Funny, Funny Men

Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver are very funny men. Their humor also has a distinct liberal bias. It’s possible that they don’t think they are biased, because they sometimes criticize Democrats as well as (though not nearly as often as) Republicans. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t biased.

By “liberal bias,” I don’t mean they always support Obama. Most of their humor is directed to two targets: first, government officials who lie, waste money, and/or support policies that kill innocent people; and second, people who don’t trust government.

These views are seemingly irreconcilable. But they make sense in the context of the liberal world view, which is that democratic government is good, but people are sometimes bad, so we need government to curb people’s bad impulses. Their solution to every problem is to put the right people in charge of government, and to them, the above two videos merely indicate that the wrong people were in charge.

On the other hand, when someone such as Hobby Lobby questions government mandates (above), or that only the government can decide what is healthy or not (below), they make fun of them for doubting that government has everyone’s best interests at heart. Because liberals doubt that people are necessarily good, they don’t like private enterprise and, especially, corporations, which they view as opportunities for bad people to take advantage of everyone else.

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Conservatives, or at least libertarians, have a very different view. They think that, in general, it is more important to get the incentives right than to put the right people in charge. Moreover, it is easier to get the incentives right in the private sector, because in a system of voluntary exchange, it is hard for anyone to get rich without making other people better off. There are exceptions, such as the case of monopolies, but most monopolies are enforced by government power.

In contrast with the private sector, government incentives all too frequently work in the opposite of the public interest. Using the power of government, people can get rich without making anyone else better off. While that doesn’t mean that all government is necessarily bad, it does make it a lot harder to design government institutions that have good incentives.

When Congress or another legislative body creates a new bureaucracy and gives it a mission that nearly everyone believes is in the public interest, they rarely attempt to insure that the bureaucracy’s incentives are in line with its stated mission. As a result, the bureaucracy soon experiences mission creep, not because its officials are corrupt but because the ones who truly believe in the mission that happens to increase the bureaucracy’s budget and power are the ones most likely to be promoted.

Meanwhile, special interest groups who benefit from the agency’s incentive-inspired mission spring up to make sure the incentives don’t change. This makes it a lot harder to fix an out-of-control government agency than an out-of-control corporation, especially one in a competitive environment.

When liberals attack corporations, as above, it is usually corporations that benefit from government power or protection against the market–power that the liberals themselves created by making government bigger. Libertarians have no problems with corporations that aren’t getting government subsidies or government protection from competition, and they are satisfied to express their dislike for any particular corporation they don’t like by simply not buying from them.

Stewart and his cohorts don’t seem to be aware of this distinction between those who trust government and those who do not. They act puzzled when encountering libertarians like Ron or Rand Paul who are as critical as liberals of the abuse of government power but who are equally suspicious of government that does not, first glance appear to be abusive. I hope they get an opportunity learn more about this in the next few years.