Gene Expression’s 10 questions for Charles Murray opens with this amusing comment on scientists and human nature:
The geneticist J.B.S. Haldane famously remarked that important theories went through four stages of acceptance: “i) this is worthless nonsense; ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; iv) I always said so.”
Charles Murray is, of course, responsible for quite a bit of “worthless nonsense”:
This process would be quite familiar to Charles Murray, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has gained a reputation for staking out controversial positions a decade before they become mainstream. Starting with Losing Ground in 1984, later with Richard Herrnstein in 1994′s The Bell Curve, and most recently with In Our Hands, Murray has made his name as a public intellectual by dropping well-researched bombshells onto policy debates. In between, he’s published shorter books on political philosophy and a thorough historical study of human accomplishment in the arts and sciences.
In In Our Hands, he notes that the US is “awash in money,” but there’s a better way to redistribute it — if that’s your goal:
Instead of sending taxes to Washington, straining them through bureaucracies and converting what remains into a muddle of services, subsidies, in-kind support and cash hedged with restrictions and exceptions, just collect the taxes, divide them up, and send the money back in cash grants to all American adults. Make the grant large enough so that the poor won’t be poor, everyone will have enough for a comfortable retirement, and everyone will be able to afford health care. We’re rich enough to do it.
Why would he recommend this?
Mancur Olson and other public-choice theorists taught us that sugar farmers can get sugar subsidies because they care passionately about getting their benefit while no other constituency cares enough about preventing them from getting it. Under the Plan, the grant will be the only game in town (every other transfer is gone), and will affect every adult in the country. Every time Congress debates a change in the grant, it will be the biggest political news story in the country, and a very large chunk of the population — and people holding a huge majority of the monetary resources for fighting political battles — will lose money if it’s raised. Compare the prospects for jacking up the grant with the certain knowledge we have of the trends in spending under the current system. They have sky-rocketed and will sky-rocket, through classic public choice dynamics. The Plan uses the only strategy I can conceive to get out of the public-choice box.