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The cake is a lie; why populism never works. And other stories.
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A poster over at the Economist, responding to one of their online debates- questioning, believe it or not, whether or not the rich should pay more taxes on principle- to clarify, this is different from the argument that you hear over here from the Left that, well, we need to pay for these programs so let's take it from the rich because they'll miss it the least, which has a certain logic to it even if you don't agree with it. This was a Parisian professor arguing, in all seriousness, that the rich should pay more taxes simply as a punitive measure. The rich being taxed for being rich. On the Economist no less. Well, back to the poster, Event Horizon, who needs an award of some kind for this post;
Dear Sir, There is a great hypocrisy in the morality arguments presented by most supporters of higher taxes on the rich. Most supporters are middle to low income citizens of wealthy countries. They envision a transfer of wealth from the rich to themselves. Their arguments would have a lot more moral authority if they advocated a transfer of wealth from the world’s rich to the world’s truly poor; say those living on less than $2000/year. So let me see people supporting that the tax on top US earners leaves America and goes directly to Africa, India and China. Ironically most of the supporters of high taxes do not even support a transfer of US money to India and China in exchange for products and services (“they took R jobs!”).
This House, at least, Mr or Ms Event Horizon, would like to present you with the only award that matters on the internets.
And it's a valid point. Someone that earns $10,000 a year, adjusted for purchasing power, or effective costs of living, would be considered poor in the United States- you might even get a free house out of the deal- but would above the national average in many of the countries that people complain that Western corporations shouldn't even be allowed to ship jobs to- including Brazil, India, China and South Africa. Hell, in a legitimately democratic but desparately poor country like Ghana, adjusted GDP per capita is as low as $1,500. McCain was attacked during the campaign because some said that a $5,000 yearly credit for medical expenses was too low- but the same amount of money could treble income for hundreds of millions of people around the World.
The concept of economic justice derived from redistributing money from the rich is shaky enough, but at the point at which you're stealing from the rich to give to your constituency groups rather than the actual poor, you look a lot less like Robin Hood and a lot more like Al Capone.
So much for the international fraternity of the proletariat, then. Ignoring the Economist's ongoing slide into economic idiocy...
I tend to think of all political science as dismal science. On a less depressing note, check out Kacie Kinzer's weird but uplifting sociological experiment-slash-performance art piece, Tweenbots.
Right, back to populism. I was reading the unintentionally amusing Venus Project and Zeitgeist Movement initiative papers, which is one of these cult-of-personality slash hippie slash collectivist movements. What struck me again, aside from the lack of willingness or ability for anyone involved in the movement to actually study first year economics before trying to debunk the system (free hint: changing the supply curve doesn't cause the demand curve to shift- it only changes the point where supply and demand meet, and thus the market price), was this repeated insistence on unity.
Of course we can go back to the works of Marx and Engels and Trotsky, maintaining that socialism has to be implemented internationally in order to work, to find this same argument. In fact, this is precisely the socialist argument to explain away the horrid failure of socialist states in the 20th century- as the Freedom Socialist party argues on their website,
Internationalism is especially vital since the first breaks in the capitalist chain occurred in impoverished colonial and semi-colonial countries, rather than in the richer industrialized nations as envisioned by Marx. Denied the resources of technically advanced countries, workers states have been forced to introduce some "free market" measures in order to keep their economies afloat. But these experiments with mixed economies are risky and short term at best. The only long-range solution is a global socialist economy, which can only be realized with revolution in the U.S.--a task that is embraced with great optimism by U.S. comrades in the Freedom Socialist Party.
It's not a sentiment unique to the most far-left social theories, either. One of the more striking examples of this view, laid out plainly, comes from Barbara Jordan's 1976 Address to the Democratic National Convention, a much lauded speech from which I shall excerpt the following paragraphs;
A nation is formed by the willingness of each of us to share in the responsibility for upholding the common good. A government is invigorated when each one of us is willing to participate in shaping the future of this nation. In this election year, we must define the "common good" and begin again to shape a common future. Let each person do his or her part. If one citizen is unwilling to participate, all of us are going to suffer. For the American idea, though it is shared by all of us, is realized in each one of us...
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Let there be no illusions about the difficulty of forming this kind of a national community. It's tough, difficult, not easy. But a spirit of harmony will survive in America only if each of us remembers that we share a common destiny; if each of us remembers, when self-interest and bitterness seem to prevail, that we share a common destiny.
I have confidence that we can form this kind of national community.
I have confidence that the Democratic Party can lead the way.
I have that confidence.
Emphasis added. This kind of argument, though, is peculiar to collectivism. This sort of logic never comes from capitalists, libertarians, or usually even social conservatives or moderates. As capitalism.org puts it in their excellent preamble, which everyone should go check out,
To live rationally in society, man requires only one thing from his fellow men: freedom of action. Freedom of action does not mean freedom to act by permission, which may be revoked at a dictator's, or a democratic mob's, whim, but the freedom to act as an absolute -- by right.
Man requires rights to those actions necessary to support his own life, the most fundamental right being the right to life, from which all other rights, including the right to liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, derive.
It's remarkable when you think about it, but so many of the arguments against capitalism stem from this underlying belief that wealth is something that exists, independent of effort, that is approportioned by the controllers of capital to their own whims, out of sheer greed, often due to the fact that most such motivated people are completely unawarey of the massive amounts of work people like Bill and Melinda Gates put into actually improving the lives of those living in poverty, rather than marching around with signs and rhyming chants.
Imagine two villages in a valley with a hundred people each. No one else exists. One village is full of entrepreneurs that organize the people to build better huts, develop new agricultural techniques, more efficient forms of labor distribution. The other village, for whatever reason, has poor systems in place- new ideas are discouraged, crime rampant, trust at a low. Let us even, to make this example as fair as possible, say that the first, more prosperous village had, at one point, exploited the poorer village and set up institutions that encouraged such corruption to exploit them. Let us even say that what trade that goes on between these two villages is set up specifically to heavily favor the rich village.
Two social and economic philosophers come onto the scene. The free market capitalist, classical liberal, would say to the poor village;
"These guys are kicking your ass. You should look at what they're doing and copy it, working on increasing your own productivity so that you can compete with your neighbors."
The collectivist, a strong believe in social justice, says to the wealthy village;
"You're exploiting these poor people. In order to make the system more fair to everyone, you should take half of what you have and give it to the other village."
Of course, this is a temporary measure, because the wealthy village will quickly outpace the other once again, even if wealth is first evenly distributed, for the exact same reasons it got ahead in the first place; it has the institutions and the cultural incentives to produce more wealth.
The collectivist, at this point frustrated with the continued "stealing" of wealth from their neighbors by the more prosperous village, would finally slap restraints on the economy of richtown, slowing down the obviously unhealthy pace of growth and redistributing the income to the good, innocent folk of poortown, who now have absolutely no incentive to reform their system or culture to encourage the same type of innovation. Finally, we have equality, since both villages are now equally unfree, one laboring for the other and the other without any economic power of it's own, and both are equally poor as production lags and finally contracts as the power shifts from innovators to the bureaurats who control the mechanisms of redistribution.
This has every danger of being a strawman, yet legitimately I find it difficult to find where this analysis of the economic policies offered by collectivist philosophies are unfair. The cigarette tax and the carbon cap and trade tax being debated now fall unevenly on the poor and middle class, constraining buying power further, while government entitlements rise higher- a system that is sickeningly remniscient of feudalism, really.
On the other hand, I think the Republican obsession with cutting taxes is unhealthy. Indeed, I think it's unlikely that government spending would grow the way it does if legislators were forced to pay the full cost with each year's budget, putting the pain immediately on their consticuencies. Those that are out protesting tea or taxes or whatever in yet another insipid street march should remember that Dick Cheney was the one who claimed that deficits don't matter, a point that Glenn Beck, at least, remembers, even if Sean Hannity has selective amnesia.
And those that support fiscal freedom seem uncomfortably comfortable with the suspension of civil liberties in the name of security- even after the Obama administration signalled t hatit may soon redefine terrorism to include right wing extremists, no less- supporting policies like rendition, which is to torture as hiring a hitman is to murder, or kidnapping foreign nationals to hold in prison indefinitely, without ever filing a formal accusation or presenting any proof of wrongdoing in a court of law and, increasingly, just blatantly deciding that maybe torture is okay as long as it works. The former two of which, by the way, Obama is completely okay with, as long as it takes place in Afghanistan instead of Cuba, because that's a meaningful distinction somehow. Glenn Greenwald has picked up the slack from the right, tearing an absolute blue streak through the Obama administration's flipflops on warrantless wiretapping, suspension of habeas corpus and executive privilege over the last few weeks. Of course, in turn, Republicans blew up the federal budget 40% when they were in power, all in the name of fiscal responsibility.
In summary;
Absolutely no one you can vote for actually supports a genuinely free society where government has little power to dictate or ruin your life with little oversight or recourse, except for Ron Paul and he has the notable drawback of being absolutely crazy.
Politics is depressing. On a more cheerful note, I strongly encourage everyone to check out In Extremo's new website- they are, far and away, the best German folk-metal band ever.
I'm also instituting a new policy of ending every article with a pretty picture, because why not.
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Phillip Straub's colorful creations can be found over here
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