Newspeak, how are ya

You’re wrong.

The book notes, for example, that “social ‘justice’ is always related to the unjust redistribution of wealth

Wow. Just wow. Who is this woman? “The most debased of hacks” seems like a perfectly good description, based on that snippet.

Perspective is everything, Henry. I work freelance in the private sector. A near neighbour with whom I graduated in the same civil engineering class works for a government department. Both of us are married, two kids – closely similar circumstances. Being a G-man, he never, ever works late or weekends. He plays golf, fer crissakes. On the other hand, I work like two men and a wee fella, weekends and all, to keep my customers satisfied. Up to Friday 4:30 p m, we’re taxed about the same. Then, while he’s chasing little white balls, I put in another 12 or 14 hours, for which privilege I pay tax. And that tax goes towards his salary and his gold-plated government pension.

To me, the propositions that

“social ‘justice’ is always related to the unjust redistribution of wealth”

and

“‘fair competition’ is almost always related to unfair government intervention in the economy”

are axiomatic.

She’s right. You’re wrong.

Thon Brocket,

You don’t think racism is a form of social injustice? Or that companies (Microsoft springs to mind, but I’m sure there are others) sometimes gain an /unfair/ advantage in the market which has nothing to do with government intervention?

Regardless, even if you don’t, you’ve got to admit that there’s an argument to be had here, and avoiding it by redefining the terms involved so as to preclude one side from being correct is sinisterly Orwellian.

Thon, the obvious question inspired by your comment is “why don’t you go work for the government?”

Thon,

isn’t there another way of seeing your complaint. It is you who are complaining about what you (wrongly, bizarrely, in my opinion, but that’s besdie the point) see as an unfair distribution of wealth. You think that because you work so many hours you should have even more wealth than you do, and that it is unfair that you don’t, and that social institutions act to deprive you of what is justly yours. What the dictionary writer is doing is what stupid or dishonest people often try to do — to pretend that we can decide normative issues by changing the language that we use (and trying to decide them in her direction). Come out and have a serious argument abouot the real issue at hand — offer us and defend a theory of justice on which Bill Gates is justly entitled to his wealth (or more than) and on which the 20% of children who grow up in poverty in the US are in a situation which justice demands or allows. Then we can debate it.

To me, the propositions (…) are axiomatic.

Clearly, since they don’t follow from anything you wrote previously.

Harry B:
You think that because you work so many hours you should have even more wealth than you do, and that it is unfair that you don’t, and that social institutions act to deprive you of what is justly yours.

I don’t think it, Harry. I know it. When I go out to work in the morning, what I earn belongs to me, not my neighbour. Now, I can live with paying taxes for the upkeep of the state – defence, policing, enforcement of contracts, and so forth. I don’t like it, and I don’t think I’m getting value for money, but hey, quid pro quo, kinda. But redistributive taxation to benefit not the deserving poor o’ the parish but privileged civil servants is another horse entirely, and flat-out wrong.

Come out and have a serious argument abouot the real issue at hand—offer us and defend a theory of justice on which Bill Gates is justly entitled to his wealth.

Let me get this straight – you’re seriously equating me with Bill Gates, and my neighbour Jim Jobsworth with the children of rural Mississipi? Your theory of social justice dictates the moral imperative of feather-bedding civil servants at the expense of more industrious people in the private sector? Wow.

As for Gates’ wad, he earned it by creating it. I imagine he and Microsoft pay a bundle in taxes worldwide, and indirectly generate a lot more through the increased productivity of Microsoft users (or they wouldn’t be using Microsoft gear, right?). I know he’s big on private philanthropy. Everybody, including the children, is better off because Bill Gates founded Microsoft instead of getting a job with the municipality. Why knock the guy? – he certainly hasn’t harmed me, and nobody’s making me contribute to his pension, the way I have to contribute to my neighbour’s.

Actually, there’s a radical libertarian argument (not sure that I agree with it myself) that the emergence of commercial Leviathans like Microsoft depends upon the state’s favourable treatment of corporations (limited liability, corporation tax policy, intellectual property laws, pork and corporate welfare, and so on). If Big Bill’s Bucks bother you, you could do worse than look thataway for some ideas. Which kinda feeds back nicely to the second quotation under discussion:

“‘fair competition’ is almost always related to unfair government intervention in the economy”

and on which the 20% of children who grow up in poverty in the US are in a situation which justice demands or allows.

Well, before I answer that one, I need a little more information – I’m a civil engineer, not a sociologist, so I don’t have the facts at my fingertips. Does the 20% figure mean that one in five children in the US are raised in absolute Ethiopian-style poverty? Or are we actually talking about distribution of wealth and income, so that 20% of children fall below a “poverty-line” determined statistically (and politically) from an analysis of the whole population, although they may be rather better off than “middle-class” children in, say, Greece? Absolute or relative? If, as I’m guessing, it’s the latter, you need to be a wee hair more circumspect about writing things like:

What the dictionary writer is doing is what stupid or dishonest people often try to do—to pretend that we can decide normative issues by changing the language that we use.

Imagine a situation where everybody’s assets / income / buying power are, through some strange externality, exactly doubled overnight. Crudely, everybody is now twice as rich, or maybe half as poor. But “poverty”, by your “distribution” measure of it, has remained precisely the same, which is obviously an absurd result. So the real measure we’re talking about here is income distribution, not absolute poverty, right?

If so, aren’t you chasing your tail? You’re simply asserting as axiomatic that some people having more than others is “social injustice”, and then arguing that to achieve “social justice” we need to redistribute wealth. Well, duh. But all that adds up to is a wail of “It’s just not faaaaiiiir!”, and doesn’t come near addressing the morality of the question. On the contrary, it raises a pretty serious one about violation of property rights by a coercive state.

Then we can debate it.

Glad to. But time may be the enemy. You know how it is. Gotta pay those taxes.

Isn’t civil engineering a heavily state subsidised part of the economy? No government then no civil engineers.

DSW

…then permit me to enter “idle spongeing parasite” in the box and so conclude the exchange…

Why, who is the parasite? You described one normal fella happily working 40 hours a week (or whatever the normal week is where you’re) and one greedy bloke working extra hours and whining about it. I don’t see any idle parasites here.

Thon,

relative poverty certainly matters (though not, certainly, as much as absolute poverty). Above a certain material level (which all OECD countries have reached) whether one is socially included, one’s relative position have a huge influence on how well one can flourish as a person. So relativities do matter.

I don’t know what your nieghbour does, or what his income is. But the reward to your talent and effort, like the reward to his, is influenced by the structure of social institutions. There’s nothing naturally morally right about one reward structure rather than another. Society should set up incentives for people to be productive, and should ensure that all benefit from the production. The existing distributive pattern has no intrinsic moral authority: I’m quite open to the fact that many beneficiaries of government largesse are benefitting from an injustice. But similarly many beneficiaries of the operation of markets.

I don’t agree with you about Gates. If Gates had never been born very little about our material circumstances would be different. He is not responsible for the creation of great wealth in society; he simly captured a great deal of it. (Of course I don’t mean to equate you with him — what I was assuming, perhaps wrongly, was that on your theory of justice there would be nothing morally problematic about someone enjoying that degree of wealth, or more, relative to the poorest in our (I’m in the US) society).

As I say, if you want to discuss it we can (not here, sure, not now, I have kids to play with). My central point was the definitions settle nothing substantive. You agree with Henry (and me) not with the dictionary author; you just have a different view than I do of what the proper theory of social justice is.

You might want to be careful, when you enter these discussions, of sounding like the greedy whiner abb1 accuses you of sounding like. I should probably be more careful about sounding complacent. I’m certainly not; I think there’s a world to win.

Well, Jet, I don’t really care how many hours you work in a week, as long as you aren’t bitching about me working my 40 hours and not a minute more. And my 6-week vacation. And my coffee breaks. And my pension plan.

You do your thing, I’ll do mine.

If you were working more hours than your neighbor and making less money than him, I’d say you have a valid complaint. But I can say that it’s almost entirely certain you are making way more money as a private contractor than he’s making working for the government. And even after you pay taxes, you’re making more than he is. In general, in any job area, the government pays you less but you have more security.

But chosing to use the fact that the government employs people similar to you as an example that the idea of social justice is flawed is a poor example. The government employing engineers is not an example of ‘social justice’ at work.

Harry B:
relative poverty certainly matters (though not, certainly, as much as absolute poverty).

Glad we got that straightened out. So your original claim that “20% of children are being raised in poverty” turned out to be, ah, an inadvertent inaccuracy. Kind of corrodes the struts under an argument, that class of thing. Doesn’t look good when folk are reading, as you wrote to Jet:

Thon got nowhere against my points, and I am disappointed with you that you think so.

Moving on,

Above a certain material level (which all OECD countries have reached) whether one is socially included, one’s relative position have a huge influence on how well one can flourish as a person. So relativities do matter.

We’re agreed that absolute lie-down-and-die poverty’s not an issue. The relevance of income distribution wanes as a society becomes wealthier (if everybody were a millionaire, then, hey, who’d worry about a few billionaires?). So the obvious course is to make the country richer as fast as we can, and the inequality problem will take care of itself in short order, not by disappearing but by becoming trivial. That’s best accomplished by steering well clear of impoverishing and counter-productive redistributive taxation, minimising wealth-destroying bureaucrats and bureaucracy and letting people like Gates get on with it.

There’s nothing naturally morally right about one reward structure rather than another.

So the reward structure that obtains in American free enterprise under a constitutional republic is morally equivalent to that of Pol Pot’s Onka? Tripe, if you’ll pardon my saying so.
A system that rewards hard work and enterprise is absolutely superior to one that penalises it. That statement really astonishes me. You’re claiming the moral high ground for “social justice” while at the same time telling me that morality doesn’t come into it. Boy.

Society should set up incentives for people to be productive

“Society” (that is, in this context, the state) is provenly lousy at setting up incentives (examine the EU’s Lisbon Agenda for a flavour). Real incentives, to the kind of person they will usefully work on, are internal and personal. The most useful thing “society” can do to make people productive is to remove disincentives. In the memorable words on the subject of a Belfast bricklayer I know: “Get your fucking hand out of my fucking pocket and get the fuck out of my fucking way. I’ve fucking houses to fucking build.”

and should ensure that all benefit from the production.>

Why? We’re back to “social justice” being A Good Thing as a given. I don’t accept that, and you haven’t demonstrated it. Actually pretty much everybody does benefit, anyway. If you buy a micro-wave for $25 dollars in Wal-Mart when it would have cost you $75 a year ago, that’s exactly as good as a $50 paycheque bonus (or maybe an $80 bonus, if it’s taxed) – a clear concrete benefit squarely down to Wal-Mart’s enterprise and productivity, and incidentally quite a bit more than Wal-Mart makes on the deal after tax. That’s $50 you can save or spend on hamburgers – creating further meaty economic goodness as you go, and the Government can tax it one way or another all over again.

I’m quite open to the fact that many beneficiaries of government largesse are benefitting from an injustice. But similarly many beneficiaries of the operation of markets.

I ain’t from Missouri, but you still gotta show me.

I don’t agree with you about Gates. If Gates had never been born very little about our material circumstances would be different. He is not responsible for the creation of great wealth in society; he simly captured a great deal of it.

Nope. Individual entrepreneurs, big or small, Gates or Apu, are what make it all happen. Without them the businesses and the jobs and the taxes wouldn’t exist. Almost every big company started out back-when as a little guy and a big idea. Big companies that don’t innovate decline and die. Entrepreneurship is as vital a factor of production as labour or capital, and has its market price and its reward accordingly. I sure as Hell wish I had the gift of it – I’ve been trying long enough in my own small way to know that it’s never easy money. Sour-gutted politics-of-envy stuff about business folk may be good knockabout in these parts, but that’s all it is, and ignorant to boot.

You might want to be careful, when you enter these discussions, of sounding like the greedy whiner abb1 accuses you of sounding like.

Abb1’s opinion doesn’t keep me awake nights.

I should probably be more careful about sounding complacent.

You don’t come across that way to me. Well, it’s Monday, and deadlines loom. Nice talking to you.

Thon,

I hope you are better at whatever you do for money than you are at having an intellectual debate. If not, perhaps that explains why you have to work so many hours at it. Calling my view evnious establishes nothing. If you assumed that I meant absolute poverty in my first intervention then you are the only person reading who did so. All the statistical reports define poverty in the US relatively, and I did so. You provide no argument not to. You interpret me as a moral relativist without any warrant except your own inability to parse my sentences. Have a nice day slaving away for the rest of society

Jet,

yes, in fact liberty is a pre-eminent value for me and most similarly inclined egalitarians. We care that people be able to do what they judge best, without interference from others. Not the only value, to be sure, but a vitally important one. We also care about how it is distributed. You might want to see the critique of Freidman and Nozick in my book *Justice* for an elaborate and accessible discussion of the problems with the different ways that they attempt to use freedom in their theories.

The problem is this — no-one has any idea what their own contribution is to the creation of wealth; still less to the creation of opportunities for human flourishing. We don’t even know what we contribute in the world set up as it is, still less what contribution we would make if it were set up justly (I think by this point Thon has conceded that Henry’s point was entirely correct, and that what we are disagreeing about is what social justice consists in — you and I agree that liberty is important, but probably disagree about other values that it has to be weighed against, and also disagree about how it should be distributed, but agree that justice is key. We also, I think, agree that we live in an unjust society: again we just disagree about how unjust, in what ways, and, of course, what should be done about it).

Creation of wealth: the problem with causal claims is that they involve counterfactual assumptions that are hard (hah!) to evaluate. My counterfactual was that if he’d never been born we’d still have as much wealth as we do (because someone else would have done something like what he did). I can’t prove it, and arguing about it is less than fruitful. This is one of many reasons for being suspicious of desert-based claims on wealth (the kind that you and Thon seem to making on Gates’s behalf).

Smearing opponents with by associating them with Marx or talking about the politics of envy simply has no place in serious exploration of these issues. If it had I would have pointed out that there has been exactly one display of envy in this thread and it was not from someone on the left. I will say one thing though. I have a lot of these discussions with some of my in-laws who are, like me, among the richest people in the history of humanity, and though I never say it, I find it very unseemly for such lucky people to whine on about the government taxing them too much. Even though I am very well-disposed, in fact to the substance of some of their (non-self-affecting) complaints.

Jet — would you like me to devise a post about the mistaken way libertarians use liberty? To be honest, I have though of doing it before, but demurred because everything I have to say is so old hat to the professional philosophers here. But it might provoke useful discussion, perhaps. If so, not for another two weeks, I’ve too much else to do (in my government job…)

Individual entrepreneurs, big or small, Gates or Apu, are what make it all happen. Without them the businesses and the jobs and the taxes wouldn’t exist. Almost every big company started out back-when as a little guy and a big idea. Big companies that don’t innovate decline and die.

I was a kid once, too.

Uncle Kvetch,
You pick the two most passionate pieces out of an emotional arguement and of course they’ll sound a bit over the top as taken out of context.

Uncle Kvetch,
He mentioned more than just income tax:

It can rob you, imprison you, draft you, dictate what you can put up your nose, put you out of your house and build a mall, or kill you, if any of those options suit its purpose,

You might even be able to add to his list of how the government withholds your liberty arbitrarily.

Kvetch — I wasn’t actually as civil as I’d like to have been. Still, managed to be civil to jet, who always makes that easy.

Jet — well, I hope I won’t lose a sale, but I’ll do my best to prepare something for a couple of weeks time, so watch out for it. I hope you’ll find my book does some of what you want — certainly not all. You might look at the concluding chapter that contains a series of conservative thoughts, all of which I think have some weight, all of which are sometimes advanced by classical liberals, but none of which are really normative in character. I think that leftists of my stripe give a great deal of credit to the caution of classical liberals about the state, and so try to be very attentive to the details of distributive schemes (including regulation); while being willing to put up with some leakiness in the redistributive buckets, both because we think distributive norms are very important and because we think that, above a certain level of economic success, economic wealth plays a much less important role in producing wellbeing than do social norms.
Anyway, I’ll try to think of a book that does what you want, though.

Thanks for that, Jet–I want to make it clear that it’s not the discussion per se I was objecting to, but the over-the-top rhetoric. The slavery analogy does no more to elucidate things, or to generate productive discussion, than calling George Bush a Nazi.

That said, as someone who’s socially liberal, it stands to reason that I share a lot of libertarians’ concerns about overreaching state power–the “war on drugs,” capital punishment, reproductive freedom, the prison-industrial complex, etc. Hell, I’ll go one step further and say that in the case of one of the things Thon (and you) cited above–military conscription–a certain, highly tenuous parallel might be drawn with slavery, in that I believe a peacetime draft constitutes a clear case of involuntary servitude.

Not being well versed in political philosophy, I also appreciate CT as a place for the noninitiated to dip into these things–there, we have something in common after all!

I hope you are better at whatever you do for money than you are at having an intellectual debate.

What’s the old joke? “A racist is somebody who’s winning an argument with a lefty”. In the same vein, I suppose we can define an incompetent intellectual debater as a blow-in with mud on his boots who makes a Philosophy! Professor! scurry around a bit.

Calling my view evnious establishes nothing.

I didn’t. I referred to the “politics of envy”, which is not the same thing, but let that pass. If you believe that general critical opinion in academia of great wealth has no component of envy, I have a bridge to sell you.

If you assumed that I meant absolute poverty in my first intervention then you are the only person reading who did so.

Nice little smear job. I didn’t assume any such thing – read the paragraph I wrote. I was about 98% sure you meant “poverty”, not poverty (it is after all a common wee sleight-of-words on the left, useful when waving shrouds at the more credulous). But it’s not my discipline, so I thought I’d better copper my bets by actually asking the question, and continued on the explicitly-stated assumption that you were talking about relative, not absolute poverty. To try to make it appear otherwise does little for your reputation as an “intellectual debater”.

You provide no argument not to.

Bullshit, in spades. And this is kinda interesting, because what I wrote next was a one-line mini-gedankenexperiment (Double everybody’s wealth and “poverty” doesn’t change, which is absurd, mattheradamn about US statistics). Response from you on that one? Zip. You didn’t touch it with a bargepole. You were floored and you knew it, so you ignored it. So when you write:

You provide no argument not to.

I have some trouble refraining from unparliamentary language. What you really mean is

You provide no argument not to, leastways not one that I can refute.

All the statistical reports define poverty in the US relatively, and I did so.

That may be the case. Hell, I don’t know – I’m just an unshaven old mud-hog and by all accounts not much of an intellectual debater. But it seems to me transparently dishonest to conflate two separate measures by giving one the other’s name. Jesus Christ, you’re a philosopher. You should know that.

Thon,

I was, indeed, unacceptably rude, and I do apologise. Re the use of the term “poverty” I tend to assume that readers of CT know what that word means, and used it in line with standard policy useage, as you suspected. You can call us all intelectually dishonest, if that suits you, but I see nothing dishonest in abiding by standard useage in a context. Furthermore, as I say, relativities in income and wealth matter a great deal when it comes to producing wellbeing, and while you have denied that, you’ve provided no argument against it. The little thought experiment, which states the obvious, doesn’t do it (I didn’t realise you thought it was an argument). Double the wealth of an already wealthy society, without affecting the distribution of wealth. Have you doubled the wellbeing or prospects for wellbeing? No, because social norms and relativities affect that. The relationship between wealth and wellbeing is non-linear, and is affected both by relativities and by social norms. If I had realised you thought it was an argument I’d have addressed it, as I do now, by saying that the full argument for the importance of relativities takes more than a blog comment and pointing you to some good accessible literature: Read The Status Syndrome by Michael Marmot, or Luxury Fever by Robert Frank, and figure out how to argue against them (neither book is at all difficult or technical). And I’ll work up something to go with the piece promised to jet. Anyway, sorry to have been so rude.