I've just googled the expression "you didn't build that" and received more than 40 million
hits.
Most of them surely (and all of them that I see on the first page of the list) involve the President's recent speech, and his statement two weeks ago about how successful people should recognize that they didn't get there, they didn't build their business, on their own. It is pretty clear from the context, where the phrase "on your own" appears repeatedly, what is meant.
There are efforts to create a furor over this, but the statement in itself is unexceptional. Of course you didn't get there alone. If you are a successful entrepreneur, you are perfectly aware of the fact that you are not a hermit living in a self-constructed hut in the rain forest. There aren't any customers or investors in the rain forest. Why would you try to create a business there?
You built your business in the middle of a social world, and a lot of people helped you. With some of these people you have a contractual relationship (customers, investors, employees), with some you never did. An inspirational 3d grade teacher may have persuaded you that you can handle arithmetic. Does it matter whether this happened in the context of a private or public school? It matters to policy wonks, but to anyone interested in the broad philosophical point it doesn't: surely some such things happened, and aided you on your way.
If you were born in North America, or Europe, you had an enormous boost right there -- your counterparts born in Haiti or Uganda may have all the same natural gifts and energies you do -- may be better endowed in those respects -- yet they didn't have the same encompassing social network. You didn't "build it" alone, you built it as part of that society.
It is a valuable point, and somebody needs to make it every now and then at the expense of Objectivists and other ideologies who create a sort of metaphysical individualism and seek to deduce a political program from that.
What I'd like to add is that those of us who believe in a large measure of individual liberty, who believe in reducing and even undermining altogether the notions of government and sovereignty, us anarcho-capitalists even -- we should be happy to climb onboard the you-didn't-do-it-alone bandwagon. Not because we don't appreciate the contributions of entrepreneurs to society but because we do. We appreciate them enough to understand them and to refrain from building an absurd metaphysics around them.
As one of the President's examples of why he is sure you didn't build a business alone, he mentions, "Somebody invested in roads and bridges." This is a bit of sleight-of-hand on his part. He is introducing government into his broader point, bridging the gap I mentioned above between a philosophical and a policy-wonkish perspective, and the (metaphorical) bridge about (literal) bridges won't hold. You don't necessarily need a system in which government builds the roads and bridges, although it happens to be the case historically that such is the way in which many of them have been built.
Those are pragmatic arguments. Would we all be better off if the highway system depended on the profit motive? Frankly, I think the answer is yes. And there would be more opportunities for more people to build businesses not alone but within the broad and perhaps anarchic social network. Some of those businesses would involve building and maintaining roads and bridges, ordered by other businesses as customers. The land use arrangements might be tricky, I acknowledge.
But the broadest point here is that there are a plurality of rights that are, in the context of our limited temporal perspective, in conflict. The only way forward is the meta-right of reconciling the first-order rights. William James makes this point while giving us an entertainingly condensed picture of politico-moral conflicts at the end of the 19th century. "See everywhere the struggle and the squeeze; and ever-lastingly the problem of how to make them less. The anarchists, nihilists and free-lovers; the free-silverites, socialists, and single-tax men; the free-traders and civil-service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-vivisectionists; the radical darwinians with their idea of the suppression of the weak, -- these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayed against them are simply deciding through actual experiment by what sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in this world."
In this process, we are all bound to be in the wrong in some sense. Hence the need to pray for forgiveness, as James says. But we may also hope that even in our wrongnesses we contribute to the education and development of our species, to the gradual reconciliation of the different rights. To the meta-right.
Thus much, James. I do not claim him as an anarcho-capitalist. Indeed, you'll see that he lists "anarchists" as one of the contending factions in the above exposition, part of the fray. A philosopher will be above the fray. (The "conservative sentiments of society" are part of the fray too, though arrayed against all the others.)
My own view of anarcho-capitalism, though, is that it is actually one with the meta-right. It is what I see when I seek to join James above that fray. It is where we will find ourselves heading as we work to reconcile all of our different impulses.
When we get to anarcho-capitalism, no one of us will be interested in claiming to have built it alone.
Most of them surely (and all of them that I see on the first page of the list) involve the President's recent speech, and his statement two weeks ago about how successful people should recognize that they didn't get there, they didn't build their business, on their own. It is pretty clear from the context, where the phrase "on your own" appears repeatedly, what is meant.
There are efforts to create a furor over this, but the statement in itself is unexceptional. Of course you didn't get there alone. If you are a successful entrepreneur, you are perfectly aware of the fact that you are not a hermit living in a self-constructed hut in the rain forest. There aren't any customers or investors in the rain forest. Why would you try to create a business there?
You built your business in the middle of a social world, and a lot of people helped you. With some of these people you have a contractual relationship (customers, investors, employees), with some you never did. An inspirational 3d grade teacher may have persuaded you that you can handle arithmetic. Does it matter whether this happened in the context of a private or public school? It matters to policy wonks, but to anyone interested in the broad philosophical point it doesn't: surely some such things happened, and aided you on your way.
If you were born in North America, or Europe, you had an enormous boost right there -- your counterparts born in Haiti or Uganda may have all the same natural gifts and energies you do -- may be better endowed in those respects -- yet they didn't have the same encompassing social network. You didn't "build it" alone, you built it as part of that society.
It is a valuable point, and somebody needs to make it every now and then at the expense of Objectivists and other ideologies who create a sort of metaphysical individualism and seek to deduce a political program from that.
What I'd like to add is that those of us who believe in a large measure of individual liberty, who believe in reducing and even undermining altogether the notions of government and sovereignty, us anarcho-capitalists even -- we should be happy to climb onboard the you-didn't-do-it-alone bandwagon. Not because we don't appreciate the contributions of entrepreneurs to society but because we do. We appreciate them enough to understand them and to refrain from building an absurd metaphysics around them.
As one of the President's examples of why he is sure you didn't build a business alone, he mentions, "Somebody invested in roads and bridges." This is a bit of sleight-of-hand on his part. He is introducing government into his broader point, bridging the gap I mentioned above between a philosophical and a policy-wonkish perspective, and the (metaphorical) bridge about (literal) bridges won't hold. You don't necessarily need a system in which government builds the roads and bridges, although it happens to be the case historically that such is the way in which many of them have been built.
Those are pragmatic arguments. Would we all be better off if the highway system depended on the profit motive? Frankly, I think the answer is yes. And there would be more opportunities for more people to build businesses not alone but within the broad and perhaps anarchic social network. Some of those businesses would involve building and maintaining roads and bridges, ordered by other businesses as customers. The land use arrangements might be tricky, I acknowledge.
But the broadest point here is that there are a plurality of rights that are, in the context of our limited temporal perspective, in conflict. The only way forward is the meta-right of reconciling the first-order rights. William James makes this point while giving us an entertainingly condensed picture of politico-moral conflicts at the end of the 19th century. "See everywhere the struggle and the squeeze; and ever-lastingly the problem of how to make them less. The anarchists, nihilists and free-lovers; the free-silverites, socialists, and single-tax men; the free-traders and civil-service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-vivisectionists; the radical darwinians with their idea of the suppression of the weak, -- these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayed against them are simply deciding through actual experiment by what sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in this world."
In this process, we are all bound to be in the wrong in some sense. Hence the need to pray for forgiveness, as James says. But we may also hope that even in our wrongnesses we contribute to the education and development of our species, to the gradual reconciliation of the different rights. To the meta-right.
Thus much, James. I do not claim him as an anarcho-capitalist. Indeed, you'll see that he lists "anarchists" as one of the contending factions in the above exposition, part of the fray. A philosopher will be above the fray. (The "conservative sentiments of society" are part of the fray too, though arrayed against all the others.)
My own view of anarcho-capitalism, though, is that it is actually one with the meta-right. It is what I see when I seek to join James above that fray. It is where we will find ourselves heading as we work to reconcile all of our different impulses.
When we get to anarcho-capitalism, no one of us will be interested in claiming to have built it alone.
A substantial slice of American opinion detests Obama for being oblivious to common sense business and moral realities. Obama's remarks will only strengthen this. They make it more likely that millions of owners of small and closely held businesses in the flyover zone will never vote for him.
ReplyDeleteObama's remarks were a classic instance of the statements that may have a grain of truth, but that are impolitic. No parent ever raised a child alone, and I happen to like the phrase "it takes a village to raise a child." But I would NEVER dare tell the mothers of America "you didn't raise your kids by yourself." That would be seen as disastrously impolitic, especially if spoken by a man. Likewise, I would NEVER tell an audience of combat veterans "you didn't do it by yourself," especially given that I have no combat experience myself.
The "You didn't build that" remarks were the most impolitic statement Obama has made since he stepped on the national political stage in 2006 or 7. The thinking in those remarks is that of George Lakoff, the 71 year old Berkeley linguistics prof who was very keen for a number of years to make his mark on American left of centre ideology. Lakoff is an authority on metaphor and analogy, and his writings can teach us a lot about philosophy and the roots of mathematics. But many of his views on political philosophy and the economic order are little more than ADA commonplaces. Lakoff, like all too many tenured academics, simply does not understand the business and technological order that undergirds our civilisation.
There is no way Obama can say what said without being guilty of special pleading for the ideology he has upheld throughout his public life. Private enterprise builds on public sector outputs, true, but the public sector in turn is predicated on a private sector willing to be taxed. Absent taxable private incomes, no society has managed to find a stable and viable political and economic order.
Like it or not, anarcho-capitalism has made headway in American public opinion. I could see this as a high school student in the 1960s. Friedman, Rand and Hayek are read by under 40s. Economics is a popular major. One cannot dismiss the libertarians and enthusiastic capitalists any more than one can dismiss the fact that one America voter in 30 is Jewish.