I’ve always been a huge history buff, and especially the history of the war in Viet Nam. Partly because of that interest, and partly because I just wanted to see a part of the world that wasn’t Europe, I traveled to Viet Nam back in 2000. Most of the sites we visited were done as part of package tours which involved being driven around the countryside on tour buses. Each time we would stop at a site, but before the tour bus doors were opened, our guide for the day would always take a moment to remind us of the importance of maintaining the integrity of the local economy.
The argument went like this. When we got off the bus we were going to be swarmed by local kids wanting to sell us trinkets or to carry water for us as we hiked through the sites. For each of these services there was a fair market price, let’s call it one US dollar for the day. We were going to be tempted, our guides told us, to pay more… after all, what difference does it make to an American tourist if they pay one dollar or five dollars for these services? We could afford it either way. The difference, our guides argued, was that by paying more than what the market demanded we would be injecting price uncertainty into the market and making it more difficult for people who cannot afford a general inflation of prices to get by in their daily lives.
I thought of this economic warning for the first time in many years this week when I heard the story of Winston Marshall, the Mumford and Sons bandmate who was cancelled and forced to leave the band for expressing a positive review of Andy Ngo’s new book, even after apologizing in a cringe-inducing, dignity-destroying way.
Now, I’m not going to dump on Marshall for apologizing the way he did, I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be famous and successful and to suddenly face the possibility of losing it all over something as stupid as enjoying a book. But we need to at least point out that by putting his tail between his legs, apologizing, and running away, Marshall has distorted the market for cancellations in the same way that tourists do when they pay 500% over market for services in Viet Nam. They incentivize bad actors and increase the costs for the next guy.
All markets, like the market for labor in Viet Nam and the market for cancellations, operate on incentives… if doing something is worth more than it costs, the market encourages that behavior. As it stands today, in economic terms, the costs of resistsing Cancel Culture are way too high and the benefits are way too low. We must reverse those realities. We must change the underlying economics.
The only way we are going to do that, is if people are willing to stand up and say “no” to those who seek to impose Cancel Culture on us. And the only way people are going to be willing to stand up and say “no” is if the rest of us are willing to stand behind them when they do. So when Jodi Shaw stands up to Smith College, we must donate to her GoFundMe. When Gina Carano stands up to Disney, we must pledge to follow her to the Daily Wire. When a desperate Mother decides to sue her school district rather than allow them to racially terrorize her son, we must support her. We must listen to podcats by Cancel Culture targets like Megyn Kelly, Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan. We must subscribe to Substack and pay for the work of writers who infuriate the Wokesters in charge of Cancel Culture. We must buy, read and discuss cancelled books and movies. When an enthusiastic agent of Cancel Culture finds themselves facing cancellation, we must join in the pile on and make it hurt. We must hire people who have been cancelled for a dumb tweet or a decades old joke.
Do whatever you can, wherever you can.
This is the fight of our lives. And we must win it.
We must…