It's Not About "Redistributing Wealth." It's About Correcting Inequities in the System.

The founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, is now worth more than $150 billion. Meanwhile, there are people in America who work two or three jobs and can't afford to cover their bare-bones bills.

You don't have to be a socialist or a Marxist or some kind of trenchant anti-capitalist to think that this sort of inequity is a problem, or to think that there is something amiss with a system that allows such extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, while others struggle and work in vain to dig their way out of poverty.

This is the point being made in a recent line of argument--its author obscured--that recently appeared in an image passing through my Faebook newsfeed. Here's the image:

Let us grant that Amazon contributes real value to the contemporary world and that its founder and CEO has worked hard and made risky choices and investments that justify him receiving very, very healthy financial rewards. In other words, let's assume that's there's nothing wrong with a system that enables some people to become filthy, stinking rich, maybe even LeBron-James-level rich. We're talking so rich that it's hard for any ordinary human being to imagine what to do with such abundance. Rich beyond what any human being needs for health and happiness and security. So rich that, to the extent that money can contribute to happiness, the person has enough wealth to buy the material contributions to lifelong happiness many times over.

Let's take that as our starting point.

The reality is that we live in a system where some people can come to possess personal fortunes so enormous that they numerically dwarf the unimaginable wealth described above. That is, we live in a system that allows wealth to keep pouring into the personal accounts of individuals who have long, long ago exceeded that point at which more money can do them any personal good in terms of human happiness. And the money keeps pouring in while single mothers are working multiple jobs to feed their children.

Sometimes, I suppose, this happens with people who are of such extraordinary virtue and wisdom that they regard this spigot of wealth as a source of enormous personal responsibility. They research how this enormous wealth can best serve the world, and then invest their money and give it to charities and causes so wisely and well that they make the world a better place for all.

I'm not going to remark on whether Bezos is such a person, because I have no idea. Maybe he is. But the point I want to make here is not about Bezos. He's just a convenient example because, at the moment, he's the richest person alive. The important thing for my purposes here is to note that our system is not designed so that only these paragons of wisdom and virtue are the beneficiaries of such wealth. Many who become exorbitantly rich channel their excess abundance in ways that are of questionable value at best.

Nevertheless, such disparity in wealth might be justified if (1) we believe wealth should be distributing in accord with merit, and (2) some people merit a personal fortune of $150 billion, while others merit $7.25 an hour, money that is gone before the end of each month meaning that they end up with no personal wealth, only debt.

While I'm not sure about a strict meritocracy (I'm too influenced by the Christian ethic of love and the call for charity and grace), I do think that merit should be rewarded. I think we need an economic system that does that. If so, we need some idea of how to measure merit. My guess is most of us would point to two things: how hard and diligently one works, and the value of what one produces through one's work. In other words, economies should reward labor and people's contributions to society--two things that are connected in complex ways.

Here's the problem. My wife is a public school teacher. Her salary would not be sufficient to sustain her and the children. We live modestly, but my income is essential for us to make ends meet, let alone build any personal wealth. In fact, if one weighs our assets against our debts, even with my salary in the mix, I'm not sure that one could say that we have any real wealth to sustain us should our salaries disappear. And if it were my wife's salary alone, her labor would at best generate a life of paycheck-to-paycheck penny-pinching with $0 in accumulated wealth--vs. Jeff Bezo's $150 billion.

But let's be generous and treat her yearly salary as wealth. Even on that assumption, Bezos's fortune is not hundreds of times or thousands of times greater than hers, or even hundreds of thousands of times higher. It's millions of times greater.

My wife works hard and diligently. I'm sure Bezos does, too. But does he work millions of times harder, millions of times more diligently? I know how devoted my wife is to her students, so let me just say I'm skeptical.

But what about the value of their respective contributions? We can't make the mistake of comparing the value of my wife's contribution to society against the contribution of the entire Amazon corporation, because there are more than 560,000 people working for Amazon to help generate its cumulative contribution. What we need to do is compare Bezos' piece of that cumulative effort to the value of the work my wife does.

But let me reframe the question in the following way. There are about 42,000 teachers in Oklahoma, and the average teacher salary in Oklahoma is about $38,000. That means teachers in Oklahoma are, taken together, receiving about $1.6 billion a year. Again, most of this goes to making ends meet rather than accumulating wealth, but let's treat it as wealth for the sake of argument. If we do, then Bezos has about one hundred times the personal wealth of all the teachers in Oklahoma combined.

So the question is this: Is the value of this one man's contributions worth one hundred times as much as the cumulative worth of all the teachers in the state of Oklahoma, diligently working to educate the next generation and make them ready to face the world, to contribute, and to succeed?

If you're as skeptical as I am about this, then we can agree to set aside the idea that, regardless of the inequities that exist, our system is a fair one because people are rewarded in proportion to the merit of their contributions. We don't live in a world where people's wealth is proportional to the merit of the work they do.

To put it starkly, the rickshaw puller in Calcutta works harder than I have ever dreamed of working but makes the tiniest fraction of what I make--and in terms of quality of life, the difference between me and that rickshaw-puller is enormously greater than the difference between my quality of life and that of Jeff Bezos. This is because, the more money you have, the less it substantively contributes to your quality of life. Lots of middle income people are blissfully happy and could give lessons to some of the very rich. But the poor struggle, their poverty grating at their capacity to enjoy their lives, no matter how wise they are in terms of getting their priorities straight.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us with a system that does not distribute wealth in proportion to either human need or the merit of those who contribute to society through their labors. Wealth gets concentrated in ways that can't be justified by the greater merit of the wealthy. This means our system is prone towards unjust concentration of wealth in the hands of some while others who work hard and diligently and make valuable contributions get far less than they deserve--and, in many cases, far less than they need to live a decent life.

What causes this problem? There are many forces in play, and I won't claim to understand them all. Part of it, of course, is that luck sometimes rewards those who take important risks--and we need to accommodate that in our system if we want people to take those risks (although, for the same reason, we should also work to cushion the costs to those who take the risks and fail). But a non-trivial part of the problem is that those who get rich often do so at the expense of the poor, because the system is set up to exploit the labor of the poor, working them hard and paying them less than their labor is worth.

In other words, part of the reason why there exists such wealth inequity in our system is that our system is set up so that the "haves" can leverage their privilege into more privileges while the "have-nots" are left competing for scraps. And this is not a comment on Jeff Bezos as an individual. I'm not saying that he is in some unique and special way getting rich by choosing to exploit others. What I'm saying is that he is part of a system that works this way--that he doesn't need to deliberately scheme to be monstrous to his employees in order to pad his exorbitant wealth while they get paid less than the value their work adds to Amazon's success. The system is set up so that this happens, without Jeff Bezos or other corporate billionaires having to take any nefarious steps to make it happen. 

So how do we fix the system to remedy this? I don't know the answer, although I'm pretty sure it will involve the thoughtful use of such standard tools as income taxes and various regulations on business, including anti-exploitation laws like minimum wage laws. I'm pretty sure it will involve robust protections on workers' rights to collectively bargain, along with societal support for the efforts of those who work hard for a living to secure a living wage.

But my aim here is not to say that some specific combination of higher taxes on the very rich and a higher minimum wage, along with state protections of collective bargaining, is what is needed. Rather, I want to make the following more modest point: when people talk about raising taxes on the wealthy and raising the minimum wage, they are often painted as if they want to take money from the rich--money the rich have earned--and give it to others who haven't earned it. Thus, these measures are sometimes described as "wealth redistribution."

But if everything I've pointed out above is true, that's a misleading characterization of what these measures are about. The point of such policy proposals is to correct a systemic problem in wealth distribution, a problem that leads to wealth getting unfairly concentrated in the hands of people who haven't done enough to warrant getting THAT huge a piece of the pie.

Suppose there's a pie on the table, and four people around it who have worked hard to earn some of that pie. Suppose there is some machine set up to distribute pie according to what each person deserves. Imagine there's a guy who worked hard enough to earn half the pie on the table--but the machine gives him all but a sliver of the pie on the table as well as every single pie at every single Marie Callender's restaurant in the city (we're assuming the machine has supernatural powers). Meanwhile, the guy at the table who has done enough to earn a quarter of the pie gets the sliver, and the last two people at the table, who have done enough to get a slice each, get to fight over the crumbs.

Now suppose the owner of the house, seeing this happen, steps in. She sends the two hundred and ninety pies that are filling up her living room back to Marie Callender's, takes back a sliver less than half the original pie from the first guy, gives a quarter pie to the guy who earned that, and makes sure the last two each get their slice. Has she taken the first guy's pie(s) from him to redistribute to the others? No, she has corrected a glitch in a machine that unfairly heaped on him more pie than he knew what to do with while leaving others with less than their fair share.

When you're doing that sort of thing--when you are looking for ways to correct wealth concentration inequities but adjusting a system that is prone towards such inequities--that's not "wealth redistribution" in any problematic sense. It's not taking what the rich have earned to give it to the poor.

It's trying to make sure the system gives everyone what they've earned.

Is Social Democracy About the Poor Being Greedy?

This morning, the following meme passed through my Facebook newsfeed:

It takes some unpacking to figure out exactly what Thomas Sowell is talking about here. Who in the world says that taking other people's money isn't greedy but keeping your own money, the money you've earned through your own efforts, is?

No one. No one says this.

This is the first thing to be absolutely clear about. What Sowell is offering here is  a version of what philosophers calls the straw man fallacy. The strategy is this. Some people are saying "Y." You disagree with Y. But instead of actually criticizing Y itself, what you do is this. You mischaracterize Y as X, where X is totally nutters. And then you say, "This view, X, is a crazy view. I don't understand why anyone could possibly believe it"--while looking pointedly at the people who say "Y." And since X is a crazy view, you are able to walk away having conveyed the impression that Y is nuts and the people who believe it are crazy--even though you've not done a single thing to show that.

So what is the view that Sowell is here mischaracterizing? Sowell is a conservative economist who self-identifies as libertarian. He appears to be an advocate of free market capitalism in the spirit of Milton Friedman--that is, someone who strongly believes in the idea of the laissez faire ecomony: if we just privatize the whole economy and let businesses pursue profit-maximization, not only will we do the most to respect individual liberty rights, but market forces will channel self-interested agents in ways that promote the general welfare.

Opposed to this philosophy is the view that government ought to be more involved in the economy than someone like Milton Friedman favors.While socialism represents one version of this view, one could favor more government involvement in the economy without being a socialist in a robust sense.

The key difference between socialism and capitalism has to do with who owns the means of production--private entities, or the state? And on this question, we're all at least partially socialist. After all, our military is not privately owned. Strictly speaking, the military is a service-provider--offering national security services--that is wholly owned and run by the government and paid for through tax dollars (or through federal deficit spending). And I have yet to hear a thoughtful and serious objection to this "socialized" military. Furthermore, most people think that some form of public education should continue, even if the form is a matter of dispute. Likewise with police and fire departments. And then, of course, there are the public libraries and public parks and public roads. These are not privately owned but publicly owned providers of human goods and services.

I believe in free markets. But I also think that some goods and services are provided more effectively and/or efficiently through collective or public cooperation. The idea with all of these public goods and services is that we all as a society contribute our share of the burden of paying for them, collectively oversee the operations via elected representatives who are beholden to us (and can be "fired" by us--that is, not re-elected--if we don't like how they manage the public goods), and all share in the benefits.

Beyond this, I take very seriously an idea expressed by one of the philosophical fathers of economies  like ours, that prioritize private ownership. John Locke believed that we acquire a right to private property through our personal labor: The resources of nature belong to all of us in common, but if I mix the resources of nature with my labor, I've added something that is mine alone. Hence, it becomes mine.

But Locke offered the following caveat: we should leave "as much and as good" for others. In other words, even if I work hard throughout the night to chop down every single tree in the woods and drag it to my plot of land, when the rest of the villagers wake up in the morning to find the entire forest gone and every log piled on my front lawn, they have a right to complain.

And if they call me greedy, that is legitimate even though I worked hard to take more than my fair share. "Lazy" might not be warranted, but "greedy" certainly is. And they are not being greedy when they take back a portion of the lumber. They are asserting their rights. I took more than I had a legitimate claim on.

Now, the society we live in is one in which pretty much all the resources of nature have been divided up. Private owners have claimed much of it. What remains falls largely under the control of the government, which at least in theory operates as the representative of the public in managing what is collectively owned.

But here's the thing. We live in a world where some people are filthy rich while many others do not have "as much and as good." Many people are so cut off from resources that they have nothing to mix their labor with--unless the sell their labor to the rich private owners. But in that case, the products of their labor belong to the owners and all the workers get in return is a paycheck. And many worry that the private owners are exploiting the workers: giving them far less than their labor is worth and pocketing the difference, getting richer and richer by riding on the backs of the less fortunate.

If this is right, then we might consider fixing the problem in something like the following way: take some of those exploited riches back from the exploiters and put those riches into public resources that the industrious poor can use to make something of themselves if they're willing to work hard--something like, say, free college education. Or maybe a federal jobs program offering competitive wages to anyone willing to work on building public infrastructure.

Aside from the issue of exploitation and correcting for it, some services and goods just make sense to provide by pooling our collective resources--through, say, taxation--and then making the goods and services available to all (the security that comes from the military, the roads that come from public infrastructure development, etc.).

When we pursue this collective strategy for meeting our needs, there is the question of what is fair in terms of paying for it. Should everyone contribute equally?

Suppose we wake up one morning and find that the woods are gone and those who are willing to work hard have no resources to work with, while some villagers are sitting pretty with huge piles of logs on their lawns, mostly inherited from their parents who were the ones who did the work of clear-cutting the forest. There is not "as much and as good" for everyone, but there ought to be. And suppose there are ways to use lumber to make public resources that benefit everyone, including industrious people without private resources. The majority thinks developing these resources is a great plan. Given the duty to leave as much and as good, don't the beneficiaries of those who paid no attention to this duty have more of an obligation to give back than those who aren't such beneficiaries?

So, consider the following activities:

A. Taking back what exploiters have unjustly snagged and putting it back into the public domain, so that the exploited can succeed through their hard work rather than have their labor greedily exploited.

B. Making sure that everyone contributes their fair share when we collectively pool our resources to produce public goods available to all.

In either of these cases, if some people resist paying up, we are justified in calling them greedy. But we aren't calling them greedy for keeping the money they've earned. We're calling them greedy for either taking more than they've earned or for being, essentially, freeloaders.

The disagreement between people on the right like Sowell and people on the left (like, say, Bernie Sanders) isn't about whether it is greedy for people to keep what is rightfully theirs. The disagreement lies elsewhere. It's about where and whether exploitation is going on, where and whether some people have come to enjoy an unfair share of the common resources of the planet, and where and whether people are benefiting from public goods without doing their fair share to maintain them.

So let's honestly debate those issues, rather than hide behind straw men. We all agree that it's not greedy to keep what you've earned. But when have people rightly earned the money in their bank accounts? And when they haven't done so, what is the best public policy response?

Hegel's Rabble

One of the most interesting talks I attended at the Central State Philosophical Association Conference was entitled "What Is to Be Done about the Rabble?", presented by Joshua Anderson. The paper focused on a piece of Hegel's political philosophy, specifically, his idea that the operation of modern civil society gives rise to a problematic underclass of people whom Hegel dubbed "the rabble" (from what I can tell, not intended to have the derisive sense that "rabble" connotes today). While I don't remember all the details of the talk and the ensuing discussion, I want to share here what I took from the conversation and from my subsequent refresher reading of the relevant passages from Hegel's Philosophy of Right--because I think it has important implications for our contemporary conversations about poverty and welfare.

For Hegel, the beneficiaries of civil society are organized into "Corporations"--by which Hegel means organizations of people who carry out some recognized branch of the work that a civil society needs done (this would include corporations in the modern sense but would also extend to other kinds of social organizations, such as universities, police and fire departments, hospitals, governmental agencies, etc.). Full membership in civil society is conferred when you become a member of a Corporation. When you do, you have a role, a recognized place in society for which you are compensated with the means to meet your needs.

Corporations in this sense are a crucial part of organizing human beings into a civil society. As Hegel puts it, the Corporation operates as "a second family for its members, while civil society can only be an indeterminate sort of family because it comprises everyone and so is farther removed from individuals and their special exigencies." Put another way, the Corporation serves as a kind of mediating social unit, between the family and the society as a whole. You become a citizen of society through corporate membership. As a member of a Corporation you have a specified role to play in an organization that itself has a specified role in society as a whole. You are recognized and remunerated by the Corporation, and the Corporation is in turn recognized by the civil society at large and given the right to exchange the goods or services it provides in exchange for capital.

This arrangement brings several concrete benefits to the Corporation member. First, and most obviously, as a Corporation member you acquire the resources to care for yourself and your dependents. Without this, you are impoverished.

Second, you acquire recognition from your community. You are seen as a contributing member--you have a "recognitive status"--and so enjoy a sense of belonging. Without such a role, you are alienated.

Third, you acquire the opportunity to do meaningful work and so experience yourself as being a contributor to society.  In Hegel's words, "the Corporation member needs no external marks beyond his own membership as evidence of his skill and his regular income and subsistence, i.e., as evidence that he is somebody." As social animals, we "find ourselves" through the impact we have on the social world. Our sense of self, our dignity, is bound up with being able to recognize that impact in our community. Hence, without such a role, we are cast into a position of shame.

Hegel argues that as civil society increases its population and its wealth, there are inherent limits to how many positions relative to the population are available within Corporations. Hegel is a bit unclear about why. He seems to think that Corporations are engines not only of production, but of differential distribution of the benefits of production. Conditions arise "which greatly facilitate the concentration of disproportionate wealth in a few hands," but the flip side is a growing mass of people who are left out. These persons are not only impoverished, but alienated and defined by shame. From the standpoint of society they are outsiders; from their own standpoint they lack the kind of identity that can confer positive self-worth.

These are "the rabble." They are denied two crucial things: First, they are excluded from the benefits of the social contract. Second, they are deprived of the opportunity to contribute to society in ways that are socially recognized and respected. In more technical lingo, they are denied the opportunity to legitimately "externalize themselves" in their social environment.

This second kind of deprivation should not be underappreciated. One of Hegel's important contributions to social philosophy--picked up on famously by Marx--is the insight that those who work have a unique advantage over those who are idle, even if the idleness is that of wealth and privilege. Those who work make an imprint on the world. That imprint is an assurance of their own significance and identity. It's as if they can see themselves through the effect they have on their environment, and so come to know that they matter. It is for this reason that, on Hegel's view, slaves are better off, at least in one crucial way, than the rabble.

Hegel doesn't see a way to avoid the creation of a "rabble" in a civil society, nor does he see a solution that will do any substantive good. He considers the possibility of the wealthier classes supporting the rabble through a kind of social welfare, which he dismisses on the grounds that receiving subsistence without working for it "would violate the principle of civil society and the feeling of individual independence and self-respect in its individual members." The first part of this dismissal is a familiar refrain today (those who receive benefits without contributing are "freeloaders" or "moochers"). The second part is more interesting: Neither charitable giving nor state-sponsored welfare confer a meaningful place in society, a recognized role and the opportunity to engage in the sort of work that confers a sense of self and dignity.

So what about giving the rabble jobs? Hegel says this won't solve the problem either, because the problem is a function of overproduction relative to "the number of consumers who are themselves also producers." You give more people more jobs, and you overproduce even more. This solution, Hegel claims, only intensifies the fundamental problem that gives rise to the impoverished class. In short, Hegel seems to be a proto-Keynesian convinced that universal employment inevitably guarantees overproduction relative to demand. To achieve a balance between supply and demand requires that a proportion of the populace remain unable to find work.

 But Hegel is vague about this, and I'm not enough of an economist to say with confidence whether he is right, or how this proto-Keynesian view relates back to his idea that the creation of a rabble is the necessary flip-side of growing concentrations of wealth. My best guess is that the existence of a pool of potential workers that exceeds the available work not only is required for the sake of preventing overproduction and so preserving profit, but is also required in order for employers to be able to keep more for themselves of what the worker's labor is worth. If workers can be easily replaced by dipping into the hungry rabble, who will happily take any employment on any terms for the sake of fending off starvation, then workers are at a bargaining disadvantage. They'll be compelled to sell their labor for less than it is worth, while corporate owners keep the difference and so get rich.

The closest Hegel comes to proposing a solution to the problem of the rabble is to suggest that the rabble serve as a motive for foreign trade and, ultimately, colonial expansion. Through the latter, society "supplies to part of its population a return to life on the family basis in a new land and so also supplies itself with a new demand and field for its industry." In other words, you export your rabble, who ideally return to a simpler agrarian existence of local self-sufficiency ("life on the family basis," as opposed to life in a civil society unified around industrial production). They are gone from your soil but still consume your goods, meaning that consumption of what you produce exceeds your local population. And this makes possible more universal employment while still facilitating the accumulation of wealth among the privileged classes.

A handy solution for Hegel. But the history of colonialization is frought with injustice as soon as you pay attention to the fact that colonial settlers were actually moving into lands already occupied by peoples not participating in the industrial social contract and its mode of social organization. Furthermore, the history of colonialization seems to me to be the history of a globalization of the industrial social model, leading ultimately to a global "rabble": whole nations of destitute and disenfranchised human beings. Eventually you run out of new frontiers, and the problem of the rabble resurfaces on an international scale.

And so we confront the question posed by Joshua Anderson in the title of his conference paper: "What is to be done about the rabble?" Is such an underclass really as inevitable as Hegel thought? Are there any meaningful solutions that address both of the chief problems from which the rabble suffer--namely poverty and lack of recognitive status?

The coversation at the conference was too rich and interesting to adequately summarize. In simplest terms, Anderson's suggestion in his talk was that the rabble themselves, by existing outside the social contract, had a freedom to act that offers hope for the emergence of a solution from within the rabble. His commentator, Roxy Green, noted that the life circumstances of the rabble will likely put limits on their capacity to understand social dynamics enough to use their freedom productively.

These points, taken together, call attention in my mind to something Hegel doesn't dwell on but which is important to consider--namely, the way in which the rabble pose a threat, and the way in which society tends to manage that threat. Insofar as the rabble don't benefit from the social contract, it is fairly clear why they threaten the social order: We can't expect them to follow the rules when they aren't beneficiaries of the system the rules are meant to keep in place. In short, the first kind of deprivation from which the rabble suffer erases a crucial constraint against lashing out destructively.

And the second kind of deprivation can positively motivate violence. As social animals, it is very important to us that we matter in relation to our social environment. If there are no legitimate roles through which we can achieve this, then what happens to us? We either begin to think of ourselves as something less than human, as having a status equivalent to the squirrels that dart across one's path but aren't part of the human community; or we assert our humanity in dangerously anti-social ways. Denied a positive impact on the social environment, some opt for a negative one.

But while the rabble are threatening for these reasons, the threat they pose is mitigated by their lack of power and their limited knowledge. When they do lash out against the civil society in ways that violate the laws, their blows are usually quite limited in their capacity to damage the system or its most affluent beneficiaries; and, generally, they are quickly apprehended and far more likely to be convicted than those who enjoy the benefits of the social order would be. This is a baseline solution that members of civil society in general, regardless of political persuasion, seems to endorse: Count on the police and criminal justice system to take care of the threat posed by the rabble--directly by removing those who break the law from society; indirectly through the deterrent effect of these examples. Given the general powerlessness of the rabble overall, this may go a long way towards solving the threat posed by the disenfranchised underclass--and that may be all the "solution" that many care about.   

But sometimes the threat posed by the rabble--either through sporadic violence or more concerted action (not necessarily violent) to claim some share of what they are denied--faces the prospect of becoming more serious. And so civil society supplements law enforcement with other strategies. The rabble's limited perspective and knowledge means that savvy beneficiaries of the social contract can find strategies to misdirect and mislead them into behaving in ways that serve or at least don't threaten the status quo. Perhaps they are led to turn on one another, to be so hostile or fractured among themselves that there is little risk of organizing effectively. If there's a poor, unskilled working class, it might be possible to pit them against the rabble.

Or perhaps the underclass is fed the promise of some otherworldly solution to their plight, the message that their state in this life is irrelevant and they should live wholly for the life to come.

Or perhaps they hunker down in hopelessness and self-blame--beating themselves up, literally or metaphorically, because they have come to accept a narrative according to which they are responsible for their own alienated state and would be just fine if only they had the will to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Perhaps they are fed stories of rags-to-riches archetypes who embody the notion that anyone can succeed in civil society, even if they start out among the rabble. Such stories imply that there are no rabble in the true sense, since anyone in this state could escape it if only they applied themselves.

Another way to manage the rabble is to follow Hegel's first suggestion: provide them with a subsistence living through handouts--perhaps as an official social policy. Do this, and they now become beneficiaries of the social contract, even though they remain alienated and denied a meaning-bestowing role. As beneficiaries of the system, they are brought within the scope of its laws. They owe their obedience. Furthermore, fear of losing what little they have can keep them from lashing out. The problem, of course, is that now they are deprived of dignity. And general allegiance to the principle of civil society--that each member gains his or her share of social goods by contributing proportionately--may combine with the very rags-to-riches stories mentioned above to produce outraged resistance from the poorest of those who do contribute, since their share of social goods may be little more than what the rabble a receiving without working for it.

What these solutions have in common is that they all operate within the framework of the system that creates the rabble in the first place. The most famous Hegel-influenced philosopher on socio-political matters, Marx, can be seen as looking for a solution by adopting an alternative system brought about by a revolution of, not the rabble, but the proletariat (the exploited workers who benefit minimally from the industrial social contract).

But is the creation of a rabble really as inevitable as Hegel thinks, given the roughly capitalist social contract that Hegel envisions? Can a free market industrial society exist without giving rise to a disenfranchised underclass, either at home or abroad? If it is not inevitable, who benefits from the patterns that give rise to this underclass, and what sort of resistance will efforts to change things generate among those beneficiaries?

My own intuition is that the creation of a rabble is not inevitable, even in a free market system, so long as that system is regulated and supplemented in the right ways--such as, for example, with minimum wage laws that undercut the incentive to play the working poor against the rabble for the sake of exploiting labor, and tax policies that erase the advantages of concentrating wealth through exploitation of the vulnerable. If the incentive to hire in the private sector is limited by worries of overproduction relative to demand, the government can step in as an entity not beholden to such profit concerns and hire the unemployed to do tasks that serve the public good: investments in infrastructure, etc.

But I'm not economist, so my grasp of these issue is limited. What do others think?

Blargh!-Worthy Facebook Memes: Some Helpful Corrections

A couple of times recently on this blog, I've found myself inspired to comment on a Facebook meme. But the ones that inspired these length treatments are hardly the only ones I have something to say about. So, I thought I'd round out this theme with some quick (for me) rejoinders to some of the more problematic recent Facebook memes--memes that just make me want to say "Blargh!"; or, in a few cases, memes that poke fun at those I disagree with, too, but which aren't really fair--and so are memes which I think should make me want to say "Blargh!" (even if I don't). There's more of the former. So sue me.

Anyway, here goes:

1.

No. No, no, no. If you state your opinion it's free speech. If I state my opinion it's free speech. Whether the opinion is ALSO hateful and intolerant depends on the content of the opinion.


2.

Let me be clear about something: I thought the Huckabee-created "Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day" was a terrible slap-on-the-head-worthy misdirection of the energies of Christians and others. Christians, in my view, should live out an ethic of love--and I'm convinced that living out that ethic is at odds with the sort of theology (usually a biblically fundamentalist one) that would inspire people to endorse and underwrite with their lunch money Chick-Fil-A's support for the systematic social marginalization of our gay and lesbian neighbors. Christians who think Chick-fil-A's support of discrimination is Christian are, it seems to me, Christians who have been deluded by bad arguments and bad theology.

But those very same conservative Christians, deluded as they may be about homosexuality, are also Christians who tend to rather consistently contribute time and energy and resources to food banks and homeless shelters and poverty-focused mission trips and other projects that help the poorest among us. But these contributions are made throughout the year. Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day got them all out on one day.

Don't get me wrong. I believe that the conservative Christian focus on sexual minorities serves, more often than not, as an easy way for conservatives to feel good about themselves: if you happen to have a heterosexual orientation, it's astonishingly easy to avoid the "sin" of homosexuality, so if being a decent human being is about being straight, you get to be good without any effort...at least if you're straight. And this easy validation often serves to obscure all the ways in which our way of life contributes to the problem of poverty, both at home and abroad. In this respect the meme above is gesturing to a deep truth.

But to suggests that Christians in general are more about supporting discrimination against sexual minorities than they are about feeding the poor, based simply on how many people showed up at Chick-fil-A on a particular day...well, that isn't fair to all those conservative Christians who, week after week, year in and year out, are contributing time and resources to helping the needy.


2.

The foundation of a democratic society, the basis for a government "of the people, by the people, for the people," isn't the right to drive. It's the right to vote. It isn't the right to board an airplane. It's the right to vote. It isn't the right to use a credit card or donate blood or open a retirement account.

It's the right to vote.

Asking for ID to vote may not be overtly racist, but it does impose an additional hurdle between the would-be voter and their ability to cast a vote. If you're part of the middle class, you don't tend to think of it in those terms because photo ID has become integral to the middle class way of life--as the above list of standard middle class activities highlights. But there are people who aren't part of that life--such as, it seems, some nuns and students, as well as those who are sufficiently underprivileged that driving their own car, boarding an airplane, making a bank transaction, writing a check, and pawning jewelry are things they only dream about.

Voting rights shouldn't be something they dream about too.

In the absence of substantive evidence of a serious problem of voter fraud, the very concept of democracy seems to demand that we err on the side of enfranchisement.


3.

Of course I'm ready. Because you remember how those violence-hungry liberals rioted and tore the country to pieces back in 2000 when Al Gore lost a highly contested election in a controversial Supreme Court decision despite getting a higher proportion of the popular vote.

Oh, yeah. That didn't happen.

And by the way, although I haven't seen a comparable poster warning about riots when Obama wins re-election, I'm hopeful enough about the general character of the American people that I'm not going to brace for revolution in that case either. Painting the opposition as fundamentally irrational, as poised for violence if the democratic process doesn't go their way, helps no one...which leads to the next meme.


4.

Yes, this meme made me chuckle--cleverly playing as it did with Missouri Republican Congressman Todd Akin's comments about women's bodies having a built in birth control mechanism to prevent pregancy due to "legitimate rape." But then I imagined a comparable meme taking some absurd comment by a Democratic politician--someone who'd been rebuked by the Democratic establishment for saying those very words, who apologized for them--and having whose words turned into a general remark about the stupidity of all Democrats.

There are legitimate thoughts--and dumb ideas--coming from both sides of the aisle. The polarization of our polity is making it harder not only to see this, but harder for everyone to be as thoughtful as we can be. In fact, sometimes members of one party seem obliged to take issue with the good ideas of the other just because the other side came up with them first. Hence, I suggest the following revision: "When a legitimate thought is about to occur, polarized political ideology has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."



5.

Now John Locke is one of the most important modern political and social philosophers. And I don't actually have a problem with Locke's words here. But I'm puzzled by these words being linked to a libertarian website--and even more puzzled that it should be posted by someone I know to be a follower of Ayn Rand's "objectivism." Do these words of Locke's actually support modern libertarianism or Randian objectivism?

I won't answer that in detail here. But it bothers me when a philosopher's words are taken out of the larger context which is required for us to understand what those words are really about. And so, being a philosophy teacher, this is a good opportunity to offers some philosophy education by providing the context.

The quote comes from a larger passage in the Second Treatise of Government that lays out Locke's basic argument for private property rights. Here's the immediate context:

"Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property."

This context has both a communal aspect--nature is the common property of all--and a private property aspect. And we can't rightly understand the latter without the former. And Beyond this immediate context there is an important broader context. Specifically, Locke offers two important qualifications that limit the right to acquire property through your own labor.

The first such qualification is that this right exists "where there is enough and as good left in common for others." In other words, your right to acquire property through labor is limited if, in appropriating for yourself more than your fair share of the common resources of nature, you leave others with less opportunity for flourishing than you yourself have managed to enjoy.

The second qualification comes in answer to the question of "how far" God has given to us the resources of nature. His answer is two words: "To enjoy." But this leads to his second crucial limit on the right to accumulate property: "As much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by his labor fix a property in; whatever is beyond this is more than his share and belongs to others." So, if you're just greedily accumulating wealth that doesn't add to the quality of or enjoyment of life, then you no longer have a legitimate claim on it. It rightly belongs to others whose quality of life would be enriched by it.

Which leads me to the last Blargh!-worthy meme...

6.

Now this one came to my newsfeed from the same source as the Locke meme, so it's only fair to judge it in terms of Locke's philosophy. And according to that philosophy, those who have appropriated for themselves more than what can meaningfully contribute to their quality of life, or who haven't left as much and as good for others, don't rightly own what they've appropriated, even if they worked hard to appropriate it. And so a government redistribution that makes it available as part of the common good which will contribute to the life quality of those who don't have as much and as good...well, that wouldn't be theft. If what was taken away fell outside of the bounds of our legitimate claim on private property, then the government would be taking it from those to whom it didn't belong. 

Interestingly, the above meme was paired with a quote from one of Locke's intellectual inheritors, a guy by the name of Thomas Jefferson (who adapted Locke's "life, liberty, and property" phrase for use in the Declaration of Independence). Here's the Jefferson quote:

"A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned."

Yes--but what about when grossly unequal distribution of wealth, caused in no small measure by those who've gained an economic advantage leveraging it into an opportunity to exploit laborers, to compensate them for their toil far less than their labor is worth--what if such practices lead to honest laborers not having enough bread to put in their mouths? Is redistribution of wealth theft then?

Sometimes, redistribution of wealth is theft. Sometimes, redistribution of wealth is returning what was stolen.

The Deficit We Should Worry About

Since not long after President Obama took office, Republicans have been making a big fuss about the federal deficit--something they don't typically do when a Republican is president and/or when military spending is the focus of attention. Then it's the Democrats who make a fuss about the federal deficit.

What's distinctive about the deficit fuss this time around is that it's linked to the 2008 economic crash and our subsequent economic troubles--as if, in hard times, it's important for all of us to tighten our belts and the federal government isn't doing its share of this. Usually this line of thinking is bolstered by an analogy to household budgets, which need to be balanced on pain of producing long-term hardship.

Not long ago a friend of mine, Steven Stark, very nicely explained the problems with this analogy. In a nutshell (and oversimplifying matters a bit), the argument is this: The federal government is fundamentally unlike a household (or a state govermnent, for whom the household analogy works better), because the federal government is a creator of currency. It creates the currency that it spends--and the currency isn't backed by gold in Fort Knox or anything like that. Not anymore.

Households get their economic resources from elsewhere, and if their expenses exceed their income they need to borrow economic resources from someone to whom they then owe money. But as a creator of its own currency, the federal government doesn't "owe" in anything like the way that we owe. And the way that the US government creates currency is through deficit spending. To put it another way, the federal government creates dollars by spending dollars--or, to be more precise, by spending more dollars than it takes in through taxation.

Deficit spending, in a nutshell, is a means for the federal government to pump money into the economy and thereby stimulate economic activity. The federal government puts money into the economy through federal spending and takes it out through taxation. When the economy is sluggish, the government peps it up by paying contractors to build roads or paying researchers to make new discoveries without asking someone else (the taxpayer) to foot the bill--that is, the government peps up the economy by putting more money into the economy than it takes out. In other words, through deficit spending. When the economy is overproducing relative to demand, the government can slow the economy down and so avoid runaway inflation by taking money out again--through taxing more than its spends.

If all of this is right, then the idea that the government needs to rein in deficit spending in tight economic times is precisely the wrong idea--and dangerously wrong. When the problem isn't runaway inflation but a cycle of shrinking consumer demand leading to business downsizing, leading to greater unemployment, leading to shrinking consumer demand, leading to even more downsizing, what we've got is a feedback loop that only deficit spending will break--only some combination of increased spending or tax cuts. To follow the household analogy here--to do as households do, and "save money" in tight economic times--is to guarantee, in effect, that our economic problems get worse rather than better.

That's the argument--rooted essentially in the economic insights of Keynes. If we're going to make progress in handling our economic woes wisely, we need to take arguments like this very seriously. We don't want to base policy on false analogies just because they seem like common sense on the surface. If we do, we're in danger of magnifying our woes rather than treating them.

But with all that said, I think there is something that conservatives on this issue get right. Because it isn't quite right to say that the federal government, unlike households (and state governments, etc.), create the currency they spend (in fact, create by spending) rather than getting its economic resources from elsewhere. Or maybe it's better to say that, while this is correct as far as it goes, it is misleading. No one lives on currency. We all live off of what currency buys. And the things that currency buys come from the planet--from the soil, and the oceans, and the mines we dig into the mountains, and the wells we dig in deserts and gulfs.

When we increase the amount of currency in circulation, we buy more things--more goods and services, more food and fuel. Businesses are stimulated to make more of the things we buy. Currency is a fabrication that governments can create by fiat, but the natural resources of the planet are not something we can similarly create by willing them into existence. The human economy depends on the economy of the natural environment. And the economy of the natural environment, upon which all of human civilization depends--does work a lot like a household budget.

The human economy is a subsystem within the broader planetary systems of nature. And the human economy is sustainable in the long run only if it extracts resources from global geo-ecological systems at a  rate equal to or less than the rate at which those resources renew themselves; and only if it dumps waste at a rate less than or equal to the rate at which the planet can assimilate those wastes.

Now fortunately, resources do renew themselves. And fortunately, our waste is assimilated, at least when our waste is some other creature's resource. But when the global human economy exceeds these environmental renewal and assimilation rates, humanity is engaged in the equivalent of massive deficit spending. We do that for long enough, and eventually we'll go bankrupt. That is, we won't be able to meet our needs anymore, and the global economy will collapse catastrophically.

Insofar as federal deficit spending stimulates economic growth, and insofar as economic growth means greater consumption of resources and waste production, federal deficit spending can contribute to ecological deficit spending--at least when the size of the global economy has already hit the limits set by renewal and assimilation rates. And there is reason to think that we are at or beyond those limits now.

The absurd character of our political system is such that those who are most clamoring for federal deficit reduction are precisely those who show no special concern for environmental protection, who think environmental concerns are overblown, who are global warming deniers, etc. But if there is a reason to be concerned about the federal deficit, it is because that deficit is correlated with an ecological one.

But this is not to say that we should oppose, on environmental grounds, any federal-level deficit spending. Not all federal deficit spending is created equal. Deficit spending is targeted: The government spends money on specific things. And some of things that one might spend money are things that help to reduce the ecological deficit. Development of our public transportation infrastructure. Research and development of more fuel efficient vehicles. Development of our capacity to harness solar energy. Environmental cleanup efforts.

Some forms of deficit spending qualify as invenstment spending--and while not every investment pays off (Solindra), the more we invest in enhancing our capacity to live within our ecological means, the better off we'll be. Some investment spending (education) isn't directly related to fighting the ecological deficit--but it is utterly essential for our capacity as a society to effectively mitigate environmental problems we confront.

In short, what we should care about isn't the federal deficit, but the ecological one. And while some kinds of deficit spending might contribute to the ecological deficit, other kinds might help mitigate it. If we want to crawl out of our current economic woes, the federal government needs to spend at a deficit. The trick is to know how to do that without selling out our children and grandchildren, without leaving them a world on the brink of ecological collapse. What we need now is targeted deficit spending that prioritizes environmental capital, that invests in our ecological wealth, and that positions us to more effectively confront the challenges ahead.


Comment: Today is Father's Day, and while this might not seem like a Father's Day post, in fact it is. My father, in his last years, devoted his life to educating the public about environmental sustainability issues, and was active in spearheading the development of "geoethics," a dimension of geology (his field) devoted to considering the ethical and social implications of insights gleaned from the earth sciences.