Reading President Buchanan's State of the Union address on the eve of the Civil War (in late December 1859) is a sobering experience.
At present [the slave] is treated with kindness and humanity. He is well fed, well clothed, and not overworked. [...] Both the philanthropy and the self-interest of the master have combined to produce this humane result.
Ah. Slaves were leading a golden happy existence. And why? Because slave-owners are, of course, philanthropic. You don't think so? Well, then, because it's in their own self-interest . Sound familiar?
There's something Andy Rooneyish in me that wants to ask: "ever notice how when we have a sneaking suspicion that what we're doing is indefensible we start claiming that self-interest is in the best interest of society?"
Remember "voodoo economics"? "supply side: economics? "Trickle-Down" Economics? Didja think it had retired? Turns out there is no scrap heap to history; it's all very recyclable.
Although Buchanan is simply repeating the intellectual mantra of his day--one in which Adam Smith and Ricardo have been brought to the sociological service of public policy--he was neither stupid nor uneducated.
The ideas of the early economists were a lot more accessible to educated men and politicians than any modern economics are to our leaders and to our intellectuals today. Just as the imaginations of the Social Darwinists were fascinated by the very concept of "survival of the fittest," so was the imagination of the first half of the nineteenth century enthralled with the trenchant notion that self-interest could have a philanthropic teleology.
It is particularly enthralling to nineteenth-century Americans, driven into their revival tents, their Chautauquas, their Mormon Temples, by the unconscious knowledge of the unholy perfidy they were accommodating. And, over time, the closer you got to the stink of the slavery they were enshrining, the holier and more possessed the believers became.
Nothing could assuage the guilt of the nineteenth-century American mind as much as the comforting thought that the God of Manifest Destiny was using their self-interest for his Holy Purpose.
I suggest that the supply side economics which has now come rising up from Bonzo's grave, is just such a notion.
Reach for your back pocket whenever anyone starts touting how the self-interest inherent in a concept makes it good for society. You're being intellectually and morally robbed.