The Justice of the Public Sector ANS

Here is an interesting philosophical piece about who property and profit belong to.  It's by Doug Muder.
find it here:  http://weeklysift.blogspot.com/  
--Kim




The earth in its natural, uncultivated state, was, and ever would have continued to be THE COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life-proprietor with the rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.

-- Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice, (1793)

• The Justice of the Public Sector. What about that idea that the government is "stealing your money" and spending it on "freeloaders"? New-fangled notions from John Locke and Thomas Paine explain the hole in that thinking.

The Justice of the Public Sector

Last week I argued that the current battles over state and federal budgets are part of a long-term conservative plan to destroy the public sector by " starving the beast". Last September (in a review of Thomas Geoghegan's Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?) I claimed that a society with a large public sector -- public schools, public parks, public healthcare, public pensions -- is a nicer place to live for the large majority of its citizens.

But even someone who granted me all those points might still say: "Yes, but the public sector is unjust. It relies on the government taking money from the people who earn it and spending it on people who didn't earn it."

Conservative rhetoric is the mirror image of Marxist rhetoric on this issue. To conservatives, you're a parasite if you flip burgers for minimum wage, pay little-to-no tax, and nonetheless expect the government to spend somebody else's taxes on your daughter's chemotherapy. To Marxists, you're a parasite if you expect burger-flippers to work for minimum wage so that dividends from your McDonalds stock can pay your country club membership.

Who's right?

If you look at things on the small scale, the conservative argument looks compelling: There's a big number at the top of your paycheck, and a considerably smaller number at the bottom that you get to take home. The idea that you "earned" the big number, but the government "stole" a chunk of it -- it looks right.

If you pull back to a larger scale, though, the Marxists have a point (especially if you express their ideas in religious terms that Marx would have hated). Pre-tax earnings (both yours and Warren Buffett's) reflect the outcome of a rigged game, because they're based on a property system that is fundamentally unjust.

Think it through from the beginning: For whose benefit did God create the world? Everybody's? Or just for the people who have their names on deeds? Babies are born into a world in which every object of value is already the property of someone else -- how can that be just? What did those babies do to lose their share of the inheritance of the world?

As Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly argue in Unjust Desserts, and I've echoed on my religious blog, the same ideas apply more widely than just to land and other natural resources. Whether you're a capitalist, a worker, or something in between, the bounty of the world economy has little to do with your efforts.

You can think of the economy as an enormous lever that magnifies the results of the effort we put into it. When we work, we pull that lever and move the world. But how did the lever get there? Why is our labor so much more productive than the efforts of our hunter-gatherer ancestors?

In a word, the answer is knowledge. Not just the insights reflected in patents and copyrights, but the deep knowledge that is embedded in the system as a whole: language, the wheel, metallurgy, and many subsequent advances made by people who are long dead. A huge slice of today's economic pie is due to them, not to us. To us it may look like a wage, but it's really an inheritance too.

So who should get the benefit of that inheritance? Lately we have been operating the American economy under the assumption that capital-owners are the sole heirs; the lever belongs to them, and they graciously let the rest of us use it. That's reflected in the fact that wages have stagnated even as productivity increases. The lever of accumulated human knowledge continues to get longer and longer, but the benefit of its use no longer percolates down to everyone.

These observations are not new. The people who built the philosophical foundations of modern society knew that there was an original injustice at the root of the property system. When John Locke justified private property in his Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690), he set the stage like this :

The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being. And tho' all the fruits it naturally produces, and beasts it feeds, belong to mankind in common, as they are produced by the spontaneous hand of nature; and no body has originally a private dominion, exclusive of the rest of mankind, in any of them, as they are thus in their natural state: yet being given for the use of men, there must of necessity be a means to appropriate them some way or other, before they can be of any use, or at all beneficial to any particular man.

That means of "appropriation" -- privatizing, in our language -- was labor. If someone gathered acorns, the acorns became his or her private property through the effort of gathering. Similarly, land became property through the labor of cultivation:

God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest conveniencies of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational, (and labour was to be his title to it;) not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious. He that had as good left for his improvement, as was already taken up, needed not complain, ought not to meddle with what was already improved by another's labour: if he did, it is plain he desired the benefit of another's pains, which he had no right to, and not the ground which God had given him in common with others to labour on, and whereof there was as good left, as that already possessed, and more than he knew what to do with, or his industry could reach to.

And there's the rub: After your labor makes a bucket of acorns or a piece of land yours, there should still be "as good left" for other people to invest their labor in and make their own. Plainly, that no longer is true, and it was already false in England in Locke's day.

So the basis of the property system was flawed from the beginning. But what can be done about it? Even if you could uproot the whole system without inciting a civil war, you would probably wreck productivity so badly that everyone would be poor for decades to come (as the Soviets proved in the 20th century).

In Agrarian Justice (1793), Thomas Paine provided a solution: Let the unjust-but-productive system run, but tax it to provide compensating benefits to those who have been disinherited from the legacy of God and our common ancestors. (Specifically, Paine proposed an inheritance tax to fund a grant of capital to the young and a pension to the old.)

And that's the philosophical basis of the public sector we have today.

So the big number on your paycheck is your share of that original unjust system. It may seem like a lot, but for most people it is Esau's porridge compared to the human birthright they have lost claim to.

Fortunately, though, those unjust desserts are taxed, and the taxes go to provide a public sector for the benefit of everyone. The public sector is our compensation for giving up our share of humanity's common inheritance. Conservatives can argue that this compensation is too large. But when you appreciate the magnitude of the legacy, I think there's a better case for claiming that the public sector is not big enough.

And that's why the burger-flipper's children are not freeloaders, even if their parents' taxes don't cover the cost of their education, or the use they get out of the parks or libraries or hospitals.

Mark Twain once responded to the charge that he was "low born" by pointing to his descent from Adam. The burger-flipper's kids have a similar pedigree. It includes Og, who invented the wheel, and goes all the way back to God, who created the Earth.