Timothy Ferris in a new book THE SCIENCE OF LIBERTY (HarperCollins, 2010) promotes a new way of looking at political labels. He points out that the usual left wing/right wing labels are out of date. They originated back in the French Revolution when the then liberal radicals sat on the left side of the French National Assembly and the conservative monarchists sat on the right side of the Assembly.
Instead of a straight line with left-wing liberals at one end and right-wing conservatives at the other end, Ferris suggests a triangle. At the apexes of the triangle you would have LIBERAL, PROGRESSIVE and CONSERVATIVE. Classical liberals are people (going back to John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine) who lean in the direction of freedom. Progressives (going back to Karl Marx and social-democrats) lean towards equality. And Conservatives (going back to the English philosopher Edmund Burke) lean towards tradition.
Like any and all labels, of course, this oversimplifies. Individual people (and politicians) are always some unique mixture of these three trends when it comes to individual issues. Even though I remain suspicious of all political labeling, the Ferris triangle seems to me more sensible than the traditional left-right continuum. Let’s take a few examples.
Minimum wage. Progressives favor raising the minimum wage as high as possible in order to bring more income equality. Liberals favor no minimum wage at all, on laissez-faire free-market principles. Conservatives are reluctant to change whatever we have now.
In this case I think the liberals have the strongest argument. Progressives have good intentions but many studies have shown that the higher the minimum wage, the more unskilled young workers are squeezed out of the market and left unemployed. This especially hurts young minority males who do not get the chance to take that first step on the lower rungs of the employment ladder. Of course you could abolish the free-market altogether and go to a system like Cuba where everyone has the same salary and inequality of income does not exist. You would probably also get, as in Cuba, equal poverty.
Health care. Progressives are in favor of a national heath care program where every citizen would have equal access and equal treatment. Liberals say the government should stay out of it and let the chips fall where they may. Conservatives say our present system is adequate.
In this case I think that the progressives have the better argument. Just as good roads, clean air and water, police protection, and equal access to the courts are important government benefits for all citizens, so too I think we are a wealthy enough society that good health care should be a must for all citizens. My wife and I get our health care bills paid (mostly) by Medicare. So here I agree with the progressives. It would probably be best to have a single-payer system for everyone as we presently do with Medicare, and as most European countries do with all citizens.
Education. This is one is tricky. Progressives, with their emphasis on equality, demand that we close the achievement gaps between minority and majority populations. That we produce not only equal opportunity, but also equal results. Liberals agree that we need to provide equal opportunity but we can’t and should not guarantee equal results. Conservatives demand that we provide solid content education for all citizens, minority and majority. All three have a point.
On the whole here I find myself somewhere in the middle of liberal and conservative points of view. Like the conservatives I think we do need more attention to solid content. Like the liberals I think we need to keep advancing the equal opportunity side promised by the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court decision in 1954. So far as the progressive point of view goes, I applaud efforts to close the “achievement gap.” However I wish we did not put so much alarm and publicity on this particular gap. There are “gaps” in every field, in every job, in every activity.
For most people (especially teenagers and young people) sports, for instance, are far more important and far more prestigious than academic test scores. And in sports, minorities (especially African-Americans), have opened up achievement gaps every bit as wide in their favor as the academic ones where they lag behind. No one seems to be alarmed about this sports gap, why make so much about the academic test gap?
Free-markets and globalization. Here I think the conservatives and the liberals have the winning side and progressives who often oppose globalization today are simply wrong. If you define progressive as favoring equality, globalization has been a huge success. Progressives today, in other words, seem to oppose the very things that are helping to achieve their goals. A recent study found that globalization does lead to change as capitalism always has. UN statistics show enormous overall gains in countries as diverse as India, China, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Brazil and South Africa. The World Bank reported in 2004 that economic growth in the underdeveloped world resulted in a “spectacular” decline in poverty in East and South Asia. The report showed that with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa, world poverty as a whole has declined dramatically. “Never before have so many people—or so large a proportion of the world’s population—enjoyed such large rises in their standard of living,” reported the Bank.
What about the United States? Have we suffered? Actually no, we too have gained! Spectacularly. Contrary to the critics of globalization, the Congressional Budget Office reported that average wages in the United States rose between 1991 and 2005. This was the period of greatest expansion in global trade and the period when China and Mexico were blamed for taking American jobs and income. Dividing the level of income in the U.S. into five parts, the gains between 1991 and 2005 for the wealthiest fifth were indeed large, 50%. But contrary to what many think the gains for the lowest fifth, the poorest in the U.S., were even larger. They increased by 80 percent! (The gains for the three in-between middle-class fifths increased by around 20%.) In the end globalization not only resulted in truly astonishing increases in world-wide prosperity, but it has also added around $10,000 a year to the average American household income!
War and peace. Here there are so many exceptions I don’t think labels make sense. When I visited the cemetery at Omaha Beach in France a few years ago I sobbed on my knees when I saw all of those crosses. Young men who never had a chance to live the rich full life I have had. And not a single one had a political label.
In the end as my few examples demonstrate, none of the three political categories, liberal, progressive or conservative has a monopoly on “progress” In other words, you can’t bank on solving problems by reaching into your back pocket and pulling out a prepaid credit card labeled “liberal,” “progressive,” or “conservative.” Maybe in the end we should refrain from using these labels at all.
Corrections and additions:
Dr. Doo Jung Jin at the Northwest University in Kirkland, Washington kindly sent me a couple of corrections for my recent blog on experiments in Korea. Japan controlled Korea from 1910, not from 1911. The Korea War did not start in 1947 as I mistakenly wrote, but in 1950. I should have caught that last error myself because it was indeed in 1950 that my wife and I had just graduated from Antioch College and were quite aware of that war.
Another reader, Steve Gorzula, gave me a boost by agreeing with my comments on zero-sum economics and by sending an interesting article of his own on Nepal, a country right now going through painful political turmoil. His article gives a good example of win-win economics by focusing on the potential for hydro-power in Nepal that could make a crucial difference in the Nepalese struggle to move into the modern world.
Bill Stonebarger, Hawkhill Owner/President
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