Cheerful Indifference

Principles, observes an old French proverb, are general reasons given for inaction in particular circumstances.   Nothing seems better suited to describe Libertarianism.  The general Libertarian principle is the noble ideal of not interfering with the life of any other person unless they are causing you harm. Note the very personal pronoun ”you.”  For, as a Libertarian acquaintance of mine cheerfully agrees, that masks what J.S. Mill called “a polite indifference to the lives of others.”  Harm to others just doesn’t have the same spur to action as harm to oneself.  That indifference leads not only to noninterference with the non-harmful pursuits of others, but to repudiation of the debts we owe each other for the benefits we have received from each other all our lives. 

What may best describe a principle, though, are its exemplars; and the shining exemplars of Libertarianism are Ayn Rand and Ebenezer Scrooge, before Scrooge’s encounters with the ghosts of Christmas.  Scrooge’s “Bah, humbug, have they no poor houses to go to?” revealed not as polite an indifference as some Libertarians would have sought, but indifference none the less.  And it is no accident that Ayn Rand’s prime symbol is the solid gold dollar sign.  But perhaps nothing better describes a passionately moral and compassionate conservatism than Libertarianism’s most recent critic, Governor Christie of New Jersey.  This past week, Christie, a Republican, took on what he called the “creeping Libertarianism” besetting the Republican Party, and some Democrats.  The topic was funding the National Security Administration, and the particular person targeted was Rand Paul, a devoutly pure Libertarian who opposed it.  Funding, using YOUR money to provide aid or prevent harm only to someone else, is a particularly touchy topic for Libertarians.  That solid gold dollar is so personal!   It’s a shame that NSA was the target, for that reveals only the seamy underside of Libertarianism.    It demonstrates only the ungenerous roots of an isolationism that starts with issues like Syria and spreads to issues like drought in Africa, disaster relief, food stamps or educating the children of immigrants.  Disaster relief has already been another hot topic for Christie, as he has blasted fellow Republicans and Libertarians for their foot dragging in funding super storm Sandy relief efforts. But the Republican debate does not as yet shed light on the problems with the Libertarian attitude that another person’s success, like his failure, belongs only to him and deserves no support from you.  No support means no government funding for new technology or infrastructure or student aid.  The fact that success would benefit all America, not just the innovators, does not seem to register with the Libertarian set.  Innovators are all on their own, just like you were when you inherited the fruits of your father’s success.

I’ve been writing for some time about the moral issues associated with laissez-faire capitalism.  I'll soon switch to other topics, but for now they’re becoming a front page topic, though certainly not because of anything I’ve had to say.  President Obama spoke this past week of the immorality of the gross inequality in America today.  And that gross inequality comes, as economist Joseph Stiglitz notes, from the heaping up of a lot of little inequalities, engineered by people careless like The Great Gatsby’s rich about the lives of others and focused only on gaining their own personal advantage; in other words, libertarians, whether they claim the title or not.  In practice, that search for your own little unequal edge is so ingrained into human nature that it can never really be eliminated.  But it can be better managed.

Because of the surge in interest, John Sutter has written an interesting column for CNN in which he surveys the various possible moral positions on inequality, from the “blessed are the poor” position of Christianity in which lack of equal access to wealth is actually a blessing in disguise, to the “blessed are the rich” position of Libertarians, which honors those who have seized the opportunity to gain their own edge without regard to others.  He doesn’t cover all the morality issues, and some positions he covers are not very practical, like the idea of Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute that the moral issue is only how to equalize opportunity.   Given the human proclivity and talent for gaining an edge, that idea, by itself, is a pipe dream.  The most practical of the moral alternatives staked out by Sutter is the social philosopher John Rawls’ idea that society should be rearranged so that excessive wealth of some becomes of benefit to all.  Rawls argues that great wealth conferred by society on a few can be morally justified only if it results in improvement of the lots of all.  You could call it structural altruism, as distinct from the structural self interest induced by unregulated laissez faire capitalism.  That implies such things as income redistribution through regulatory limits on CEO salaries passed on to enable higher worker salaries, high tax rates on wealth to enable innovation, infrastructure development and better health care, and incentives for charitable funding of socially beneficial activities like schools and hospitals and disaster relief.  Rawls sees a structurally and legally reinforced payment of that debt of reciprocity I’ve mentioned.

Some of what I’ve written sounds a bit grouchy, even to me.  That comes in part from my having just got back from a delightful stay “down ocean”, as we say in Maryland, with a touch of sciatica to reward my time relaxing on the sand, and partly from the cheerfulness of the indifference to others displayed by my Libertarian acquaintance.  Another study published this past week reports that in general conservatives are happier than liberals, and it’s probably true.  Pundits will debate the why’s for years, but, as my wife quickly noted, it’s likely that a big part of that extra happiness comes from a sense that the problems of the world are “someone else’s problem.”  To misuse badly the old Zen koan, conservatives see the world only as a stick to be used, while liberals tend to see both the ugliness of its crookedness and the beauty of what it could be if straight; and beyond that the wide gaps to be crossed.   And, as King Solomon noted, the increase of wisdom is the increase of sorrow.  But the gaps are not impossible.  Crossing them begins with reforming the political system to eliminate the gerrymandering that produces a congress filled only with self-interest, not a passion for the good of the whole country, and to enable a rebirth of moderation in politics.  Societal reform will follow that.

Rights and Obligations

Karl Marx described the ideas of his contemporary Giuseppe Mazzini as “nothing better than the idea of a middle class republic.”  Of course, a middle class republic is what we have today in America, and Marx’s ideas are on the scrap heap.  The Italian Mazzini was formative in the instigation both of the Italian republic as the idea man behind Garibaldi(he is called by some the “Thomas Jefferson of Italy”), , and of the core idea of a European Union as a loose confederation of the republics of Europe; in his own time he was called “the beating heart of Italy” and over 100,000 attended his funeral in 1872.  In 1862, his followers were expecting from him something along the lines of the French “Rights of Man”, a key document of the French Revolution that served as a clarion call to overthrow tyranny; instead he set them on their ear by presenting them with a tiny book entitled The Duties of Man.  As a middle class person in a middle class republic, I could relate.

The claim that Mazzini made that so startled his followers was that we should have no rights; rights are obligations we place on others without their consent to act in a way favorable to us.  Instead, Mazzini argued we have should have only obligations as human beings that we place on ourselves, the only legitimate target of our coercion if we are truly free, to behave favorably toward others. We have duties.  It is too easy an out to characterize his position as extreme; though it was, one of our societal problems these days is that we are losing sight of what Mazzini was really talking about.  His contemporary John Stuart Mill understood when he talked about our social debt of reciprocity as essential to the preservation of liberty.  In the 20^th century, C. S. Lewis understood when, in The Screwtape Letters, he put in a devil’s mouth the idea of changing the Ten Commandments so they would read, “Thou shalt not kill, but need not strive officiously to keep alive.”

Tell me, what do the “collateral damage” occasioned by drones, the average of 14 homicides per day in America since the Newtown killings, the slaying of Trayvon Martin, the loss of life and property during Hurricane Katrina because of skimpy construction of a levee and the loss of health and sometimes life occasioned by Medicare coverage cuts all have in common?  Answer: they all represent results of the idea that we have no mutual obligations except those required by law and we have the right to minimize those.  With regard to the Martin case, Attorney General Holder is correct when he notes that expansion of rights of self defense via “stand your ground” laws has not been accompanied by any expansion of the rights of the person you see as an attacker.  Consequently, people who provoke an attack by their words or actions can claim self defense when shooting the person they provoke.  It’s legal, but it’s sort of like blaming the bull for the bull fight.  That has caused a tragedy and is likely to cause more. But the deeper tragedy is that we have lost our sense of obligation toward others.

The issue of course is how to define our obligations.  Laws by themselves are never enough.  Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, a foundation document for our Constitution, pointed out that the laws of a democratic republic do not work if they are not infused with the citizenry’s sense of mutual obligation.  J.S. Mill, as noted, pointed out that the very idea of Liberty has built into it the notion that we share a debt of reciprocity.  That has to be our starting point, the recognition that we all have benefited from the actions of others, whether we have known about them or not, and we have a societal obligation to return the favor.  The Libertarian sense of indifference to the needs of others, if shared by all, would have left us extinct with the Neanderthals.  Our gun legislation should consider not just the person being protected but also the effect on others.  We need to reinvigorate our sense of community, not just to defend it like Zimmerman was seeking to do, but to participate in its healthy growth.  It has taken a village to raise a child, and we are that child.  Then we have to accept that others, no matter how superficially unlike us, are fellow children of the village, toward whom we have obligations.  That was the tragic flaw in Zimmerman’s thinking; he recognized his own “rights” and those of the neighbors he knew, but not the fellow citizenship of Martin and Martin’s “rights”.  That also is a tragic error in the thinking of some people attacking the verdict, the idea that Zimmerman is “not one of us”, an enemy instead of a seriously flawed fellow citizen.   They, like Zimmerman, would seek to enforce extra-legal justice.  We are all victims and we are all perpetrators, and standing  our ground on our rights will not cure the problem. We have obligations.  

Sub-optimizing Happiness

At Christmas time, we put out a chair pillow in bright seasonal colors, embroidered simply “Dear Santa, I can explain.”  It’s one of my favorite things because it encapsulates so neatly our universal human problem of misunderstood and conflicting goals.  The teacher wants Johnny to learn arithmetic; Johnny wants only to be happy and play games.  Each means well, despite their appearance to the other.  The teacher’s fear is that Johnny’s low math score will ruin his/her record; Johnny’s fear is that lack of practice will make him drop that outfield fly ball. Each breaks the other’s rules and must struggle to be understood.  But it is the teacher who is the “Santa” capable of enabling or destroying Johnny’s dreams.

An article in the Federal Times the other day expressed the same issue in different terms.  Imagine two workers, one from government and the other from the private sector, about to retire and planning their investment strategy.  The government worker invests 100 percent in aggressive stocks and the private sector worker goes 40 percent in stocks and 60 percent in bonds; which is more conservative? It turns out to be the government worker, because 70 percent of the government worker’s retirement income comes from defined benefit pension plans, while the private sector worker’s retirement derives almost entirely from IRAs and 401-Ks subject to stock market fluctuations.  In terms of risk analysis to total incomes, the government worker’s strategy is appropriately conservative.  What causes the apparent anomaly is our focus only on the part of the risks to income that we are making choices about.  We tend to ignore the total income picture in favor of sub-optimizing one part.

The DC city government is currently battling WALMART over the requirement for a recently enacted $12.50 an hour “living wage” in DC.  The DC government points out that at the DC minimum wage without the “living wage”, a worker in a family of three or more would be living under the poverty level; WALMART cites its responsibility to shareholders and the fact that the productivity of low-wage workers is less than the wage level just enacted, and threatens not to build more stores there and possibly close existing ones.  It is a classic example of the ongoing struggle between corporations and government that I’ve written about.  WALMART is exercising its raw power as the Santa who threatens to take away its gifts if DC is a bad boy.  It is also an example of the misunderstood and conflicting goals problem.  WALMART’s profits come from the economic productivity of workers exceeding their salary costs, with no consideration of their happiness outside the store.  DC government’s success comes from happiness of its citizens, their “social productivity”, regardless of their skills and income. A strong case could be made for each point of view, and usually is.  But they each sub-optimize the total picture.

A city dweller’s happiness comes from the sum of economic and psychic income they derive from both employment and other factors - schools, parks, crime-free streets, interesting activities and facilities, etc. – generally provided through government.  A sound piece of real estate advice used to be to buy the cheapest house in the best neighborhood; much of life is lived outside the house and work place.  The total “happiness income” of a person comes from a variety of public and private sources.  A sound role of DC government would be to improve the economic life of its citizens by providing better schools and other training.  A sound role for WALMART would be to improve the health and morale, and consequentially the productivity, of its workers through better training and pay rates that are at least at or above the poverty level.  Each claims they cannot afford to meet the other’s demands, but there is room in the middle for joint efforts to improve the productivity and living conditions of WALMART workers.  A “living wage” of $10 an hour would exceed the poverty level for a family of three; improvements in employee training and in public education, with funding support from WALMART, would benefit both WALMART and DC government.  In this rapidly changing world, WALMART cannot continue to prosper by creating an old fashioned serfdom of marginal workers, but total economic support of workers includes things that go beyond WALMART.  DC needs better funding and better organized government to support its citizens.  WALMART can become a better “citizen” of DC by pushing for that.

The battle for dominance between corporations and government benefits neither and has gone on too long.  Each makes societal contributions the other cannot, and it is time for each to recognize and support the legitimate needs of the other.  A big part of the problem is that each is seeking success measured in different ways.  Both need to resist sub-optimizing and to seek solutions to problems that speak to the needs of both.  Given the problems ahead of us with climate change and global strife, the responsible actions of both will be needed for the survival and prosperity of either.

De-Urbanization

Some sociologists say that the single event most influencing American life in the 20^th century was not the atomic bomb or the computer but the mechanical cotton picker.  For, like the enclosure movement in 17^th century England,  that invention drove the southern poor, black and white, off the land and into the cities, where they have languished in ghettos ever since.  The cotton picker was aided in its transformational effects by World War II, including its aftermath GI Bill and Baby Boom, which created work and opportunities in cities but not in the countryside, generating in the process the vast tracts of “ticky-tacky” suburban houses that surround our city cores.  The inter-country migrations of the desperate poor created by globalization have only accelerated the process.

America was not alone in that transformation.  Future historians may look back on the 20^th century as the century of the sprawling city.  In ancient times, only one city, Rome, was known to have over one million inhabitants.  In 1950, there were 83 cities over one million, with only one, New York, over 10 million.  In the early 21^st century, there are 468 cites over one million world-wide, with 20 over ten million and 7 over 20 million.  Only one of those, New York, is in America. And those megacities all include their ghettos and suburbia, only now ghettos are called shantytowns.  In some, people rent large cardboard containers to sleep in.  If you have the money and leisure, city life is a cornucopia of art, music, fine dining, and interesting people; “How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen Paris?”  But for large portions of urban dwellers, it remains a life of quiet misery, especially when compared with memories of better times in their home villages.

The 21^st century may see the end of that.  Solar technology, satellite communications, cloud computing, and robotic manufacturing all may signal the end of the urge to group large masses of cheap labor together in miserable living conditions for economies of scale.  In developing countries, village solar power generators and wind turbines as well as satellite ground stations are replacing the need for construction of enormously expensive national power and communications grids.  Cloud computing and broad-band internet are already advancing at-home professional work and education in industrialized countries and will spread rapidly to the developing world.  A geographically much less concentrated world is possible, though it will be years in evolving.  Life outside cities is once more being seen as valuable.  The “buy local” food movement in America is a sign of coming times. 

When my wife and I were last in Greece, a drive across the countryside revealed countless deserted villages, where whole towns had picked up and moved to Athens for work and modern comforts.  A third of the population of Greece was said to live in Athens or its suburbs.   The same scenario was being replicated in places from Mexico to India.  Now, the EU financial crisis is causing a movement back to the land, and Greece, as it led the way into the crisis, is leading the way out.  Now in Greece, young workers, jobless in the city and facing losses from austerity of traditional urban services, are returning to their former land and villages. They are cultivating their grandparents’ farms, only now with modern tools and methods.  Schools have been set up to retrain them in rural living.  Crisis is being turned into opportunity.

What are needed are public policies that enable these movements back to the land.  Current agricultural policies such as subsidies favor large commercial farms in the U.S. at the expense of the small one-family farm; that needs to change.  The current Obama initiative to promote broad-band internet across the country is a big step forward and needs a bigger push.  Health policies favoring nurse practitioners, remote diagnostics and robotic medical technology in remote places need encouragement.  Solar and wind technologies support greater decentralization and need emphasis.  Public broadcasting support of arts and music will make rural life richer.  Land use policies need to move away from strict zoning to mixed residential and small business environments.  We need consciously developed laws and regulations supporting the family farm.  As our GDPs have climbed, our happiness indices have gone down, and a big part of that are the inhumane urban environments we have created for ourselves.  A saner future is ours for the taking.