Can We Sacrifice for the Common Good? Solving national problems exacts a price that won’t get cheaper by ignoring them. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/can-we-sacrifice-for-the-common-good/\
Recently the portents of a weakening economy have continued. As the Wall Street Journal reported, “tech stocks and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell sharply again on Monday,” and “Friday’s jobs report . . . showed employers added 151,000 jobs last month . . . half as many as in November and December.” We’re hearing more and more gloomy talk of a looming recession.
Many commentators, the Journal continued, are blaming “Mr. Trump’s willy-nilly tariffs” –– the latest on Canadian aluminum and steel––that “are weighing on business sentiment.” Trump’s measured admission that tariffs may cause “a little disturbance” and require a “period of transition” was not enough for many economists who see the more serious negative effects of raising tariffs as more important than the improvements that others say could follow correcting our negative balance-of-trade with China, Canada, and other countries.
Canada’s surplus, for example, alone was $64.26 billion in 2023. Our total trade deficit is $1trillion. Surely, eliminating such imbalances would be good for our fisc––especially those of our rich Nato partners, who until very recently have defied the 2014 obligation to spend a meager 2% of GDP on their militaries, while freeloading for decades on our military for their defense. And don’t forget Mexico’s $170 billion, and as Victor Hanson reminds us, “Mexico currently siphons off $63 billion in remittances from the U.S. economy, most of it from illegal aliens.”
So, which “experts” should we heed? First, we must acknowledge the problem with the dueling, credentialed economists who counsel government officials and inform us citizens––economics is not a science properly understood. Any discipline that involves individual, unique human beings–– with their unpredictable spontaneity, their “passions and interests,” and their power to serve both no matter how irrational, destructive, and selfish––cannot be the subject of a pure science.
For, as historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin points out, when it comes to human beings, “the particles are too minute, too heterogeneous, succeed each other too rapidly, occur in combinations of too great a complexity, are too much part and parcel of what we are and do, to be capable of submitting to the required degree of abstraction, that minimum of generalization and formalization––idealization––which any science must exact.”
This is not to say that economic knowledge and patterns are unavailable. But much of that wisdom comes from the long record of human experience and common sense, which provide us with useful information over time that can guide us. Even literature, particularly novels of social realism, can show us economic truths. For example, Charles Dickens’ chronically indebted Mr. Micawber says, “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” Or take economist Herbert Stein’s famous adage, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”
Such common sense and practical wisdom may be dismissed as simplistic by professional economists with their complex theories, mountains of quantitative data, and forbidding jargon. But if such common sense like Mr. Micawber’s had been heeded over the last several decades, we would not now be facing over $36 trillion in debt, and entitlements laden with $74 trillion in unfunded liabilities, while our defense budget––less than what we spend on servicing that debt–– is inadequate for answering China’s challenge in the Indo-Pacific, as well as threats from other geopolitical rivals.
Another factor in our inability to anticipate future problems and dangers is our representative democratic government with regularly scheduled elections that hold politicians accountable to the voters. Since ancient Athens this “tyranny of the majority” has been a challenge, and a seductive argument for technocratic oligarchies.
The premier champion of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, nearly two centuries ago recognized this tendency for politicians to kick cans down the road rather than anger voters. The masses’ “conclusions are hastily formed from superficial inspection of the more prominent features of a question. Hence it often happens that mountebanks of all sorts are able to please the people, while their truest friends fail to gain their confidence.” Thus, “the difficulty that a democracy finds in conquering the people’s passions and subduing the desires for the moment with a view of the future.”
Winston Churchill in his postwar history The Gathering Storm similarly explained the causes of World War II. These include “the structure and habits of democratic States,” which “lack those elements of persistence and conviction,” and pointed out “how, even in matters of self-preservation, no policy is pursued for even ten or fifteen years at a time.”
In our times, however, this problem has worsened. The century-long dominance of scientism, and the empowerment of government “experts” housed in regulatory agencies, have crowded out and delegitimized the common sense, doctrines of faith, and traditional wisdom that in Tocqueville’s day were foundational to our Constitutional order, and to the citizens who elected their leaders.
No illiterate farmer in Tocqueville’s day, for example, would have taken seriously for a minute the claim that biological sex is an artefact of political power to be altered and multiplied; nor would he contemplate eliminating the cheap, abundant fossil-fuel energy that has created the modern world. Only we Westerners in thrall to scientism can be that stupid.
Another feature of our world that has eroded our capacity to make sacrifices for the common good is our therapeutic sensibility, which has replaced the tragic understanding of human nature that has existed for millennia, and characterized our civilization. The therapeutic narrative is a byproduct of the Enlightenment and its faith in science and technology, which replaced traditional wisdom and Judeo-Christian doctrines. Now progressive improvements in material life, and the “human sciences” like sociology, psychology, economics, and political science, supposedly can mitigate and eliminate the evils of human existence.
Indeed, new technologies in transportation, medical science, agronomy, and communication have changed and improved the world, and reduced human suffering. But that success encouraged utopianism, once a wish-fulfilling fantasy of “heaven on earth,” that now is our birthright––as long as the technocrats are given the power to direct and manage our lives, at the expense of our unalienable rights.
The flaw in this dream is a fallen human nature and its destructive passions and impulses, visible on every page of history. The 20th century alone should have disabused us of that hubristic belief in perpetual progress. The prevalence of mass violence, the holocaust, gulags and civilian slaughter, driven by irrational political religions like communism, Nazism, and fascism, and empowered by new weapons of war that killed hundreds of millions, tell the gruesome tale.
Such cruelty and violence have been, and continue to be the exorbitant costs of our utopian dreams. And it’s the horrific reconfirmation of the tragic wisdom that as Euripides says, “Suffering is a necessity for man,” not an anomaly that progress will correct. For as Kant said, “from the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight can be made.”
Yet despite those lessons, the West has continued to entertain unrealistic expectations for human life, based on the belief that people do evil only because of material deprivation, political tyranny, or a lack of social validation and respect for their identities and self-esteem. In addition, they are entitled to success and happiness as unalienable rights, as are the absence of criticism, or hard work, or any personal accountability for their choices and failures.
In such a world, self-sacrifice for anything beyond one’s desires and grandiose expectations is scorned. Hence our age of “micro-aggressions,” “safe spaces,” or anything that troubles one’s subjective, thin-skinned standards of insult, now turned into “hate speech,” “assaults,” or even “violence” unprotected by the First Amendment.
And what’s worse, all of us, including those we call the “poor,” live in a world of affluence, health, safety, and comfort our ancestors could have imagined only for the gods. For decades now our civilization has validated Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, who over 150 years ago said that we “enlightened” moderns are “ungrateful animals.”
All these factors––the structures of representative democracies, the category errors of scientism, and the therapeutic utopian imperative––make difficult the answer to our opening question whether we can make the sacrifices necessary for correcting our feckless handling of looming debt, deficits, and underfunded entitlements disasters.
At least on the topic of tariffs, Donald Trump has told us that there will be a “little disturbance” and a “period of transition.” Perhaps that’s understated, but it does remind us that solving national problems exacts a price that won’t get cheaper by kicking the can down the road.
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