Asymmetric Concern

The Somali day care corruption scandal, a theft of taxpayer money that was simultaneously brazen and clownish, has been pushed off the front page by the anti-ICE rage in Minnesota and elsewhere. The deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were unnecessary and tragic, and have served as rallying cries for the protestors. The cynic in me noted that there are people of a socialist mindset who welcomed these tragic deaths, because they serve the cause and because their way has historically cared little for individual lives even as they purport to be the only ones who care about “the people.” This is echoed in the relative apathy to the fourteen homeless people who froze to death in New York City during the current cold snap, deaths that might have been avoided if the new socialist mayor had done as mayors in the past have: get them off the street and into shelters, even if just temporarily.

I recently note a similar asymmetry in a discussion regarding the lack of disaster in the wake of the defunding of the Corporation For Public Broadcasting. While Becket Adams at National Review noted that “vanishingly few” NPR and PBS affiliates have actually shuttered, one commenter noted that “the government spends so much money on stuff I don’t care for, so I don’t mind if a few of my tax bucks are wasted on NPR/PBS.”

While in the grand scheme, the $4 or so per taxpayer that CPB funding amounted to is noise, a billion dollars is still a billion dollars, and the only way we will ever stand a chance of getting spending under control is if we treat every dollar saved as important and every dollar wasted as outrageous.

Unfortunately, when it comes to cutting and spending, people are far more fussy about cuts than about waste... or fraud or duplication or needlessness. This is evident in the howls of outrage at the imperfection of meager DOGE cuts and the overwhelming indifference to the orders-of-magnitude greater misuse of tax dollars. Worse yet, many people are actually crowing that DOGE cut less than was claimed, as if cutting waste is an affront. Many of these are simply doing so because they don’t like Trump, and want to deny him a victory even if that victory is good for the nation. This is bonkers on its face, yet here we are.

Even conservative estimates of wasteful spending run to a couple hundred billion dollars, and I’m inclined to believe Elon Musk when he estimates that the total could be as high as a trillion dollars. That’s one dollar of every seven spent by the government. To call that level of dysfunction mind-boggling feels woefully inadequate.

Apologists are willing to tolerate that massive waste/fraud as part of the cost of “doing good” and helping people. They ignore the systemic harm, the long-term adverse effects, and the opportunity cost. They live off anecdotes, as if every single needy person who goes un-helped is proof of the heartless apathy of those who decry waste and demand better management of taxpayer money. They ignore the big picture harm. It is, of course, ironic that many such apologists are also believers in “systemic” racism, sexism, and other bigotries.

The nirvana fallacy that gets applied to every instance of imperfect spending reduction is no obstacle, either. Concentrated good is preferred over distributed harm, even when the distributed harm is far, far greater than the concentrated good.

This “asymmetric concern” is not just a province of the Left. Tariffs, the favorite playtoy of our current President and by extension a rah-rah favorite of his fans, work the same way. Concentrated good: some companies or business sectors benefit. Distributed harm: Consumers across the board pay for those benefits - and pay far more than those benefits actually accrue to the beneficiaries. Most nations’ leaders embrace tariffs precisely because they produce concentrated good, no matter the greater degree of distributed harm. Concentrated good is visible, so it buys votes. That’s before we get into cronyism, pay-to-play, and other forms of pelf. Distributed harm is harder to see in the present, and easier to wave off or blame on other things afterward, so voters are less likely to lay proper blame.

People who study history know that the various forms of collectivist governance don’t work remotely as well as free markets and systems rooted in property rights, but the latter aren’t nearly as plainly visible as the “do something” that most big government types use to promote themselves and their electoral aspirations. When combined with salesmanship and the ego satisfaction that “doing something” provides, even when doing does more harm than good, and we get what we have today, here and around the world: a persistence of what doesn’t work. More of the same crap, just in shinier packaging and with promises that ‘we are smarter, so this time it’ll work.’

And selective caring amidst a broader apathy.

Caring that, it must be noted, is curated by the press and other media sources. They choose whichever Current Thing moves the zeitgeist in desired directions, and give it wall-to-wall while ignoring arguably far more important or impactful matters.

No one wants to believe that he or she is being manipulated, or manipulable for that matter. Yet we all are, even the smartest and most dialed-in of us. It’s why I have chosen the cynic’s path on so many things, why I do my best to avoid rushes to judgment or conclusion, and why I doubt every new thing I read until I see (a lot of) verification. And even then, I still get things wrong and I’m still prone to being tweaked by manipulators.

All this, including asymmetric concern, is human nature. Which makes it perpetual, and which requires eternal vigilance. The hardest part is ignoring emotional reactions, but ignoring emotional reactions in favor of rationality is the only way to make things better. How do we get more of the latter? Only by being those rational voices in a sea of emotional noise.