At times I doubt that it is worthwhile to refute arguments made by people of the Ayn Rand ilk, in part because the ideology’s many sympathizers seem impervious to any challenge to their myopic worldview, and in part because the existence, if not the adequate funding, of the welfare state does not appear to be in any immediate jeopardy. Yet Randian views are fairly prevalent on the right, even if right-libertarians' radically anti-statist goals remain forever beyond their reach. We still have a relatively democratic form of government, which responds to popular demands for a modicum of security and opportunity for people born, or thrown, into poverty. For any government, including a Republican-led one, to radically upend this system would be to incur certain electoral defeat.
Yet I find myself irresistibly drawn to the discussion about this peculiar ideology. A prominent right-libertarian author of the 20th century, Ayn Rand saw selfishness as a virtue that was mistaken for a vice. She was countering those who believed that sacrificing one’s own interests for the sake of someone else’s was a moral good. For Rand, this was perverse. People of great talent and strong work ethic, Rand believed, had become far too selfless. People would be far better off if they sought great wealth unencumbered by concerns about the less fortunate.
I went through an Ayn Rand phase when I was 19, reading “The Fountainhead”, “Atlas Shrugged”, and “The Virtue of Selfishness” with considerable, if fleeting, respect. Since an aggressive and winner-take-all form of capitalism seemed victorious, I welcomed a reason to believe in such a system and feel vindicated rather than hopelessly defeated. Yet never once in my life had I found myself thinking, “You know what the problem with the world is? People are thinking too much of others, and not enough about their own interests.” Nor did Rand's work convince me to entertain such a thought. Such a proposition seemed quite readily debunked by simple observation of most people’s behavior.
To me, at least, it seems pretty clear that most people take care of themselves and their families first, and then, if they are so inclined, give a fraction of whatever is left over to others. Just look at the way people accumulate huge amounts of wealth and use it for their own benefit. They pay taxes on that wealth, of course, but often grudgingly and using whatever means they can to shield as much from the government as possible. Affluent people often send their children to colleges costing $50,000 per year or more; if they were really as self-sacrificing as they are accused of being, they presumably would send their children to perfectly acceptable state universities and donate the saved money to support college education for poorer young people. (And if this did happen, it would be a horror that I suspect we could learn to live with, Rand's objections notwithstanding.)
I do not blame people for wanting to keep their money when they move from poverty to the middle class, nor do I fault the middle class for wanting to maintain and improve their lot. Lacking the comprehensive social welfare state of most other advanced democracies, Americans have to accumulate a large amount of private wealth to achieve economic security. The last few years of life, if lived in serious illness, can easily wipe out a lifetime of savings and investments. This might help the case for a more comprehensive welfare state, but just as it seems unlikely that America will abolish the limited social welfare system that it has, it seems equally unlikely that the country will adopt the cradle-to-grave Scandinavian model.
Yet, since there are many who think otherwise, I feel driven to defend the welfare state. Earlier, I called the Randians' belief system peculiar; the reason is that the system mistakes a phantom of absolute social equality for the real thing, and its devotees are not placated in the least when the misperception is pointed out to them, even with undeniable evidence. A recent social media post, paraphrasing a common conservative assertion, declared that “Effort and talent are unequal, so it would be unfair for income to be equal.” If you believe that there is any danger of everyone’s income being equal, you must believe that the proposed $15-per-hour minimum wage would make workers’ pay equal to that of executives. If so, I would encourage you to do some research into executive pay. Even Bernie Sanders would never allow absolute equality, for then he would be a communist and not a democratic socialist. Nor does progressive taxation seek to establish total equality, since even with high rates, it still takes only a fraction of people's wealth as they become richer. Those who would tax 100% of people's income past a certain point do exist on the left, but they are mostly confined to narrow academic circles and marginal political organizations. Given the great increase in income inequality in the past few decades, which has been more or less maintained during seven years under a liberal Democratic president, the fear of absolute economic equality does not seem particularly well-founded. Just as there are democratic pressures maintaining support programs for low-income people, there are pressures against dramatic increases in taxes on richer people. They, too, donate, lobby, and vote; indeed, richer people vote more consistently than poorer people do.
The result is that a 4.6% increase in tax on income exceeding $250,000 was a hard-won achievement for progressives; presumably, a more aggressively confiscatory tax policy would be harder to pass through Congress. The alleged malign selflessness has not prevented legislators from taxing capital gains more lightly than ordinary income, maintaining the carried-interest loophole, or substantially eliminating the inheritance tax, all policies that reflect the considerable political power of very affluent people quite unashamedly looking after their own interests. Nor does it prevent state legislatures from levying a cornucopia of taxes and fees that take a larger fraction of poorer people’s income than richer people’s. When I paid nearly $200 for a vehicle registration fee, I would have welcomed some selflessness on the part of the people--most of whom enjoy an income much greater than mine--who determine the fees.
To be clear, I do not completely oppose conservative economic policy. For example, there is a reasonable case for lower capital-gains taxes, given the existence of corporate income tax. A too-large state can encumber economic growth; free markets produce more wealth and overall economic well-being than central planning. But the discussion here focuses on putative evidence for radical self-sacrifice among successful people, Ayn Rand’s heroes, and that evidence is thin. A substantial decrease in the size of economic inequality might make a transition to an egalitarian dystopia at least a remote possibility, but since that is plainly not happening, radical anti-redistributionist rhetoric seems to be a straw-man attack.
In fairness, right-libertarians do have a plausible argument to make even if they concede that absolute equality is not being proposed. According to those in this group, any redistribution is morally equivalent to robbing people at gunpoint. This makes discussion of precise amounts and uses of redistribution irrelevant, since robbery is wrong whether you take $5 or $5,000, and whether you give it to a homeless person or use it to gamble at the race track. But this objection to social welfare reflects a distorted view of socioeconomic reality. People on the far left, of course, have their own naïve economic beliefs, but right-libertarians are taken with the belief that heavily concentrated wealth does not buy its owners political power and the distribution of rewards and privileges that inevitably follows from it. A plentiful supply of labor enables an employer to dictate the terms of employment to a worker, a significant advantage to the employer that can force the worker to either accept poor working conditions at one job or accept similar conditions at another. This is not physical coercion, of course, but it is an exercise of power over a person that warrants some kind of mitigation, even if only meaningful collective bargaining rights. You can imagine what would happen if, in addition to this advantage, successful people also did not have to pay for poor people to receive food and housing assistance, health care, or education. (Recall, all of these things are paid for by ostensibly robbing the rich.) The assurance of education is what enables many to have choices beyond those indicated in my example. If such assistance were not provided at taxpayer expense, many, if not most, poor people would stay poor no matter what they did. If this is the kind of society you prefer, that is your right, but do not pretend that such a society is free for people without resources.
Nor is my example the only way in which richer people can effectively take wealth from poorer people. Read Steven Teles’s “Kludgeocracy in America” to become educated on the ways in which some wealthier people game the system to enrich themselves at the expense of poorer people. Unlike Teles, I think the most practical solution is to use downward redistribution to compensate for the upward kind, but whether you agree or not, after becoming more aware of planned distortions in a supposedly laissez-faire system, you will see that the notion that existing economic inequality largely reflects the function of the free market becomes insupportable.
Perhaps the solution is to remove these distortions and allow the free market to work its magic unfettered. Strong right-libertarians go even farther than this. Perhaps you are inclined to agree with them that redistribution equates to robbery. If so, you probably implicitly share certain suppositions with the Randians that liberals and even some conservatives do not. One of the main suppositions is that people are largely autonomous and independent, entering and withdrawing from society as they find necessary and expedient. As such, people can pick and choose what social programs they would like to support. Of course, there are certain items, such as law enforcement, national defense, and the justice system, that people necessarily must support, since they benefit from these services whether they like it or not, and, if funding these services were voluntary, some would choose to free-ride off of those who agreed to pay. Libertarians are not necessarily anarchists; even Ayn Rand agreed that taxation was necessary. But according to this philosophy, people’s dependence on society is very limited and does not extend to social welfare. Misfortune might render me desperately poor someday, but, if I so wish, I could choose not to support social welfare programs, making myself ineligible for benefits, if the law so allowed; I could save my money and take my chances.
In theory, the government could abolish social welfare programs altogether or make their funding voluntary. In order to prevent people from opting not to pay but collecting benefits later, people who declined to support the system could be made ineligible for benefits. Of course, this would cause some serious problems. Some, presumably, would opt not to pay, and thus greatly reduce the funding available for people in need, and, as misfortune rendered some non-payers desperately poor, we would have a growing number of extremely poor people facing starvation, homelessness, and disease. They could seek charity, of course, but presumably there would be a limit to how much support philanthropic people and institutions would be able to provide for a growing number of desperate people.
It has been said to me in response to this line of argument that people should suffer the consequences of their choices, and that, seeing others suffer and die as a result of their foolishness, people would make more responsible choices. Seeing the state protect people against the consequences of their actions, the argument goes, people are encouraged to make irresponsible choices and then get to force others to pay the price. The argument against redistribution in principle thus has a utilitarian bonus to add to its deontological basis.
This argument has problems of its own. People can become desperately poor for reasons having nothing to do with irresponsible personal choices. But in any case, none of the disastrous consequences of the abolition of the welfare state would pose a problem for those opposed to redistribution in principle. If taxing people to support the poor is fundamentally morally wrong, it does not matter what the consequences of declining to do so would be. Property rights are sacrosanct, and, presumably, people can only be forced to support the basic functions of government listed above.
Yet, properly understood, social welfare is one of these basic, necessary government functions. Unfortunately, and perhaps to the discredit of its defenders, social welfare is not properly understood. Social welfare is portrayed, sometimes even by its defenders, as a one-way obligation of a richer person to a poorer one. This makes social welfare vulnerable to the argument that people are not entitled to other people’s property.
Cass Sunstein has a blunt way around this problem. To the taxpayer, he says, “It’s NOT your money.” By law, whether we like it or not, some of our money belongs to the government; we can vote for legislators who make that quantity greater or less, depending on our preferences, but once that decision is made, we cannot rightfully decide that money owed in tax is our own. Unless we agree to this, government itself becomes impractical if not impossible, since people will naturally want the benefits of government without the cost. While Sunstein is right that the money we owe in tax is by definition not our own, this point is unsatisfactory, on its own, as a justification for social welfare spending. Just because the government can do something does not mean that it should do so.
To be sure, it is entirely right for the government to help those who cannot help themselves; those who disagree in principle are deeply misguided, as I will attempt to show. But the “It’s not your money” argument is not enough to show why this is so. That is, there is no individualistic way to justify redistribution. Once it is conceded (wrongly) that people thrive largely independently of others—that is, that it is possible for people to separate their own welfare from that of others—the case for redistribution is weakened, perhaps fatally so. Fortunately for those who support redistribution, this proposition is absurd. The individual cannot thrive without society; therefore, the argument that the individual should not have to pay taxes to support the welfare of other people is indefensible. The individual is not supporting other people to his own detriment (as would be true in the case of actual robbery); he is paying to sustain a community upon which he depends--that is, to support the social system without which the wealth he claims for himself could not have been acquired in the first place.
You might object, “How does my welfare depend on the provision of material aid to people able to support themselves who choose instead to collect benefits? I just saw a person pay for prime rib with food stamps!” I might agree that people blowing their $3 per day on fancy food early in the month is a political issue of great concern, but you must agree that at least some government assistance goes to people in genuine need. (If not, I have some people I would like you to meet.) In any case, you cannot very well divert a deontological argument in a utilitarian direction when you find that the argument is failing; if you oppose mandatory social insurance in principle, you oppose it whether its beneficiaries are deserving or not. And I am not asking you to concede that all social welfare spending is to your own advantage; I am as painfully aware as you are that a substantial amount of government spending serves the selfish interests of politically connected constituencies. But I do not see how you can get by in life without benefitting from the services of people who became productive members of society because the government provided for them. Meet your author, who suffers from a debilitating illness but is able to contribute to society because the government pays for much of his health care. (Thanks, by the way. And you’re welcome.)
You might object, “But you get your wages!” Yes, but not nearly enough to pay for the medical care I need in order to be able to earn those wages. So the government makes up the difference, for me and for others in similar circumstances, and everyone more or less benefits. You necessarily depend on me, and I necessarily depend on you.
Perhaps this argument is academic, since even legislators on the right are not proposing to eliminate all social welfare spending. But ideological discomfort with redistribution is often exploited to resist expansions in our social support system, and motivates the push for cuts to that system. (See the proposal to eliminate Obamacare, and I do not share the confidence of many on the right that, should its opponents succeed, they will replace the law with one providing similar benefits to the most vulnerable people.) So it is important that people understand why government support for the vulnerable is necessary and legitimate.
Even though radical right-libertarianism is flawed, it is difficult to challenge, since its individualistic assumptions are so deeply rooted in our culture that any discussion of social policy, even in defense of social welfare spending, tends to rely on individualistic language and make individualistic arguments. So if redistribution is to be properly supported, it must be supported in communitarian rather than individualistic terms. This is not easy to do in a culture that so fanatically devoted to individual rights that it sees even basic positive social obligations as an affront to liberty. To change this distorted view, welfare supporters must reconceive the individual as part of a larger social organism, no part of which can thrive without the adequate care of the other parts. That is, Rand is wrong. Society is more than the sum of its parts; those parts do not function interdependently only as they see fit on a case-by-case basis, and withdraw whenever they become exhausted and shrug. Is this socialistic? Absolutely. You are a member of a society; it depends on you, and you depend on it. Embrace it, Comrade!
“But what about the malingerers?” What about them? According to my argument, we are all, at some level, necessarily and inescapably dependent on one another and the social organism of which we are a part, and yet no organism is perfectly healthy. We have ailments; we might even have vestigial parts, which do nothing for society’s benefit but do depend on society for their survival. Of course, as a matter of good social policy, we might treat the ailment; we might well decide that these folks are indeed draining scarce resources from people who desperately need them; we might decide that some tough love is in order for them, and to their benefit; and provided that decent-paying employment is available for such folks, I am inclined to agree with these assertions. But I am refuting the objection to social welfare in principle, not social welfare in admittedly imperfect practice, since the objection in principle is the one being uncritically echoed by Rand’s free-thinking, fiercely independent fans.
I do not pretend to have an elegant solution to every problem, nor an airtight argument for every position I take. Like others, I often look for arguments to support positions suggested by my intuitions, and this is hardly a perfect science. If you do not agree with my communitarian defense of social welfare, I hope that you will find your own reasons to support at least a safety net for the poor. But I do encourage people to look critically at the arguments made by those who interpret moderate redistribution as evidence of creeping totalitarianism. Decades into America’s experiment with the welfare state, we are in many ways, despite dire warnings, freer and more prosperous than ever before. And we have a mild form of democratic socialism to thank for it.
(1) Teles,
http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/kludgeocracy-in-america
(2)Sunstein,
http://home.uchicago.edu/~csunstei/celebrate.html