Student loan forgiveness would help everyone, but it wouldn’t help everyone equally. Everyone would benefit a lot, and the people who still owe money would benefit somewhat more than the people who paid off their debts.
Let’s call the people who paid off their debts Vladimir, and the people who still owe are Ivan.
Just to be clear: student loan forgiveness means that Vladimir and Ivan would get all the benefits that the US as a whole would get from the program. Ivan would get the additional benefit of not having to pay back as much money. So, Ivan would benefit more.
“Vladimir’s Choice” is a Russian folk tale that is used by cognitive pscyhologists to explain why people will often choose not to benefit just in order to make sure an out-group doesn’t also benefit. Vladimir, an impoverished peasant, was one day visited by God, who said, “Vladimir, I will give you anything you want.” While Vladimir was thinking about what he wanted, God said, “But there is one condition. Whatever I give you, I will give twice that to Ivan.” Vladimir thought about it for a while, and then said, “Gouge out one of my eyes.”
There is a classic experiment along these lines. People are broken into two groups, and one group (Vladimir) is given the option of getting ten dollars, in which case five dollars will be given to the other group (Ivan), or getting twenty dollars, in which case fifteen dollars will be given to Ivan.
It’s astonishing the number of people who choose the first option—Vladimir’s Choice. The book Dying of Whiteness has a chapter about people who would materially benefit if Medicaid were expanded to their state (by which I mean they would live longer) but they would rather suffer than allow those same benefits to go to minorities.
There are, I think, some really good objections to student loan forgiveness in terms of disproportionate benefit (some of which are mentioned here and here). These objectons have to do with such a transfer of wealth benefitting people who are already reasonably well off (I think they’re reasonable, and imply some methods of forgiveness are better than others, not that the whole idea is bad). But that isn’t the kind of objection I hear most often—the one I hear is Vladimir’s Choice.
Why can people who believe complicated conspiracy theories not believe that a little bit of racism on the part of a lot of people adds up to a lot of racism? Why can people who believe that government regulations are oppressive refuse to think that oppression might have valences? Why can people who believe that big institutions do everything wrong not think that they might also get issues of race wrong?
The contradiction is particularly troubling when it comes to Libertarians, since, in my experience, they strive to be consistent and logical in how their policies relate to their beliefs (unlike, for instance, Trump supporters). And Reason talks about institutional racism as a problem, so it isn’t that Libertarianism is essentially hostile to recognizing institutional racism.
Libertarians say that the basis of their belief is that individuals should be fully free in order to achieve what they can. Obviously, a person born into poverty isn’t as free in terms of the possible achievements as someone born into wealth. So, were Libertarians genuinely committed to a notion of a system that made sure all individuals are equally free, they would fully support systems that levelled the playing-field, so to speak, of the rich and poor, the abled and disabled, the stigmatized and the privileged.
In this post, I want to talk about the Libertarians who refuse to support such policies, and that isn’t all of them (in other words, #notallLibertarians).
These Libertarians like the strictures of birth that make sure the game is rigged, but they don’t like the strictures of government that try to make sure that individuals are free to achieve their best. They don’t want a fully free system, in which all people are equally free to achieve all things; they want a system in which they can thrive without restriction. They argue that help from the government creates dependency, while accepting the help they’ve gotten from their birth hasn’t. That doesn’t make sense. If accepting help creates dependency, then they’re dependent on their birth.
I have spent a non-trivial amount of time arguing with this kind of Libertarian, and my experience is that their entire way of arguing makes no sense unless you assume the just world model, and engage in a non-trivial amount of “no true Scotsman.” When pushed on the point that they can’t actually defend their position, they start the whaddaboutism. I’ve also never met a Libertarian who knew much of anything about the economic history of the nineteenth century, but that’s a different crank theory.
I like Libertarians. In my experience, they’re logical af. Thus, unlike people on various other points on the political spectrum (it isn’t a binary or continuum), most of them are consistent regarding their major premises. They follow their arguments out. I admire that. They take unpopular positions because those positions logically follow from the premises they value. They reason deductively.
That they are true to their principles makes them very different from a lot of people with whom I argue, and I think they should praised for that consistency. The problem is that some Libertarians reason from the premise that all individuals should be equally free to achieve, while some reason deductively from the just world model and faith in the will. Let’s call this latter kind of Libertarian Just World Libertarians.[1]
The “just world model” says that people, products, and ideas that are good will succeed. As a corollary, the most successful people, products, and ideas are the best.
The “just world model” is one of those models not smart enough to be wrong. Its adherents (they’re all over the ideological spectrum) can find data to support the just world model, but arguing with them always reminds me of Catholic arguments for the virgin birth (involving parrots and light through glass). They refuse to name the data that would prove them wrong. The just world model supportable, but non-falsifiable. They almost always end up in the “no true Scotsman” fallacy or Gnosticism.
There is an old joke: someone says, “All Scots like haggis,” and Joe says, “I’m a Scotsman, and I don’t like haggis,” and the person responds, “You don’t count. You aren’t a true Scotsman.” That’s how the “just world model” works—it’s an Escher argument, in which each claim disappears into the premise that can’t be falsified.
The second non-falsifiable principle to which Just World Libertarians are committed is that if an individual wants something badly enough, they can get it. It’s still “no true Scotsman” because an individual who doesn’t achieve their goals can be dismissed as not having enough will.
Libertarians are far from alone in reasoning about politics in this way—they have premises that they refuse to consider rationally. Were I Queen of the Universe, I would dictate that instead of talking about a binary or continuum of left or right, we would map the spectrum of political affiliations in terms of how people reason about politics, rather than what their politics are. Thus, people who refuse to look at disconfirming data, read opposition information, or identify what would make them change their mind would all be grouped together, regardless of how they vote. Unhappily, I am not Queen of the Universe.
What matters in a democracy isn’t what your political affiliations are. Democracies can manage a lot of very different political affiliations. What matters is our commitment to democracy. It doesn’t matter if media would say that you’re “left” or “right” or “centrist.” If you aspire to a one-party state, if you think your policy agenda is obviously right and people only disagree with you because they’re deluded or corrupt, if you refuse to look at information that contradicts what you believe, if you don’t worry about whether your argument is rational, you’re opposed to democracy.
The two premises of Just World Libertarianism—people get what they deserve, and an individual can achieve whatever he wants with sufficient will (the gendered pronoun is deliberate)—are confounded by African-American men being stopped more often, searched more often, charged more often, and getting harsher penalties than white men. If our system doesn’t treat African American men in the same way it treats white men, and therefore African-American men are not equally able to achieve whatever they want, then the major premises of Just World Libertarianism are wrong.
And they are. Racism isn’t the consequence of individuals who deliberately choose to engage in racist actions out of hate or fear. Racism is a system that ensures that people of variously imagined stigmatized “races” are held to different standards from others, given diminished options, and perceived as deserving their diminished status because that they have a diminished status is proof that they are worse.
And that’s why Just World Libertarianism is racist. The adherents of that ideology are, in my experience, non-falsifiably committed to exactly the premises that fuel institutional racism. Of course, it isn’t only Just World Libertarians who are irrationally committed to the just world model and faith in the will—so are American fundagelicals.
And that is why fundagelicals fling themselves around like over-tired two-year olds when anyone talks about institutional racism: because if institutional racism is a plausible explanation about how the world works, then the basic premises of their political agenda are flawed. It is, and they are. And they’re racist.
[1] In my experience, the self-described Libertarians who consistently vote GOP are in this latter category. So I suppose someone could say, “Not real Libertarians.”
Every once in a while I find myself arguing with people about an apparently pedantic, but actually very important, point about demagoguery. People I respect and think are very smart insist that demagoguery is a condition unique to democracy.
I think that this argument comes from several sources. One is Mortimer Adler, who argued that the Athenian empire collapsed because of “too much democracy.” (It didn’t.) Another is sloppy inference from morphemes. Demagoguery and democracy share the “dem” after all.
Although pedantic, this argument is also really troubling, in that it implies that the solution to demagoguery is to abandon democracy, and/or that only the masses are susceptible to demagoguery, a solution that also implies some degree of authoritarianism.
It’s not only pedantic, but wrong.
Were Adler right, then the elites in Athens would have been right in their decisions, and the problems would have come from bad decisions on the part of the “demes” (the small landowners). Alcibiades was elite; he was a jerk out for himself. There’s no reason to think he was only supported by the small landowners. And that term—the demes, small landowners–is the linguistic source of demagoguery and democracy. Demagogues were leaders of the small landowners—the demes. Democracy is a system that includes them.
Alcibiades was an example of what was toxic in Athenian democracy, but his success had nothing to do with too much inclusion. It was about too much factionalism on the part of oligarchs and demes.
What happened is that what had been a neutral term for the leader of a political party (the demes) became a term for an unscrupulous rhetor, largely as a consequence of anti-democratic elitists like Plato and Plutarch.
Thucydides used the term in a neutral way, meaning the leader of the party of the demes. So, his use of the term is like someone saying “the leading Libertarian” or “the leader of the Republicans.” His hero Pericles was a leader of the demes, a demagogue. One of his villains, Cleon, was a leader of the demes, a demagogue. Alcibiades was a disaster, and not a leader of the demes, and another disastrous leader, Nikias, was not a demagogue.
What made Cleon, Alcibiades, and Nikias disastrous leaders wasn’t that they were demagogues (only Cleon was) but that they didn’t have Pericles’ combination of good judgment and rhetorical skill. Thucydides wasn’t making a point about democracy, but about rhetoric and judgment.
Aristotle (whose understanding of demagoguery is pretty interesting) says that a demagogue—that is, a populist politician—can gain power when the rich so oppress the poor that the poor are desperate. Then, the rich get worried about the agitation of the poor and so support a tyrant. And democracy ends.
Plato and Plutarch both took up the issue of demagoguery, and both were profoundly elitist, thinking that the demes should have no part in politics. Plutarch’s narrative about politics was that there are two groups: the rich (basically reasonable) and the poor (completely driven by emotions). Poor people are basically irrational, and easily roused to authoritarianism. A good government gives more power to the rich, but also gives the poor a way to express their concerns that the rich can consider. (This is a misunderstanding of what happened in Athens, by the way.)
The Founders were strongly influenced by Plutarch. And, therefore, their ideal was not the Athenian democracy, but the Roman republic. They believed the republic solved the problem of rich v. poor. And they knew that the Roman republic had its demagogues. So even the Founders understood that demagoguery was not just a problem of democracies—it arose in republics.
Thomas Hobbes translated Thucydides because he was worried about the presence and damage of demagogues, and he lived in a monarchy. His horror of demagoguery was the consequence of his seeing the devastation created by the Thirty Years War and the English Civil Wars, neither of which happened in a democracy or republic.
It would be difficult to claim that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not demagoguery, and it was created under an authoritarian monarchy. Hitler’s rhetoric began in the conditions of democracy, and remained the same under fascism. Did he stop being a demagogue March 24, 1933 when he became dictator? Stalin’s rhetoric (not a democracy) is exactly like Father Charles Coughlin (democracy). But only Coughlin’s is demagoguery? If people have the same rhetorical strategies, shouldn’t we characterize their rhetoric with the same term?
Insisting that demagoguery is a condition of democracy means that we say that the Founders and Hobbes were wrong to worry about it, that Hitler stopped being a demagogue March 24, 1933, that neither Castro nor Stalin ever engaged in it, that there was never demagoguery about Jews, Slavs, Africans, and…well, this list is way too long, except in democracies.
Really? Is that a claim anyone wants to defend? That the rhetoric that blamed Jews for the plague was not demagoguery? Even if it was exactly like the demagoguery during the Weimar democracy that blamed them for Germans losing the Great War? So, exactly the same rhetoric is not the same just because of the governmental system under which it happened?
Pedantic much?
Demagoguery is not a form of rhetoric that only arises in democracies.
