Aplastic surgeon of Chinese ancestry in  Sydney, Australia, may not sound like an  

average individual, but the moral of his story  is all too common in countries around the world.  

Born in Malaysia, this plastic surgeon  was in one of many high-level positions  

occupied by the Chinese minority and coveted by  the Malay majority. Moreover, under the country’s  

affirmative action policies, he understood that  his days as a plastic surgeon were numbered. He  

took it all without bitterness, offering to stay  on to treat disfigured children and others until  

a Malay plastic surgeon was available to replace  him. But he missed the point. They wanted him  

out of there, whether or not there was a Malay to  replace him and whether or not disfigured people  

had anyone else to turn to. The surgeon relocated  to Australia, where he was apparently doing quite  

well by the time I encountered him. The real  victims of the Malaysian government’s policies  

were still in Malaysia. This dog-in-the-manger  approach is by no means peculiar to Malaysia.  

Envy of others’ success and embarrassment at  being visibly unable to match their performance  

have been political driving forces behind  many programs of preferences and quotas.  

When Romania acquired additional territory  from the defeated Central Powers after the  

First World War, it also acquired universities  which were culturally either German or Hungarian.  

One of their top priorities was to get rid of  the Germans and the Hungarians on the faculties  

and transform the universities into  Romanian bastions. At that point,  

roughly three-quarters of all Romanians were still  illiterate, so replacing these foreign professors  

with Romanians of comparable caliber was very  unlikely. But replacement was not the issue:  

Getting rid of those who were better qualified  was the issue. Despite all the zeal expended in  

converting German and Hungarian universities in  the new provinces of Bukovina and Transylvania  

into Romanian universities, there was no urgency  at all about creating a university in the province  

of Bessarabia, where none existed. Moreover,  when Hungarian students living in Romania began  

going to Hungary to attend universities there,  the Romanian government forbad them to do so.  

What is involved is not just envy. It is  the threat to one’s ego that is crucial in  

promoting dog-in-the-manger policies. When Nigeria  became an independent nation, back in the 1960s,  

many of the educated, skilled, business  and professional people in northern Nigeria  

were from tribes in southern Nigeria. One of the  top priorities of northern Nigerian politicians  

was to get rid of such people. The hope was to  replace them eventually with northern Nigerians.  

But, in the meantime, the northern  Nigerians wanted them out of there,  

even if they had to hire Europeans to replace  them or suffer a deterioration of the services  

being performed by the southern Nigerians.  Having Europeans in these occupations was  

far less of a threat to the ego than having fellow  Africans so dramatically outperforming the locals.  

Such attitudes are not unknown in the  United States, whether or not ethnic  

or racial differences are involved. The same  dog-in-the-manger can be found when the issue is  

class. Liberals have never ceased denouncing  Ronald Reagan’s “tax cuts for the rich” in the  

early 1980s, despite the actual results, including  a record-breaking period of economic expansion.  

After the tax rate was cut on the highest income  brackets (and on others), not only did the total  

tax receipts rise but the percentage of those  receipts paid by “the rich” also rose. Why then  

were the liberals unhappy? Because those in the  upper brackets paid these vastly greater taxes  

out of rising incomes, while retaining a higher  percentage of those incomes for themselves.  

The dog-in-the-manger principle requires that  the rich be made worse off. Any policy that fails  

to do that has failed politically, regardless of  what economic benefits it may bring to the society  

as a whole. While such attitudes are sufficiently  widespread around the world that they cannot  

be attributed to a particular culture,  neither are they inevitable. Very often,  

the key ingredient in the rise of explosive  resentments is the rise of an intelligentsia  

preoccupied with invidious comparisons  rather than general well-being. Ironically,  

all too often the rich themselves have  been the patrons of such intellectuals,  

whether at the universities, the foundations or  other institutions supported by their donations.