On Wishing the Pilot (or President) Will Fail

Back in January, on the day of Trump's inauguration, I posted on Facebook a reflection on memes like this one: 



The post was quite popular, being shared and reshared many times through Facebook, but I never got around to posting it here. A friend just reminded me of that post, and it seems appropriate, after Trump's first hundred days in office, to revisit that reflection. So I'm posting it here now. Enjoy.

I have heard it said that wishing for President Trump to fail is like wishing for the pilot of the airplane you are flying in to fail. This is a fair point, but some things are worth noting about this analogy.

First, if the pilot is incompetent to fly the plane, what I'd hope is that this incompetence is made apparent by some early but reparable failures, so that the pilot can be ousted from the cockpit before crashing the plane.

Second, a lot hinges on what the pilot is trying to do. If the pilot of a plane bound for Denver is indifferent to the passengers' wishes and needs and aims to redirect the plane to Miami because it will earn him a boatload of cash, I hope someone catches on and stops him before he succeeds... although I'd rather he land it successfully in Miami than crash.

If a pilot has been paid off by villains to deliver a plane full of people to some remote island to be made into slaves, then I hope that the pilot will fail to realize that aim--and either be forced to land the plane anywhere safe or have control of the plane taken away and handed over to someone with more benign aims. But if the choice is between crashing and being sold into slavery, it would be a hard call.

But what if the pilot is planning to fly the plane into a crowded building in an act of terrorism? If I can't get control of the plane away from the pilot, I might in that case hope he's so incompetent that he crashes into a bog or lake, someplace where there is a chance of survivors.

And if it looks to me like the pilot is drunk when he staggers into the cockpit, I'm not going to "give him a chance." I'm going to do what I can to call his state to the attention of anyone who can stop him from taking off in that state. And if I fail at that, I'm going to prepare for the worst, maybe by trying to find out if any passengers know how to fly the plane and sharing my fears with them.

In short, a whole lot hinges on whether you think the pilot is sober, competent, and motivated to serve the passengers by bringing them safely and efficiently to the destination they've chosen. Likewise, what we think of Trump's competence and aims and temperament will influence what we hope for, as well as how trusting or vigilant we need to be.

But of course, this analogy is imperfect, since a president has a far more complex set of objectives than a pilot has. It's more about preserving and directing a complex set of social institutions in such a way that each of us can succeed in achieving our aims. If the president wants to dismantle an institution that I am convinced works well to help us achieve our aims, and has no clear plan for implementing something that works as well, I will hope he fails at that, and I may try to do what I can nonviolently do to secure that hope. At the same time, I might hope he succeeds at doing something else.

Of course, there are even more disanalogies between a pilot flying a plane and a president serving a country--disanalogies that came up in discussion on my original post. What disanalogies do you see, and what are their implications?

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?

Racism and the Charleston Shootings: Individual and Collective Responsibility

Over the last few days I've seen the following meme reappear on social media. It shows up every once in awhile, usually when someone has done something horrible. This time, it's resurfaced in reaction to discussions about the tragic mass shooting at a black church in Charleston. Here's the meme:

This meme troubles me a lot. I'm a fan of individual responsibility and accountability. My worry is that this meme, in the name of accountability, functions to immunize us from it.

Let me explain. Clearly, the person directly responsible for the deaths in Charleston was the shooter, Dylann Roof. And he should be held accountable. He should be put on trial and, when convicted (which he presumably will be), sentenced harshly.

But when this Reagan quote resurfaces, as it has a tendency to do in the wake of horrific crimes, its purpose is not to encourage holding the agent of the crime accountable. It's purpose, rather, is to point the finger away from ourselves. "Hey, everyone! Look over there! Look at that deranged racist, that agent of horror."

If the trick works, we avoid having to look collectively towards ourselves and the ways in which we as a society contribute to the conditions that breed such agents of horror.

In Matthew 7:3, Jesus offers the following rhetorical question, intended to inspire us to look to ourselves, to see our own sins and not just the sins of others: "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"

Of course, Dylann Roof's sin is more than just a speck or sliver. People are dead because he pulled the trigger of a gun, again and again and again. He shattered lives. And none of us did anything as bad as that.

But there is a sense in which Dylann Roof is just a speck of sawdust. Because there is in America today the plank of racism, and what Roof did is a sliver off that plank.

"But I'm not a racist! I'd never do anything like what Roof did! What he did horrifies and outrages me!"

I like to think that every reader of this post thinks these very things, and thinks them sincerely. But racism isn't something that springs up in the hearts of individuals all by itself. Racism is learned. Racism isn't an individual thing but a cultural and systemic thing that takes root in individuals.

And all of us play some role in shaping our culture, for better or worse. All of us can take responsibility for fighting to make our society less racist, for identifying the subtle social forces that marginalize black Americans every day, for working to dismantle the hateful ideologies that make them targets for overt acts of violence.

I'm resistant to saying things like, "All of us a racists," because I think this sort of statement generates more heat than light. But even if we aren't all racists, racism is first and foremost a collective phenomenon, not an individual one. Social structures and cultural patterns conspire to make life harder for black citizens than for white ones--and these structures and patterns are bound up with implicit racial biases that most people don't even know they have. These biases are planted in our subconscious minds by broad cultural forces, coloring our choices and our thinking in ways we aren't aware of, ways which are at odds with our conscious values and commitments.

The grim truth is that many white people who aren't racist, who abhor racism, are victims of systemic and cultural racism in a different way than blacks are victims. White Americans who want to promote equality and justice are too often infected, against their wills, with cultural forces that compromise their own best intentions. That's why I prefer to say that those who harbor implicit racial biases are victims of racism, as opposed to being racists. But implicit racial bias is a problem, even if those who harbor those biases aren't individually responsible.

The evidence of this is clear all around us, and documented in study after study: Well-meaning preschool teachers who earnestly read "Martin's Big Words" to their students on Martin Luther King Day are nevertheless more likely to perceive black and white children differently in the classroom without even knowing it. They are, especially, inclined to perceive them as more responsible for their misbehavior. Liberal college professors who preach against racism in the lecture hall are nevertheless less likely to respond to inquiries from prospective graduate students if they think they're black. When I step on an elevator with a woman, she never unconsciously clutches her purse more closely to her body. But this happens to a black friend of mine regularly.

Why does this happen? What are the cultural forces in play? And how are these forces related to the forces that still today perpetuate the more overt forms of racism, like what we saw on display in Charleston? Dylann Roof didn't spring out of the ground. His racist ideology didn't come out of nowhere. What stew of social influences made him ripe for the more overt racism that found voice in his hateful manifesto and eventually drove him to kill? And what can we, collectively, do to change those forces?

These are questions that we need to tackle. If we want to stop tragedies like the Charleston shooting, we need to wrestle with how individual hate crimes are related to broader social patterns, patterns that won't go away just by punishing individuals. Unless we all take collective responsibility for the social force that is racism, that social force will keep giving birth to new Dylann Roofs.

Quoting Reagan may make us feel like we're off the hook. And that's the problem. We didn't shoot those people. And we may not harbor racial prejudices ourselves. But racism is a collective, structural, ideological, and cultural reality. And the only way to end it is if all of us take responsibility for asking the right kinds of questions, for listening to the stories of our black neighbors, for tackling the complex, thorny social issues that keep racism alive.

There's a plank in America's eye. We need to work together, all of us, to pull it out.

Religious Extremism: Critiquing a Facebook Meme

There's a (new?) Facebook meme that's crossed my newsfeed recently, one which I think warrants some critical attention. It looks like this:



There are several problems with this meme. Let me list a few.

1. Caricaturing the Left

I've never seen or heard anyone on the political left openly "side" with Muslim extremists--that is, defend the horrors perpetrated by such groups as ISIS or Al Qaeda, or argue that these groups are justified in what they do.

Rather, what I've seen and heard them do is react to sweeping generalizations that impute to all of Islam these horrors, or that strive to hold moderate Islam accountable for Muslim extremists in a way that they don't hold moderate Christians (or Jews) accountable for Christian (or Jewish) extremists.

This is not to say that there don't exist "leftist extremists" who are cheering on ISIS as they lop off Christian heads. But if they exist, they have no reputable public voice in this country--and so I suspect that this meme is really intended to caricature and thereby prematurely dismiss the kind of views I have heard from the political left.

People often hear what their biases tell them to hear, rather than what others are saying. I suspect there are people out there who believe that many moderate voices on the political left are really "leftist extremists" who are "siding with the decapitators" because they don't hear what those voices are actually saying.

The person on the political left says something like the following:

"There are extremists in every faith, and just as we don't stereotype all Christians as extremists based on the existence of extremists who act in the name of Christianity, so too should we avoid stereotyping all Muslims as extremists based on the existence of extremists who act in the name of Islam."

But what is heard is this:

"In saying that not all Muslims are extremists, I am defending Islam--which means I'm siding with Muslim extremists. And in saying that there are extremists who act in the name of Christianity, I am criticizing Christianity as a whole, which means I'm siding against Christians."

The above meme invites such an extreme and extremely muddled mistranslation, and hence perpetuates misunderstanding.

2. Framing the problem as a matter of who to side with in an us/them polarization

There's a disturbing us/them theme running through this meme. There's "us": the Jews and Christians who are labeled as extremists for wanting to exercise religious freedom (freedom to pray where we want and to withhold services where our religious conscience tells us to). And then there's them: the Muslims, who really are extremists, who are actually killing people in gruesome ways. And the liberals, by defending the Muslims while criticizing the Jews and Christians, have chosen to side with them.

This way of framing things actually builds on the first issue I talked about. It is clearly and obviously a mistake to compare a conservative Christian baker's refusal to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding with a nominally Islamic extremist's participation in terrorism and murder. Anyone who treats the two as morally comparable is operating with dangerously distorted lenses.

But no one with any publicly credible voice does that. There are many on the left who both criticize the Christian baker and defend the typical Muslim from being wrongly stereotyped based on the actions of extremists. But that is not the same as likening what the Christian baker does to what the ISIS terrorist does, let along siding with the ISIS terrorist over the conservative Christian baker.

The deeper problem here is the tendency to deflate the meaning of "extremism" in the first two examples so as to implicitly suggest that what is identified as Muslim extremism is as common among Muslims as the desire for freedom to act on religious conscience (even in controversial cases) is among Jews and Christians.

Let me be clear: I think Christians who want to withhold their business services from gay and lesbian couples are misconceiving Christian ethics in a way that promotes division and marginalization, thereby undermining the core thrust of Jesus' love ethic. But laws requiring them to provide such service are demanding that they act in ways that violate their sincere beliefs. Not without reason, of course. For the sake of preserving equality of opportunity for a socially marginalized group, it may be necessary to tread on freedom of religious conscience--but if so, to treat this matter as equivalent to invoking the law to keep extremists from beheading their targets does no one any good.

But in a sense, this meme does that very thing. It lifts up, as the paradigm of Christian extremism, something that even the most progressive Christian can understand and (somewhat) sympathize with: the struggle of conscience faced by the Christian baker. By implication, the meme suggest that even the most progressive Muslim is likely to view in a similar light the ISIS foot soldier hacking into the vulnerable neck of an aid worker.

As such, the meme plays into anti-Muslim stereotypes. It draws a sharp line between us and them, between what we are like and what they are like. By portraying "our" extremism as mild and at worst controversial compared with "theirs," the whole Christian and Jewish community is contrasted with Islam as a whole. And since their extremists target us, they are a threat to us. Sides must be taken.

3. Minimizing non-Muslim Extremism

My final point is related to the preceding one. The meme minimizes the extremism of those who self-identify as Christians and Jews for the sake of sharpening the perceived divide between Islam and other religions.

If we're looking for the worst cases of Christian extremism, refusing to bake a cake isn't among them. One might be tempted to point to Westboro Baptist Church and their hateful signs as a better example--or perhaps the isolated acts of those who kill abortion doctors in the name of Christianity. But these Christian extremists operate within the context of a civil society that has been relatively stable since the Civil War. By contrast, ISIS operates in a war-torn region of the world, one heavy-laden with ethnic conflicts which were, for a long time, forcibly suppressed by oppressive regimes.

We can only learn so much from comparing the worst that Christian extremism has produced in the stable environs of contemporary America with the worst that Islamic extremism has produced in the more volatile social, economic, and political climate of the Middle East.

There are better comparisons. And although I'm not a fan of Christopher Hitchens' overall assessment of religion in god is not Great, Hitchens does discuss, in that book, an example that may offer a better basis for comparison: the ethnic violence that tore through the former Yoguslavia after the collapse of its totalitarian communist regime. Hitchens describes the scene that greeted him when he visited the region in 1992:

The mainly Muslim city of Sarajevo had been encircled and was being bombarded around the clock. Elsewhere, in Bosnia-Herzegovina...whole towns were pillaged and massacred in what the Serbs themselves termed "ethnic cleansing." In point of fact, "religious cleansing" would have been nearer the mark...In effect, the extremist Catholic and Orthodox forces were colluding in a bloody partition and cleansing of Bosnia-Herzegovina. They were, and still are, largely spared the public shame of this, because the world's media preferred the simplification of "Croat" and "Serb," and only mentioned religion when discussing "the Muslims."

Hitchens goes on to  further describe what he takes to be the media's glossing-over of religious identities and divisions:

It would have been far more accurate if the press and television had reported that "today the Orthodox Christian forces resumed their bombardment of Sarajevo," or "yesterday the Catholic militia succeeded in collapsing the Stari Most." But confessional terminology was reserved only for "Muslims," even as their murderers went to all the trouble of distinguishing themselves by wearing large Orthodox crosses over their bandoliers, or by taping portraits of the Virgin Mary to their rifle butts. 

In Is God a Delusion?, I criticized Hitchens and the other new atheists for failing to distinguish between religion and what I call religionism. There is a difference, I think, between living out a religious faith and using religion as an identity marker to ideologically divide the world between us and them. The latter is what I mean by "religionism," and it's what I think is at work in cases like the violence in the former Yugoslavia. The Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs weren't slaughtering Muslims as an expression of their faith. Rather, they were acting out a divisive us/them ideology, and were invoking Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam as identity markers in their ideology of hate (in much the way that racists invoke "white" and "black" and other racial categories).

And so I think Hitchens is wrong to blame religion for the violence in the former Yugoslavia. But for the same reason, it is wrong to blame religion for the violence perpetrated by ISIS and other groups like them. ISIS and similar groups deserve to be called Islamist extremists only insofar as Islam serves as the identity marker with which they work out their ideology of hate. But if that is what warrants calling them Islamist extremists, then the closest parallel in Christianity--what deserves the corresponding label of "Christian extremism"--may be the brutal ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina by nominally Christian Croats and Serbs.

It is quite possible that different religions don't do enough to identify and guard against elements in their theologies and religious practices that lend themselves to extremist interpretations. It is quite possible that Islam can do far more than it has done in this regard. It is even possible that in recent years, Christians or Jews have done better. I don't know. But if so, these concerns need to be raised and addressed in a spirit of solidarity, in which people of all faiths are working together to defeat the problem of extremism, rather than taking sides against each other and seeing extremism as the problem of the other guy.

Because as soon as we do that, we are on our way to embracing the very us/them thinking that leads to extremism.

Anti-Gay Bigotry, Sincere Belief, and Christianity

There's a meme going around on social media that looks like this:



A recent Huffington Post article, "The Myth of Christian Discrimination in the LGBT Rights Movement," did a pretty nice job of explaining some of the key problems with this meme. But there are things I wish the article would have said--and there is a grain of truth in the meme that I want to acknowledge.

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 5 Best Sentences? Um, no.

So, not long ago the following facebook meme crossed my newsfeed (not sure of the original source):

 

The 5 best sentences I'll ever read?

I think not.

The best sentences I've ever read probably include "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" and "But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven." I think this one is pretty challenging: "Jesus answered, 'If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.'" I like this one from Aristotle: "Now virtue is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on deficiency." And I like this one from Mahatma Gandhi: "Democracy disciplined and enlightened is the finest thing in the world. A democracy prejudiced, ignorant, superstitious will land itself in chaos and may be self-destroying." (Okay, so technically that's two sentences.)

But these five? They'd hardly be worth my attention, except that yesterday was Labor Day, and taking the time to explain why I don't find these sentences...impressive...actually gives me the chance to say some things about labor. So here goes:

Number 1: "You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity, by legislating the wealth out of prosperity."

Huh?

Although that's all the response this sentence really deserves, let me generously expound a bit: The claim here seems to be that you can't make the life prospects of the poor better through legislation that taxes the wealthy (although I could be wrong about that...who the #$%@! really knows what this sentence is saying?).

But let's assume my translation is on track. If that's what's being said here, then, to put the point as plainly as I can: Bull.

Here's the thing. There are people who have found ways to leverage small advantages in our economy into progressively large ones by exploiting the power they gain over others. Doing so takes work--I'm not talking about lazy bums here. I'm talking about hard-working opportunists who are ruthless about maximizing their own wealth, even if it undermines the life prospects of others.

How does this work? The answer isn't simple, but here is one way: In any large business, the profits made are the result of collective effort. But the distribution of those profits is often in the hands of a few decision-makers. And those decision-makers have an incentive to reward themselves more highly. Some will act on this incentive. Some won't. Some will act on it to an extent. And some will be ruthless about it--perhaps by exploiting the desperate circumstances of the poorest in  society, leveraging their desperation into labor agreements which basically have them contributing far more to the collective entrerprise than they're getting out of it. And the decision-makers pocket the difference.

The more widespread such opportunistic practices are, the greater the poverty. Social, political, and economic realities can influence how widespread these practices are. One way to fight such practices is through labor unions. Collective bargaining can help prevent exploitation, since workers who are united are harder to exploit--but only if there isn't a sufficiently large pool of laborers outside the unions (perhaps waiting in Bangladesh) that can be turned to without much trouble.

A lot has been accomplished over the years by the efforts of workers' unions. Lives have improved. More people in the developed world have more hope of making a decent living by working hard. But beyond what laborers can do for themselves, there are things governments can do. Minimum wage laws, for example.

And taxes.

That's right. Taxes. To put it simply, if those inclined to exploit desperate workers for personal gain would have the gains of exploitation taken away in taxes, they'd lose the incentive to exploit. Why circumvent the labor unions in the US and build a factory in Bangladesh if the tax penalty is so high it will take decades to recover the moving and building costs? Why, for the sake of lining your own pocket, would you be grossly unfair in the distribution of wages in your company if, beyond a certain very healthy income of the sort you'd have to work hard to achieve, the taxes become so high that you'd just be handing money to the government that could better be spent making your workers happier with their jobs and with you?

This is part of what a progressive tax structure can do--not by itself of course, but as part of an overall government strategy aimed at erasing the incentives which lead to opportunistic exploitation and the poverty it can produce.

Taxation used in this way isn't about taking money from the rich people who earned it and giving it to the lazy bums who didn't. Rather, it's a piece of an overall plan for discouraging the inequitable distribution of wealth within a business, when that wealth was made through collective effort but decision-makers are inclined to disproportionately reward themselves.

Number 2: "What one person receives without working for, another person works for without receiving."

Well, in many cases I suppose this is true. My children receive food without working for it. I worked for it. I didn't receive it, since it went in my kids' bellies.

This, of course, is as it should be.

And I suppose that if you have hunter-gatherers living in an area of bountiful natural resources, they're "working" for what they receive in the minimal sense of reaching out and pulling the fruit from the trees. But then you compare them with another tribe of hunter-gatherers who live in a desert working far more than the first tribe has ever dreamed of working...and for their labors end up with far less. When you make that comparison, it begins to look like the first tribe has received something neither they nor anyone else worked for. And it looks like the second tribe is working hard without receiving much--but not because some other tribe is living off their labors.

Sometimes, one person receives something by good luck rather than anyone's work. Sometimes, another person's work has nothing to show for it because of bad luck, not because someone else ended up receiving the benefits.

So, what is this sentence getting at? I have a job. I get paid. The rickshaw puller in Calcutta has a job and gets paid. I work hard, but the rickshaw puller works orders of magnitude harder than I have ever dreamed of working. And the rickshaw puller gets a fraction of a fraction of what I make. There are probably investment bankers who spend as many hours at work, raising their blood pressure and shortening their life expentancy, as the rickshaw puller spends at work hauling more privileged people from one part of Calcutta to another. But the rickshaw puller, for that same amount of labor, is making a million times less.

The difference is a matter of luck, an accident of birth. Some people can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps, no matter how hard they struggle, because they have no boots. Others have closets full of boots they don't know what to do with--bought with their own money, to be sure, money they earned by working; but their work was rewarded 100,000 times more highly than the poor rickshaw puller's work. Do they deserve all those boots in a way that the rickshaw puller doesn't?

So: Who is working without receiving, and who is receiving without working? If two are working just as hard but one is getting a lot more, is the excess enjoyed by the one something that he or she is receiving without working for? Is the point that we should always receive an income in proportion to how hard we work? I suppose we could pull that off by having a world government taking income from those in the richest countries and giving it to the struggling poor laborers in the impoverished regions of the world...but I doubt that's what the fans of this sentence have in mind.

So what do they have in mind? Unless I miss my guess, it's supposed to be about government programs aimed at providing a social safety net for the poorest among us. You know, the programs that make sure the children of the unemployed single mother don't go to bed too hungry. True enough, that food those kids eat wasn't food they grew themselves. Their mother didn't grow it, either. Farmers did that.

Of course, most of the profits didn't go to the farmers--or to the poor kids. It went to Monsanto stockholders. And maybe to the lawyers Monsanto hires to sue the pants off farmers who inadvertently grew some genetically modified Monsanto crops because seeds drifted over from a neighboring farm.

Those making the big profits here probably worked hard, too--maybe as hard or harder than the farmers. Who knows? And I suspect that the mother of the hungry kids might be willing to work hard, too--assuming she could find a job, and assuming the cost of child care didn't all but erase her income ( maybe a job that earned her 3% of what that Monsanto lawyer makes in a year), and assuming she got to keep the job after the second time she missed work to tend to a sick child.

One single mother might be able to pull it off because she has an aunt or mother in town who can watch the kids so she can work three jobs to pay for rent and put food on the table for the children she never gets to see. But another single mother might be in a city far from relatives--because she ran away from the home in which she was being sexually molested and beaten, and became a prostitute to survive, and got pregnant. And now she has next to nothing and a baby to boot, and doesn't want to go back to prostitution on account of the child, but has no skills, no support network. No bootstraps.

We live in a world where opportunity and talent are not fairly distributed, where effort does not always translate into prosperity, and where there are no simple solutions. Some people are handed opportunity on a plate, and with a little bit of effort can turn it into a cornucopia. Others are handed a turd.

In such a world sentence 2 is staggeringly naive.

Number 3: "The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else."

First of all, I should point out that we left the gold standard for currency a few years ago--by which I mean in the 19th Century--and the economic realities of today aren't adequately represented by a statement as naive as #3 (for more details on the complexities of the issues in play, see here).

Second, the government is able to provide goods through organized collective action that a bunch of individuals, acting on their own, couldn't provide for themselves. The members of society benefit from the fruits of such collective action: national security, domestic peace, transportation and energy infrastructure, a basic social safety net (to help make sure that, even when catastrophic illnesses or natural disasters or financially devastating layoffs occur, we'll still have bootstraps we can pull ourselves up by).

I enjoy a relatively secure daily life in part because of a criminal justice system provided me by the government. I get to work driving on roads and over bridges built by the government. My children are being educated by the public schools. I help pay for these things through taxes. Others help pay for them too. But since we'd all be poorer without the opportunities these public goods provide, should I think of the taxes I pay as the government taking something away from me? Or is it better to think of it as being part of a society that, through collective effort, is providing me and those around me with someting none of us could have produced acting on our own?

My paying taxes, in that case, is the difference between me actually being a part of that collective action and me being a freeloader.

Number 4: "You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

Huh?

Number 5: "When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them; and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work, because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation."

Yeah, and if half the people in a nation fly to the moon in order to get away from the other half, and the other half fly to the moon to get away from the first half, then everyone in the nation will asphyxiate together on the moon.

Here's the thing: This statement is true enough, but so what? The statement matters--is something we should care about--if it's about something that's in danger of really happening.

I think those who find this sentence to be one of the best ones they've heard think of it as a warning about what will happen if we allow too much "socialism" into our society. But if so it's based on an Ayn Rand-inspired dystopian fantasy, not on any kind of socialism that has even the remotest chance of being vaguely approximated by the American government, regardless of which political party is in power.

I don't mean to say that there aren't serious problems with how we deal with poverty in America. While it is clearly false that half of Americans do not think they need to work because the other half is going to take care of them (and false that any policy proposals on the horizon would move us towards such a situation), it is true that there are some Americans who do not think that they have much hope of crawling out of poverty by working hard. They see living on welfare as the fairly miserable existence that it is, but don't believe that their effort and struggle will lead them to anything better. What results isn't laziness but hopelessness--not the optimistic idea that others will take care of them if they kick back, but the pessimistic idea that the social system won't reward them if they work hard.

If you want to change that, you have to change the way wealth is distributed. Somehow a higher proportion of the wealth generated by labor has to get into the pockets of the lowest level laborers, which in turn will likely mean that someone who is currently raking in the big bucks will have to see a smaller share of that wealth than they do now. There may be different ways to achieve this result, but one thing is clear: We can't rely on business decision-makers to fix the problem, since they tend to be beneficiaries of the current system. Chances are, if it's left to them, the problems will remain or only get worse.

Policies in Norway--a socialist country--have helped to ensure that the unemployment rate is among the lowest in the world--this despite having an ample social safety net. What's happened here? How dare the Norwegians be gainfully employed, in defiance of the Ayn-Randian narrative that socialism leads to a nation of people waiting for handouts? Maybe the answer is this: What encourages people to get to work is the presence of job options that promise a decent life, not the absence of a basic social safety net.

Is it foolish for a government to say, "If you don't bother to work we'll take care of you, and if you do bother to work we'll take your earnings away to take care of those who don't"? Absolutely. Has any presidential contender for either major political party in the US States ever seriously proposed such blasted idiocy? No. Have some people caricatured and distorted more left-leaning American politicians as if they were saying such a fool thing? Yes. Is a sentence that gestures to such a caricature one of the "best sentences I'll ever read"?

No.