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Riddle: Granting Me a Hechsher Might Make Me Treif. What Am I?

Of Fishy Milk and Winey Whiskey

R. Aryeh Klapper writes:

PRODUCTS THAT ARE KOSHER ONLY WITHOUT A HEKSHER

Many years ago Garelick Farms decided to market its milk all-natural, which meant that it needed a natural source of Vitamin D – and it chose shark oil. This had at least two consequences: Hood Dairy began running an ad with the tagline “There’s something fishy about Garelick Farms milk”, and the KVH (this was long before I became involved) pulled its hashgachah.

Garelick Farms sued Hood, arguing that the fish was imperceptible, and won – the (non-Jewish) judge tasted the milk and agreed there was no fish taste. I therefore ruled that the milk was kosher because the KVH had pulled its hashgachah.

The judge’s taste test demonstrated that the shark oil was nullified (certainly the percentage was below 1/60 anyway), so the only remaining issue was deliberate nullification (bittul lekhatchilah), which makes a product prohibited to the person or person for whose benefit the nullification occurred.

R. Akiva Eiger (YD 99:5) states that a nullification done with no specific end-user in mind, but rather for “whomever will wish to buy”, is considered to be done for the benefit of all eventual purchasers. One understanding of this position is that anything consciously produced with observant Jews in mind has that issue, even if the observant Jews are a trivial percentage of the intended audience. However, by giving up its kosher certification, Garelick Farms demonstrated that it did not have any concern for observant Jews, and therefore the milk was kosher because it had lost its hekhsher.

Paradoxically, had the KVH accepted this argument and sought to restore the hekhsher, the milk would have become treif. My contrarian ambition was to develop a list of products that were kosher only when unhekhshered, as many industrial koshering procedures ultimately depend on some form of nullification. (Note however that this broad interpretation of the prohibition is not obvious either in R. Akiva Eiger or in his cited source, Responsa Rivash 498, and is not followed consistently in practice today; see for example Igrot Moshe YD 1:62-63.)

I thought this was a compelling but creative psak, and to make sure I really believed it, I went out and bought a quart of milk and drank a glass before paskening that anyone else could do so. But Dov Weinstein shows me that in the current issue of Tradition my teacher Rabbi J. David Bleich makes the same argument. Here is his quote.1

“Paradoxically, according to R. Akiva Eger, a product that otherwise would be permitted may become forbidden by virtue of the fact that it is certified as kosher. Products produced for the mass market are not produced for the benefit of Jews. Accordingly, if some small quantity of a non-kosher ingredient is present, but nullified, the product is permissible. The same product, if produced for a Jew, according to the opinion of R. Akiva Eger, even for an unspecified, anonymous Jew, is prohibited.

Kosher certification is sought by a producer precisely because he wishes to market his product to the Jewish consumer. Targeting the Jewish consumer as a potential customer creates a situation in which nullification is carried out expressly for the benefit of a Jew and hence, according to R. Akiva Eger, a Jew may not benefit from such nullification. Accordingly, stem-cell burgers might be produced that are indeed kosher but they would become prohibited if labeled as such!”

Barukh shekivanti ledaat mori!

This same position of R. Bleich and R. Klapper is also expressed by someone rather further to the right on the Orthodox spectrum: Rav Moshe Shternbuch, who concludes with the

“great lesson, that sometimes a הכשר that is not מהודר and relies on ביטולים makes things worse, since without a הכשר it is permitted since it was not mixed together for the sake of Jews, … but when there is a הכשר, since then they are being מבטל for the benefit of Jews, it is forbidden, and in such circumstances with a הכשר it is worse than without a הכשר.

אמנם נראה שאין להסכים שרבנים יעניקו הכשר על סמך ביטול, דכשהגוי מיצר יום אחד במיוחד עם הכשר, אז הלוא מבטל בשביל יהודים דוקא וזה אסור, … וכן מבואר בשו”ת הרדב”ז (שם) דהא כתב וז”ל, והדבר ידוע הוא שאסור דהוה בשעה שלוקחו מן העכו”ם כאלו מבטלו לכתחלה, ואם כן יש לפרש דהיינו כשידוע כשעושה כדי למכור לישראל דאז הוי כמבטלו לכתחלה.

ולפי זה נראה דאם קונה מהשוק וכבר נתבטל אין בזה איסור אף בקנה, אבל כשקונה בהכשר, וסומכין על ביטול ברוב, כיון שמערב בשביל יהודים גרע ואסור, הרי לדברינו לימוד גדול, דפעמים שהכשר כשהוא לא מהודר וסומכין על ביטולים מגרע, שבלי הכשר מותר כיון שלא עירב עבור יהודים, ובקנייה לא נקרא מבטל איסור, אבל כשיש הכשר שאז מבטל לצורך יהודים אסור, וכה”ג בהכשר גרע מאשר בלי הכשר.

ושפיר נראה ליזהר כשאנו מעניקים הכשר למאכל שנעשה בהשגחתינו, ומעורב שם איסור, אין סומכין על ביטול, כיון שאז נתבטל עבור היהודים וההכשר מגרע, ולא מועיל הביטול, ואסור גם בדיעבד.2

R. Feivel Cohen, too, maintains that the granting of a הכשר to a food whose production includes the admixture of forbidden ingredients renders the food forbidden:

והנה לפי זה היה נראה להתיר נתינת הכשר לתוצרת נכרים שנותנים במאכל איזשהו איסור כל שיש בו ס’ כנגדו ואפילו כשרוב הקונים ישראל … וגם הא דקונים אותו מהנכרי אין בזה איסור מכיון שכבר נתבטל וכנ”ל ונמצא לכאורה שאין בזה צד איסור להישראל הקונה

אמנם נראה דאינו כן דכל זה כשביטלו הנכרי מעצמו אבל המפקח הנותן הכשר הרי מצווה על ככה לעשות באופן שהאיסור יתבטל וכל שציווהו הישראל הו”ל כאילו עשהו הישראל בעצמו וכה”ג אסור כנ”ל דהו”ל כישראל המבטל איסור לכתחלה, כנלע”ד:3

I am not sure, however, how persuasive these arguments are in the general case of הכשרים. While it is certainly reasonable that if a certifying agency instructs the producer to utilize a certain process that includes the admixture of forbidden ingredients, this admixture would then be considered to have been done on behalf of Jews, this seems much less clear with regard to a process that has been designed by the producer, where the certifying agency is merely being asked for its imprimatur. Perhaps these authorities reason that since if the certifying agency were to deny certification to the current process, the producer would cooperate with the certifier to find a mutually satisfactory alternative, it follows that whatever process is acceptable to the certifier is considered to be for the benefit of Jews. But even if we accept this logic, it would still seem to apply only to situations where the producer is able and willing to modify its process at the certifier’s behest. In cases where this is not an option, where if the certifier were to deny certification, the producer would simply operate without certification (or find a more lenient certifier), it seems difficult to argue that the mere decision to seek certification renders the preexisting process as being for the benefit of Jews.

Furthermore, Rav Moshe Feinstein, in the course of his famous dispute with Rav Pinchas Teitz over the permissibility of blended whiskeys that contained sherry wine and glycerin,4 adopts a stance that arguably implies a more lenient approach to our question as well. Rav Moshe declares that it is obvious that since most of the whiskey is sold to non-Jews, the whiskey is considered to have been produced for non-Jews and therefore permitted to Jews:

ומדין אין מבטלין איסור לכתחלה שאסור במזיד אם הפעקטערי של היין שרף הוא של ישראל ואסור אף למי שנתבטל בשבילו כדאיתא בסימן צ”ט סעיף ה’ וכיון שעשה למכור הוא כמו שנעשה בשבילם כדכתב בחדושי רע”א בשם הריב”ש. הא פשוט שכיון שרוב היין שרף נמכר לעכו”ם נחשב במה שנעשה למכור כנעשה בשביל הרוב כמו בהובא מחוץ לתחום שנחשב שהובאו להעכו”ם כשהרוב הוא עכו”ם …5.

Responding to R. Teitz’s objection that insofar as the Jewish customer base is significant, and therefore taken into account by the producer in determining the production quantity, the whiskey is considered to have been produced at least in part for Jews, R. Moshe argued that the fact of the increased production due to the Jewish customer base does not matter for a variety of reasons, the first of which we cite here:

ומש”כ כתר”ה שכין שהרבה ישראל קונים אף שהם המעוט מרבים בשבילם ולכן דומה זה להא דמרבים להביא מחוץ לתחום בשביל ישראל המועטים שאסור כדאיתא בעירובין דף מ’. הנה לא חששתי לזה מכמה טעמים שיש בבטול הזה להתיר.

חדא דמסתבר דכיון דהוא בשביל קנס לא שייך אלא בעשה איסור בבטולו דהוא כשערב לאוכלו הוא עצמו או ישראל אחר אבל באם עירב להאכיל לעכו”ם שלא עשה איסור דהא כיון שרשאי למכור לו האיסור גופיה ליכא שום איסור בהתערובות לא שייך לקונסו. ולכן אף אם נימא שכיון שיש גם מעוט ישראלים הקונים כגון חלק עשירי נמצא שאחד מעשרה עשו עבור ישראל שנעשה בזה איסור שיש לקונסו על כל פנים הא יש תשעה שלא עשה בהו איסור שאין לקנוס עלייהו ומותרין וכל דפריש מרובא פריש. ואין לומר דכיון שבמידי דרבנן יש ברירה יש לנו לומר הוברר הדבר שאלו שקנאו ישראלים הם דאיסורא, הא רוב ראשונים סברי דמה שיש ברירה בדרבנן הוא מצד ספק דרבנן לקולא ואם כן הכא דהוא לחומרא אין לומר ברירה אף שהוא מידי דרבנן. ולא דמי להביא מחוץ לתחום שאינו מצד קנס על עשית איסורים שאין שייך זה על מה שמוכרים העכו”ם דהעכו”ם הא לא עשה איסורים אלא הוא איסור שאסרו על מלאכת יום טוב כשנעשו בשביל ישראל וכיון שמרבים בשביל המעוט ישראלים הוי כנעשו הכל גם בשביל ישראל שיש לאסור. …6

According to R. Moshe, a product that is produced via a process involving ביטול does not become prohibited to Jews insofar as Jews are only a minority of the total customer base, since only a pro rata portion of the production is actually prohibited, and any particular sample of the product is permitted under the rule of כל דפריש מרובא פריש. While R. Moshe was not discussing giving a הכשר to such a product – on the contrary, his entire goal was to establish that contra R. Teitz, blended whiskeys did not (מעיקר הדין) require a הכשר – his argument should apply equally to a product with a הכשר, as long as the basic premise that only a minority portion of the production is intended for Jews remains true. [The act of awarding the הכשר might be problematic, but this would not engender a prohibition upon the product after the fact, due to the principle of כל דפריש, as above.]

I discuss this topic, among others related to purchasing food produced by non-Jews, in a recent haburah, available at the Internet Archive.

  1. Tradition 46:4, p. 62 [↩]
  2. שו”ת תשובות והנהגות חלק א’ סימן ת”מ [↩]
  3. בדי השלחן סימן צ”ט סעיף ה’ ביאורים סוף ד”ה שנתבטל בשבילו [עמוד פב] [↩]
  4. See. R. J. David Bleich, The Whiskey Brouhaha, in Tradition 34:2 pp. 58-77 and Contemporary Halakhic Problems, Vol. V, Chapter VIII. [↩]
  5. שו”ת אגרות משה יו”ד חלק א’ סימן ס”ב ד”ה ומדין אין מבטלין [↩]
  6. שם סימן ס”ג ד”ה ומש”כ כתר”ה.‏‏ Cf. Tradition ibid. pp. 71-72. [↩]

Good News: The Robots Are Coming for White Collar Workers, Too!

Then They Came for the Lawyers

Technology has already driven blue-collar workers into the underclass. Professionals may be next.

BY  | 

Strange though it may sound, there was a time when manufacturing work resembled professional work today. In the 18th century, on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, life wasn’t bad for skilled tradespeople, who enjoyed a remarkable level of freedom and flexibility in performing their work. They represented a relatively well-off, aspirational class.

Then came the machines. The mechanization of manufacturing transformed industrial work. Because the new machines cost lots of money, bosses kept a close eye on workers to make sure they were doing their jobs and taking good care of the equipment. Over time, this monitoring allowed industrialists to rejigger production in efficiency-enhancing ways. Where manufacturing work was once something of an art that relied on knowledge built up through apprenticeship and experience, it became a highly scripted slog, broken down into repetitive tasks. Anyone could do it, and so the special status and relatively high wages once enjoyed by manufacturing workers disappeared. Laborers became mere extensions of the machines, handling tasks the machines could not — until, eventually, they could.

Across advanced economies, the professional class — white-collar workers in business management, technology, law, finance, and medicine — has largely escaped the ill effects of the recent changes, including rapid globalization and automation. Those changes have disproportionately hurt workers engaged in routine sorts of tasks — running machines on factory floors or carrying out back-office jobs — and those without a college (or especially a graduate) degree. Conventional wisdom long held that this immunity was likely to continue. A paper published by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne in 2013, which famously estimated that 47 percent of job categories would be vulnerable to automation in coming decades, ranked positions such as manager, engineer, and lawyer among those at lowest risk of displacement.

But the forecast for highly skilled workers is starting to look less sunny. The professional world is about to be transformed by artificial intelligence. As that process unfolds, it could reshape white-collar work much as industrialization transformed manufacturing.

Anyone who has ever interacted with companies such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook is already familiar with AI, whether they know it or not. Every time we like a friend’s photograph, send an email, or search for a good nearby restaurant, we provide massive amounts of data to those firms. The tech giants use that data to train machine-learning programs to provide us a more customized experience. That process, in turn, allows the firms to sell us more stuff or to sell more advertisements to others who want to sell us more stuff.

But the same techniques that generate the ads that follow us around the web are increasingly finding their way into the workplace, as Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb write in their new book, Prediction Machines. Many firms already rely on AI to help them assess business risks (to tell banks which borrowers are most likely to default, for instance) or anticipate consumer demand. And new applications are appearing all the time.

Employers already amass piles of human resources data on their workers: the roles they have held in the company, for instance, and the way both they and colleagues around them performed in each. Machines that are fed that information on a large scale can divine what sorts of worker characteristics are most associated with high team performance — and, therefore, which job applicants are most likely to thrive within the company. By chewing on reams of detailed career histories, machine-learning programs can predict whether a worker on a particular career arc should be promoted or directed toward the exit — or whether a valued employee is about to quit. They can be given sales data and asked to predict which accounts can be made to generate more business and which are dead ends.

Yet this is only a start. According to Agrawal, Gans, and Goldfarb, machine prediction will get steadily better and vastly cheaper. Those advances will give companies incentives to more aggressively find ways to deploy AI — and more concertedly collect information on their employees to feed into those systems. The result will likely be much closer monitoring of workers of all sorts.

Continue reading…

From Foreign Policy, here.

Ron Paul on the Looming American Entitlements Crisis

Spending Our Way to a Fiscal Crisis

By 

Ron Paul Institute

July 25, 2018

Another ominous sign is that this year both Social Security and Medicare will have to draw down on their reserve funds to be able to pay benefits. The Social Security and Medicare trust funds will both soon be bankrupt, putting additional strains on the federal budget and American taxpayers.

The excessive debt caused by excessive spending will inevitably cause a major economic crisis. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, there is little to no desire in Washington to cut spending. Instead, both parties are committed to increasing spending on warfare and welfare while ignoring the looming entitlements crisis.

Examples of fiscal irresponsibility on Capitol Hill are easy to find. For instance, even though the Untied Stares is currently spending more on its military than the combined budgets of the next seven highest spending countries, Congress recently increased military spending by 82 billion dollars. This brings the total the US spends on a futile effort to police and democratize the world to 716 billion dollars. The US House has also recently passed a farm bill that increases spending by more than 3 billion dollars over the next five years. This bill does not take a step toward ending subsidies to wealthy farmers and even continues providing farm subsidies to non-famers! Pressure on Congress to increase spending on farm subsidies is likely to increase as famers becomes collateral damage in President Trump’s trade war.

Many progressives are attacking the House farm bill because it makes some reforms to the “SNAP” (food stamp) program, even though the House version of bill increases the budget for food stamps by at least 1.7 billion dollars over the next five years!

When the economic crisis hits, there will be no choice but to cut spending and raise taxes. Of course, Congress is unlikely to raise taxes or cut benefits. Instead, it will rely on the Federal Reserve to do the dirty work via the inflation tax. The inflation tax is the worst type of tax because it is both hidden and regressive.

One of the worst features, if not the worst, of the tax reform plan is increasing the inflation tax by authorizing the use of “chained CPI.” Chained CPI hides inflation’s effects by claiming that rising prices do not harm Americans as long as they can still afford low-cost substitute goods to replace products they can no longer afford due to the Federal Reserve’s devaluation of the currency — as if people forced to buy hamburger instead of steak are not negatively impacted by inflation.

Increasing federal debt will also put pressure on the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low to prevent federal interest payments on the debt from skyrocketing.  Eventually, the Fed’s monetization of the debt will lead to hyperinflation and a rejection of the dollar’s world reserve currency status. The question is when, not whether, the welfare-warfare state and the fiat currency system will end. Hopefully, those who know the truth will succeed in growing the liberty movement so we can convince Congress to gradually unwind the welfare-warfare state, restore a true free market in money, and stop trying to run the world, run the economy, and run our lives.

From Lewrockwell.com, here.

Non-Interventionism Is Best for Marriage, Too

“The Surrendered Wife”?

Jun 30, 2001  |  by 

I cringed at the title, but the book, “The Surrendered Wife,” offers a surprising amount of wisdom

I don’t know who her PR agents were. I don’t know what her marketing strategy was. I just know that there couldn’t be a worse title for a truly valuable book than “The Surrendered Wife” by Laura Doyle. Even as I write it I cringe. But it got my attention. And maybe that was the goal…

Despite my reservations, I read the book in an effort to demonstrate how broadminded I am. “The Surrendered Wife” is a book about letting go. It is not a book about submissiveness. It is not anti-feminism. It is a book that demonstrates the destructiveness of trying to control another human being, particularly your spouse. So I read it. Cover to cover.

I saw myself, and many close friends (you know who you are) in Ms. Doyle’s stories. And while she takes her philosophy to an extreme of passivity that I find unpalatable – i.e. “don’t express your opinion, just say to your husband ‘whatever you think'” – there is a lot of wisdom in her insights. Perhaps my husband would enjoy if just once in a while I would keep my big mouth shut and turn to him adoringly and say, “Whatever you think.”

Maybe. Maybe not. But I know he would appreciate it if I didn’t always tell him he took the wrong turn and the slowest route. He might appreciate it if I didn’t tell him how to talk to the waiter, what to order, and the exact amount of the appropriate tip.

Our husbands want to know they have our respect, trust, and, as Laura Doyle suggests, every time we control, direct, or even worse, criticize them, they know they don’t.

And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As with children. If we don’t expect our husbands to succeed, they probably won’t (unless he’s got a very contrary personality and responds well to reverse psychology!)

The nitpicking, the correcting, the “I know a better way” attitude is destructive on many levels – to the husband personally and to the marriage. I know that I don’t enjoy spending time with people who are always telling me I’m wrong – either directly or by implication.

And this situation sure doesn’t augur well for one’s intimate life. It doesn’t encourage closeness and desire.

FOR HIS OWN GOOD

Of course, when we correct our husbands, we mean it for their good. We’re only doing it to help them. But most husbands don’t experience it like that. To them, it’s an attack. To them, it’s emasculating. To them, it’s depressing and destructive.

There’s nothing liberated or egalitarian about being critical. Our husbands are not our project, our work in progress, a piece of clay for us to mold. And our husbands are not children. (It always annoys me when women refer, half-jokingly, to their husbands as one of their biggest children. Do they think their husbands find that flattering or amusing?) It won’t create a new/modern marriage if we whip our husbands into shape. But it is a quick road to divorce.

“But I do know a faster way to drive there,” wives complain. Good. Keep it to yourself. (I would say, “Unless asked”; Ms. Doyle would say, “Even then.”) You’ll get there five minutes later with a stronger marriage.

“But he’s handling the situation all wrong.” Give him a chance to figure it out for himself and grow from it. Don’t rob him of his opportunities to stretch and change.

There is an important caveat in the book that none of this advice applies to an abusive situation. Similarly, if there is, God forbid, a serious crime at stake. If your husband is about to commit armed robbery, don’t say, “Whatever you think!”

We have to lift our husbands through caring and respect. As Rabbi Eisenblatt writes in Fulfillment in Marriage: “…to the extent that the marriage partners appreciate and respect each other they will create a nourishing atmosphere in which each can grow and develop into a still better partner.”

Worth taping to the fridge.

POSITIVE EXPRESSIONS

Positive expressions of pleasure after tasks well done accomplish much more than harsh words. And don’t qualify those compliments. Drop the “but” as in: “That was nice of you to make dinner but why didn’t you clean up the kitchen?” “I appreciate that you went grocery shopping but why did you buy ten bags of potato chips?” Practice saying two simple words: “Thank you.”

A woman’s belief in her husband’s abilities and potential will inspire him to greater heights. Nagging will drag him down.

It’s not about being submissive. And I don’t know if it’s about surrendering either. It is about letting go. We don’t have to run the world. (The Almighty’s on that job 24/7.) We don’t have to control our husbands. We don’t have to dominate our children.

And the most surprising thing of all is not only do things not fall apart without us at the helm, sometimes they actually get better.

Postscript: Whenever I address this topic to women, they invariably say, “What about the men? Don’t they need to hear this?” Of course, they do. There are many men who would benefit from the ideas in this book. Hopefully, their needs will be addressed. But asking, “What about the men?” can also be a way of avoiding personal responsibility. Don’t worry about the men for a minute. Look inward instead of outward. Do you see potential for growth and change? You go girl.

From Aish Hatorah, here.

Social Darwinism Is a Straw Man (and Has Nothing to Do With Darwin, Either)

Social Darwinism and the Free Market

By 

Mises.org

July 24, 2018

The Free Market 30, no. 5 (May 2012)

In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 3, 2012, President Obama called a budget proposal of his Republican opponents in Congress “thinly veiled Social Darwinism.”

What did the president mean by this comment? The budget proposal in question, he claimed, would require drastic cuts in government programs designed to aid the poor. “And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last—education and training, research and development, our infrastructure—it is a prescription for decline.” Further, his opponents reject proposals to increase taxes on the rich.

How can anyone favor refusing government aid to the poor and oppose requiring the rich to pay more in taxes? Obama answered that those who think in this way must believe that the welfare of the rich is of primary significance. The poor, and everyone else, must take whatever “trickles down” to them from the rich.

It is this view that Obama had in mind when he spoke of Social Darwinism, but the doctrine is usually characterized in a different way. Darwin, it is alleged, has taught us that evolution is a struggle in which the strong overcome the weak. To aid the poor would in this view act counter to progress. It would be an attempt to promote the survival of the unfit, rather than the fit. Instead, we should stand out of the way and allow the poor and improvident to suffer the natural consequences of their feckless ways.

Responses to Obama’s speech from defenders of the free market have not been slow in coming. The libertarian philosopher and historian George Smith, among others, has noted that Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, usually classed as the main Social Darwinist defenders of the market, believed nothing like the doctrine just described. Spencer approved of private charity and includes in his The Principles of Ethics a discussion of the duties of “positive beneficence.” “Spencer opposed coercive, state-enforced charity, but he favored charity that is voluntarily bestowed. . . . In one essay he observed that it was becoming more common for the rich to contribute money and time to the poor, and he praised this trend as ‘the latest and most hopeful fact in human history.’ Moreover, the final chapters in Spencer’s Ethics are devoted to the subject of ‘positive beneficence,’ the highest form of society in which people voluntarily help those in need.”

Further, as the political philosopher Larry Arnhart has pointed out, Darwin did not teach that human evolution depends on ruthless struggle. To the contrary, he emphasized theimportance of social unity and cooperation. “‘Selfish and contentious people will not cohere,’ Darwin declared, and without coherence nothing can be effected. If Social Darwinism is all about selfish competition . . . then Darwin was not as Social Darwinist.”

Ludwig von Mises already called attention in  to this misunderstanding of Darwin. “The notion of the struggle for existence as Darwin borrowed it from Malthus is to be understood in a metaphorical sense. . . . It need not always be a war of extermination such as the relation between man and morbific microbes. Reason has demonstrated that, for man, the most adequate means of improving his condition is social cooperation and division of labor.” (Human Action, Mises Institute 1998, p. 175)

Indeed, it is difficult to find writers who called themselves “Social Darwinists.” But some of Obama’s critics have gone too far. Jonah Goldberg, e.g., treats Social Darwinism as largely a myth for which Richard Hofstadter, the author of Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), bears primary responsibility. “Simply put, there was no intellectual movement—at least not in America or Britain—called Social Darwinism, and the evil views attributed to so-called Social Darwinists were not held by its alleged founders. . . . [Richard] Hofstadter, the historian who essentially invented the idea that American capitalism in the nineteenth century was inspired by Charles Darwin, never offered much by way of actual proof that his idea was accurate.” (Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés, Sentinel, 2012, pp. 102, 110)

Goldberg’s thesis is not correct. There really were a number of people who defended capitalism with quasi- Darwinist arguments. Murray Rothbard discusses one example of such a defense, a speech delivered in 1934 by Colgate University President George B. Cutten. In Rothbard’s summary, “The theory is originally based on an unwarranted extension of Darwinism to the history of man. Supposedly, man develops continually struggling against nature—i.e., struggling to adapt himself to natural conditions. As generations develop, the ‘fit’ or ‘the fittest’ survive, and the ‘unfit’ die. The progeny of the ‘fit’ are also ‘fit,’ while the ‘unfit’ get no chance to reproduce. In this way the human race supposedly improves. As Dr. Cutten puts it, ‘The strong won, the weak lost; the strong left progeny, the weak died early and childless. It worked out pretty well too.’”

Cutten averred that “men are violating Nature’s wishes and injunctions, that the unfit are being protected by ‘modern medicine and modern philanthropy’ and are debilitating the race by being permitted to live and have children. . . . That is the essence of Dr. Cutten’s thesis and the broad outlines of social Darwinism or rugged individualism. It seems to me that the mere statement of it would expose it as obvious bilge.” (, ed., Roberta Modugno, Mises Institute 2009, pp. 50–52)

As Rothbard trenchantly remarks, the Social Darwinist argument is a poor one. Even if it accurately described biological evolution, very much contrary to fact, why would it give us a guide to policy? Why should we aim to promote the goal of evolution, if we prefer not to do so? The Social Darwinist theory masks a recommendation about social ethics with a pseudo-scientific narrative. Rothbard ably sums up the manifest failings of this position. “It is therefore evident that there is no moral or ethical value attaching to a survivor. Sheer luck plays the biggest part in history in determining who has survived. The Rugged Individualist suffers from the delusion that survival—sheer survival—is ipso facto evidence of high moral qualities.” (Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 54)

Instead of falsely denying that Social Darwinism ever existed, supporters of the market do far better to adopt a different defense; and here once more Mises guides us to the proper path. The free market is not, as the Social Darwinists imagine, a struggle between rich and poor, strong and weak. It is the principal means by which human beings cooperate in order to live. If each of us had to produce all his food and shelter by himself, almost no one could survive. The existence of large-scale society depends absolutely on social cooperation through the division of labor. “The fundamental social phenomenon is the division of labor and its counterpart human cooperation. Experience teaches man that cooperative action is more efficient and productive than isolated actions of self-sufficient individuals. The natural conditions determining man’s life and effort are such that the division of labor increases output per unit of labor expended.” (Human Action, p. 157)

Further, as Mises also pointed out, social cooperation by no means benefits only the rich and more productive people in society. Precisely the reverse is the case. Mises, explaining Ricardo’s law of comparative cost as a more general law of association, argued that it is to the advantage of those of superior ability to trade with those less skilled. “Ricardo expounded the law of association in order to demonstrate what the consequences of the division of labor are when an individual or a group, more efficient in every regard, cooperates with an individual or group less efficient in every regard. . . . Ricardo was fully aware of the fact that his law of comparative cost, which he expounded mainly in order to deal with a special problem of international trade, is a particular instance of the more universal law of association. . . . Collaboration of the more talented, more able and more industrious with the less talented, less able, and less industrious results in benefits for both. The gains derived from the division of labor are always mutual.” (Human Action, pp. 158–59)

Of course, such trade helps the less able, since their trading partners are by hypothesis more efficient than they are; but contrary to what one might at first think, the more able gain as well, if they specialize in the area of their greatest advantage. The free market is not a struggle but a cooperative endeavor of supreme importance.

But have we not left one question unanswered? If the market is not the struggle between rich and poor depicted by Social Darwinist myth, how can defenders of the free market oppose government programs that aid the poor through the provision of education and medical care? How can the defenders oppose heavy taxes for the rich? If Obama’s invocation of Social Darwinism does not explain such opposition, what does?

The answer to that is sufficiently obvious, though it escaped the mind of our president. These programs take from some to give to others: they strike against the cooperative aim of a free society. The poor fare far better in the free market than they do from government largesse. Obama would of course disagree, and to show in detail the evidence for our claim is an extended task that will not be attempted here. (For those interested in the issue, Henry Hazlitt’s Man Versus the Welfare State is an excellent place to begin.) But one may note with astonishment that so obvious a reason for opposing his programs failed to occur to the president. Instead, he resorted to a catchphrase, Social Darwinism, virtually empty of substance.

From Lewrockwell.com, here.