The Libertarian PC Police

Will Wilkinson and Megan McArdle were apparently not happy with this bit from Obama’s latest speech:

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but how exactly did they hear within those relatively mundane seventeen words a hidden call for Americans to rise up and kill the wetbacks? (Or the hookers from Juarez, in McArdle’s case.) I mean, Obama doesn’t bring up Mexicans, or third world workers, or even the concept of the global marketplace. He even baldly states, “the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job.” Obama simply mentioned the blunt truth that, when corporations pull up stakes to pursue the cheapest means of production, they tend to leave a trail of human wreckage in their wake. And they do this “for nothing more than a profit.” Those are the key thematic words in Obama’s point, I would argue, not shipping the jobs “overseas.” To claim that this is all tantamount to demagoguing foreigners and immigration, per McArdle, or that it is “intellectually bankrupt,” according to Wilkinson, belies a bizarre and extreme form of libertarian political correctness. These guys are in serious need of a thicker skin.

Let’s take, say, an assembly line worker who has just been laid off so the factory he worked in can open up shop in India. Is he expected to look upon the economic immolation of his family and community and say to himself, “Well, at least it’s raising the living standards of those poor sods in Bangladesh?” Given Wilkinson’s accusation that Obama is failing to extend a philosophy of mutuality beyond American borders, and that he ignores “the very real, yet non-American people who gain immensely from outsourcing,” it must be assumed that this is precisely what he means. But good God! What an impersonal – and, indeed, totalitarian – philosophy. What a gross subservience of the individual to the good of the collective. In case Wilkinson is curious, this is the kind of thing leftists are referring to when they (rather sloppily, I’ll admit) describe capitalism as “fascistic.”

The weirdest part is that, a while back, Wilkinson cast aspersions on the idea that a sense of community or sharing norms could be applied to something as big as the nation-state. Now here he is asserting not only that a sense of mutuality and interdependence can be applied to the entire globe (and yes, interdependence, mutuality, community and sharing norms are all basically the same thing), but that this application can be brought about by something as impersonal and viciously darwinian as the global marketplace of corporate-capitalism. You have to wonder exactly what planet the man is living on.

Many of us on the left side of the political spectrum are as supportive of a 100% open border policy as anyone (as for Obama, he must work within the given political realities). However, since we do not have a one-world government (and many of us, including myself, would think it a very bad thing if we did) and we do not trust the market to spread those values, we are left with no other practical option but the structures of the nation-state. This isn’t a matter of creeping nationalism or xenophobia, it is simply doing what you can with what you have to work with.

As for McArdle, she says she wants Obama to remind us that “our problems are of our own making, and the solutions are within us.” Okay, I’m all for that. So would McArdle be in favor of transforming the United States into a Scandinavian-style social democracy, for instance? That certainly seems to be the best way to provide Americans with some form of interdependent economic cushioning without resorting to protectionism. Thoughts?

~ by Jeff on March 19, 2008.