Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery. — “Wilkins Micawber” in David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens.
I have derided marginal thinking in economics and politics because it ignores the full-blown consequences of policies that are meant to be benign. In fact, such policies often have marginal consequences that are far-reaching and destructive.
One such policy is the subsidization of homelessness. Polities that do so (e.g., California) attract homeless persons from surrounding regions and even across long distances. Thus a small addition to a “compassionate” city’s population will result in unsightly and unsanitary encampments, harassment of and criminal acts against non-homeless persons, degradation of whole areas with resulting loss of business (and jobs) and reduced property values. In the alternative, taxpayers are made to foot the bill for keeping the homeless off the streets (when they can be lured off the streets) by accommodating them in hotels and purpose-built “hostels”, where unsanitary conditions and crime will nevertheless fester.
A set of policies is responsible for inflation, which is a marginal phenomenon: a general increase in the prices of products and services. (The rate of increase is now about 4 percent a year, as against the previously prevailing rate of about 2 percent a year.) What are the policies? The leading one, of course, is the huge increase in the Fed’s balance sheet over the past several years, which has enabled the federal government to spend money like a fleet of drunken sailors. There are also policies that restrict supply by giving money to people for not working, or just giving it to them (e.g., SNAP, extended unemployment benefits, expansion of Medicaid, COVID stimulus checks). There are also policies that directly restrict supply, one of which is the minimum wage, which deters employment of unskilled labor and prevents the resulting unemployed persons from acquiring marketable skills. (Government policies, in general, have imposed a huge burden on economic activity, which I measure in “America’s Mega-Depression”.)
The thing about marginal changes is that they can cascade without “nudging” by government. Cascades are especially prevalent among impressionable children, adolescents, young adults, and rootless adults whose moral compasses are broken. If you are at all attentive to the internet (and who isn’t these days?), you may be under the impression that the country is being overrun by young persons who don’t know what sex they are but want to change whatever it is. There seem to be a lot of adults (including parents) who are encouraging this destructive fad, or who feel compelled (lacking a moral compass) to go along with children who want to go along with it.
All of that comes on top of wokeness, which features the indoctrination of the impressionable and morally weak in the general belief that all human beings are created equal — not just under the law, but in all respects. A key tenet of wokeism is that nothing should be said or done to disabuse the woke of the nonsense they swallow and regurgitate. Au contraire, everything should be done to reinforce wokeism, including but far from limited to rewarding criminal behavior, disregarding actual ability and performance, and censoring those who oppose wokeism and its destructive consequences.
Gender confusion and wokeism seem to go hand-in-hand with another marginal change with destructive consequences: the explosion of social-media addiction (enabled by the explosion of cell-phone use) among young persons (and the aforementioned addled adults). On that front, I refer you to Maggie Kelly’s post, “Scientists Report Drop in Young People’s IQs” (The College Fix, March 9, 2023), and an excellent series of posts by Jonathan Haidt at After Babel, beginning with “The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began around 2012” (February 8, 2023) and including “Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults with Worse Mental Health” (May 15, 2023). (Go to Haidt’s archive for a complete and up-to-date list of entries.)
By pointing out the marginal nature of these various practices, policies, and consequences I don’t mean to minimize them. What I mean to do is emphasize the importance of eliminating rot at its source. The rot in America has a common source: the destruction of civil society and (thus) of traditional morality at the hands of government.
See, for example:
Do not despair. My diagnoses come with a remedy.