I have been thinking about agency a lot recently. It started with an essay by Simon Sarris titled "The Most Precious Resource is Agency." In it Sarris tells of a few historical figures that were able to exercise their agency at a very young age, how that experience set them up for success, and how agency is now missing from the lives of most young people.
Leonardo da Vinci was a studio apprentice to Verrocchio at 14. Walt Disney took on a number of jobs, chiefly delivering papers, from 11 years old. Vladimir Nabokov published his first book (a collection of poems) at 16, while still in school. Andrew Carnegie finished schooling at 12, and was 13 when he began his second job as a telegraph office boy, where he convinced his superiors to teach him the telegraph machine itself. By 16 he was the family’s mainstay of income.
Sarris doesn't romanticize child labor; rather he points out that when exceptional children are given the opportunity and the means to do great things, they excel far beyond what most adults think children are capable of. I couldn't help but think of my own schooling: when I was in regular grade-level classes I did poorly because I was bored and was simply not allowed to excel. When I got into honors and AP classes I rose to the challenge. The experience changed how I thought about individual potential and the effect of having high expectations.
The Billionaire Space Race
I critique the left a lot. I do it because I'm part of the left (center-left, but still!) -- not because I think conservatism is better, but because I think liberalism is better than its worst actors! The nascent billionaire space race between Musk, Bezos, and Branson brought out the worst tendencies of the contemporary left: a sneering dismissal of the value of private enterprise and achievement.
I reject the modern left's demand that all good things ought to be done, instead, by the state. This is helpless thinking, and one which reveals their belief that people either lack agency or shouldn't have the agency to solve problems without government control. This thinking kills societies.
Critics of Bezos and Branson mostly correctly pointed out that what they accomplished wasn't technically new: we've had rocket-powered planes and suborbital VTVL rockets for several decades. But all of these were developed as part of government defense programs -- never because private industry thought they were economical. And they were only prototypes that never graduated to useful products. The key development is exactly that they did it with private enterprise and that they have a plan to make them self-sustaining.
Real technological innovation is happening in this market, if not yet at Blue Origin or Virgin. Elon Musk's SpaceX was the first private company to independently develop an orbital rocket. SpaceX pushed the boundaries of modern technology in developing the first reusable and autonomous VTVL orbital rocket. It had never been done before, and nothing close had ever been done by private enterprise or public programs. (Various governments were content to just throw money at the problem, reusability and costs be damned!)
SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic all show what is possible when stubborn people set out to solve a problem they deeply care about. That is agency at its best.
No Space for Agency
The modern left seems to think that the state has a monopoly on agency. We see this in the housing discourse: dominant voices on the left advocate for only building social housing (housing built and owned by the state) with no room for the private market. It doesn't matter that the state can't afford it, can't administer it, and can't effectively plan for it; all that matters is the ideological purity of the state solving a problem.
We're seeing the same attitude directed at the internet (nationalize Amazon, city-owned internet), election regulations (limiting individual contributions, democracy vouchers), healthcare, and space exploration.
Let me be clear: NASA is my favorite government agency and I have been a fanboy from a very young age. I attended Space Camp, built the Lego model of the Space Shuttle, witnessed one of the very last Space Shuttle launches, and even wrote a letter to President Clinton when I was 10 advising him to ignore the environmentalists protesting the launch a nuclear-powered space probe (and I got a response!). I love NASA and think we should increase their funding from 0.48% to 2% of the federal budget.
But none of my love and respect for publicly-funded space exploration precludes private actors from funding space technology. Indeed, the beauty of the American system is that the government can help bootstrap a new industry and then rely on private enterprise to deliver technological advances faster and cheaper than government programs. Our whole system depends on unleashing the potential of the average person to solve hard problems and being rewarded for their success.
And the left conveniently forgets that private enterprise often saves the government money.
In short: America is best when we encourage and celebrate individual agency.
Impacts On Governance
The biggest divide, in my eyes, between the average American and the modern left is their views on individual responsibility and agency. Your average Joe will tell you that a can-do attitude is fundamental to being American -- that JFK was right when he said "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." This American mythos of individual responsibility is reflected in the structure of our society and what we expect our government to do for us.
I believe in the Nordic model: a strong capitalist economy combined with a robust welfare state. I recognize, like President Obama pointed out, that no one is truly a self-made man. We rely on our institutions and public programs to build a prosperous society. No one should go hungry or without shelter just because they don't have enough money. And no one should be deterred from entrepreneurship because they worry about medical bills.
But leftists who dominate popular discourse take it a step too far: they want the state to take over industries and not allow the private market to function. We see this most clearly in San Francisco: socialists in our city government want to ban private housing development and only build government-owned housing. They refuse to allow the market to build enough homes for the middle class by imposing years-long processes that cost millions of dollars on anyone looking to build homes. They claim the only true way to achieve affordability is by state control.
This is an impoverished worldview. It is a rejection of what works in every other affordable city and an insistence that only The State can solve the problem, and individual agency is not just bad but actively harmful. This belief is stealing money from our pockets, preventing family formation, pushing thousands of people into homelessness, and overall just killing our cities.
Agency is not a four letter word
We know that centralized state control doesn't work. Communism has failed everywhere it's been tried. Centrally planned economies always fail. Centrally planned cities and societies are no exception. We can't keep treating entrepreneurship and individual action as bad things.
We must abandon this popular idea that our problems are too big for individuals to help solve. We must stop demanding that our government solve everything for us. It is beyond time for us to let Americans do what Americans do best: start companies, build things, and solve problems.
Any indictment of socialism or communism will always get me fired up. Very relevant to current affairs, I like this article a lot.