Great Fictions

Many people prefer comfortable lies to uncomfortable truths.

A large percentage of what we on the right believe is simply fantasy. I hate to say that, but it is true. I’ve believed for over 50 years — since I first read John Adams’ famous line to Abigail about the Constitution being made only for a “moral and religious people” that the greatest fiction is that only moral and religious people would ever control the levers of government.

The belief that only virtuous people rise to office isn’t a political principle — it’s a hope. A hope that power somehow filters for virtue.

History proves power doesn’t filter for virtue; it filters for incentive and reward.

To sharpen Bastiat’s definition of government a bit, there are people who not only attempt to live at the expense of others — they succeed at it, and the larger the structure, the easier it becomes to hide the transfer. We don’t get philosopher-kings. We get coalitions, pressures, and bargaining among imperfect humans using authority over other imperfect humans. It is how we get $9 billion in fraud in Minnesota and 18% of all U.S. home-health and hospice Medicare billing from LA County.

There are other fictions we cling to. Libertarians and some conservatives believe tariffs are wrong because they violate a free market. That is true in a free market, but the global market is not free and never has been. It is a negotiated battlefield of subsidies, labor manipulation, currency policy, VAT rebates, and regulatory barriers disguised as safety standards. A tariff in this environment, for the taxes it represents, is not so much protectionism as a counterweight in a rigged system — the only available mechanism to offset an imbalance created elsewhere.

We already accept this logic domestically. If one company dumps product below cost to wipe out competitors, we call it predatory pricing; when nations do it, we call it globalization.

The same blindness existed with pharmaceuticals. For decades Americans paid dramatically higher drug prices while countries with socialized medicine paid far less, and the explanation was always that their system was more efficient. But efficiency didn’t explain it — leverage did. Once the U.S. government began threatening pricing pressure, companies suddenly discovered they could charge more abroad. Prices rose overseas because they had been artificially low. For the folks in Rio Linda, that means Americans were paying a hidden export subsidy for foreign healthcare systems — not charity, but price discrimination enforced by policy. We were effectively running a healthcare trade deficit.

Another fiction is that justice is blind. We say it because we need to believe it; a society cannot function if people openly believe the law is selective. Yet observation makes the belief harder to maintain. The legal exposure for protest activity, property damage, and civil disobedience has not been evenly applied in recent years. Whether one attributes that to prosecutorial discretion, politics, media pressure, or institutional caution, the result is the same: the public perception of unequal risk. And unequal risk changes behavior more than unequal law, because people respond less to statutes than to expected consequences.

We also believe politicians when they promise to “make life better.” That sounds reasonable until you ask the forbidden question: compared to what baseline? Government has no resources of its own. Every benefit must be extracted, borrowed, inflated, or deferred from someone else, and even regulatory relief requires enforcement somewhere else. Every action redistributes risk. So the promise to improve conditions is not a promise to create value — it is a promise to rearrange burdens. Sometimes that rearrangement is necessary, but it is never free.

Thomas Sowell’s well-known formulation is:

“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”

Sowell used that idea repeatedly in his economic writing to argue that public policy debates go wrong when people assume a policy can eliminate costs rather than merely shift them to someone else — across time, groups, or incentives. It fits closely with the Bastiat-style “seen vs. unseen” that every benefit necessarily implies a cost borne somewhere, even if politically invisible.

We maintain the comforting story because the alternative is uncomfortable: government cannot manufacture prosperity; it can only shape incentives around it. The most reliable improvements in living standards historically came from allowing millions of private decisions to operate within stable rules, not from directed attempts to engineer outcomes.

There is one more fiction conservatives often hold — that just exposing these realities will fix them. It won’t. Human beings prefer noble myths to complicated truths. People want their leaders to be virtuous, markets to be fair, courts to be neutral, and policies to be painless. A political system built on persuasion will always supply those stories because voters reward reassurance more than accuracy.

The danger isn’t believing in ideals — a society needs them. The danger is mistaking aspirations for operating conditions. A free society survives not because its citizens are uniquely good, but because its structure assumes they are not by dispersing power, limiting reach, and forcing tradeoffs into the open.

The reason Adams issued his private caveat was because the Founders created such a system of freedom that people would be free to be righteous or corrupt. It is a system that could easily be diminished and perverted. Our Constitution did not require a moral and religious people to function. It required a system strong enough to operate when they weren’t.