One of the key things I learned from reading Ayn Rand is that many arguments that are supposedly about politics aren’t really about politics. They’re about something deeper. They’re about philosophy, and sometimes about very abstract and foundational issues in philosophy. Often, they are a projection of basic assumptions about the nature of reality (the branch of philosophy called “metaphysics”) or the means by which we know the truth (“epistemology”).
The most common of those projections is “magical thinking,” a term taken
from psychiatry
but with deeper philosophical roots. It is the implicit assumption that the law of cause and effect can be suspended, that if we wish hard enough, if we want something strongly enough, we can bypass all of life’s normal limits and trade-offs. You can find this everywhere in politics, where its appeal is obvious: You can promise everything to every constituency, without worrying about how it will all get done. But magical thinking tends to be most prominent in the party in power, and at the moment, it is most brazen on the Left.
Take the Democrats’ multitrillion-dollar Build Back Better spending bill, which was supposed to add or extend a whole set of welfare benefits. It has been whittled away by the more conservative Democrats and may not survive, but it shows the intended agenda of the “progressive” Left. The premise behind this push for massive government handouts is the notion, as Annie Lowrey
proclaims
in the Atlantic, that “poverty is, always and everywhere, a choice.” This doesn’t mean that poverty is an individual choice, that it is a failure of individual effort or prudence. What it means is that poverty is a political choice — that we could end poverty tomorrow by voting to mail out trillions of dollars in government checks. As I
observed
recently, “The idea is that there is no merely practical factor, no principle of economics, that prevents the government from immediately ending all poverty just by giving away lots of free money. Therefore, to refrain from doing so is merely a political choice, and a cruel and callous one at that.”
In this outlook, trade-offs and consequences are not to be considered. For example, if the government hands out generous pandemic-era benefits, people might stop working — Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently
confirmed
that labor force participation is well below pre-pandemic levels — so there will be nobody to produce the goods or deliver them. And suddenly, we have rising prices that make people worse off even after the new benefits.
Or consider another keystone of the Build Back Better agenda, a childcare benefit that promises to lower parents’ expenses while also mandating higher pay for childcare workers. The result? It will make childcare
less affordable
. But this complaint comes from pro-welfare-state leftist Matt Bruenig, so naturally, he still thinks there is no need for limits or trade-offs:
“For a government, solving these problems is pretty simple. You can pass a law that mandates higher wages for child care workers and then use public money to fund the child care sector rather than rely upon user fees. This gets you lower (or no) costs for parents, higher pay for workers, and reduces (or eliminates) the negative shocks and horizontal asymmetries that come from funding the child care system with out-of-pocket fees.”
A government-funded, government-run system produces totally affordable, high-quality care at no cost to anyone! Just look at the example of public schools and healthcare. Oh, wait. But the lure of the belief that Congress can just snap its fingers and decree that workers will get paid more while prices go down is irresistible.
The same lure is behind President Joe Biden’s main solution to the supply chain backup, which is to impose fines on shipping containers stuck in ports. There is no reason to think a fine will solve the problem. Importers aren’t leaving their containers in shipping yards just because they feel like it. They’re doing it because of a shortage of trucks and warehouse space. As one trade journal, the Truckers Report,
puts it
: “Not every importer has the space to house containers before big sales days such as Black Friday arrive. In previous years, companies could pick up containers and place the goods in short-term storage. Unfortunately, Southern California warehouses have reportedly hit total capacity and national space stands below 4 percent availability. The harsh reality is that proactive measures were not taken to deal with the record-setting imports along the West Coast as economies rebooted.”
To think that imposing a fine will do the trick instead of solving these underlying problems is magical thinking.
Perhaps the greatest example of magical thinking is the global warming crusade, whose priorities Matt Yglesias
sums up
sardonically on Twitter: “All people want is a climate change solution that drastically reduces emissions without making energy more expensive or requiring lifestyle changes.” Is that too much to ask? Of course it is, which is why yet another international climate summit just ended with little more than a promise to meet again next year. But magical thinking is there to fill in the gap.
That’s the main role and temptation of magical thinking: to serve tribal or partisan ends. You want your preferred system to work, you want your preferred solution to solve all problems, and when it doesn’t, you have to paper over the difference with magical thinking.
Take the ultimate hand-waving rationalization for the policies of the Left: Modern Monetary Theory. This is the view that there is literally no limit to how much money the government can print to achieve its fantastical aims. Here is how economist Stephanie Kelton
presents
the theory:
“The carpenter can’t run out of inches
The stadium can’t run out of points
The airline can’t run out of [frequent flyer] miles
And the USA can’t run out of dollars.”
There is an old debate in philosophy, going back to the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, about whether ideas have an existence of their own, as purely intellectual entities (Plato’s position), or whether they ultimately refer back to individual, concrete things in the real world, which was Aristotle’s view. If you take Aristotle’s position, then “inches” ultimately refer to the lengths of specific objects — say, a piece of lumber — and, of course, a carpenter can run out of lumber. Similarly, in an athletic contest, points are earned by the specific actions of putting a ball through a hoop or carrying it over a goal line, and there is a limit to how many times a team can do that, especially when the other team is trying to stop them.
Dollars are a measure of wealth, which means actual goods and services, and every dollar ultimately refers to a service that is performed or a product that is made. If the goods aren’t made and delivered, the dollars are worthless, as we are currently being reminded.
But the
Platonic approach
, treating words and ideas as mere phantasms unmoored from concrete reality, explains why people can be so easily swayed by magical thinking. We naturally reach adulthood with our minds crammed full of complex ideas that we picked up as children without ever explicitly examining how we learned these concepts or what exactly they refer to. This is a normal and unavoidable process of development. But it means that we have to take care, as adults, to go back and engage in the significant intellectual effort of tracing important concepts back to their roots in reality, to have some idea of what “money” is and what “wealth” is and how they are created, so we can make sure we’re not misusing them. If we leave concepts as just words and sounds and incantations to be repeated, we leave ourselves at the mercy of fast-talking hucksters who sway us with magical thinking.
Magical thinking is so ingrained in politics that it doesn’t just shape the goals and policies of a political movement. It also shapes the methods by which they seek to gain support. For example, Democrats just lost an election in Virginia
partly
because people saw their children’s schools being invaded by a theory in which all white people are regarded as inherently, “systemically” racist. So, their answer to this election loss? Even more loudly
accuse everyone of being racist
. White women with school-age children? “
Footsoldiers of white supremacist patriarchy
.” People who vote for black politicians with right-leaning views? “
White Racists Can Vote for Black Republicans
.” You get the idea.
Who thinks this is going to work? It is a fantasy that one’s own rage at encountering political opposition will make the opposition go away, with no need for any form of outreach or persuasion.
To be sure, this sort of thing is endemic in politics on all sides. The Right’s version of this is the nationalist conservatives who dream of bringing back established religion. (Former national security adviser Michael Flynn just
called for
“one nation under God” with “one religion.”) They point to the decline of faith and propose to make religion
dominate the public square
by giving it the full support of government. But their magical thinking (or should I call it “miraculous”?) causes them to get lost in a chicken-and-the-egg dilemma. They can gain political power when the majority agrees with their outlook, and the majority would agree with their outlook if only they had the political power to impose it.
Magical thinking is always a temptation, and that’s exactly why we need philosophical reminders that wishes, hopes, and intentions always come up against the hard reality of limits and trade-offs. Did I start by mentioning Ayn Rand? She famously took up as her rallying cry a formulation of Aristotle’s Law of Identity: “
A is A
.” Now we know why.
Things are what they are, and the law of causality always applies. A is A. Don’t forget it.
Robert Tracinski is editor of
Symposium
and a senior fellow at the Atlas Society. He writes commentary at
The Tracinski Letter
.
