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Libertarianism ------------- The
basic thesis is laid out in the Introductory section of 1600 words, followed
by documentation and argumentation in three sections, on History, Human
Nature, and Morality. With these additions, the essay comes to 13,200 words,
followed by eight appendices totaling an additional 18,000 words. But you can
read just the first 1600 words in as little as five minutes or so. -by Jim Bechtel As a founder of R.E.A.S.O.N. ( www.reason.ws
), Rationalists, Empiricists, And Skeptics Of
Nebraska, my writing has a Introduction
(1600 words): Economic
Fundamentalism. The
Garden of Eden. 1.
History: a) E Pluribus Unum Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian
models of government. b) Laissez faire liberalism The unstable 19th
century pyramid of exploitation. c) Laissez faire conservatism Railroads. TV Violence.
Modernity. Anarchy. New Deal pragmatism. Ideology. Minimum wage. Eliminating
poverty. Class war. Abortion. 2.
Human Nature Individual and group.
Evolutionary psychology and evolutionary social sciences. Cheaters and saints. Primate
stress. 3.
Morality. Slavery, capitalism and
poverty. Problems of modernity. 4.
Conclusions. Apologetics. Extremism. ------------------------------------------- Appendices: 1.
Letter on Reagan, with documentation 2. For
America’s Sake, by Bill Moyers 3. Krugman on Milton Friedman 4.
Walter Williams on Disparity 5.
Social Security 6.
Abortion 7.
Religion 8.
Altruism ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction Economic
Fundamentalism In my years in the peace movement I met many wonderful people, some of whom called themselves anarchists, libertarians, or pacifists. One thing we had in common was our rejection of the militarism of the mainstream culture. In the rationalist/skeptic movement I’ve also met people attracted by our rejection of mainstream ideas. And we’ve attracted our share of crackpots! Since our meetings are open to the public, we have to cope with them as best we can. One old fellow is a Nazi (definitely out of place), one young fellow is a Gold Standard Monetarist, one was a Christian Socialist, several are Libertarians, and so on. If they come with a sense of humor and openness they’re welcomed, and maybe we can learn from each other, but if they come with the grim dogmatism of a Cultist it becomes (as one member wrote to me) “wearisome” trying to debate with them, especially the dedicated economic fundamentalists. I’m going to use “Libertarian” as a shorthand umbrella term for them, with the understanding that it includes all shades of definition. (You can find discussions & links in the Wikipedia articles on Libertarianism, Anarcho-capitalism, Minarchism, Objectivism, Free Market Anarchism, Classical laissez faire Liberalism, etc.) The
Garden of Eden! Just think what Adam and Eve got to enjoy! No rules & regulations, no taxes, no governing councils, no laws! (Well, OK, there was that one law against eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Early on we see Yahweh's hostility toward knowledge.) Every culture seems to look back with longing at a mythical Golden Age when mankind lived together in harmony, free as the birds. Maybe this longing is a dim reflection of the time we spent as hunter-gatherers, living in a state of relative equality which left traces in our psychology, an instinctive egalitarianism that stemmed partly from the fact that our groups were our extended families, and partly from the fact that stone-age nomads can't accumulate much to distinguish them from each other. Burial mounds reveal status symbols like jewelry and swords only after transitioning away from simpler hunter-gather economies. (More on this in Part Two, Human Nature.) One of the Big Questions facing modern man is: How do we preserve what was good in the traditional, small-scale, face-to-face way of life, in the midst of this vast, complex, impersonal civilization we have constructed? How do we build the ideal society? There have been many answers to
that question, from Fascism on the Right to Communism on the Left, and I
don't claim to be omniscient enough to pick the best one, but I think we can
apply the power of reason and whittle down the possible candidates. First,
let's grant good intentions to all such seekers. Everybody wants to return to
But even before getting into that
level of detail, why not simply first look around the world and ask which
social systems seem to be the most successful at producing a good life for
their practitioners? "By their fruits ye shall know them," so to
speak? If we take this unbiased empirical approach and look at measurable
results, we immediately have to disqualify the The Garden of Sweden may not be the Garden of Eden, but they must be doing something right: Number One in The Economist's Intelligence Unit's "democracy index," second lowest infant mortality in the world, number one in the "mother's index," in third place in global competitiveness, near the top in technology, high in the UN's "human development index," in Quality of Life, etc. High taxes, yes, but in return they enjoy free university education (!), free child care, very generous sick leave and parental leave, a ceiling on health care costs, cheap and efficient public transportation, and so on. In other words, the economic system is run for the benefit of the people! It’s no coincidence that they are also among the world’s staunchest environmentalists. Whereas capitalism is committed to maximizing private profit from the natural world, alternative economic models allow more weight to ideas of “public good.” Libertarians and other True Believers
can bad-mouth the Swedes as "heretics" all they want in the name of
their various abstract orthodoxies, but in real-world terms the Scandinavians
have far lower crime rates and poverty rates than we do,
and a better life in virtually every measurable way. Why? Many variables, but
in my opinion one of the main reasons is because, like the other
"leftist" western and northern European countries, they rejected
Stalinist Communism and Marxist Revolution in favor of Fabian Socialism or,
to use its less demonized label, economic democracy, simply the
use of the vote to make the economic system more humane --a system built up
in Sweden by the Social Democratic Party and the trade unions. Half the
delegates in the Swedish Parliament are members of unions (a dirty
word in the (Incidentally, in 2006 79% of Americans said they'd like to belong to "an employee association for an independent voice" -i.e., a union. So four out of five want it, but fewer than one in ten actually belong to such an organization, which raises a question for another day: Why are Americans powerless to get what they need? Hint: the power of propaganda.) I can already hear one objection
to the term “socialism:” What about the likes of Hugo Chavez? In early
2007 the Venezuelan National Assembly voted him the power to rule by decree
so he could “build socialism.” Certainly not very democratic. Well,
let’s face it, Third World nations without the equivalents of the Magna
Charta and the Fabian Society in their background are unlikely to evolve
easily into economic democracy, as If they’re lucky, systems of
benevolent paternalism or authoritarianism can succeed for a while
(Singapore) but, as with hereditary monarchy (George III), they are
eventually doomed to crash against the long-range problem of getting rid of
incompetent oligarchs or murderous Leaders (Pinochet). Sometimes they place
their hopes in military intervention to restore order or keep the peace, as
we saw recently in “Socialism” is a broad and vague
enough term to begin with, but it has been so demonized by its enemies that
it is practically useless. Ironic, since it was once such a popular term that
even right-wing regimes claimed the label. Hitler’s “National Socialists”
purged the socialists from the But it’s only a word, so we’d just as well abandon it in favor of “economic democracy.” After all, the word is less important than the idea behind it: Using the power of the vote to make the economic system more humane and beneficial. As George Bernard Shaw and the other Fabians understood, it is the natural extension of democracy. Incidentally, Shaw’s book, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, is still a very enjoyable introduction to the basic concepts. (As a famous playwright, he often attended High Society events in which some Grande Dame would inevitably ask how he could possibly be a -sniff- sewcialist. He wrote the book in reply.) Voting democratically to make the American economic system more humane is rejected outright by Libertarians. It’s “collectivism,” taboo, even though the logic is clear. Businessmen enjoy the invisible benefits of living in the cooperative effort we call civilization: a work force educated in public schools, kept healthy by water treatment plants and meat inspection laws, traveling to work on publicly constructed highways, vacationing in National Parks, etc. But taxing the businessman to help pay for his benefits is rejected by Libertarians as "tyranny." By default then, they allow the machinery of the State to be monopolized by private power. In the name of some fictional utopian world --in which water magically gets purified, National Parks preserved from commercial use, and schools & roads built, all without collective decisions and enforcement-- in the name of this incoherent vision, the economic fundamentalists would disarm us of the best weapon we have in the real world, leaving us as defenseless against concentrations of corporate power as 19th century serfs. Fundamentalism: Just as Creationists reject our best tool for dealing with biology, Libertarians reject our best tool for dealing with social problems. And they do so by distorting (or simply ignoring) history, human nature, and morality. 1.
History Popular historian David McCullough warns us that amnesia is as harmful to a nation as it is to a person. It’s important for us to understand: How did we get here? What follows is selective and simplified, to be sure, but accurate. And the events and conclusions, as contrary to common beliefs as they might be, can be found in any standard college text. It’s the job of the professional historian to see through popular myths. For example, Ronald Reagan was an idol to many Libertarians and one of the most popular presidents ever, with the public ranking him right up there with FDR, but we historians rank him as mediocre (only 26th) for many reasons including his disastrous economic ideology. See Appendix 1. a) E Pluribus Unum When some of the English
colonies in North America (but not all
--thus Canada) broke away from the mother country they adopted the
Articles of Confederation, little more than a loose alliance, reflecting
their distrust of governmental power. But defects quickly became obvious. If
you’re a blacksmith near the border of a state, will you be charged a toll to
carry a wagon wheel to a customer across the state line? There is no national
market. If you’re a wine salesman from Delegates assigned to reform the Articles of Confederation decided instead to scrap them and create a genuine national government. The result was the Constitution. Fear of centralized power led the Jeffersonians to strike a bargain. Admitting the need for reform, they agreed to support the Constitution only if it were first amended to protect individual rights from officialdom (and from majorities). Thus the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the “Bill of Rights.” Freedom of speech and freedom of the press would ensure that minority opinions could survive and compete. Political parties were born from
this. On the right were the Federalists, exemplified by So the conservatives of the time believed in strong, active, central government, while the liberals of this period embraced laissez faire and “states’ rights.” Ironic, how these ideas would shift. But also instructive. b) Laissez faire liberalism
abandoned In a world of widely scattered
log cabins, a laissez faire anti-government philosophy may have made
some sense. Why was it abandoned? In the first place liberalism, being pragmatic, is more interested in results and is thus willing to change ideology. If laissez faire no longer protects rights, scrap it. (Here I follow J. Livingston and R. Thompson: Liberalism is procedural, conservatism substantive. Liberalism sees democracy not as belief in specific dogmas but as an evolving system of procedures such as free speech, which ensure liberty. It seeks the guidance of reason, inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment. Conservatism sees society as residing in the substance behind specific symbols to which there is an emotional commitment: Flag, Capitalism, Religion, Hierarchy. It seeks permanence, guided by Tradition.) From time to time human suffering
challenges a society’s conscience; the post-Civil War was such a period. One
example: Mill owners preferred to hire children to serve the looms; their
small arms could more easily reach into the machinery to untangle knots. Of
course, so the complaint went, they tended to become less alert as the
12-hour workday dragged on (nap time), and sometimes a little kid would get
her arm torn off. If
she survived, what could you do but fire her? She’s obviously
useless with just one arm. She’s “free” to sit on the curb with a begging
bowl. (Unless she’s jailed for vagrancy.) The grim reality of every-day life
in the 19th century is beyond imagining for most of us modern
pampered Americans, although it still exists in the Clay Naff: "I endorse the claim that capitalism creates wealth better than any other system of economy. I also think fire cooks food really well, but that doesn't mean I want fires blazing out of control in my home. Like fire, capitalism needs to be carefully regulated." Novelists like Stephen Crane (Maggie, Girl of the Streets), Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward), Mark Twain (The Gilded Age) and Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie) captured the spirit of the times -and anyone, libertarian or not, who wants to understand America should read the literature of the late 19th century. Ignatius Donnelly’s novel, Caesar’s Column, envisioned a future in which the poor rise up in rage, kill their rich tormentors, and cement their bodies into a pillar. The people of the nineteenth century feared class war the way we feared nuclear war. Why? The misery and desperation created by raw unregulated capitalism threatened the survival of civilization. Robert Wiebe‘s classic, The Search for Order, interpreted the reform movements of the Progressive era as the response to unsustainable chaos. The search for order led to a re-thinking of the old laissez faire dog-eat-dog ideas. J. P. Morgan created the world’s first billion dollar corporation, U.S. Steel, and paid himself a fee of $150,000,000 for arranging the deal. Now, folks, this was when a beer cost a nickel and a meal cost a quarter; a million bucks was a lot of money, and 150 million was staggering. What did this vast fortune rest on? Protective tariffs, shutting down competitors, etc, but most importantly, it came from “working 200,000 men twelve hours a day for wages that barely kept their families alive,” as Howard Zinn puts it. Forget the morality of it, if you
like, and just look at the practical side. It didn’t work. There were no
customers. With all the wealth concentrated at the top and masses of workers
at the bottom too poor to buy anything, the system was unstable, the
pyramid of exploitation was top-heavy, and it collapsed over and over again. And
there were no social services; if you were out of work, you were “free” to
face the terror of starving or freezing to death. Depressions and recessions
happened every few years. You could have been born during the one in 1857,
witnessed the collapses of 1865, 1873, 1893, 1907, 1910, and 1917, lived into
your seventies, and died during the crash of 1929, never having seen a
ray of hope in your entire desperate lifetime. (Note: most of these collapses
preceded -and thus could not have been caused by-
the Federal Reserve System, the favorite scapegoat of monetarists.) Imagine
such a fearful life, never knowing if you’ll survive from one crash to the
next. Talk about hopelessness! The situation was intolerable; the cry was “Do
something!” Mary Ellen Lease, The pressure mounted for one simple idea: Government had to become active on behalf of all people, not just the elites. Republican Teddy Roosevelt marks the change. His active, even hyperactive, personality fit the times; you couldn’t keep him from doing what needed doing, involved in everything. He had to be “the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral,“ as his daughter said. TR was a man of action; he was eager to “do something” about the social problems tearing society apart: Inspect meat-packers, broaden the banking system, set aside land for national parks, break up monopolies, regulate the railroads, label drugs, etc. A member of the elites himself, he was not catering to some kind of resentment of the rich from the poor (most of whom wished to become capitalists themselves) but to the widespread understanding that vast riches were accumulated unfairly, on the backs of poorly-paid working people. Liberalism now abandoned the old
Jeffersonian utopian mythos of The seeds of TR‘s “New Nationalism” came to fruition a generation later in the wide-ranging New Deal of his Democratic cousin Franklin Roosevelt. (Eric F. Goldman’s Rendezvous with Destiny captures the excitement of this era.) “Mindful of Plutarch's
warning that ‘an imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal
ailment of all republics,’ [Franklin D.] From the good background essay by
Moyers, Appendix 2 Using the power of the vote to make the system more democratic included the 16th Amendment (Income Tax), aimed at tapping into that concentration of wealth at the top to make life better for everyone, including those at the bottom whose sweat helped create that wealth. Of course, nobody enjoys paying taxes, and those with power can skew tax laws to their benefit, but that is an argument for more effective democracy, not for abolishing taxes. Libertarian cultists often claim the 16th Amendment is unconstitutional because some States, when ratifying it, replaced commas with semicolons, and other such arguments without merit, which are listed and analyzed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_protester_constitutional_arguments (Incidentally, regarding taxes, if someone offered me a job paying ten million dollars a year on the condition that I pay 90% taxes, leaving me with a million to live on, I’d jump on it so fast …. The point is that taxes are an abstraction, what is REAL is the living standard you’re able to enjoy.) c) Laissez faire conservatism First off, we can agree with libertarians and conservatives on the dangers of the excesses of State power, and the need for vigilance (see below, under Morality). Woodcock's heroic history of Anarchism reveals a wonderful spirit of resistance to oppression. And we can acknowledge the unintended dysfunctions of modern society. The problem is in diagnosing the causes of these dysfunctions. A good example is the negative impact of capitalism. Two case studies: 1. Railroads. Everyone knew the railroad would create a national market and bring prosperity along its route, which it did. And since it was far beyond the resources of private enterprise for the first generation or so, conservatives demanded that government subsidize its construction. Corruption was one result (the Credit Mobilier scandals). What no one could have predicted was that it would erode the strength of the family farm, where most Americans lived, and where family members had been strongly dependent on each other in their rural isolation. Railroads pushed the farm in the direction of cash crops (dependent on distant markets and mail-order goods), eroding self-sufficiency and increasing urbanization, weakening the family, and ultimately contributing to the rise of divorce (details: Henslin, 1998). 2. Violence. Commercial
television, through desensitization, role modeling, and operant conditioning,
increases the level of violence in society. This is well-documented. For example, Dr. Brandon Centerwall has tracked the doubling of homicides that
follows 10 to 15 years after TV is introduced into previously isolated
communities, in In both cases conservatives, including their libertarian allies, correctly identify social problems (weakening of the family, violence) but are unable to identify the causes because of their ideological blinders. So “liberalism” is blamed or, if you’re James Dobson, “secular humanism” is the convenient, if illogical, scapegoat. The modern world. Libertarians often target “bureaucracy”
when they argue for shrinking government but, as Max Weber showed,
bureaucracy is a basic feature of modern industrial society, replacing the
oath of personal loyalty in medieval feudalism with the impersonal rules of
the office. The It’s not enough to just say “bureaucracy
is bad.“ The creation of a professional civil
service in 1883 was a great step forward. More or less nonpartisan, the pride
of the dedicated career bureaucrat was efficient public service. But changes
in the Civil Service 30 years ago expanded the number of political appointees
in place of public servants, and under Dubya Bush
the partisan politicization of the bureaucracy reached disastrous new levels.
Competence was secondary to ideological loyalty. The result? Hurricane
Katrina: “Heck of a job, Brownie.“ H. George
Frederickson of the Department of Public Administration at the Max Weber interpreted modernization as the replacement of tradition with rationality (bureaucracy as an efficient way to pursue profit, initially), Durkheim defined the modern world as one of increased specialization (“organic solidarity“), and Tonnies saw it as the loss of intimate community or Gemeinschaft. Now, wouldn’t it be nice if there were a simple answer to “the Gemeinschaft problem“? Wouldn’t it also be nice if there were a simple answer to the diversity of species? But neither the Creationists’ bumper stickers (God made them) nor the Libertarians’ (gummint bad) are fruitful. Biology is complicated, societies are complicated, and these shortcuts are dead ends.
Anarchy. An “archon” was a priest-king, and the prefix “a“ means “without.” As a-theism is life without a god, a-archon or anarchy is life without a ruler. The idea is that self-organization will occur, people will voluntarily form associations to accomplish their goals. Indeed this does happen in simple pastoral/horticultural societies (see “the CAP problem” in the section on human nature). So far so good. But recall JP Morgan’s pyramid of exploitation. What “voluntary association” would have any effect on that? In industrial/capitalist societies, anarchy means not only “a-archon” but also “a-public interest.” We saw that the practical objection to exploitation was that there was no base of customers, leading to constant collapse. Teddy Roosevelt’s response was to take action to address the problems of inequality. But old anarchist and libertarian ideas -“do nothing”- remain powerful despite the lessons of history, just as in religion the zeal of the creationist overcomes the facts of the geologist. As government began to be used for the common good, government activism became more & more suspect in the eyes of the ruling elites (until Reagan could announce “government is the problem“). After Teddy Roosevelt, reformers
and progressives no longer had a home in the Republican party as True
Believers in the Invisible Hand of the Market recaptured it. President
Coolidge said “the business of New Deal pragmatism. By the 1920s conservatives had completed their switch to embracing laissez faire: “Mind your own business, government! Taxes are evil. That’s MY money! Jail the Reds and pinkos advocating leftist ideas. And don’t tell me I can’t run my looms with child labor!” But the Great Depression of the 1930s ended
that, as the homeless unemployed threw together grim shanty-towns and set up
cooperatives in which barter replaced money (see the 1934 movie Our Daily Bread) and
radical ideas spread (read Steinbeck‘s In Dubious Battle). This
time the collapse was the ultimate one. In 1933 four thousand banks failed (zero
after New Deal reforms). In those days before deposit insurance, if your bank
folded you were plumb out of luck. “In one Midwestern town … one woman,
shouting and sobbing, beat on the [bank’s] closed plate-glass doors; all of
her savings from a quarter century of making rag rugs had vanished. A woman
who had taught the fourth grade for fifty-two years lost every penny she had
set aside for her old age.” Farm foreclosures skyrocketed. “One account
reported that on a single day in April, 1932, one fourth of the entire area
of the state of (To understand what happened in
the 1930s, the events that created modern In the face of such social problems, in such an extreme crisis, the question is how do we protect the public interest; what safeguards work? Do nothing? Continue to have blind faith in the fairy-tale “Invisible Hand” of Adam Smith, as classical “free market” economists had traditionally insisted? FDR’s advisor wrote: “The cat is out of the bag. There is no invisible hand. There never was. We must now supply a real and visible guiding hand to do the task which that mythical, nonexistent, invisible agency was supposed to perform, but never did.” (Rexford Tugwell, quoted in Leuchtenberg, p. 34.) If you listen to conservative Congressmen spouting on C-Span, you’ll see that the ideology of the free market has never admitted defeat. Just as the creationists can’t win on facts but will never quit, thus inflicting on us an endless “culture war,” likewise the economic fundamentalists can’t win on facts but won’t quit, so we have to suffer endless “spin-doctoring” (propaganda) to convince us to embrace their ruling-class ideology. Note: Sociologists define “ideology” differently from most dictionaries. We define it as cultural beliefs that justify stratification. (Henslin, p. 160.) Three examples: The Divine Right of Kings was the ideology, the cultural belief, that justified aristocracy, racism was the ideology that justified slavery, and Social Darwinism was the ideology that justified the Robber Barons. Political ideologies are, therefore, closed systems masking economic interests, and their believers become defensive & belligerent when challenged, as we see with the same three examples. The Diggers (“True Levellers”) challenged the 17th century power structure (Divine Right) and were executed, abolitionists challenged slavery and got tarred and feathered; reformers challenged Social Darwinism and risked being jailed as “Reds,” and so on. (Slavoj Zizek goes further, with his metaphysical definition: ideology, even when transparently false or cynical, subconsciously restructures social reality itself to conform to its fantasies. “Cultural beliefs that justify stratification“ is adequate for our purposes.) Libertarianism is ideological; it asks “is this orthodox?” (that is, does it comply with their elaborate & sophisticated dogma?) while economic democracy is pragmatic, and asks “does this reduce poverty?” Being more outcomes-based, economic democracy is self-correcting -as long as it stays democratic. (From Bentham’s utilitarian “shoe-pinch” theory of democracy: Who else can best tell where the shoe pinches than he who is wearing it? Who‘s a better judge of governing than the governed?) The practical FDR said: Try something. If it doesn’t work, try something else. The result is that the New Deal programs ranged across a broad spectrum from the highly successful TVA on the far left (brainchild of Nebraska’s own George Norris) to the Blue Eagle flag of the fascist National Recovery Administration on the far right (too collectivist, struck down by the Supreme Court). His successor Eisenhower left New Deal accomplishments in place and Americans enjoyed an era of consensus. By contrast Reagan and Dubya Bush were the exact opposite of FDR the pragmatist; they were pure ideologues, pursuing their narrow, divisive, right-wing ideological goals with religious fervor regardless of practical consequences. Their ruthless quest for power has produced the present bitterness and gridlock. It was Michael Deaver’s job to sell Reagan’s image (versus substance), Karl Rove’s intent was to govern by arousing the narrow “base,” and his successor Ed Gillespie is known for his “fierce partisanship.” How long it will take to undo the damage I don’t know. The Minimum Wage: Used to be if productivity went up, wages went up. If the company made higher profits, the good fortune was shared with the workforce. But no more. On Labor Day 2001 a study was released that showed that if the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity it would be $13.80, and if it had risen with profits it would be $20.46. Nobody with a job would be poor. (Inflationary pressures are another story.) So the rules of the game have changed, back toward the way it was played in Marx’s day: Lower wages = higher profits. For decades I’ve had to listen to the mouthpieces for Big Business roll out their predictions of the unemployment and doom that would result if fast-food cooks got a decent wage. Their argument usually goes like this: If Melvin pays three cooks five bucks an hour (total $15) he can only pay two at 7.50 an hour (total $15). True but irrelevant. Or relevant only temporarily and only on the micro-scale of the individual cafe. On the macro-level what happens nationally is, there is more money in the hands of cooks and others with a high “marginal propensity to consume” (the lower the income the more you’re forced to spend all you get, just to survive). More demand is injected into the local economy, stimulating it, and as the economy grows Melvin finds his business booming, and hires back anyone he might have actually laid off in the panic that resulted from listening to the prophets of doom. That’s how it has worked since the Great Depression: A constantly increasing minimum wage and a constantly expanding economy. And right-wing prophets who are constantly wrong. As part of his War on Poverty in
the 1960s, President Johnson got the minimum wage boosted to 111 % of the poverty
level (“if you work you won‘t have to live in poverty“), and unemployment was
2.6 %. But President Reagan listened
to the right-wingers, the minimum wage declined to 77% of poverty (“screw you“),
and unemployment reached 10.8 %. More
recently, several studies of For a good discussion of recent economic history, with attention to Milton Friedman, the patron saint of the Right, see Appendix Three. Poverty. When asked what causes poverty, “personal laziness or societal injustice,” 60 % of Americans blamed the poor (to 40% blaming society), while Swedes saw it just the opposite and blamed the social structure 61 to 17. West Germans agreed 54 to 12. (Inglehart et al, “Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values,” American Sociological Review, Feb 2000.) Now, if it’s a personal defect,
why help “those people”? On the other hand if it’s a social problem,
why not fix it? So the Europeans plunge right ahead and eliminate poverty.
(And, by the way, note that nothing disastrous happens as a result.) What do
I mean by saying they eliminate poverty? More accurately, they reduce it to
very small percentages (one percent of the Dutch are poor over a five year
period.). The “Old World” of Europeans see a social problem -poverty and the human suffering it brings- and attack it. We insist on moralizing about it (dividing the victims into the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor”) and hold back. So one reason we do such a poor job of reducing poverty is we are out of touch with reality, blinded by our harmful ideological beliefs.
A brief history of our dominant ideology: 1600s, John Calvin (Calvinism: wealth is God‘s reward for virtue); 1800s, Herbert Spencer (“Social Darwinism:” let the poor die out), and most recently Davis-Moore (unequal rewards are functional; a necessary incentive for meritocracy), rebutted by Tumin‘s four questions about whether or not people actually get what they deserve: a) Is work rewarded in an
objective way? Norman Borlaug, an b) Is the system a true meritocracy? The most accurate predictor of success in college is family income, not grades. CEO salaries have become a scandal, golden parachutes of millions of dollars awarded for failure. More like a rigid caste system than a meritocracy: The best long-term recent study of social mobility found that “five or six generations are required, to erase the advantage or disadvantage of your economic origins” (WH 11/17/02). c) What about unpaid work, such as mothers at home? Is the job of raising children really worthless? d) What about the waste of talent in the “reserve labor pool” of the unemployed, or the conflict brought on by glaring inequality? Conclusion: Dysfunctional. Regarding d): Americans love the Horatio Alger myth of “rags to riches” because it reinforces the ruling-class ideology of success. In the movie “Finding Forrester” an unrecognized genius, a black kid, is rescued from the ghetto by a curmudgeonly old white professor (Sean Connery). In “Good Will Hunting” the unrecognized genius is rescued by his therapist (Robin Williams). Nobody asks, what happens to all those without a rescuer? Millions trapped in poverty with no rescue = wasted talents = dysfunctional. The “free market” actually means
control by those with influence; the wealthy. But the ideal of competition,
the vision of the village street lined with mom & pop shops, is an
attractive myth. More than a myth, it was true once upon a time, in European
villages of 1500 AD, or in the Here’s a recent example: How we lost our leadership in internet access: “….
Equating capitalism with material “wealth creation,” as libertarians do, overlooks the fact that wealth creation also happens in non-capitalist and pre-capitalist societies, is a joint effort, and ignores immaterial wealth, intangibles like those contributed to society by humorists and satirists (what’s the dollar value of the last joke you told?) or by educators (what is the value of the knowledge you acquired in college?). Yes, our markets benefit from the “Rule of Law,” but law is not exclusive to capitalism; in fact the Robber Barons scorned it. There are Left and Right versions of anarchism: the boring Right believes in free markets (the mom & pop myths), the wild Left is less orthodox and so is much more interesting: Why not go all the way, to Proudhon? “All property is theft.” Yikes! Get your hands off my bicycle! But there’s a kernel of truth behind it: Property rights do not automatically override all other values or considerations, such as the goal “to promote the general welfare,” as the Preamble to the Constitution puts it. In the 1890s, when the concept of the public interest began to emerge, Robber Baron Vanderbilt said simply “the public be damned!” It’s a rarity to find a business leader who will admit, as Edward Filene did during the New Deal: “Why shouldn’t the American people take half my money from me? I took all of it from them.” (Leuchtenberg, p. 190.) Class war: The Roman empire’s “Clash
of The Orders” was messy, bloody. Does this stress on class war
make me a Marxist? No, I recognize other factors. Most historians endorse a “multi-causal”
view of history. Four quick examples of these other factors: From William H.
McNeil I learned to appreciate the overlooked role of the nomad warrior
tribes who struck across the Eurasian steppes, bringing down or transforming
dynasties in So Marx’s economic determinism is not the only explanation for the shape of history, but certainly the struggle for economic power is a real part of social evolution, and we wear blinders if we ignore it. Especially when those with wealth and power are waging and winning a class war right under our noses (Appendix Four). The dominant ideology is so well propagated, working people identify with ruling class beliefs. Financier Jay Gould boasted in 1886 “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half“ because desperate working men did not identify with their brothers but with their masters. The Homestead Steel Strike six years later was a perfect example. Three hundred down-and-out cowboys, miners, and roughnecks were hired to attack the strikers, resulting in a day-long gun battle. Marx called this “false consciousness,“ as opposed to “class consciousness.” One libertarian recently told us he considered himself a capitalist because he is selling his labor in exchange for a salary. Fellow Reasonnaire Jim G replied “no, labor is one of the factors of production for a capitalist, and so is slavery--some factors are just compensated better than others.” Are Privatization: Scandals at Walter Reed
hospital, attributed to the private contractors (http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/03/06/outsourcing_walter_reed.php),
remind me of when I was at HUD a quarter century ago. The Reagan
Administration, also under this same spell, the myth of private enterprise
efficiency, outsourced the appraisal of FHA homes, allegedly to "reduce
the cost of government." It was a joke. Immediately all the old FHA
appraisers quit the government and went to work for private appraisal firms
because they could make more money. It ended up costing the government more.
Around the same time a study showed that the Public Housing program cost less
than Section 8 private-owner subsidy, for providing low-income housing. The
"common good" can often be achieved at lower cost by public
investment ("gummint"), but is
opposed by Reaganites & Busheviks
for ideological reasons. The
American Prospect’s Michael Tomasky sums up the present: “The two parties ... have
fought to a draw --the
irresistible force of secular belief in public investment set against the
immovable object of faith-based laissez-faireism.” But the
Right knows how to break the deadlock. LBJ,
President Lyndon Johnson, may have been a disaster in foreign policy but his
background in hard-scrabble The
Slavery analogy: From pharaohs, Hebrew patriarchs and Roman senators, to
Dutch ship captains, African emperors and Because
the New Deal tidal wave of support and LBJ’s
trouncing of Goldwater showed conservatives that they could never win on the
bread & butter issues. Then -jackpot! They hit on the snake-oil
approach described by Thomas Frank: Distract voters away from the real
collective issues like poverty with the modern equivalent of ‘how many angels
can dance on the head of a pin?’ Now it’s ‘when does the ghost arrive to
inhabit a clump of cells?’ which they word as ‘When does the embryo acquire a
soul?’ The ruling class can pursue its goals undisturbed, while those they
regard as peons are sidetracked by the magic show. (The abortion debate
always comes down to unprovable religious
assertions: See Appendix 6.) And
then there’s this other outlet for dissatisfaction with the ruling class: Libertarianism.
With the destruction of a real Left (Red Scare 1920s, McCarthyism 1950s)
Libertarianism is the only permitted alternative. If you can clearly see the
defects in unrestrained corporate capitalism, but the effective challenge has
been eliminated from consciousness, you join the Libertarians and enjoy the
illusion that you’re embracing an alternative. In reality you’re defending
corporations from regulation. The Libertarian “attack” on capitalism actually
defends it, as Libertarian-Right lobbies like ALEC, the American Legislative
Exchange Council, pursue pro-business anti-regulation legislation (and even
the weakening of church-state separation).
The
power of the nation-state is also needed to address the looming environmental
crisis. A great danger here is that the crisis may be misinterpreted or “spun”
as a free-market problem of “supply,“ ie, access to
dwindling petroleum supplies, leading to a militarized and fascist America
dominating the oil-producing parts of the world. See M. Klare:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=157241 2. Human Nature Homo
economicus (Adam
Smith) = classical liberalism ( Ultimately,
political ideologies rest on deeply buried assumptions about human nature. On
one side -the left- we have the belief that human nature is flexible*:
Thus the environment in which you are raised does in fact
influence you (why else are we communicating in the thought-processes of
English?), so education can improve people and humans can learn from
their mistakes, must be trusted to govern themselves, and therefore deserve
to be free, all equally. “Do what you wish.” The extremes of this
individualism are libertarianism (rejection of collective decisions) and
anarchism (not to be confused with nihilism). *Human nature, flexible but not “blank:” See Phenotypic
Plasticity, Pigliucci, 2001. On the
other side -the right- we have the belief that human nature is incurably evil
(sinful), that mankind never learns and therefore needs to be firmly
controlled through hierarchy, and this requires inequality. Edmund Burke (d.
1797) founded conservatism (on rhetoric, per Hannah Arendt) and rejected
individualism. Society is organic, he said, and thus Parliament should
represent historic functional interests --the Church, the nobility in the
House of Lords, etc. “Do what you’re told.” The extremes of this view are
totalitarianism (Stalin, Hitler). Perhaps
the truth lies somewhere between: We are both individuals and members
of a group. ----- Original Message ----- Sent: Friday, June 20, 2003 5:51 PM Subject: [Reason-Omaha] Conference: evolutionary psychology, human nature, and the social sciences How we got to this point in our understanding: a) Evolution:
Charles Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace. Darwin's work sparks the gathering of mountains of
evidence for evolution, from a variety of disciplines. Noah's b) Sociobiology:
E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins. c) Evolutionary Psychology: Richard Alexander, David Buss, Cosmides & Tooby. Summarized & popularized by Robert Wright in The Moral Animal (why we care) and Geoffrey Miller in The Mating Mind (why rock stars get the girls), many researchers are out there probing the psychology of various branches of the animal kingdom, exploring how selection pressures shape brains to think the way they do. http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/ep.html Question: Can
evolutionary psychology explain human societies? d) Evolutionary Social Sciences: In its infancy. The outlines are becoming visible in
the papers presented at conferences like the HBES
conference in You can see what a variety
there was, from stalking & spying as a mate retention tactic, and
measuring the sexiness of humor; through detecting free-riders in collective
actions, and resisting invasion by tit-for-tat strategies; to Paleolithic
demography, and culture as superorganism. (It was
hard to decide which ones to attend.) BTW, in a brave pioneering book that in my opinion will be reinforced as the research advances, one social scientist has already applied what we know of evolutionary psychology to economics, sociology, and politics: [Book: The Evolution of Human Sociality] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0847695352/ref=lib_dp_TFCV/103-5357420-8892651?v=glance&s=books&vi=reader#reader-link I believe
science will knock out the underpinnings of the cherished beliefs of economic
fundamentalists as thoroughly as with religious fundamentalists, but with as
little success in defeating them, for similar reasons. The new paradigm will
require generations to become second-nature, as did Darwinism. The keynote speech by zoologist Pete Richerson of UC-Davis and anthropologist Robert Boyd of UCLA at the HBES conference was based on an upcoming book by them on "The Nature of Culture" which should take this subject to a new level. One thing that struck me was how much of the collaborative research in this field is inter-disciplinary; contributors are biologists, anthropologists, mathematicians & computer whizzes (for game theory & simulations), medical specialists, psychologists, neurobiologists, and a scattering of other fields (management, astronomy, poli sci). You can get some idea of the flavor of the keynote speech from a different piece of theirs available in pdf: It gets interesting from about halfway down: http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/Speed_PhilLife.pdf [End 6/20/03 email.] Drawing
on Not
surprisingly, Social Darwinism isn’t dead, and some conservatives even
fantasize incorporating the insights of evolutionary psychology; “Neo-Social
Darwinism.” On this struggle to fit We can get some idea of what
original human nature was like by looking at surviving hunter-gatherers (see
Melvin Konner, "Dim Beginnings," NYRB 3/1/07, and the exchange of letters in the 3/29/07
issue) or by looking at other primates, especially our closest relatives, the
chimps. In this regard, bonobos (formerly
"pygmy chimps") have been a favorite topic because they "make
love, not war," using sex in place of violence to resolve conflicts. On
the political spin-doctoring about the bonobos: In any case, we have evolved a sense of morality and fair play alongside our aggressiveness. By the way, evolution is relevant for understanding much more than just economics. Why religion and generosity? Why bar-room brawls and child abuse? Why creative arts and intelligence? Why obesity and shyness? Check out David Sloan Wilson's book, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives. It’s all there, and it‘s great fun to learn: http://urel.binghamton.edu/PressReleases/2006/Jan-Feb%2006/EvoS.html For FAQ
on evolutionary psychology: http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/projects/human/evpsychfaq.html
For evolutionary
psychology & economics: http://else.econ.ucl.ac.uk/newweb/index.php For a typical demonstration in the
neuroscience laboratory that homo economicus is
extinct, see Scientific American: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=13&articleID=27333871-E7F2-99DF-3A66FD19F6C2AF91 This essay will
become endless if I divert further into “ev psych,”
so I’ll just limit myself to two more comments: 1. One area of research is CAPs,
Collective Action Problems, where tribes or villages work together for mutual
benefits (which may not be equally distributed). CAPs
are of special interest to the evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists
working on these issues. Why do people all over the world often sacrifice for
the common good? Game theory folks have worked out the math for equilibrium
between “cheaters” & “saints” in societies. Too many of either type and
the system can crash. It is in our biological nature to work out systems of
balance between individual selfishness and group altruism. The math isn’t
built-in but the emotions are; that‘s what they‘re for. “Mirror
neuron” systems in the brain enable us to experience what others are
experiencing, and this empathy creates an almost organic bonding. We feel
stressed if we suspect there’s too much exploitation in the system. And
we feel good when we do good for others. For
more on the pleasure of altruism, see Appendix Eight. 2. Primate stress. Here is another example of the kind of insights into
human social systems that we can glean from biology. One of our R.E.A.S.O.N members follows this field closely and keeps
us supplied with frequent updates on the research. This is a recent example,
almost at random. This is a narrative for the layman; the websites above can
provide access to actual research. Begin
excerpt from http://www.eurekalert.org/bysubject/index.php?kw=16 Why do humans and their
primate cousins get more stress-related diseases than any other member of the
animal kingdom? The answer, says "Primates are super
smart and organized just enough to devote their free time to being miserable
to each other and stressing each other out," he said. "But if you
get chronically, psychosocially stressed, you're going to compromise your
health. So, essentially, we've evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves
sick." A professor of biological
sciences and of neurology and neurological sciences, Sapolsky
has spent more than three decades studying the physiological effects of
stress on health. His pioneering work includes ongoing studies of laboratory
rats and wild baboons in the African wilderness. [And a wonderful book, A
Primate’s Memoir.] He will [did] discuss the
biological and sociological implications of stress at 12:45 p.m. Feb. 17,
2007, in a lecture titled "Stress, Health and Coping" at the annual
meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in What can baboons teach
humans about coping with all the stress-inducing psychosocial nonsense we
encounter in our daily lives? "Ideally, we have a
lot more behavioral flexibility than the baboon," Sapolsky
said, adding that, unlike baboons, humans can overcome their low social
status and isolation by belonging to multiple hierarchies. "We are capable of
social supports that no other primate can even dream of," he said.
"For example, I might say, 'This job, where I'm a lowly mailroom clerk,
really doesn't matter. What really matters is that I'm the captain of my
softball team or deacon of my church'--that sort of thing. It's not just
somebody sitting here, grooming you with their own hands. We can actually
feel comfort from the discovery that somebody on the other side of the planet
is going through the same experience we are and feel, I'm not alone. We can
even take comfort reading about a fictional character, and there's no [other]
primate out there that can feel better in life just by listening to
Beethoven. So the range of supports that we're capable of is
extraordinary." But many of the qualities
that make us human also can induce stress, he noted. "We can be pained
or empathetic about somebody in Pursuit of happiness The Founding Fathers
probably weren't thinking about health when they declared the pursuit of
happiness to be an inalienable right, but when it comes to understanding the
importance of a stress-free life, they may have been ahead of their time. "When you get to
Westernized humans, it's only in the last century or two that our health
problems have become ones of chronic lifestyle issues," Sapolsky said. "It's only 10,000 years or so that
most humans have been living in high-density settlements--a world of
strangers jostling and psychologically stressing each other. But being able
to live long enough to get heart disease, that's a fairly new world." According to Sapolsky, happiness and self-esteem are important factors
in reducing stress. Yet the definition of "happiness" has less to
do with material comfort than Westerners might assume, he noted: "An
extraordinary finding that's been replicated over and over is that once you
get past the 25 percent or so poorest countries on Earth, where the only
question is survival and subsistence, there is no relationship between gross
national product, per capita income, any of those things, and levels of
happiness." Surveys show that in "The Typically, observant
Mormons and other religious people are less likely to smoke and drink, he
noted. "But once you control for that, religiosity in and of itself is
good for your health in some ways, although less than some of its advocates
would have you believe," Sapolsky said.
"It infuriates me, because I'm an atheist, so it makes me absolutely
crazy, but it makes perfect sense. If you have come up with a system that not
only tells you why things are but is capped off with certain knowledge that
some thing or things respond preferentially to you, you're filling a whole
lot of pieces there--gaining some predictability, attribution, social support
and control over the scariest realms of our lives." End excerpt
from http://www.eurekalert.org/bysubject/index.php?kw=16 In the State of The Nation-State has been seen as
the alternative to the State of Granted natural selection, what
is the Unit of social selection? It is the atomized & alienated
individual for the Libertarians (Margaret Thatcher: “There is no such thing
as society!”), it is class for the Communists (use the State undemocratically
if necessary to enforce an end to class struggle -cf. Chavez in Venezuela),
it is Race for the Nazis (use the State to protect Blut
& Boden). They don’t get it. Rousseau (d. 1778) wrote that everywhere man is born free but lives in chains. He thought that if we just returned to the state of nature, discarded the corrupting influences of government, harmony would prevail, while Hobbes (d. 1679) saw us as so evil in the state of nature that we needed strict rulers to keep us under control. Rousseau mistook us for ants (the automatic harmony of the General Will), Hobbes mistook us for bears (“nasty, brutish“). Neither Rousseau (anarchism) nor Hobbes (fascism) turns out to be correct. It’s not an either/or, not nature/nurture but both. Modern Conservatives, like their 19th cent Social Darwinist predecessors, admire Hobbes (Leviathan = dictator) and still enjoy denouncing Rousseau (under the mistaken either/or) in the name of a poorly understood pop version of sociobiology. A good example of this is the David Brooks column on Hobbes and Rousseau, NYT 2/25/07. He doesn’t get it either. My old mentor Paul Beck used to ask his class: In perfect freedom, what do we do about red lights? None of us likes to be told what to do, that’s human nature, but is it really helpful to think of traffic lights as immoral, a form of “coercion,” stealing our liberty to cross the intersection when we feel like it? Rules are inherent in social animals, sorry. You don’t get to be the whiny kid in the sandbox all your life; growing up means giving up some liberties and accepting some responsibilities. But True Believers don’t get it: WH Public Pulse 3/16/07 Beware busybodies Endless theological debates about the esoteric nature of liberty, and whether or not it outweighs all other values, are futile and must yield to the verdicts of history and biology. The simple truth is, humans as social animals do take collective actions -yes, even through government- to address their problems. Get over it. By the same token, as social animals we have evolved finely-tuned cheating detection modules and anti-exploitation instincts (which produced the reform movements discussed above). Excess exploitation threatens group solidarity: See Appendix 4.
3.
Morality Perhaps the most indefensible claim libertarians like to make is that they are the lone guardians of virtue, that all other systems are immoral. My reply to that is: Slave markets. There is nothing in capitalism that forbids making profit from the buying and selling of human beings. Capitalism’s only commandment is: Buy low, sell high. In fact, history suggests that slavery was worse where capitalism was stronger. The classic study of Brazilian
culture is The Masters and the Slaves, by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto
Freyre (of One libertarian replied that
slave traders, those Dutch and English Protestant sea captains, weren’t “real”
capitalists, which would have dumbfounded their investors in the early stock
exchanges in Capitalism and religion both co-existed comfortably with slavery for centuries. I can’t resist quoting Nobelist Stephen Weinberg on this. After reviewing the history of secular abolitionism and the resistance from religion (especially from pious pro-slavery Southern Baptists), he commented “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil, but for good people to do evil --that takes religion.” (NYR 10/21/99). To me, it seems that capitalist slave markets must be for Libertarians what fossils are for Creationists: a huge embarrassment, with no way to explain them away, and devastating to their side. But in both cases you could waste the rest of your life trying to get through to the True Believers. Neither slave markets nor fossils matter if you “have faith.” And capitalism is, at heart, a religious faith.
Capitalism’s big boost came out
of the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s. Calvinist merchants and traders
convinced themselves that “wealth is God’s reward for virtue” (and if so then
poverty is obviously His punishment for sin). Catholics, having their own
agenda, were never as committed to capitalism’s defense, since it wasn’t
their invention. Pope John Paul II, as the supposed shepherd of all his
flock, the poor as well as the rich, felt free to criticize atheistic
communism on the left as well as unregulated capitalism on the right. Here in
When the Pope criticized capitalism, the Protestant publisher, quintessential WASP Harold Anderson, wrote an editorial implying the Pope didn’t know what he’s talking about. Archbishop Elden Curtiss rose to the Pope’s defense. In an op-ed piece (2/14/99) he wrote: “I always appreciate Andy’s commentary ... but I think he missed the point ....John Paul II ... is concerned about capitalism that has as its only purpose increased returns to investors. He reminds people of the world to consider what the economy does to people as well as what it does for certain ones. Capitalism, even in our own country, becomes immoral when little consideration is given to the plight of people who struggle beneath the poverty level. Exploitation of people by corporations and individual capitalists is always wrong.” Amen. To the
extent that we are living in a more humane world now than we did in the
1890s, with their terror of class war, it’s because we’ve adopted the reforms
demanded by our ancestors in the Populist and Progressive movements, ideas
initially advocated by, yes, socialists like Upton Sinclair and Norman
Thomas. Unable to admit this truth, reactionaries have concocted the
elaborate, sophisticated and successful rhetorical cults of Reaganism and Friedmanism to
get us to agree to roll back the clock and reverse the progress. (How they do
this is covered by Thomas Frank and David Brock.) As part
of their sophisticated media campaign, they even pressured PBS into producing
a triumphalist TV documentary, For
most Americans the label “socialism” ends the discussion. Yet if it weren't
for them, we wouldn’t have the things we take for granted and embrace as
normal and desirable: Overtime pay, Social Security, vacations, unemployment
compensation, the ending of child labor ... In fact some extremists do try to
argue that we should get rid of all that, but they get nowhere --thus always the temptation to win
the argument by force. (See the discussion of fascism in The New Dark Age essay.) Wall
Street would love to get their hands on the Social Security trust fund, pump
those billions into the stock market for a one-time rush. Thus the Right’s
push to “privatize” Social Security, which requires whipping up fears about the program’s future. See Appendix 5. Rejecting
Libertarianism as a philosophy doesn’t mean defending the excesses of modern
society. Of course we are subject to the evils of mass scale. And of course
bad laws get passed, especially laws based on Grover Norquist’s
perversities and the Busheviks‘ inanities. For example, the “No Child Left Behind”
fiasco. By analogy: Penalize the dentist if his patients have lots of
cavities. a)
Abolish schools & hospitals? b)
Abolish bureaucracies? c) Work
to improve them? Clearly
a) and b) are mere wishful thinking, the lazy way out because c) requires
effort. Yes, it’s immoral to allow children’s brains to go undeveloped; yes
it’s immoral to let patients die in hospitals from mistakes. But abolishing
public education, or embracing alternative-medicine quackery, are not
solutions. Yes, we
suffer under Michels’ “Iron Law of Oligarchy;”
officials at the top are far removed from those they serve. And yes, we pay a
price for Weber’s “bureaucratic rationalization.” Magic has been replaced by
science, the courage of the warrior by the Pentagon’s machines, and the
craftsman’s pride by the drudgery of the assembly line. That’s a different
problem. But is a requirement to register as a gun owner “immoral” in the
same sense that shooting someone is? Libertarians get too easily outraged by
trivial inconveniences and too easily ignore devastating human suffering.
Which brings us to: Is it moral to accept poverty, as it once was moral to accept slavery? Recently Jeffrey Sachs reported in Scientific American (11/06), on Sustainable Developments: Welfare States, Beyond Ideology. Preview: “One of the great challenges of sustainable development is
to combine society's desires for economic prosperity and social security. For
decades economists and politicians have debated how to reconcile the
undoubted power of markets with the reassuring protections of social
insurance. Most of the debate in the An older study (Kenworthy),
part of Sachs’s “rich empirical record,” shows Europeans far more successful
than us at eliminating poverty, with no ill effects. Poverty rates prior to
the application of social programs are pretty comparable in the For a more complete discussion see Do Social Welfare Policies Reduce Poverty? A Cross-National Assessment, by Lane Kenworthy, Luxembourg Income Studies Working paper No. 188, Sept 1998. Hard to find. Try this link: |
