The Moses Complex

For a worker to go home at the end of the day without a sufficient amount of money to live to the next day is, I think, a violation of Jewish law and government should be modeling that standard," [Rabbi Jack] Moline said in an interview last week, explaining why he backs the living wage campaign. -- Washington Jewish Week, February 2, 2006

Apparently, I am not a good Jew. I take the libertarian position that when a worker and an employer come to terms on a wage, then there is no need for government to interfere.

Or perhaps I am an Orthodox Jew. The Jewish Week article quotes Orthodox Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld as saying that "Some might suggest that this type of proposal might hurt low-income workers." That would be my position, based on standard economic analysis, which predicts that putting a high floor under wages causes excess supply of labor -- in other words, unemployment. I would ask Rabbi Moline whether creating unemployment does not violate Jewish law.

Unfortunately, many more Jews side with Rabbi Moline than with Rabbi Herzfeld. In fact, so many of my friends are liberal Democrats that I was surprised to learn from an op-ed article on January 31st by David Boaz of the Cato Institute published in the Wall Street Journal that a Gallup poll found that support for libertarian beliefs is "strongest among well-educated voters."

Most of the well-educated people with whom I interact are not libertarians. Because many of them are Jews. This leads me to suspect that there is some major inconsistency between libertarianism and mainstream Jewish beliefs. I think that many Jews, as well as many non-Jews on the Left, suffer from what I call the Moses Complex.

One of the most basic narratives in Judaism is the Exodus, in which Moses leads the oppressed Hebrew slaves out of the land of Egypt. The Exodus is a movie that is constantly being remade, and not just by Cecil B. DeMille. It is the basis of Marxism and of what I call folk Marxism, both of which were embraced by many Jews.

The Original__________Marxist____________Folk Marxist
Pharaoh.........................Capitalist Class.............Wal-Mart
Hebrews........................Working Class............Other Stores
Moses............................Karl Marx...................Liberal Pundits
God...............................Communism................Government

Karl Marx's political economy was an oppressor/oppression story between capitalists and workers. Jews found that story particularly captivating. To this day, I believe that most Jews are "folk Marxists," who believe that the natural result of free markets is worker oppression, and that only heavy government intervention mitigates this outcome.

In fact, under free markets wealth is created and people of all classes benefit. Folk Marxists see Wal-Mart as exploiting low-skilled workers. But when you observe the long queues that form when Wal-Mart advertises for jobs, you realize that what low-skilled workers need is not government protection but more Wal-Marts.

Since the 1960's, folk Marxism has incorporated new groups into the oppressor/oppressed narrative. Whites are oppressors, and Blacks are oppressed. Men are oppressors, and women are oppressed. Israelis are oppressors, and Palestinians are oppressed.

The oppressor/oppressed narrative is not 100 percent wrong. But it is far from 100 percent right. There are times when the well-being of some people is higher than that of others, but it is not the case that the well-off are oppressors and the poorly-off are oppressed. It can also be true that the well-off are more skillful, more hard-working, more logical, more frugal, and/or more self-disciplined. Sometimes, it is less useful to describe people as oppressed than it is to tell them that their behavior needs to change if they want to be better off.

Putting too many people in the roles of oppressors and oppressed is one problem with the folk version of Exodus. Even more troubling is the way that Jews have re-cast the role of the Savior with the "mighty hand and outstretched arm." We have replaced the concept of an all-knowing, merciful God with a belief in an all-knowing, merciful government. This attribution of God-like qualities to government has little religious or intellectual justification.

Jews are aware that government is not perfect. However, we ascribe bad government to the accidental result of having the wrong leaders. Exodus describes a "cruel Pharaoh," rather than a Pharaoh operating without checks and balances or a Pharaoh with too much power. In a political version of what social psychologists call the Fundamental Attribution Error, Jews ascribe all of the evils of government to individual leaders rather than to the context in which leaders operate.

Jews turn to government as an instrument to improve personal ethics. While we recognize and resist the attempts by social conservatives to try to use the instrument of government power to address perceived moral failings in the realm of sexual conduct, many Jews do not hesitate to view government as the instrument through which we must address perceived moral failings with respect to smoking, seatbelt safety, obesity, paper recycling, support for the arts, and so forth.

Historically, Jews have not tried to reduce the power of rulers. Instead, our approach has been to curry favor with them, interpreting their dreams (Joseph), providing wise counsel (Mordechai), and financing them (Rothschild).

If we cannot win the favor of the ruler, then the alternative is to flee. The Jews were delivered from Pharaoh. We did not overthrow Pharaoh. We did not force him to sign a Magna Carta. When we second-guess the behavior of European Jews during the Holocaust, we ask, "Why didn't they escape?" more often than we ask "Why didn't somebody walk into one of those open-air rallies and blow Hitler's brains out?"

In contrast with folk Judaism, traditional American folk beliefs favor individual rights and limited government. Americans do not think in terms of good kings with wise counselors or bad kings with evil counselors. Americans want no kings. Libertarians believe that these folk beliefs have intellectual merit. Centralized power is inevitably inept and corrupt. Checks and balances, protection of individual rights, and Constitutional limits on government all serve to promote a better society.

The Moses Complex can be seen in the Leftist view of health care policy. Many people on the Left have come to view health care in terms of a folk-Marxist narrative involving oppression. People who do not have health insurance and/or are not obtaining the right health care are the oppressed. The oppressors are the insurance industry or the pharmaceutical industry or greedy corporate employers stinting on health care coverage or even the entire American free-market system. In this way, health care becomes another re-enactment of the Exodus.

The reality is rather different. The reality is that Americans obtain enormous amounts of health care services. This is true for the rich, the poor, the insured, and the uninsured. The reality is that 85 percent of our health care expenses are paid for by third parties, either government or private insurance. Third-party payments insulate individuals from health care expenses, but the costs come back to bite us in the form of stagnant wages (because health insurance benefits eat up a rising share of worker compensation) and higher taxes.

The Left's narrative is that "the system" preys on people by denying them preventive care, because acute care is more profitable. As this New York Times story portrayed it, because our system will not provide foot care to people with diabetes, they have to undergo amputations.

The reality is rather different. For preventive health care, the doctrine of collective moral failure is less useful than a recognition of personal responsibility. When you see people who have failed to obtain preventive care, the chances are higher that this reflects lack of willpower and self-discipline than that it reflects lack of funds.

Jews, and others who promote government expansion, believe that a good leader would "fix" the health care system. The libertarian view would be that health care delivery can be improved with trial-and-error learning, which markets provide. As enterprises attempt innovations, the market will keep those that succeed and discard those that fail. Government control, by contrast, will turn health care into an arena where producers protect their profits by lobbying in Washington, without having to compete and innovate to serve consumers.

A good student of economics learns that moral consequences do not always match intentions. Relative to moral intentions, markets are biased upward and government is biased downward. That is, even though market participants may be motivated by self-interest, their actions, in the context of competition, enhance the well-being of many, particularly through innovation and technological progress. In contrast, government policies, even when motivated by moral conviction, often have unintended consequences that are harmful, such as the unemployment caused by labor market regulation.

With markets, there is a natural mechanism to correct errors. Firms that fail to serve customers go out of business. Consumers who are poorly served under the status quo represent profit opportunities to upstart entrepreneurs.

There is no natural mechanism to correct government failure. Any government policy, no matter how flawed, develops a constituency that will lobby for its perpetuation.

Not every misfortune that occurs in society is a replay of Pharaoh's enslavement of the Jews. The Exodus narrative can always be tried on, but it does not often fit properly. Usually, problems are more complex and systemic than a simple oppressor/oppressed narrative can describe. Sometimes, the best solution is to increase, rather than to diminish, personal responsibility. Often, government programs can exacerbate problems, with no built-in correction mechanism.

We can address collective failures without adding to the responsibilities and strengthening the power of government. Personal activity and voluntary associations can help to repair the world with less danger of fostering arrogance, corruption, and unintentional harm.

The key to good government is not finding a superior leader who will help government play God. Instead, we need to be realistic about the human imperfections that are bound to be present in politicians. We need to take into account the adverse incentives under which they operate. America's founders had the right idea when they focused on limiting and dividing the powers of government, rather than depending on the wisdom and benevolence of rulers.

Jews are welcome to believe that we have an ethical mission, but we must recognize that government is a flawed and dangerous institution. The Moses Complex is an unhealthy syndrome.

Arnold Kling is the author of a book on health care policy, Crisis of Abundance, forthcoming in April from the Cato Institute. He is a member of a Reconstructionist Jewish synagogue and teaches statistics and economics at an Orthodox Jewish high school, both in suburban Washington, DC. He is also author of Learning Economics.

Hoot, man! And what, how and who determines "a sufficient amount of money to live to the next day"? The employer? The employee? The government? Rabbi Moline?

And where is this money going to come from if the employee John Doe didn't earn enough for his employer during his {Doe's} previous day's work? Example: John Doe makes $26 dollars worth of widgets for his company in a day, but it is decided (by someone) that JD "sufficient amount" is $32. Where is that extra six bucks per day coming from...365 days a year x 218 employees?

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