Toward a Larger Left

I’m fascinated to hear of an overwhelmingly conservative humanities course. Is that typical of the department, or unique to certain courses such as the one you chose?

I am somewhat amused by the disagreement over the role of management in the workforce, but not entirely surprised that somebody who has never worked in a factory would have trouble understanding it. It is rather sadder, though, that your classmates couldn’t understand your viewpoint. Were you able to understand theirs?

If I might offer an analogy – it is very obvious to any observer that the quarterback on a football team and the wide receivers play different roles and both are indispensable. It does not, however, follow that the critical role of the receiver means that he should play quarterback or that either should be the coach. Teams work best when all of the necessary roles are filled by people who do them well – and doing extremely well in one role does not inherently make you qualified to fill another. The coach may never handle the ball; that does not mean that he is not essential to the team. In the same way, even though the manager never actually (ideally) turns on any of the machinery, his contribution to the success of his team can be greater than that of any of his workers.

The point of this piece is sort of … vague. Is this the whole post?

“The left has succeeded in making it sound hollow and unconvincing. Your average liberal blogger is happy to admit all the papers are full of lies, all the politicians are bland sellouts, and the government is run by lobbyists and corporate hacks. And (nothing new here) your average citizen is happy to agree (it takes a lot of education to be dumb enough to think otherwise). But where do you go from there? Elect Howard Dean?”

None of that was ever really news to classical liberals or the more intelligent conservatives though. The point is that despite these inadequacies, if you manage to keep a stable system of property rights going and try to enforce the rule of law, then in general people seem to be able to get along. And one can look at the systems that the left previously venerated and see how catastrophic (because they forgot those fundamentals) those systems turned out to be, to show that the onus is really on radical leftists to show that their criticisms are valid.

>The point is that despite these inadequacies, if you manage to keep a stable system of property rights going and try to enforce the rule of law, then in general people seem to be able to get along.

First, this (“keep a stable system of property rights going and try to enforce the rule of law”) is not an accurate description of conservatism. If we look at the actual policies followed by conservatives, everything ranging from trumped-up wars to torture and detention to the deregulation of banks and financial institutions, we see that conservatism is in practice far from this simple description.

Second, it requires a very skewed definition of “people in general.”

Not even mentioning the billions living in poverty around the world…

What about the 50 million without health insurance? The additional millions losing their homes? The other millions whose pension plans were wiped out?

Saying “in general people seem to get along” doesn’t place any sort of onus on the left, it requires a very selective vision that pushes the very real hardships faced by millions to “the edges”.

And third, it requires a misrepresentation of the left. Referring, obliquely, to “the systems that the left previously venerated” points us to (I suppose) Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China, nations that very few people on the left ever venerated and which have not been venerated by anyone at all for at least fifty years.

This reference is about as relevant to the current debate as a reference to the right-wing Henry Ford’s well-documented veneration of, and support for, European fascism.

It is more illustrative to look at the systems the left currently venerates.

Canada, for example, with a health system that is the envy of the world, virtually non-existent poverty, and educational outcomes consistently rank in the top ten.

Or the Scandinavian countries, where the standard of living is unmatched, where health and education are universal, where there is peace and prosperity.

The onus falls on the left only if (a) we ignore what the right actually does, (b) we ignore the poverty and hardship that is prevalent in our world, not just an edge case, and (c) we misrepresent the left, even the version of it that existed 50 years ago.

Aaron’s statement places the onus squarely on the right to show what’s wrong with “Chomsky’s solution”. What, precisely, is wrong with democracy? “Media democracy, to prevent the population from being misled by deluded elites with big megaphones. Economic democracy, to promote a better mix and fairer distribution of societal goods and necessary evils. And political democracy, so that our military isn’t led by murderous thugs into endless immoral engagements.”

I wrote my short line above BEFORE reading the other comments, and noting that most of the voices on this subject tend to be male. Left feminism is as much about labor as it is reproductive rights (I guess pun unintended), but you wouldn’t really know it these days.

It is more illustrative to look at the systems the left currently venerates.

To which my response is “nothing, because the left is opposed on principle to veneration”. The examples you mention seem to be outperforming the competition at the present time and, therefore, may be worthy of imitation by nations who are currently doing worse. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t be improved further, or that they should not be scrutinized for flaws.

Different people have different definitions of “left”, of course. But mine includes a skeptical attitude towards hero worship, either of individuals or of societies. If someone’s idea of critical thinking is to substitute one idol for another, that person can’t be a leftist as I understand the term. IMO this is why the right so frequently fails to understand the left — not deferring to authority is a mode of thinking that is simply beyond their comprehension.

P.S. “People can survive under this system, except for the ones who don’t” is not a rousing endorsement of any political or economic system. Societies ought to be at least trying to do *better* than that, otherwise why do we form them in the first place?

Stanford, like many universities, maintains full employment for humanities professors by requiring new students to take their seminars.

The sneer here seems gratuitous, especially given the composition of the audience. Is your point that humanities professors don’t offer anything of value?

Steven, the point is that if you meet those minimum requirements, then you can wage as many trumped-up wars as you like.

how are they to turn these goals into a realizable program?

Why, they are to get together and start participating and taking control.

#1: There were some leftists in the courses taught by the social anthropologists, but in general my sense was that they were pretty rare. (Recall that Condi Rice was Provost.) But I definitely think that the sessions that dealt most directly with political questions were stacked with conservatives.

#12: I’m not sure what part of that is a sneer. I think leftists would agree that full employment is a good thing.

#15: I think the act that the public agrees with that shows that a negative analysis from the left has won adherents. I think the reason 2 million people don’t read Z Magazine is that it’s just not that interesting to them. It’s not like more centrist outlets do any better; TNR‘s circulation is only 60,000. (2 million people do go to see Michael Moore movies, though.)

As for what people can do to make a realizable program, that’s what I’m working on now. It’s a bit too long to fit in this comment box, but the gist of it is that I think Paul Wellstone basically had it right. Some people need to investigate the things that have gone particularly wrong and think up changes that would improve them. Some people need to go out and knock on doors and organize people into groups that can take collective action. And some people need to win elected office so they have a paid staff that can mobilize the organized groups and attempt to implement the suggested improvements through the panoply of legislative maneuvers.

The bit about full employment suggests (1) that without those seminars, the professors in question wouldn’t have enough work, and (2) that the primary value of the seminars, to Stanford, is to employ the professors, rather than to accomplish some educational purpose.

Nonsense. The recent eight years of conservative dominance have seen nothing but pointless aggression.

Pointless? I think the good people at Halliburton and KBR would beg to differ.

Statements like “the domestic economy is structured to make the majority of the population expendable servants of the rich” will only cause people to tune out and vote Republican.

Would this be the “if you can’t say it in six words, don’t say it at all” philosophy of governance? Maybe the words “domestic” and “structured” are a bit eyeglaze-inducing, but so too is “vocationally focused.”

I mean, this must be some quirk of grammar bugging you: clearly people wouldn’t tune out in response to the content of the statement. How about: the way our economy is set up, the rich get richer and the rest get screwed. That says the same thing I think that, uh, resonates with people, if I’m allowed to use a word like “resonates” without people tuning out on me and voting Republican.

Actually, I’m guessing that most people in the United States will believe you if you say, “The rich get richer and the rest get screwed.”

What they won’t believe is what has to follow, “If we work together, we can do something about it.” Then they’ll hesitate at “We should.” And they’ll really begin to slow down when told, “There will be some risk involved.”

And they may stop dead at, “By the way, since there are billions of desperately poor people in the world, we’re probably going to have to give up some power, and perhaps some comfort, in order to save some lives.”

Doesn’t absolve any of us from trying to make it happen, though.

The left needs to build credibility and trust

OK. How do you suggest the left ought to do this?

What progressives need is a critically minded populace. From where I stand it seems like the vast majority of conservative voters support the things they do only because they’ve been tricked into thinking those things are in their interest.

Doubtless some progressives are led by a similarly unwavering, uncritical dogma (of idealism, change etc.). But the conservative political machine operates on a much more sophisticated you-be-the-driftwood inertia. It’s easier to make people think that things are alright than it is to make people think things could be better…conservatives can exploit that comfortable, political apathy. We can’t.

I’m really just echoing others’ points here, I suppose, but the problem for me is rejuvenating (genuine) political participation. Obama’s campaign took a step in the right direction (lots of door-knocking, community organizers, emphasis on new technologies, etc)

Stanford’s definitely an odd school. If you take out the portion of the general American population that’s outright lunatic (denying evolution or global warming, wanting to deport all Mexicans, birthers, etc.), what you’d have remaining would probably be further to the left than the Stanford student body. You have a large number of people who are provincially pre-professional–engineers, pre-meds, wannabe consultants–who by and large come from a privileged background and are headed into a high earning field. At best you get a milquetoast liberal centrism that thinks Thomas Friedman is one of America’s great public intellectuals and reads the Economist because of how thoughtful and insightful it is.

Even progressive racial views and social liberalism have much less sway than you’d hope. My take is that about 30% of the students outright oppose gay marriage, 40% are genuinely committed to it, and the rest don’t care but tend toward not offending who they’re talking to.

So, wherever we look for a means to promote progressive change, the kids sitting in IHUM section are not going to be the leaders of that revolution. Which isn’t surprising, nor should it be.

Cause something is happening here,
But you don’t know what it is…
Do you, Mr. Jones?

35: I can’t speak for Aaron, but it could mean something like this for example:

Mitbestimmungsgesetz (in English, Codetermination Act) of 1976 is a German law which requires companies of over 2000 employees to have half the supervisory board of directors as representatives of workers.

David: Higher taxes is a means, whereas economic democracy is an end. Income redistribution (aided by taxes) would certainly be part of it, but I’d also favor systems to promote worker self-management and cooperative ownership and so on. That said, I will confess that the lunch you bought me persuaded me to be vehemently in favor of a financial transactions tax. (For the rest, Kane runs a high-speed trading hedge firm.)

Very well said, Kaveh. Any practical suggestions? We all know what, when, where, how, and whom to criticize publicly. What, when, where, how, and whom should we venerate publicly?

@41
Who/what/when/where how…

That’s something that needs a lot of consideration, I actually think the veneration of Obama (such as the frequent display of his portrait), annoying as it may be sometimes, is good cultural politics and good partisan politics too, but rather than venerating leaders, why not venerate people who make sacrifices? Whistle-blowers, for example, things that are not conventionally venerated (“our ideals”, “the American dream”). I think appealing to people’s willingness to make sacrifices is underrated.

These may not be great answers, but I think the problem *should* be what & who should we venerate, how…?

Why should the first-world masses want to change the way the world works? They have it pretty good, compared to what an egalitarian system would bring them.

Of course it’s true that first-world workers have an economic interest in getting a bigger share of the pie than their capitalist compatriots. But it’s hardly as though they have nothing to lose but their chains. I think if unless you want to get into False Consciousness territory (who wants to do that? epicycles on epicycles) you should probably start with the premise that the social base of The Left With A Capital L isn’t in the main composed of legal residents of OECD countries, and certainly not of Stanford students.

@45, Why should the first-world masses want to change the way the world works?

I agree in principle, but what about the first-world underclass? The system can’t function without a large underclass. In the US they have to keep 2+ million people in prisons, and that still leaves a helluva lot of people (tens of millions) who probably do want to change the way the world works. Also, a lot of them (especially in Europe, but in the US as well) are closely associated with the third-world masses.

Aaron,

1) Feel free to call me Dave, just like you did at lunch.

2) I did not claim that “it’s impossible to do anything about inequality.” I am just pointing out that it is very, very hard and that most of the plans that my friends on the left have come up with are likely to fail. As an example of a policy that would do a great deal for reducing inequality, I would propose an end to illegal immigration in the US. One of the reasons that the fellow who cleared our dishes from lunch is paid so poorly relative to you and me is because there are so many more people in the US competing for his job. Decrease that competition and you will increase his wages. But, most of my friends on the left (and my libertarian friends) want more immigration, not less.

3) Perhaps I can make my point clear by quoting you with some minor word replacement.

Kane seems to suggest that it’s impossible to do anything about anonymous publishing, since clever wealthy people will always find a way to evade the laws. I’m not sure how he squares this with the fact that anonymous publishing is lower in other countries or that anonymous publishing used to be much lower in the US. Did rich people get much cleverer since the New Deal? Are there no clever rich people in Denmark?

There are all sorts of technical/cultural reasons why thing X — whether it be inequality or anonymous publishing or illegal file sharing or whatever — might be higher now than in the past or higher in the US than elsewhere. Just because this is true does not mean that there is a government policy that could conceivably change it. To make that case, you need to propose a specific policy. What law does Denmark have that the US does not have that you think would have a meaningful impact on inequality in the US? I can’t think of one. What law did the US have 50 years ago that it does not have now that would matter?

4) Can’t you see that this sentiment — “since clever wealthy people will always find a way to evade the laws” — is very naive? It isn’t that clever wealthy people will need to “evade” the laws, they make the laws. Again, to have a productive discussion, you need to suggest a law that might do something and that would not be weakened by all the other laws/institutions we have. (Or you need a master plan to get rid of those laws/institutions as well.)

Start by considering tax-exempt municipal bonds. Even if you could pass a dramatic increase in income taxes, the wealthy would simply shift their money to tax-exempt bonds. Taking these sorts of dynamics seriously is required if any discussion of “economic democracy” is going to be more than a pipe dream.

Since you seem to be interested in tax policies primarily (or taxes/fees on financial transactions only?) – what about 91% top income tax bracket?

Heck, even if someone is interested in everything but tax policies, it seems unassailable that restoring New Deal-esque tax brackets would reduce inequality.

If a few heavily-funded groups can pull together hundreds of people to go storm in on town hall meetings reliably in order to protest government involvement in health care, I should think we can pull together equal numbers of people to go storm in on town hall meetings to demand New Deal Taxes.

Again, to have a productive discussion, you need to suggest a law that might do something and that would not be weakened by all the other laws/institutions we have.

This is… an absurdly high barrier, depending on what you mean by weakened. May I suggest you amend this to: Again, to have a productive discussion, you need to suggest a law that might do something despite being weakened by all the other laws/institutions we have.

Oh, and:

Even if you could pass a dramatic increase in income taxes, the wealthy would simply shift their money to tax-exempt bonds.

Thereby reducing interest rates on those bonds, and thus providing municipal government with access to more affordable money for projects etc. Am I understanding what would happen incorrectly, or is this particular outcome a bad thing?

Geo: I don’t know about “lavish,” but I did pay for Aaron’s lunch. ;-)

Salient: Whether or not increased purchases by rich people of municipal bonds and the accompanying lower interest rates on those bonds would be a good thing is not the main point. The issue is how much can (politically) plausible changes in the tax code actually decrease in equality? My answer: Not much. But the only way to have that discussion is to dive into the details. And, side note, Will Wilkinson’s essay on economic inequality is relevant to this discussion. Also, I am happy to use your “despite being weakened” phrasing.

Henri: If the 91% income tax bracket actually caused rich people to pay, you know, 91% of their income in taxes, you might have a point. But, of course, it didn’t. Although I don’t know this literature well, I think that the standard story is that the percentage of their income paid by rich people has been remarkably constant over time. The increase in inequality has been driven by their dramatic increase in income.

David:

The issue is how much can (politically) plausible changes in the tax code actually decrease in equality?

This strikes me as begging the question. Meaningful political change is never “plausible” until it happens.

Aaron,

Lane is a smart guy, but his posts/discussion are evidence for my argument: it is very, very hard to meaningfully impact the amount of economic inequality in the US. Now, if tiny, almost imperceptible changes are all that you are interested in, then fine, agitate for the end of “the homeownership subsidy.” I agree! But those changes are not what most people (or just me?) read the phrase “economic democracy” to mean. If you are interested, I am happy to go through a point-by-point on those ideas, or maybe we should save that for our next lunch?

In the meantime, let me give an honest answer to your question about alternatives.

1) Learn to live with it. Although it might be nicer to live in a world in which, say, professional basketball players are paid millions per year, there is no easy way to move from this world to that, without unacceptable infringements on human freedom. There is nothing wrong, of course, with tinkering around the margins but don’t expect to change anything in any meaningful way.

2) Focus on social equality rather than economic equality. The great engine for social equality in the US, at least before the Vietnam War, was the draft. For most purposes, it did not matter how rich you were, who you parents were or where you went to school: even Stanford! You served. You lived cheek-by-jowl with a fairly broad cross section of American society. You lived equally. Now, being a Friedmanite, I am against the draft, but that is an institution which achieved many of the goals of the sort of people who talk about “economic democracy” seem to favor.

3) Dramatically increase the use of vouchers. Now, some of my friends on the right oversell the good that vouchers might do. But, from a social equality point of view, they are the best way of putting people on an equal footing. Needless to say, this will be a long battle. Most of your Stanford classmates will be sending their children to schools with very few poor kids. They may not think that giving vouchers to poor families that can be used at their schools is such a great idea. The same difficulty applies to health care. (Medicaid patients see a very different cross-section of doctors than non-Medicaid patients.)

Imagine a world in which everyone received a medical care voucher that allowed purchase of health insurance, funded at a high enough level that every health care company accepted the voucher. Imagine the same for education vouchers. Those two changes alone would do more for inequality, at least social inequality, than endless fiddling with “public services.”

4) Dramatically decrease immigration (at least, of unskilled workers). Now, obviously, this brings economic democracy to US citizens while simultaneously hurting would-be immigrants, but if we take a “citizenist” view of matters, there is no better way to raise the living standards of dish washers than to prevent other dish washers from coming to the US.

And that is just off the top of my head! Your friends on the right often have similar goals. We just don’t think that increasing the head count of the Federal Government or the complexity of the tax code is likely to achieve them.

Imagine a world in which everyone received a medical care voucher that allowed purchase of health insurance, funded at a high enough level that every health care company accepted the voucher. Imagine the same for education vouchers.

We implement these vouchers, you agree to strict and comprehensive cost-control regulation so that providers can’t rent-seek. Deal?

(Indeed, though I think “funded at a high enough level” would be rather infeasible, this proposal amounts to the kind of system I could support with satisfaction rather than resignation.)

Lane advocates universal “high-quality child care followed by good public schooling and affordable access to a good college … good health care throughout life … clean and efficient public transportation … four weeks of paid vacation each year, an additional week or so of paid sickness leave, and a year of paid family leave to care for a child or other needy relative.” He shows that such policies take 15 points off the Swedish Gini coefficient. (That would immediately bring us down from .45 (#94) to .30 (#21), compared to Sweden’s .23 (#1).) Do you really consider those “tiny, almost imperceptible changes”? If so, it’s hard to see what difference vouchers would make.

These things are clearly not impossible; they’re also clearly not enough. But they’re good first steps; once we get there I can suggest more.

The left’s goal isn’t “increasing the head count of the Federal Government or the complexity of the tax code” — leftists are strong proponents of simplifying tax reforms (in part because it cuts down on loopholes). I want to promote economic democracy in part because I want a more decentralized economy, where lots of people are free to start new businesses and pursue new ideas, instead of just a handful of authoritarian giant corporations. Let’s work on decreasing the head count of them.

Taxing income at all means taxing upward economic mobility, which means you get less of it, both the the obvious money-sent-to-the-government-can’t-make-you-richer sense and in the broader incentives-based sense, so the more you tax incomes the less equal things are going to get.

The better approach is to leave incomes alone and instead tax wealth and consumption (adjusting the ratio of these areas to incentivize your desired level of personal savings.)

Jeff, that first paragraph makes no sense.

money-sent-to-the-government-can’t-make-you-richer

It… depends what you mean by “richer.” A moderate income can’t buy you a well-maintained road. For that matter, it can’t even buy you reasonable health and dental care (if you pay a la carte).

But yes, income taxes are imperfect proxies for wealth taxes, and it does indeed make a lot of sense to tax wealth progressively.

One of my major answers would be to have an inheritance tax (rather than an estate tax).

I don’t know enough about how estates are gifted or entrusted to evaluate this — I was not aware that there is a difference between an estate tax and a gift/inheritance tax. From my superficial standpoint, your proposal sounds much more reasonable than the system we currently have. (This is assuming we are converging on agreeing to a gift/inheritance tax somewhere vaguely in the 90-95% range, not the 10-20% range.)

Oh, I see that people have already been talking about a wealth tax. :)

it is very, very hard to meaningfully impact the amount of economic inequality in the US.

The Great Compression and its reversal: sheer coincidence?

Although it might be nicer to live in a world in which, say, professional basketball players are paid millions per year, there is no easy way to move from this world to that, without unacceptable infringements on human freedom.

That depends greatly on which infringements you consider acceptable. Higher marginal tax rates are only one of many tools – in particular, corporate governance in the US could use a large overhaul. Use of shareholder funds to lobby or donate to political campaigns should be considered a per se breach of fiduciary duty by the executives who approve it; that would be a nice start. (Do they expect a return on that investment, or not? If so, it’s a bribe; if not, it’s a waste.) When corporate managers have to start using their *own* money for political contributions and lobbying, instead of company money, a lot of other battles become easier to fight.

For most purposes, it did not matter how rich you were, who you parents were or where you went to school: even Stanford! You served.

I don’t think this is actually true. Some people got into, say, the Texas Air National Guard and remained exempt from the draft even while AWOL from their unit. I think anyone who could afford to go to college at all was exempt for the duration of their student status – which could be pretty long if you can afford to also pursue graduate degrees.

But a lot of liberals are against the draft for many of the same reasons you are, so it’s kind of beside the point.

Dramatically increase the use of vouchers. Now, some of my friends on the right oversell the good that vouchers might do. But, from a social equality point of view, they are the best way of putting people on an equal footing.

And undersell the harm – in the South, which is the main place they have political currency, vouchers are essentially a plan to funnel state funds to religious schools that teach doctrine rather than a secular curriculum. (And I bet nobody will ask too many embarrassing questions about how racially integrated they are, too.)

Even aside from that, though, I can’t really see the rich sending their children to “voucher plus zero” schools even if there are a wide variety of them, so your social leveling doesn’t happen. You might as well just reform the existing school system so that the resources available to a school don’t depend on the economic class of the neighborhood it serves.

(For the health care suggestion, we may be headed in that direction already – but that would *be* a public service, even if it’s mediated through private insurers and doctors.)

Dramatically decrease immigration (at least, of unskilled workers).

Doing that without “unacceptable infringements on human freedom” is left as an exercise for the reader. (Hell, we unacceptably infringe on human freedom *now* in the pursuit of immigration prevention and we still don’t stop the amount we don’t stop. And that’s not even counting the school of thought that restriction of immigration is *in itself* an unacceptable infringement on human freedom.)

there is no better way to raise the living standards of dish washers than to prevent other dish washers from coming to the US

* Raise the minimum wage. (What, are all the restaurants going to switch to paper plates? The demand for dishwashers is pretty inelastic, until restaurants as an industry start going out of business altogether. This solution in particular makes it irrelevant how large the pool of potential dishwashers is – at least, as long as the minimum wage laws are enforced.)

* Train them to be something more economically valuable than dishwashers. This one is so obvious I don’t see how you could have missed it (although, because of the inelastic demand, someone else will have to come in and wash dishes; but supply and demand will pull the wages up even without direct government action. In addition, if dishwasher is a “part-time job while working through college/vocational school” job rather than a permanent one, low wages for the time you hold that particular job will have less impact on lifetime earnings than if people are stuck in it.)

* Permit more union organization, and allow the dishwashers’ union to negotiate for improvements in their wages. This is a well-known, widely used and successful method that right-wing administrations go to great lengths to prevent.

* Provide more and better free/subsidized services. This means that an individual’s standard of living is not wholly defined by that individual’s income. Better public transportation, for example, allows more individuals to avoid the costs of car ownership while still holding the same job.

* Stronger enforcement of unfair and deceptive business practice legislation; some businesses basically have “gouge the unsophisticated” for a business model. (Payday lending comes to mind.) In some cases the whole industry could be replaced by a public service/utility. (If the government is the liquidity provider of last resort for banks, why can’t it also be the liquidity provider of last resort for people?)

* Revive the WPA to take up the slack in the labor market (this ripples through to affect all labor, but most strongly low-skilled segments like dishwashers). There’s a lot of neglected or inadequate public works that we *could* be working on, if we bothered to.

And that’s just off the top of my head.

This is assuming we are converging on agreeing to a gift/inheritance tax somewhere vaguely in the 90-95% range, not the 10-20% range.

That’s not the usual structure. Usual structure is that after some amount of deduction, gifts/inheritances are taxed as income–at whatever the income tax rate is. And I’d be in favor of more brackets to income tax–but I’m not in favor of a very-high tax on all gifts no matter how small the recipient’s income is.

Usual structure is that after some amount of deduction, gifts/inheritances are taxed as income

I thought we were punting the income tax. But certainly, agreed, a progressive graduated % that starts at 0% for gifts worth less than the current poverty level and tops out around 90% for gifts worth millions would be much better than a flat tax. Sorry, I was assuming progressive graduation up to 90% without consciously recognizing my own assumption, much less stating it explicitly.

Okay, but everyone else gets that road, too. So the money you’re not accumulating because it’s been taxed away isn’t doing anything to bring your relative wealth upwards and thus reduce inequality.

(Shrug.) The progressive taxes which paid for the road reduced inequality, one hopes. The reduction in inequality comes from the high end, not low end.

Another possibility is to tax income, but make the rate progressive based on wealth rather than income itself. The rate can be made flat up to what we think is the optimum savings level based on age…

Eh, neat idea, but it seems less useful than just taxing wealth.

Aaron: There is little wrong with the goals that you correctly ascribe to Lane. But surely you know that people like Lane have been advocating for “good public schooling” for 20 years, if not 40. How many people like Lane send their children to public schools (non-magnets) in places like Washington DC, Boston or New York City? How many Stanford graduates do so? Round numbers: Zero.

Now, if evil far-right Republican executives and legislatures had been running those cities/states for the last few decades, you/Lane might just argue that all we need is to elect Democrats. Or if those cities spent less per student than rural schools you might argue for better funding. But neither concern is true. If Democrats spending lots of money can’t produce “good public schooling” in cities that they have controlled for decades, then isn’t it clear that just wanting these things is not enough. Indeed, isn’t just wanting them the same as wishing that the streets were paved with chocolate: a nice sentiment with no clear description of how it might come about.

Again, our debate is not so much over goals — I wish that poor kids in Boston received an education as good as my children do — it is over the best way to achieve those goals, given the realities of the world we live in. Anyway, I am comfortable with vouchers for things like health, education and so on.

But then you lose me with talk like “four weeks of paid vacation each year, an additional week or so of paid sickness leave, and a year of paid family leave to care for a child or other needy relative.” You really want the government to tell me that I need to offer 4 weeks (not three weeks, not two weeks with higher pay, not two weeks with lots of free time during the day). I hate it when the government tells me what to do.

And don’t you as well. I, obviously, don’t know your politics very well, but I would have assumed that government infringement of the sorts of freedoms that you value would drive you nuts. Am I missing something?

Moreover, there is a direct contradiction between your desire for a society with “lots of people are free to start new businesses and pursue new ideas” and these sorts of regulations. Do you have any idea how hard it is to start a business in Massachusetts and comply with all the regulations we already have? I do. The more you require businesses to carry out your preferred social policies, the less people will be “free to start new businesses.” You can have one or the other, but not both.

So, if taxation is the answer to reduce inequality, the implementation through income, wealth, estate, etc., to be progressive in each category, the biggest obstacle is still convincing the wealthy and the better off that they deserve to pay more. Of course they can use their wealth to hire hacks to blow holes in all your arguments.

Anyway, for starters. The wealthy should pay progressively more for national defense because they have more to defend. I’m sure they do, but they should pay still more because most likely our enemies around the world are more pissed off at our wealthy than they are at our rabble.

David:

Your basic point seems to be: in the absence of a wide and deep social consensus in favor of the goals posited here — greater economic equality, tax fairness, stricter environmental protection, more equal educational opportunity, etc. — ingenious and energetic people will always find ways to evade whatever laws, policies, and regulations seek to enforce those goals.

Granted. But suppose there was such a consensus, and the problem was not to enforce humane policies on a lot of people who didn’t share the goals of those policies, but rather just to prevent free riding by a small minority of cheaters? Wouldn’t that remove the difficulty in principle, and shift the left’s strategic emphasis toward creating a moral consensus and away from devising super-clever, lawyer-proof policies ?

I don’t want the government telling me exactly what bargains I can strike with my employees.

Yes, but often your employees do want the government telling you that, because they don’t really have equal bargaining power with you.

The prospect of being employed by David Kane is the best argument I’ve heard in a long time for a basic income.

Aaron wants

a more decentralized economy, where lots of people are free to start new businesses and pursue new ideas, instead of just a handful of authoritarian giant corporations.

Me too! Is that what the rest of you (Salient, Alex, b9n10nt, Tim B, et al) want?

If you don’t want it, no worries. Please explain to Aaron why this is a bad or irrelevant goal, why the left should focus on other things. That is a reasonable position.

But if, like Aaron, you do want lots of people “to start new businesses,” then you ought to listen to either a) the sorts of people (like me) who do, in fact, start new businesses or b) the sorts of people (like many of my buddies) who might start new businesses. The vast, vast majority of them will tell you that more government regulation means fewer new businesses.

Again, if you don’t care about new businesses, that is fine. By all means, write a law which forces me to offer at least 4 weeks of vacation, and 6 days of sick leave, and 20 minutes per day for personal errands, and free coffee and every other little thing your heart desires. Again, I am not requesting a return to the state of nature. I am making the empirical claim that, if (like Aaron) you want more new businesses than you would otherwise get, you need to reduce, not increase, the costs of business formation.

Also: I’d probably be OK with a few giant authoritarian corporations running the world, if they accomplished my goals. But I am currently firmly convinced that won’t happen and couldn’t happen: is there a definition of “authoritarian” which doesn’t come into conflict with my “no suffering due to someone else exploiting you” principle?

Doesn’t it seem logical that in order to create an environment where new-small businesses can flourish you need to crush the old-big businesses and deploy some mechanism that prevents small businesses from growing too much? Seems to me government regulation could help here by, for example, imposing heavier regulations on big businesses, higher taxes, stricter anti-trust rules, etc. So, hurting businesses helps businesses. Other businesses.

Shmoon produced a bunch of things that sound pretty luxurious.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmoo

I’m pretty sure exterminating the schmoos qualifies as an example of exploitation.

But if, like Aaron, you do want lots of people “to start new businesses,” then you ought to listen to either a) the sorts of people (like me) who do, in fact, start new businesses or b) the sorts of people (like many of my buddies) who might start new businesses.

Actually, although this sounds plausible, it is completely wrong! The people who *already* start new businesses are irrelevant to a discussion of how to convince *more* people to start new businesses. Marginal business-starters can’t be the existing business-starters because they’re not on the margin.

What we would need to focus on is the type of people who *don’t* start new businesses now, but would under a different legal and/or economic system. I suspect that many of those people are not starting new businesses because they lack either the capital or the educational background to do so, and therefore leveling the immediate availability of resources will lift more people into the opportunity-for-entrepreneurship category. (Educational disadvantages take time to remedy, maybe even a generation or more. But that’s no reason not to start ASAP.)

But I’m not sure we really need more new business starts anyway. There are already a lot of failed new businesses, which involve considerable waste (and bankruptcy externalities). We could keep the average business size down (assuming that’s desirable, and I think it probably is) by stronger antitrust enforcement and a more wary attitude toward mergers and acquisitions, rather than total regulatory capture of the agencies tasked with watching those developments, and such an approach might be as efficient or more efficient than trying to encourage more new business starts (that just lead to being squeezed out of the market by the big guy, or being bought up by the big guy making him even bigger).

P.S. Five minutes’ study of the history of labor conditions in the Gilded Age will prove the point at #87-88 beyond any reasonable possibility of doubt. Butchers, bakers, and brewers may provide a quality product out of their regard to their own interest, but employers do not provide quality working conditions out of their regard to their own interest unless potential employees are scarce.

Link to 538 discussion on school vouchers:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/who-wants-school-vouchers-rich-whites.html

1) Before this thread peters out completely, I would like to establish my leftist credentials by noting this comment I sent to the SEC a few years ago about how to reduce executive compensation at public companies. It is genius, I tell you, genius!

2) b9n10t and Tim B: Again, the issue that I have with friends on the left is not so much a bias against social engineering (see comment 1) above) but a plea for competent engineering. The whole idea that you could drive major policy change by making a distinction between co-ops (especially co-ops in which everyone, even the one-afternoon-a-week part-timer has an equal share) and for-profits is fantasy. Can you give an example of any non-tiny business in the US that could function if everyone had exactly an equal share?

And, even if you relax perfect equality, you still have the problem of people (like me) becoming co-ops if you make co-ops desirable enough.

Aaron writes:

So the policy change here would be some sort of Basic Income Grant, like Nixon and Charles Murray have proposed.

I can’t recall the last time that someone at Crooked Timber made a non-critical reference to Charles Murray. I often think that the best way to create a “larger left” is to take Murray (and others like him) more seriously.

Just because I want people to start new businesses doesn’t mean I want people like you and your friends to start new businesses. I was thinking more about helping the working class start new businesses, and when I talk to them the problem is always getting loans and capital, not government regulation.

First, just what sort of businesses are we talking about? Second, certainly, if you can’t get capital, there is no need to worry about regulation. But, once they have capital, I think that small business folk complain heartily about regulation. Third, we already have a fairly amazing system for “helping the working class start new businesses.” It is called banking. Walk into any bank, and there is a person whose sole job is to fund new businesses.

Now, one might argue that not enough funding is going on. That is a larger debate. But it sure does remind me of all the people who said, 4 years ago, that not enough people had access to capital/loans for buying their own home. Also, if it is really true that not enough capital is going to help working class folks (or others) start their own businesses, then those loans that are made must be very profitable with surprisingly low default rates. I doubt that is true.

In any event, this has been a pleasant discussion.

David Kane:

“The whole idea that you could drive major policy change by making a distinction between co-ops (especially co-ops in which everyone, even the one-afternoon-a-week part-timer has an equal share) and for-profits is fantasy.”

Listen, I’m out of my depth here, no doubt. But if you look at the emergence of the corporation, it was a major policy change (in the aggregate) that wasn’t driven by a “distinction” but by a host of legal and policy developments nurtured by an activist state. Well, if the goal of leaders in the 18th C US was capitalist industrial development, then these policies emerge and support the goal. If the goal today becomes a prosperous and ecologically sustainable ownership society (bosses and workers unite!), then a complex and dynamic array of policies and social levers are pursued toward that end.

Yes, any single policy in isolation would be comically insufficient.