“The successful conduct of business demands qualities quite other than those necessary for passing examinations.” – Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, pg. 165
Despite the happy truth that income and wealth inequality speak to individual freedom, enterprise being rewarded, and a shrinking of the lifestyle gap thanks to entrepreneurs turning former luxuries into common goods, inequality continues to obsess academics, economists and politicians. Free thinkers not paralyzed by envy must be vigilant.
They must be given the tautology that the very economic freedom that has produced so much wealth also produces enormous inequality. The latter is a genius of freedom, not a demerit. When government is taxing, spending and regulating less, keeping trading lanes open, and maintaining a stable currency, capital formation soars. It also migrates toward the most talented who, while removing unease from our lives, frequently grow very rich.
It is wealth that oddly concerns deep thinkers in our midst who continue to search for fixes to what is not a problem in the first place. Hint to the class warriors: if taxes are raised to confiscatory levels, regulation made onerous, global trade restricted and taxed, and money devalued, inequality will shrink. Life will surely be more miserable, and it will be because coerced equality whereby we can’t express and be rewarded for our talents is a pretty good definition of misery. Still, inequality will plummet.
So while the horrid “fix” to inequality stares them in the face, and has been achieved in sick-inducing fashion around the world in countries like the old Soviet Union, wealth-gap worriers continue to seek out softer solutions to that which is once again not a problem.
Increased access to education is one of the "solutions" that excites many wealth-gap handwringers consumed by excess emotion. Fareed Zakaria has predictably jumped on the schooling bandwagon, as has Laura Perna, executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy. Perna recently told the Wall Street Journal that “Education is one of the levers that we have in place to address income inequality.” It’s amazing how easily the well-schooled are gulled.
Indeed, a focus on test scores and education is something more commonly experienced in socialist countries. It’s in places like France, according to Ludwig von Mises in his classic book Socialism, that economic “selection comes to be based not on genuine capacity but on compliance with certain forms, the passing of certain examinations, attendance at certain schools…” In the U.S. many of our wealthiest were and are college dropouts, or individuals who never had much time for school in the first place. By the very name “entrepreneur,” they’re doing what hasn’t been done before, and that’s to some degree why big commercial leaps don’t require schooling to achieve. We have great colleges and universities in the U.S. precisely because we're a very rich nation, not because we have great schools. What could a college professor possibly impart to the ambitious?
It seems the members of the Beatles were asking much the same back in 1950s Liverpool. According to their biographer Bob Spitz, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were mostly poor and uneducated. Lennon was the only band member to grow up “solidly middle class,” while Spitz described Starr’s living conditions during childhood as “Dickensian.” Whatever wealth gap existed in England during the ‘50s and early ‘60s, the future Beatles were all to varying degrees on the wrong end of it.
And if education is the great leveler as is so often presumed by the educated, the prospects of them moving up in the world were rather dim. About Lennon, Spitz writes that “English, history, geography, math, science, and French – held absolutely no interest” for someone who, by his own admission, was most comfortable “with the thick lads” at school. For Starr, school from the earliest of days was “a great and terrifying burden.” McCartney and Harrison weren’t much better in the classroom, and as Lennon was the band’s leader in the early days, they not infrequently found themselves racing from classes in order to find him at art school across the street. Music—not traditional education that so excites the elite—was their passion.
This was important because while the future Beatles were once again “thick” in the classroom, they were geniuses when it came to music. So obsessed was Lennon that he was said to “behave distractedly” each night before listening to Radio Luxembourg, and all the new sounds from American artists like Elvis Presley. Education? Lennon taught himself how to play his first guitar (purchased for 5 pounds) by listening to the radio. What else could he do? It didn’t come with instructions.
Spitz writes that McCartney “picked up instruments the way some people pick up new languages.” Starr, having given up on school by his early teens, taught himself to play drums by “listening to music and rapping along on ‘biscuit tins’ with a pair of sticks.” Despite a musical “education” that screamed primitive and “informal,” Starr was so valuable to arguably the most successful band in music history that when he quit in the late ‘60s, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison “sorely missed Ringo’s ‘feel and soul,’ his intuitive fills…” Spitz went on to write that the “fourth Beatle” had all along “been the missing piece of the puzzle, and it didn’t take long for the Beatles to appreciate his absence.”
To the story of the Beatles’ staggering success despite humble beginnings and ineptitude in the classroom the skeptical reader may well respond that the Beatles were truly unique; a one-in-a-million tale. Not everyone is born with their talent. 99.9% of bands never make it to the very first gig. Fair enough, but….
There’s something to how the Beatles rose “to the toppermost of the poppermost.” Spitz notes that while their musical peers all had day jobs, “the Beatles had never even thought seriously about punching a clock. It was only ever music, only the band, only the Beatles. There were no other options. This was their life’s work.” While school did nothing for them, McCartney and Harrison “handled guitars with stunning self-assuredness and possessed the power to make their instruments hum like Maseratis.”
The truth unearthed by all of this is that while education may get some into certain specialized doors, wealth and success are a function of passion, of doing what most animates one’s talents. The amazing story of the Beatles reminds us that economic freedom beats classroom learning when it comes to getting a leg up by many miles. Schooling was never going to represent the way up and out for the Beatles, but freedom to do that which most ignited their passions was, and did.
Notable here is that it’s invariably the educated and fairly well-to-dowho presume that others will benefit from the same kind of learning. They’re right, education does lift those eager to enter certain professions that prize one’s ability to pass a test, or earn a degree. The problem is that we’re not all that way. Everyone’s happily got different interests; everyone’s reinforced by different stimuli.
If the Beatles had been forced to into office work thanks to music not being an option, four exceedingly successful men would have likely ended up failures. Just the same, if Donald Trump had been forced into musical schooling and a music career, odds are that a man known for telling people “You’re Fired” would frequently be on the receiving end of this kind of bad news.
Education as the path to achievement? Maybe for some. But to maximize the economic chances of everyone, the only answer is economic freedom. Nothing else comes close. It’s thanks to economic freedom that we can pursue what most elevates our skills and passions, and it’s when we’re doing what we love that hard, wealth enhancing work is anything but. Economic freedom doesn't so much "create jobs" as some like to say, but it does maximize the possibility that our work of choice will be what most showcases our talents. Thank goodness the Beatles were free to pursue what enlivened them.
It bears repeating that total economic freedom will almost by definition widen the wealth gap. That the latter is true is the most certain sign of all that what bothers the elite isn’t a problem at all.
