The Median Voter is a Maoist

Seeking truth from facts

What the American voter wants is impossible. Social Security is on track to be insolvent by 2032. What should we do about it? We could increase taxes to pay for the benefits, but 80% of voters are against that. We could cut benefits to match the taxes we have, but 90% of voters are against it. We could move the retirement age back, but 74% of voters oppose it. We could borrow money to pay for it, but 76% of voters are against that too. This is not simply different samples at different time, because these all come from the same poll a couple months ago. Relatedly, the American voter thinks the government is spending too much, but should increase spending on every government program while simultaneously cutting taxation and shrinking the size of the government.

The best defense of the voters’ beliefs are that they think someone else can be made to pay for it. It’s only a partial defense, because the things they scapegoat – on the Left, the billionaires, on the Right, foreigners – cannot pay for more than a pittance of what they want done. But even this is not an adequate explanation, because voters demand the impossible.

Consider Obamacare, which I wrote about at length last month. The Affordable Care Act banned charging higher prices to people with preexisting conditions. If you do this, however, sick people will select in and healthy people will select out. To have insurance exist at all, you need people to be compelled to purchase, rather than allow them to opt out when they are healthy and opt back in later when they are sick.

The ban on discriminating on preexisting conditions was extremely popular with the voters, and so we kept it. The requirement that you purchase health insurance was not, and so we zeroed it out in 2017. These policies are not something where you can get one but not the other – they are the same policy, fundamentally inextricable. And yet, we did A which leads to B and simply say that it will lead to C.

I think the better explanation is that the median voter in America is a Maoist. They do not believe in tradeoffs. They believe that, if only everyone were good and honest and working toward the right goals, good things will happen. That politicians disagree with each other is simply a sign that they are corrupt. If the people are good and sincere, then we can simply do things and it will all work out okay.

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This sort of attitude once ruled China. I do not call the American voter’s ideology Maoist as simple namecalling. It is just literally true. Mao Zedong’s program was that it was only the ideological sincerity which was needed for success to come. This ideological sincerity had magical properties. Consider one of the Three Constantly Read Articles, “The Foolish Old Man who Removed the Mountains”. There is a Chinese story about an old man who lived near the Taihang and Wangwu mountains. He wanted to travel, but the mountains lay in his way. So, he called his sons to him, and they began to dig up the mountains with hoes. A Wise Old Man comes and rebukes him for doing an impossible task, but the Foolish Old Man responds: “When I die, my sons will carry on; when they die, there will be my grandsons, and then their sons and grandsons, and so on to infinity. High as they are, the mountains cannot grow any higher and with every bit we dig, they will be that much lower. Why can’t we clear them away?” And so he and his sons resume digging.

It is not the case, however, that he and his sons did indeed clear away the mountains. Instead, God was touched by his conviction, and sent down two angels who carried away the mountains. Mao suggests, then, that there are two mountains the Chinese people wish to dig up – imperialism and feudalism – and if they dig them up without rest, then they will touch God’s heart and do the impossible. Mao is not so primitive as to suggest that a literal deity will come down and do it – instead, “our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people”.

The great disaster of Maoism – the Great Leap Forward, with its tens of millions starved – came because Mao thought enthusiasm meant that constraints could be ignored, and that simply intending for something to happen was the same as doing what was necessary for it to happen.

Before the Great Leap Forward, state planning was run by Chen Yun, who was by all accounts a serious, soberminded individual. It was he who coined the phrase “crossing the river by feeling the stones”; I disagree with communism as an economic system because I believe it to be inefficient, but there is also no doubt in my mind that competent administration set on achieving possible goals can indeed grow. Reading Chen Yun’s selected works (volume three can be found here), one is impressed by the focus on whether the means can achieve the ends. When he makes projections of future production quantities, they are not fanciful but possible (p. 208). To combat inflation caused by an excess of currency printing, he says that they must “strive for a balance between revenue and expenditure, between credit receipts and payments” and that “we should not wait until next year to check inflation” (p. 208). That the government is trying to solve inflation by opening more restaurants is ridiculous, and why communism is a failure at persistently raising living standards, but it is at least an attempt to do the possible with the feasible. Problems are not solved by enthusiasm, but by carefully exchanging evidence, comparing alternatives, and reconsidering matters (p. 194-5), allowing for the possibility that the methods may not lead to the results.

You do not see this in Mao. The people’s enthusiasm would suffice to dissolve constraints. What was his solution to nuclear warfare? “The atom bomb is a paper tiger. … the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two types of new weapons”. What was his solution to the shortage of steel? Melting down their woks and hoes for sulfurous ingots of pig iron. Mao would later concede that these ingots were worthless, but at the time he said that (reorganizing slightly) “on the foundation of the tremendous energy of the masses it is possible to accomplish any task whatsoever”. Nevermind what Chen Yun wrote to him (p. 147) in May of 1959, stating that “over 40% of the 9 million tons of iron … contains sulfur in excess of 0.2 per cent”. How shall heavy industry be developed, and should it come at the expense of light industry and agriculture? He has the answer: “If your desire is genuine or strong … there more grain and more materials for light industry … and there will be more funds in the future to invest in heavy industry”. How shall agriculture be improved? Here Mao is unusually specific, but his ideas are all wrong: to grow more, the people should simply plant more and plant deeper. On the basis of this, fanciful quotas were set. Mao’s method of projecting agricultural growth was to pull numbers out of a hat. Not setting quotas higher and higher became a confession of disbelief of the program, and the people starved because their food was requisitioned. When Peng Duhai submitted the mildest of criticisms, suggesting that local leaders were overstating production, he was purged. One of the striking details of the Great Leap Forward is that when cooking and food distribution was centralized – it had to be, they had melted down all their cookware – the first months were those of plenty. Production was going to increase, so food was free, and gorging yourself was an ideological statement. When the food ran out, that was that.

I mentioned that Mao does not often include details in his writing. His instructions are aphorisms – not “do this”, but “see that this is done”. And of course, there is a great gap between what the appropriate things to do were, and what outcomes they would actually lead to. If things lead to disaster, they can be disavowed as being a misunderstanding, and not showing the fundamental wrongness of the program. Mao Zedong, at the Lushan conference of 1959, said “I do not claim to have invented the people’s communes, only to have proposed them. … When I was in Shantung a reporter asked me: ‘Are the people’s communes good?’ I said: ‘They are good,’ and he published it in a newspaper. There was a spot of petit-bourgeois fanaticism there, too. In the future reporters should keep away.”

I must emphasize that the Lushan conference was not when Mao submitted self-criticism, Liu Shaoqi became the dominant figure in the government, and the Great Leap Forward stopped. That came later, at the Seven Thousand Cadres conference of 1962. The Lushan conference was when Mao purged Peng Duhai for mild criticisms of the feasibility of the Great Leap Forward. Chen Yun fell “sick”, and absented himself from politics – you’ll note the table of contents has a gap from summer 1959 until 1961, when it became possible to describe the catastrophe that had occurred. (After it did, Chen Yun was willing to bend to empirical evidence – see p. 177, on the advantages of individuals raising pigs, and p. 190, on the advantages of private plots).

Mao wanted the impossible done. Man cannot do impossible things. The cost of pretending otherwise is death.

The voter wants impossible things, too. I do not think the American people are going to starve themselves to death – we are too far from the threshold of survival for that – but the American people have set themselves on an inevitable conflict with reality. More and more of the economy is dedicated to parasitism on the public – Social Security, Medicare, disability (both for the actually disabled, and for veterans), the department of defense. We seem to think that we can pay for it all with taxes on just our enemies. In practice, we have funded it all by pulling forward consumption from the future, and borrowing heavily. For a time this can be sustained, but the bill will come due.

I suspect, of course, that the voter has always wanted impossible things. What is remarkable is that we have long kept the demand for impossible things away from the actual conduct of the government. For many years, the budget was balanced, and entitlements were a small part of the budget.

I believe that what keeps government functioning are moral taboos as to what is right and proper for the government to do. When the government does not do something, it is a violation of the norm for the government to involve itself in it. This is simply a bias toward the status quo, not a consistent libertarianism – once the government is involved in regulating something, you are a madman for thinking it could ever be safely provided without the government. Further, once a government program does exist, it failing is never evidence that it should be gotten rid of. The program does not fail, it is failed. It being inefficient simply means that it was “chronically underfunded”, and needs “reinvestment”.

You’ll note how the defense of libertarianism is hardly ever expressed in the terms of utilitarianism. One does not persuade anyone by saying that there is decentralized information about people’s utility functions, and a price system is the only incentive compatible way to elicit it. Instead, the case for libertarianism is built upon natural law, and analogy. We have lower taxes because it isn’t right for someone to take the product of your work, not because taxes will move you along your labor supply curve and cause you to produce a socially inefficient level of labor.

This often leads us into errors. We may reject government programs which are beneficial, and over apply the wisdom of non-intervention. But we must weigh that against the basic errors that people fall into with a government program. If the amount of spending is zero, then the people cannot ask for spending to be doubled and taxes to be halved. Half and twice zero is still nothing.

Lastly, someone who purports to represent the people, and wants to bring the people’s will into office, is a dangerous character. The people wish to chew on the pretty foxgloves. A politician’s job is to do what they think is best for the people, not to do what the people want. Let them vote for whoever they should choose, but you should not help them.