The NatNat rez

Resolved: Limiting economic inequality ought to be a more important social goal than maximizing economic freedom.

Rob—Zombie? Lowe? Petrie?—asks about NatNats, and I’m happy to (marginally) comply. Of course, you won’t have Coachean Life to kick around in a day or two, as I’ll be on vacation, so I can’t wrestle this one around for day after day after day, but there’s not much we can do about that. Fortunately the topic is so elemental in LD terms that there isn’t much one has to say to have said enough.

Governments exist, at their most basic level, to do a handful of things. Most importantly, and universally, they establish order among individuals. Governments create and enforce rules, which establish order. John Locke talks eloquently about doing this in what has become the democratic model, with representative government enacting legislation, an executive enforcing the legislation, and a judiciary interpreting the legislation. But it is done as well by a totalitarian government. Rules are set, people follow them. The difference is that in the totalitarian state, the people have no say in setting the rules.

Secondly, governments provide a synergistic ability to perform what individuals cannot perform. Governments, by their nature and size, are able to provide infrastructures, for example, things like roads or reservoirs, that serve their citizens beyond what the citizens could have done for themselves. Once humans develop large societies from small tribal groups, a relatively new phenomenon in the history of our species, the individual no longer is able to provide for self and family. Distances become greater, specializations become common, and government steps in to provide what we once provided for ourselves. Pre-societal humans, if they wanted water, plopped down next to a river. Nowadays we turn on the faucet. In other words, governments provide services to individuals that they cannot provide for themselves.

Thirdly, and again derived from nature and size, governments are able to deal meaningfully with other governments. We’ve talked about sovereignty in the past, and that subject is not relevant here (but feel free to listen to the Parsippany Ritz podcast if you’re interested).

And that would be about it. Establishing order, providing organization beyond the individual level and dealing with other comparable polities are what governments universally do, one way or the other, well or poorly, regardless of the type of government.

The NatNat rez looks mostly to the second area of what a government does. One government differs from another government in many ways, including how it provides services to individuals that they cannot provide for themselves, and in what services it provides. And it is important to keep in mind that any government runs on the support of the individuals it governs, in the form of taxes. Money goes in, money comes out. Again, differences exist: a thieving dictator’s handling of the money is different from a democratic socialist state’s handling of the money. In any case, only a government can “limit economic equality.” So we have to be looking at describing the nature of governments in the rez.

Resolved: Limiting economic inequality ought to be a more important social goal than maximizing economic freedom.

The most extreme limiting of economic inequality would be a Marxist system in which there is no such thing as private property. The most extreme maximizing of economic freedom would be a laissez-faire state with no regulations on capital whatsoever. Historically, Marx and his followers were responding to the extant situation, where big forces of capital did whatever they wanted without controls, and pocketed all the profits. The idea of eliminating private property would, of course, theoretically eliminate the big forces of capital, but would also eliminate one of the cornerstones of the West’s received wisdom of Rationalism. Property, many believed, was an inalienable right. The conflict, in other words, was clear.

The real world has gone a great way since Marx’s day in resolving this conflict. On the one hand, the purely capitalistic libertarian state is now subject to government regulation at many levels. On the other hand, the urge to hold private property has proven hard to suppress, and purely Marxist governments do not really exist, and the legacy of totalitarian states devolving out of communism may have demonstrated in the laboratory that these governments never could exist. That, of course, is moot. Still, many socialist ideas have been incorporated into many otherwise capitalistic states, most noticeably in the area of health care, even in the US. So the deep background here, which is what we’ve discussed so far, is that the extremes have for all intents and purposes existed, and we’ve evolved into some middle ground. But that middle ground is vast. Take a look at these ratings: http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/countries.cfm This is the Heritage Foundation’s index of economic freedom. The amount of income tax is pretty telling from country to country. You could do worse that diving into these figures with notepad in hand.

But we haven’t really addressed the resolution yet, that “limiting economic inequality ought to be a more important social goal than maximizing economic freedom.” If we are going to limit economic inequality, we are presumably going to have either a redistribution of wealth after the fact, i.e., the richer subsidizing the poorer to some extent, or we are going to have a distribution of the wealth before the fact, i.e., the public possession of the wealth and the elimination of private property. One could easily run a completely pro-communist aff, in other words, and be resolutional. I don’t think that is a terrible debate: far from it, the study of capitalism v. communism is very enlightening, and it wasn’t all that long ago that, indeed, cap v. com was literally the NatNat topic. This could be seen as a variation on the theme.

As I say, however, to some extent history has already resolved the cap v com debate, and while just because something happened doesn’t make that something inevitable, I wouldn’t want to be defending communism after looking at those heritage.org figures. Freedom, it would seem, equates pretty straightforwardly with free capitalism. And freedom is an awfully strong benefit of any system, not to mention a system that allows you to keep most of your wealth. An attractive picture, unless you’re destitute in Hong Kong. Or, a couple of notches down, the US.

So what other debate is there? Well, the first thing I thought of when I heard this topic was not cap v com but Rawls v Nozick. (I very recently posted a Feed piece on these two yabbos that NatNatters ought to take a look at.) The chief question that Rawls poses, the way I see it, is going back to that second purpose of government discussed above, that governments provide services to individuals that they cannot provide for themselves. Given that, in our complex modern society, we seem to be unavoidably faced with a class of economically deprived, for whatever reason, what responsibility, if any, does government, and by association tax-paying individuals who make up that government, have to that underclass? There’s an awful lot of leeway in answering this question, and that leeway could make for a good debate. Rawls tells us that we need to create a society that provides a certain minimum benefit for the least privileged. That is, as we “create” a society, we must fashion it in such a way that the least privileged are getting what they consider to be a fair deal. To achieve this end, we must do our societal creating behind a veil of ignorance: we cannot know our own position in the society, as that might corrupt our decision-making. Not knowing our position will lead us to this minimum benefit for the least privileged position, because for all we know, the least privileged might be us. Needless to say, if we were absolutely fair and incorruptible, we would come up with exactly the same decisions; the veil of ignorance is merely an insurance policy against the fact that, unfortunately, we are not angels.

The end result of Rawls’s thinking is a fairly robust support system for the underclass, and his ideas are associated with liberalism, i.e., a large government system running a lot of programs for the public weal. This kind of system can be seen as prioritizing limiting inequality. Keep in mind that the logic of Rawls is not manifest, and you just can’t walk into a round, say “veil of ignorance” and walk away with the ballot. The V of I for Rawls is a philosophical determining mechanism, not an end in itself. But reading the first hundred pages or so of Theory of Justice should be enough to get your head straight on what the man was talking about. After these pages he goes into the math; I, for one, was not equipped to go with him.

On the other hand is not really Nozick, as the aforementioned article explains, but conceptually we think of it as Nozickian. Ayn Rand, of all people, supported charity for the poor, as a sort of noblesse oblige aspect of the possession of wealth. The botto line of libertarianism is not, therefore, letting the poor rot. Rand is as much a libertarian as Nozick, and not that I’d ever suggest anyone torture themselves by reading Rand’s prose, I will say that once you get her drift, you will understand the neg. The position opposite to limiting economic inequality is one in which the government does not directly take on the responsibility of seeing to its underclass. This is not done out of meanness or parsimony, but out of the belief that the best system for the growth of capital is the system that least attempts to control that growth. Short of crippling monopolies or unfair business practices, including the unfair treatment of labor, the belief is that, since everyone is equal and has an equal opportunity to create their own wealth, it should be their private business to do so, and the government’s job is to keep away from it. In other words, the government is obligated to be laissez faire, because the laissez faire system will result in the most wealth for the most people. The very idea that wealth is obtainable to one and all acts as an incentive, as compared to the welfare-ish Rawls state, where the dole acts as a disincentive. Look, for instance, to the unemployment situation in the UK. At the point where unemployment is about as attractive as low-level employment, you run a large risk of finding a large group who opt out. Why work when you don’t have to?

I think the very interesting ideas of capitalism are in this construct. Despite the fact that I am a dyed-in-the-wool liberal—I know, you’re shocked, shocked to hear it—I think there is reasonableness and potential in that small government, every man for himself idea. I mean, didn’t it work in the US? Doesn’t it potentially build the most prosperous nations, the most vivacious, the most exciting? Where is the financial excitement in the world today? Outside of China (which may be too important to posit an “outside of” argument), it’s in the freewheeling capitalist nations.

Anyhow, this just scratches the surface. And because of the wide open nature of the rez, it’s far from inclusive. It’s merely the starting point of one evening’s aimless noodling.

And now I’ve got to go get Tik (pronounced teek) out of my suitcase.