A timeless and frankly tiresome debate in this country opposes a capitalistic individual responsibility to a socialistic common good. Although they would vehemently deny it, the former's proponents have the upper hand. As capitalist competition creates ever richer and more powerful winners, great inequality enables the winners to buy themselves privileges. Individual responsibility remains only for the have-nots. The real choice, therefore, is between socialism for everyone or socialism for the privileged only. The idea of universal free-market individualism is a fantasy. That the idea fascinates many does not make it any less impractical.
Some real-life background is instructive. The social contract, such as it is, is being slowly torn. Few workers have union bargaining rights anymore. As seen in the protests and counterprotests about changes to public workers’ benefits, the few who still have collective bargaining rights encounter hostility and resentment more than fraternal sympathy. Politics, the sometime recourse for those shunted aside by economics, is increasingly out of bounds, controlled by the rich few and their corporate associates. Indeed, people are encouraged to avoid and distrust government, leaving the state to help the winners take all the rewards.
As ordinary people are increasingly on their own, powerful executives retain the benefits of the corporate form. Attempts by ordinary people to wrest concessions from this boys’ club-like arrangement are dismissed as “socialist”, as though corporatist capitalism is the natural order. The idea of people working through government to achieve some kind of justice in the allocation of opportunities and rewards now seems almost naïve. Public provision of any kind of good or service (except physical security) is now widely seen as perverse, while private markets are treated as near-sacred.
The deteriorating social compact is not simply a move from collectivism to individualism. Those with the benefit of corporate or political connections retain the benefits of collectivism even as ordinary people lose them. Individual responsibility, yes, but only for the rabble. Even if faltering homeowners are not rescued, big banks still will be. Not so much because of hypocrisy, but necessity and convenience: when the bigwigs are in trouble, so is everyone else, so they will always have to be bailed out.
By necessity, any success by conservative-libertarians at making individuals more responsible for their failings is going to leave better-off people and interest groups protected. People will not give up their special privileges for the sake of a coherent right-libertarian ideology. They will retain their privileges while imposing that ideology's punitive component on the weak. This leaves us with the burden of social welfare. If the haves are going to enjoy privileges, so too must the have-nots. Otherwise you have an aristocracy or plutocracy in everything but name. It is not long before social becomes socialist and reasoned discussion, at least for one side of the debate, must cease.
It’s telling that the word socialist is a slur. The negative connotation is not entirely due to the former Soviet Union , now a fairly distant memory for most people. Yet the slur remains potent – so effective because it need not even be explained. If leftish Democrats such as President Obama seek to provide more necessary goods and services in a socialistic manner – that is, through taxes drawn disproportionately from the richest people – it remains to be explained why it is bad to have some goods and services provided socially. Is it so horrible that the naturally or socially well-endowed should support those not so blessed?
This gets more complicated. People ask, How dare we take the fruits of people’s hard labor? Yet this question hides a disputable premise. Note the emphasis on individual virtue: hard work understood not as a gift of God or nature, the gift of an able body and mind inclined toward industry and persistence, but a virtue entitling its possessor to special rewards. Personally, when I look at the (few) achievements I’ve made by working hard and applying myself, I see myself as very lucky. God (or something) gave me to do what I did. It’s nice to profit from it, but it’s too much to say I’m entitled to benefit exclusively. If anything, my good fortune imparts a responsibility for care toward people less fortunate – yes, even if they’re given to sins such as sloth. We all have sins.
Some of us have resources to protect ourselves against accountability for those sins, though, and this is where the problem arises. We might as well confess our common sin, humble ourselves before God and one another, and in the mean time embrace our responsibilities toward one another – yes, even strangers, even – gasp! – Mexican immigrants – despite their sins and ours.
The conservative fear of indulging people’s bad habits is not unfounded. It really can do harm to give someone money they probably will spend on alcohol instead of food, cigarettes instead of clothes for their kids. People really do these things. I suspect this explains much conservative anger about the welfare state. But it also leaves a lot of “Joe the Plumber” style complaint about punishing the virtuous wealthy – and accordingly, the problem of attributing to individual virtue and entitlement, gifts that properly should inspire gratitude and generosity. There remains a sense that some are entitled to special rewards, while others are not even entitled to basic needs.
For all its faults, government deserves some credit for making such needs available to everyone regardless of economic status. This is not meant as a glowing panegyric to statism. Although my experiences with the Department of Motor Vehicles have been mostly quite decent, thank you, I can accept that for many, government has been a huge pain in the backside. But there is still some kind of virtue in being able to get something you need even if you can’t afford it, without having to go begging in the streets. At the very least, critics should be asked to explain why everything, including basic needs such as medical care, should be provided (and paid for) privately, as they clearly prefer.
Of course, there are benefits and costs to providing goods socially, as there are to providing goods individually. But the more dire the consequences of failing to provide something socially/publicly, the stronger the justification required. In the United States
If you doubt this, consider public discussion about reforming old-age entitlements. It seems likely that future changes in these programs will cut benefits for better-off people, forcing them to pay for more things out of their own pocket. That is to say, they will lose sweat, blood and tears for forty (or probably more) years to generate wealth and then, instead of receiving a nice share of that largesse to support a reasonably comfortable retirement, be expected to live on whatever they’ve been able to scrounge up from their meager earnings until or unless they become really desperate.
People are supposed to be on their own, unless of course they are major owners in a big corporation. Then, according to five members of the Supreme Court, you have the right to draw money from that corporation to support elected leaders who will legislate in your favor. It’s a splendid arrangement: socialism for the well-off, free market for everyone else.
This aggressive self-interest at the expense of social welfare can be seen in media discussions about Medicare and Social Security. Nearly all discussions assume the need to cut the programs rather than find ways to fund them fully and maintain a political economy that is fiercely competitive yet compassionate at the same time. It’s time for people other than just old lefties to stand up and demand that government include them in decisions that will affect them, rather than pretending that we don’t need to be involved in government because we don’t need government. The elites will get theirs no matter what; we'd better get in and get ours.
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