Progressives' year of planning blindly

It has been a busy year for progressives. At the start of the year, Justin Trudeau was lecturing people on standing up for gender equality; by mid-year he was kneeling in solidarity with BLM. Now, as the year draws to a close, he is telling everyone to rise back up to confront the existential global warming crisis. Throughout the standing, kneeling, and rising the federal government nearly doubled its spending to pay for mandated economic shutdowns and to “reset” the country in a more feminist, intersectional, and climate-friendly direction. It is unclear what kind of callisthenics Mr. Trudeau has planned for us next year.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with being feminist, intersectional, and climate-friendly. Every reasonable person would like to mitigate unfair discrimination and protect the environment. There is, however, a fatal flaw with the progressive tendency to impose a top-down government reordering of societies, cultures, industries, corporations, and human behaviour to address these sorts of challenges. It is that the people doing the reordering have no idea when, where, how often, and to what extent discrimination or other human actions cause problems, or how best to solve them.

Merriam-Webster defines 20-20 hindsight as “the full knowledge and complete understanding that one has about an event only after it has happened.” But our knowledge of past events is neither full nor complete. Hindsight can tell us what events have taken place, but not necessarily why or how. The politicians or activists who declare that a particular fire, flood, or some other natural disaster was caused by man-made climate change are making it up. They might be right, but nobody knows. Hindsight can't tell us. Like everyone else, those who presume themselves fit to reorder society have only an incomplete and inexact understanding of the past. They have an even worse understanding of what is happening today, or of what might happen tomorrow, next month, or next year.

On the issue of gender and racial disparities, statistics show that some groups of people have higher incomes than others, but do not tell us when, where, how, against whom, and to what extent unfair discrimination might be taking place. Some people might have a good understanding of a few specific past events, but this limited knowledge can hardly be extrapolated, as progressives are ever inclined to do, for the purposes of setting national policies that redistribute capital, control prices, restrict commerce, and regulate contracts among 38 million people across the country, all in hopes of improving social equality without resulting in unintended consequences that are deleterious for all.

Fortunately, the limitations of hindsight in enlightening central planners with specific details about social problems do not leave us helpless to mitigate such problems. One of the marvels of free markets is that people are led by an invisible hand, as Adam Smith wrote, to promote society's interests while pursuing their own self-interest. For example, the business owner who unfairly discriminates against certain groups of people, by limiting his or her own opportunities to trade, will be forced to pay more for the same amount of labour and work harder to attract the same number of customers. The market doesn't eliminate unfair discrimination, but it provides a powerful financial incentive against it, and unlike government diktats based on a central planner's misunderstanding of past and current events, the market mechanism is well targeted and does not, through unintended consequences, wreak havoc on innocent parties.

Markets have similarly been extraordinarily successful in mitigating environmental problems. The decades-long trends show that the environment in Canada and around the developed world is much cleaner than it used to be, and that the death rate from environmental disasters has plummeted. Governments played some role in this improvement, but it was driven largely by increased prosperity, better technology, and private property rights. There was a reason why, in the 1980s, the Communist world suffered far worse pollution than the free world.

The alleged horrors of climate change have also been exaggerated. The human miseries that climate change is often said to exacerbate by destroying the environment — filth, starvation, poverty, shorter life expectancy, and so on — were everywhere the norm before societies embraced markets and capitalism, a reality that has led George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux to conclude that “the worst environmental calamity is the absence of capitalism.”

Progressives like Justin Trudeau say they want a fairer and cleaner future. Me, too! But we won't get there with central planners misinterpreting past events and extrapolating them to reorder society and control the actions of 38 million Canadians. The hindsight of central planners, let alone their view of the future, is not 2020. Let us rather rely on free markets.