The Bad Classroom and the Challenge of Achievement
I am in the process of exploring what useful ideas about liberalism and conservatism can be derived from three metaphors. In the previous post, I explored public goods and private goods. Private goods aren't good for broad benefits. Whether that is a regrettable lapse or a catastrophe depends on the benefits we are talking about. Public goods aren't good for personal motivation and incremental learning. Again, how bad that is depends on what we are talking about.
The second metaphor imagines a classroom with twenty desks. The room as a whole holds eighty students, sixty of whom stand at the back. The other twenty stand in the hallways and hear whatever they can hear.
Presuming that all these students are paid up customers, liberals will want to ask what nutcase admitted a hundred students to a course being held in a classroom that has only twenty desks. The classroom is inadequate to meet the needs of the students and liberals will suspect that if you look at the standing students, you will find darker skins and poorer educational backgrounds. Conservatives are not at all inclined to talk about the needs of the students and the way the university has met them. If a conservative has one of the desks, he is interested in finding out how he can keep it for himself; if he does not, he will be interested in finding out what he has to do to get one.
Notice that everything in the perspective of the conservative student is oriented toward making things better for himself. It is a perspective that has a lot of respect for competition and it is likely to see the seated students as the winners of the competition than as somehow unfairly privileged. This perspective pays a lot of attention to personal responsibility for outcomes, so it is a very good motivational view. It is a "healthy" view as well, because it highlights the relationships among aspiration, achievement, and reward.
But it isn't very good for systemic questions. If you were outfitting an oceangoing vessel, you would want a liberal planning the supply of lifeboats because a conservative would be interested only in what he would have to do to be in one of the boats. The liberal would want to be sure there were enough boats for everyone. The liberal perspective matches aggregate need with aggregate supply. It is more interested in seeing that everyone's needs are met than assuring that his own needs are met. Liberals are deeply suspicious that when choices have to be made so that some are included and some excluded, it will be the same people--the systematically marginalized--who will be excluded.
In this scenario as in all the others, the better scenario is the one that highlights what you want to highlight. The conservative question is a really good question for some things. The liberal question is a really good question for other things. You really can't ask them both. When you do, you wind up with forty desks instead of twenty and no demand that the university provide the services for which it has already received the money.
Dramatis Personae
The third metaphor has to do with the relationship between the economy and the polity; between the market and politics. When you read a liberal account, you will nearly always see that the government "intervenes" in situation to protect "citizens." When you read a conservative account, you will find that the government "interferes" in the normal operations of the market and everyone loses as a result. Why "intervenes" and "interferes?"
It comes down to the dramatis personae. Who are the actors in this drama? The conservative perspective has two actors. The first is "everyone participating in the market." That means employers, investors, and producers at one end and employees and consumers at the other. "The market" is Adam Smith's notion of intelligent design. It allocates goods and costs precisely under most circumstances and it benefits all participants, though not equally. Most importantly, it is "self-correcting." When prices are too high, the market forces them down; when goods are scarce, the market supplies more of them.
Since the market is "self-correcting," it does not need to be "corrected" by governments. That is why government actions are called "interference." Liberals who don't like the way the market distributes incomes, for instance, have no foothold at all on this argument. If something is wrong, the market will correct it if it is left alone. Besides that, government doesn't intervene adroitly and the effects of its clumsiness are reduced production and higher costs for everyone.
Liberals, it goes without saying, see it differently. Did you notice that there are no citizens in the conservative list of characters? Liberals see citizens and taxpayers in the bottom part of the market where conservatives see consumers and employees. They take the corporate greed and overwhelming power of the largest businesses as weapons that can, at any moment, be unleashed against the people they, the liberals, have sworn an oath to protect.
An active government is, as a matter of fact, all that stands between the citizen and the most abject wage slavery. Without government protections, the U. S. economy would be one huge "company town," where the company controlled what wages you got and what your groceries cost and when you fell behind, you could never leave town. Oh and by the way, marginalized workers don't even need to apply for work.
It is this picture that gives meaning to "intervene." In this context, it sounds more like "protect and serve," which you might see on a police car. If the companies can band together, then the workers can band together. Fair is fair. If a product is unsafe or ineffective, the companies selling it won't care and if the government doesn't intervene, the citizens will be victimized over and over. The market has no conception at all of "the public good" so it really can't be trusted. There is no democratic control by consumers, so it can't be "corrected," if by that term we will mean that it will be brought back to meeting the needs of the people.
So conservatives see the market and a marvelous machine and the government as a hapless and dangerous tinkerer. Liberals see the market as a device for the systematic abuse of the citizenry and the corporations as conscienceless ghouls. And again, the best question is this: "What is each of these perspectives good for?" If liberalism is a screwdriver and conservatism a hammer, the one thing you need to know is whether the dilemma facing you is more like a screw or more like a nail. And it is not "your view" or "their view" that is finally of most importance. It is "our view." That's why we have governments and that's why we don't let them do whatever they want.
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