In 19th century England, factions of Nottingham textile workers began destroying new factory machinery meant to automate parts of the job. History deemed them the Luddite movement, named after a semi-fictional weaver named Ned Ludd, whose identity was appropriated by disgruntled laborers to herald laborers around their cause.
The Luddite fallacy — the false theory that long-term technological development impedes employment prospects rather than improves them — has persisted throughout modernity. The fallacy became fundamental to Karl Marx’s ideology, and resurgence in belief in the fallacy has occasionally reemerged throughout economic downturns. But perhaps no embrace of the Luddite fallacy in recent memory has proven as disturbing as that among contemporary populists, predictably within a socialist fringe of the Western Left, but more frighteningly in the angry far-right.
In the monologue that sparked a thousand takes, Tucker Carlson spoke on behalf of millions of President Trump’s supporters who have rebelled against the capitalist orthodoxy that has defined classically liberal conservatism for the better half of a century. I won’t add a 1,001st take on Carlson’s overall sentiment to the conservative Crock-Pot, but it’s worth examining a portion that comes dangerously close to embracing Ludditery.
But Republicans now represent rural voters. They ought to be interested. Here’s a big part of the answer: male wages declined. Manufacturing, a male-dominated industry, all but disappeared over the course of a generation. All that remained in many places were the schools and the hospitals, both traditional employers of women. In many places, women suddenly made more than men …
Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.
Though Carlson explicitly blames immigration for the death of manufacturing, as he alludes to with his continued disdain for Big Tech, the real culprit is technology. The Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University found that a whopping 85 percent of manufacturing job losses can be blamed on technological development rather than the free trade of cash or labor.
Rage and hardship may evoke sympathy, but they do not confer moral authority. Those lambasting Big Tech and immigrants for taking their jobs deserve compassion, but their fallacious understanding of labor markets and the necessity of creative destruction for economic growth cannot be allowed to steer the Right into embracing the mantle of victimhood and advocating for bigger government.
Carlson argues that capitalism is a tool. But it’s actually just the result of giving people freedom, unleashing the forces of supply and demand and their creativity to guide our economy, as opposed to having government (which is a tool) guide it. Freedom is much more than a tool, and that’s why market capitalism also works, by any contemporary liberal ethical code.
Capitalism is not a moral system, but it is consistent with nearly every moral system we know. It passes the veil of ignorance test posited by the modern father of philosophical liberalism, John Rawls. While Marxist utilitarians simply care about sharing bigger pieces of the economic pie, market capitalism makes the pie bigger, improving the bottom line for all of its participants. If you had to join a society knowing you might be one of its least fortunate, you would want to join a system with a market economy — the system that has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system in human history (it isn’t even close).
The free market — the collective organization that spontaneously results from the individual decisions of millions of economic actors — is the single most efficient economic system in human history, one that relies on the notion of continued evolution in industries. It is also a system whose participants must adapt to the times in their pursuit of happiness.
There is no true stability in this world, and certainly not in human economic life. In the last century alone, laptops replaced clunky desktops, which replaced computers the size of lockers, which replaced typewriters, which replaced pens and paper. Not only that, but computers replaced telegrams, which replaced letters sent by train, which replaced letters sent by boats, which replaced letters sent by foot.
We needn’t even go back too far to see it: The people who once made MP3 players in China have had to change their jobs already. Technology doesn’t just find faster replacements; it finds better ones. Wages may not have grown as fast as we’d like, but the purchasing power of the average American’s wage, combined with the technological improvements in his life, make people today wealthier all the same. Today’s middle class Americans, and even some of the poor, lead lives and enjoy choices that millionaires a hundred years ago couldn’t have imagined.
Seventy-seven percent of Americans own smartphones, connecting them to unlimited knowledge, communication, job opportunities, and art, up from a mere 35 percent just eight years ago. And if you live at the U.S. poverty line, you are among the highest-earning 16 percent of all human beings alive on the planet, and easily among the 1 percent of humans who have ever lived.
Carlson diagnoses very real and pressing problems, but their solution requires smaller and smarter government, not more. The nation is long overdue in adopting a vocational educational model, one that not only recognizes the dignity of nonacademic learning, but the necessity of it. The market wants more specialized labor, not more humanities B.A.s.
As the labor market tightens, employers in industries such as manufacturing, electricity, and welding are facing an intense labor shortage due to a skills gap. We already have universal public education through the 12th grade and cheap, subsidized, or free junior college across the country. Expanding our training programs for specialized labor would benefit both businesses and workers.
And as Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, correctly noted in his National Review response to Carlson, “It’s not the free market that is financializing the American economy and empowering Wall Street’s leveraged buyouts of American businesses. It’s the federal government’s preferential tax treatment of corporate debt and guarantee of ‘too big to fail’ bailouts. It’s not the ‘invisible hand’ giving investment income preferential tax treatment over workers’ wages, even though in a globalized economy that discrepancy can incentivize American investors to create jobs overseas instead of here.”
There’s a laundry list of broken government policies that compassionate conservatives can reform or revoke to let consumer choice and market forces optimize the economy. And creative destruction is a part of that.
Periods of technological unemployment are busts followed by booms, just as every other portion of economic growth cycles requires. The men who made carriages and saddles may have lost their jobs when Model T cars replaced travel by horse, but they didn’t stay unemployed for long. They adapted, as generations of workers did before them, to move into the new and better automobile industry.
Disgruntled populists may lament that occurrence, but rage can’t cause us to try to reinvent the wheel. The American Dream isn’t a promise of outcome, but of opportunity, and so far, freedom of opportunity has resulted in fairly decent outcomes. Markets work. They have worked — and they have made people both free and uncomfortable — for hundreds of years.
