johnbyronkuhner.com

Teapartiers and Ron Paul types talk of a minimalist government whose sole function is the protection of basic rights; everything else, they say, is not a concern of government.  But all governments throughout history have had another role, which is not protective so much as promotive: government favors some things and cultivates them.  This is because government is above all an expression of culture; even its protective powers are not coherent without a culture to inform it what to protect.  The U.S. constitution empowers the government to protect (and promote) trade, by involving itself in such things as currency; the Spartan constitution banned currency to protect virtue, which it conceived as a militaristic indifference to wealth and comforts.  The promotive aspect of government is inherent and cannot be abolished: by having a place to meet, a deliberative body must promote some form of life over another: it can meet under an oak tree, in a hotel conference center, or in a grand beaux-arts marble edifice; or it can not meet and not debate at all; each indicates the form of the culture.

Our government is involved in any number of things, preeminently trade, but also scientific research, education, marriage, the postal system and now the internet, the arts, and so forth, which are indicative of the values of the supporting culture.  All of these are identified by their supporters as basic rights, because that is the traditional justification in our society for something we want the government to support.  So you will hear talk of “the right to an education,” “the right to marriage,” “the right to art,” and now “the right to the internet.”  This line of thinking is not really coherent, but then again, no line of thinking is.  It makes more sense when the word “right” is construed as “something I believe all people should have if they want it.”  And yes, this means that people will continue to talk about “the right to fashion” and the right to anything else they really really like.

This is a necessary prism for understanding the political divide in the United States today.  The Republican party consistently uses language pretending that government has no promotive role in society when they attack social entitlement programs and progressive taxation.  Yet they certainly believe in government’s role when it comes to promoting business.  This is a cultural question: the culture they want promotes trade, and distributes increasing amounts of economic power (i.e., money) to fewer people.  This is to them one of the virtues of our culture: that it rewards certain types of men with fabulous wealth.  It is the culture of the game Monopoly: the game reaches its successful conclusion when one person has bankrupted all competitors and stands alone.

The opposite view can be found in a nice little piece by Matthew Yglesias, in which he gives an account of his principles.  The principles themselves:

On economic policy, here are the main things I’m trying to accomplish:

— More redistribution of money from the top to the bottom.
— A less paternalistic welfare state that puts more money directly in the hands of the recipients of social services.
— Macroeconomic stabilization policy that seriously aims for full employment.
— Curb the regulatory privileges of incumbent landowners.
— Roll back subsidies implicit in our current automobile/housing-oriented industrial policy.
— Break the licensing cartels that deny opportunity to the unskilled.
— Much greater equalization of opportunities in K-12 education.
— Reduction of the rents assembled by privileged intellectual property owners.
— Throughout the public sector, concerted reform aimed at ensuring public services are public services and not jobs programs.
— Taxation of polluters (and resource-extractors more generally) rather than current de facto subsidization of resource extraction.

This has not altered much from FDR and Frank Capra days, with the exception of the last, which indicates a new environmental awareness of the sustainability concept.

I agree with almost all these principles, and will note in particular his first, that of moving wealth from the top downward.  We are in the midst of a worldwide upward wealth redistribution, which is worst in all the countries under strong American influence.  And this pattern does not make for either justice or stability.  Egypt, for example, has done what our economists have told it to do, and has seen what counts as fine economic growth: 6% this past year, 5% for the two years before, and 7% each of the three previous years.  The problem was that it was Republican-style growth: growth consumed entirely by the wealthy, which had no impact on the bottom four quintiles and no impact on unemployment.  Forty percent of Egyptians already live on less than two dollars a day, and two-thirds of Egyptians are under 30.

Along this vein is Tom Robbin’s l’envoi from the Village Voice.  He provides a graph (slightly misleading as is the custom now in all respectable publications; the chart does not start at 0 but around 5%) showing how much income the top 1% of our country controls.  It’s a shame he didn’t discuss wealth, which is far more skewed than income is.  But this will do:

The numbers on the chart show that nationally, America’s top earners are now taking in 24 percent of the income, back to where they were just before their gluttony crashed Wall Street in 1929. But they are pikers compared to New York. Our state’s most privileged class holds 35 percent of the dough. Here in the city, the fat cats do even better, with a whopping 44 percent. This is why New York State ranks last in terms of the income gap between rich and poor. And it is why New York City is the most polarized of the nation’s 25 biggest urban areas.

“If New York City were a nation,” reports James Parrott, economist for the institute, “its level of income concentration would rank 15th worst among 134 countries, between Chileand Honduras. Wall Street,” he adds, “with its stratospheric profits and bonuses, sits within 15 miles of the Bronx—the nation’s poorest urban county.”

Supporting the middle class, George Bailey-style, both personally and by proxy in the government, strikes me as good policy, for a lot of reasons.  Not only because my religion teaches that “he who has two tunics must share with him who has none,” not only because it teaches that at the gates of heaven the rich will be judged by the poor, but also because it’s the kind of culture and country I believe in.