Serving others and our inadequate human brains

I have a few blog topics lined up, but Rob's comment yesterday made me put those aside and address the structure of human society as a result of evolution.  Have we evolved to be socialists or have we evolved to be capitalists?  To be contentious and boastful, which I am allowed to do on my own blog, my opinion is that the more sophisticated of us are able to see what the market is and transcend our ape-like methods of dealing with each other.

I despise the word "progressive" because the thinking is so backwards.  As Bastiat said of Rousseau and his followers, "while they claim themselves as progressive, I find their ideas 20 centuries behind" -The Law, (paraphrased).  There's nothing wrong with helping others, but how do you do so without being taken advantage of and how do you gauge whether your efforts are the optimal way of helping them?

Rob wondered if we evolved to embrace socialism because those who survived were tribal and lived communally.  My argument, which is Walter Block's argument, is that we evolved to understand the importance of working together, but the sophistication of the market alludes many of us.

In a small tribe, the implicit understanding of me taking care of you when you're sick is that you will take care of me when I am sick.  If the tribe were very large you might be able to get out of your obligation of taking care of me when I get sick.  And humans, being the self serving beings that we evolved to be, would find many reasons to skirt our "scout's honor".  The Amish are probably the nearest and largest example of communes that work.  Part of their success is that they limit themselves to a small set of tasks and so these jobs are easy to parse out and keep track of.  What happens with a very large and very complex society tries to live as a commune?  Chaos or tyranny.

Money, not government, enables civilization.  Having a fungible, divisible, and durable good is beautiful.  The demand for services, the number of providers, and the scarcity of goods can now be measured.  Calculation is possible.  If I am sick then I give the doctor money as a promise to take care of him when he is sick.  Money solves the problem of simultaneous wants that plagues barter systems (and craigslist) and it solves our evolutionary need to work together -- if we can recognize it as such.

In a free society, the greatest humanitarians would be those with the most money, the largest houses, the fanciest cars.  Their wealth is a reflection of how much they've helped others, and since market exchanges are a net benefit to both parties, the wealth is only a fraction of the good they've done.  Perhaps the so-called "douchebags" of this world are trying to prove they're humanitarians by wearing $300 ray-bans or $200 jeans.  Perhaps they evolved faster than the rest of us to recognize the meaning of the market but still haven't developed any skills or talents other than being DBs.  Back on topic, I have to add the caveat "in a free society" because of how grotesquely government has skewed the market.  So much of wealth accumulated today is by political means, either as direct payments from the government or through government privileges such as limited corporate liability, IP, protectionism, competition killing regulation, or other favorable legislation.

Here's how I've carried out the belief above in my own friendships.  My socialist friend let me borrow his paint sprayer (mutual friends immediately know who I'm talking about when I say socialist and paint sprayer in the same sentence).  Getting ready to move I knew I wouldn't be able to return the favor.  I had used his property, the sprayer will not last as long as if I had not used it, parts will have to be replaced (eventually), and there was a time when he or anyone else was denied use of it because it was in my possession.  Neither was this the first time he helped me and saved me a bunch of money.  Because I am unable to return a similar service (both because I don't own any tools he'd find useful or have any talents related to manual labor), and because I knew the rental rates of paint sprayers, money was the most obvious way of fulfilling my promise to help him the next time he was in need.  Of course, he being an unselfish friend, said the money was unnecessary and he would have let me use it anyway, but he accepted the money.  Taken to the extreme, say I wanted to borrow the sprayer every other day, even the most sacrificial of us will require some compensation or put an end to the generosity.  In a large and complex society, money is the necessary measure of what we're willing to give and what we can get from others.

Did we evolve to be socialists?  Absolutely not.  Socialism employs violence or the threat of violence to achieve certain ends.  Did we evolve to be market anarchists?  No, because we lived communally and it's hard to grasp the concept of money and how it relates to our tribal communes.  So now what?  We don't have to become a "new man" as Marx requires, we simply have to learn how to use the tool of money as primates learned to use rocks and sticks.  Libertarianism is the only philosophy compatible with the world and human nature.  It takes into account our strengths as well as our faults.