Ampersand has a hysterical post up where he points out that Megan McArdle’s entire system of whiny arguments about using taxes for “charity” is based on the incorrect notion that only the wealthy pay taxes. But I what I find interesting about it is the conversation he references illuminates how libertarianism is simply a weak cover story for good, old-fashioned class warfare.
I don’t know why Matt should find this remarkable:
Still, the main psychological point remains that there’s a remarkable tendency to equate advocating that others engage in risky acts of physical violence with the idea of possessing courage and strength as personal characteristics.
After all, we’ve already internalized the notion that advocating taxing other people in order to give their money to someone else is somehow morally akin to charity.
That’s why I’m mostly unable to get on the train with the strange fascination with this woman. Yes, she’s horrendously wrong and pig-headed and possesses a shocking lack of self-awareness, but I’m a softie and I just end up embarrassed for her. I mean, she thought that was a zinger. It’s like watching a hobo in a top hat; some laugh at his delusions, but I just cringe and look away.
Anyway, the whole statement betrays the fundamental issue with libertarianism, which is that it’s not based around a concept of liberty so much as it’s based around the concept that the bodies of the working class are the actual property of the rich. Sending people to die in war while avoiding the service yourself makes perfect sense in this regard; the working class belong to you, and you can dispose of their bodies for your own means if you see fit. Not saying that Megan believes that outright, necessarily, but she clearly from this statement thinks that the use of other human beings lives to advance an imperialist agenda is, on the moral scale, far down the list from asking the worthy rich to pay back to a society that has given them so much while others have so little.
Her obsession with relabeling social spending “charity” makes me bananas; it’s a common trope on the right and it’s meant to reinforce the idea that the wealthy are morally superior to the poor. And because they are morally superior, they shouldn’t encourage moral inferiority with generosity, and if they privately extend charity, then it’s best to do so with strings attached, for the moral improvement of the poor. Get them off the welfare rolls and into the churches where they have to at least pretend to love your definition of Jesus before they get to eat. This view of social spending infects the government under conservatives—the maudlin concern for the souls of the poor has led BushCo to do things like tie welfare benefits to finger-wagging classes about the importance of marriage, for instance. The main thing is that if you’re poor, assistance needs to be tied to a ritual humiliation of some sort, some kind of admission from the recipient that they’re not worthy. Public assistance for the middle class and the wealthy (in the form of schools, roads, corporate tax breaks, the court system, government bailouts, etc.) is not tied to humiliation; because of our relative wealth, you can tell god already likes us better and therefore we don’t need moral improvement. It’s a baffling worldview to me—there’s no reality-based reason to think the poor are morally inferior as a class. For instance, the rich as a class start wars and wreck economies, leaving people in dire straits all the time. The poor do that pretty rarely, so already there’s two giant, overwhelming points in their favor. And even if some poor people do in fact spend welfare checks on alcohol and gambling, that’s still nickels and dimes in the moral account book compared to what Halliburton and Lockheed Martin do with their huge government no-bid contract giveaways, which end up feeding a machine that kills people. All the beer-soaked poker games in the world have no hope of causing the deaths of over 600,000 Iraqis. Single moms drawing welfare checks might not be submissive to a patriarchal definition of morality, but somehow that doesn’t caused millions of refugees fleeing a war-torn nation. I could go on, but you get the point.
83 Responses to “How about we start focusing on the moral improvement of the neoconservatives?”
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I don’t think the ampersand essay was as good as you go. But on the other hand nothing one can say about McCardle’s form of logic can be brutal enough. She makes stupid look smart, frankly. This whole thing about taxes being charity gets my goat in a completely different way. These phony free marketers/libertarians always forget to know that taxes grow out of a set of policy decisions that are analagous to the free market: if citizens want more services for themselves or for other citizens they are free to vote for more taxes. Saying that they shouldn’t want those services, or that they shouldn’t levy those taxes on other citizens, has the same logical standing as complaining (as conservatives frequently do) that people shouldn’t “want” to dress up as disfavored cultural characters at halloween or shouldn’t “want” to drive big cars. Why is one set of wants (driving big cars, attending huge mega churches, buying flowers on mother’s day) ok and another set of “wants” (wanting national health care, wanting to spend money on public schools or roads) not ok? As citizens we are all part of the same family and we make our decisions collectively. Its no more *wrong* for citizens to make joint decisions about government spending than it is wrong for families to make joint decisions about family spending.
The libertarian sleight of hand is to argue that one can simultaneously be a member of a free society and a voting citizen and *not* share in the common good as well as the common defence. But this is no more possible for adult members of any society than it is possible for adult members of families. We are all in it together precisely to the level that we all agree on how we earn and how we spend our money for the good of all. Anything else isn’t libertarianism, its free loading. (though I happen to believe the two are identical).
aimai
“Her obsession with relabeling social spending “charity” makes me bananas; it’s a common trope on the right and it’s meant to reinforce the idea that the wealthy are morally superior to the poor.”
“Public assistance for the middle class and the wealthy (in the form of schools, roads, corporate tax breaks, the court system, government bailouts, etc.) is not tied to humiliation; because of our relative wealth, you can tell god already likes us better and therefore we don’t need moral improvement.”
In my mind, there is no real difference between “social spending” defined as welfare, or Social Security (which many Americans try desperately to avoid thinking of as welfare - which it still is anyway), or spending on schools, roads, police protection, fire protection, levees around a city prone to flooding, government assistance after a major disaster, etc.
All of these are forms of “social spending”, which all of us benefit from in one way or another.
I do object strongly to the idea that corporate tax breaks and bailouts are “social spending”, at least not anything like the same as welfare or Social Security.
Rich and poor benefit from roads (the poor eat food delivered by trucks even if they can’t drive on the roads), schools (I know not all schools are equally well-fed), police, fire people, levees, etc.
However, most tax breaks are aimed purely at those already well off, most bailouts are insurance policies to protect capitalists from the predations of the “invisible hand of the marketplace”, etc.
Unlike “libertarians”, I believe citizens have a moral responsibility for each other - and that does NOT mean judging poor people as lacking for being poor or admiring rich people and aspiring to be as ruthless…
Treating all people with dignity and respect, regardless of their class, upbringing, financial resources, etc., is just good common sense.
“A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man…” (and woman…)
The reason, aimai, is that McCardle and other Libertarians don’t want universal health care, public schools, functioning bridges, etc., because they have good private health care, don’t have kids and live in flatland. What, not all 300 million Americans live like that? Well, if it’s good enough for McCardle, it’s good enough for them! And are you saying there’s somethign immoral with McCardle driving her Hummer through a childless desert? Now you’re just judging.
It all boils down to narcissism. If it effects them in a way that is even a minor inconvenience, it’s wrong and they’ll justify their selfishness with economic hand waving. And if that doesn’t work, they’ll slap you around with ten tons of Atlas Shrugged until you’re just so bored and dizzy you give up.
Worked so far for Grover Norquist, that hot god of bathtub drowning libertarianism, so it must be good!
Single woman on welfare: a check of about 500$ a month (in Quebec), or 6000$ a year. A bit higher with kids.
Halliburton CEO: a few billions a year in corporate welfare.
Now who’s the biggest welfare leech on the taxpayers? I know who I’d rather be giving my money to: the person who actually needs it.
“Single woman on welfare: a check of about 500$ a month (in Quebec), or 6000$ a year. A bit higher with kids.”
And if that woman’s kids get educated, get good jobs, and pay taxes we all benefit. If one of her kids goes on to cure cancer or end our dependence on oil, the whole world could be improved, even a rich guy’s life.
But the rich guy has a stake in keeping those people poor and uneducated. In an atmosphere that casually discards our moral responsibilities to each other but endlessly worships the wealthy and powerful as our betters and role models, it’s easy to see the mote in her eye and ignore the log in our own.
The way the Frost family was viciously attacked for getting a few crumbs from the rich man’s table should be instructive to us all. Every one of us is a medical or financial crisis away from being looked at as “Lebensunwertes Leben” in the eyes of those at the top of the social ladder.
To my mind, 100,000 people getting government assistance to help get a better life is money well spent - while a tax break to a wealthy family who produces another George W. Bush would have done the world more good if it was burned…
Sure there is - they’re poor
What bothers me most about this whole approach tho, is the lack of self-interest: to wit, more income distribution inequality = fewer v rich people & poorer working/middle classes. Given that the proportion of income that is spent, not saved, varies inversely with relative size of income, this means less spending i.e. less consumption i.e. less profits …and all of a sudden we’re back to the 1920s, with the same ending fairly predictable.
Oops, sorry, that wandered OT a bit.
These phony free marketers/libertarians always forget to know that taxes grow out of a set of policy decisions that are analagous to the free market: if citizens want more services for themselves or for other citizens they are free to vote for more taxes.
The one and only time I won an argument with my annoying faux-libertarian dad was when he was complaining about the lack of services in Arizona where he lives and I pointed out that was the reason we paid high taxes in California: we get services in return for those high taxes. If you don’t think you need or will need those services, move somewhere with low taxes. If you want your disabled neighbor to have an Access bus available so s/he can get around, you’re going to have to pony up a little tax money for it.
He was forced to concede the point.
What utter tosh, as we Brits say. Libertarians don’t believe that the working class (such a quaint Marxian term) are the property of anyone; the whole point of the libertarian point of view is that people own themselves, as Ayn Rand, John Locke, Milton Friedman, etc, argued for years. Pay attention to what people actually say, it saves a lot of trouble later on.
best regards
“If you don’t think you need or will need those services, move somewhere with low taxes. If you want your disabled neighbor to have an Access bus available so s/he can get around, you’re going to have to pony up a little tax money for it.”
And the feelings about the validity of having or using those services are usually based on a person’s age and experience, not only on political beliefs.
I bet if your dad’s health was such that he was the one who needed the Access Bus, he probably wouldn’t see a problem with it at all. However a healthy 25-year-old (like many people I know) might look at the availability of such a service and rail about the waste of money.
Libertarians don’t seem to be able to ever see themselves in situations beyond their control. They think no harm will ever come to them as long as they worship at Ayn Rand’s idol and continue to practice class warfare on the less fortunate.
It’s the inability to understand and empathize that’s most disturbing in these situations…
McArdle once argued against this view by saying that even when she was freelancing and therefore uninsured, she still opposed government-funded health care.
“McArdle once argued against this view by saying that even when she was freelancing and therefore uninsured, she still opposed government-funded health care.”
Which is a ridiculously easy thing to say when you’re not currently severely ill, and incredibly easy to reverse when you find out you’re going to die from some treatable condition that you can’t afford to treat…
McArdle manages to pack so much stupid into so little space. Really the economy of language is amazing, almost poetic.
So exactly who is suggesting that taxes=charity besides the libertarians? Charities do often provide services that are also covered by the government and that is where the similiarity ends. And no one gets moral brownie points for paying their damn taxes.
Jonathan, I find that what people say can often involve deceit, so I prefer to look at what they do. In that regard, the belief that the rich own the working class shows itself. By taking people at their word, even when it doesn’t match up to actions, we leave ourselves open to the sort of bullshit stories libertarians tell themselves and others.
You’re being a little disingenuous. Most libertarians oppose the Iraq war.
Again, the actual stances of libertarians betray your argument. Libertarians are opposed to corporate welfare just as much as you are.
So because some people are irresponsible with my tax dollars, it justifies even more people being irresponsible with them? Brilliant!
I do think the libertarians pick up on one notion that liberals can’t seem to shake, which is the bias towards thinking that government expenditures should always be justified in terms of references to the poor. Thus, the S-CHIP bill, which recognizes, correctly, that the middle class often need emergency medical help, gets torpedoed, rhetorically, by the question of why someone making 60.000 per year ‘deserves’ S-CHIP. On the other hand, when agribusinesses or investment firms put their hands into uncle sam’s pocket, they sanely dispense with the moralistic language and talk the language of self-interest.
I think it is in the self-interest of the average tax payer to get a lot more back from the government than she gets at the moment. In fact, they should get optimal service, or at least should try to. The reason we should have universal health care is two-fold: one is that it is the moral thing to do, but the other is that it is the self-interested thing to do. And that the wealthiest pay the most in this system is not some moral fault, but a virtue - since the accumulation of wealth among the few always endangers the health of the republic. Interestingly, the economic logic of the libertarians always stops short of being applied to public policy. Otherwise, they would have to acknowledge the obvious - the greatest beneficiaries of state spending are the wealthy. They’d have to be crazy not to use their wealth in order to bend legislators to their will, and guess what? They aren’t crazy, and they do use the system to bend legislators to their will in all domains of economic life. Legislation, as well as anything else, is a profit opportunity. You think Blackwater, Raytheon, or the companies that have profited enormously from the Defense department invention of the internet are not using government money to buy the mcmansions?
Libertarians do recognize this on one level. Most of them supported the war in Iraq, which, unsurprisingly, paid big government dividends to an endless array of government ‘defense’ suppliers, who in turn pay the salaries of those most inclined to libertarianism - the engineering class, the hedge funders, the consultants. It is a circle jerk of the wined and dined, and the moral talk about ‘charity’ is mainly for suckers.
Why is one set of wants (driving big cars, attending huge mega churches, buying flowers on mother’s day) ok and another set of “wants” (wanting national health care, wanting to spend money on public schools or roads) not ok?
Only the latter set threatens their delight in being a privileged elite.
Do you enjoy it when conservatives, in a debate about abortion, tell you that you don’t really care about reproductive freedom, you are just interested in having sex as much as you want? Or when they attack the teacher’s unions as self-interested and opposed to any reforms that would help children.
Perhaps it’s a better policy to engage the actual arguments that people make instead of attacking their motivations.
“Perhaps it’s a better policy to engage the actual arguments that people make instead of attacking their motivations.”
It’s certainly a good diversion when you want people to watch one hand while the other is picking your pocket.
As Amanda said above, “…I find that what people say can often involve deceit, so I prefer to look at what they do.”
And what they often do is stuff their mouths at the public trough while screaming when the less fortunate try to get a little too…
Hmm. Interesting: “Do you enjoy it when conservatives, in a debate about abortion, tell you that you don’t really care about reproductive freedom, you are just interested in having sex as much as you want?”
Imagine how terrible it would be to get as much sex as you want. Why, the heavens would open, Lucifer would come down and ushered you straight into hell.
Welfare for the rich is typically in the form of paying them to do something decorative but useless, like making museums or bombs or information. So perhaps we need to figure out something decorative but useless that poor people can do — maybe a living museum a la Sturbridge Village…
Have you seen this article by China Mieville about Libertarian utopias? I love how he sums up the ideology:
“‘libertarianism,’ that peculiarly American philosophy of venal petty-bourgeois dissidence … they recast their most banal avarice—the disinclination to pay tax—as a principled blow for political freedom.”
Simon, it’s a waste of time to take people at their word when their actions blatantly contradict what they’re spouting. For example: Would you believe a random politician stands for “good old-fashioned family values” if he makes the statement at a press conference while simultaneously engaging in indecent acts w/ a blowup doll on national TV?
“it’s a waste of time to take people at their word when their actions blatantly contradict what they’re spouting.”
mustlelid,
How about a politician who spends most of his time talking about the poor, but then builds himself a 28,000 square foot house?
Should we listen to his words or his actions?
Only if you consider war and masses of impoverished refugees a BAD thing, and I think we have definitively seen that libertervatives (conservatarians?) do not.
Feature, not bug.
Or a politician that opposes school vouchers but sends his kids to a private school, or an Al Gore that burns too many fossil fuels, and so on and so forth… It really isn’t that productive to the debate at hand.
Do you enjoy it when conservatives, in a debate about abortion, tell you that you don’t really care about reproductive freedom, you are just interested in having sex as much as you want?
Um, what?
Yes, it’s true — I want to have as much sex as possible without having to worry about getting pregnant. Why that’s anyone else’s business, I have no idea.
I especially want to know why a self-proclaimed libertarian thinks it’s his business to decide whether or not I’m having too much sex.
No reality based reason to believe the poor or morally inferior, no. It comes from religion and is so deeply embedded in our culture I don’t know if it’s possible to root it out.
It comes from Calvinism you know. We are all so totally depraved that there is nothing we can do to earn salvation. However, for mysterious reasons of his own, God chooses to love and save some people anyway. And of course if God is showering his unlimited love upon you why then it’s obvious that you will prosper, therefore lack of prosperity means God doesn’t love you. Simple. At least it was for the good burghers of early Calvinism.
MKK
“How about a politician who spends most of his time talking about the poor, but then builds himself a 28,000 square foot house?
Should we listen to his words or his actions?”
And you would be more likely to listen to what Edwards says about poor folk in America if he was living out of a 1973 Dodge Dart parked on a city street?
Elect John Edwards and see if he runs the government as a kleptocracy like the Cheney/Bush administration. Then, and only then, can you piss on his position in life’s lottery as compared to what he wants for all Americans…
How about a politician who spends most of his time talking about the poor, but then builds himself a 28,000 square foot house?
Ah, yes, the conservative’s favorite fallacy: if you’re concerned about the poor, the only logical solution is to give all of your money away and become poor yourself. Because there’s absolutely no middle ground between stuffing every penny you find into a mattress and giving everything you have away until you’re completely impoverished.
So much for noblesse oblige. But, hey, an ethic that officers in the US Marines are required to follow is clearly a wimpy, candy-assed ethic that no real man would adhere to. Because everyone knows what pansies the Marines are.
A 28,000 square foot house is “middle ground”? Ok.
How about a politician who talks often of global warming, but then fights against building a wind farm in Nantucket Sound because…”I sail out there.”
Somehow there needs to be a way to explain to middle-class libertarians* that an enormous amount of propaganda is created in order to persuade them that they belong to the rich side of the rich/poor divide: that the middle class has more interests in common with the rich than they do with the poor. This propaganda makes it seem as if ~$50k/yr is the dividing line between getting more than you pay from the govt and giving more than you get, when in fact the dividing line between the people who really benefit from an economy based upon corporate welfare is much, much higher. I’m always completely baffled by middle-class people who want to eliminate an estate tax that will never, never affect them.
*And as I always say, the only people stupider than libertarians are ravers.
Chris and Jonathan Pearce,
Something to remember is that any discussion that takes place here takes place against the background of years of combined listening to, and watching, the phony and inhumane rhetoric of the right and the libertarian lapdogs who support it. Its not that we haven’t all had our moments of “taking people’s arguments at face value” or watching their mouths and not their hands. Its that we’ve all gotten past that. Unlike charlie brown we weren’t going to run at that football over and over again only to have it moved at the last minute.
Chris, its really childish of you to come here and vent your rage at better men than you will ever be. Its not like you can elevate your own petty life by dragging them down. Only the far right trolls would ever assume that a person has to live poor to fight for the poor. Your assumption that Edwards cant be serious about poverty because he now has personal wealth is terribly revealing about your own limitations as a person–and about the basic assumptions of your party and your friends. You must believe that all people are so selfish that they would never make a move towards a more just society unless they were personally oppressed–never care about all our children’s futures unless their own children were at risk–never fight for health care unless they themselves couldnt’ afford health care. What a pathetic world view that is. But basically, that’s all you’ve got. All people are selfish so all actions that appear to be taken with other people’s good in mind must be fake. Most of us, though, live in another world in which lots of people–not just the edwards’ or the gores’ actually believe that its their job to work to make a better, more just world. That’s not because we are all poverty stricken welfare queens. Often its because we are middle class. We just belong to a society and culture that doesn’t privilige childish selfishness and call it courage.
Do please go on complaining that some rich people actually care about social justice. You simply make yourself and your party look even more pathetic than they already do.
aimai
A 28,000 square foot house is “middle ground”? Ok.
Yes, damn John Edwards for putting money into the local economy by building a house, and then sending money to the county government by paying property taxes! Really, what kind of monster pays property tax on a big house?
I guess if he bought a house that size and then whined and complained that the county was “stealing” money from him by daring to tax him, that would be fine with you, right?
Only the latter set threatens their delight in being a privileged elite.
*stands, applauds*
Dang, woman, that was beautiful.
-Ayn Rand The Fountainhead
Perhaps Johnathan Pearce does indeed believe that men don’t own one another, but even his little Nazi hero Ayn Rand certainly believed that women were the property of men.
There are two reasons to take people’s words seriously and assume, for the sake of argument, that they mean what they say.
First, they may be right. Unless you engage their actual arguments, you cannot know that you have not succumbed to groupthink or conformation bias. (Even then, you cannot be sure, but the grounding for your confidence in your own opinion is less shakey.)
Second, once in a while you may run into a person who is sincere in their beliefs and may be convertible. I was once a sincere right libertarian, and was converted to left libertarianism after years of arguing only when confronted with basic problems with right libertarian ideology that I could have learned sooner if the people I argued against had taken me seriously enough to point them out. (I have mentioned this before on a blog forum and the primary response I got was someone ridiculing the idea of a libertarian annoyed that other people did not help him figure things out, as if I was morally deserving of ridicule for being taken in by an incorrect ideology because I was not smart enough to instantly see its flaws, rather than say, thinking that talking to a converted right libertarian might be a great resource for learning how to convert right libertarians.)
Well, it’s a matter of maintaining cognitive dissonance. I mean, most libertarian fears of social justice can be distilled into, “YOU’RE COMIN’ TO TAKE MY MONEY!” Now, if we were to give these guys the benefit of the doubt, we can unpack that primal fear. Why are libertarians so afraid of having their money taken? I think we get part of the way there with, “because they’re afraid and resentful of giving money to brown people” but I think that the rest of it is this: for all that the guys making 50-60K a year think they’re upper class, they know how tightly they’re stretched. They’re terrorized at the thought that universal health care will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
It’s back to terror management theory for a lot of these guys, added to the invisible knapsack of white and (usually) male privilege, where health care and a decent living are much more likely to be correlated with working hard and getting an education than with most other demographics. Until there’s a good way to convince these types that their success is a lottery, AND it’s not a moral condemnation on them that they’ve done better in that lottery, there’s going to be a lot of flailing and “universal health care is unproven” type bs assertions instead of listening.
Chris and Simon, how about a president who touts his “No Child Left Behind” act, then neglects to fund it, and later on, throws hissy fits at the thought of all children having ready access to proper medical care? Who says we’re going to war to liberate oppressed people and make the world safe from terror and then…well…the results of that are clear.
chris:
Wow. Is that really all you managed to get out of the Cape Wind controversy? Shit, I’d never even heard of it before you just referenced it, but even after only five minutes of wiki-searching I’m pretty sure that I have a far more nuanced understanding of the issue than you’ll ever have.
The other thing about the non-equivalence of the “sending kids off to war” and “sending money off to the gummint” statements is that actually, almost everybody does pay taxes: you have to be really, really poor not to do so (or really rich with an awesome tax lawyer). But when I advocate “charity” in the form of taxation, well, I’m gonna participate in what I advocate because every year, I pay taxes. This is very unlike advocating that lots of poor kids should go and be brave and quite possibly die in the process while I sit at home on my behind.
*standing ovation for aimai*
I’ve found the comment threads here and at Amp’s really interesting. I’m amused by the point that keeps coming up wherein it is pronounced that surely no one but the poor benefits from government assistance! That just seems so mindbogglingly stupid. I guess it’s only “government assistance” if it’s welfare. Tax breaks, highways, airlines, student aid loans, Social Security… that’s just what we should expect the government to do, right?
You hate rich people, right?
(As other say, “What? Rich people can’t help poor people?”)
um, don’t they kind of go together? That is, one of the benefits of reproductive freedom is to have sex as much as you want. So why would this be an insult? And in particular, why would a *libertarian* think this is an insult?Not that I’ve ever actually had a conservative make this “argument” against me in an abortion debate, either.
But this brings up another question: what’s the difference between a libertarian and a conservative, these days?
In my political taxonomy, a libertarian is someone who doesn’t believe humans are social animals.
A conservative is someone who prefers the status quo.
There seems to be all kinds of overlap between them, especially on economic issues … maybe because most libertarians are people for whom the status quo is “all my money is MINE, MINE I TELL YOU!”
Yeah, I’m going have to go against Ted Kennedy on this one. He’s being a flaming hypocrite.
Most libertarians oppose both the war in Iraq and corporate welfare. McCardle has said herself that she thinks money should be given to the poor with no strings attached, so they can decide what to do with their own lives.
It may make you feel better to attack a straw-person, but Bush is not even remotely a libertarian, and neither are his policies.
I think it is telling that the biggest brouhaha right now in Mitt Romney’s home town, a town with a few middle class people and an increasingly whopping pile of wealthy ones, is whether to override the property tax limitation because THE ROADS are DESTROYING their luxury cars!
This isn’t about schools, here, it’s about potholes that wreck even the sturdiest hummer. They ran out of all those vaunted private solutions and now have to deal with the nasty issue of actually paying more taxes for their own good!
This isn’t about schools, here, it’s about potholes that wreck even the sturdiest hummer. They ran out of all those vaunted private solutions and now have to deal with the nasty issue of actually paying more taxes for their own good!
The funniest part, of course: those potholes probably formed because of the Hummers since most residential streets are not equipped to handle 6,000 pound vehicles every day. So not only did they cause their own problem, now they’re whining about paying more taxes for a problem they created.
Republicans: the Party of It’s Not My Fault and You Can’t Make Me, So There.
Do you enjoy it when conservatives, in a debate about abortion, tell you that you don’t really care about reproductive freedom, you are just interested in having sex as much as you want?
Bad example: Amanda blogs extensively about the importance of reproductive freedom for many reasons other than non-stop fucking, including the rights of pregnant women to control their own pregnancies, plus she has a regular spot on Reality Check and podcasts and all that activisty, edumacational type stuff.
So in fact you can look at her words and her actions, which line up, and come to the conclusion that people making that claim are just being pricks.
Ah, yes, the conservative’s favorite fallacy: if you’re concerned about the poor, the only logical solution is to give all of your money away and become poor yourself. Because there’s absolutely no middle ground between stuffing every penny you find into a mattress and giving everything you have away until you’re completely impoverished.
Don’t be so scornful, Mnem…I was just about to pay off my credit card debt when the Edward’s extravagant lifestyle fucked me over. Every time his wife decorates a room I personally go to bed a little hungrier.
Most libertarians oppose both the war in Iraq and corporate welfare.
Um…then I think libertarians have a hell of a class action defamation suit against these people who introduce themselves as libertarian on Fox News, Townhall, Politico, and the comment threads of every left-leaning blog I’ve ever read.
McCardle has said herself that she thinks money should be given to the poor with no strings attached, so they can decide what to do with their own lives.
That’s because all of her “strings” are attached on the “collecting” side, namely, “don’t you dare increase my taxes!”
money should be given to the poor with no strings attached, so they can decide what to do with their own lives.
And because there’s no such thing as economies of scale.
Jonathan, I find that what people say can often involve deceit, so I prefer to look at what they do.
You’d have a real problem applying that to libertarians then…
Its because human happiness and advancement isn’t the endgame of their political ideology. They have other goals. And this is why.. *drumroll* ..I hate them!
On the wind power issue, I think Kennedy is being unreasonable. I also think that Gore should tone down his private jet, high-class lifestyle. Just the other week I saw an article about Chomsky investing in corporate stocks to save up for his grandkids’ education, and this was attacked on grounds that the man is anti-corporation.
None of these complaints are legitimate. I’m sick of this style of counterpoint.
When your ideas lose to better ones, you cannot simply attack the shortcomings of individuals. Serious and honest people know that until you address the ideas themselves, you’re only making noise.
Poorly phrased but not wrong. Libertarianism is not ultimately an ideology of liberty but rather one of depriving the majority from any protection from the structural coercion of the market.
It is worth noting that the functions of government deemed legitimate and necessary by Libertarians are solely those necessary to defend the property of the capitalist class (military, police, courts, etc., the Nightwatchmen state) while defining any function of government which serves to limit the absolute dependence of the majority upon the market for a subsistence a gross injustice (taxes, minimum wage, social spending, healthcare, social security, welfare.)
Good point, Praxis. They also endorse infrastructure that is designed to permit businesses to shift the costs of doing business onto the public–for example, rather than maintaining private roads, depending on public roads to transport goods.
McCardle has said herself that she thinks money should be given to the poor with no strings attached, so they can decide what to do with their own lives.
Of course, it should only be given voluntarily, out of other people’s pockets, and in such minute quantities as to insure that the poor never become actual competitors for people like McArdle.
“Why is one set of wants (driving big cars, attending huge mega churches, buying flowers on mother’s day) ok and another set of “wants” (wanting national health care, wanting to spend money on public schools or roads) not ok?”
“Only the latter set threatens their delight in being a privileged elite.”
Alternatively, because the first set of wants involve spending their own money, while the second set involve spending somebody else’s?
“Alternatively, because the first set of wants involve spending their own money, while the second set involve spending somebody else’s? ”
Says Tom, committing the same fallacious reasoning as Megan McArdle.
When it was explained to Tom that taxes are everyone’s money, he gibbered, repeated his original claim, and then clutched his plastic toy gun and several barbies to his chest and shouted, “Pool party at my compound!”
“Jonathan, I find that what people say can often involve deceit, so I prefer to look at what they do.”
Very good: this is known as revealed preferences.
Just as an example, quite a lot of people say that taxes should be higher. The actual number of people who voluntarily pay more taxes is really quite small.
There’s an account called “Gifts to the United States” for example, run by the Treasury since 1843. Collects around $3 million a year.
The number of people who actually act as if taxes should be higher seems a great deal smaller than the number who say they should be.
It would be surprising if hatred of being taxed started with libertarians or even with Americans. And, as Tim Worstall’s post above suggests, even extraordinarily wealthy “progressives” almost never pay more in taxes than they are required to by law. This would fall under the “watch what they do” category.
In your rush to discredit the rich progressives who don’t volunteer to pay extra taxes as if it were some trump card, you’re being willfully ignorant to the fact that a lot of progressives, myself included, don’t mind at all paying higher taxes for a good social safety net, but considering over half of our tax dollar is not in fact going to health care for poor kids, or shelters, or road maintenance, but is in fact going towards a massive corporate warmachine that has killed over 75,000 Iraqis — can you blame us for not jumping at the opportunity to pay a little extra in?
Praxis:
I think you’re correct about the structural consequences or logic of libertarianism, but I don’t believe most libertarians think this way.In particular, I’ve found libertarians particularly blind to the structural coercion of the market. IMHO they have a lot of trouble perceiving structural constraints of any kind, or even social structures of any kind.
To my ear, one of the quintessential libertarian statements was by Margaret Thatcher:
This is what I mean by “libertarians don’t think humans are social animals.” *Baboons* have more than just individuals or families, but libertarians don’t seem to notice these higher-order groups (in baboons, they’re called “troops” and “clans”), or think they have any real existence.“In particular, I’ve found libertarians particularly blind to the structural coercion of the market. IMHO they have a lot of trouble perceiving structural constraints of any kind, or even social structures of any kind.”
Wrong. Libertarians - taken as a broad term here - would argue that “structural coercion” is just verbal flim-flam. For example, if a person has to take a low-paid job, at least for a short while, that is not because he has been “forced” to do so because of some coercion, but because he is only able at that point in time to command such a job, given his skills, the supply and demand for labour, etc. It is a bit like saying that I am “coerced” into carrying an umbrella because it is raining.
Libertarians, and many others, insist that coercion is a term that should be used precisely. I agree .
What I’m getting at is closer to when you’re coerced into carrying an umbrella because the people upstairs are choosing to dump water out their windows. They’re not consciously aiming at you, which is why it’s structurally coercion rather than coercion-coercion. What else would you call it?“What else would you call it?”
How about the fact that the universe can be pretty shitty towards us sometimes?
I don’t (unlike Jonathan above) regard myself as a libertarian, more a classical (no, not neo-) liberal.
Now I do think you’ve got something here:
“In particular, I’ve found libertarians particularly blind to the structural coercion of the market.”
Now I do disagree with you….but I agree that that is one of the ways in which my world view departs from yours.
“IMHO they have a lot of trouble perceiving structural constraints of any kind, or even social structures of any kind.”
I’m hugely aware of structural constraints: for example, in any form of welfare system you’re going to meet up with the problem of what happens when people are both earning and also receiving welfare. There’s something called the welfare trap: you earn a little more money working but your benefits get cut and you can end up no better (in some cases, actually worse) off. In the UK ssystem, for example, it’s not unusual for people half in and half out of the welfare system to face marginal tax rates of 80-90%. And just as I don’t think such tax rates on the rich are a good idea I don’t think those sort of tax rates on the poor are either.
Or, again in the UK, we have a near insane system whereby someone working part time on the minimum wage (29 hours a week) will be paying income tax.
These are structural constraints, they are important and part of my writings (yes, I write for a living) is about exactly how do we break these constraints. Like, perhaps raise hugely the tax free allowance on income.
So I’m well aware of structural constraints. What I’m not co0nvinced of is that markets produce them: perhaps more accurately, I think that while there areindeed such structural constraints, markets are a way to break them.
Amanda: The main thing is that if you’re poor, assistance needs to be tied to a ritual humiliation of some sort, some kind of admission from the recipient that they’re not worthy.
The patterns I always see is that these designs start out as some way to distinguish those worthy of “charity” from the unworthy. Be it heaps of paperwork, inspectors in your apartment, nosy social workers inquiring about your exact relationship with your roommate, or preachers demanding that you fake belief.
And really, the only way I see to overcome this is to stop giving a damn if a person is “worthy” of assistance. So what if they have five children out of wedlock, are not even looking for work and spend all their money on cigarettes and booze — feed the children, and give the adults the same liberty to make a mess of their lives that a middle- or upper-class person enjoys.
It might still be cheaper than all that nosy bureaucracy and endless paperwork, which punishes the working poor most of all, because they have neither money not time.
Besides, health care is never charity. Diseases couldn’t care less if they get a poor person, a rich person, or someone whose work a rich person really needs. They only care if they have a good breeding ground of people living in squalor and/or without access to medical help.
Ms Kate @ 46: it’s about potholes that wreck even the sturdiest hummer.
That made me laugh. Because the only good reasons, really, to drive that type of car is because you are going to war, or because you are too poor to afford roads.
(And I’ve driven a Trabant over some seriously bad roads…)
Just as an example, quite a lot of people say that taxes should be higher. The actual number of people who voluntarily pay more taxes is really quite small.
Gosh, you mean that other people aren’t wiling to take up your slack when you don’t want to pay your fair share? The nerve of them!
Yes, I’ve heard this argument a million times as well: “Well, if you liberals want better roads and schools, then you pay for them!” Which is along the lines of going out to dinner with friends and then refusing to pay for your share of the meal because, after all, they were the ones who wanted to go out to dinner, not you.
“And really, the only way I see to overcome this is to stop giving a damn if a person is “worthy” of assistance. So what if they have five children out of wedlock, are not even looking for work and spend all their money on cigarettes and booze — feed the children, and give the adults the same liberty to make a mess of their lives that a middle- or upper-class person enjoys.”
A very libertarian idea. Seriously, proposed by Charles Murray (he of The Bell Curve). Abolish all welfare completely and simply give every adult in the US $10,000 a year. Start taxing it back when incomes go over about $35,000 a year.
You go to work, you still get your $10k. You smoke dope on the stoop, you still get your $10k. Would cost about the same as the current system too.
Moral and cultural interpretations of the “worth” of the poor are not new under Bush, though I’m sure you know that. We hit a new low with 1996 welfare reform under Clinton. You should read Flat Broke with Children on how our cultural interpretations of work and family impact the lives of low-income mothers and children on public assistance. It’s written by feminist sociologist Sharon Hays, and it’s wonderful.
Tim Worstall, two quick questions:
Seriously? Markets impose no structural constraints ? I think you mean to say something different, so rather than respond to it as written, I’ll wait to see if you care to elaborate.
And, while I’m at it:
So, not very libertarian, then. I know this seems nit-picky, but I can’t imagine the above scenario being acceptable without at the very least a pragmatic appreciation for social safety nets, which internet libertarians seem to consider inconsistent with liberty.
The patterns I always see is that these designs start out as some way to distinguish those worthy of “charity” from the unworthy. Be it heaps of paperwork, inspectors in your apartment, nosy social workers inquiring about your exact relationship with your roommate, or preachers demanding that you fake belief.
HAve you read this yet?
What I find a bit odd about this post is that McArdle, far from being obsessed with relabeling government social spending as charity, actually takes the opposite position in her original post. She finds fault with people who assume that she must be against social spending programs only because she’s personally selfish or uncharitable, when in fact she’s more concerned about these programs’ overall efficiency and expansion of government power. She also takes umbrage at people who assume that governmentally required redistribution of wealth to others is morally equvialent to private charity. The latter is commendable because it’s a voluntary act; the former isn’t because the individual giving has no choice.
One might rationally disagree with the assumptions underlying libertarianism generally, or with McArdle’s views on S-CHIP, but it doesn’t seem fair to criticize her for equating government social spending to charity when she’s argued the complete opposite.
Tim:
I’m not sure I understand you. Are you saying that you don’t see a significant difference between having to carry an umbrella due to rain, and having to carry one because other people throw water out their windows?Jonathan,
Oh I wasn’t arguing that this was what Libertarians professed (or actually in some cases) believed, but rather the objective outcomes they work for when viewed outside of the narrow lens of Libertarian ideology.
Perhaps one thing I should clarify: I don’t self-identify as a libertarian. Rather, as a classical liberal. I work as a freelancer for the Adam Smith Institute, as an example. I’m as astonished at some of the ideas of the Objectivists (Ayn Rand’s followers) as you are. I find their hatred of altruism quite absurd. With that out of the way:
“We hit a new low with 1996 welfare reform under Clinton.” You might be interested to know that the academic behind that whole idea is actually an Englishman called Richard Layard. He’s of the left (is now a Labour peer) and the idea came very much from the left originally.
“Seriously? Markets impose no structural constraints ?”
Of course you’re right in one sense. It’s a silly thing to say. In another, not so much. I would argue that the universe imposes structural constraints: we have scarce resources and unlimited desires, so we can’t solve all of our desires with the resources we have. That’s the basic point of economics, after all: how do we satisfy as many desires as we can with what we have to hand? And how do we create more wealth to satisfy more desires?
I’m not convinced that markets impose more structural constraints than that basic unpleasant fact does. I am sure that, at least in certain cases, government or the State can make things worse (and, of course, in some cases make it better).
This is where the distinction between classical liberal and libertarian might be important: I agree that there is a place for the State, that it can at times make life better. Just that the number of such times is lower than many commonly assume.
“I know this seems nit-picky, but I can’t imagine the above scenario being acceptable without at the very least a pragmatic appreciation for social safety nets, which internet libertarians seem to consider inconsistent with liberty.”
Internet libertarians and those actually proposing policy are really rather different creatures. My occasional employers, the ASI (and they were very much influential in proposing privatisation in the UK, just as an example), the people at Cato, Megan McArdle herself, me, we’d all agree that there does need to be a social safety net. Our arguments would revolve around what is the best one to have, what provides the maximum help to people, with the least cost…and we’d also want to insist on it providing the maximum of liberty at the same time. That last is what leads to (some of) us proposing the simple flat benefit. It’s often called a Citizen’s Basic Income. Just give everybody the minimum necessary to live upon. Tear down all of the highly restrictive programs that determine where people can live, or how much they can earn part time, or dependent upon marriage status. Given that there will indeed be a social safety net, let’s make it the best one we can. As an example of ASI tax policy currently you start paying income tax at about $10,000 a year in the UK. The ASI argues that it should be about $28,000. The poor simply should not be paying income tax. Or another classically liberal/libertarian idea, the negative income tax. This is now known as the EITC and Milton Friedman spent 50 years arguing for it, supporting it and stating that it should be expanded.
I’d also want to make very clear that there’s an ocean of clear blue water between “conservative” and classical liberal. Again, my occasional employer the ASI argues that drugs should be, if not legalised, at least decriminalised. As did Milton Friedman:
http://www.fff.org/freedom/0490e.asp
We argue that how you deploy your gonads and with whom is entirely up to you as a consenting adult. The ASI (although I personally disagree) is strongly in favour of legal abortion and supports the further liberalisation of it going through the UK legal system now. You’ll find that most libertarians agree with these as well. But just as we want government to stay out of your sex life, your social life, your private life, we also want them to stay out of your economic life: at least, as far as is possible in all of those things while still protecting the rights of others to also do as they desire.
Tim Worstall, thanks for the clarification.
Half-joking: then libertarians who actually propose policy have one hell of a message problem between themselves and their constituency.
Do you really mean to imply that the creation of more wealth will necessarily satisfy more desires? There’s a strong argument to be made that market forces have the emergent effect of concentrating created wealth where wealth already exists. I’m assuming that this anti-social structural constraint of markets is part of your concept of the benefits of State involvement in the economic life of citizens.
Great Disco Ball, the CAPTCHA I pulled is hard. Is that a ‘9′ or a ‘0′?
Edit: I guess it was a ‘0′.
Tim @ 68: A very libertarian idea. […] Abolish all welfare completely and simply give every adult in the US $10,000 a year. Start taxing it back when incomes go over about $35,000 a year.
Unfortunately, most self-identified libertarians seem too attached to their money to invest it into the freedom to opt out of the rat race if they need to and the vast simplification that not having to think too much about other people’s worthiness brings.
The obvious idea to make joining the system voluntary might work in some utopia with minimal social differences to start with, but as we lack such an utopia, a voluntary system would die of averse selection.
So it would have to be taxes, and we’re back on square one as far as most libertarians are concerned.
PiatoR @ 71, HAve you read this [Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment] yet?
I have read a long review of the book and IIRC an accompanying interview when the book was translated into German, but I haven’t actually read the book itself.
This is a topic I have mostly been following in Germany, and the longer I look at it the more frustrated I get with the realities of the reasonable-sounding approach “Welfare is for those who cannot help themselves”.
There is this huge bureaucracy working to determine if you could, maybe, help yourself, or if you have family who could do it, and they mete out hunger and fear as punishment to the ill, the confused and the disorganized, while the magazines are full of stories of people willing to put in the effort to game the system.
I know some people where I cringe at the thought of giving them no-strings-attached money, because I disapprove of the way they live their lives. But personal squicks are no base for policy.
Besides, if you could get all the people who prefer a frugal lifestyle to having to work off the unemployment rolls, it would do wonders for the unemployment numbers, and if everyone had a chance to walk away from a job they hate without the fear of ruin it would increase workers’ bargaining power immensely.
And the latter is why I’m sure that a system as discussed will never be implemented.
“Do you really mean to imply that the creation of more wealth will necessarily satisfy more desires?”
Increased wealth certainly makes it “possible” to satisfy more desires. A world which, in the past two decades, has seen hundreds of million come up out of absolute poverty (that $ or two a day level) to something like a middle class lifestyle, certainly seems to be delivering that as well.
Sure, especially if you keep the qualifying quotes around “possible.” The structure of your sentence I was asking about seemed to imply that there would never be a means of creating more wealth would be detrimental to the health of society. I agree that it’s worth talking about absolute improvements in the lowest concentrations of wealth, as long as we’re not pretending that the extra wealth created by markets has gotten down to help the least wealthy without some nonmarket help by individuals and governments.
I’m cautious about using absolute standard of living as the only metric of benefit and ignoring relative wealth, however, since at the end of that path lies the apology for slavery that slaves had their basic needs provided for better than the free poor. Clearly, that’s not your argument, but in a world where wealth is power, a system that increases your wealth slightly (say, the margin between making your rent and not) while increasing my wealth enormously (say, the margin for running a small competitor out of business on legal fees) is an incremental approach towards a communal indentured servitude — and I don’t think that is what you’re wanting to argue for, either.
I guess this comes back to your idea of markets constraints as being optimal with respect to the constraints of the physical universe. There are plenty of things which the physical universe puts heavy constraints against — flying, for example, or living after a major heart attack — which humans decide are worthwhile to undertake regardless. I’m curious about how you, as someone who gets paid to think about these things from a neoliberal perspective, would enumerate inherent effects of markets that are worth sacrificing wealth in order to counteract.
Er, sorry. “Classical liberal perspective,” not “neoliberal perspective.”
“I’m curious about how you, as someone who gets paid to think about these things from a neoliberal perspective, would enumerate inherent effects of markets that are worth sacrificing wealth in order to counteract.”
I’m not sure that I would say that there are inherent effects of markets which make it worth sacrificing wealth to counter act. I’d agree that there are certain side effects of certain markets at certain times which make it worth reallocating wealth, certainly.
For example, the work of Amartya Sen tells us that people can in fact end up starving even when there’s no shortage of food. What can (and in the case of most late 20th century famines did…those that weren’t deliberately caused) happen is that a certain group, a certain section of society, doesn’t have the purchasing power to buy the food that is there. The famine in Niger a year or two ago was of this type: as was the appalling mid 1970s one in Ethiopia.
The solution is simply to give money to those without the purchasing power. The solution is not to ship in food, that takes 6- 10 months to arrive, bought from American farmers, shipped on American ships (what overseas food aid really means).
The phrase is, quite literally, that we should drop money out of helicopters. Provide those starving with the purchasing power to go and buy food. This saves them from dying and also has further effects: for example, higher prices will encourage farmers to grow more next harvest (and free food being shipped in would reduce that urge).
I hope you see what I’m getting at here. I don’t want markets to be sidelined, abandoned, abolished: but I am willing to agree that some of the outcomes can be undesirable. But the undesirability, at least in this case, is the inability of some to take part in those markets. I would rather subsidize their ability to do so than abandon the market itself (specifically, with food, as one who spent 7 years living in Russia from before the end of the Soviet Union onwards, I really don’t want to see markets in food abolished: even if some do need subsidy in order to take part in them).
If, in your original question, we replace “inherent” with either “sometimes” or “side effects” then certainly, there are times when we should intervene.
I should also point out that I’m not paid to think about these things: I don’t write position papers. I’m paid to write about them, sure, but not to come up with original policy.
One thing that might annoy some around here. There’s been one proposal by the current Bush Administration which I think is fabulous, a real advance, a certain gain in human happiness. That is that they asked Congress to alter the rules about emergency food aid. They wanted to be able to do the money out of helicopters thing and also , when food did need to be purchased, to do so locally, rather than buying it from American farmers. Really, who would have thought it, a government listening to a recent Economics Nobel winner (as Sen is) and then changing Govt policy to fit the new reality?
Unfortunately Congress refused. The combination of the farmers’ intrerests and of the shipping industry closed down the possibility of a policy that actually alleviated more famine for less taxpayers’ money.
But then that’s why I’m a classical liberal: entrenched interests tend to do that, which is why I want a government smaller than it is, so that the interests have less possibility of buying favour.
Thanks, this is definitely part of what I was curious about.
Getting the insignificant pedantry out of the way up top:
* If you’re paid to write papers about classical liberal policy, I certainly hope you think about what you’re writing.
* The reason I picked the phrase “sacrificing wealth” was that if, as you say, markets are optimal at creating wealth with respect to physical constraints, then reallocating wealth in a non-market fashion (like dropping it from helicopters) is the same thing as sacrificing created wealth.
* I’m puzzled as to how you distinguish some basic effects of markets, like wealth creation, as “inherent,” and others, like wealth concentration, as “side effects.” Can we split the difference and say “inherent side-effects” for all of it?
* I am honestly fascinated by your suggestion that reducing the strength of government relative to interests that wish to manipulate it makes is less susceptible to manipulation and not more so — but that is a whole other ball of wax entirely, and not one that I’m eager to, er, what does one do with a ball of wax? Yeah.
Okay, that’s done with.
I happen to think that your scenario above is a great example of when it’s worth it to oppose market forces. I would describe this as an inherent result of the force of wealth concentration: eventually, some group of people within the system face what is essentially gambler’s ruin; no matter how good the game may be, they can no longer pay to play.