I have, at times, described my political instincts as a mix of libertarianism and utilitarianism. My libertarian bona fides are in serious question these days, but lets run with it for the moment. Jay Ackroyd at Eschaton has a post today that puts those two ways of approaching policy in serious tension.
Piketty says that wealth distributions skewed to the top decile reduces economic growth, and now the IMF reports the same is true of skewed income distributions.
Good news! Giving free money to poor people is good for the economy! Legislation establishing confiscatory estate taxes and setting up a government jobs program fixing infrastructure must be in the works!
I was sort of glib with my title. I don’t suppose “liberty” would be the particular focus, but more of a natural right to property. But, I guess Libertarians do the same to some extent. Their concern is perhaps generally with “liberty” but they spend most of their time on property rights with liberty rights being in more of a soft focus.
But, for argument’s sake, what if the premise is correct: that confiscating property from dead people and giving it to poor people was very beneficial to the economy? But, let’s also say there is a natural right of dead people to give property to their children.
What’s a policymaker to do in that situation? Honor the property rights of the recently deceased or promote the utility of the living?
I expect you probably go with the mixed bag we’ve had in the past. The government takes some and leaves some alone. And we haggle endlessly over the proper balance.
Ehh…private property rights are incompatible with libertarianism. Libertarianism is, and always has been, anti-capitalist and socialist in outlook. Just because a bunch of neo-authoritarians have, in the last few decades, hijacked a 150+-year-old term in order to be dishonest about their hatred of freedom, doesn’t change that.
Jefferson saw that one of the fatal flaws in the Roman Republic, one of the models for the American system of government, was inherited wealth and power exemplified in the Roman Senate. Plutocratic families ruled through generations, and as Jefferson commented, they were concerned more about their own personal fortune (in the broader sense) than that of the Republic they governed.
Although a child of the Enlightenment in many ways, he differed from his European counterparts by working to change the state-provided patterns of inheritance. First in Virginia, then in the Congress, he fought successfully to overturn laws which gave all inheritance to the eldest son.
In this way of thinking, a society with libertarian goals must, restrict the maximum economic and political power of the few, in order that liberty can be experienced by the many.
Jefferson shared his thoughts and readings with James Madison. Jefferson saw a generational improvement in the contemporary citizens. Revolutionaries, farmers, merchants and beyond. with primogeniture, the second and later sons of royalty must look abroad, or closely at home, to plunder.
It seems a far more confounding and valid principle to the question of whether dead people have natural rights, is whether we are going to continue calling our society meritocratic. Our narratives of the American Dream are based on the idea that if you work hard and make the right choices then you can get ahead. But in the society that we currently have, wealth is “sticky” (Pew Wealth Studies)–relatively few from the bottom 40% move up and relatively few of the top 40% move down, regardless of how hard the former work, or how little the latter work. Much of this is arguably based on our current system of inheritance.
If our values as a society are that a person gets to where they are because they have worked for it, then giving a house to a person just because they were born to somebody who had one but who has now died is not meritocracy, it’s simply an extension of middle ages aristocracy. While the person is alive they give their middle/upper class benefits to their children–after they die, the society who gave them the infrastructure for that way of life should absorb that wealth for the greater good. If meritocracy were functioning in our current society, people would likely not find inheritance as a cultural ritual to be problematic–but meritocracy, statistically, is rare in our society unless you are firmly in the middle of the wealth pack. The current model is broken, and there would seem to be a need to shift the balance from property rights to a more egalitarian social justice–Rawls would make a nice start.
“Much of this is arguably based on our current system of inheritance.”
It’s not the wealth but the system of networking the elite enjoy that perpetuates their status. The friends and families in that network will always ensure that the right doors, college admissions, jobs, husbands and wives fall to the members of that network.
“after they die, the society who gave them the infrastructure for that way of life”
Quit that. The one matter we can easily state regarding an estate is that it’s not your property, so quit inventing moral justifications to go looting.
It is wealth. And it’s social networking. Wealth and income are powerful mechanisms to solidify and create social networks. You can’t disentangle these processes. On the other hand, if you have wealth, then you can get your way in the corridors of power. But if you have no wealth, then you won’t have the social contacts–or if by some coincidence a poor person knows a powerful person, they don’t have the capital to coerce a socio-political effect. Wealth is the hinge that determines these subsequent effects.
“Looting” cannot be performed on one’s own property. If a person dies and the family members fight over who gets it when they haven’t “earned” the value of that property with specific labor equivalent to that value, then they are technically the looters. The property and wealth belongs to the public if the person who “earned” it dies. The infrastructure (roads, education, property defense mechanisms such as police, fire departments, military, etc) were provided by public cooperation that allows for the individual’s labor to accumulate into individualized wealth. Therefore when the person dies, that wealth belongs to the public.