by Gary M. Galles
Gary Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University.
In school we were taught that analogies, metaphors, and similes describe one thing in terms of another. While those terms may have faded from memory or been tossed on the scrapheap of unneeded minutiae, they turn out to be even more important than our teachers said. Much of what we know is by analogy to something else (such as faded and scrapheap in the sentence above — memory doesn't exactly fade like a pair of denims, and ideas aren't literally thrown away, but the analogies make the meanings more vivid).
Analogies are incredibly powerful in extending understanding by producing dramatic new insights, such as seeing that electrical current is like water current in some ways or that much government activity is like a pirate's plundering. William James recognized this power when he wrote, [T]alent for perceiving analogies. . . [is] the leading fact in geniuses of every order.
The ability of analogies to express ideas and arguments forcefully explains why so much of what is said, thought, and written is couched in that form. But using analogies is also dangerous, because any analogy, however helpful, is misleading if pushed too far or used in the wrong context. Everything is both like and unlike everything else in multiple ways, so there are always many potential analogies, accurate and inaccurate, that can be applied.
Poor analogies, typically based on unimportant but obvious surface similarities, are often seductive. (For example, paternalism to describe coercive government policies — your parents once had power over you for your own good, but they didn't steal from strangers to finance the exercise of that power.) And even good ones break down at some point. (Wave theory helps us understand some of light’s properties but not others.) Therefore, analogies can be abused to mislead as well as used to inform. Abuse has long predominated in public discourse, as George Orwell pointed out in Politics and the English Language 60 years ago.
For example, profligate tax-and-spend, and borrow-and-spend, government policies are called investing in America, ignoring the fact that, unlike private investment, those who finance the investments have no choice and are different people from those who benefit from them. Tax reductions — reducing the disincentives to produce by increasing the fraction of one's output that one actually owns — are called voodoo economics, implying that recognizing that incentives matter is no more logically defensible than a witch doctor's prescriptions. Or they're called trickle-down economics, ignoring the fact of mutually beneficial voluntary arrangements by implying that the reductions are merely transfers of wealth to the already wealthy at the expense of others, in the hope that they will eventually spend some of it and allow a trickle of gains to reach some further down the economic food chain.
However, perhaps the most common political abuse of analogies involves war. We have heard that war is hell, all’s fair in love and war, and war is politics by other means (any combination of which illustrates the risks of compounding imperfect analogies). We heard that the 1970s oil crisis was the moral equivalent of war (although government price controls did far more damage than OPEC, making one wonder who declared war on Americans). Government has declared war on every conceivable problem, from drugs and crime to poverty and illiteracy. But the imagery of urgency, resolve, and giving it all we've got for the good of the country doesn’t match the policies or their effects on the taxpayers' pockets and liberties. Rather, declarations of such wars are often just dramatic rhetoric used to promote politicians' pet programs, which frequently do more harm than good, such as the vast invasions of property and privacy, and the increases in violence and corruption, triggered by the War on Drugs.
Many Casualties
War imagery is invoked to show determination to win. But shooting wars have no winners, just those who lose more and those who lose less, as illustrated by gruesome casualty comparisons. And casualties are the last thing war on [fill in the blank] social-program supporters seek, though honest evaluations would find many casualties. (Witness the large public-housing projects that became instant slums in the War on Poverty.) Wars also end with a formal surrender. But government wars on poverty, drugs, and the rest can never be won in a similar way.
We hear of trade wars, in language implying that they are essentially contests between domestic and foreign producers — making protection of our firms against their firms sound sensible. Unfortunately, this rests on the erroneous idea that trade is a zero-sum game, analogous to the conservation of mass, in which when one party gains, the other loses. However, both buyers and sellers expect to gain by trade, or they wouldn't voluntarily participate. Trade, then, creates wealth, rather than conserving it. A better war analogy for protectionism is that of domestic producers and government allying to pillage domestic consumers.
Analogies have consequences. They are much of what each of us knows. But they are also often used to mislead, making them, like nuclear energy, potentially both powerful for good but also destructive. It's time we recognize that fact. This is especially true given the frequency with which analogies are abused to further government encroachment on our shrinking freedoms.