How to Cause Class Division by Trying to Avoid it
Most people are familiar with self-fulfilling prophecies. Tell a groom he’s going to trip on the first step up to the platform during his wedding and he’ll focus so much effort on that step that it will no longer be natural and, voila, the prophecy is fulfilled. Built into many of those kinds of scenarios is this truly ironic fact about human nature, particularly the relational component of that nature: people tend to produce exactly what they want to avoid.
A woman focused on finding a man who is non-abusive or non-alcoholic will more often than not end up with an abusive or alcoholic husband.
Well, this administration’s efforts for the government to distribute wealth has the goal of ameliorating if not eliminating class distinctions in American culture. But the result will be anything but the desired goal.
Here are two independently caused but mutually reinforcing reasons that class division and conflict will rise under the current administration’s policies:
- Some people are more productive than others. That productivity is naturally associated with reward. Those rewards lead to class distinctions. Government can impede the direct relationship between productivity and reward. It does it, for instance, by co-opting some of the producers’ rewards and giving them to the unproductive. It might be ideal for the producers to look fondly on their provision for the unproductive, and to think of the unproductive as baby-brother favorites. However, the contrasting reality has been, is, and most likely always will be less akin to fondness than to resentment and animosity. After all, painting the producers in a negative light, the teacher just took the bully’s toy and gave it to the kid the bully already wanted to beat up. Just exactly what should the teacher expect next time she turns her back!
- Equally important is the unfortunate side-effect of impersonal help for the unproductive. People should not act like animals, but they normally do. People should not be entirely governed by behavioral stimuli, but they normally are. So incentives produce more of whatever behavior is associated with them, and punishments produce less of whatever behavior is associated with them. Well, if producers have rewards removed, and the unproductive receive rewards because they are in need—that is, because they are unproductive—why would they do anything to jeopardize the rewards they are receiving? Why become productive in order to begin being punished?
Is benevolence worthwhile? Absolutely. And it is right even if it leads to the same results as above. But voluntary, virtue-driven benevolence does not lead to the same consequences, at least not systemically and necessarily. But there is no room for virtuous benevolence when the people sufficiently productive to give away a portion of their rewards cannot keep their rewards long enough to give them away.
And are unproductive people inherently evil? Of course not. Some cannot be productive for reasons no fault of their own. But create a society in which the unproductive are rewarded with the forcibly seized rewards of the productive, and we will surely start to believe they are naturally, incessantly, deliberately, and abusively unproductive—a consequence unintended but as certain to follow as government is to continue to grow!
Evidence: USA 1932ff.
