Chyden Finance: profit from hypocrisy

“Keep the company of those who seek the truth, and run from those who have found it.” —Vaclav Havel

When we compress complex issues into one-dimensional spectra — left vs right, religious vs atheist, conservative vs liberal, etc. — we end up talking at cross-purposes, often with ourselves.

Part of the problem is the habit of thought that comes from having only two non-trivial political parties in the USA and in many other countries, which Krushchev described as being like boots: there is no significant difference between the left and the right.

In the USA, the left tends to favor big government, and the right tends to favor big business. OpenSecrets.org maintains a database of individuals who move back and forth between the two categories of this false dichotomy. One of the most prominent examples today is Timothy Geithner, who has held executive positions at Goldman Sachs, the New York Fed, and the US Treasury Department; however, a multitude of less well-known examples fills the Revolving Door Database.

Choosing between ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ in the USA — both terms, egregious bastardizations of their original meanings — is a watered-down exercise in choosing between ‘national’ socialists and ‘international’ socialists. No one of any practical significance in the USA is calling for a return to Thomas Paine’s dictum, “That government is best which governs least.” The tacit assumption along the whole political spectrum today is that each is to be lorded over, and the only real question is by whom.

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Granted, the libertarians have attempted to improve the debate somewhat, with David Nolan’s introduction of a two-dimensional political map. However, with less than 1% of the popular vote in all but one presidential election since 1972, their overall influence is trivial.

By way of comparison, Independent Ross Perot garnered 19% of the popular vote in 1992, and 8% in 1996; and Independent John Anderson, received 7% of the popular vote in 1980, the only year that the Libertarian Party candidate, Ed Clark, polled higher than 1%.

In the midst of this fray, we have various forms and levels of sanctimony, the advocates of which tout the benefits of their idiosyncratic preferences very loudly, while flagrantly ignoring the costs. We frequently hear about what the speaker believes that we all should do, and virtually never about how difficult and costly it will be. Whether your demon of the day is Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken, Michael Moore, or the Man in the Moon is irrelevant when the speaker’s goal is to force his or her vision of The Good onto society at large.

We see this in school curricula, where the battle is to see which world view is to serve as the foundation of the indoctrination of a generation, with little or no consideration for the side effects and tradeoffs. Was Christopher Columbus a courageous explorer xor a mass murderer? Were the Founding Fathers of the USA liberal democrats xor slave-owning tax-dodgers? Is religion a system of communion with the Word and the Way xor a mystical justification used throughout history for genocide and conquest?

Are you with us xor against us? America: love it xor leave it.

One of the messages that has been a cornerstone of public school curricula in the USA for more than a quarter-century is that girls should receive more attention than boys, purportedly because women do not fare as well as men in the capitalist labor market. (Never mind the richness of the irony that leftist champions of women’s rights routinely invoke the selling price of a woman’s services on the open market as the predominant measure of her worth.)

In the 1970s, Women’s Lib sounded so good. How could one be against it, unless one were some kind of mouth-breathing knuckle-dragger?

I mean — c’mon! — Walter Wriston built the medium-size First National City Bank of New York into the colossus that is Citibank on his willingness to hire every female business school graduate in the Northeast that he could find a desk for, when his competitors at other banks — stuck in their 1950s mindset — saw the increase in girls in college in the 1960s and 1970s as a problem, because it meant that the proportion of male graduates was diminishing. Wriston had the insight to see opportunity, where his colleagues and competitors saw only cost.

But… for every benefit, there is a concomitant cost. Every dollar spent encouraging girls qua girls — as opposed to encouraging children in general, regardless of gender — to go to college is a dollar not spent encouraging boys qua boys to go to college. Every dollar spent on Women’s Studies is a dollar not spent on programs oriented toward men. Every dollar spent demonizing men is a dollar not spent addressing the issue of abusive mothers.

Any male, especially if he had blue eyes, who dared complain in the waning days of the 20^th Century was screeched down on the one side and chortled down on the other. To the feminists, he was a bourgeois perpetuator of patriarchal hegemony; and, to The Boys, his masculinity was suspect.

Roll the clock ahead by a half-century, and what to we have? Young urban women today earn more on average than their male counterparts, in large measure because the student populations on US university campuses have been majority female for more than a quarter-century. Yet, women of all ages still carp about the Glass Ceiling and the mythical paycheck of 59¢, 70¢, or whatever the magic number is today, for every $1 that a man receives.

The Gender War is so last century. Continuing to fight is makes as much sense as opposing the USSR.

As long as one frames the diagnosis in terms of a false dichotomy, one is almost certain to pursue an ineffective cure.

If one can identify this kind of folly in others and anticipate its positive and negative externalities, one can get rich by taking the fools’ money away from them.

Invest accordingly.

CWE