August 15, 2006
Self-Interest Posted by John Steele Gordon at 08:55 PM EST First, let me make it clear that Eugene Talmadge and I have nothing in common philosophically, politically, or any other way, except both being male and with deep Southern roots. Very different roots, to be sure: My Southern ancestors of his generation didn’t like him or his kind of rabble-rousing politics one little bit. He was, however, a world-class rabble-rouser, famous for saying, “The poor dirt farmer ain’t got but three friends on this earth: God Almighty, Sears, Roebuck, and Gene Talmadge.” It was the “poor dirt farmers”—in his day called “white trash”—not mill workers, who were his political base. Second, Joshua Zeitz is right that I love making fun of the liberal elite. But so many liberals have become so oblivious to just how elitist and out of touch they are that I often can’t resist. Most still seem to think we live in Gene Talmadge’s America, when it’s as dead and gone as he is. But I think Joshua Zeitz misunderstands what I’m getting at a little. By self-interest, I do not mean just economic self-interest, although that to be sure is usually a very big part of it. But there are lots of people who, for instance, do not work at jobs that would maximize their incomes, because they prefer jobs that are less remunerative but more fulfilling, like, ummm, writing history. Mother Teresa was pursuing her self interest in the slums of Calcutta, because she would have been miserable doing anything else. Self interest encompasses the totality of what human beings need and what they seek. The pursuit of self-interest, in other words, is simply what Jefferson called the pursuit of happiness. But this being planet earth, the pursuit is not always straightforward. For one thing, people differ wildly in their ability to perceive and pursue their self-interest. Some are easily led astray by demagogues and hate-mongers of both left and right. Some cling to outworn beliefs and outworn paradigms. Some, in Oscar Hammerstein’s words, were “carefully taught to hate and fear” when they were young and can’t break free from that early training. Congenital optimists will pursue their self-interests very differently from congenital pessimists faced with the same set of circumstances. And one’s self-interests often conflict. Everyone who hasn’t lived on Mars the last 40 years, for instance, knows that smoking cigarettes will kill you if something doesn’t get you first. Therefore it is in every smoker’s long-term self-interest to quit. But their short-term self-interest in getting that nicotine monkey off their backs makes that very, very hard to do. And politics is not a Chinese menu. You can’t pick and choose from a candidate’s platform; you have to take the whole platform or reject the whole platform. Many may have voted for Ronald Reagan because of his unfeigned and deeply held belief in American exceptionalism that the vast majority of Americans also believe in (but which is contemptuously dismissed by most liberals as vulgar yahooism) while they had grave doubts regarding his economic ideas. Then, four years later, the voters of 49 states went for Reagan over another candidate who promised to raise their taxes, not lower them. Why? Because the tax cuts had worked. Mondale wanted to go back to the 1970s, and a landslide’s worth of Americans said, “No thanks!” Lincoln was right. Democracy works because you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Had the Reagan tax cuts not been a great success, the Bush cuts would not have been possible. Neither would Clinton’s, for it was he who signed the bill lowering capital-gains taxes, with altogether happy results.
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