Grievance and Political Correctness: A Movement, Or A Business?

Social movements: whether you love ‘em or hate ‘em, the reality is we’re all going to live through several in our lifetimes. Maybe we’ve even participated in one or two when we were younger (I’m looking in the mirror right now). While some social movements enjoy their moment in the sun then fade into the annals of history -think of the Temperance Movement or Impressionism- others seem to have great staying power. There are many going on right now, in fact, that have been around for decades and show no sign of losing steam. Think of the War on Cancer, the Sexual Revolution or the Civil Rights movements, for example. Despite the many social changes they’ve already created, the millions of dollars they’ve collected and spent, and the evolution in tactics and leadership they’ve undergone over time, they carry on and on. They seem to be like vast trains always consuming money and resources and chugging along a track, but never seeming to reach a final destination.

Why is it that some movements never seem to be able to declare “mission accomplished”, stop taking up resources, and go home?

Social Movements And The Economy

This is an important question to consider because social movements are expensive. They affect our economy more deeply and in more ways than most people realize. Indeed, they can also be a hidden drag on our national resources, as I’ll discuss below. While many Americans struggle to save for retirement, public schools lack books and roads and bridges across the nation crumble from neglect, social movements suck down millions of dollars of private and government support every year to advance their agendas. Do they deliver commensurate value? That depends on who you ask, and how they define “value”. There’s no objective way to answer that question. However, analyzing a large social movement as if it might be a type of business could help us understand what gives some of them staying power and such a command over public hearts, minds and resources.

If you asked most economists, or spoke with most social scientists, business people or social activists themselves, they would agree that social movements are quite different from businesses. For one thing, social movements depend primarily on volunteer labor that can’t be commanded or well controlled. Businesses, on the other hand, operate on the tightly controlled efforts of paid employees. Social movements also don’t keep books. (While the various organizations that help fund the movement or work on its behalf must account for their funding, the movement itself is an abstract entity, so of course it can’t track its inputs and outputs or pay taxes.)  Businesses, in contrast, must account for their spending habits.  Another big difference is that social movements don’t exist to create a financial profit. A final key contrast between social movements and businesses is that the purpose of social movements – at least in theory – is to put themselves out of business. After all, they exist to stop the conditions that caused them to come into existence in the first place.

Don’t they?

Well, let’s not jump to conclusions. The very longevity of some movements rightfully allows us to call into question how serious they are about eliminating the problems they’re trying to fix. And the fact that so many large social movements continually operate in ‘crisis mode’ should also raise eyebrows. Why do many movements never seem to have enough resources to accomplish their missions? Why do their needs always increase, but never decrease? And why does the solution to the problem they’ve been flogging for decades always move off into the distance with every victory declared?  How can this be? It’s a curious phenomenon. And a very expensive one, with significant impacts on your retirement savings, the national debt, and the wealth gap. Yet the tax dollars and voluntary contributions to support the movements simply ignore their obvious paradoxes and just keep rolling in. Why is that?

Incompetence and Corruption – Answers, Or Just Symptoms?

Some people would blame simple incompetence for the lackluster performance of many social movements.  Maybe the leadership simply gets in over its head in too many situations. Certainly incompetence is a problem and there’s some of it in every organization, but can an entire movement be so successful for so long if it runs mainly on the inability to make good decisions? Probably not. An alternative (or, more likely, complementary) explanation is corruption. Many would agree that there’s a strong case to be made for the role of theft and fraud in squandering resources meant to be used to fight a problem, especially if a movement enjoys the support of several large formal organizations. Think of the scandal that happened in 2010, for example, when it was revealed that after the giant Haitian earthquake, several members of Oxfam – a leading organization in the movement to end hunger – spent some of the organization’s hunger relief money to hire prostitutes and promote wild sex parties?^1,2 The Haitian government was so outraged that they banned Oxfam from every operating in Haiti again. Interestingly, Oxfam had already had a similar “slip up” when providing relief efforts in Chad a few years earlier, yet the organization was still receiving millions of dollars in both British government support and private donations from around the world.²  How much progress was that money actually providing towards he goal of ending hunger? How much harm was it doing along the way? Sadly, Oxfam’s basic story of corruption isn’t unique. But can we conclude that the overall failure of so many movements to achieve their goals is really due to individual acts of corruption? I don’t think so. In fact, I think corruption is only the symptom of a much deeper, and more subtle, problem. I believe the forces that operate to prevent a movement from reaching its stated goals are a function of the way many mass movements are organized and structured. Could we understand this better if we chose a non-traditional way to look at the movements? What would we see if we looked at large, persistent social movements not as simply a loose mass of people all voluntarily trying to ‘do good’ and solve a common problem, and instead looked at them as forms of businesses aimed at enriching themselves with wealth and social power?  Interestingly, if we start to look at large social movements as types of business ventures, we can start to find some answers to the questions raised above.

Social Movements As Businesses

I’m going to single out one particular movement- the political correctness movement, which rests on the mass generation of grievances – to see if examining it as a business helps make sense of why it’s flourishing despite its obvious inability to achieve its basic goals of promoting racial, gender and income equality and social harmony. Why choose political correctness? Because it’s probably the largest, most visible and most pervasive social movement in modern American society. It has deeply infiltrated our social lives, our personal identities, our educational system, and our entertainment. It shows no signs of abating and grows more powerful all the time. And for all the time and money donated to achieving “equality” and every change made in society made to accommodate the many demands of the movement, as a whole, the movement simply claims that the wrongs it aims to right grow ever worse. Political correctness has now even created a lens through which other social movements are practically required to operate if they hope to survive in a society increasingly controlled by PC dictums.  For example, consider how often we’re now asked to respond to environmental disasters, the scourge of chronic disease, or poverty and hunger, not because they affect us, or even because they affect others, but only because they affect others of specific, politically preferred, classes?  Want an end to water pollution? Caring about dirty water is now a racial issue. It’s important only because (in the minds of environmental leadership) it differentially affects the health or well-being of racially preferred communities. A community’s water needs are now important only in proportion to the extent to which that community can lay claim to being “victims” of a perpetually unjust “system”. Likewise, sharing food simply so your fellow man has bread to eat, no longer makes the cut. The bread must be divided and distributed in proportion to the political appeal of the narratives of injustice put forth by various communities when asking for some free bread. These are two common scenarios, but the examples go on and on.

So let’s ask some basic questions. If political correctness (or any other large movement) is a type of business, then it must have products, customers, and ways to “sell” its product(s) to its customers. It must rely on workers, and have some way to manage, advertise and distribute its products. If it’s a very large movement with many products, it may be organized and function more like an entire industry than as just a single business. Is it possible that the PC movement has found a way to harness grievance, or the power of mass complaint, and turn it into a household commodity that is created, marketed, distributed and sold to various consumer groups by a complex and sophisticated grievance business? Although the profits of the grievance industry have to be measured mainly in terms of social rather than physical capital – in other words, in terms of power, prestige, psychological satisfaction and that all important ability to dominate all social thought –in all other respects, if we consider the modern grievance movement as a business or industry, that does seem to help explain why it’s become as much a part of our culture as Google, Kleenex or microwave ovens. It also helps to explain why grievance is equally likely to never go away.

The Grievance Industry

Grievance, of course, is nothing new. Many mass movements have been sparked by grievances. But when the grievances were satisfied, most of these movements died out. Mission accomplished. Our modern political correctness movement, however, which encompasses many different grievances, is different. It has no natural end point and no means of satisfaction. Every shift society makes to satisfy a grievance is met with scorn and cries of “That wasn’t done right!” or “It’s not enough! You must do more!” If you think about it, that’s not unlike the way many financial investors turn their noses up when a company reports a nice increase in quarterly earnings. It’s not uncommon for investors to react to such good news by downgrading or selling the company’s stock because the increase “wasn’t good enough” (even if it beat expectations!). While we often wag our fingers (and rightfully so) at the levels of financial greed displayed by Wall Street, the levels of greed for control over society’s thoughts and actions displayed by the grievance movement, are easily as extensive and shocking.  

Grievance is, in many ways, the ideal industry because it’s built upon a manufacturing model in which the raw materials –ideas and emotions – are intangible, ubiquitous, endlessly renewable, potentially available for anyone to exploit, and free. At it’s core, grievance is a collusion between rank capitalism and voluntary slavery. Ironically, the movement has been conceived, nurtured and skillfully harnessed by groups of people who claim to reject both capitalism and slavery. At the top are the captains of the grievance industry – the robber barons who exploit various masses for their willingness to exchange control of their lives for various special privileges the industry secures for them. Industry leaders create scripts for the aggrieved to live by – as victims of racism, for example, or an oppressed and excluded minority – and the ‘workers’ (the aggrieved) take liberties that are offered to them in compensation and off limits to the rest of society. Forgiveness or exculpation for transgressing the law; subsidized living expenses, and the right to form exclusive societies within a culture that otherwise forbids exclusion, are examples of the privileges the aggrieved may be granted. There are many more. But the general idea is that, in exchange for helping the elites of the grievance movement to advance a narrative that they can use to police and create a monopoly over social thought and behavior, the aggrieved give up their right and ability to live their own lives. As individuals or communities, they many no longer form their own identities, discover their own values, forge their own futures, or make up their own minds. What a Faustian bargain it is. The aggrieved give up their lives, and the robber barons get an endless source of emotional raw material to mine, process for public consumption, export and exploit to create power, purpose and income for themselves and the “staffs” of mostly unpaid, ernest volunteers who do the day to day work of advancing and managing the movement.

The aggrieved may be looked at as an endlessly renewable natural resource, if managed properly. The industry can use them in three ways: find them more to complain about, encourage them to complain louder, or recruit more of them to complain. Recruitment is the most important component (there’s power in numbers), but how does recruitment occur? If we look to the direct marketing industry, we may find some answers. Direct marketers are the companies that want you to pay a little fee for the privilege of buying their laundry soap or protein bars. They survive by getting you to buy in and keep purchasing their soap and bars every month. They grow when you persuade your friends, family and strangers to think that they, too, want in on the deal. To incentivize recruitment, the company shares a tiny sliver of its profits with you for every paying body you bring in. The grievance industry operates similarly. Instead of soap and protein bars, though, it “sells” ideas, emotional satisfaction, and the power of belonging to the mob. As long as the mob has ever more grist for its mill and keeps getting larger, the grievance industry keeps expanding its market share in the marketplace of ideas. Its ultimate goal? The same as the peddler of soap and protein bars: to achieve a monopoly on selling the product. Only in this case, the product is the right to police and exercise control over all social thought and behavior.

Who Pays for Grievance?

Creating and managing the grievance industry isn’t cheap. “Workers” (the aggrieved) must be paid with subsidies, freebies and special social privileges to secure their output and loyalty.  A worker in the racial grievance division, for example, might require rent, food and health care subsidies. Plus maybe a few freebies thrown in (anybody remember Obama’s free cell phone program?) A worker in the gender grievance division might require a group of supporters to visit their representatives to lobby for a favorable bill. So where does the money to pay all these workers and their required expenses come from? Most of us pretty much know the answer intuitively: it comes from the pay of working taxpayers (you), coerced into parting with some of your earned cash by the police powers of the state. In other words, forced taxation. And why does the state choose to redistribute the incomes of productive laborers to grievance workers? Because, like all industries, the grievance industry has created a strong lobby for itself. The workers, the leaders (mainly academic ideologues and wealthy contributors), the celebrities, and the “administrative staff” (rank and file, mainly volunteer, co-dependents who carry out the professional roles and day-to-day tasks) all assail the state in various ways with reasons why they should be allowed to co-opt public support for their workers/clients. Protests, ad campaigns, and, yes, good old-fashioned mass letter writing and meetings with public officials, are all part of the lobbying effort. (Who hasn’t, for example, seen commercials touting schoolkids who will starve unless somebody else’s parents buys them a school lunch? This is a complaint by parents who feel they can’t provide lunch for their children, and their solution is to have you do it for them.) A more informal, but increasingly invasive, form of lobbying is the day-to-day, informal Maoist-style barrage of public shaming being carried out everywhere by the “social justice warriors” and well-meaning, mob-loving do-gooders. Pressuring you into supporting them by buying your laundry soap from the same company they buy theirs from, secures themselves the approval of the crowd and a place in the emerging  new order. The ultimate object of all this activity is to convince the government to engage in gross legislative overreach and create a permanent industry bailout fund in the name of “saving the vulnerable” (the aggrieved). It’s no accident that the grievance industry operates at a loss. If it returns, in aggregate, less in human growth and productivity than it spends in taxpayer labor and money, it creates an ever deeper hole into which to throw resources. At the same time, it grows the need it’s supposedly trying to eliminate. Operating this business at a loss makes sense because if it did otherwise – if it excelled at turning unproductive people and communities into highly productive people and communities – where would the new recruits to keep the business going, come from? It’s rather like asking, if the Fed throws money at the banking industry only after the industry operates at a loss, why should they strive to be good stewards of your savings? (Are you listening, Wall Street?) What’s ingenious about this model is that it forces taxpayers to become permanent consumers of grievance by becoming mandated paying customers via taxation. There is no consent, and no method to opt out except by revolting outright and facing punishment by the state. Every dollar earned through productive work must be partially commandeered by the state – who takes its job very seriously – to underwrite the paychecks for the grievance industry workers so they can continue to go to work, the industry can flourish, and everyone involved can get what they showed up for: cash, freebies, the opportunity to evade personal responsibility for one’s actions, or the honorable badge of self righteousness and moral authority. How can anybody put a price on that?

Which raises an interesting question: What happens if a grievance worker gets tired of their job, and chooses to go on strike? No industry can survive if that happens very much. So, the consequences for the worker are very similar to workers on any other job: no work means no pay. No more subsidies, or rights to feel OK about oneself. In fact, if a worker tries to strike, the industry leaders and fellow employees are likely to engage in an “asset seizure” of sorts. The miscreant might be stripped of reputation, rights to participate in community, or their tangible pay (cash, subsidies, freebies). And just how would a grievance industry worker “quit”, anyway? There are lots of options. A grievance worker might decide to get an education, to see what alternative “jobs” might be out there. Maybe they learn a skill and become self-supporting. Perhaps they give their child the perspective that their birth situation isn’t very good, and the dream of moving beyond their community when they grow up. Quitting might also take the form of switching to a different religious or political party that emphasizes the ability to do better for themselves. Or could quit simply by choosing to try seeing the point of view of someone who disagrees with the grievance narrative. The latter is generally considered an unforgivable sin by grievance industry members, not much different from, say, peeking at classified intel. Some things are just not meant to be known by the plebes. What happens to workers when they try to think above their pay grade? The industry reacts pretty harshly. Look at the number of ways that the racial grievance industry has, for example, threatened and attempted to politically assassinate black political leaders who have seen value in conservative views. Collusion with the enemy – the “other” who makes the grievance narrative ring true – is treason.

Grievance, Interest Rates and Economic Bubbles

AS I mentioned earlier, the grievance industry is expensive to maintain. This might not always have been a problem, but under our current economic circumstances, it’s a critically heavy burden for the public to bear. We need to make some decisions about how much longer and to what extent the taxpayers will continue to bail out the grievance populations.

When the grievance industry was in its infancy, America was a very different place. Our work force was younger, technology was increasing productivity rather than stealing jobs, and retirement lasted, on average, five years or less. Future boomers were still in their prime working years and the economy was expanding nicely. National debt was relatively low and the interest rate averaged about 7%.  Today, our work force is much older, the boomers are retiring in droves and life after retirement age has lengthened by almost twenty years. The dollar has shrunk significantly in value and the national debt exceeds our annual GDP. It’s actually expanding now by around a trillion dollars a month. The U.S. has spent far beyond its means, in part to support a growing grievance class that consumes copious quantities of economic resources while contributing extremely little to grow the economy.

The downward pressure in interest rates, as a direct effect of our growing debt, is a particular problem for workers hoping to retire some day. Between the mid-1960’s and 2000, when the tech bubble burst, the average interest rate was about 7%. To keep interest payments manageable as the national debt grew, and to help prop up the economy after the bursting of the tech and housing bubbles, the Fed lowered interest rates to their current, historic low. Driving rates down was a necessity undertaken in the belief that it was better to prop the economy up in the short run and worry about bubbles later, than to let the economy founder and reset for the long run. Corrections cause a lot of temporary pain, and creating pain for the taxpayers is never politically popular. Near zero interest rates are now required not only to keep the stock market and debt-soaked banks and corporations from failing,  but also to keep the cost of the interest payments on our egregious national debt somewhat affordable. (Remember that as the debt increases, the interest payments on the debt also increase – exponentially.)  The situation is now so dire that some economists are calling for the U.S. to impose negative interest rates as Japan and Europe do. Alarmingly, there’s not a lot of pushback to that idea coming from either the Fed or the White House. Whether or not the U.S. ever actually crawls down into the rabbit hole of negative interest, from which there is no known escape, interest rates will probably never rise again until buyers of our debt go “on strike’ and the Treasury is forced to raise rates to coax their money out of their wallets. At that point, as interest rates rise, our economy will start to spiral into an unrecoverable black hole.

So how do low, low interest rates necessary to keep our debt payments under control, affect you? If you’re saving for your retirement, your job is now a lot harder. Savers can’t get interest returns on their savings to grow their nest eggs. Millions of hardworking, productive citizens will be condemned to live out their old age in poverty. This is a financial and ethical disaster beginning to unfold right now and will destined to explode when the Social Security Trust Funds run out around 2024 (according to the Congressional Budget Office – and assuming we don’t go into a recession between now and then. Good luck with that!) The anti-poverty grievance movement will quickly gain millions of new members. In the meantime, investors who fund our debt by purchasing Treasury securities are likewise being punished, because they, too, also getting cheated on interest returns (yield). While the astute among them will purchase low-yielding Treasurys today to sell them to greater fools when rates drop tomorrow, that game lasts for only one or two rounds. Who will keep buying ever greater numbers of Treasurys then, and continue to fund our ever growing debt, when they’re just guaranteeing themselves more and more loss in the future?

Soooo, if it’s not worth putting money into a savings account or Treasurys, where will investible income go? Probably to the stock market, which is always ready to swallow up cash that’s looking for work to do. This creates stock bubbles that make stock owners feel wealthy as long as their stock keeps rising as the bubble keep expanding. And when the bubble pops? Will we bail out everyone who invested in the stock market and got hurt? Would that be ethical, or even possible? If we could afford to do that, then why can’t we afford to do away with the markets altogether, simply pay everyone a Universal Basic Income, and not require anyone to go to work any longer?

Of course that’s not possible, or even realistic. But neither is keeping an economy running on zero interest. Mom and Pop will want to chase the rising market, and everyone up the financial food chain above them (their investor, his or her broker, the research team who ferrets out the investing data, and so on) will get their cut of the fees. Risky investments and exotic financial schemes that promise higher returns will proliferate. Aggressive Wall Street speculators will be rewarded and the rich will get richer. As mortgage rates drop on lower interest rates, home prices soar. That’s great for sellers and flippers (for example, Zillow and Redfin both plan to aggressively re-start the flipping sides of their businesses as the virus lockdowns ease), but it’s not so good for low income or first time buyers. Nor is it good for the banks and mortgage companies that have to lend more and more money to less and less credit worthy borrowers to keep the cash rolling in. Eventually, a housing bubble forms. So do stock and exotic credit scheme bubbles. Finally, the Federal Reserve is placed in a quandary: should they let the bubbles pop, the banks fail, and corporations, investors and working people (especially retirees) get badly clobbered? Or should they prop up the markets with money created out of the nothingness?  That money may be “funny’, but it isn’t free. It must get paid back through taxation or inflation, but most people don’t make the connection between a rising debt and rising taxes or falling value of the dollar. Therefore it makes political sense to fleece the people slowly rather than hurting them in ways they see. The effect is that more and more people get pushed into debt in a vicious cycle of driving up the debt to support the grievance industry, then going into poverty to pay off the debt. Is the irony lost on the grievance industry? Or, is it possible that poverty is of concern only if the impoverished agree to become industry workers and create grievance? Will YOUR debt manage to those who are complaining today that you’re not giving them “their fair share”?

If this is all remotely plausible, is there an actual industry to which grievance might be compared?

Grievance and the Art Industry

Yes, I believe there is an industry to which grievance can be compared, to see if my argument holds water: the art industry. They’re actually a lot alike. Like the grievance industry, the art industry is diffuse in terms of objectives, participation and leadership. However, both can be considered cohesive economic entities. Art is considered a perfectly legitimate product whether it produces something tangible, like a statue or musical score, or only something intangible, like the emotions generated as a result of a shocking display. (Does anybody remember Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ”, a photograph of a crucifix immersed in a tank of the artist’s urine? It won both a visual arts award from the National Endowment of the Arts and waves of angry protest from Christians in the U.S. and abroad.)  Similarly, in the grievance world, both tangible and intangible items are considered legitimate ‘products’. Examples might include a written speech, a newly discovered sense of anger, or a riot orchestrated to express frustration at a policy. Graffiti created by one person without permission on property owned by another, as a way of expressing the idea that one community does not respect the boundaries laid out by the other, is a good example of a grievance product that is both tangible (the graffiti) and intangible (the message sent). Grievance and art, in fact, are frequently inextricably intertwined.

The economic outputs and impacts of both the art and grievance industries are significant, but difficult to ‘value’ and quantify, What, after all, is “Piss Christ” worth? The ink and paper photo is intrinsically valueless, but the reaction generated was priceless – at least to the artist. Where these industries differ is primarily that the impacts of the art industry can be generally added to the economy, whereas the impacts of the grievance industry must be mainly subtracted from the economy. Most art adds to the GDP, whereas grievance expands the national debt, promotes reduction in interest rates, destroys the value of retirement savings, and increases the divide between rich and poor. Because the grievance industry creates more poverty than wealth for those outside the financial class, it internally generates its own ever growing income, customer base, and need for itself in a permanent vicious cycle. It could be argued that peer-to-peer direct marketing comprises its core business model and can explain much of its staying power. Analyzing grievance through the lens of economics gives us the potential to explain why the grievance movement persists in spite of failing to ever secure its objectives. Whether we want to join it or fight it, one thing is clear: we’re likely to be more successful if we understand it. Putting it under the lens of economics for examination may be a very productive way to do that.