I'm pretty sure I won the last time you ran such a "contest," but all I see are a series of false factual claims. The use of 'moral,' maybe?
For the contest, I'm guessing "sir, as if he were a knight." Waiters really like it when you suggest that they're "really earning their salary today," too.
I would guess these two sentences: "Very few people in America have to wonder where their next meal is coming from. Even sick people who don’t have money or insurance will receive medical care at hospital emergency rooms."
Do I have to pick one? Then the latter.
No, no winners yet. Let's say that you have to identify the offending claim *and* say roughly what's obnoxious about it.
W/d, I remember you winning. I owe you a beer but you're not upgrading to teh f3114t10 even if you go two for two.
Hmm, that's tough. I guess I'll go with "The poorest American girls are not humiliated by having to wear torn clothes." Thank you, Malaysia!
All I can say is that D'Souza article makes me want to punch him in the face. A lot.
However, Gary Farber blogged this already.
I agree with 7, but aggravting because the sentence is stupid gendered crap.
I'm pretty sure I won the last time you ran such a "contest,"
On preview, I think I can do without the... is a '4' really an 'a' in l33t?
This line is particularly ironic:
"The American janitor or waiter sees himself as performing a service, but he doesn’t see himself as inferior to those he serves. And neither do the customers see him that way"
Since, in my experience, Americans* are the very first to complain if a service employee doesn't show them the right degree of due deference.
* Excluding the nice egalitarian people at Unfogged, obviously.
My nominations:
The poorest American girls are not humiliated by having to wear torn clothes.
True. They are humiliated in many other far more degrading ways, in addition to having to wear torn clothes.
And:
there is virtually no restaurant in America to which a CEO can go to lunch with the absolute assurance that he will not find his secretary also dining there
Also true. She will be at the next table with one of the CEO's colleagues, whom she is screwing.
How could anyone pick just one thing to be offended by? The $100 bill, the no one doesn't know where their next meal is coming from, the 'Sir'ring the waiter, the torn clothes -- it's all good. And they're aggravating because they make it clear that D'Sousa is an oblivious nitwit at the very, very best.
Surely it's: Even sick people who don’t have money or insurance will receive medical care at hospital emergency rooms.
It's the celebration of totally whacked inefficiency from a professed capitalist.
and this:
Given the standard of living of the ordinary American, it is no wonder that socialist or revolutionary schemes have never found a wide constituency in the United States.
while not all that directly aggravating, is distinctly stupid. The classic revolutionary is a well-educated member of the middle class, not someone emerging from grinding poverty.
Particularly annoying is the lead-up to the "next meal" bit:
The moral triumph of America is that it has extended the benefits of comfort and affluence, traditionally enjoyed by very few, to a large segment of society. Very few people in America have to wonder where their next meal is coming from.
Eating regularly is not a "benefit of comfort and affluence", you asshole.
I vote for this:
Even sick people who don’t have money or insurance will receive medical care at hospital emergency rooms.
because, duh, in most other Western countries sick people with no money or insurance can see a doctor outside the emergency room. Also, I think you can't go to an emergency room for just anything; if you have, say, kidney cancer and no money or insurance you die, though I guess you get to go the ER just before that. I realize all this is probably obvious to everyone else, but hey, it's a contest.
OTOH, being annoying about healthcare in the U.S. seems like a low degree of difficulty, so points off for that.
For all his riches, Bill Gates could not approach a homeless person and say, "Here's a $100 bill. I’ll give it to you if you kiss my feet." Most likely the homeless guy would tell Gates to go to hell.
Obviously, Dinesh D'Souza needs to spend some time checking out bumfights.com before he makes any bigger a fool of himself. Guys pull out their fucking teeth for $100.
It's pretty obvious that D'Souza doesn't know a single poor person.
This would be a good point to beat him repeatedly over the head with UN tables on infant mortality, literacy, and so on.
Pointing out that, to the extent that modern Western capitalism has delivered 'comfort and affluence' to many it, as a socioeconomic phenomena, is not unique to the US nor a specifically American 'moral triumph' _especially_ since many other Western capitalist nations do it rather better.
there is virtually no restaurant in America to which a CEO can go to lunch with the absolute assurance that he will not find his secretary also dining there
I think that's the taker. That's the single sentence that both falsely promotes the status of the poor and severely understates the income gap. It's classist, but it's very easy to read it as sexist, too.
Of course, construction workers and plumbers are nowhere near the bottom of the economic tree in the first place. Skilled workers in highly unionised industries != poor.
"Even sick people who don’t have money or insurance will receive medical care at hospital emergency rooms."
As a sick person without money or insurance who has had to go to a hospital emergency room, I say: you fucker, you fucker, you fucker fucker fucker.
If you're Dinesh D'Souza this is indeed a miraculous country. He can make a very comfortable living writing trite nonsense like this for decades and will doubtless continue doing so. I toy with the idea of adopting a pseudonym and getting on that Wingnut Welfare gravy train myself.
22 is so, so true. The salaries of plumbers and, say, daycare workers are quite different. And daycare workers aren't the bottom of the economic tree either.
re: 24
I've joked with my wife for years that once the doctorate is in the bag, I'll prostitute myself as a right-wing pundit. The UK doesn't have that many of them, in the vicious middle-brow bourgeoise brownshirt sense, and there's an untapped market there.
This would be a good point to beat him repeatedly over the head with UN tables on infant mortality, literacy, and so on.
Or, apropos yesterday's discussion in the David Bowie thread, a good point to post factual links on hunger in America. For the benefit of third parties witnessing the argument.
(Gary did a nice job of that.)
The winning sentence is indeed the one about poor girls and ripped clothes. Mo gets that, but MAE and Silvana come closer to my reasoning.
Yes, the totally unnecessary gender restriction is irritating but the real thing that got me is that standards of what's shameful and humiliating are context-dependent. If no one in America wears ripped clothing, the shame that, in other places, attaches to ripped clothing goes with something else-- clothing that doesn't fit, or that obviously comes from Goodwill, or whatever. Any observant child knows this. So they aren't humiliated by ripped clothes, but they're just as humiliated by something else. Maybe it hurts less when you have patches.
I think we do a pretty good job of humiliating the poor, in part-- and this is what I love-- by buying into Horatio D'Alger's anyone-can-do-it fantasy.
24: I totally hear you.
What we really need to do, though, is post this essay and a current photo of D'Souza over at one of those boards where waiters hate on their customers. It would be really great if every time he went into a restaurant, the waiters recognized him and told them about how they really feel.
"told them about how they really feel." s/b "shat in his soup"
24: If you read the original piece, D'Souza does point to his career path as one of the things that makes America great. He also says that the roads are "paper-smooth," in the second sentence. Seems he's comparing the U.S. to India; I wonder if he's ever been to Europe.
21: There's a nice little extra fillip of nastiness in the implicit assumption that it is, of course, naturally desirable to want to eat at a restaurant that your secretary can't eat at.
Well, what's annoying about the ripped-clothes sentence is not only is it not true (the little time I have spent in schools I have seen children with ripped clothing and falling-apart shoes), but even if it were true, it's fucking meaningless, like Labs said, because even if your clothes still have structural integrity they can humiliate you in all other kinds of ways.
re: 31
There's nothing worse than someone who believes that their success is entirely down to their own 'hard work', especially when 90% of them come from a life of unremitting privilege* and good luck.
*relative or absolute.
It's kind of scary to think how well I could fit in as a Horowitz-style ex-lefty, with an anti-Muslim/Arab twist to the story. Though I'm neither female nor Arab, which cuts the appeal somewhat.
32: And that this is a front that the CEO has recently lost—but he is still buffered against the ignominy of eating among his janitors.
As a representative of Europe, I'm sending Zinadine Zidane to chest butt this moron.
"You know why these clothes are on sale, Mom? Because the kids who wear them get beaten up."
Oooh, look at the no. 1 source.
I don't know, Labs, this is still pretty freaking shameful no matter what else would be.
You may donate my share of the winnings to the Gates Foundation.
What I love about the restaurant line is that it's literally true, since we're looking for absolute assurance. It is also, for that reason, completely irrelevant to the argument.
There's a nice little extra fillip of nastiness in the implicit assumption that it is, of course, naturally desirable to want to eat at a restaurant that your secretary can't eat at.
It's astonishing how a piece that ostensibly celebrates a less-stratified, more-class-mobile society actually makes so many class-based assumptions.
(The link to the D'Souza article is broken, btw.)
re: 42
"It's astonishing how a piece that ostensibly celebrates a less-stratified, more-class-mobile society actually makes so many class-based assumptions."
Which isn't surprising since, as a matter of fact, the US isn't a less-stratified, more -class-mobile society. The US (and the UK) are among the least-class-mobile western societies.
Which isn't surprising since, as a matter of fact, the US isn't a less-stratified, more -class-mobile society.
Sorry, sloppy language on my part. Should be "an ostensibly less-stratified..." blah blah.
From my secondhand experience I would argue that we're more mobile than the U.K., but I'd be crazy to claim we don't have plenty of class issues nevertheless.
D'Souza is completely out of touch with reality, unreality, and Reality TV -- all three at the same time. A lot of bums would kiss your feet for $5.
"(The link to the D'Souza article is broken, btw.)"
That's so you go read my post and find the link there.
re: 45
Both the US and the UK are massively worse than almost any comparable western nation.
I think the link is fixed. So NO ONE SHOULD EVER GO TO GARY'S BLOG UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.
A metafarb! I call foul, though; 47 and 27 weren't making the same point, since 47 didn't explicitly mention the other information contained in his post; I read it as Gary humorously acknowledging his desire to have people read his own blog (which I did).
That should read, 'my understanding, from a recent report, is that'
adopting a pseudonym and getting on that Wingnut Welfare gravy train myself
Yes---we all stock up on anti-emetics, become pseudonymous wingnut pundits---which surely, we could do better than these folks---so then we put them out of their jobs, then we all simultaneously unmask in an orgy of political Sokalism.
re: 53
That sounds like a top-notch evil plan.
Last I checked on long-term comparative US / UK social mobility, Americans are no longer more intergenerationally mobile than Brits. The US used to be significantly more socially mobile, whence the myth: but that has not been true for a while.
What kind of research has been done on the difference between income mobility and social class mobility? I see them as interrelated but not identical.
My son says that when he was at Tufts University, a generally liberal school, his fellow students would talk about the janitors (mostly immigrant) right in front of them, as though they were furniture.
As a waiter my brother had a regular customer who would tip big, but he'd tear his $50 bills in half and throw them on the floor. This was in Portland, Oregon, too, which hasn't really made the big time yet.
re: 55
I gather from that report (linked to above) that the UK was in fact better than the US pre-1970. Or at least, that US studies of men born between 1956 and 1970 showed less social mobility than UK studies done at the same time. The difference is slight.
That would be compatible with the paper you linked to which says that the US was more generationally mobile until the 1950s.
So, it's been about 50 years or more since the US was more socially mobile than the UK.
I doesn't seem so much about mobility to me, but rather the improvement of circumstances for those stuck at the bottom relative to other countries. He has a pretty unrealistic view of just how peachy it is for the lucky duckies, but there is a wee bit of truth to it. After all, we've been largely genocide-free for some time now.
re: 57
Here at Oxford I've heard some pretty horrible stories about upper-middle class or upper-class students being really shitty* to college staff -- cleaners and so on.
However, to be fair, in quite a few of those cases college authorities came down _hard_ on the offenders.
I can also think of one particular story re: a rowing club trashing a restaurant _twice_ (as doing it once wasn't funny enough) which, in the retelling, was riddled with total disdain for the working staff on the part of the offenders.
That sort of behaviour is pretty common, although by no means universal, in my experience, among the upper-middle-classes.
* By which I mean rude or verbally unpleasant.
nattarGcM, I think the two studies may be compatible (iirc the one I linked used data from Oxford Social Mobility Study for UK portion), but the link in your 49 doesn't work for me.
The moral triumph of America is that it has extended the benefits of comfort and affluence, traditionally enjoyed by very few, to a large segment of society.
The 'opportunity society' argument. So really, old Geo. Washington shouldn't have bothered to cross the Delaware, he just shoulda sent a guy across the river and demanded back-end points plus a large advance for the whole country.
No need to bother with the bidness about consent of the governed or anything like that. Cash on the barrelhead and we'll fly the bloody Queen's flag all you like. And it'll be a moral triumph.
"You just know they all would've been Tories during the Revolution." -- Molly Ivins
max
['What? The President can't knight me? THAT'S JUST WRONG!']
re: 62
Sorry, the link was broken.
http:/www.suttontrust.com/reports/IntergenerationalMobility.pdf
Looking at both papers it does look like they are compatible. Pre-1950s: US more socially mobile than the UK,
1950s - 1970s: UK more socially mobile than US,
1970s - present: slowly declining UK social mobility + static US mobility.
Geo. Washington shouldn't have bothered to cross the Delaware, he just shoulda sent a guy across the river and demanded back-end points plus a large advance for the whole country
In fairness, we should note that Washington had a "lifelong interest in land speculation".
57: John, was the torn $50 the big tip he left, i.e., the waiters had to tape their $50 tip back together, or was that just a little extra something he did?
54: "re: 53
That sounds like a top-notch evil plan."
And we all get to wear those kewl Mission: Impossible-type masks, right?
66: He tipped 20% plus on dinners for big groups, and the torn bills were the tip, or part of it.
20% isn't really that big, as some of my waiter friends tell me. I hear of 50%+ tips happening with some regularity.
69: Your friends must be really attractive.
re; 67
I hope so, although I'd settle for pointy hoods or colour-coordinated beanies.
Re: 69. I don't really understand tipping conventions. Tipping is supposed to be an appreciation of your waiter's service -- so why is it calculated as a percentage of the total bill, rather than at a rate based on the number of people in your party, the number of dishes, or some other factor that ties in to the amount of work or service performed? I find that at the cheap restaurants I frequent, the waiters work just as hard, or a lot harder, than at fancier places. So it makes sense to tip about 50% at cheap restaurants (which I do, and it still ends up being only about 3-4 dollars), and only about 15% at more expensive places.
I vote for the $100 bill to the bum thing, for kind of the reasons Smasher gives in 21. My immediate reaction on reading that was, "right, prostitution doesn't exist in the U.S." The sexism of the bum thing depends on a default assumption that the bum in question is a man. Also that men would rather starve in the street, literally, than degrade themselves for food. Which is not only not true, but as someone pointed out upthread, an idea that just adds to the degredation of having to humiliate yourself to eat--now you're not only kissing someone's feet, you're not even a real man any more.
72 is correct; I think all decent people do the same.
70: There is often much alcohol involved, and yes, it happens more often to female waiters.
Horse shit it is, but I find it a bit less offensive than similar horse shit from, e.g., Jonah Goldberg. D'Souza is in love with a totally bogus image of America, but the fervor of the convert is somehow less offensive than the same shit coming from someone to the manner born.
The Gates shoe-kissing bit is interesting in another way. I'd be more than happy to kiss Gates' shoes for $100. Maybe that's just because I'm a whore by nature, but I think it also has a fair bit to do with the fact that I'm secure enough in my status that it would just be a relatively painless way of making $100, not a deep humiliation. What hurts isn't the shoe-kissing, it's the desperate need for the money. And anybody who thinks that isn't alive and well in America is really, deeply clueless.
I can't wait until America exports some of this goodness to Europe. I don't think our plumbers have had a vacation for decades.
In the United States, on the other hand, the social ethic is egalitarian, regardless of wealth.
My vote is for the opening sentence most pissing off FL. I have not read the whole thread. But here are my reasons.
a) "Social ethic" is a poorly defined term.
2) "Egalitarian" does not need to be modified by "regardless of wealth." You know, as opposed to those other systems of egalitarianism, in which the wealthy are more valuable than the poor.
3) I'm not sure egalitarian is the world he's looking for here. The dominant ethos in the U.S. simply isn't economic egalitarianism. We are committed to the idea that everyone is equal under the law, perhaps, but that's not what his article is about.
Now I see the contest has been won. Oh well.
we call the waiter "Sir," as if he were a knight
First, I ponder my own times waiting tables.
Then I laugh hysterically.
Oh, and then I read it again!
Then I die from hysterical laughter!
But my death throes are so violent that I start a wave of vibrations through the earth that cause a tray carrying the entire dinner for an eight-top of fatass country club members to land on Dinesh's head, and it kills Dinesh.
And then my spirit finds rest.
My experience in the service sector accords with RMP's.
Incidentally, I think Dinesh's essay works just fine as a study of a pervasive myth that many Americans believe, but not so much as a reflection of reality. He didn't sound insane to me because I've heard it all before; but he's still wrong.
81: Every job I ever had that involved working on a retail level with the general public just made me hate my fellow Americans.
Every job I ever had that involved working on a retail level with the general public just made me hate my fellow Americans.
83- I've heard this again and again from many people, but I worked two retail level jobs over the course of about 5 years of my life and "the public" never bothered me very much.
Admittedly, neither of the jobs was waitressing. (Although one was fast food, which is pretty close. The other was retail sales). Overall most people were reasonably nice, and those who weren't, well, at least you could vent about them to your coworkers after they left. I just never found that part of either job unpleasant.
But from talking to people I get the impression that most people find "Working with the public" nearly intolerable.
Maybe I am just born to serve.
(As if I were a knight.)
I was checking to see if D'Souza was on The Dartmouth Review when they published the names of students who attended a meeting of a campus gay organization, and it turns out he was gone a year before. But the year they published that, he wrote an article
"identifying a Freshman undergraduate who had begun a sexual relationship with another student against her mother's wishes. D'Souza offered details of the woman's sex life, and criticized Princeton University for paying the student's tuition fees after the student's mother withdrew financial support. The ensuing scandal was reported in The New York Times. D'Souza claimed that the woman's name had been published as the result of a 'proofreading error'and that he 'care[s] about the girl; that's why [he] wrote the story'"(internal citation omitted).
If one would compose the ultimate Standpipe Bridgeplate-annoying comment, one must begin with "Well", one must praise Unfogged, one must include a subjunctive "would have", one must refer to knowledge available only via private email, and one must close with a smiley. Anything else?
I don't actually want to annoy SB, I'm just asking.
Apologizing for earnestness elsewhere in the same comment, when said earnestness was warranted, or at least benign.
I think this would be pretty hard to pack into an SB-annoying omnibus, given the nature of earnestness, but I'm sure someone will prove me wrong.
I'm sure someone will prove me wrong
I'm pretty sure I have gotten all of this except a smiley into one comment. I will work on my emoticon use. ;-)
Almost forgot: "fuckwit".
95: Yeah, I don't like that one either.
What else do you do?
Shhhh!
90 - you need a "schweet" in there somewhere.
we call the waiter "Sir," as if he were a knight
That did floor me as well. That "as if he were a knight" is obviously just thrown in there randomly and he doesn't really mean it.
Or maybe he does! And he goes on to say "And the waiters generally wear smart uniforms, often with bow ties. Where but in America could the so-called 'employees' be better dressed than the so-called 'customers'?"
And "fuckwit" is still better than "whiny ass titty baby".
Well, I would of composed a comment where I praised Unfogged for its unique culture of respect, insistence upon rigorous argument and maintaining a community the likes of such camraderie has never been seen in honor of ogged. It's mind-boggling the conversational quality here.
But who wants to be a fuckwit when one's beloved author function has cancer? :-(
Apologies for the earnestness.
(P.S., SB, I e-mailed you. Is Friday okay?)
But, Becks is right. So maybe Cala's pwnage is premature.
Almost, Cala. By "subjunctive 'would have'" I meant "would have" in place of "had", as in, "I wish I would have met you / Now it's a little late".
Friday's no good, it's my night to put things at right angles to each other. Saturday?
Cala pwns.
An unmarried man bachelates.
Ack. I think I am a serial "would have" offender.
it's my night to put things at right angles to each other
95, 97: I like "fuckwit." And 104 is completely, entirely right.
"would have" is okay in some constructions. Just not in backtracking subjunctives.
This comment is a fib, but it's short.
I dispute that.
I meant, maybe an unmarried Arnold Schwarzenegger was a bachelator. But otherwise, not.
You know w-lfs-n is out of town when nobody has yet busted on the typo in the title.
By "subjunctive 'would have'" I meant "would have" in place of "had", as in, "I wish I would have met you / Now it's a little late"
This bugs me too, and it seems to be everywhere lately.
Shortly after 9/11, D'Souza gave a talk at my university entitled "Why They Hate Us." Many unsuspecting liberal undergrads (myself included) attended, expecting some actual insight into the motivations behind Islamic fundamentalism.
Instead, we got to hear 60 minutes of this "Boy, ain't Amuricka great!" bullshit.
Ah, but here Cala subtly replaces the "would have" that would have been correct with the always unacceptable "would of". Nice move!
Well, I hate to break up a good ol' snarkfest, but since I linked approvingly to the Dinesh essay on my blog, I'd like to say a word or two in its defense.
In no society on earth is there a complete absence of poverty, or racism, or other ills. In no country on earth is every last person a saint who has never once insulted a person he felt was socially inferior to him. It's not fair to judge America by that standard.
Rather, we should ask ourselves: What other country on earth has taken such vast numbers of immigrants from all over the world and integrated them into a functioning society? A society where not all of them will grow rich — that would be impossible — but anyone can, and many do? Not Japan. Not China or India. Not France, the UK, or Germany. Not anyone else but America.
Maybe I'm reading between the lines a bit, but I think the key point Dinesh makes is not that everyone in America achieves success, but that there is no deep-seated social or structural prejudice preventing them from doing so. If you come to America from Vietnam with nothing, and end up running your own chain of drugstores, people will admire you for your drive, not hate you for being an immigrant.
In short, Americans respect achievement, not lineage. In fact, while it may help financially, having a famous or rich parent or sibling can actually cause other people to look down upon you as someone who didn't get where he is on his own merits.
Finally, while not denying the plight of America's poorest citizens, I note that I honestly cannot recall seeing any articles in the news lately about widespread American famine, but I have seen plenty of articles about Americans being too fat.
There. Go ahead and do your worst.
"In fact, while it may help financially, having a famous or rich parent or sibling can actually cause other people to look down upon you as someone who didn't get where he is on his own merits."
My heart bleads for the poor desperate disrespected rich lambs.</snark>
The point is that the US isn't unique in any of these respects -- it isn't even particularly good with respect to most of them.
US exceptionalism is pretty bloody irritating -- especially to all those countries* with better rather than worse social mobility, better rather than worse records on social justice, health, education, infant mortality, and so on.
If you relieve believe that the anyone can achieve success in the US through hard work and that no 'structural prejudices' exist to prevent them from doing so then you are deeply naive.
* i.e. pretty much every first world nation apart from the UK.
I think that misses the point. Is America great? Damn right it is. I'm very happy and proud to live here. But D'Souza's article enlists our justified patriotism in the cause of glossing over some unjustifiable realitites, not to mention its sheer flights of fancy ("paper-smooth" roads? Come on my morning commute some time.) That the U.S. has more or less successfully, though not perfectly, absorbed immigrants from around the world is a great thing; as is the fact that large portions of society enjoy at least certain minimal levels of material comfort. These facts are not to be despised, but neither should they be used to gloss over the massive problems in U.S. health care, or the persistence of real deep-rooted poverty. And to say that there's no famine--as if that should be the standard!--and plenty of fat people in the U.S. while not offering a word about the very real and horrible combination of poverty, mal- or undernutrition, and obesity that too many Americans experience, is facile and, shall we say, unhelpful.
Incidentally, I checked the immigration stats. You ask 'What other country on earth has taken such vast numbers of immigrants...?'
However, immigration to the US is roughly on a par with many European states and does not in fact greatly exceed them. The percentage of foreign born citizens of the US is roughly the same or within 2 or 3% of the UK, Germany, Austria and France and significantly _less_ than Canada or Australia.
I don't want to sound like I am just bashing the US. The US record isn't the worst.
However, these exceptionalist myths about immigration and social mobility are just that. Myths.
127: D'Souza's essay has several major flaws. I'm picking two. He sets the bar very low; one can characterize his argument fairly as reducing to the claim that America has neither a nobility nor a caste system. This is, I presume, the point of the muddled egalitarian sentence. He also says that its standards of living are better than that of a third-world country. This, I expect, the point of the clumsy claims about the lack of tattered clothing.
That's certainly a fair claim. But if the bar is that low, then there's nothing uniquely great about the U.S, and its intellectually dishonest to praise the U.S. as if it were the only country without a caste system and famines.
#128: "US exceptionalism is pretty bloody irritating -- especially to all those countries* with better rather than worse social mobility"
I remember reading an analysis of the "social mobility is better in other countries" claim (I don't recall where) that said this is because other countries just have a tighter grouping of incomes around the mean. So, for example, someone in Country X might triple his annual income from $20K to $60K and vault from, say the lower class to the upper class. But in America, pulling down $60K, while obviously an improvement over $20K, isn't going to make anyone call you rich — because we have lots of people who make lots, lots more than that. But Americans with lower incomes aren't any worse off just because other Americans are relatively rich.
If I find the source for this argument, I'll post it here.
#130: The percentage of foreign born citizens of the US is roughly the same or within 2 or 3% of the UK, Germany, Austria and France and significantly _less_ than Canada or Australia.
Are you talking about only those foreign-born citizens alive right now? Immigration to the US has been going on in large numbers for a very long time from a wide range of foreign countries, and virtually defines us as a nation. I don't think you can say the same thing about Canada or Australia.
GB, the problem with the D'Souza essay is that his examples are preposterous to the point of delusion. No homeless person would kiss a shoe for $100? People allow themselves to be sodomized by strangers for $100. We treat waiters like knights? WTF? Janitors are treated as social equals?
D'Souza may see the world this way, but I'll bet if he sat down and actually talked to some janitors, wait staff, and homeless people, he'd find that they most certainly don't. This isn't to say there aren't some very real advantages to living in America—we aren't seeing the great Mexican migration simply by chance—just that D'Souza must have been smoking some really first-rate crack to have chosen those as his illustrations. Because they are absurd.
re: 134
And how do you think the people who now live in Australia and Canada got there? By magic?
Leaving aside the small numbers of native inhabitants of both countries, *everyone* who lives there was an immigrant. In this respect they are *exactly* like the US. And, when it comes to more recent immigration, both have higher rather than lower percentages of 1st generation immigrants.
Unless by 'defines us a nation' means 'forms part of our mythology we tell to ourselves', of course. Which may be true, but is irrelevant.
re: 133 that looks a lot like a fairly desperate attempt to wriggle out of a simple fact with respect to social mobility. The studies mentioned measure how likely it is that someone from the 1st income quartile will move into the 2nd, 3rd or 4th income quartile and vice versa. It's an abolute measure of mobility that isn't affected by spurious* concerns about tightness of distributions around the mean.
Also:
"But Americans with lower incomes aren't any worse off just because other Americans are relatively rich."
Is false. There are a raft of studies showing that, vis a vis quality of life, relative income matters more than absolute income. It does, as a matter of fact, make a difference.
* It's also a pretty counter-productive move to point to income inequality as an 'explanation' for lack of social mobility and then think this might be exculpatory in some sense.
GB, in response to your no American famine, but fat Americans comment, I'd just like to point out that lots of poor people are fat, and this is emphatically not a good thing. Given all the research about the poor effects obesity has on health, is that really something we want to trumpet as socioeconomically egalitarian success? No, because poor people are fat because they can't afford healthy food, and they get fat and get diabetes and die.
There was a long thread about this here, but I have just spent ten minutes and I can't fucking find it.
$20K to $60K is a huge jump if you're living in the U.S. Granted, if your family income is $100K+, it probably looks like a pittance, but it's a big difference and one that jumps up considerably in standard of living. To name one, the $60K a year guy probably has health care and a reliable car. If the $20K guy has that, he's probably substantially in debt.
124, 129: Just to clarify my above comment: I do think America is a great place to live, and I think we've done a bunch of swell things. But D'Souza's brand of self-congratulation is precisely the reason so many people get annoyed by us. It comes off as a plastic grin and a tacit denial of some of the really terrible aspects of US domestic and foreign policies.
re: 139
Yes, exactly. My natural response whenever I hear an American trotting out the 'We're so special and great' line is to want to shout 'NO' [slap] 'YOU' [slap] 'ARE' [slap] 'NOT'.
It's infuriating. Both because of the sort of smug* self-satisfied blindness that it connotes and also because on almost every factual ground it's false.
That is not, of course, to say that the US is the worst place to live or isn't better than many places in some respects, or anything like that. There are many many worse places.
* Even if it were true people who went about stating it all the time would still be dicks.
But Americans with lower incomes aren't any worse off just because other Americans are relatively rich.
I don't know about that. I feel sure we've discussed the stuff about subjective well-being and income inequality before on this blog. I'm not sure what the current consensus is on whether a large absolute gap between relative positions is bad for subjective well-being or not, but it at least seems possible that it could be, and there are other reasons to care about income inequality--unequal influence over the political system, for one.
But D'Souza's brand of self-congratulation is precisely the reason so many people get annoyed by us.
I'm not so sure that's a good reason to refrain from self-congratulation. Quite a lot of countries are going to be pissed at us anyway, for reason ranging from economic prowess, McDonaldization of culture, and military power. It's pretty naîve to think if we dressed in ashes and sackcloth that France would love us. (Nor that we're the only country with inflated opinions of our own self-worth and destiny. I think England had an empire once? It wasn't a humble one, either.)
The reason we shouldn't do it is that it's toolish and blinds us to lots of social problems. Hey, poor people have TVs! We must have a mobile society.
Ah, I see MM already addressed that. I flipped through what I could google while I was composing that comment, and, to be clear, I saw stuff that indicated that relative position mattered, but not that how far the distance in between relative positions mattered. That's not to say there isn't research to support that, but I either didn't see it or didn't know how to properly interpret what I did see.
To continue harping on 133: GB, maybe I'm misunderstanding your point, but it seems to be that the social mobility calculus is flawed because if in country X, one doubles his income, he moves up a few class levels, but in the U.S., that's not true.
I've already quibbled with the '$60K is just like $20K' comparison. But let's take it for the sake of argument. To get from making $20K a year to $60K a year is pretty much a jump from hovering around minimum wage to say, an entry level engineering salary in a mid-sized market. To get that, you have to have access to the relevant opportunities and education, and probably go into debt.
Now your thesis is that counts as the same economic class, and so counts against social mobility unfairly. But isn't that a greater problem for your argument? That if one does make it, and goes off to college, and gets a good job, one ends up in the same class as everyone who didn't? Doesn't that rather count against social mobility?
#136: Leaving aside the small numbers of native inhabitants of both countries, *everyone* who lives there was an immigrant.
I disagree. There is a difference between the founders of a nation, and people who immigrate (emigrate?) to it later on. For example, I don't count George Washington as an immigrant to America.
Looking at immigrants who arrived after the nation was "up and running", so to speak, I believe the US vastly outclasses Canada and Australia.
Lately, Canada's numbers have more immigrants than the U.S.; it's certainly 'up and running' now.
That said, I'm not sure if the numbers are counting only legal immigration or not. It's harder to come to the U.S. than it used to be.
And yes, I'll admit D'souza goes a little overboard in his early paragraphs (which are essentially just a preamble to his main point, anyway).
But then, exuberance, optimism, and enthusiasm are such quintessentially American traits...
#146: Lately, Canada's numbers have more immigrants than the U.S.
Well, it's like Steven Colbert said: "Immigrants built this country. But here's the thing: It's built now. Finished sometime in the 70's, I think."
(I think this was from a class day speech he gave at some university; can't find the link.)
144: $20K/yr is about double the minimum wage, actually.
GB, the trouble with exuberance, optimism and enthusiasm is that they tend to be conjugated as irregular verbs:
I am exuberant, you are loud, he is a public nuisance;
I am optimistic, you are naive, she is on another planet;
etc.
Nobody here is hating on America, but ask yourself who is going to be impressed by this farago of D'Souza's, except his fan club.
Um, you can't talk about how America's welcome to immigrants is what makes us great (but) and also crack jokes about how we shouldn't let any more in. Statistics about past immigration don't prove anything about our current greatness anyway.
If you're going to be an American exceptionalist, best to rest it on how much better our music is.
Does the Hasselhoff oeuvre count as American or German?
I don't count George Washington as an immigrant to America.
George Washington was born in Virginia. Only people born here were/are eligible to be President.
In the interest of comity (comedy?), here's that Colbert link.
152: You know who's German? The Scorpions.
Deine Mutter is German.
and also crack jokes
Oh, we can always crack jokes. It's what we do best.
Incidentally, I have noticed a distinct lack of comments congratulating meine Mutter. A link to my blog is congratulated so this can be rectified. SB, you in particular should be interested.
#153: George Washington was born in Virginia.
But Virginia was a British colony at the time, not part of America, which did not exist yet. In fact, the Constitution says:
No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President
So people not born in the US (like Washington) could be President, as long as they were US citizens before the Constitution was adopted.
But anyway, pick some person of the same era who came over from Britain proper if you like; the point still holds.
Hey, that's a pretty good poem.
(Please do not take the above as anything less than enthusiastic praise, coming from me. I am notoriously bitchy and critical about writing, which may seem unjustified, given my blog writing, but nevertheless I am.)
Link is included, not congratulated.
GB, fine, but I don't see the point of the point. So we let a lot of immigrants in in the past, so what? No cause for smugness now.
160: Thanks! I'm sure my mother would be pleased to hear that, which she will if you post it at my site.
149: $20K/yr is about double the minimum wage, actually..
Yeah, if you work 9 to 5, five days a week, 50 weeks a year. On those terms, an hourly wage of $10 gets you to $20K annually.
Not good enough? Pull some overtime. Get a night job. Get some training for a better job. Get promoted. Get married and have a 2-income family.
The minimum wage (which is paid, I believe, by some tiny fraction of all jobs in America) is not supposed to be a ticket to prosperity, but rather a starting point. It's not called "a pretty decent wage, all things considered"; it's called "minimum". For a reason. There's nowhere to go but up.
To say that GB may have some kind of a point: I have the impression that some forms of class mobility are easier in the US than in the UK (possibly continental Europe as well). It's not at all that income mobility is greater, or even as great, but that for those few who do manage the income mobility, there aren't a lot of non-income class markers.
Matt Mc/Grattan mentioned awhile back that he was from a working-class family, and still thought of himself as working-class despite being a grad student. The class identification persists beyond a move into a different professional class. My husband's family is working class (was working class when he was growing up. Now they're more poor than working class), but that fact isn't really perceptible in his professional life -- he hasn't got any obvious class markers that differentiate him from someone who grew up playing golf at the country club.
I think that difference between the UK and the US is overvalued by people in the US (and I'm not sure to what extent I'm describing something real) but I get the feeling that it's a lot of what D'Souza is vaguely attempting to talk about in his inimitably offensive way.
re: 145
I don't understand the comment, GB.
For Australia, Canada and the US, approx 99%+ of their populations are either immigrants or the descendents of immigrants. I don't see how the US is different in any way shape or form. All the wierd stuff about the nation being 'up and running' -- I have to confess I don't understand your point, other than that you're completely committed to US exceptionalism and are searching for some special qualification of 'immigrant' to retain US exceptionalism.
I don't even understand what the qualification is supposed to _mean_ or how any such qualification doesn't apply just as much to other nations.
1. D'Souza's a dick, and really bad things should happen to him. (On that, I assume there is comity.)
2. The U.S. is a remarkable country, and I'd rather live here than anywhere on earth. We really have solved, or at least addressed, an an astonishing array of problems pretty well.
3. There are still signifcant problems in the US, and D'Souza's special brand of bs is to pretend you can't believe #2 while acknowledging or doing anything about those problems.
Not good enough? Pull some overtime. Get a night job. Get some training for a better job. Get promoted. Get married and have a 2-income family.
cf. 28:
I think we do a pretty good job of humiliating the poor, in part-- and this is what I love-- by buying into Horatio D'Alger's anyone-can-do-it fantasy.
Better than the "no one can do it without help from the government" fantasy.
re: 164
Yeah, that may be a fair point re: a possible source of difference between the UK and the US.
I do think of myself as working class despite no longer really living a working class life (in many respects) and no longer pursuing a working class career path. My children, on the other hand, if/when I have them, will be undoubtedly be middle class.
However, the questions about whether I (for example) consider myself working class and whether or not I could pass for middle-class, i.e., to use your phrase whether working class origins would be 'really perceptible in his [my] professional life', are different questions. I suspect the latter question may be less of an issue in the US because, and this may be a false impression, less stock is placed on how people speak.
Pulling apart those questions of self-identity and public-identity, Cala, I believe, has mentioned in the past that she feels a class distinction (herself) even if others may not be aware of it.
People's views of their own class-origins are pretty confused though -- no doubt mine included -- which is why it makes sense for these studies of social mobility to concentrate on income level rather than perceived class status.
re: 168
No one can do it without help from the government. That seems to be a matter of simple fact. Rather than a myth.
However, the questions about whether I (for example) consider myself working class and whether or not I could pass for middle-class, i.e., to use your phrase whether working class origins would be 'really perceptible in his [my] professional life', are different questions.
Right, and I'm pretty ignorant about the UK, so I may be getting it wrong. I've got the impression from friends, though, that 'class of raising' identity is perceived by people as less mutable and more of a concrete fact of identity than it is here.
(This is all from the point of view of white folks -- racial issues complicate class mobility in the US a great deal.)
Cala, I believe, has mentioned in the past that she feels a class distinction (herself) even if others may not be aware of it.
I'm not sure I get your point here. It may be true that Cala feels it, and I would certainly rather that Cala didn't feel it, if people are out there making Cala feel it on purpose, they're dicks. But her feeling doesn't appear to be something that can be ameliorated by government policy. And it's precisely when people argue that the government should worry about this stuff (cf. claims that all Dems want to do is improve the self-esteem of kids, and no actual teaching) that I get nervous.
re: 171
Yes, I think that's true.
I'd dispute that it's not _quite_ fixed (for some value of 'quite') in the US but yeah, the impression I have, is like yours: that it's less fixed than the UK.
re: 172
"But her feeling doesn't appear to be something that can be ameliorated by government policy. And it's precisely when people argue that the government should worry about this stuff (cf. claims that all Dems want to do is improve the self-esteem of kids, and no actual teaching) that I get nervous."
Which is precisely why I said: "...it makes sense for these studies of social mobility to concentrate on income level rather than perceived class status."
165: For Australia, Canada and the US, approx 99%+ of their populations are either immigrants or the descendents of immigrants.
Immigrants from where? My original comment spoke of the wide range of countries whose people have come to America over the years. If 90% (made-up number) of Australian immigrants came from Britain, I'm not impressed.
I think America has attracted, and successfully integrated, immigrants from a more diverse array of countries, and in larger numbers, than Canada or Australia. And that's what I'm talking about: In America, national identity has long been a political concept, not an ethnic or geographic one.
Tell a foreigner you're American, and sooner or later they'll want to know where you're "from" — i.e., where your family emigrated from. Does the same thing happen to Canadians and Aussies?
#170: No one can do it without help from the government. That seems to be a matter of simple fact. Rather than a myth.
What, you mean because the government builds roads and maintains police forces and all that other stuff our tax dollars pay for? Or are you talking about something else?
The percentage of Australians born overseas in the 2001 census was about 21%, which seems to have been about constant for the last century. See here (scroll down). About a quarter of those are from Britain, but the rest are from more or less anywhere. Not sure how this compares with the US, but if 75 million Americans are immigrants today I'll buy the drinks.
re: 176
Yes, I meant that pretty much the entire infrastructure and fabric of our society relies on a functioning state. Right down to the level of laws that permit the existence of the corporations in which many/most of us work.
No-one in a modern Western society gets anywhere without the government being involved every step of the way. Just because the government subsidy goes via corporations, say, rather than directly into someone's hands doesn't mean that the beneficiary of the former is any less dependent on the state.
re: 175
Again, Australia and Canada are extremely diverse societies and I'd be very surprised if they were any more 'white Anglo-Saxon' than the US.
Sorry, that would be 60 million. I'll still buy.
GB, Canadians at least are far more likely to retain that ethnic identity, as a core of their personal id, often for many generations, and by and large this shows little sign of abating.
I think Americans have always done this to a greater degree than our melting-pot ideology wanted to admit. And that some, at least, of the American nationalists who have deplored the resurgence of ethnic identity among Americans over the last generation either ignore this or are being disingenuous about it.
re: 177
I looked it up, the US is somewhere around 10 - 15%.
The UK is a little under 10%. Most northern European countries are somewhere a few percent either side of that.
Australia and Canada are quite a bit higher, as you point out.
Re: No one can do it without help from the government. and What, you mean because the government builds roads and maintains police forces and all that other stuff our tax dollars pay for? Or are you talking about something else?
I don't want to speak for M/att, but I'd say: No one can do it without things like the G.I. Bill, the home-mortgage tax deduction, and a host of other leg-ups (legs up?) that the U.S. government commonly gives to help people who have a small amount of capital to make it a little bit larger.
It's easy to see "help from the government" when it comes in the form of a (very modest) monthly Social Security check. It's harder to see, but no less influential on the life prospects of Americans, when it comes in the form of tax breaks for buying a house, getting a college education, etc.
I'd bet the percentage of Americans "born overseas" was way higher a few generations ago. We just had our big immigration boom earlier, that's all. And the society you see now is the result of all those immigrants turning into Americans.
I like how the government taking less of your money as taxes counts as "help" from the government.
I like how the government taking less of your money as taxes counts as "help" from the government.
It sure likes like help if you're a renter.
149: Yes, I was being sloppy. Good nitpick though; I was mentally figuring around $8 bucks an hour (someone who's worked their way up at a McDonald's) and holds a second job to reach around $20K.
173: I do feel a perceived class difference here, but it's really just me being a spoiled brat. I have an iPod and a damned M.Phil. My family's the sort of working-class (grandparents) to middle class-minded/educated (parents) that didn't quite make it financially, and it shows up when I have to remind myself that J. Crew isn't an expensive store for most people (though it's overpriced no matter which way you slice it) and that other people think that $40K a year is a bad salary. (Whereas I'm going, dude, and it comes with health care! Yay, being a junior prof!)
Tell a foreigner you're American, and sooner or later they'll want to know where you're "from" — i.e., where your family emigrated from. Does the same thing happen to Canadians and Aussies?
Anecdotally, yes. And they're not all English in Canada. Toronto is as diverse as any major U.S. city. There's also Québéc. Not English. My boyfriend's family descends from Ireland and Germany, and the area has a lot of Scandinavian families & Eastern European groups, mostly Ukraine.
Before my mom met my bf she asked 'what nationality?' my boyfriend was and when I told her Canadian (because I was being a literalist ass), she giggled and I said, 'mom, are you trying to ask if my boyfriend is black?' and she blushed so hard I could hear it over the cell phone.
I never said or implied everyone in Canada was of English ancestry.
Cala, I couldn't quite parse this:
Whereas I'm going, dude, and it comes with health care! Yay, being a junior prof!
but you should try to get more than $40K in your first tenure-track job, at least. I get 45, and wouldn't mind more.
Lowering expectations, MW.
GB, then this?:
I think America has attracted, and successfully integrated, immigrants from a more diverse array of countries, and in larger numbers, than Canada or Australia.
re: 184
There are inumerable ways in which the structure of our state institutions benefit people. Many, many, many ways that go a long way beyond the direct receipt of state benefits.
It doesn't come down to things as crude as whether they take less of your money or whether they give you money directly.
To take one minor example, one of the reasons many middle-class professions such the law, dentistry, medicine, accountacy and so on, carry the higher incomes they do is because the state specifies who and who can't do those professions. It requires accreditation, licensing, qualifications, and so on. The happy professional making $200,000 a year is, in part, happy because the state stops other people from doing his or job.
The well-off professional didn't carve his or her wealth out of the raw soil with his or her bare hands. They've been the beneficiary of state intervention again and again throughout their lives and continue to be the beneficiary of that intervention.
190: I took that to refer to total numbers, wherever from, which is true, but probably mostly because the US is much more inhabitable than either Australia or Canada.
Global warming might change that.
Wait, I get it; "going" is used in the sense of "saying."
So on lowering expectations: As I understand it during the APA you're all like, "Yay! This is the job I have been wanting my whole life!" and on the campus visit you're like, "And give me some more money." Maybe you save that till after the offer, but it can be trickier because you may not have another offer. See LB's post on negotiating salaries, somewhere. (Of course I did not do this.)
GB, what do you think the difference is between being a modern American and being an iron-age subsistence-level farmer in medieval Europe or parts of modern Africa?
It's the fucking government.
In regards to the Boostrap Theory of economic advancement, sure, a few people on the margins can haul themselves up to a level of their choosing, but that is a rather rare exception. The main distinction in my experience lies in the availability of second chances, so to speak. Very few people at all, regardless of SES, go through life in a consistently prudent and mistake-free manner, and even if they do, there are unforseen roadblocks (illness, layoffs, etc.)
The difference shows up when the upper middle class kid who flunks out of school (to take a personal example) gets to live at home and fiddle around for a while before getting his act together and going back, whereas someone without that sort of family support would be fucked. And these differing outcomes have nothing at all to do with personal industry. Sure, there is a hypothetical path to prosperity from any starting point in this country, but it's silly to think that one need only follow it, and all will be fine.
That's more or less the advice, I've heard, MW.
Or there's the calamother's approach: "The students pay how much and you have how many and you make what? Go ask for a raise."
That $60k/year (or whatever) isn't "your" money that you earned as the just reward of your hard work. It's the outcome of a complex system that makes your ass-sitting "worth" more than sweat labor eking out a living by trying desperately every year to grow enough food to make it through another winter.
I hate the argument that taxes = the government "taking" money that somehow "belongs" to people who didn't even create the shit in the first place. Taxes are our investment in keeping the fucking system running so that we don't end up starving to death the next time there's a fucking drought.
re: 199
Yeah, exactly. That thought forms part of my 'why libertarians are mostly wankers' viewpoint.
No one would deny that there is a certain amount of money a government needs to function properly and provide basic public services. Yet few would deny that governments generally end up taking much, much more than that, for purposes that frequently have nothing to do with "keeping the fucking system running".
GB, what do you think the difference is between being a modern American and being an iron-age subsistence-level farmer in medieval Europe or parts of modern Africa?
It's the fucking government.
And yet, we somehow muddled through without a federal income tax until 1913.
Or, as you might put it, we somehow muddled fucking through without a federal fucking income tax until fucking 1913.
I think you mean 19fucking13, GB.
Another point in response to BPhD: As a rule, the government provides public services to everyone equally. Therefore the difference between my income and that of the next person precisely reflects the difference in value we ourselves are personally creating, not what the government has provided for us.
There is no logical reason why person A should pay more for government services than person B just because A is more productive than B, unless we have decided to position Karl Marx's slogan, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" as the organizing principle of American society.
Therefore the difference between my income and that of the next person precisely reflects the difference in value we ourselves are personally creating, not what the government has provided for us.
The traditional response is that if you have more stuff, it costs more to insure that I don't take it. No one expects homeowner's insurance to cost the same for every house, despite the fact that the contracts are identical.
That's because it would cost the insurance company more to replace an expensive house than a cheap one. I don't see how that's analogous to taxing people with different incomes. Where is the potential loss that the government might have to pay for out of its pocket?
On the subject of immigration and ethnic diversity once again:
"According to the United Nations, Toronto is the most ethnically diverse city in the world. A remarkable 41 percent of its population was born outside of Canada. The city is home to more than 80 ethnic groups and more than 100 languages, and is marked by an incredible diversity of distinct neighbourhoods, cultures and communities."
Found here.
Anecdotally, I'm Canadian and I was in university before I met anyone whose grandparents were both born in Canada.
I think Canada restricted immigration around the time the US did but that they began to loosen the restrictions earlier.
And yet, we somehow muddled through without a federal income tax until 1913.
In 1913 the Keating-Owen Act regulating child labor was still 3 years off. The Meat Inspection Act was a whopping 7 years old. It's the year the Department of Labor is being formed, and the Federal Reserve Act is being passed. Damn, no more state currencies! The Glass-Steagall Act is 20 years away. Your bank goes under? Doors are locked! Your money's gone! Aaahahahaha! The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic (FDC) Act of 1938 is still 25 years away. It gets helped along by the The 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide Incident, in which over 100 people die because selling a toxic drug is not yet illegal. Market forces bitches!
Now let's all sit around and yearn for that golden era before the income tax.
selling a toxic drug is not yet illegal
No, but killing people always was, even then. I'm not familiar with the particular incident you describe, but the makers of the drug could have been punished for poisoning their customers, and that punishment would have been a powerful deterrent to selling lethal drugs. All without new laws or government departments. Amazing!
208 - I put that badly b/c I tried to do it quickly. And I'm about to repeat the mistake. There are, to my knowledge, three standard responses to complaints about about taxes, and progressive taxes.
1. [the best, to my mind] An awful lot of what you've achieved is a function of luck. If you were doing whatever is your present job in Poor Country X, for example, you might be paid much less. There is no societal benefit (in terms of a loss of extra effort) or violation of fairness in taxing luck. There is a very nice Krugman essay here that is an actual treatment of this argument.
2. We're taxing equal amounts, it's just measured in the marginal value of the odd dollar to people with different incomes. I can make a handwavy argument here about negotiated tax rates, but this is more or less a direct appeal to a sense of fairness.
3. [the point I was trying to make] Pretend social order costs. Social order--people not trying to kill you and your family for your stuff--is worth more to you than to someone with less money because you have more to lose in the absense of social order. If you and Bill Gates were forced to share a gigantic lockbox that contained "title" to all the various possessions each of you had, he woud end up paying a larger share of the rent--the security for that box is much more valuable to him.
As I said, I think #1 is the best argument, and the linked essay really is worth reading. Will Wilkinson, on his blog, has a response of sorts--it's not to that essay, but to the idea of dessert. (I think there are actually several posts over there about this.) I find his argument too dependent on process and a keen belief in formalities, and therefore unconvincing, but you might find it more satisfying.
"...and that punishment would have been a powerful deterrent to selling lethal drugs."
And yet, it wasn't.
Do you think that Teddy Roosevelt was some sort of crazed leftist, and that the Progressive era reforms mentioned above, among others, were unnecessary, economy-and-freedom-damaging indulgences of society, or what? (If "what," please elaborate.)
There is no logical reason why person A should pay more for government services than person B just because A is more productive than B
Nonsense. If person A earns 100k/year and person B earns 20k, person B is much closer to not being able to pay rent than person A. That's a logical reason. Another logical reason is that person A has clearly benefitted more from government and the complex society we've created than person B. Is person A innately better than person B? Is person A innately harder-working than person B? Does person A create more value than person B? The answer to the first two questions is probably no, and the answer to question three is a complete toss-up.
And are you really so very offended by the word "fucking"?
Seriously, how do libertarians respond to the quip that libertarians are anarchists who want police protection from the poor?
Another logical reason is that person A has clearly benefitted more from government and the complex society we've created than person B.
While I agree with your overall point, I'm not sure this follows as a matter of evidence, let alone a matter of logic. For a big enough picture of complex society, sure. It's only because our society values lawyers that lawyers are paid well, etc.
But this is hard to quantify. Does a kid whose parents pay for college benefit more from the government han the kid who goes on a Pell grant? I'm not sure how to do that math, but I'm pretty sure it's not a truth of logic. Does a rich person benefit more than a struggling family from food stamps?
Anyhow, the reasoning for the progressive tax is fine without that premise. We have things we agree through legislation to fund. We need to get the money from somewhere. $1000 means a lot more to someone making $20K than someone making $1M. If you view taxation as a necessary evil, then take it from the people that aren't going to starve.
No, but killing people always was, even then. I'm not familiar with the particular incident you describe, but the makers of the drug could have been punished for poisoning their customers, and that punishment would have been a powerful deterrent to selling lethal drugs.
Easy enough to say if someone else took the drug first and died, creating a convenient warning. Or maybe everyone should hold advanced degrees in chemistry to educate themselves about the likelihood of bad reactions? Consider, also, that if any drug killed people -- and many that have failed to be approved carried such risks -- the result wouldn't be flocking to other companies with proven safety records. It would be a widescale distrust of the industry and no incentive for a young entrepreneur to make a go of it in pharmaceuticals. No research, no new drugs. Why take the risk?
Come on. If no regulation had never been tried before, this argument might make sense. But it has, and the result wasn't children refusing to work in factories with poor conditions, making smart choices to only work in those with safety standards and livable wages. It was a mess. People didn't stop eating the rat-infested meat because there was no reason anyone had to tell them. According to the roommate (a British history scholar), England instituted social programs because charity couldn't keep up with the need. People are just not smart enough and lucky enough to make radical libertarianism work.
SomecallmeTim has referenced the right guy in his mention of Will Wilkinson, if you haven't ever encountered sophisticated libertarianism, I highly recommend you take a look at his blog. Also, can we just note that Gaijin Biker is obviously right that attributing All Good Things to the post-new Deal American government is the very definition of crazy? Hey, I am at peace with the welfare/regulatory state, but the reason America was a much, much better place to live in 1900 than 1800 had little to do with the safety net provided by President McKinley. No, it was 100 years of scientific progress and economic growth. Not recognizing this is an error that spawns more errors.
Come on. If no regulation had never been tried before, this argument might make sense.
And this is what's so damn annoying about libertarians. They all sit around and talk about this stuff in a total vacuum. Apparently the supreme reign of market forces isn't so attractive that any of them move to Somalia or the Congo and corner the market by opening a stand that sells both machetes AND tourniquets.
Right, but a lot of 19th century progress and growth in the US was helped a great deal by things like governmnent or government supported surveys - geological, geographical, botanical, etc. - and a transportation infrastructure (canals, railroads, roads) heavily involved with the government (local, state, federal) through debt financing. Similarly, the distribution of public lands by definition involved the government - not just in sales but in guaranteeing titles and resolving disputes between claimants.
Not all of that government involvement was good, and better government would have been better (just as better business practices would have been better), but it's hard to see a lot of the progress happening as it did without various levels of government doing more than guaranteeing public safety and order.
220 is to 218. In general, if you look mainly at protective legislation and the welfare state, of course government was smaller in the 19th century. If you look at size of bureaucracy, of course government was smaller in the 19th century. But if you look at public-private involvement, you see the state - usually state and local, especially before the Civil War, but sometime federal too - involved in all sorts of private enterprise. Before general incorporation laws became general, corporations needed specific legislation to get started. And individual states sometimes ran their own monopolies.
I'm sympathetic to the argument that particular private-public arrangements didn't work in that past, so we should try something else, and I don't necessarily have a problem if that something else would involve less government. But I'm not particularly sympathetic to arguments that don't acknowledge the historical government presence that was there.
but a lot of 19th century progress and growth in the US was helped a great deal by things like governmnent or government supported surveys - geological, geographical, botanical, etc.
It was also helped a great deal by the fact that the land and the accompanying natural resources were largely free. Sure the army had to slaughter and/or forcibly relocate some natives, but quite of lot of that was done on the cheap by disease.
217: I had in mind someone with a college degree vs. someone without--clearly the person with the degree benefitted from investment in research and higher ed more directly and personally than the person who didn't go to college.
But you're almost certainly right that I wasn't using the word "logic" in the correct sense--I think I meant, "it's evident."
There's an unfortunate obsession with progressive taxation in some of the comments above.
The claim that no-one gets where they are without direct or indirect government intervention doesn't come down to some crude reductive claims about taxation.
Government regulation is the sea in which all of us swim and corporations and rich people are the beneficiaries of that just as much -- and I would argue a lot MORE -- as a recipient of social-welfare.
As has been pointed out in earlier comments, government regulation controls the incorporation of companies, the allocation of natural resources, employment laws, safety laws, regulation of the professions, criminal justice, the enforcement of civil contracts, and so on ad infinitum.
This applied just as much in the 'lassez faire' Golden-age of the 19th century that libertarians keep wanking on about as it does at present.
Every single person making a comfortable living is just as much the recipient of government help as anyone on welfare and on the breadline. As B.PhD mentioned above, the difference between being an Iron Age subsistence farmer and living a modern affluent lifestyle _is_ intimately bound up with the structure of our state and that has sod all to do with whether or not a state levies federal income tax.
It just doesn't come down solely to crude worries about justifying progressive income tax. Even if governments levied no income tax and dispensed no social-welfare at all it would still be the case that the middle-classes and the wealthy would be the direct beneficiaries of government intervention in many many ways. Beginning with stopping poor people taking their shit and going on up from there.
Matt, I don't see why you're finding the specific focus on taxation to be unfortunate. You say, Even if governments levied no income tax and dispensed no social-welfare at all it would still be the case that the middle-classes and the wealthy would be the direct beneficiaries of government intervention in many many ways, and I agree completely. But isn't that precisely why the focus on taxation matters? Without taxation (of some sort), where would government revenue come from? Maybe this is a naive question and there's some huge source of govt. money that I'm not thinking of at 2:45 am. But without *some* kind of revenue base, government wouldn't be able to do any of the things you list.
Well, historically government _has_ done many of those things without income tax. Obviously, they've still raised revenue but it has been through other means: land taxes, customs and excise, other forms of levy, and so on.
Clearly, as you say, government can't do many of those things without revenue but I think the focus on taxation and specifically income taxation ends up placing the ball in the libertarian's court.
It ends up shifting the focus quite narrowly to how government raises money and where that money _appears_ to go in direct spending and away from the morass of legislation and all of the infrastructure of society which acts to benefit those very people whining loudest about government taking 'their' money.
Many of those legislative and infrastructural benefits predate income taxation at the level of the nation state.* The UK, for example, didn't introduce income tax until the late 18th/early 19th century but the state did a fairly good job prior to that of raising income from other sources.
That's probably as much a polemical/rhetorical point as it is a substantive one, though.
* But obviously, as you say, they don't predate all government revenue acquisition.
#213: Your arguments 2 and 3 contradict each other.
2 says we're taxing equal amounts, since the little a poor person has is worth as much to him as the riches a wealthy person has. Then 3 says we should tax rich people more, since their stuff is worth more.
#218: Also, can we just note that Gaijin Biker is obviously right
Comity!
Gaijin Biker is obviously right that attributing All Good Things to the post-new Deal American government is the very definition of crazy?
Interesting fact: No one did that. GB brought it up as a straw man, after I called him out for suggesting that if you're poor in America it's your own damn fault.
Well, Matt we sure don't want to blame the victim, but I think you may be strawmanning it up a touch now, Matt. I took GB making a local point wrt the minimum wage -- not suggesting that anyone can make it. Obviously, some people get screwed by luck of the draw -- if you are raised in a chaotic, home situation, for example, the deck is stacked against you.
And, actually, bphd made exactly the claim I took GB to be rebutting:
GB, what do you think the difference is between being a modern American and being an iron-age subsistence-level farmer in medieval Europe or parts of modern Africa?
It's the fucking government.
This is just wrong. I'm not a libertarian, and even the most out there libertarians contrary to some statements on this thread place a high value on provision of public order, enforcement of contracts, etc. But here are two moves that don't obviously follow:
1) without public order we have nothing --> therefore therefore the mechanism that provides public order is primarily responsible for all gains in well-being (comment: how do we explain differential growth in places that both possess equal levels of public order?)
2) without public order we have nothing --> therefore therefore the mechanism that provides public order has an unlimited (or very strong) claim on our property (comment: maybe they have a claim on other rights of ours as well?)
Both of these inferences are off, and both are being made here. The latter is especially common an unfortunate: granting enormous power to government because government is the ocean in which we swim may be some brand of political philosophy, but it sure isn't Millian liberalism. (and I think that by popularizing this argument, even though he eventually retreted from it, Rawls did liberalism a huge disservice)
Again, it's straw-manning. As far as I can tell, no-one has endorsed either your 1) or 2). Rather, your 1) and 2) look like caricatures of what people have actually said.
re: 1)
The claim isn't that *all* benefits that accrue to us are the result of state intervention in our lives but rather that no-one can say that *none* of the benefits that accrue to them are the result of state intervention in their lives. That claim is quite distinct from your 1).
The point is that everytime someone claims that they got where they are under their own steam or that poor people are the recipients of the benefits of state power while they, as mighty providers, are not: they are wrong.
re: 2)
I for one have sympathies with a few strands of left-libertarian (but not right-libertarian) thought and am certainly *not* in favour of the extension of state power.
However, no-one, as far as I can tell, said anything about the benefits that accrue to us from state endorsed or supported mechanisms justifying *all* extant state power or its extension. The strongest claim made by anyone in the above thread, as far as I can tell, is that *some* state power -- for example the power to levy income taxes -- is justified by the benefits that accrue to us.
Again, that latter claim is quite distinct from your 2).
I took GB making a local point wrt the minimum wage -- not suggesting that anyone can make it.
On the basis of what textual evidence? Generally when I see someone issue a string of short imperatives, they're taking it that the person they're addressing can do what they say. "Ought" implies "can" and that sort of thing. And the "Get married" thing plays into stereotypes in an especially distasteful way.
exactly the claim
Hum, baa, how did we get from "it's the fucking government" to "the post-New Deal American government"? Answer: You made it up.
We could have a discussion about political philosophy that might be kind of interesting; I think there's just no reason whatsoever to take absolute property rights as a starting point. Nozick failed to justify it in a bunch of ways. And progressive taxation shouldn't be conflated with an unlimited claim on our property, and it really shouldn't be conflated with a claim on other rights of ours; Hayek's arguments in The Road to Serfdom really don't cut any ice against the New Deal.
But that's not at issue here. What's at issue is that D'Souza wrote a bunch of bullshit about how nice American society is to the poor. Then, when the statistics on immigration undercut GB's attempted defense, he started poor-shaming. And then tried to divert it into a totally fucking tiresome argument about progressive taxation. This is about the equivalent of dragging an argument over foreign policy into a discussion of pacifism; you can always divert "should we [do Y with progressive taxes/go to war against Z]?" with "[Progressive taxes/Wars] are always and everywhere wrong!" but almost nobody wants the U.S. actually to be run by that system. Except that pacifism has more to be said for it.
Hum, baa, how did we get from "it's the fucking government" to "the post-New Deal American government"? Answer: You made it up.
I don't think it's much of a stretch to assume that B didn't intend by 'it's the fucking government' to comprise Japanese feudalism.
Also, can we just note that Gaijin Biker is obviously right that attributing All Good Things to the post-new Deal American government is the very definition of crazy?
I'll grant you that, but only if you grant that no one actually was attributing all good things to the post-new Deal American government. FWIW, a weakened version of 1) is probably what B meant. No one can say that all goods that have accrued to them resulted from their own labor alone.
Hey, I am at peace with the welfare/regulatory state, but the reason America was a much, much better place to live in 1900 than 1800 had little to do with the safety net provided by President McKinley. No, it was 100 years of scientific progress and economic growth.
Might not the two be interrelated? (And if we're bitching about the current government, let's compare 1913 with today.) With child labor laws, more kids go to school (and wages for adults probably rise, but that's just a guess.) Does a more educated workforce help the economy? Might it help further scientific development. Regulating the sale of drugs & offering generous patents spurs scientific development; you've made this point before when discussing health care. What about healthier workers?
There's nothing wrong with thinking we might be able to get away with less regulation (though I really like being able to be an educated consumer of pharmaceuticals with all the inserts and charts and tests), but to assert that none of our current scientific and economic development is connected to some of the safety regulations seems unwarranted.
Ok, so if everyone agrees that 1 and 2 are false, then great. My work here is done. Although I really don't think that is what everyone thinks.
Matt, I guess now I am confused about what you think I've done wrong. bphd makes a point which assigns enormously strong causal role to government in the difference between how we live now and subsistance agriculture. Hey, if she was talking about provision of public order solely, then my bad on the New Deal comment. But either way, I take it you agree: it is incorrect point to "government" as the difference between our well being now vs. 1800. So what's the damage?
The political phil argument is, I think, a great one to have. And I wouldn't begin with absolute property rights. Indeed, I wouldn't begin with *absolute* rights of any kind. The strong disanaology that you (maybe?) suggest between property rights and other rights is, I think, a hard one to sustain. It's particualrly a hard one to sustain on the basis of "all that you have you owe to luck." From the standpoint of the big bang, sure, you don't "deserve" your job, or "deserve" to be in an economy where your job is well compensated. But you also don't deserve your physical capabilities, or your friends, or your freedom in this fashion. That's why the acid bath against claims of desert is a bad line of egalitarian argument.
But either way, I take it you agree: it is incorrect point to "government" as the difference between our well being now vs. 1800.
I wouldn't agree to that. "Government" is precisely the difference between our well being and that of residents of Somalia.
And this: "Hey, if she was talking about provision of public order solely, then my bad on the New Deal comment."
The government did an awful lot of public investment before the New Deal -- it's not as if the pre-New-Deal government were a libertarian dream of only police and national defense.
"Government" is precisely the difference between our well being and that of residents of Somalia.
Oh please. Somilia would be exactly like the US if only they had our government?
Well, not the particular individuals involved.
239: No, but Somalia has more in common with the other countries without functioning governments than they do with any country that has a functioning government.
Cala, I basically agree that there's a complex interaction between governmental institutions and economic growth, and that governmental institutions can help a lot. They can also hurt a lot, which is why case-by-case is usually the way to go. It's clear (to me, at least) that the public university system contributes a great deal to our well being. It's less clear that public control of the DC school system does the same. So an appropriately caveted huzzah for public goods provided by the government, funded by taxation! (and yes, simple redistribution can be one such good)
The move that I find dubious is the one from a (stipulated positive) activity of government to a prima facie *moral* claim justifying exercise of government power. You see this a lot: if you get 3 cents from the government, or work in a field that the government licenses or regulates, you need to act in way X, Y, Z. The problem is that in a society where public and private so interpenetrate, it's just very hard not to get involved in the government in some way. Remember (long ago) the discussion of the pharmacist who doesn't want to dispense birth control. Now I think this is a crazy thing to do, and that all pharmacists should dispense birth control. But many people thought it should be *legally incumbent* on a pharmacy to stock condoms/dispense the pill because ... pharmacists are regulated by the government, and benefit from the lowered competition that results from government accredidation. That seems to me like an very strong consequence, a big reduction in the freedom of that pharmacist in exchange for a "benefit" s/he was in no position to refuse. When we agree with the government action, it's easy to say "you owe the government, stop complaining." But this seems to me the wrong response.
Idealist, are you honestly saying that you don't think that life in Somalia would be improved drastically by the establishment of a functioning government?
If so, that's kind of nuts.
Precisely the same? No, the natural resources are different. And government implies "history of having been well governed" -- it'd take a long time for Somalia to make up for the American history of public education and governmental investment over the last few centuries.
It's a huge component of the difference.
Somalia has more in common with the other countries without functioning governments than they do with any country that has a functioning government
The claim appears to be that all you need is government. And that if Somaila had a government like ours that alone and with no other change would make them as well off as us. That there is nothing about our culture or our history or anything else that makes us Americans that would make the difference, it is just the sure and benelovent guiding hand of the government that makes all the difference.
Idealist, are you honestly saying that you don't think that life in Somalia would be improved drastically by the establishment of a functioning government?
Nope. Only an idiot would think that, so thanks for the implication. On the other hand, I believe that it is crazy to agrue, as has been argued above, that government is the sole difference.
241 gets it right, though (and he did not say "all you need is government," or at least not "all you need to reach U.S. standards of living is government"). If Somalia had a secure democratic government, with institutionalized respect for its citizens' rights (even though there were some forces that didn't like it), and the government had effective control of the country and could enforce the laws—so that, for instance, warlords could not terrorize the citizens into doing what they wanted—then it would be much closer to the U.S. now than it is to Somalia now.
If Somalia had a secure democratic government, with institutionalized respect for its citizens' rights (even though there were some forces that didn't like it), and the government had effective control of the country and could enforce the laws—so that, for instance, warlords could not terrorize the citizens into doing what they wanted—then it would be much closer to the U.S. now than it is to Somalia now.
Obviously.
he did not say "all you need is government," or at least not "all you need to reach U.S. standards of living is government").
see
"Government" is precisely the difference between our well being and that of residents of Somalia
and
GB, what do you think the difference is between being a modern American and being an iron-age subsistence-level farmer in medieval Europe or parts of modern Africa?
It's the fucking government.
(not to get all pc on you, but I believe these commenters are shes not hes)
When we agree with the government action, it's easy to say "you owe the government, stop complaining." But this seems to me the wrong response.
Yes, but that's the strawman of the position, at least in the pharmaceutical case.
The pharmacy benefits from a monopoly not just in licensing the practice (one that wouldn't require stocking condoms any more than a license to open a clothing store means you have to carry my size) but in that in some small markets, there's no market pressure at all (there's only one pharmacy). I can't order drugs from Canada or from another pharmacy online. That's the relevant enforced monopoly, not the one requiring the license of pharmacists.
So it's not saying "we made this medical regulation and granted you a license, therefore you must dispense birth control", exactly. It's "we've made the business situation such that we've granted you a monopoly even against other pharmacists that do supply birth control." That's where I think indeed, the pharmacist is in a position of owing the government. But not due to the licensing, due to the artificial monopoly.
And the response to this is either require pharmacists to stock drugs, or let me buy my medication through Amazon.
236, 242: What Rawls said, and he got this right, is that property rights are part of the basic institutions of society and the question is whether those basic institutions are just. It follows pretty much right away that society has the right to limit property rights (and moderate taxes are a very limited limit) if such limitations would be just. It also follows that society has the right to limit free speech if such limitations would be just; but since they wouldn't be just, it doesn't have that right. We can argue about what would be just here, but we're just not going to get any arguments about taxation here. We can argue cases, of course, based on the effectiveness.
Also, without society itself we'd have what we have in the Hobbesian state of nature, viz. nothing (or: our bodies, for as long as we could keep them). This is what Rawls is getting at when he talks about society as a cooperative scheme or whatever phrase he uses. This doesn't mean that society has an unlimited claim on everything we have, because its claim is still limited by justice; but arguments against regulation based on the limited effectiveness of society won't get you very far in a well-ordered society.
As for the pharmacists: This seems like the same thing writ small. For whatever reason we've decided that pharmacists should have a government-granted monopoly. (It ain't "lowered competition.") Having set up that institution, why should we say that the government isn't allowed to regulate what the pharmacists do? Obviously we don't want to allow pharmacists to be able to refuse to fill prescriptions for Republicans because they hate Republicans and want them to die; or to refuse to fill prescriptions for AIDS medicines because AIDS patients ditto; in fact I think it should be a condition on being able to participate in this legal monopoly that pharmacists should fill any valid prescription, including those for birth control. If this represents too much intrusion into pharmacists' individual rights, maybe the institution of the legal monopoly is unjust. Or, if you don't want to have to fill prescriptions don't become a pharmacist.
(Note that this doesn't extend to stocking condoms. No government monopoly on sale of condoms.)
"Government monopoly" s/b "goverment-enforced monopoly," and anyway pwned by Cala.
The move that I find dubious is the one from a (stipulated positive) activity of government to a prima facie *moral* claim justifying exercise of government power.
I'm suspicious of strong claims of specific moral claims in either direction about government action. You can jerry-rig a justification for just about any government action. Cf. Padilla. Once you've decided the government can act in an arena, it's consequentialism all the way down. The moral claims seem to be simply a way of setting the intensity of certain default preferences.
250: My 'he' refers to apostropher, who wrote the post quoted in 245. I thought "the claim" in 245 meant apostropher's claim, but now that I reread it it meant "the claim that other people were making," so sorry for that misreading.
Matt, so long as your are willing to go with all rights (speech, our bodies, property) being of a piece and subject to abrogation, super. I am with you 100%. Or at least, I am 100% in approval of your intellectual consistency . I don't think, actually, that our rights are best construed as social institutions, I think they have pre-social moral force. And yes, I would argue self-ownership, and aspects of property rights are one such. That doesn't mean these rights are insurmountable, of course, and in any event it's a longer discussion for another time.
But on the practical application of this reasoning (and the pharmacist case), I want to hear more about what counts as a compelling concern of justice. For whatever reason -- probably old and odd ones, as you note -- we regulate pharmacists. So here's the question: why *should we* further constrain what they can do? Why should we make X is legal into X is mandatory in this case? Doesn't this just raise the stakes of political decision-making -- once something becomes permitted, you may be forced to do it? This seems like a bad idea absent urgent need. But your standard (at least with respect to the pharamcist case) appears to be convenience, or economic efficiency. That seems like a low hurdle for forcing people to do things they don't want to do.
probably old and odd ones, as you note
Hein? When did I say that?
Sorry, thought that was your implication of "for whatever reason" and "it ain't lowered competition". But retract, retract retract. Didn't mean to put words in your mouth.
As for all our rights being of a piece and subject to abrogation, I said society doesn't have the right to abrogate our freedom of speech; ditto for bodies, religion, all the usual basic liberties, Justice as Fairness has a pretty good list. I'd say that they have a moral force independent of which society you're in, and I think any society that doesn't respect them is thus morally wrong. But it seems as though discussion of your rights is most important with respect to society (perhaps microsociety as well as macrosociety), because that's where they get respected or violated. And I also think property rights are much more socially constructed than the others.
As for the pharmacist thing, I can't recognize anything I said in your paraphrase. I said that, since we grant pharmacists a monopoly on filling prescriptions, we can require them to fill all prescriptions. If a pharmacist won't fill your prescription, you won't get the medicine you need. Where did I mention convenience and economic efficiency? We regulate pharmacists because, as a profession, they play a certain important role, and a pharmacists who won't fill prescriptions isn't playing that role.
I'm not sure I'm interested in continuing this discussion.
Whoops, hadn't seen 258; by "for whatever reason" I meant "let's leave the reasons out of this," and "it ain't lowered competition" I meant "it ain't just lowered competition, it's a full-fledged monopoly."
That said, I still think the paraphrase in terms of convenience and economic efficiency is unfair, and I'm still not sure I'm interested in continuing this discussion, cause, y'know, I should be doing other things.
Ok, no need to continue. But I'll clarify anyway.
On the pharmacist, I just think you are reifying -- in basically exactly the way I fear -- if the gov't regulates X and gives people licenses we can (and should) require them to do everything that's legal. This seems to me a recipie for, as I said, increasing the stakes to political participation. And I really don't see why a gov't license to X should *only* mean the gov't can tell me what to do with respect to X. Why? Why can't the priviledge of participation in a regulated market carry some responsibilities not with respect to that market. E.g., if you dispense drugs, you're in the health business, sell condoms too. I don't see the moral case there, or even a practical one, for a bright line, unless the "practical" case is "because we're afraid the gov't will overstep, and we want to maximize personal liberty." In which case I say: exactly, and that same point flows back to "prescribe every legal drug."
When the government grants me a patent, it does so on condition that I file a detailed and publically accessible description of how my invention works, and also that I sell condoms.
Common carriers have to transmit signals without regard to their content, but correspondingly, they're protected from liability for that content, and also they must sell condoms.
262: I don't get your point, SB.
My right to swing my fist ends at the tip of your condom.
baa, I'll give you a more careful response later, but for now, I'm just going to say if the gov't regulates X and gives people licenses we can (and should) require them to do everything that's legal. while in the neighborhood of the maxim, isn't the maxim at work here and 'convenience' certainly isn't the primary concern.
In other words, a free torch is included with every bale of straw.
Busy today though.
I don't get your point, SB.
I'm ridiculing the idea that there's no practical case (from, say, relevance and proportionality) for limiting the scope of one's obligations incurred by prosecuting privilege X.
1) without public order we have nothing --> therefore therefore the mechanism that provides public order is primarily responsible for all gains in well-being (comment: how do we explain differential growth in places that both possess equal levels of public order?)
2) without public order we have nothing --> therefore therefore the mechanism that provides public order has an unlimited (or very strong) claim on our property (comment: maybe they have a claim on other rights of ours as well?)
Neither of these are what I'm saying. What I am saying is that without the governmental apparatus of the modern state we wouldn't have the modern state. Not "we'd have nothing." But basically, to use just one example, what property and money would be "yours" would be yours exclusively in terms of what you could physically protect--not because of lack of police protection (which wasn't really instituted in England, at least, until late in the 18th c, I believe), but because of things like contracts, laws, titles, deeds, and so forth. It would be impossible to have more than a cottage-industry level of business production, for instance. Anyway, so therefore the establishment of modern capitalist government is, yes, primarily responsible for modern well-being. Your comment, baa, is impossible to answer because such a situation doesn't exist: government regulation and laws and so forth do change locally, not to mention from nation to nation.
(2) Should be "without public order we would have nothing more than subsistence-level existence, therefore there is no such thing as "our" property in the purest sense." All property beyond that which I physically hold in my hands is, pretty much by definition, "property" only in the sense that there exists a conceptual apparatus to support it as such. Re. the comment, I would say that in fact "rights of ours" are, for the most part (I might even argue in all cases, though I'm not sure about this without thinking it through some more), like property, concepts that are constituted through governments. I'm quite willing to make normative claims about what rights people should have, and what rights I will argue people do have, simply as people (the most fundamental being bodily rights, inasmuch as simply being means being embodied), but as a bald statement of fact, we don't have any rights unless those rights are supported and enforced by the state.
Joy. A debate about libertarian philosophy.
I thought that we concluded that GB was fuckin prissy.
I'm more just wondering why the thread went on for another 60-odd comments after 199-201, which were pretty much definitive.
