Robert Reich delivered a speech at UC Berkeley in 2007 in which he played the role of a hypothetical candidate who could only tell the truth:
His main point was that the truth was untellable. And although his politics are left of center, his hypothetical unspeakable speech slaughtered every sacred cow the Berkeley audience held dear:
- A solution in Iraq is going to be tough.
- Treating more sick people will mean younger people will pay more.
- It’s too expensive to treat older people at the end of their life “so we’re going to let you die”.
- If we use government to control costs there will be “less innovation” in medical technology and you should not expect to live much longer than your parents.
- Global warming can only be tackled by a carbon tax which is going to cost you a lot of money.
- We’re going to have to pay teachers more for quality education — costing you more — but we have to be willing to fire the turkeys despite the unions.
- Anyone who does an unskilled, repetitive job will lose it in the near future to outsourcing or automation. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
- A minimum wage doesn’t help as much as an earned income tax credit.
- Helping people at the bottom earn more is going to cost higher income people more money.
- Medicare will bankrupt the nation unless something is done and will impoverish the youth.
- The best way to ameliorate global poverty is to do away with farm subsidies.
The student audience, which at first clapped enthusiastically as Reich started to tell his unspeakable “truths” stopped clapping by the end. Reich had uttered the fundamental heresy. You really can’t have something for nothing. Pulling in one direction meant giving way in another. He went on to say that America was hopelessly addicted to fantasy; that anyone who got up on stage and reeled off the points he had made was politically dead.
Although I may disagree with many of the public policy positions that Robert Reich takes, his point that the truth makes piss-poor politics seems valid. Things come down to choices: lower costs versus death panels; torture versus intelligence; equity versus growth. And politicians, ever eager to garner votes, never want to say this. They will always try to have it both ways. Even when politicians choose one road over the other, they take pains to suggest they are simultaneously proceeding down two paths. One can disagree with the choices Reich makes but he is right to say that choices are unavoidable.
Choices are unavoidable, but the alternatives are not fixed over the long term. Constraints are real, but the constraints change. The reason politicians survive is that human creativity often rides to their rescue. New knowledge, new resources and new worlds have turned many a hack into statesmen. But they are the beneficiaries, rather than the creators of productivity; what is irrational is to expect genuine creativity in a world dominated by politicians. The missing pairs of choices in Reich’s list are these: creativity versus certainty, risk versus return, bureaucracy versus innovation. We can live only if we take the risk. That is the most unsayable truth of all.
(Hat tip to Aretae.)