Arvin Vohra is an edu­ca­tor and entre­pre­neur who was born and raised in Mary­land. His lat­est book is Lies, Damned Lies, and Col­lege Admis­sions. His com­pa­nies include Arvin Vohra Edu­ca­tion, Mind Sculp­tor Soft­ware, and Education4Sale.com. His book, The Equa­tion for Excel­lence: How to Make Your Child Excel at Math, has been pub­lished in both the United States and China, and has been fea­tured on Chan­nel 9 News. Before start­ing his own busi­ness, he stud­ied Math­e­mat­ics and Eco­nom­ics at Brown Uni­ver­sity, and then worked as an actu­ary. Read more »

Dur­ing the past elec­tion cycle, the Repub­li­can Party empha­sized the impor­tance of “cre­ative destruc­tion” in a free mar­ket. This is the idea that in a free mar­ket, new prod­ucts and ideas take the place of old ones. New busi­nesses are cre­ated, and old busi­nesses are destroyed. For exam­ple, when the auto­mo­bile was invented, the horse and buggy indus­try became obsolete.

Cre­ative destruc­tion is absolutely essen­tial to progress. Unfor­tu­nately, Repub­li­cans seemed to grasp this idea only par­tially. First, they sup­ported the Wall Street Bailout and hun­dreds of sub­si­dies for big cor­po­ra­tions, includ­ing the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try. But more impor­tantly, they do not seem to rec­og­nize that cre­ative destruc­tion also applies to the world of ideas, social val­ues, and cul­tural norms. For exam­ple, the work of Galileo and Coper­ni­cus destroyed the idea that the sun orbited the earth, and cre­ated the idea that the earth went around the sun. Sim­i­larly, the under­stand­ing that it was okay for women to read destroyed the idea that lit­er­ate women should be burned as witches. Today, the Repub­li­can fail­ure to embrace cre­ative destruc­tion in the realm of ideas and social pol­icy alien­ates them from the vast major­ity of intel­li­gent Amer­i­cans, who do not want to see the devel­op­ment of new ideas halted by an oppres­sive government.

Gay Mar­riage

The ques­tion I hear most often from oppo­nents of gay mar­riage: “Why do gays need to have offi­cial, gov­ern­ment approved mar­riage? Why can’t they just do what­ever they want?”

First, his­tor­i­cally, they haven’t been able to, and have been per­se­cuted for “obscene” behav­ior in many coun­tries. But more sig­nif­i­cantly: right now, het­ero­sex­ual, monogamy gets the equiv­a­lent of a gov­ern­ment sub­sidy. It allows you cer­tain con­ve­niences, such as the abil­ity to visit your loved one in a hos­pi­tal. It allows the mas­sive ben­e­fit of being able to get a visa for your fiance, a green card for your spouse, and help pave the way to his or her U.S. cit­i­zen­ship. That is no small priv­i­lege, and is con­ferred only to het­ero­sex­ual monogamy. Repub­li­cans have no prob­lem fight­ing against the spe­cial ben­e­fits con­ferred to pub­lic sec­tor unions. And yet, they seem totally okay with a mas­sive gov­ern­ment ben­e­fit con­ferred to a group of peo­ple whose prac­tices have a 50% fail rate (50% of het­ero­sex­ual, monog­a­mous mar­riages end in divorce.)

In the past, the gov­ern­ment had granted het­ero­sex­ual monogamy an absolute monop­oly, in the same way they once gave Bell a com­plete monop­oly on the phone sys­tem. Gay men and women had the choice of: het­ero­sex­ual mar­riage or noth­ing. Now that monop­oly is being chal­lenged, which is exactly what Repub­li­cans should support.

The sim­plest solu­tion is to get rid of all spe­cial priv­i­leges given to het­ero­sex­ual monogamy. The only other rea­son­able solu­tion is to give iden­ti­cal priv­i­leges to all other forms of per­ma­nent con­sent­ing rela­tion­ships between any num­ber of adults.

Pornog­ra­phy

The sec­ond stu­pid­est RNC move this year (after mis­treat­ing Ron Paul) was to argue for more vig­or­ous oppo­si­tion to pornog­ra­phy and “obscen­ity”. Polit­i­cally, this makes lit­tle sense. The only seri­ous oppo­si­tion to pornog­ra­phy comes from hard­core fem­i­nist groups, who tra­di­tion­ally vote Demo­c­rat, and that oppo­si­tion is wan­ing as more female-friendly porn enters the marketplace.

But it’s another exam­ple of the Repub­li­can fail­ure to under­stand Cre­ative Destruc­tion. Open com­pe­ti­tion of ideas has pretty clearly shown that just as peo­ple pre­fer faster com­put­ers, they pre­fer var­ied and explicit porn. The mas­sive inter­net traf­fic and bil­lions of dol­lars in rev­enue has shown that pretty handily.

Eng­lish

The Eng­lish lan­guage is a great lan­guage. It com­bines the aca­d­e­mic com­plex­ity of Latin with the imme­di­acy of Anglo-Saxon. It has been used in the poetry of Shake­speare and T.S. Elliot, in the nov­els of J.D. Salinger and Philip Roth. It is the basis of com­mands in the C pro­gram­ming lan­guage, and in Java, Action­script, Python, and dozens of oth­ers. It is the lan­guage of busi­ness through­out the world. In open, free com­pe­ti­tion, Eng­lish has done quite well. And the last thing that the Eng­lish lan­guage needs is a gov­ern­ment subsidy.

And yet, by insist­ing that Eng­lish become the “offi­cial” lan­guage of the United States, that is exactly what Repub­li­cans are demand­ing. It is a com­plete unwill­ing­ness to embrace cre­ative destruc­tion. It’s a refusal to say that “Eng­lish can com­pete just fine on its own,” and instead say­ing, “We can­not face the pos­si­bil­ity of fail­ure, so we need gov­ern­ment protection.”

Drug War

The Drug War is an attempt to use gov­ern­ment force to prop up an obso­lete idea: the idea that alco­hol is fun­da­men­tally good, and mar­i­juana is fun­da­men­tally bad. The thou­sands of highly suc­cess­ful cur­rent and for­mer mar­i­juana users in Amer­ica, rang­ing from artists and come­di­ans to the Pres­i­dent of the United States, indi­cate that this view is patently false. Mar­i­juana does not auto­mat­i­cally destroy your life. And destroy­ing the lives of mar­i­juana users by incar­cer­at­ing them cer­tainly doesn’t improve anything.

Cre­at­ing the Future

Just as tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions make old ideas obso­lete, new ideas make old ones obso­lete. By demand­ing that the gov­ern­ment pro­tect obso­lete ideas, Repub­li­cans have failed to truly com­pre­hend and embrace cre­ative destruc­tion. Allow­ing peo­ple to cling to back­wards views is fine. Peo­ple have the right to believe what­ever fool­ish­ness they want.

But using gov­ern­ment to force oth­ers to kow­tow to them is pre­pos­ter­ous. If the Repub­li­can Party wants to be taken seri­ously by the peo­ple whom oth­ers respect, they need to rec­og­nize the impor­tance of cre­ative destruc­tion in the realm of ideas and values.

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