How ‘we’ hide the truth about policy – Orange County Register

“The most dangerous pronoun discourse has nothing to do with gender identity. The problem is that “we” is not defined in public policy debates. ” These are the words of Richard Morrison, a researcher at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Morrison has identified “our fallacy,” and I am often guilty of it.

I often say things like, “If we increase spending on this or that, it will cause some economic distortion.” Who exactly is this “we”? Definitely not me or most of you. Politicians propose and vote on additional spending, and the president signs new spending bills into law.

The problem also comes up when I write things like, “By 2021, we’ve increased our debt to $24 trillion.” However, neither borrowing nor spending is done by you and me. It is done by a number of politicians in Congress, with the support of the president, and with the support of several officials at the Treasury Department.

Just pick up a newspaper or listen to politicians, or even people like me, and you’ll soon realize that this “we” is everywhere: “We must protect our children by close (or open) schools!”; “We need (or do not need) a national industrial policy!”; “We have to invest in infrastructure (or something else)!”

This group is a phantom, easily called out but sometimes unidentifiable. Is it personal? Doctor? Experts? The federal government? All members of Congress, or just supporters? Does “we” include the president and his administration? How about the judiciary? Or do the leaders of a representative democracy have the honor of attributing their actions to each of us?

Take the idea that “we” have to invest in infrastructure. Who decides exactly where to invest? With whose money? And who will get a return, if any, from that investment? Are these the people who will lose their shirt if the investment fails? These are not trivial questions, because the rhetoric makes it nearly impossible to say that there are both winners and losers in any such trade.

That’s exactly the point of using “we”. It implies collective responsibility, creates the false impression that most people are on board, and suggests that we share the same benefits. “We” is often used to obscure the truth and create the illusion of oneness.

The same is true of many other words. In 1926, political scientist Parker T. Moon of Columbia University wrote this in his book Imperialism and World Politics: “When people use the simple word ‘France’. , people think of France as a unit, an entity… we not only mean unity but personality to the country. It is words that hide the truth and turn international relations into a captivating drama in which individual nations are the agents, and it is too easy for us to forget the men and women. flesh-and-blood women are the real actors. “

Nowhere is this insight more revealing than in assessing the fallacy of using import duties to protect “America” from “China.” Countries don’t actually trade with each other. People of the same bloodline trade, sometimes individually, and sometimes they join forces in business companies. To embrace this reality is to recognize that Washington’s import taxes hurt Americans by preventing them from making the most of the good deals. The claim that “we” must tax “them” puts the American consumer at a loss.