“I may disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend your right to say it”—a quote that captures the essence of classical liberalism: individual liberty, freedom of speech, conscience, and religion.  A philosophy that strongly influenced the Founders and is reflected in the First Amendment.

Over the past twenty years, however, modern American liberalism has placed greater and greater emphasis on outcomes and equity while elevating compassion as its guiding principle.  The Left’s argument is straightforward: freedom is not meaningful if people lack the material conditions to exercise it.  But the gap between intent and outcome is where liberal ideology does not pass muster.

To illustrate the point, consider two random moments—one real, one fictional.  Recently, Bobbi and I watched Bohemian Rhapsody, the film about Freddie Mercury and the rock group Queen.  The movie’s grand finale culminates in a recreation of Queen’s iconic Live Aid performance in 1985—an event that was organized to raise money and awareness for famine relief in Africa.

Later that week, I caught a rerun of Seinfeld.  In the episode The Chaperone, Kramer becomes the unlikely mentor to Miss Rhode Island, a contestant in the Miss America Beauty Pageant, whose sincere solution to world hunger is disarmingly simple: “If everyone would just give up one meal a day, we could end world hunger.” Jerry’s dry reply—“Yeah, that’ll work”—delivers the punchline, revealing a much deeper truth.

So, what does Live Aid and famine in Africa have to do with Seinfeld’s fictional Miss Rhode Island?  When confronted with the very real problem of world hunger, the instinctive liberal response was compassion: people are starving, we have food, so we should give it to them.  To the virtue signaling Left it was both satisfying and the best thing they could do – or was it?

The belief that complex social problems can be solved through well-intentioned compassion is more than a bit naïve.  Live Aid raised enormous awareness and significant funds, but it did not solve the food scarcity problem any more than the fictional Miss Rhode Island’s solution would have.

That does not diminish the sincerity of the Live Aid effort; but it does highlight the limits of it.  History offers repeated examples of what happens when good intentions are disconnected from realistic incentives.  Since the 1980s, severe food shortages and starvation have been common occurrences in places like Venezuela, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and Sudan where each crisis was caused by government inefficiency and the lack of realistic incentives

The problem was not a lack of food – the problem was a failure of an economic system to deliver it.

The modern Left behaves as if economic systems are static pools of wealth waiting to be divided, when in fact they are dynamic processes driven by investment, risk-taking, and incentives.  Remove those drivers, and scarcity intensifies.  Policies that focus solely on redistribution, without regard for how food or any other commodity is produced and distributed undermine the very outcomes they seek to achieve.

Compassion matters.  But it is not a governing principle.

Effective economic policy requires alignment between incentives and outcomes.  It requires conditions in which individuals can innovate, produce, trade, and profit.  Without those elements, redistribution becomes a palliative—whether the issue is food, housing, energy, or anything else.

Economics, at its core, is about how societies allocate scarce resources with alternative uses.  Therefore, government policies must be judged not by the intentions they express, but by the incentives they create.  And I’ll never understand why the liberal establishment in this country does not understand that simple economic truism.

Thought for the day:  “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” —Age-Old proverb