What's the allure of liberalism?
It means different things to different people. I suspect that at least half the people at the Hoover Institution were on the left -- liberals and in some case radicals -- in their early 20s. I include myself. One reason is that you simply want to save people who haven't received cosmic justice. You would like to see that rectified. And it's only with the passage of years that many people finally understand that life doesn't work that way. But there are other people, I think, who get a personal sense of worth and sometimes superiority from their liberal vision of the world. And they're not going to give that vision up easily.
So you were a lefty once.
Through the decade of my 20s, I was a Marxist.
What made you turn around?
What began to change my mind was working in the summer of 1960 as an intern in the federal government, studying minimum-wage laws in Puerto Rico. It was painfully clear that as they pushed up minimum wage levels, which they did at that time industry by industry, the employment levels were falling. I was studying the sugar industry. There were two explanations of what was happening. One was the conventional economic explanation: that as you pushed up the minimum-wage level, you were pricing people out of their jobs. The other one was that there were a series of hurricanes that had come through Puerto Rico, destroying sugar cane in the field, and therefore employment was lower. The unions preferred that explanation, and some of the liberals did, too.
Did you discover something that surprised you?
I spent the summer trying to figure out how to tell empirically which explanation was true. And one day I figured it out. I came to the office and announced that what we needed was data on the amount of sugar cane standing in the field before the hurricane moved through. I expected to be congratulated. And I saw these looks of shock on people's faces. As if, "This idiot has stumbled on something that's going to blow the whole game!" To me the question was: Is this law making poor people better off or worse off?
That was the not the question the labor department was looking at. About one-third of their budget at that time came from administering the wages and hours laws. They may have chosen to believe that the law was benign, but they certainly weren't going to engage in any scrutiny of the law.
What that said to me was that the incentives of government agencies are different than what the laws they were set up to administer were intended to accomplish. That may not sound very original in the James Buchanan era, when we know about "Public Choice" theory. But it was a revelation for me. You start thinking in those terms, and you no longer ask, what is the goal of that law, and do I agree with that goal? You start to ask instead: What are the incentives, what are the consequences of those incentives, and do I agree with those?
That's news to me. Perhaps he just researched the subject. Inquiring minds want to know more.
I only met those people when I got into university. Anarchy and communism seems to go hand-in-hand with post-secondary, it seems like such ideologies are rampant among liberal arts students.
