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세상은 복잡하지만, 우리는 그런 불확실성의 환경에서도 무엇을 해야 하는지 분명히 알고 있다.
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이번 일본의 폭우에는 무려 1,000 밀리 리터의 비가 내렸다. 아무도 예상하지 못했던 사건이다. 어떤 기상학자도, 어떤 도시 설계가들도 생각지 못한 사건이었다.
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국가는 가난을 구제할 수 있을까?
Can the State Reduce Poverty?
•Henry Hazlitt
[A selection from The Conquest of Poverty.]
From the beginning of history, sincere reformers as well as demagogues have sought to abolish or at least to alleviate poverty through state action. In most cases their proposed remedies have only served to make the problem worse.
The most frequent and popular of these proposed remedies has been the simple one of seizing from the rich to give to the poor. This remedy has taken a thousand different forms, but they all come down to this. The wealth is to be "shared," to be "redistributed," to be "equalized." In fact, in the minds of many reformers it is not poverty that is the chief evil but inequality.
All schemes for redistributing or equalizing incomes or wealth must undermine or destroy incentives at both ends of the economic scale. They must reduce or abolish the incentives of the unskilled or shiftless to improve their condition by their own efforts; and even the able and industrious will see little point in earning anything beyond what they are allowed to keep. These redistribution schemes must inevitably reduce the size of the pie to be redistributed. They can only level down. Their long-run effect must be to reduce production and lead toward national impoverishment.
The problem we face is that the false remedies for poverty are almost infinite in number. An attempt at a thorough refutation of any single one of them would run to disproportionate length. But some of these false remedies are so widely regarded as real cures or mitigations of poverty that if I do not refer to them I may be accused of having undertaken a book on the remedies for poverty while ignoring some of the most obvious.
The most widely practiced "remedy" for low incomes in the last two centuries has been the formation of monopolistic labor unions and the use of the strike threat. In nearly every country today this has been made possible to its present extent by government policies that permit and encourage coercive union tactics and inhibit or restrict counteractions by employers.
As a result of union exclusiveness, of deliberate inefficiency, of featherbedding, of disruptive strikes and strike threats, the long-run effect of customary union policies has been to discourage capital investment and to make the average real wage of the whole body of workers lower, and not higher, than it would otherwise have been.
Nearly all of these customary union policies have been dishearteningly shortsighted. When unions insist on the employment of men who are not necessary to do a job (requiring unneeded firemen on diesel locomotives; forbidding the gang size of dock workers to be reduced below, say, twenty men no matter what the size of the task; demanding that a newspaper's own printers must duplicate advertising copy that comes in already set in type, etc.), the result may be to preserve or create a few more jobs for specific men in the short run, but only at the cost of making impossible the creation of an equivalent or greater number of more productive jobs for others.
The same criticism applies to the age-old union policy of opposing the use of labor-saving machinery. Labor-saving machinery is installed only when it promises to reduce production costs. When it does that, it either reduces prices and leads to increased production and sales of the commodity being produced, or it makes more profits available for increased reinvestment in other production. In either case its long-run effect is to substitute more productive jobs for the less productive jobs it eliminates.
A similar judgment must be passed on all "spread-the-work" schemes. The existing Federal Wage-Hour Law has been on the books for many years. It provides that the employer must pay a 50% penalty overtime rate for all hours that an employee works in excess of 40 hours a week, no matter how high the employee's standard hourly rate of pay.
This provision was inserted at the insistence of the unions. Its purpose was to make it so costly for the employer to work men overtime that he would be obliged to take on additional workers.
Experience shows that the provision has in fact had the effect of narrowly restricting the length of the working week…. But it does not follow that the hour restriction either created more long-term jobs or yielded higher total payrolls than would have existed without the compulsory 50% overtime rate.
No doubt in isolated cases more men have been employed than would otherwise have been. But the chief effect of the overtime law has been to raise production costs. Firms already working full standard time often have to refuse new orders because they cannot afford to pay the penalty overtime necessary to fill those orders. They cannot afford to take on new employees to meet what may be only a temporarily higher demand because they may also have to install an equivalent number of additional machines.
Higher production costs mean higher prices. They must therefore mean narrowed markets and smaller sales. They mean that fewer goods and services are produced. In the long run, the interests of the whole body of workers must be adversely affected by compulsory overtime penalties.
All this is not to argue that there ought to be a longer work week, but rather that the length of the work week, and the scale of overtime rates, ought to be left to voluntary agreement between individual workers or unions and their employers. In any case, legal restrictions on the length of the working week cannot in the long run increase the number of jobs. To the extent that they can do that in the short run, it must necessarily be at the expense of production and of the real income of the whole body of workers.
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호기심과의 전쟁
“동기화된 묵살”을 실천하는 사람들은 상대의 의견을 알지도 못할 뿐만 아니라, 알려고도 하지 않는다.
The War on Curiosity
•Brian Balfour
Last March, protestors at Middlebury College in Vermont sent professor Allison Stanger to the hospital with a neck injury. Stanger’s crime? She had the nerve to ask the protestors to allow the conservative/libertarian author Dr. Charles Murray to speak, and then to engage in a debate after his speech.
According to news accounts, after about 20 minutes of protestors shouting down Murray’s ability to speak, “Professor Stanger then took the microphone and asked the students, ‘Can you just listen for one minute.’ Many in the audience replied, ‘no.’ She added that, ‘I spent a lot of time preparing hard questions.’ Finally, she conceded that, ‘You’re not going to let us speak.’”
Stanger is a liberal professor who chose to combat Murray’s ideas with words, not violence or the heckler’s veto. This was simply unacceptable to the protestors.
After moving to another location on campus, Stanger and Murray were confronted when attempting to leave following their discussion. What followed was minutes of pushing and shoving, and “(w)hen Stanger tried to shield Murray, according to a Middlebury spokesman, a protester grabbed her hair and twisted her neck.” Stanger ended up going to a hospital where she received a neck brace to treat her injuries.
Over the last year and a half, we’ve witnessed a rash of accounts of college campuses being turned into riot zones by Leftist protestors hoping to shut down conservative or libertarian speakers. Middlebury is just one, and far from the worst , of such examples.
These protestors would rather incite violence than listen to a viewpoint that challenges their own.
The War on Curiosity
Why is the Left so afraid of an opposing opinion? How do they justify resorting to violence to shut down a dissenting voice rather than engaging in debate?
One such explanation is the war on curiosity.
This war is engaged by anyone without the faintest interest in learning about political philosophies, economic theories or moral principles that challenge their existing worldview.
Are you a soldier in the war on curiosity? Take this litmus test:
How do you react when presented with new information or a viewpoint that contradicts your beliefs?
If the revelation stimulates your intellect and makes you thankful for the chance to expand your knowledge and gain a better understanding of an opposing position, you have the gift of curiosity. You welcome the opportunity to challenge your beliefs with this new information, a process that may enable you to more strongly confirm the justness of your belief and sharpen your argument in favor of it. Or, if the new viewpoint is persuasive enough, you alter your belief, owing a debt of gratitude to the one who opened your eyes.
On the other hand, if you react with anger, anxiousness or a general feeling of being threatened, you are likely allowing your emotions to snuff out your intellectual curiosity.
“Motivated Ignorance”
Social psychologists, writing in a 2017 LA Times article , described such reactions as “motivated ignorance.” People engaging in motivated ignorance “neither know — nor want to know — what the opposition has to say.”
Indeed, in one study cited by the authors, “people we surveyed said they anticipated getting angry if they were to listen to the other side, and suspected that it might damage their relationship with the person spouting off.”
Those who are not curious close themselves off to other views. Over time, they can’t figure out how any normal human being could possibly think differently than they do on political issues. Sinister motives, or stupidity, must be the only explanation. This is where the nastiness comes in. If one disagrees, surely they must be evil, dumb, racist or transphobic.
And because those who are not curious become convinced the other side is some sort of cartoonish villain, the uncurious feel compelled to not just ignore opposing viewpoints, but to silence them. Nobody should feel the indignity of being exposed to such “hate speech,” they’ll reason.
Using Shaming or Bullying to Silence
Violence is the most extreme and dangerous tactic in the war on curiosity, but far from the only one.
Safe spaces offer protection for those who feel threatened by opposing viewpoints. There are campuses that offer mental health counseling to students who cannot bear “ even the thought of an individual coming to campus” to express non-politically correct views. That the mere thought of someone with opposing views setting foot on your campus can threaten your mental health takes motivated ignorance to the Nth degree.
Public shaming or bullying is another popular tactic. Anyone who disagrees with a Leftist is obviously a racist, or homophobe or a tool of the rich and therefore must be discredited through name-calling. Why bother with debate when mindlessly dismissing other viewpoints as “not worthy” of discussion is so much easier, and empowering? After all, moral authority is valuable currency in the Left’s desire to gain the top slot in our social hierarchy, and demonizing opponents has proven to be a more convenient route than open debate of ideas.
Leftists Tend to be More Uncurious of Opposing Views
To be sure, the war on curiosity is being waged by people of all political stripes. However, Leftists seem to be outgunning their opponents when it comes to motivated ignorance. Indeed, social scientist Jonathan Haidt in his book “ The Righteous Mind” reported on a study which found “clear and consistent” results that “(m)oderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions” when people of varying political bents were tested on how well they understood their ideological opposites.
In other words, Leftists don’t understand their opponents’ views as well as their opponents understand theirs.
When is the last time you heard of a Leftist speaker being shut down by violent protestors?
The Role of Confirmation Bias
Enabling this war is confirmation bias – the strong tendency in us to interpret all new information through the lens of our prior beliefs. Whatever your political philosophy is, you can easily immerse yourself into media outlets, social media and internet content that exclusively reaffirm your convictions. One can comfortably spend hours a day consuming political information without once encountering a differing viewpoint.
Moreover, most Americans can go thru thirteen years of public education, plus four or more years in university, and never be confronted with a viewpoint counter to the orthodox Leftist vision of government as benevolent dispenser of justice.
Lack of exposure to other viewpoints may help explain why so many Leftists can muster no greater argument than “shut up, racist.”
The war on curiosity serves only to dumb down political debate. Non-Leftist viewpoints get silenced, while progressive arguments need never be thoroughly presented because intimidation and name-calling prove much easier and satisfyingly self-righteous. History proves such trends lead to ugly outcomes.
Brian Balfour is Executive Vice President for the Civitas Institute, a free market advocacy organization in Raleigh, North Carolina
필자: 손병호, 발췌
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