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The most devastating critique of expanded government economic power—whether advanced by the woke left or the postliberal right—rests not on the familiar warning that today’s weapon will be turned against us tomorrow, but on a deeper and more fundamental truth: government is constitutionally incapable of generating sustained abundance because it is always and everywhere a third-person economic actor. James Lindsay, building on Milton Friedman and Bob McEwen, distinguishes three categories of economic decision-making. First-person transactions occur when individuals spend their own money on their own needs; second-person transactions arise when either the money or the consumption belongs to someone else; third-person transactions, the exclusive domain of government, occur when an agent spends other people’s money on still other people’s needs. This final category produces a catastrophic double detachment from both cost and quality, rendering genuine wealth creation impossible no matter how noble the intention.
In first-person economics, the actor faces unrelenting pressure to balance cost against quality, efficiency against adequacy, and innovation against economy. Because the problem is his own and the resources are his own, he has every incentive to discover superior solutions and—under private property and profit—to scale those solutions for strangers whose problems he may not personally care about. The profit motive performs the miraculous feat of aligning naked self-interest with the systematic solving of dispersed human problems. Markets thus become discovery machines that generate exactly the surpluses society demands—no more, no less—while constantly punishing waste and rewarding improvement. Abundance emerges not from altruism but from an incentive structure that makes indifference compatible with service.
Government, by contrast, enters every economic arena as a pure third-person participant. Taxpayer funds are not its own, the services or goods it procures are not for its own consumption, and the bureaucrats or politicians who allocate resources face no personal bankruptcy for failure nor personal enrichment for success. Policy directives may demand “efficiency” or “innovation,” but these remain precatory slogans without the lash of loss or the lure of gain. The result is systemic waste, misallocation, and eventual stagnation. Historical episodes of apparent state-led productivity—Soviet industrialisation, Nazi rearmament, contemporary Chinese growth—prove the rule: they rely on forced mobilisation, suppressed consumption, and often plunder, and they collapse once the coercive surplus is exhausted and the misallocations compound.¹
The Chinese case, far from refuting the argument, illustrates its prescience. Beijing’s hybrid system permits profit only after political quotas are met and party loyalty is demonstrated. The resulting economy can indeed produce impressive physical output, yet it does so at the cost of collapsing total-factor productivity, ghost cities, and a property sector larger than the 1929 American bubble. Private entrepreneurs now husband cash and flee rather than invest, precisely because the third-person political actor can expropriate gains at will. What appears as hyperproductivity is in reality a sugar rush of debt and coercion, already giving way to the predictable hangover of a middle-income trap.²
The American founders understood that liberty and prosperity require strict limits on state economic power not merely to prevent tyranny but to preserve the only known incentive structure capable of producing general abundance. Proposals from Zohran Mkwana’s “no problem too small for government” socialism to JD Vance’s calls for state-directed “right-wing ends” share the same fatal flaw: they seek to achieve through third-person coercion what only first-person discovery coordinated by profit and price can deliver.³ Until the right grasps that government cannot be made to possess the correct incentives—any more than a square can be made circular—the allure of “using the state for our side” will continue to seduce and ultimately impoverish. True prosperity demands not a more muscular manager of the economy but the humbling recognition that no such manager can ever exist.
Endnotes
- Historical state-led cases: China, the USSR, and Nazi Germany achieved output spikes through coercion and consumption suppression, not sustainable productivity; each encountered severe misallocation and stagnation once coercive inputs were exhausted.
- China’s slowdown: China’s growth was driven by market liberalization (1978–2010) and reversed when political control tightened; falling TFP, capital flight, and overbuilding confirm the limits of state-led productivity.
- Incentive failure is structural: No ideological orientation can turn a bureaucracy into a profit-and-loss–disciplined discovery process; industrial policy without market discipline becomes third-person misallocation.
Glossary
First-person transaction: A situation where individuals spend their own money on their own needs.
Second-person transaction: A transaction where either the money or the consumption belongs to someone else.
Third-person transaction: When an agent (e.g., government) spends other people’s money on other people’s needs, lacking direct incentives for efficiency or quality.
Total-factor productivity (TFP): A measure of how efficiently an economy turns labor and capital into output.
Middle-income trap: When a developing country’s growth stalls after reaching middle-income status due to declining productivity and misallocation.
References
Foundational Economics & Productivity
- Solow, Robert. “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function.” Review of Economics and Statistics (1957).
https://doi.org/10.2307/1926047 - Baumol, William. The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn’t. Yale University Press (2012).
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300179286/the-cost-disease/ - Gordon, Robert. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton University Press (2016).
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691147727/the-rise-and-fall-of-american-growth
State Capacity, Bureaucracy, and Incentives
- Tullock, Gordon. The Politics of Bureaucracy. Public Affairs Press (1965).
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/tullock-bureaucracy - Niskanen, William. Bureaucracy and Representative Government. Aldine-Atherton (1971).
https://www.cato.org/books/bureaucracy-representative-government - Hayek, F.A. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review (1945).
https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw.html
Industrial Policy & Development Economics
- Rodrik, Dani. “Industrial Policy for the Twenty-First Century.” Harvard University (2004).
https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/files/dani-rodrik/files/industrial-policy-twenty-first-century.pdf - Amsden, Alice. Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization. Oxford University Press (1989).
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/asias-next-giant-9780195076035 - Wade, Robert. Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization. Princeton University Press (2003).
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691117294/governing-the-market
China’s Growth and Slowdown
- Brandt, Loren; Van Biesebroeck, Johannes; Zhang, Yifan. “Creative Accounting or Creative Destruction? Firm-Level Productivity Growth in Chinese Manufacturing.” Journal of Development Economics (2012).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2012.02.001 - Pritchett, Lant & Summers, Lawrence. “Asiaphoria Meets Regression to the Mean.” NBER Working Paper No. 20573 (2014).
https://www.nber.org/papers/w20573
Nordic Economies & Welfare States
- Bergh, Andreas & Henrekson, Magnus. Government Size and Implications for Economic Growth. AEI Press (2011).
https://www.aei.org/research-products/book/government-size-and-implications-for-economic-growth/ - OECD Data on Nordic Economies.
https://data.oecd.org/
Market Failure, Government Failure, Incentives
- Coase, Ronald. “The Problem of Social Cost.” Journal of Law and Economics (1960).
https://www.jstor.org/stable/724810 - Kirzner, Israel. Competition and Entrepreneurship. University of Chicago Press (1973).
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo5972460.html
Technology, Innovation & Productivity Slowdown
- Bloom, Nicholas et al. “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” American Economic Review (2020).
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20180338
Christopher Hitchens, ever the unflinching provocateur, levels a stark charge against religion: it imperils morality, breeding selfishness and stupidity under the guise of piety. In his words, the evidence mounts on every side that faith not only fails as a moral arbiter but actively corrodes human potential, turning inward gazes toward dogma rather than outward toward shared humanity. This critique resonates when one pores over sacred texts or historical annals, where contradictions abound and ethical lapses reveal the frail scaffolding of divine claims. Yet such scrutiny, while indispensable, risks eclipsing a broader vista, where religion’s flaws yield to its functional virtues in the grand theater of human society.
For the vast middle stratum of humanity, those ensnared by daily exigencies and spared the luxury of philosophical rumination, religion serves as an unpolished but efficacious bulwark. It furnishes hope amid despair, direction in disarray, and a rudimentary moral compass to steer the uninitiated through existential tempests. Empirical patterns affirm this role: religious priming fosters prosocial behaviors, from amplified generosity to bolstered communal ties, while global surveys depict faith as a stabilizing force across diverse polities. Here, the institution transcends its doctrinal frailties, operating less as metaphysical truth than as sociological salve, channeling primal impulses toward cohesion rather than chaos. To dismiss it outright ignores how it equips the multitude for endurance, sparing them the abyss of unexamined voids.
This duality underscores a profound tension: religion thrives inversely to the intensity of its interrogation. Up close, it falters, inviting Hitchens’s scorn; at scale, it endures, a pragmatic hedge against nihilism’s chill. As secular currents erode its grip, one must ponder whether its communal scaffold will atrophy into irrelevance or harden into reactionary fervor. The verifiable record tilts toward adaptation, not extinction, reminding us that truth in such matters demands not polemic but proportion—a measured reckoning that honors critique without forsaking utility. In threading this needle, we glimpse religion not as eternal verity or infernal deceit, but as a human artifact, imperfect yet indispensable in its hour.
A ceaseless torrent of stories engulfs us: news reports, social media posts, advertisements. These narratives, far from impartial, bear the imprint of power, ideology, and commerce, often cloaked as unassailable truths. Georg Lukács’s theory of reification, rooted in Marxist critique, equips us to dissect how such tales solidify into perceived inevitabilities, obscuring the fluid, contested nature of social reality.
What is Reification?
Reification, as Lukács articulates in History and Class Consciousness (1923), transmutes human relations and capacities into thing-like entities, severed from their historical and social origins. Building on Marx’s commodity fetishism—where social bonds masquerade as inherent traits of objects—Lukács extends this to capitalism’s pervasive grip. Society fractures into calculable, alienated forms, fostering a “contemplative passivity” before a “second nature” of seemingly immutable laws [1]. Objectively, labor and institutions morph into mechanical processes; a worker’s effort reduces to a wage, stripped of human agency. Subjectively, individuals perceive their own capacities as alien, commodified; a news story about “economic growth” masks exploitation as natural progress. This schism spawns epistemological fractures, where bourgeois thought struggles to reconcile human intention with the apparent objectivity of social structures [2].
The Process of Reification in Media
Media reification unfolds systematically:
- Narrative Construction: A story is crafted with intent. For instance, a news outlet frames tax cuts as “common sense” to bolster corporate interests.
- Widespread Dissemination: The narrative spreads across platforms—television, X posts retweeting the claim, op-eds echoing it—amplifying its reach.
- Normalization: Dissenting voices, like economists questioning tax cuts’ benefits, are sidelined as fringe, entrenching the narrative.
- Perceived Objectivity: The story becomes fact; tax cuts are no longer debated but accepted as economic necessity.
This process dulled scrutiny of inflation’s causes in recent years. Media pinned it on pandemic supply chain issues, while corporate price-gouging lingered in the shadows until alternative voices struggled to break through [3].
Real-World Examples of Reification
1. The Kamloops 215: Unmarked Graves
In 2021, Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc announced 215 potential unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. Media framed this as evidence of genocide, cementing the narrative as truth. By 2025, no bodies were exhumed, claims shifted to “soil anomalies,” and federal probes stalled, with cultural sensitivities complicating excavations [4, 5, 6, 9]. Indigenous advocates urge deeper inquiry, but premature conclusions fueled church arsons and policy shifts, illustrating how media reification can outpace evidence [7, 13].
2. Book Removals in Alberta: Queer Pedagogy
Alberta’s 2025 order to remove “sexually explicit” books from school libraries by October 1 led Edmonton Public Schools to purge over 200 titles, including Gender Queer and The Handmaid’s Tale. Media branded this a “book ban,” solidifying a narrative of censorship that drowned out debates over age-appropriateness, parental consent, and queer pedagogy’s educational role [8, 10, 14, 15]. Provincial leaders called the list “vicious compliance,” arguing it mislabeled classics as pornographic, yet the censorship frame entrenched division [11].
3. George Floyd and Black Lives Matter
George Floyd’s 2020 murder propelled Black Lives Matter globally, with media casting it as emblematic of systemic racist policing—an undeniable factor in the tragedy. Yet the narrative simplified complexities, downplaying Floyd’s toxicology (fentanyl, hypertension) and officer training failures, framing the incident as singularly racial [12, 16, 17]. While galvanizing reform, this reification obscured socioeconomic drivers, fueling backlash and diluting broader discussions on policing [18].
Recognizing and Challenging Reified Narratives
Countering reification demands rigor:
- Question Origins: Who gains from this framing?
- Scrutinize Language: Does rhetoric naturalize bias?
- Seek Alternatives: Are dissenting voices suppressed?
- Assess Impact: How does acceptance shape policy or divide society?
- Engage in Dialogue: Share alternative perspectives in public forums to disrupt reified consensus.
Through such steps, we resist—not with cynicism, but with a relentless pursuit of totality, bridging subject-object divides for authentic understanding.
End Notes
- Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. MIT Press, 1971. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/history-and-class-consciousness
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Georg [György] Lukács.” Accessed August 31, 2025. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lukacs/
- Economic Policy Institute. “Corporate profiteering drove inflation, not supply chains alone.” June 10, 2022. https://www.epi.org/blog/corporate-profiteering-drove-inflation/
- Fraser Institute. “No evidence of ‘mass graves’ or ‘genocide’ in residential schools.” February 12, 2024. https://www.fraserinstitute.org/commentary/no-evidence-of-mass-graves-or-genocide-in-residential-schools
- Angus Reid Institute. “Two-thirds want additional evidence before accepting that soil anomalies are unmarked graves.” August 13, 2025. https://angusreid.org/indigenous-residential-schools-kamloops/
- America Needs Fatima. “4 Years, $320 Million and Zero Bodies.” March 13, 2025. https://americaneedsfatima.org/commentaries/4-years-320-million-and-zero-bodies
- Dead Wild Roses. “The Kamloops 215: When Unmarked Grave Bury the Truth.” March 2, 2025. https://deadwildroses.com/2025/03/02/the-kamloops-215-when-unmarked-grave-bury-the-truth/
- CBC News. “The Handmaid’s Tale among more than 200 books to be pulled at Edmonton public schools.” August 28, 2025. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-school-books-removal-1.7620807
- Quillette. “Four Years. Zero Graves. Now What?” February 27, 2025. https://quillette.com/2025/02/27/four-years-zero-graves-now-what/
- Dead Wild Roses. “Book Bans and Narrative Warfare: How the Edmonton Public School Board Plays the Queer Pedagogy Script.” August 30, 2025. https://deadwildroses.com/2025/08/30/book-bans-and-narrative-warfare-how-the-edmonton-public-school-board-plays-the-queer-pedagogy-script/
- Edmonton Journal. “Edmonton schools’ book purge sparks backlash.” August 29, 2025. https://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/edmonton-schools-book-purge-backlash
- The Conversation. “5 years after George Floyd’s murder: How the media narrative has changed around the killing and the protests that followed.” May 23, 2025. https://theconversation.com/5-years-after-george-floyds-murder-how-the-media-narrative-has-changed-around-the-killing-and-the-protests-that-followed-257199
- True North. “Kamloops ‘unmarked graves’ narrative faces growing scrutiny.” March 5, 2025. https://tnc.news/2025/03/05/kamloops-unmarked-graves-scrutiny/
- National Post. “Alberta’s book ban debate: What’s really at stake?” August 30, 2025. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/alberta-book-ban-debate
- CTV News. “Alberta premier questions Edmonton schools’ banned books.” August 29, 2025. https://www.ctvnews.ca/edmonton/article/vicious-compliance-alberta-premier-questions-edmonton-schools-banned-books/
- New York Post. “George Floyd case: Revisiting the toxicology report.” May 25, 2025. https://nypost.com/2025/05/25/george-floyd-toxicology-report-revisited/
- Reason Magazine. “The George Floyd narrative and its oversimplifications.” June 1, 2025. https://reason.com/2025/06/01/george-floyd-narrative-oversimplifications/
- University of Southern Maine Honors Theses. “Media Framing and Respectability Narratives in #BlackLivesMatter.” 2020. https://aquila.usm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1852&context=honors_theses
In 2025, university speech codes brand dissent from critical race theory as “harmful speech,” stifling debate and punishing inquiry. Such trends, now pervasive in academia and institutional life, underscore the urgency of revisiting Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Her dissection of ideologies that smother complexity, silence dissent, and erode pluralism offers a scalpel to confront what we can call critical social constructivism (CSC)—a dogmatic fusion of postmodern epistemology and activist theory that reduces all social dynamics to a binary of oppressors versus oppressed. Arendt’s insights, forged in the crucible of Nazism and Stalinism, expose CSC’s totalizing grip, equipping us to resist its spread with reason, pluralism, and courage.
Arendt’s analysis centers on the concept of “supersense”—a pseudo-rational framework that reduces the entire complexity of political and social life to a single, all-explaining cause, then reinterprets all facts to fit that cause. In totalitarian regimes, this meant scapegoating Jews (Nazism) or the bourgeoisie (Stalinism) as the source of all societal problems. This ideological fog collapses nuance into conformity, transforming dissent into moral deviance and treating disagreement as complicity in evil (Arendt, 1951).
CSC mirrors this logic. It frames reality as a construct of language shaped by dominant power structures—whiteness, patriarchy, capitalism—and asserts that all disparities must be attributed to systemic oppression. While this worldview offers the appeal of moral clarity in a fractured age, it betrays its promise by declaring competing explanations—like class, culture, or individual agency—not just mistaken but illegitimate. When scholars question CSC’s tenets, as documented in 2024 university speech codes labeling disagreement as “harmful speech,” they are not refuted—they are condemned. This echoes Arendt’s warning about ideological systems that no longer argue but excommunicate.
CSC’s reliance on unfalsifiable claims—where disparities alone are taken as definitive proof of oppression—results in a brittle intellectual environment. For example, the assertion that all economic disparities are due to systemic racism dismisses any possibility of alternative contributing factors, such as historical context, cultural norms, or policy complexity. This forecloses debate and inquiry, replacing openness with a rigid moral orthodoxy. Arendt cautioned against precisely this: ideologies that prioritize loyalty over truth and stifle critical thinking under the guise of moral duty.
To be sure, CSC does not reproduce the brutal apparatus of mid-20th century totalitarianism. There are no gulags or secret police. But the logic of ideological absolutism—the erasure of ambiguity, the intolerance of dissent, the moralization of disagreement—is alarmingly familiar. CSC demands conformity not through terror but through professional penalties, reputational ruin, and institutional shaming. It cultivates fear—not of imprisonment, but of exclusion.
Against this, Arendt’s defense of pluralism is both timely and essential. She champions unpredictable, diverse political judgment as the lifeblood of freedom. This stands in stark contrast to institutional practices like corporate “privilege checklists” and mandatory DEI trainings, which—according to 2024 HR policy documents—require employees to affirm contested ideological claims as truth. Such rituals reward performative compliance and punish epistemic independence.
Arendt’s prescription is not reactionary, but rigorously liberal: uphold free speech, demand empirical rigor, and embrace the “messy pluralism” that characterizes real democratic life. She reminds us that justice is not advanced through ideological purity but through open discourse and mutual respect.
This essay opens a blog series exploring essential works of political and philosophical thought that equip us to resist ideological excesses like critical social constructivism. We begin with Arendt, whose analysis of totalitarianism lays the groundwork for understanding how modern ideological movements erode reason, pluralism, and freedom. In the posts that follow, we’ll turn to thinkers like Orwell, Mill, and others who similarly illuminate the stakes of defending open discourse in an age of dogma.
Read Arendt. Challenge dogma. Defend the discourse.
Three Salient Points for Arguments Against Critical Social Constructivism
Ideological Closure Undermines Reason
CSC’s unfalsifiable claim that all disparities stem from systemic oppression dismisses factors like class, history, or agency, replacing inquiry with dogma. Arendt’s concept of supersense warns precisely against such epistemological closure.
Pluralism Counters Dogma
Arendt’s insistence on diverse, independent perspectives directly challenges CSC’s demand for conformity, as seen in 2024 university speech codes that label dissent as “harmful.” Rebuilding spaces for Socratic dialogue is a practical and philosophical antidote.
Authoritarian Tendencies Threaten Liberty
By recasting disagreement as moral deviance—as exemplified in 2024 corporate DEI mandates enforcing ideological compliance—CSC erodes liberal norms of free inquiry, mutual respect, and intellectual autonomy. Arendt’s work offers a vital framework to resist this drift.
References
Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
The case of Catherine Kronas, an elected parent member of the school council at Ancaster High Secondary School within the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) in Ontario, Canada, exemplifies a significant conflict between institutional policies promoting cultural sensitivity and the protection of individual rights to free expression. On April 9, 2025, during a school council meeting, Kronas respectfully objected to the practice of land acknowledgements—formal statements recognizing Indigenous peoples as the original stewards of the land—asserting that they constitute compelled speech and are politically controversial. She requested that her objection be recorded in the meeting minutes, causing no disruption. Nevertheless, on May 22, 2025, the HWDSB suspended her from her council role, citing allegations of causing harm and violating the board’s Code of Conduct policy. The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) responded by issuing a legal warning letter, arguing that the suspension infringes on Kronas’s freedom of expression under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This situation underscores the broader tension between fostering inclusivity through practices like land acknowledgements and safeguarding individual rights to dissent, raising critical questions about free speech and compelled speech in educational settings.
Free speech is a cornerstone of democratic societies, ensuring that individuals can express diverse viewpoints without fear of censorship or retaliation. In educational contexts, this principle is paramount, as schools are environments where students, parents, and educators should engage in open dialogue to foster critical thinking and intellectual growth. The suspension of Kronas for voicing a dissenting opinion on land acknowledgements risks stifling such discourse, creating an atmosphere where conformity is prioritized over debate. This not only undermines the educational mission but also sets a concerning precedent for how dissent is managed in democratic institutions. Protecting free speech in schools allows for the exploration of controversial issues, encouraging students and community members to develop informed perspectives through reasoned discussion. The Kronas case illustrates the importance of maintaining an environment where differing viewpoints can be expressed without penalty, ensuring that educational institutions remain spaces for intellectual freedom and democratic engagement.
Compelled speech, where individuals are required to express or endorse statements contrary to their beliefs, poses significant risks to personal autonomy and freedom of expression. In Kronas’s case, the HWDSB’s expectation that council members participate in or refrain from objecting to land acknowledgements effectively compelled her to align with a statement she viewed as political and divisive. Her suspension for merely requesting that her objection be noted demonstrates how institutional mandates can penalize dissent, potentially violating Section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees freedom of thought, belief, opinion, and expression. Such actions may create a chilling effect, where individuals self-censor to avoid repercussions, eroding the foundation of free expression. The JCCF’s legal challenge highlights the lack of procedural fairness, as Kronas was not given an opportunity to respond to the allegations against her. While land acknowledgements aim to honor Indigenous histories, their mandatory imposition in public settings must be balanced against the rights of individuals to dissent. The Kronas case serves as a critical reminder of the need to protect free speech and resist compelled speech to maintain a free and open society.
Key Citations
- School board reaffirms suspension of parent opposing land acknowledgement
- Parent suspended for objecting to land acknowledgement; legal warning sent
- Canadian school board suspends parent for opposing Indigenous land claims
- Legal warning sent to Ontario school board for suspending elected school council member
- Legal warning sent to Ontario school board for suspending elected school council member
- Compelled Expression
- Compelled Speech on Canadian Campuses
- Free Speech
- Compelled Speech
- Section 2(b) – Freedom of expression
- Indigenous Education
- Indigenous Education Policy
- What’s wrong with land acknowledgments, and how to make them better
- Land Acknowledgement
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