Would-Be Foreign Influencer in the National Post: Our Incomes Can be Infinite!

I have very little to do with the Cato Institute, preferring to spend my time jousting with their intellectually subordinate Canadian cousins, the Fraser Institute. But I couldn’t help notice the following manic rant about the importance of economic inequality in the National Post by Cato “scholar” Michael Tanner, not least because it seems decidedly out of place at a time when Canada’s New Right, of which the Post is a founding member, is baying about the danger of letting foreign varmints pollute the purity of Canadan debating halls:

 In what way does someone else’s success harm me? Such a viewpoint stems from the misguided notion that the economy is a pie of fixed size… In reality, though, the size of the pie is infinite. But to make it grow, we need people who are ambitious, skilled risk-takers.

This sort of cheerfully ignorant hocus pocus, much like the oft-repeated statement that “there are no absolute truths” (which I ran across in a peer-reviewed article yesterday, much to my disappointment) is an alarm signal. Any time you read it, you can be sure that the person whose work you are reading is so profoundly incapable of critical thinking that nothing else they say is likely to be of any value.

The size of the economy cannot be infinite. We live in a world of scarce and limited resources. This is actually the founding principle of economics — their first commandment, their Prime Directive. Things can’t be infinite. And it gets more amusing, too. Tanner would agree, I think, that the number of people in the world isn’t actually infinite. Dividing an infinite number by a finite one gets you back to infinite again, so what Tanner is also saying here is that your individual income is also potentially infinite.

Now, how feasible do you think that is?

Incidentally, I also want to vent my spleen at another much more widely accepted phrase he sneaks in: the idea that “risk-takers” are the leaders we should seek out. This is simple foolishness. By definition, taking a risk means entering a situation where you don’t know what the outcome will be, and in which there is a likelihood the outcome will be bad. So we have, here, leadership by willful ignorance.

Now, what Tanner really means is that we should seek out people who take risks and, so far, have always won their gambles. Again, this is foolishness. Either you are seeking out intelligent people who saw something the rest of us didn’t, in which case they aren’t risk-takers, or you’re advocating that we reduce leadership contests to something equivalent to gambling that your friend is probably going to win his next spin at the slot machine because, after all, he won the last one and that makes him a successful “risk-taker.”
Original Article
Source: sixth Estate