To Be a Caring Conservative

“All the while, the existing social safety net—combined with various anti-poverty programs—in the United States already provides for our nation’s poor by offering them an adequate standard of living.”

Introduction

My most recent Merion West essay “Conservatives Are Not the Only Ones Who Ignore ‘Facts and the Science,’” which was published in May, contained a lengthy section on the heritability of many complex human behavioral traits including industriousness, intelligence quotient (IQ), honesty, creativity, courage, etc. As this essay explained, recent scientific findings over the past 20 or so years have conclusively established that the heritability of these traits cannot be discounted. This, however, appears to be in tension with a long-standing Zeitgeist on the political right: that under the American ideal, which has persisted largely unchanged since the nation’s founding, all men and women are equal in the eyes of God; each person possesses inherent dignity; all must receive equal treatment under the law; and, most importantly, every individual is due an equal opportunity to succeed.

Today, conservatives still tend to reject the equal outcomes goal of the Left; however, a problem persists: How should capitalism, the preferred economic system of nearly all conservatives, account for the inherent unfairness of the genetic lottery? How can an individual with an immutable IQ of 80 possibly compete in an economic marathon with a person who possesses an IQ of 120? This conundrum demands that conservatives address this serious moral issue.

Capitalism and Inequality

In another Merion West essay, published prior to the aforementioned one in May, I argued that both income and wealth inequality have not been increasing in the United States, despite frequent claims to the contrary by many left-of-center commentators. However, the worldwide statistics on this point are truly compelling. Personally, my first encounter with the question of rising vs. falling inequality was during my college days in the 1960’s when I was exposed to the seminal research of Simon Kuznets. In his groundbreaking 1955 paper “Economic Growth & Income Inequality,” Kuznets offered that “The central theme of this paper is the character and causes of long term changes in the personal distribution of income.” Does inequality in the distribution of income increase or decrease in the course of a country’s economic growth? After a careful review of the scant data (Kuznets had the statistics for only three countries—Great Britain, Germany, and the United States), he found that “The general conclusion suggested is that the relative distribution of income…has been moving toward equality.”