Principle of Legitimacy

I recently read Malcom Gladwell’s latest book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfit and the Art of Battling Giants. His books are a collection of data, combined with stories, making surprising, often counterintuitive, points. He and Charles Murray are the best I know at writing statistics books for general reading. And Gladwell’s tend to be less numbers-heavy and more weighted with stories. They can be a fun read.

His underlying theme, in David and Goliath, is that those who appear to be the underdogs might actually have advantages that aren’t obvious, but might explain why they win against the odds. With the David and Goliath story, he passes along various scholarly details, saying, “No one in ancient times would have doubted David’s tactical advantage once it was known that he was an expert in slinging.” (Notes, pp. 279-28.)

David was powerful like an artilleryman, as opposed to an infantryman. He was skilled and practiced, as boys of his day were likely to be, given time to practice. Goliath, on the other hand, may have suffered from a glandular disorder called acromegaly. Besides making him very large, it was associated with a partial blindness. So Goliath needed David to come in for close contact battle. All David needed to do was attack, with skill, from a distance. Essentially, Goliath brought a sword to a gunfight.

The book sorts through a number of underdog stories, from a girls’ basketball team to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights movement. Sometimes the stories seem only peripherally associated to the theme (my opinion), but they still make for an interesting read.

One of the ideas Gladwell talks about is the “principle of legitimacy” in leadership, or authority: “When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave” (p. 207). Among the many things in the book I was marking to recall later, this one got special attention.

Remember back in the 1990s, when the Clintons and their allies were lying to the American people and then eventually saying, “What difference does it make?” and “It’s only his personal life.” Remember that? I remember thinking of the William Cowper quote, "When was public virtue to be found when private was not?"

If a leader lies to the woman in his life he has covenanted with, and lies about it to the people he serves—aware that the behavior subjects him to the risk of blackmail—can such a person be trusted with the life and death decisions of the leader of the free world? I don’t think so. Nor would I trust anyone else who claims character has nothing to do with ability to lead.

Gladwell doesn’t continue on with the idea of personal morality, however. He looks at other behaviors that lead to authoritative legitimacy:

Legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice—that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can’t treat one group differently from another (pp. 207-208).

Gladwell doesn’t seem to me particularly political. And if I had to guess, I’d say he leans slightly democrat. He does not go on from this point to talk about our current presidential regime. He talks about police in New York, English-Irish unrest in Belfast a couple of decades ago, and the end results of the three-strikes-you’re-out laws that started in California. All worth reading.

But I’d like to just briefly apply the three rules to this president.

·         People need to feel like they have a voice.  No.

o   This president doesn’t listen. No Republicans voted for Obamacare. Most Americans were against it, and have continued against it, with those percentages growing as the rollout continues to fail.

o   He refers to legitimate questions about an array of administration-caused scandals as trumped up faux scandals: VA deaths, Benghazi deaths and cover-up, IRS targeting of conservative groups…

o   He refuses to listen when Congress puts limits to his executive powers, and acts unilaterally outside the law

·         Consistency of rules over time. No.

o   Those seeking citizenship through the maze of legal means get turned away, sometimes for years. Meanwhile, illegals are invited and welcomed and forced on border states—and remember how Arizona was sued for being willing to help enforce existing laws? The administration claimed that it has the right to pick and choose which laws it chooses to enforce, and no state should assume enforcement is a good thing.

o   Obamacare doesn’t work—not news. So the president decides who gets exemptions, at his whim—or which rules will get postponed to after another election, breaking his own law.

·         Fairness from one group to another. No.

o   Voting violations will not be prosecuted by this justice department. When New Black Panthers were shown to be blocking voting places and intimidating voters, the DOJ said it wasn’t possible for African-American-skin-colored people (blacks, but we not supposed to use that descriptive word?) to be prosecuted for racist behavior.

o   Homosexuals, atheists, "green" businesses,and anyone else the administration favors currently, gets special treatment, exemptions, rules. But religious people are not allowed their God-given right to practice their religion. Under duress, the administration gave in and allowed exemptions for churches and religious nonprofits. It saw no need to extend that exemption to closely held companies, run by religious people, like Hobby Lobby. SCOTUS has ruled in Hobby Lobby’s favor, but only narrowly. And the dissent argument claims that the 1^st Amendment right to freedom of religion goes out the window when one enters the marketplace. Courts have put small businesses—bakeries and photographers—out of business when they refused to act against conscience.

When a solid majority of Americans disapprove of how the president is doing his job, and 67% believe the country is on the wrong track, that either means—as this president and his minions assert—that it’s simply because of his color. Or it means he lacks legitimate authority to lead—because of his behavior.

Redistribution

In the conservative world, we’re fairly used to looking at wealth redistribution, and refuting any arguments for it. Because we believe in the basic economic/freedom principle that the person who earns the money should be the person who decides how to spend that money. (Milton Friedman argued the point decades ago.)

We’re a little less practiced at talking about, or even looking at, other forms of redistribution.

A few years ago there was a story going around about an economics teacher who arranged to “redistribute” grades in the class. The A students would “share” with the lower-grade students, to even things out—to be fair. Everyone would receive the class average. On the first test, everyone got a B. On the second test, everyone got a D. On the final, everyone failed. Why should anyone work, if the result was going to be squandered on those who didn’t put in the work? It was, of course, a comparison to socialism. And the final summary was this:

When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

I’m not sure of the origin, whether there actually was such an economics teacher. But the story caught on, and various college students took on the challenge of making videos of people being asked to sign a petition about GPA redistribution. (George Mason and Carthage, for example.)

So that was about equal opportunity for success based on grades. For some reason, hard-working students, even liberal ones, are reluctant to assume it’s unfair to lazy people for them to work hard and thus have greater opportunity to graduate/get good jobs.

Similar assertions about opportunity redistribution are used in affirmative action. The argument is, if there is racism, then there is an unfair advantage to favored races (Asians and whites, typically) and unfair disadvantage to non-favored races (namely African-Americans and Hispanics). If so, the argument goes, then there should be some “redistribution” of opportunity based on race—take from the advantaged races and give to the disadvantaged races, as if people are less individuals and more representatives of groups that share their skin color.

There was an satirical illustration of this concept, in the form of an affirmative action bake sale, done on some college campuses (Bucknell and Berkeley), and followed up in a mall by John Stossel. It got the conversation going, and even those getting the advantage saw the system as demeaning. However, it’s hard to tell whether the point got across, or whether the very subject of race was so taboo that discussion was shut down. But that’s a subject for another day.

I saw a somewhat unbelievable poster online, advertising a panel that would be discussing getting rid of all advantageous opportunities—evening things out. The panel theme is “No More Success Stories.” Why? Because for every 1 in a million success story, there are 999,999 left behind. Not kidding. Pretty sure this is not satire.

So, the question is, should differences in opportunity be evened out? Should opportunities be redistributed?

The concept behind Obamacare answers those questions with a loud yes. It is a simple fact that some people are healthier than others, and true that these healthier people can get by with paying less for health care, sometimes even opting to go without health insurance, or getting only a catastrophic protection policy. Others—the no-longer-young, the elderly, the already ill or injured—don’t have the luxury of going without health insurance coverage, or may have to pay more to get it. They are disadvantaged by less than peak health.

So Obamacare attempts to “redistribute” through financial measures the financial health advantages particularly of the young and healthy demographic, and make them pay more so that the older and less healthy demographics can supposedly pay less than they would. In reality, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in any demographic paying less for whatever coverage they had before the law, but that’s a discussion for another day. The point today is that the law was designed to “redistribute” good health advantages. And it is true that pretty much every single young healthy person will be required to cough up significant income that they wouldn’t otherwise have spent.

This isn’t a surprise. It was part of the discussion before the Supreme Court; it’s in the transcripts. (I wrote about the ruling before and after.) The law is a tax on healthy people intended to subsidize the less healthy.

One major problem with “redistribution” of any opportunity is that it uses some distant, powerful overseer (tyrant) to make decisions best made by individuals. Most young people are not as financially well off as most older people, nor as well off as they will be later in their lives. They are paying student loan debts, getting started in their careers. If there is a time to risk doing without comprehensive health insurance, they’re at the best time of their lives to do it. Maybe a catastrophic policy would be wise, if they can afford one. But chances are in their favor that their money is better spent on something else—and that’s why so many of this demographic have chosen to spend less on medical coverage.

Obamacare, in essence, forces young healthy people to impoverish themselves for a product they don’t need in order to help pay a subsidy for that product to people at the culmination of their career and lifetime of wealth building who can better afford to pay the higher costs. In the first year or two, paying the penalty/tax is a lower burden than paying for the actual product. It’s just money into a black hole, though—no actual benefit to the young healthy person being extorted.

On top of it all, the failure of the Obamacare website is just a little too much to believe. Here’s the summary: young people are forced to buy a product they don’t want, don’t need, and can't afford to help buy that product for those who are already affording it—and this tech savvy demographic is supposed to voluntarily sign up for this servitude on a website that doesn’t work.

Yes, that is centrally planned “redistribution” at its finest. Welcome to tyranny.

Another Counterfeit

It would have been more insightful for me to have divided Monday’s post, Counterfeits, into two parts, with this being added as a third part. That would have made a neatly planned week of posts. Unfortunately, I don’t always organize that far ahead what I will say. So, less neatly, here is another example of a tyranny/southern-hemisphere counterfeit.

Equality

As Americans, we have practically born in us a sense of fairness and equality. We don’t have an aristocracy—a class of people who receive special privileges and immunity from various laws based on their parental heritage. We honor our government leader, our President (even the current one) based on the position. But we expect that person to be subject to the same laws as the rest of us. If he robs a bank, he goes to jail. If he murders his secretary, he suffers the weight of the law. If he lies before Congress, he is prosecuted for perjury.

That is what we mean by Blind Justice. The law doesn’t look to see who the accused is—what their wealth, position, race, religion, gender, ethnic heritage, or other special interest category may be—before weighing the evidence. We are equal before the law.

Blind Justice, Alabama
photo by Scott

We don’t have a class system—a stratified society based on arbitrary, permanent conditions. The concept of avoiding people who are beneath us seems unpleasantly foreign. We don’t call one another “uppity” for “trying to rise above our station.” Rather, we have the American Dream, where hard work and brains put to good use in a free marketplace offer the opportunity for rising above current conditions for anyone.

The southern hemisphere counterfeit for equality is something else altogether—equal outcome. “Leveling the playing field” is the lie. It is the claim that, if someone else has more than you do, it is because they had some unfair advantage, that their level of work and yours are irrelevant. There’s an unspoken claim that, just one time if we redistributed the wealth and started fresh from the same starting line, then everything would be fair.

But outcomes will always be different—because individuals are different. I used to see this clearly in relation to my children’s education. When we moved to our current school district, and I attempted to continue their gifted education, there was a lot of resistance from the teachers. They seemed to believe that every child deserved the same input from them. But if the goal of education is to help each child gain the education that will help them reach their potential, then every child’s education is different—customized. Some teachers seemed to think, if a child was already reading well and doing the required level of math, then the teachers' duty was done, and they could turn their attention to students still struggling.

That meant that bright students spent hours every day sitting around waiting, often bored, rather than engaged in learning. “Fairness” in this common classroom setting means paying attention to some students while ignoring others—in an effort to make the outcome of the education the same: the limit of the slowest learner.

The elementary school report card actually said, “performing at grade level” or “not performing at grade level.” When my daughter showed up there a couple of grade levels above her age in several subjects, the report card practically implied she was getting stupider by sitting in that classroom—and that was OK as long as she wasn’t slipping behind the slower learners. As a mama bear, I never said, “Oh well, I’m sure the professionals know best”; I got her the heck out of that non-learning environment and saw to her education myself. Some might say I unfairly unleveled the playing field.

Fairness in economics is likewise not holding some people back to keep anyone from getting ahead. Even if you could start everyone at the same level, some people work hard, use their creativity, save up resources to invest in capital improvements, and come out ahead before long.

You can see this historically in frontier America. Homesteaders would start out with a few tools and basic belongings. They would clear the land, build shelter, plant crops, raise animals, and move ahead, if they could, from subsistence to prosperity. Sometimes misfortune got in the way—a hailstorm, a fire, an accident, a drought. Sometimes a family would have to move on and start over multiple times. But eventually some people prospered. Was it because they were given an unfair slice of the overall economic pie, thus depriving otherwise deserving individuals? No. It was a combination of hard work, mental and physical, along with some good timing.

Equalizing outcomes isn’t about fairness; it’s about coveting, that last of the Ten Commandments that tells us it’s wrong to be jealous of our neighbor’s good fortune.

The southern hemisphere counterfeit of “equality” is about using the covetousness we’re trying to rid ourselves of, nurturing it, and using it to persuade us to give power to some entity that promises to take from someone we’re envious of. Maybe to give to us, maybe not—it’s often enough for them just to stick it to the person with more. And for doing so, they get an unequal portion of power/control over the people.

Which is better?

·         Subjecting ourselves to a controlling force that takes from the prosperous and uses the spoils as it chooses? (southern hemisphere controlled economy)

·         Allowing individuals to prosper from their hard work, ingenuity, and frugality, with the possibility that any of us, even all of us, can prosper? (northern hemisphere free enterprise)

Next time someone says it has to be equal or it isn’t fair, ask whether equal relates to equality before the law or equality of outcome. There’s a hemisphere of difference between the two.