benefits.
From the outset, there are severe practical difficulties that come with handing over a large amount of cash to a government bureaucracy and then trusting that this bureaucracy will ever help the poor. Elected representatives and civil servants act primarily out of their own self-interest, just like everyone else. This means that they care much more about getting votes and securing their own pension plans than they do about helping the needy. As a result, once the bureaucrats collect their revenue, they will invariably divide up the vast majority of it between Halliburton-like special interest lobbies, civil servant benefits and pork-barrel projects directed at major middle-class voting blocs. Where the money will most certainly not go is to the ranks of the needy poor, who wouldn't be numerous enough to hold their government accountable even if they did occasionally go to the voting booths.
But let's imagine for a second that we were living in a Kucinichian fantasy world, and that we could surmount the crippling problems of gross government corruption and inefficiency. Sadly, the forcible redistribution of significant chunks of wealth from rich to poor would still wreak social havoc.
The amount of wealth to be distributed in society is not fixed, but instead depends upon the efforts of industrious individuals whose labor creates the goods that people want to enjoy. As history has demonstrated repeatedly, the forced redistribution of wealth inevitably devastates economic production by destroying incentives to work and deflating investment opportunities. As tax rates go up, individual productive incentives shrink in inverse proportion to decreasing profit margins. At the same time, stagnation sets in from the sudden shortage of surplus capital that could otherwise fund new productive ventures. This stalls the job market and stunts natural economic growth, which ultimately is the only real hope for those who are truly committed to lifting themselves out of poverty.
What's baffling about the many radical leftists who still inhabit college campuses today is that they seem blissfully unaware of the most basic and hard-learned lessons that history teaches us about the formidable flaws of massive government programs. In an Icaran fashion, such programs inevitably attempt to fly society too close to the sun, and end up causing much more poverty and injustice than they alleviate. As H.L. Mencken famously responded to critics who fancied themselves progressive, "The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake."
Anthony Dick's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at adick@cavlierdaily.com.
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