I Want the "Freedom Card" to be Trumps

One of my interests in social science is the connection between competence and salience. We tend to become more expert in things that interest us, and we are more interested in things that we know something about. There seems to be a dynamic interplay between competence and salience wherein increases in one are related to increases in the other. My research has been in the world of sports for the most part, and I have observed that people tend to like and seek to become more adept at sports that they know more about. However, the principle is applicable to other areas of life as well, and I have begun to think about how it might apply to political persuasion.

One area of competence that most people build up to some degree concerns the kinds of legitimizing discourses that inform social structures and norms. We are all somewhat adept at the usual arguments and aphorisms that we use to rationalize and justify our choices and actions, and we sometimes speak about this discourse through the metaphor of card playing. For example, one might play the "race card” or the “patriotism card”. We are all familiar to some extent with the often tiresome kabukiesque debates that are acted out by talking heads on TV news programs.

I think that libertarians need to increase the salience of their ideas to ordinary people. To do this, we need some “cards” and to show people how to play them. One “card” that I would like to see become more playable is the “corporate welfare” card. Seeing the state as the source of special privileges would facilitate people’s problematization of the state itself. Most ordinary folks don’t know about corporate welfare and the kinds of benefits and special privileges that might be subsumed under that term, i.e. they are not competent as to the concept. They don’t see it in their everyday lives, i.e. it is not salient to them. In contrast, they see individual welfare recipients all the time and know how to talk about AFDC and food stamps. Thus, it is common to hear relatively poor people railing against their slightly less fortunate neighbors and ignoring the much greater parasitism of Halliburton.

A lot of libertarian concepts might be simplified and packed into “cards” for use around the water cooler and down at the road house and wherever ordinary folks might congregate.