Analysis of Legislation

One advantage that capitalism has over competing political philosophies is that the evaluation of legislation can be performed analytically.  It is not necessary to read an entire piece of proposed legislation to decide whether it conforms to capitalist principles.  If any small portion of a proposed law violates these principles, then we can say that the same applies to the bill as a whole.  Hence it is possible to oppose a proposed piece of legislation simply by siting a portion that goes against these principles.

In contrast, alternatives to a capitalist approach require a more holistic approach.  In order to determine whether legislation violates these principles, it is generally necessary to examine the whole piece.  This is because we want to know the effects of the legislation, not just the ways that it proposes to achieve those effects.  In order to do this we will have to look at all of the effects of all the various parts of the bill in question.

Of course it is very difficult to know what the effects of a piece of legislation will actually be.  This is what makes Rawlsian analysis, for example, so difficult.  Inequalities are to be arranged so that they benefit those who are least well off.  This form of analysis is similar to capitalism in that it is based on the idea of rights.  Suppose that one part of a piece of legislation violates this principle.  Can we say that the bill in its entirety violates it as well?  First of all a body of law can violate the difference principle simply by passively allowing certain kinds of inequality to persist, so it would be impossible to know whether legislation conformed to this principle even if we were to examine the bill as a whole.

Rawlsian analysis must be performed not only on the bill as a whole, but on the entire body of laws that govern a particular polity.  If a part of a bill enabled any illegitimate, preexisting form of inequality to persist, the bill as a whole might still be legitimate if this problem were addressed in some other part of the bill.  Similarly if one part of such  a bill introduced such a form of inequality, the bill might be acceptable if this was addressed by some other part of the bill.  Thus the situation with this form of analysis is even worse than I originally stated.

Other forms of analysis have problems that are at least as severe.  Take utilitarianism for example.  Defining the greatest good for the greatest number is a problem in and of itself.  Using this principle to evaluate legislation is even worse.  Suppose there were some way of determining how one part of a piece of legislation would impact everyone, and we had some social welfare function that we could use to define the greater good.  It is actually quite doubtful that either of these conditions hold, but even if they did utilitarian calculus would still produce a problem in that it is not analytical.  The effects of one part of a piece of legislation may depend on other parts of that law.

We might think that these considerations would make things quite difficult for capitalism's foes.  The inability to morally evaluate bills under competing political philosophies turns out not to be as serious an impediment to their efforts as we might think.  The truth of the matter is that capitalism provides the only way that a sizable proportion of the electorate can actually morally evaluate legislation.  Why then is it that capitalism has such a difficult time becoming the law of the land.  Even if it is the case that only between nine and thirteen percent of the electorate morally support capitalism, since our opponents cannot tell whether they should support or oppose legislation we should still succeed.

I suspect that one reason may be that capitalism does not favor any particular individual or identifiable group.  Its alternatives enable legislators to favor one particular group or another.  This group will be well aware of how the legislation effects them.  Capitalism interferes with special interest legislation, which legislators will depend on in order to get political campaign contributions.

It may also be the case that a portion of the electorate that is larger than that which supports capitalism will benefit from some departure, or at least think that it will.  However, I doubt that such a large proportion of the electorate would actually have time to analyze legislation in order to make such a determination.  I think it must be the case that opposition to capitalism can only survive because a substantial proportion of the electorate forms an opinion about legislation despite not being able to perform such an evaluation.

Perhaps supporters of capitalism might make some headway by pointing out that proposed legislation violates capitalistic principles, and that only they are capable of providing any transparent form of analysis on each issue.  In any debate they could simply ask their opponents to provide some such form of analysis so that their supporters will be able to see whether the legislation truly violates some objective, verifiable set of principles.  Of course they will be unable to do this.