Stuart K. Hayashi
This is a revised version of a previously published post, “Symbolater Syndrome, Pt. 2 of 4.”
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| California governor Jerry Brown insisting his minimum-wage raise makes sense “morally” after he just admitted that his economics legislation does not make sense “economically.” |
Suppose there is no legally mandated minimum wage, and I am jobless. Then someone named Lysander offers to hire me for $5 per hour. I accept. That is a pay raise right there — I went from making zero to making five dollars per hour. Then the government decrees that there is a minimum wage of $15 per hour. If Lysander is caught paying me $5 per hour, he could be fined or imprisoned. On a cost-benefit analysis, Lysander decides that while he could profit from paying me $5 per hour for the value I add to his business, I don’t add enough value to his business where he would still profit from paying me $15 per hour for that same work. He decides he should not have me working for him. As for the people already in Lysander’s employ, either he fires some of them or keeps them all on while cutting their hours. Far from helping the poor, this measure hurts them. Absent of the minimum wage, I would be making five dollars per hour. With this minimum wage, I am stuck at zero.
For decades, supporters of raising the minimum wage have denied that such a measure has any adverse effect on employment. There is nothing surprising about that. Yet in more recent years, I have noticed a more worrying trend: there are people who support raising the minimum wage who do not deny it.
Yes, They Know It Will Reduce the Income of Some Poor People to Nothing; They Still Do It For the Poor?
I first noticed this in my correspondence with a particular woman online. She and I had become acquainted when discussing GMOs (genetically modified organisms). She properly wanted the government to stop interfering with GMOs — and, later, I learned that she improperly wanted the government to continue interfering with pretty much every other industry. Part of her desire for such interference to continue and expand was her tirades demanding an increase in the minimum wage to what she called a “living wage.”
One of our mutual online acquaintances then showed this woman a study that evinced that, everything else being equal, raises in the minimum wage contribute to reductions in employed work hours for the poor and unskilled.
The woman then replied something to the effect of, Yes, I know the economic argument. I support raising the minimum wage because I care about the well-being of low-income families.
I was floored by her reply. I expected that she would deny that the minimum wage contributes to unemployment among the poor and unskilled. She did not deny it. She refrained from denying it and then she still asserted that raising the minimum wage is “for the poor” and unskilled.
That turned out not to be a fluke, as a higher-profile instance of this phenomenon followed. In early April of 2016, California governor Jerry Brown gave this rationale for demanding an increase in the state’s mandated minimum wage [in the link, I cued it to the precise spot where he begins what I quote him saying]:
Economically, minimum wages may not make sense. But morally and socially and politically they make every sense, because it binds the community together and makes sure that parents can take care of their kids in a much more satisfactory way [emphases Governor Brown’s].
He says it at the 1 minute, 24 second mark.
Let’s translate this. What does it mean for a raise in the minimum wage to “make sense” “economically” or not? An increase or decrease in the poor’s average income, as affected by legislation, is an economic effect. For most of the past five decades, hardly any supporter of a raise in the minimum wage would dispute that the very purpose of a law adjusting the minimum wage is to have an economic effect. Legislation on the minimum wage is, by definition, economic legislation. That is just as the purpose of a comedian telling jokes is to make the audience laugh. To say that you don’t care what is the economic effect of your own legislation — legislation that is, by your own design, touted as economic legislation — is akin to a comedian announcing that he doesn’t care if his jokes are funny.
A government-mandated increase in the minimum wage making sense economically means that raising the minimum wage does exactly what its supporters of the past 50 years have claimed it would do: improve the living standards of the poor and unskilled. Governor Brown contradicts himself in proclaiming that a minimum-wage hike “makes sure that parents can take care of their kids in a much more satisfactory way,” because that will only happen if the minimum-wage hike has the economic effect on low-income people that the minimum-wage hike’s proponents have long insisted that the minimum-wage hike would have. That is, the minimum-wage hike will only ensure that low-income people “can take care of their kids in a much more satisfactory way” if minimum-wage hikes do “make sense” “economically.”
To admit “economically, minimum wages may not make sense” is to admit that legally mandated minimum wages do not in fact help the poor and unskilled as was previously claimed, but that they in fact hurt the poor and unskilled. What is the source of Governor Brown’s apparent contradiction? Governor Brown explains that it makes “every sense” to him “morally.”
To wit, Governor Brown first inadvertently admitted that raising the minimum wage harms rather than helps the poor (the poor being his ostensive value), but he will go through it anyway as a gesture to indicate his moral concern for the well-being of the poor.
It Does Symbolize Concern for the Poor...
This is beyond “idolatry”; it is symbolatry in practice. I define symbolatry as someone sacrificing her own purported value in favor of something that merely symbolizes that very same value. I call it symbolatry rather than idolatry because an idol is a narrower type of symbol. In this context, there can be a greater variety of symbols for values for which the actual value is sacrificed.
If Governor Brown genuinely valued the well-being of the poor, he would do what “makes sense” for them “economically” — refrain from raising the minimum wage and, more than that, work to abolish it altogether. In lieu of that, he performs a ritual that “makes sense” for him “morally,” which is offering a symbolic gesture of concern for the poor that, by his own inadvertent admission, does actual harm to the poor. The same goes for that aforementioned woman who didn’t even deny the minimum wage raise’s actual effect on the poor. What is purported to be the real value (the well-being of the poor) is being sacrificed and destroyed for the sake of performing a symbolic ritual that is intended to be interpreted as a show of solidarity for those same poor.
Some people might respond that, in this context, my introduction of the term “symbolatry” is unnecessary. They might say there is already a term for this, and it is a term much beloved on Twitter by right-wing people who have cartoon characters for their avatars: “virtue-signaling.” But I am not accusing Governor Brown and that aforementioned woman of mere “virtue-signaling”; there are important differences. To accuse a man of “virtue-signaling” is to put emphasis on his desire to convince other people of his own exalted moral status. Rather, my suspicion is that Governor Brown and that woman are performing the ritual of pushing for this legislation in order to convince themselves that they are caring and morally upright. Furthermore, when a man is accused of “virtue-signaling,” the implication is usually that this symbolic gesture is empty and of no effect. My accusation against Governor Brown and that woman is much harsher: they are trying to convince themselves that their performance of the ritual indicates compassion for the poor and yet, on some level, they are at least vaguely aware that the ritual’s completion — meaning successful passage of the minimum wage increase — will actually harm poor people in real life. This symbolatry has graver consequences than “virtue-signaling” does.
Conservatives Who Say Minimum-Wage Apologists Care About Intentions and Not Results, Need to Learn the Definition of “Intention”
When gestures which symbolize help for the poor — and are actually known to harm the poor — are prioritized above the poor themselves, I do not consider that a good intention. As I said before, it is for that reason that I object to the common right-wing accusation that left-wing supporters of antipoverty measures are all about good intentions while not caring the results. As one Wall Street Journal op-ed put it, “Too many policy makers evaluate new interventions — labor rules, wage laws, environmental regulations — only by what they hope to accomplish. They do not consider the consequences, the unintended effects, and the trouble that their policies will cause for employers and workers…” (emphases added). The subheading that Journal’s editors (not the op-ed’s author) chose was, “Free enterprise is under assault from politicians who only care about good intentions, not results.” A conservative who says this reveals a flaw in his thinking far larger than the flaw he imputes to the left-wingers, as that conservative overlooks the very meaning of a sincere intention.
Just as the concept of “50 percent” derives from “a single unit,” the concept of “sincere intention” derives from the concept of “producing the results desired.” Should I have a sincere intention to erect a stable house or not, then I definitely care if, as results of my efforts, the house gets built and remains standing and stable in the ensuing years. But suppose I announce my strong motivation to build a house and, five years later, you notice no house is built and, when you ask me about it, I shrug it off. Moreover, ever since the day subsequent to my announcement, I made no effort to have the house built. Insofar as I am indifferent to the results, it is proper for you to conclude that I held no sincere intention to build that house after all. And a sincere intention is the only kind of intention there is — to be insincere in professing to intend to build a house is to lack the intention of building a house.
You can observe the degree to which a person intends to do something by observing the degree to which that person cares about obtaining the results he claims to desire. Even if a person enters a competition she knows she probably will not win, if you observe that she made every effort to do her best within the rules, you know her intention was still to win.
Suppose my home has an insect infestation. I decide to do something about it — I obtain Brand A of an insecticide and spray it. I say that my intention in this is to kill the insects. After the first try, the insect infestation remains. I try four more times; the insects remain. I therefore decide that to attain the desired goal — eliminate the insects — I must try some other measure. I therefore hire an exterminator who uses Brand B on the insects. Finally the insects are gone and I am satisfied.
In that scenario, you can tell that when I claimed my intention was to kill the insects, that was indeed my intention. You can tell as much by how I handled my methodology. I said that I intended to bring about a particular result, and that I was using a particular method — Brand A insecticide — to try to bring about that result. After repeated attempts with this one method, I did not obtain the desired results. Because I was not lying to anyone — not even myself — about intending to kill the insects, I was therefore willing to try another method. In short, if the person saying that he intends to reach that desired goal has tried one method to reach it repeatedly and has always failed with that method, you can tell whether he intends to reach that desired goal by observing his willingness to try some alternative method to reach the desired goal.
It is therefore illogical to assert that someone has a particular intention when not caring about the result. Someone intends a specific outcome insofar as this person concerns him- or herself with bringing about the result that is this same outcome. The allegation that a politician “cares about intentions and not results” implies that the politician does not care if X happens but does care to take an action solely or mainly in pursuit of making X happen. An intention without concern for results is a contradiction in terms. For a conservative to accuse anyone of caring about intentions and not results is for that conservative to reveal that he does not understand the meaning of “intention.”
Now suppose I say that I intend to kill all the insects in my home and I try Brand A insecticide. I try four more times and it hasn’t worked. I am introduced to other options. I reject them in favor of trying Brand A insecticide 95 more times, contaminating my house and filling it with fumes. Is it really my intention to eliminate the insects? You would be proper in judging the answer to be no. More likely, my intention was not to eliminate the insects but to go through the motions of “taking action” with respect to fighting off the insects. If my intention was to kill the insects, then the result of killing the insects would take priority over trying Brand A insecticide over and over again after a consistent record of failure. Indeed, “going through the motions” might have been the original expression for someone making gestures representing a firm commitment to a goal while not being so committed in reality.
Likewise, if a man says that the intention of his legislation is to reduce poverty, you can observe how much this really was his intention by whether he pays attention to the extent that this legislation actually reduced poverty. Should it be the case that this man and his colleagues successfully pass such legislation across the country and, after four decades of failure, they are still pushing for more legislation of this type, there will come a point where you are rational for doubting that their intention is to reduce poverty. The likelier explanation is that their intention is to go through the motions of “doing something” about it, just as a man who uses the same obviously ineffective insecticide a hundred times intends not to kill the insects but instead to go through the motions of “doing something” about the insects.
This is comparable to how I come across millennials who say that the academic Marxists still existing today genuinely intend to have communism implemented to help the poor. No, that is not the case. Perhaps someone who lived in 1848 might be given the benefit of the doubt — maybe a nineteenth-century man might have been naïve enough to believe honestly that communism could cure poverty. But after a century of communism wreaking only destruction — killing Venezuela even as I type these words — its apologists have no such excuse. Marxism’s apologists do not bear an honest intention to help the poor; they, at best, intend merely to go through the motions of caring about the poor. And, incidentally, Karl Marx himself stated explicitly and approvingly that he anticipated that at least hundreds of peaceful people would be killed in the name of communism — he was not naïve about that.
A Man Who Intends to Help the Poor Will Rethink His Prior Support for Particular “Antipoverty” Measures
By contrast, let’s now take a look at someone whose actions suggest an authentic intention to address poverty. When he first started his campaigns to ameliorate Third World destitution, the musician Bono put all his emphasis on the most conventional measures, such as calling for increased foreign aid and trying to pressure the World Bank to forgive debt to developing countries so that they could obtain even more loans. Back in 2002, Bono told People magazine with some ambivalence, “We are taught not to court success here” in his native Ireland. “There’s an old story about an American and an Irishman looking up at a mansion. The American looks at it and says, ‘One day I’m going to live in that place.’ The Irishman looks at it and says, ‘One day I’m going to get the bastard who lives in that place.’”
But after years of his campaigning, Bono observed that to place most of his emphasis on taxpayer-funded aid was not a winning strategy. Because he did intend to fight poverty, he was therefore willing to adjust his methodology. He eventually observed that political-economic liberalization — what he explicitly called “capitalism” — is the most effective antipoverty measure. By 2012 he explained to Georgetown University students, “Commerce — entrepreneurial capitalism — takes more people out of poverty than aid. Of course we know that.” The dramatic nature of that change in opinion was not lost on Bono; he chuckled and said, “ ‘Rock star preaches capitalism.’ Wow! Sometimes I hear myself and I just can’t believe it!”
Three years later Bono admitted to Rolling Stone that he had decided to make it a priority “to understand commerce — I think that’s very important. If you told me 20 years ago that commerce took more people out of poverty than aid and development, I’d have scoffed.” He is not scoffing anymore. True, he has not given up entirely on recommending taxpayer-funded foreign aid or debt forgiveness, but his willingness to shift emphasis and recommend more liberalization is what evinces that his stated intention to try to fight poverty was indeed his real intention.
Bono talks about capitalism at the 38 minute, 4 second mark.
Conversely, consider some elderly political Progressives, such as Ralph Nader. Purporting to intend to reduce poverty, Ralph Nader has continued for a half-century to urge the very same policy of raising the minimum wage, and, after proclaiming that poverty has not been reduced, he urges this some more. If reducing poverty was Nader’s consistent intention, there would have been some reconsideration on his part, self-reflection in the manner of Bono’s. It is not that Ralph Nader cares about his own intentions and not about the results. Rather, Nader does care about the results, and he is getting the results he intends — to go through the motions and make gestures that symbolize concern for the poor. And as Nader and his disciples obtain success in their having their measures ratified, the poor are hurt.
Rush Limbaugh categorizes instances such as this one as “liberals” putting “symbolism over substance.” Sadly, right-wingers such as Limbaugh are not immune to that malady either.
Trump’s Border Wall As Symbolism Over Substance
We can see that with the position taken by supporters of President Donald Trump in his yearly demands that there be federal funding to build a wall on the USA’s southern border to keep out undocumented immigrants. In rallying around President Trump on this cause, the supporters’ stated main intention is to have the result of there being a net reduction in the number of undocumented immigrants in the USA. Yet, there is plausibility in doubting that this is the supporters’ main intention, and some reason to suspect that, on some level, a number of supporters know that it is not their main intention.U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) provided Congress a ranked list of items that needed funding in order for the agency to perform its operations. CBP ranked a funded wall for the southern border as a low-priority request. By that, CBP meant that if it could have all the funding it wanted, it would not reject the offer for a border wall, but that, if budgetary constraints prevented the agency from getting everything it wanted, the border wall would be among the first items it would sacrifice. What sort of funding, then, does CBP rank as a higher priority? The CBP placed greater urgency on securing funding for additional surveillance technology, such as additional drones and motion-detection sensors along the border, citing this as a much more cost-effective in blocking or deporting undocumented migrants, providing more bang for every buck taken from a taxpayer who genuinely desired to rid the country of undocumented migrants.
As Sen. Dick Durbin paraphrased what the CBP wanted, “What they said over again was technology. They don’t rule out barriers. They don’t rule out fences. But that isn’t the first priority.”
In 2018, Congressional Democrats balked at funding Trump’s border wall. As a counteroffer, they proposed giving the CBP what it wanted — additional and upgraded surveillance tools in lieu of the wall. Trump’s apologists tried to spin this counteroffer as an example of Democrats being far less responsive to unauthorized border-crossings and far more lenient on undocumented migrants than Trump and Congressional Republicans. The irony of this is that if the Congressional Democrats completely triumphed over Trump and the GOP, the result would have been a wider net reduction in undocumented immigrants being in the USA than would Trump having his way, the construction of a border wall going completely unopposed in Congress.
Reece Jones, a geographer at the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa who specializes in studying border walls and the extent to which they are effective, noted on Twitter, “If Dems stop the wall and get a ‘win’ by agreeing to more surveillance, drones, sensors, and agents, it will be worse for people on the move. The reality is walls don’t work but all the other stuff can.”
Here is the thing that worries me about the wall debate. If Dems stop the wall and get a 'win' by agreeing to more surveillance, drones, sensors, and agents, it will be worse for people on the move. The reality is walls don't work but all the other stuff can.— Reece Jones (@reecejhawaii) January 9, 2018
Could it be that Trump’s supporters, so zealously in favor of having the border wall, are simply mistaken in rejecting the Congressional Democrats’ counteroffer as less likely to give them the outcome they desire? Could it be that they genuinely believe the border wall would do more to reduce the number of undocumented migrants in the USA than would the Democrats’ counterproposal? They would have to dismiss a lot of empirical evidence concerning borders that are already heavily fortified. The most fortified national border for Europe is between Morocco and Spain, with five fences, barbed wire, and a ditch. Migrants from sub-Saharan Africa have been able to get through even that. Decades earlier, fleeing people were able to get past the armed guards placed along the Berlin Wall.
And when the fortification of a border prevents people from bypassing it directly, there are other methods of getting around it — literally. The most militarized border on Earth is the one separating North and South Korea. Rather than cross this Demiliatarized Zone, the favored method that North Korean refugees use to get into South Korea is first to cross into mainland China illegally. Then, from mainland China, they travel into South Korea. And consider the first immigrants to come into the USA illegally from Mexico: Chinese workers. When they couldn’t enter the USA from the south, they got in through the north.
The very engineer tasked with designing Trump’s border wall — himself an immigrant from Mexico — has explained publicly why the wall deserves little confidence.
Given the mountains of evidence that the Congressional Democrats’ offer would do more to block undocumented immigrants than would Trump’s border wall, why does the latter captivate Trump’s followers so? The reason is its symbolism. As the budget negotiations faltered, Trump apologist Dinesh D’Souza suggested to right-wingers that they become resigned to the “wall” being more “symbolic” than literal. But it was always symbolic. First, mentions of a wall were a mere mnemonic device that Roger Stone, Sam Nunberg, and Steven Bannon devised to help Trump remember to bring up the topic of immigration while campaigning. And, for many of Trump’s voters, the wall became a perfect gesture to express their resentment for Latin Americans coming across the border. As noted by Ben-Gurion University scholar Sarai Aharoni, unsympathetic toward that attitude, “Walls are rarely built of stones or bricks alone. Fortresses are created through a wall-mindset.” To that, Reece Jones added, “The wall is a symbol of all of the other exclusions behind it.”
Walls are rarely built of stones or bricks alone. #Fortresses are created through a wall-mindset.— Sarai Aharoni שרי אהרוני سراى اهرونى (@saraia555) January 9, 2018
The wall is a symbol of all of the other exclusions behind it— Reece Jones (@reecejhawaii) January 9, 2018
The wall is so seemingly perfect in its symbolism that Trump’s supporters self-deludedly overlook the imperfection of its execution.
Hence, in their fervor to support construction of Trump’s border wall, Trump’s supporters sacrifice their supposed main intention and value — minimizing the number of undocumented immigrants in the USA — in favor of having their precious gesture representing a desire to minimize undocumented immigrants in the USA. This, too, is going through the motions.
Longtime readers know that I want aspiring immigrants to succeed in getting past these arbitrary obstacles to their long-term settlement in the USA. For that reason, it almost became tempting for me to root for Trump’s border wall over the Congressional Democrats’ counteroffer. But I cannot root for either. Besides my opposition to taxpayer funding in general, I do not condone the eminent domain being exercised to seize private land for the border wall’s construction. And the Congressional Democrats’ counteroffer violates private property rights as well, allowing border-enforcement agencies to place their surveillance equipment on private citizens’ land against their consent.
But as one who abhors the unjust placing of obstacles against peaceful immigration, the one piece of praise I can give the border wall is that it would divert resources away from more-effective measures of border enforcement and result in there being more undocumented immigrants in the USA than there otherwise would be.
If the border wall gets built, I will not chalk up its failure to keep out undocumented immigrants as an example of the wall’s right-wing apologists prioritizing “intentions” over “results.” When the wall stands and fails to stop unauthorized crossings of the border, it will be that the wall’s proponents have actually fully realized their main intention — to have their gesture representing a desire to keep out foreigners, the erection of a monument to their own spitefulness toward Latin Americans. The wall will amount to that.
Conclusion
My final analysis can be phrased in the manner that Robert W. Tracinski phrased it when writing about another governmental intrusion in 2008: “…I’m getting impatient with all of this talk about the Law of Unintended Consequences. It lets the...advocates of government interference in the economy...off the hook. . . . How could they help it if there were ‘unintended consequences’...?”
For someone to agitate for legislation that symbolizes helping the poor, all the while knowing on some level that the legislation’s passage will hurt some poor individuals, is not to have good intentions for the poor.
Conversely, the construction of Trump’s border wall is a much more overt expression of resentment toward a group of very poor people — which makes it ironic that the border wall’s construction would do far less to keep undocumented immigrants out of the USA than would the countermeasures by Congressional Democrats that have been mischaracterized as more lenient toward the poor immigrants.
On Wednesday, March 21, 2018, I added the 2012 quotation of Bono about capitalism doing more for the poor than foreign aid does, and I added the 2008 quotation from Robert W. Tracinski. On Saturday, November 23, 2019, I added the section on the Trump border wall.
