This week, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite think-tank, the ‘libertarian’ Adam Smith Institute, called for the minimum wage for young people to be scrapped, because, they argue, “young people are just not worth that amount of money [£4.92 for 18-20 years olds & £5.93 for those 21 and older, per hour] to” employers. This is, quite simply, right wing economic ‘logic’ at its most ridiculously oversimplified and divorced from humanity! Right-wingers, conservatives, republicans and any other peddlers of free-market evangelism pride themselves on a kind of hard-nosed, unsentimental form of logic that they feel allows them to view the world more honestly; to be more honest with themselves and others, about the state of the world and therefore more constructive with their suggestions for how to make it better; more constructive at least than those they disdainfully refer to as liberals or ‘progressives’ (ensuring they always emphasise the ‘pr’ as a vocal manifestation of their dismissiveness). Unfortunately, by ‘world’ they often mean ‘economy’ and ‘making it better’ usually amounts to more growth, more
productivity, more profit. Indeed, defining things in economic terms, however false they the may be, is what they do best. Unclouded by the kind of sentimentally and bleeding-heart irrationality that defines liberal thinking, the world becomes a vast and entirely pervasive market where all elements of society, no matter how apparently unrelated, are reduced to mere market factors; activities and events that quantifiably influence the fluctuation of imaginary money. This is the world of market traders who watch a giant wave decimate the lives of millions and wonder how it will affect the price of gold; or design engineers whose ‘cost-benefit analyses’ calculate that it makes more (financial) sense to simply ignore a potentially fatal design flaw and pay the court ordered damages to the relatives of the deceased than to fix the problem. These people, or at least the corporations of which they are a part (because, of course, corporations are legally individuals unto themselves), are psychopaths. Joel Bakan’s The Corporation explains this far better and in more detail than I am capable, but based upon clinical criteria, these legally defined individuals display a worrying array of psychopathic tendencies. Many of these traits are in fact the result of the hyper-detached rationality of the humans who run them: viewing the world as a constant stream of ever changing numerical data and under overwhelming pressure to influence the impression of that data so that their team appears to be winning. 
This way of viewing the world, though certainly unnerving, is widely accepted as, at worst, a necessary evil or, at best, a deliberate and rigidly followed ethos in the business world. What is particularly concerning, however, is that the disciples of this kind of economically derived rationalism see it as a model applicable to wider society; and what’s downright frightening is that many of these people now have the power to put it into action. They think that the kind of detachment from subjectivity and emotion that has made them monetarily successful in business automatically puts them in an ideal position to utilise the same strategies on society and in government. Indeed, they believe it is this detached rationality that gives primacy to their solutions, to their reforms, to their social programmes over those of the emotionally clouded liberal. This would work, if government were elected to act as the CEO of a corporation; but, fortunately, it is not. It is elected to serve the people and to administer the resources of their society in a way that allows everyone the equal opportunity to combine their intellect and initiative to make themselves as happy as possible in whatever way they see fit (within the limits of the law and their abilities). Certainly, I am not naïve enough to think that this actually happens in practice; rather, it is the ideal we should be working towards. Unfortunately, when we follow the over rationalised right-wing businessman’s form of social engineering, what we end up with is something bordering on a Zamyatin-esque dytopia of overly rationalised, unthinking, unfeeling quantification in which human suffering and empathy are entirely absent from the equations used to decide the policies that govern our lives. Explain to me how young people, already alienated from their society through super-high levels of unemployment, are expected to give a damn about a society that then pays them nothing when they do get a job? We work to make this illegal in developing countries, why work to make it legal in our own? When the world is viewed in strictly numerical and economic terms they become dangerously over simplified through the ignorance of human beings as a social and emotional creature. Mathematical formulae can predict and guide many things; but, when dealing with society and the people within it, this kind of rigid rationality must be tempered and informed by compassion and humanity. I don’t intend to make overblown, emotive and mawkish comparisons between modern-day free market evangelicals and ruthlessly efficient totalitarian governments, but, they do appear to share a similar penchant for mindless rationalism and inhuman efficiency. Making social decisions based entirely upon mathematical and economic rationality and efficiency is not only ignorant, it is dangerous.
