There are of course all kinds of wealth. Some are born with a funny nose, others with a club foot, some without wit, and others can reduce the table to helpless laughter. Some are cute, some are ugly. Some have a sense of right and wrong, some are criminals down to the bone. This in turn means that some have friends, while others have none. But let's stick with a narrow definition of wealth as dollars in the bank.
Andrew Carnegie thought the wealthy had an obligation to the poor, but that their wealth shouldn't be redistributed by a committee. Instead, the wealthy should themselves redistribute their money (as Bill Gates does).
"Thus is the problem of Rich and Poor to be solved. The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; intrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself. ...disposing of surplus wealth ... for the general good"
Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth: Essays and Other Writings, (NY: Penguin, 2006), 12.
Against this, in private conversation, Burczak asked me why we can let the poor and stupid vote, but not partake in financial decisions, or not be shareholders in the great companies and have some general sense of ownership of the means of production.
Authority is something that Carnegie was not willing to dispense with. Wealth itself he was willing to disburse, but not authority.
Personally, I find Carnegie's passage to be offensive insofar as we know some of what he did to amass wealth. Not only union busting with hitmen, but squeezing every last working hour out of his wage-slaves. Something like Scrooge, he then turns around and disburses it in a potlatch-like fashion, to stun the poor with his largesse.
The eight-hour day, sexual harassment laws, laws against discrimination in hiring, are tips of the hat toward equality. The wealthy are nevertheless masters, and the poor nevertheless, slaves.
The autonomy that would be provided by a system in which at least some money was provided for the very poor on setting out into life would help increase general liberty.
To what extent should government interfere in the laissez-faire invisible hand of the market? Hayek provides few guideposts. Those few he offers are analyzed by Burczak.
"For example, he [Hayek] suggests that a wealthy society can assure to everyone 'some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work" Burczak, 39 and Hayek, 120).
Minimum wage, worker's comp, public health hospitals, the law that requires that any hospital take in emergency cases with or without insurance, come out of a notion of the general good. But everything that comes out of the general good acts as a tax on the wealthier members of society whose work and creativity is lessened.
Laws that require taxation, or that keep minimum wages up, are done with a sense of the general good. If those laws squeeze entrepreneurs to the point where they close factories, only to reopen in places like China and Mexico, where fewer laws protect the working class, this does not serve the national good. If, however, the poverty is so extreme in another country that a general lawlessness prevails, that country may have trouble attracting industry.
Baseballs were made in Haiti until Aristide took over and began a nationalization process. Rawlings relocated to Costa Rica. All MLB baseballs are made in a single factory there. 610 assemblers in aggregate make less than a single MLB American baseball player although they work 14 hour days.
Burczak writes, "Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of Hayek's legal theory is necessary in order to fashion a practical and persuasive vision of post-Hayekian socialism in which democratic governments would be authorized to alter the rules of the economic game based on socialist notions of justice" (40).
The key word in Burczak's sentence is "authorized." If you change that word to "required," you have a completely different sense, right? Try the sense with the word change.
Authorized or Required? Required would mean that companies lost all their autonomy and were squeezed much as workers formerly were in the 19th century. Now whole companies are are in effect slaves of state-run capitalism.
On one side is total freedom for the entrepreneur. Such conditions prevailed in the nineteenth century and allowed the likes of Andrew Carnegie to amass appalling fortunes at the expense of the many.
On the other side is a state that regulates competition, and enforces draconian taxation.
Under Carnegie, you had factory towns where only one person was making decisions. Under communism, you had only one person making choices (see Kim Jong-Il above, and analyze who's making decisions). It is always authority that is the last thing to be spread.
How do you spread authority?
What if you spread the authority so far that no decisions get made, or if the workers decide they can retire with full benefits after ten years on the job?
(Is this enough for today?)
4 comments:
"Any cook should be able to run the country." V.I. Lenin
These are enormously complex questions, which can't be answered, or solved in a blog, or a blog comment box.
We know that an uncontrolled, unmediated capitalistic system is open to all kinds of abuse. Society isn't a free-for-all with the spoils all accruing to the victors. But we don't want a Robin-Hood economy either.
The Robin Hood myth is actually based on a criticism of a system in which an irresponsible monarchy needed to be beaten back. Is a responsible monarchy better than an irresponsible socialistic one-party system? (But this is a pointless question.)
The issue today, for me, is to what extent we will pretend that the world is an organized whole, to which we (as an independent nation) owe a debt of allegiance. The world may someday be a united front, but for the time being, we're a world of individual, independent nations, each of which must guard its own interest(s) in all of its dealings with the rest. Any nation which voluntarily sacrifices the interests of its own citizens to some ideal of cooperation or capitalistic competition is doomed.
I don't think we "owe" China, or Greece, or Brazil, or Mexico anything. We may choose to help them, or we may enter into mutual agreements for mutual gain. But the first priority for our internal affairs and diplomatic intercourse should be the welfare of Americans--not other people. (China is actually doing to the U.S. what we have done for generations to much of the Third World. Welcome to exploitative capitalism!) We come first. Solve our own economic woes, bring up our standard of living, insure our own security. Once we've done that--and not one second before--we can then turn to helping others.
Put the oxygen mast on your own mouth first, then proceed to help the child in the seat next to you.
That should be "oxygen MASK" not "mast" in my post above.
The Mexico problem is hilarious. I was looking at the front page of the WSJ in the Price-chopper and it said that the Mexican government objected to Arizona law that it wasn't constitutional, and intends to challenge them in a US court?
How can a foreign government tell us what our own laws mean?
Meanwhile, the Mexicans have incredibly violent laws that protect them from Guatemalan and other illegals who seek to emigrate north (first time offenders get two years in a Mexican prison, in which they have a 50-50 chance of survival).
I have suggested a wall of China (broken cups and saucers piled fifty feet high and 900 miles long).
No doubt the Mexican authorities will object.
Bank robbers can also object that a life sentence is too stringent.
Manson can object that while he's killing people, we're killing whales, man.
And so we should be the ones in prison.
It would be nice to get a president in that made some sense on these issues.
Of course we won't solve any of our issues in my blog, or anywhere else.
What worries me is that our politicians are so limp that someone who really wants to ram through laws will emerge, and he or she will go way too far, and simply start dropping daisy cutters and a-bombs eliminating the need for a wall altogether.
If we can't draw a line somewhere, I'm sure that somewhere there is someone who can.
I'd like a wall about two hundred feet high surmounted with barbed wire and layered with land mines, and patrolled by drones.
I used to care about Afghanistan. But now that we got rid of the better general, and Obama doesn't seem to care about the place, we might as well get out and see what happens.
As for socialism, I'm still against it. I think it's evil.
But it's still important to give a hearing to intelligent people who feel otherwise. I hope someone else on the blog will help me read Burczak's book. He's no dummy, and has written a very scintillating book.
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