Welfare, Justice, and Laffing

I’ve been doing a little canvassing for the NDP, and in that capacity I’ve gotten in more political discussions than I’ve ever had in my life… even though those discussions generally take up too much time to be worthwhile. I’ve had some trouble understanding the conservatives around here, because I give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they understand the consequences of their positions. If they aren’t ignorant, they must have some motivation, right? But it can be tough to figure out their motivations.

So I’ve been trying to figure out some of the underlying differences between conservatives and liberals, stuff that goes deeper than the issues of the day. Robert Altemeyer’s work was very helpful in showing the authoritarian / anti-authoritarian split, but I figure there must be other causes as well. After all, there was a time when there were authoritarian left-wing regimes, albeit not recently enough for me to remember them.

I think one of the big psychological impulses underlying conservatism these days is probably a drive to prevent cheating a punish cheaters. This must be behind the drive to limit welfare, and especially to drug test welfare recipients… conservatives will tolerate an inefficient and wasteful system if is helps prevent anybody from cheating the system, from becoming a “welfare queen”.

It’s probably similar with the justice system. Here there’s the liberal impulse: “better ten guilty men go free than one innocent suffer”. And there’s an opposing conservative impulse, which is best seen when dealing with despised underclasses like racial or religious minorities: better to lock them all up than risk one going free. Or better to kill them all and let God sort them out.

I suspect that optimally efficient solutions could be found for both of these, a level of scrutiny which will produce some false positives and some false negatives. That solution need not be the average of the liberal and conservative ideals, though, nor even between those ideals at all. I’m reminded of the Laffer Curve idea for optimum tax rates, which usual predicts that the most efficient tax rates are 60 to 80%, far above what even the crunchiest lefties want in this country.

There could be some dispute choosing the best goal to aim for, though. In the example of the tax rates, the 60-80% is the rate to maximize tax collection, and thus the size of the government. Other optimum rates can be found to maximize the size of the private sector (not zero, but certainly not 70%) or to maximize the size of the economy as a whole.

I guess this brings it around to those motivations. If someone is proposing a justice system that isn’t calibrated right to give the lowest crime rate, what is it calibrated for? What is the real goal?

This is getting perilously close to me needing to read a whole stack of new books. I’m not sure when I’ll find the time.