The New York Times has an article entitled Income Gap Is Widening, Data Shows.
Income inequality grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of Americans those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 receiving their largest share of national income since 1928, analysis of newly released tax data shows.
The top 10 percent, roughly those earning more than $100,000, also reached a level of income share not seen since before the Depression.
While total reported income in the United States increased almost 9 percent in 2005, the most recent year for which such data is available, average incomes for those in the bottom 90 percent dipped slightly compared with the year before, dropping $172, or 0.6 percent.
The gains went largely to the top 1 percent, whose incomes rose to an average of more than $1.1 million each, an increase of more than $139,000, or about 14 percent.
The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980.
“Largest share of national income since 1928.” Hmm, seems like something economically significant was just around the corner in 1928.
You mean the Philadephia Athletics winning the World Series? Does that mean the Oakland A’s or the Phillies will win this year?
Or, maybe the distribution of incomes (though problematic in its own right) has nothing to do with who wins the world series, or even the stock market.
Interesting – did they include information on the percentages of taxes paid by these groups?
Or anything about on economic mobility, people’s incomes changing over time?
In any case, why is this information of particular interest? What conclusions should we be drawing from it, if any?
And, is the 0.6 percent decrease for the bottom 90 percent due to the evils of Daylight Saving Time?
Damn you, sun thieves!
“Or, maybe the distribution of incomes (though problematic in its own right)”
Income is not “distributed”.
Honestly, Doug, I don’t think people notice effects around here of what you’re describing. This state is largely upper-middle, middle, and lower class. Few of our friends and neighbors are in the upper tier. I don’t think it crosses the average person’s mind.
In the west is where I’ve noticed this situation in action. Places where people want to be, where home values have exploded, and the wealthy have congregated especially in the mountain areas. The main problem there is figuring out where the service sector workers are going to live, due to everything becoming so expensive.
Around here, stagnating wages just result in higher balances being carried on more credit cards.
Kurt’s got it right. All this shows is that the superior people in our society are being more justly rewarded, and the ticks and leeches are ending up with spending power more commensurate with their indolence.
Too bad Bush is term-limited. That and a few more category 5 hurricanes hitting major urban centers ought to really help bring income numbers in line with individuals’ just desserts. Our best and brightest know how to just get out of the way.
Remember, there is no surer sign of a man’s talent than his ability to extract economic rents.
T,
Ever driven through Geist? :)
Branden –
I think you infer too much from Kurt’s brief comment, although the snark may well be in the right ballpark.
Of course, if you can make that much stew from that little oyster in other contexts, you could make a fortune in food service!
I get stuck when trying to understand the claim that “the poor get poorer” is an obvious fact. The problem I run into is that it does not hold up when I compare the poorest 20 percent of the US population to the poorest 20 percent of the world’s population. Or when I compare the poorest 20 percent of the US population to 50, 100, and 150 years ago in the US.
Does it mean that a segment of the poorest people have less overall wealth than they did at some time in the past? I’d argue that the poorest 20 percent are considerably better off than the poorest 20 percent of 100 years ago. Were there one or more local maxima between then and now? When did they occur?
If, on the other hand, it is intended to mean that poorer people control a smaller percentage of total savings, income, rents, or some other measure of financial wealth, then the claim seems more plausible, but not as traumatic. There are, for example, other forms of wealth such as health, leisure time, and personal happiness that might easily offset a 0.6 percent drop in income for the bottom 90.0 percent described in the NYT.
I do believe that the overall amount of wealth is increasing and that the rich are getting dramatically richer. But I see nothing wrong with a growing “gap” between me and the richest people. Perhaps this is where I miss the point? Perhaps I don’t understand because I have no urge to measure my wealth by comparing it with the financial wealth of the richest people?
Branden–
Yeah, point taken. But if you drive through any little mountain town, you can find Geist-like prices attached to 2000 square foot homes.
If you’ve ever wondered how God feels about money just look at the people he gave it to.
The basic assumption behind headlines like this in the NYT is that income inequality is a measure of how fair or unfair our economic system is, the inevitable conclusion being that Bush and Congress are not pursuing enough “egalitarian” (i.e. socialistic) measures to confiscate from those whose activities have monetary value and earn them income and those whose activities do not have as much value.
If it could be demonstrated that this disparity is the result of some illegal or unjust policy or practice, that would be one thing. But, no such evidence is offered. Instead, we’re just supposed to shake our heads in disgust as we indulge in a bit of self pity and class envy.
Meanwhile, the positive effects upon our society and economy that derive from individuals working hard and smart to earn lots and lots of money are ignored since such people are not in the “working” class, but are rather the leeches upon the labor of the “bottom” whatever percent.
I think JoeK’s points are well-taken. My modest middle-class income earns me a lifestyle that would literally have been the envy of kings of 200 years ago. The lack of income among the poorest of the poor in our country has much more to do with lifestyle choices and generational patterns of deliquence, addiction, government dependency, etc. than about the poor being victimized by the rich.
Well, exactly. A man’s worth as a human being is directly proportional to the economic value he has created.
Not really…he’s part of the problem. He’s no more a conservative than his father.
Barry Goldwater, Ron Paul…those are some REAL conservatives.
“Broken window fallacy”, anyone?
Yay Bastiat!
What god? There isn’t one.
“The man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it”
Kurt Weber wrote:
Conservatism is as self-described conservatives do. Bush calls himself a conservative, the conservatives backed him in the last 2 presidential elections, and moreover, the results speak for themselves. As Doug’s post indicates, the distribution[*] of income has concenrated among the already-wealthy.
Anyway, by this metric, Bush has been a great president, hasn’t he?
So under Bush, haven’t the most worthy human beings seen the shackles come off, with the fully expected result that they’ve got more dough to roll in? Shouldn’t we want the next president to continue this trend?
It would seem there is a portion of the population who could quite rationally be very satisfied with Bush’s performance as president. Why should they complain about the quality of his “conservative” credentials when his policies have led them to thrive in ways Barry Goldwater or Ron Paul are unlikely to?[**]
[*] You’re quite incorrect to say that income is not “distributed”. Anything that is statistically measurable is subject to distribution analysis. Housing densities, BMW ownership, CAFOs, reported UFO sightings, or what-have-you. What you’re probably objecting to is the “re-distribution” of wealth by the government. This is not the sort of “distribution” that Doug’s post, or the NYT article, refers to. Equivocation is illogical.
[**] I posit that Goldwater is unlikely to win the Presidency in 2008 because he’s, er, dead, and Ron Paul because of his poor showing in 1988. Has America come around to see things his way? I guess we’ll find out, but his dark horse had better get out of the gate soon, with a number of major primaries only a year away.
For my part, these statistics don’t disturb me because I’m a softie for the plight of the poor. I’m a collection attorney. I garnish the wages of the poor and freeze their bank accounts. I force people into bankruptcy. And I don’t feel guilty about it. And I’m reasonably happy in my work. Not because of the pain I cause, but in spite of it.
And, I’m not jealous of the very rich. If you ask anybody who knows me well, they’ll tell you that I don’t get overly excited about a bunch of material stuff. Sure, I like a big TV, a soft couch, a fast computer, and some decent beer. But fancy cars, nice clothes, 5-star restaurants or whatever else doesn’t really motivate me.
So, where am I coming from?
These kinds of statistics indicate a lot of waste in our economic system. It’s like our economy is a huge furnace, blazing away day and night. A bunch of heat is escaping out the windows, the attic is hell hot, and the rest of the house is tolerable. But, if winter comes, we’re going to have a heck of a time keeping our living quarters warm.
We need an economy where hard work, innovation, and risk are rewarded, because we need those things to keep our standard of living high. But, it’s stupid to over-reward those things because there is a point of diminishing returns. Would we have fewer aspiring software tycoons if Gates was only worth $20 billion? Would we have fewer aspiring oil magnates if Rockefeller only got to leave $500 million to his heirs?
The risk we run is that too great a concentration of wealth has a warping effect on markets and democracies. With enough money, you can buy monopolies or at least buy into cartels and get the government to enforce them for you.
I figure the economy is going to do better in the long run where you have a bunch of relatively little guys who can take some risks because they’ve got 6 months living expenses in the bank, and a social safety net to fall back on if things get a little rough. At least it’s going to do better than when you have a situation where you have a relative handful of very well-off people who can innovate to their heart’s content — if that’s what they care to do with their time — and the masses who are a couple of paychecks or a heart attack away from losing their house who simply can’t afford to take a risk, no matter how great an idea they have.
I figure the stronger America’s middle class is, the stronger America is.
Steve wrote:
I disagree. I think you’re making an invalid inference. The headline is “Income Gap Is Widening, Data Shows”. Where is the value judgment in that? Maybe the gap is a good thing, as Kurt Weber and I have argued.
What does this have to do with your income as a metric of your personal worth? Do you earn more than you deserve? How do you know? If you’re a completely average American, falling squarely at the 50th percentile of human potential, how do we determine that “a lifestyle that would literally have been the envy of kings of 200 years ago”?
How much do you know about the lifestyle of Bourbon or Habsburg kings?
Does a person at the 25th percentile of human potential in the U.S. deserve the lifestyle of a king of 500 years ago? How about two thousand, when there was a Roman Emperor around?
How negligible does the productive potential of an American citizen have to be before we determine that they deserve no better than the conditions of a Darfur refugee camp? Do they need to be, say, quadriplegics, and/or profoundly mentally retarded?
What if it’s not their potential that’s the problem, but just the fact that they’re lazy? How much less do they deserve than the merely unfortunate?
Or are there certain minimums to which all people are entitled? If so, what are they, and whose responsibility is it to satisfy those minimums?
Do you swear by your life and your love of it that you will never life for the sake of another man, nor ask him to live for yours?
Your principles are on the line!
Two corrections to my previous post:
Parker,
I used Kurt’s previous posts to Doug’s blog as context. ;-)
I first sensed something was really wrong with our economy when I listened to the young guys,some probably in early 20s at the gym, talking about how much money they had accumulated by speculating on pre-construction purchase/re-selling of property. It’s like the ‘smart people’ don’t work:they live on speculation,and fall back on their dividends. In my prime years no one ever lived on dividends except retired people. Isn’t speculation what caused the Great Depression? Is that where we’re going as a nation? Excuse me for being naive and probably off-subject ,but I just turned 65 yrs old and I remember the days back in the early 60’s when I thought if I could ever earn $10,000 a year ,my life would be set.After all I would have a good pension when I retired and no one even thought about health insurance being any kind of problem.All the retired people I knew lived on Social Security and pensions. The best jobs were working at Steel or in Auto Industry.
The labor movement is dead,and nothing has replaced it,that helps the blue collar class.( do we still use that term?) There is basically only a service class left who can no longer afford to live where they work, but the upper economic echelon can afford not only a maid,but a second maid and a gardener. Half the country is going to end up serving the other third or so,and will have to do so by ‘commuting in'( Will we ever have decent public transportation?)It reminds me of my days when I lived in Mexico and roomed in a pension.Everyone either was domestic help or hired domestic help.
The more I understand what’s happening to this country the more ‘leftist’ I become.
What’s eventually going to set this country right again are these masses of immigrants ,illegal or not, that corporate america wants to come in to do the work at below living wage salaries. In the next generation or so they’ll organize,hopefully,there’ll be another national labor movement similar to what took place in the 19th and early 20th century.Everyone has noticed that most of these immigrants are Hispanic and Hispanics in the USA are very self-aware culturally and very organized,and American organized labor is chomping at the bit to get them organized,and they will.The day will come and I hope I can see it!
As a middle class kid who went to some pretty fancy schools, I have to laugh at the idea that “there is no surer sign of a man’s talent than his ability to extract economic rents.” I’ve met a number of people whose families have been “extracting economic rents” for generations because great-great grandpa did something innovative (or was an unusually successful crook, e.g. Joseph Kennedy, Sr. — and yeah, I went to school with one of them).
If you look at the Forbes 400, inheritance is the biggest single source of great fortunes. Me and my fellow middle class cycnics at said fancy schools used to refer to it (riffing on the old brokerage commercial) as “making money the old-fashioned way.”
It would be nice to believe that our economic system rewarded talent and hard work and punished indolence and stupidity, but it would also be nice to believe in the tooth fairy.
Branden: I think that the value judgment came from Steve, not from the headline or from the story itself. (No offense, Steve, but why such a knee-jerk reaction? The story wasn’t attacking the making of wealth.) I actually read the entire story this morning. It was pretty balanced.
Mark McDonough:
Very well said.
Thanks, Branden!
The thread may be dead, but I’ll give it a try…If there is no implied moral judgement about the income gap, why mention it in a newspaper? My contention is that such a gap, by itself, is morally neutral absent over factors.
My point about the kings is simply that our nation is prosperous in general because of the entrepreneurial undertakings that yield obscene financial rewards and, being a part of that rising tide, albeit in a “risk-averse” service job, my middle-of-the-road lifestyle is better than it would otherwise be if the entire economy were not lifted by the rising tide of capitalism. That’s why I don’t complain about the income gap, which is an inevitable by-product of capitalism, as though I would somehow be better off if it didn’t exist.
That said, I believe that the handicapped, mentally ill, etc., should be provided a safety net. I am not a Utilitarian or a Darwinist in the sense that the unproductive must live however they can. My wife and I care for a completely mentally and physically disabled person in our home and this county is generous in providing for her well being. This is befitting a civilized nation. We are, after all, higher in the order of things than ants, which despite their efficiency, tend to lack humanity.
I contend that our society can provide for the poor at all because its engine is driven by capitalism–the selfish pursuit of obscene profit. Seems to me that system provides the best mechanism for raising everyone’s living standards and providing material wealth to provide a saftey net for the truly unfortunate, not the negligently lazy or ignorant.
For capitalism not to be socialism or communism, there must necessarily be material consequences for lack of initiative or work, even if as a society–to reflect our own human dignity–we choose not to let our compatriots live in total want.
(I know a little something about the Bourbon and Habsburg kings, as a function of my job. The cheap Chardonnay you can get at a 7-11 was better than anything they had! =)
BTW, what principles am I at risk of having compromised if I answer “incorrectly” here?
I should also mention that I don’t think any human system is perfect. Many people come by their wealth through inheritance, which may not reflect hard work on their individual part, but is certainly not intrinsically wrong. Who else, other than the beneficiary of the inheritance, is more morally entitled to it? The government? Why? If rich people are only allowed to get just so rich, where do you cap it? Based on what? To whom would you give the excess wealth? Based on what criteria? I contend that the wealth would not be generated at all.
The flaws of Capitalism notwithstanding, it has worked to make the USA a prosperous nation. What more can you say about a country where the poorest people have the highest rates of OBESITY?
On the point about inheritance, I will chime in that, because a worker has a greater claim to his wages than an heir has to a decedent’s estate, I think you get rid of the income tax before you even think about reducing the inheritance tax.
On the point of obesity among our poorest, that’s not evidence that our poorest are more slothful or that we have such great bounty that even the poor can be fat. Rather, it seems that the poor neighborhoods tend to have worse food choices. There is much more likely to be a McDonald’s within walking distance than a grocery store with a bunch of fruits and vegetables. Not sure what you do about that, if anything, but I think that’s an accurate description of the situation.
Steve wrote:
Now I’m really confused. What implicit moral judgments are in the sports pages or weather forecast?
Steve wrote:
How do you measure any of these things? How do we know when the income gap has grown to such a degree that “everyone’s” living standards are not being raised enough? Is such an outcome even possible, or are the two unrelated? If the latter, how do we establish what standard of living is warranted even for the lazy and ignorant?
Your reasoning seems to me less a defense of our capitalist system than an uncritical acceptance of it. But if it is impossible for our capitalist system to fail, why does it need your advocacy on a blog? By contrast, if it can fail — whether through deliberate tinkering by political forces, or phenomena that emerge over time (perhaps as unforeseen consequences), how will we know when it is not meeting our expectations?
Whoa. I think you slipped a false distinction in there. Communist/socialist states are not well-known for their tolerance of sloth (among the laboring classes, anyway — it’s de rigeur for their privileged classes just as it is for ours).
(source)
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Some folks, including Trotskyists, would argue that due to their heavy authoritarianism, neither the USSR nor the PRC constitute legitimate examples of Socialism, but as a wild-ass guess I’m going to assume that’s not your position.
I posit that whatever the differences between communist/socialist and capitalist nation-states are, neither coddles those who are indigent and capable of work but unwilling to do it.[*] Therefore, I challenge your premise as unsound.
Anyway, getting back to your post:
Ayn Rand said, “In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.” She and many of her followers applied this dictum to proponents of the “mixed economy” and the “social safety net”. I mentioned this only to illustrate the stridency of some advocates for capitalism.
It might be that “fiercely moderate” better describes your stand in this particular ideological struggle. :)
[*] Well, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich were happy to raise the specter of “welfare queens” riding in limousines to pick up their AFDC checks, but pointing to the Soviet Union and Communist China as admirable examples of how to get tough with society’s parasites is not something they had the chutzpah to do.
Branden, I don’t agree that the all communist/socialist states were intolerant of sloth among workers. Indeed, the workers’ joke in the Soviet Union was “they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work”.
There has to be some reward, real or perceived. Denmark is a different animal, where the people seem to eagerly embrace their socialism with a work ethic. The Danes I spoke to were delighted to surrender 79% of their income in exchange for cradle-to-grave services, such as health care, education including university, housing, pension, etc. They find it a fair trade.
I imagine the authoritarian distinction you highlighted has much to do with it.
That’s a joke pretty much anywhere low wages are paid, including in my personal experience a golf course where I worked in the bag room and a warehouse where I worked unloading trucks.
Interestingly, decision making about what wages and prices should be is much more ‘communal’ in a free market than it has ever been under systems that call themselves ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’.
Doug, fat poor people is a fairly new phenomenon – which can only happen when a society is very productive, as ours is.
Historically, ‘poor’ has been a near-synonym for ‘hungry’ – I don’t think you can find much of a ‘fat poor’ group before WWII.
Discussions of this also reflect ever-changing definitions of what ‘poor’ is – as Mike touches on, things commonly available today would be the envy of kings, not so long ago.
I truly wish someone who uses the term ‘ free market’ would write a definition for it. Must Free market assume outsourcing and downsizing as part of wage/profit management mechanism in the market place? Does it mean that business shouldn’t have to pay health insurance if they feel they can’t afford it? Does it mean that the minimum wage should be kept low as business calculates their bottom line, and that we need illegals to come into the country to work,because legality would probably lead to accountability? And does it mean that any kind of labor movement would make the market ‘unfree’? I can’t answer any of these questions,but maybe someone can.
Mike Kole,
Sorry, when I wrote:
I left out the word “neccessarily” before “coddles”. I apologize for my lack of clarity; evidently I was carried away by my footnote ripping on Reagan and Gingrich.
Recall that my point was to argue against Steve’s essentialism when he wrote:
The necessarily implies that any capitalist system that fails to impose material consequences for lack of initiative or work instantly becames a communist or socialist system, regardless of its other characteristics.
Even if this is taken as hyperbolic overstatement, I think you and I both agree that the fates of slackers in a society is an insufficient datum, taken in isolation, to characterize its economy as either “capitalistic” or “socialistic”.
Lou,
Even when I was a youngster reading Rand, I detected an inconsistency in the attitudes of many self-described libertarians. That is, in a minarchist state, there are no barriers imposed by the government preventing individuals from associating to provide goods on certain terms.
Why, then, should there be any barriers preventing individuals from associating to provide labor on certain terms?
The usual — unconvincing — argument I hear against labor organization is that if someone pays you for your labor, they have a “right” to demand that you refrain from all sorts of exercise of your natural rights. But there are surely limits to this, as no libertarians I’ve encountered argue that an individual can contract away his entire self to an employer (i.e., you cannot consent to become a slave).
But maybe there are some libertarians on this blog who can explain to me how their principles are entirely consistent with a slave society, provided that the slaveowners can plausibly argue that their slaves “willingly” entered into their service. (Why would anyone believe the testimony of a person after they’ve become a slave?)
If not, and your rights are inalienable, then if you can’t contract away your whole package of rights, which rights can you contract away? What piecemeal forms of slavery are acceptable? Can you rid yourself of your whole package of rights if you ensure that you distribute them among a number of agents, as opposed to just one?
Or are there some rights that are really inalienable, and the others you can barter away in exchange for being housed and fed by an owner?
Freedom of contract is an interesting concept when juxtaposed with “inalienable” rights. I’ll say this for drug prohibitionists — at least they’re consistent on this score: if there’s no individual right to snort cocaine, then there’s no problem with an employer firing someone for snorting cocaine.
But if you have an inalienable right to snort cocaine, and you may simply “choose” not to exercise it, perhaps in trade for something else, why can’t you also choose to forfeit all of rights for the remainder of your lifespan, wholly subordinating yourself to the control of another? What would a libertarian’s ideal “slave contract” look like?
Finally, once a particular person has acquired a reasonably large number of such “voluntary” slaves, what is the essential distinction between his collective and an authoritarian state?
Lou –
On my own, I came up with “a free market is one where exchanges are made voluntarily on the part of both parties”.
You can compare and contrast with what Dictionary.com provides:
free market. Dictionary.com. Investopedia.com. Investopedia Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/free market (accessed: April 05, 2007).
I do think that there can be a net social benefit to market regulation – particularly regulation that discourages coerced exchanges and promotes honesty and transparency in exchanges.
The specifics of such regulation – what it is, and what it should be – is a big part of politics, and people’s views on this are much affected by the beliefs and biases that they hold.
BTW, I was making more of a theoretical point, that exchanges in a free market can be thought of as ‘communal’ decisions about pricing – exchanges in a market where prices are set by fiat cannot.
Economics is known as the dismal science for a reason – I always liked the joke that “the reason we have economists is to make weathermen look good!”.
Parker: People now don’t get as much physical activity as they once did. My mother grew up in a large, poor family, but they ate very well. From what she has told me, they were not an anomaly. Huge meals, three times a day were the norm for them and the people they knew. The difference between then (1930’s, 40’s and early 50’s) and now was that they had to put a lot more effort into putting food on the table (making almost everything from scratch, slaughtering hogs, killing chickens, hunting, fishing, having a huge vegetable garden) than most people do today. Raising and making food took a lot of physical labor. Other household chores and odd jobs also required physical activity. The people in my mother’s family, and others like them, worked off a lot of the calories they consumed. They didn’t have a lot of leisure time and leisure activities. Certainly no television and video games.
At that time, convenience foods were not staples of poor people’s diets. Processed convenience foods were too expensive for large families. According to my mother, one of the few convenience foods that was a staple in their household was sweetened, condensed milk. Back then, Eagle Brand was considered an essential pantry item and was used in coffee, on cereal, and in other types of everyday food preparation. Of course, what do people use it for now? Making cookies and fudge, mainly.
Pila –
Or Internet!
That’s another impact of our society’s material success – less physical effort is needed to obtain food, clothing, and shelter.
The downside is that our bodies work better and last longer if we use them, up to a reasonable point.
It sounds like your mother’s family was rich in some ways that are increasingly rare, today.
There shouldn’t.
The problem with the status quo is that employers are, by law, forbidden to refuse to deal with such associations–which is equally unacceptable.
I do.
No libertarian I know uses that term to describe one’s rights, precisely for the reasons you give. An inalienable right is a right that not only cannot legitimately be taken by another, but also cannot be given up by oneself. But if one owns himself, then he “owns” his rights–and so he can indeed give up some or all of them by his own accord, if he so chooses.
The essential distinction is that everyone involved chose to participate–they didn’t tie up their children in their agreement, nor did the individual simply claim authority over an arbitrarily-chosen piece of territory. Every single individual explicitly chose to participate of his own free will, without being threatened with the loss of something that was already his to begin with if he refused to participate.
I wrote:
Kurt Weber wrote:
Oh, goody. Now I’ve met one.
Note, however, that I anticipated this argument in the preceding sentence:
So how does the minarchist libertarian society correct the problem if they do not catch the slaveholder in flagrante delicto, exerting coercion against another person while shoving a slave contract in front of them and demanding their “X” upon the signature line?
What of the slaveholder’s right against self-incrimination[*]? Once he’s got the slaves, why does the State have any more prerogative to solicit their testimony against him that it does to solicit the same from his credenza or refrigerator? The slaves are his property, not beings with rights, and what business is it of the State to gainsay his word, particularly by seizing control of his personal belongings?
Thanks for helping to draw up
entire self to an employer (i.e., you cannot consent to become a slave).
Kurt Weber wrote:
Oh, goody. Now I’ve met one.
Note, however, that I anticipated this argument in the preceding sentence:
So how does the minarchist libertarian society correct the problem if they do not catch the slaveholder in flagrante delicto, exerting coercion against another person while shoving a slave contract in front of them and demanding their “X” upon the signature line?
What of the slaveholder’s right against self-incrimination[*]? Once he’s got the slaves, why does the State have any more prerogative to solicit their testimony against him that it does to solicit the same from his credenza or refrigerator? The slaves are his property, not beings with rights, and what business is it of the State to gainsay his word, particularly by seizing control of his personal belongings?
Robert T. Long, a self-described libertarian philosopher, has a short but interesting article about slavery contracts. Unlike Nozick, he comes out against them.
Well, then, let me introduce you to the front page of the Libertarian Party of Illinois.
[*] Remember, even among conservatives, this is one of those sacrosanct constitutional rights — at least when folks like Monica Goodling are asserting it. If it’s a black crack dealer doing so, it’s just evidence of liberalism run amok, awarding more rights to the “criminal” than the “victim”.
Hmm, the above got butchered a bit by a cut-n-waste error. Please ignore the duplicate material from “Thanks for helping to draw up” to right before “Robert T. Long”.
Branden,
I was doubtless reading Tortilla Flat at a similar age when you were reading Ayn Rand. I didn’t realize that Libertarians had anything to do with Labor Unions and fair wages.It’s difficult for me to orient my response in that context.I’ve been trying to figure out what a libertarian is for a long time and I keep getting snatches of insights.. I don’t want to read what libertarians are supposed to be,or even what they say they are. All I need is what solution they would propose for inequities in our society, if any.The Labor Union scale wages made the good life for many in my blue collar family and now it’s basically gone to history books. The road to the good life now is somehow tied to speculating in the pre-construction housing market. When did this happen? why? Who changed all the rules? Where did the money and power go? Ive always maintained we think basically according to how we earn our living,and I have always looked at a situation first to see how students can meet success,but that’s a typical teachers’ perspective..I manipulated the classroom situtation any way I could to set up ‘an atmosphere leading to succcess’ I felt I owed students.I feel that’s how everyone does everything, but so often money and power are the tools,and the rationale for manipulating ones domain ( which always includes others,willing or not)should always be open for discussion and transparency,and not be argued away by any philosophical or religious belief.
What’s been a tremendous gift of this blog for me, is the examination of issues by rational, objective discourse and I do deeply appreciate how rational objective thinking of issues can give higher perspectives although I have always appreciated the influences of Descartes and the rational objective thinkers who brought us the Age of Reason.A Frenchman once told me that Americans( myself included) were never as logical as the French because the French have all studied Descartes. This conversation was in French in France so it’s not that I’m without some background.My response was that truth was in the accomplishment as much as in the logic.And the response back ( a little condescendingly) ‘C’est typiquement americain’
But to sum up all I would like to know is what a typical libertarian would do about the abuse of power inherent private control( private control coupled with deregulation is our current working environment).It seems that libertarians maintain ‘make it private and let it be’. I know the word ‘victimization’ has been stricken from the libertarian lexicon so it’s hard to call a spade a spade,even if a spade is there,but still there can be exchanges of insights.
Lou,
I don’t blame you at all for being a bit at sea. When I was much younger and reading Rothbard’s For a New Liberty, I was confused by his passing rejection of “anarcho-communism” and “anarcho-syndicalism” in its early pages. I hadn’t even heard of these terms before, couldn’t even guess about a definition of “anarcho-syndicalism”, and was baffled completely by the concept of “anarcho-communism”. Rothbard didn’t bother to explain those terms, and it was years before I found out what they meant.
Note: the following is a personal view, and will probably meet with screeching objections from any other self-described libertarians on this blog.
Well, “right-libertarians” — that is, those who trace their intellectual development back to Frederic Bastiat[*], who essentially deny that Karl Marx had even the slightest iota of insight about anything, and who — relatedly — haven’t even caught up to Charles Dickens when it comes to observing urban, industrialized society, pretty much don’t want to have anything to do with labor unions or fair wages. Right-libertarianism is a philosophy for plantation owners, and is at present adopted mainly by the nouveau riche, or those who expect to be riche any day now, if only those hated liberals in Washington, D.C. would just stop taxing them.
There is another branch of libertarian thought, “left-libertarianism”, which was heavily influenced by socialism, but which broke from that movement in the late 1800s, well before the Soviets could get any blood on their hands. (The Second International was formed in 1889 primarily as a means of purging anarcho-syndicalists and other anti-authoritarians from the socialist movement. Lenin showed up in 1905.)
Very simply, left-libertarians have strong anarchist tendencies just as right-libertarians do, but whereas right-libertarians are skeptical only of State power, left-libertarians tend to apply that critique of power to any organization, institution, or hierarchy. Therefore, left-libertarians tend to turn a jaundiced eye toward corporations, religious institutions, and even heavily-centralized labor unions.
Right-libertarians, as far as I have been able to tell from about twenty years of observation, blame two and only two things for societal inequities:
* individual failures on the part of the person on the low end of the inequality; and
* government interference.
In conversation, right-libertarians will almost always start with the first explanation, chalking up a person’s poverty or other misfortune to their own failure of intelligence or initiative. If that proves untenable (say, someone was born with Down’s Syndrome or rendered quadriplegic as a young child in an accident), then they’ll move on to the government interference explanation, and construct as long and as tenuous a causal chain as necessary. It usually comes down to government regulation or subsidization of some sort.
There’s an exception; when a right-libertarian explains why he personally does not enjoy the lifestyle of Bill Gates, he’ll go for the government interference explanation first. You can lay money on it.
In any case, for right-libertarians, the responsibility for societal inequities — insofar as they acknowledge that phrase as having any meaning — is pushed onto the individual suffering for the inequity, or onto the foggy abstraction of “the government” (insert contemptuous spit here). Seldom if ever will you find a right-libertarian accepting any degree responsibility for the broader prosperity of the society they live in. This dovetails, nicely, you’ll notice, with right-libertarians’ long-standing rejection of the notion of economic externalities, and their rabid opposition to the concept of anthrogenic global warming.
I’ll note that this last part of my reply applies just as well to modern American conservatives of the Goldwater mold. This method of assessing resposibility, I think, explains the long history of cross-pollination between right-libertarianism and conversatism much better than any philosophical symmetry. They can agree on who to blame for all problems (“lazy people” and “the gummint”), and that makes for close comradeship.
[*] A note here about Objectivists; they are often, but not always, in alliance with right-libertarians on the issues of the day. Ayn Rand famously detested the Libertarian Party. An Objectivist will not trace his ideological heritage to Bastiat, Lysander Spooner, or even Thomas Jefferson. An Objectivist’s history of great philosophical thought basically goes: humans make fire, yawning chasm, Aristotle, yawning chasm, Ayn Rand, we’re done now.
I was introduced to “anarcho-syndicalism” a couple of decades ago in Ursula Le Guin’s sympathetic, but not overly fawning, examination in “The Dispossessed”. I’d recommend the book to anyone interested in getting a good “middle-brow” introduction to anarcho-syndicalism in presented as entertaining “soft” science fiction.
At (or shortly after) the time I read “The Dispossessed” I had an interest in the ideas of the Hungarian economist Tibor Liska (who was sometimes called the Milton Friedman of socialism), who, while not an anarcho-syndacalist, tried to introduce market concepts to socialist economies.
The junction between Liska’s ideas and “anarcho-syncalism” might be in replacing our concept of “property” with a notion of “temporary exclusive rights to use” infrastructure (including improvements to land) and land. My recollection though of Liska’s thoughts is fragmentary, and it seems unlikely that he ever considered eliminating money from his economic system, but I recall one of his ideas was that individuals be sold tempory exclusive rights in the “means of production”. Alas, finding Liska’s works since the fall of the East bloc has become difficult.
In intellectual property most “property rights” evaporate after a period, for example 20 years for a utility patent after its date of filing. I think it would be interesting exercise to consider what an economy would look like if all property rights in physical means of production (land, industrial facilities) reverted to the public after a fixed period for resale to another party. Suppose our government, instead of having sold land, had just leased it for 99 years (as the Zambian government is doing now for commercial farmers being displaced by Mugabe’s “land reforms” in neighboring Zimbabwe)? We might have had a constant stream of property reverting to the government, with improvements, for resale, possibly reducing substantially the need to tax to fund government.
I have some sympathy for Branden’s observation that (some) on the right have a knee jerk hostility to the possibility of global warming resulting from human activity, though he is being more than a bit broad brush in his assault. And some on the left have embraced the possibility of human induced global warming with gusto as (yet another) club against what I suppose they might term the world economic order, but in reality reflects their open hostility to modern life. What this reflects is that for some ideology has become an all-embracing world view, that is to say, a religion. Objectivism and Marxism are, in my view, religions.
For myself I will admit a small taint of anti-consumerism, though I am hardly opposed to an industrial economy. Just to get in a dig at DST I will add, and I am being quite serious, that DST is a vehicle for fanning discretionary consumer purchasing and is clearly anti-environment.
BTW, if the segment of libertarian right Branden is referring to has been keeping up on the research they have a new club themselves, which is the possibility that up until the 1980’s particulate pollution associated with fossil fuels reflected enough light from the sun to counter balance the warming effects of increased greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. I for one can’t wait to hear these folks announcing if we had just left well enough alone in the 1960’s we wouldn’t have global warming. (Just in case someone thinks I am advocating getting rid of scrubbers from coal power plants, I am not.)
Paul,
The two books I happen to be alternating right now are Anarcho-Syndicalism by Rudolf Rocker and, as a matter of fact, The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Thanks for not spoiling the ending for me. :)
Thanks to Branden and Paul for sifting Objectivism and Libertarianism through the intellectual sieve.What I got out of it that some libertarians are left-wing anarchists,but that many are little more than typical small-govt conservatives and that we are all aware of ideas and concepts without being able to categorize them in the great outline of philophical thinking( such as Milt Friedman’s economic theories).Also, any philosphy is best understood as a whole and seen as an alternative to another set of philosophical beliefs.
I also realize again that I am no intellectual, but I ‘recognize it when I see it’ and thanks to those who are and who can express themsleves so lucidly,and with humor.
Lou wrote:
That’s my perception as well. In my view, too many right-libertarians do far too little to distinguish themselves from the conservatives that hailed George W. Bush’s accession to power. And what has the resulting trend on the size of government been over the past 6 years, with the party of “smaller government” in power? Despite this flagrant abandonment of principle, right-libertarians on this blog and elsewhere manage to work up more spite for the Democratic Party (whose presidential candidate Walter Mondale frankly admitted he’d “raise taxes” to relieve the budget deficits run up by Reagan) than for the Republicans.
Generally, I’d have thought betrayal of promises to be a greater ethical failing than backing the wrong horse, but right-libertarians and conservatives keep teaching me something new on this front.
This is why I also accuse right-libertarians of being single issue voters when it comes to electoral politics, focusing on the top marginal income tax rate to the exclusion of all other issues. Have my income taxes gone up under Bush? No. But my health insurance premium has, and so have my co-pays. Is more money left in my pocket? Nope. So from my perspective, I’ve just had my taxes shifted, with “private” collectors taking a bigger piece of my income.
The above is not precisely how I personally approach the subject. Human reasoning is too prone to fallacy for us to take most folks’ claims of philosophical systematization seriously. It’s probably Ayn Rand who turned me off of philosophical system-building, for a simple reason: she claimed that her entire philosophy could be derived from a few axiomatic statements concerning existence, consciousness, and identity. But neither she nor any of her disciples[*] actually did this. I know what logical and algebraic proofs look like. Show me your work, or don’t make the claim.
Nietzsche was a nice antidote to Rand in that he often wrote in collections of aphorisms (and was frequently entertaining, besides). This approach might actually be more suited to human moral reasoning, which seems to be highly heuristic in nature.
That said, there is value in systematic reasoning, because (unless the language used is deliberately obfuscatory) it is easier to detect inconsistencies. Sometimes philosophical inconsistency is just a reflection of an inconsistent human nature; other times it’s indicative of a flaw, which we should reject.
I have no magic prescriptions for determining the proper balance between heuristic and algorithmic approaches to philosophical thought. I think it’s best if everyone is as independent and critical as we can manage. The more we reject dogma of any stripe, the more likely we are to recognize the geniuses in our midst who can lead us across the next gulf in our intellectual endeavors.
Wingers of both conservative and libertarian flavors are frequent deployers of ideological litmus tests, but also claim to be big on rewarding individuals who exhibit superior intellect and industry. Maybe the best way they can start is by learning to remove the ideological blinders that keep them from identifying such people.
[*] Surely you’ve heard of such world-famous giants of the intellect as Leonard Peikoff, Harry Binswanger, and Peter Schwartz…
Branden- Some of my biggest battles as a Libertarian candidate came from the libertarians, because I did not thrown them enough red meat running as an incrementalist rather than offering only end-point solutions, thereby not passing their litmus tests. That part of the libertarian movement I could certainly do without. Indeed, it will be relegated to this 1-4% so long as it clings to the litmus tests in all the various areas of public policy- not merely personal economics.
As to the Randroids… I’m deeply amused by the Peikoffs of the world. Rand’s own word for people like them was “secondhander”; i.e.: one who lives off another’s glory and fails to produce originally on their own. There’s something sadly ironic in people who dogmatically march in line- in the name of individualism!!!
Mike Kole,
I can easily believe your experience as a candidate. The left-libertarians have problems on this front as well. I often find myself thinking that a more convincing proof of one’s “radical” credentials is not how extreme a reform one proposes, but how well one is able to keep up the fight for what one believes in given only incremental successes.
Totally agreed on Peikoff and friends. I used to despise those people — now I just feel sorry for them, living as they do off the copyright royalties of their dead benefactor. These clowns do more to discredit Objectivism than any philosophical critic could.