Recently there was a fair amount of excitement in the Blogosphere surrounding David Mamet's Village Voice article, Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'. Mamet's conversion occurred after a period of reflection when Mamet discovered that there was an insurmountable chasm between his personal experience of the world and his perception of the larger world viewed through the lens of his liberal ideology:
... I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).
And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.
"Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.
I suspect Mamet's conversion experience has occurred to a great many former liberals. Upon even the most cursory reflection, it becomes clear that there is an almost unlimited capacity for unintended consequences inherent in most liberal policy prescriptions. For example:
- Welfare was meant to help the poor escape poverty; in fact, it tended to trap the poor in their dysfunction.
- The social work approach to crime was meant to help nascent criminals escape a life of crime yet almost inexorably led to higher crime rates.
- On the international scene, appeasement of aggressive states is meant to promote and preserve peace yet has always led to increased aggression.
I could go on; there are countless examples of great policies that did not produce the desired effects. This, of course, does not mean that conservative policies always work or do not themselves frequently engender unintended consequences, but conservative policies by definition are likely to be re-examined when outcomes do not meet expectations, while liberal policies that fail are typically reinforced because their failure is rarely taken to mean that the policies were inadequate but rather are explained as a failure of implementation.
We now are beginning to notice the outlines of the unintended consequences that have arisen from the latest incipient disaster stemming from a current liberal pre-occupation. The situation is worth considering closely.
The current stampede for Ethanol has all the accouterments of a liberal policy adventure. A potential problem is first exaggerated out of all proportion to the extant data and the certainty of the scientifically illiterate escalates exponentially in reaction to the tocsins of doom emanating from Al Gore and his minions. I am not interested in debating the existence or significance of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Lubos Motl, among others, has done an excellent job keeping the science in view. I am interested in considering the results of the AGW hysteria and the policies that have emerged from it.
In both small ways and large the policies that have emerged from the AGW hysteria have been inimical to both the environment and the poor. Recent studies have shown that the dust-to-dust environmental cost of a Prius is greater than the same calculation for a Hummer. A recent story, reported by Lubos Motl, discovered:
BMW 520d: more efficient than Toyota Prius
The Sunday Times organized a test and it seems to imply that Prius is just what it seems to be - a fashionable symbolic bubble for hypocrites that actually consumes more fuel than ordinary big cars and enjoys undeserved special rights on the superhighways.
On their trip from London to Geneva (plus 100 urban miles), the BMW pictured above played music and ran air-conditioning while the Prius driver turned off both as he tried to drive very carefully. Nevertheless, the BMW consumed 4.7 liters per 100 km (41.9 mpg) while the Prius has burned 4.9 liters per 100 km in average (40.1 mpg). Subtle BMW gadgets to save fuel seem to be more important than the hybrid core of the Prius as well as its 500 missing pounds.
The fact that someone who wants to drive a Prius to save fuel and produce less CO2 is probably not achieving what he desires is actually relatively trivial, though the cost of disposing of the toxic metals and chemicals that are a significant problem for such cars may well prove to be another unintended consequence of the fashion.
The bigger problem than hybrid cars that arises from our need to "save the earth" is the effect on the global economy of the rush to produce corn based ethanol.
INSIGHTS: Why Ethanol Production Will Drive World Food Prices Even Higher in 2008
We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history. The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before.
The world is facing the most severe food price inflation in history as grain and soybean prices climb to all-time highs. Wheat trading on the Chicago Board of Trade on December 17th breached the $10 per bushel level for the first time ever. In mid-January, corn was trading over $5 per bushel, close to its historic high. And on January 11th, soybeans traded at $13.42 per bushel, the highest price ever recorded. All these prices are double those of a year or two ago.
As a result, prices of food products made directly from these commodities such as bread, pasta, and tortillas, and those made indirectly, such as pork, poultry, beef, milk, and eggs, are everywhere on the rise. In Mexico, corn meal prices are up 60 percent. In Pakistan, flour prices have doubled. China is facing rampant food price inflation, some of the worst in decades.
The inflation in food prices is painful for many Americans, merely annoying to many others; unfortunately it is life threatening for too many in the developing world. Real people will starve so that we can shower money on agribusiness in the name of fighting a problem that may well be non-existent in order for well to do Americans to feel noble that they are helping to save the world.
When the result of a policy is so misguided and so inimical to real people, as opposed to the idealistic desires of the proponents, and this occurs again and again, it is time to look for the "root cause."
The liberal impulse specifically denies the aggression within the self of the liberal. There is no aggression in their desire to help others and to save the planet; their desires are selfless. They certainly can justify their reactive anger at those who would thwart their attempts to help the unfortunate but that is "reasonable and expectable" anger caused by those who are trying to rape the earth and exploit the poor. (For those who have been paying attention, the defense of projection may well come to mind.) I would humbly suggest that any policy that does not take into account man's inescapable tendency toward aggression and refuses to countenance the need to use aggression as opposed to simply pretending it does not influence the policy, is a policy that at the very least enables terrible aggression to be committed upon those least able to defend themselves.
Freud described the core of neurotic symptoms as being "the return of the repressed." The forbidden drive always presses for discharge and ultimately finds a way. On a larger scale, it is hard to deny that repressed and suppressed aggression always search for discharge. Too many liberal policies enable aggressive discharge by proxy. This is not a coincidence.
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