Different Standards in Politics
by Joseph Rowlands

There is a major source of confusion in politics. While people recognize that they can't seem to communicate, they always assume the problem is on the other side. Either their political opponents are ignorant, possibly intentionally ignorant, or they are just evil and are pursuing destructive goals.

Each side assumes they are right, and the other is flawed. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. If there is a disagreement, at least one side is wrong. But even the flaws are misunderstood.

Consider a policy like minimum wage. The economics of a minimum wage are crystal clear. If the minimum wage is above the market rate, it means that the marginal workers will lose their job (or the business itself will go under). A business can't afford to hire someone for more than they the expected revenue they'll bring in as a result of hiring them. A minimum wage above the market rate necessarily increases unemployment.

What's infuriating to many conservatives and libertarians is that regardless of how well understood this effect is, minimum wage laws are still promoted and passed. How can this be? Do the people passing these laws really not understand them? It really does appear that they don't understand, or that they are intentionally misunderstanding.

If it were simply a matter of ignorance, the problem could be solved pretty quickly. The problem is that pointing at ignorance assumes that you share moral and political standards, and it is just a matter of one person having information that the other person doesn't. It's simply a matter of educating. The thought is if you could educate the voters, or at least their elected representatives, the policy would end. But is that really the case?

This brings us to the source of the confusion. There is an unjustified belief the there is a shared standard of value accepted by all sides instead of radically different views.

The conservative confusion is the assumption that 'liberals' are simply lacking important economic insights, but if they understood, they could find agreement. The case of minimum wage highlights this. If only the liberals understood that they were increasing unemployment, and particularly for the poor, they might oppose the policy. So from this perspective, education is the means of achieving political progress and reconciliation.

The liberal confusion is different. The left judges policies in terms of the intended results, and they think the opposite is true. For them, minimum wage laws are an attempt at increasing the salary of the poorest people, and they see opposition to these laws as driven primarily by those who want to keep wages low. Who would want that? Potentially businessmen who don't want to have to pay more.

So conservatives would complain that liberals don't understand the consequences of the actions, and liberals would reply that the conservatives are just trying to thwart their efforts at helping the poor.

In issue after issue, the right believes the left to be ignorant of the unintended consequences of the action, while the left views the right as harboring secret, selfish desires. The right tries to judge a policy by all of its effects, including the unintended ones. The left views the policy in terms of what it directly accomplishes, and sees unintended consequences as caused by others. If a minimum wage increase is followed by unemployment, this is just because businessmen are choosing profits of jobs.

These conflicting views would be bad enough on their own. It would be challenging to convince one party that they are mistaken in terms of which is the appropriate standard of judging a policy. It is exasperated by the fact that each side does not recognize that the other size is using a different moral standard. Conservatives continue on a quest trying to educate the left about unintended consequences while the left sees it as an attempt to deceive people about the real reasons why the right opposes a policy.  The left doesn't view the right as simply ignorant. They view them as corrupt, and aiming for immoral ends. So instead of trying to educate them, they seek to minimize their influence through condemnation or shame.

If they understood that there are entirely different standards being used to judge policies, the debate might be different. There might be less vitriol and less dismissal of people's arguments. They could debate the purpose of morality and politics, and whether intentions are more or less important than consequences. They could work at getting to the root of the actual conflict, instead of debating derivative issues and never grasping the actual conflicts.

This confusion, based on an unjustified assumption that the parties are in basic agreement about the standards of politics, is part of a larger mistake about morality. There is a widespread belief that there is universally recognized (even if just in terms of essentials) morality. Outside of political debates, this belief manifests in an assumption that everyone knows what's right and wrong (they have a 'conscience'), and some just choose to do wrong. They don't recognize that people can have genuine disagreements about the nature of morality. To them, you are either moral or you are not.

In politics too, there is a belief in a universally accepted view of morality and how it connect to politics. The left doesn't view the right as disagreeing with their moral standard. They view the right as accepting the standard, but choosing to perform evil anyway. The right, on the other hand, believes in a common standard and explains disagreements in terms of ignorance or politics. Neither side recognizes a fundamentally different approach.

Discuss this Article (0 messages)