To Shoot A Myth; F. A. Harper

Dr. Harper is a member of the staff of the Foundation for Eco nomic Education. [9 ] The real reason why myths are impossible to shoot is that the forms they can take are infinite in number, and also that they evade one's aim at an infinite speed. As to the number of forms myths can take, consider the possible answers to 2 plus 2. The only nonmythical answer is 4. But there are infinite mythical answers. It is similar with any other problem or question, how ever simple or complex it may be, since each problem has only one correct answer. So if one's aim were perfect and he could shoot a myth with every shot, he could spend his entire lifetime shooting myths released by only one myth factory, without ever demolishing all this factory could produce. For automation is well established in myth factories; their production can operate at a fantastic speed, with practically no cost. Myths Are Like Fog As I write this, my wife and I are on the North Atlantic on a Norwegian freighter. Last evening a heavy fog fell on us and our path. Captain Aaby had to leave in the middle of his dinner to oversee operations and was up all night watching things. The bits of moisture in the fog cloud may be compared to myths in their number. They impeded our view as myths becloud the truth. It is possible, of course, to "shoot" a fog particle. But how foolish it would have been for Captain Aaby to do that.

Instead, he proceeded on his course the same as ever, guarding only against collision with another ship or an iceberg. [10 ] Such is the futility of the enticing sport of shooting at all existing myths. And in addition, they are hard to shoot because they Hit here and there at the speed of force without resistance since they are not burdened by the weight and rigid confines of fact. And if you should happen to be so lucky as to hit one squarely, it is likely only to spatter into any number of sub-myths, as if you had hit a gob of mercury with a hammer; and then you will have only spread mythology rather than having demolished it. Myths grow most freely in the soil of matters beyond the reach of our senses to detect directly. Religion, in coping with faiths about the far beyond, has abounded in myths throughout the existence of· man, as evidenced in the wide differences of religious belief that have always existed. And every field of scientific contempla tion has been full of myths before more certain scientific truths emerged as each science developed. Social science, being a young science, is still in the mythological realm so far as widespread understanding is concerned. Eco nomic myths are too numerous to shoot-economic fog, we might call it.

The Major Myth Perhaps the greatest economic myth of all is the one that the government should-and can-do for us what we cannot otherwise do for ourselves. In social science this is the counterpart of a prinCiple that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; for if you remove the "we" [ 11 ] out of any social agglomerate, nothing is left but the shell of a dream. And so if we translate this myth into its real equivalent, it becomes: "We can do for ourselves what we cannot do for ourselves." For in doing things for ourselves, we can do anything for each other, coopera tively and by means of exchange, to any extent we desire and are capable of doing under any man-made scheme that we can design. The myth about government is comparable to what might be called a mythical law of social dynamics: "For no governmental action is there an equal and opposite reaction." Or in accounting tenns, this myth is compa rable to saying that when the government does things, you need not use double entry to balance accounts; that you can enjoy the debit side and forget the credit side; that people can generally get something from nothing; that the government is capable of spontaneous generation of the goodly things of life.

Derivative Myths In a sense, the government seems capable of spontane ous generation--:-the generation of endless minor myths begotten from this major. myth. The list of offspring is seemingly endless. A few items will illustrate. When the government gives indiscriminate aid to mothers of children born out of wedlock, it seems like a fine, humane thing to do when viewed only on the debit side. Why should the innocent children of irresponsible parents be made to suffer privation? Why not legalize aid [ 12] to them? The myth of the matter comes into focus only when. one looks at the credit side of the matter. You cannot legalize the economic support of illegitimacy without inducing more of the same thing-without stimu lating the production of the subsidized product. The fruits of this action have become more and more con spicuous with passing time, as in the instance in Illinois where for the third generation one household is living on the alms of illegitimacy and has abstained from any other form of gainful employment. The process is not quite the same as profitable barnyard reproduction of calves and pigs since the cow and the sow do not resolve their economic welfare by choice in quite this same manner.

But otherwise, there is some striking similarity. If the market pays for raising pigs, farmers will raise them. If the government pays for having illegitimate children, that product will be forthcoming, too. So if pity for one illegitimate child leads to one additional case of illegiti macy that would not otherwise have occurred, the merit of the process is certainly debatable; if two or three or more are the result, it is clear that the myth has gener ated the object of its pity. The myth is found by looking at the credit side. Why can't someone invent a means of myth control? Compounding the Error Even then, having generated that which was the object of our sympathy, other troubles ~rise as not only unmar ried mothers but also myths reproduce offspring. Cook [13 ] County officials found that Elsie M. had illegally ob tained $5,864 relief for ten children sired illegally by nve men. So they sent her to jail for six months. The ten children then had to be kept in foster homes-all at an additional expense of $19,948.

As another illustration, take the case of alcohol produc tion and consumption. Year after year has been found in the federal budget, on pages so far apart that their disharmony was not easily detected, two items of interest in relation to one another. On one page is an assessment for all taxpayers to help make up the deficit of the gov ernment-operated rum factory on the Virgin Islands; on another page is an assessment on all taxpayers to help cure alcoholism in the District of Columbia. Now whether the neurotic residents of that city of government officials overdid their alcohol consumption with the product from that particular factory, or on vodka, there seems to be a myth or two buried somewhere in this contrast. The two together seem like a make-work tax project of the nrst order. The Taxpayer In Between Then there is the case of untold millions of dollars of taxpayers' money being spent to increase agricultural production, while billions of what taxpayers have left thereafter are being spent to study the problem of how to dispose of lrlrsurplus"farm products, to buy and store those products, and to dump them at far below purchase price. The similarity between this and the alms to ille[14 ] gitimate children, both produced in surplus because of reliance on the forthcoming alms, is too close to escape notice. The myth is evidenced on the credit side of the account.

It is traditional with consumers that they would like to pay less for what they buy. By one device or another price ceilings or whatnot-the government enacts the "protective" legislation. Prices are forced down. Some producers quit producing. Then the myth emerges from its cocoon: Instead of consumers being able to buy the "necessary" product at a "reasonable price," they can't buy it at all because it hasn't been produced. And for a desired product not to be available at any price is a more distressing situation for consumers .than to have a price higher than they like to pay. Tariffs and all sorts of international trade "protections" also offer innumerable illustrations of myths. Some pro ducer wants the domestic market protected from foreign infiltration, and an appropriate mechanism is enacted into law. Perhaps it is for purposes of "national defense," or sympathy for the workers of the local factory in Podunk, or whatnot. Looking at the debit side only, it appears reasonable and a good thing to do. The myth is found on the credit side. If we could see it all worked out, it is as though Farmer A and Farmer B are ready to trade two horses, even for even, but each adds a tariff of 10 per cent to protect himself against the other's dumping his horse on the market; they still trade even, in the end-or perhaps don't trade at all, to the disadvan tage of both as separately judged by themselves.

[ 15] There are myths of this sort without end, for the myth factory is endless in output. The reader can add as many others as he likes from his own experience, illustrating their extent and form. But the point of this whole discus sion is not to try to list them all. It is, instead, to suggest that shooting myths, like shooting fog particles on the high sea, may be a sport of sorts but it is no way to get to the port of truth. Truth to the Rescue Fog on the high seas is not man made, of course, whereas economic myths enacted into law are man made . .And therein lies one difference perhaps worthy of note. Whereas man has no control over the creation of fog, in any detectable form or degree, he has control over the creation of man-made myths. And so birth control of myths is a worthy objective, while shooting them after their uncontrolled production is a rather futile sport. How to control their birth, then, is the question.

Birth control of myths is better and easier than their displacement with truth. As Dean Myers of Cornell used to say: "There is only one thing worse than ignorance, and that is to know something that isn't true. Unlearning is a difficult and painful process." In any event, it is truth that serves the processes of both birth control and the displacement of myths; for in the displacement process, myths are like the human mind in abhoring a vacuum. So if you try to displace a myth by removal alone, instead of replacement by a [16 ] superior belief that will successfully push it aside, a sit uation is required akin to a vacuum, and this' is difficult if not impossible to accomplish. So to shoot a myth or push it aside, without displace ment by first instituting a superior concept, merely means that the suction of the vacuum will promptly replace it with one of the innumerable substitute myths stand ing by.

Success in dealing with myths, then, would seem to be to work for the positive concept of truth rather than to work against the negative concept of innumerable myths. Then all the myths will fade away and die of neglect and disfavor. And your energies will have been most fruitfully employed that way. To use a mathematical analogy, you can never attain a positive number merely by cancelling out endless nega tive numbers. It is the same with myths.· It's fun to shoot myths but it's just a sport like shooting clay pigeons which is fun but not the way to get anything for dinner. Probably the best way to combat myths is to live strictly by the guide of truth as one sees it, insofar as choice can make the truth accessible. [ 17] IMPRISONED IDEAS THERE are many classifications into which men and women may be divided-as upper, middle, or lower class; rich, well-to-do, and poor; religious, skeptical, and athe ist; conservative, liberal, labour; Catholic, Protestant; master and man; and so forth and so on, ad infinitum.