Christopher St. Clair writes, in response to my post below, “Justice is no simple concept, and I am doubtful that a notion as transcendental as justice can ever be perfectly expressed within any given political system.” Why is justice “transcendental”? What does it transcend? If it transcends human understanding, then it would seem an unprofitable subject of discussion. But I suspect that justice does not transcend human understanding. Instead, I suspect that those who call it such do so as a means of disguising the injustices they wish to rationalize. Justice, in fact, has been the subject of extremely careful and precise thought over the years, and has been very effectively defined. “Justice is the constant and perpetual wish to render every one his due.” Justice is the outcome of a series of just acts. When, at the end of a sequence of acts, no wrong has been done by anyone to anyone, the outcome is just—even when that outcome is not “fair” or pleasant.
The problem arises when a person attempts to reconcile his desire to do wrong to innocent persons (i.e., to take from people things that they have earned) with his desire to “do justice.” Such a person is caught in a bind: how to say that it is wrong to harm an innocent person—but, then, at some times, okay to harm an innocent person. (At that point, the person will often try to fly to a higher strain by using a phrase like “social justice,” to distinguish what he’s talking about from actual justice.) But the fact is that inequality can be just. Any attempt to redefine justice as “fairness” or “equality” will result in contradiction—as well as other logical problems brilliantly charted by Anthony de Jasay in Justice And Its Surroundings.
“I fundamentally believe that social insurance policies are for the betterment of all,” writes St. Pierre. But his sincerity of belief is not in dispute. Nor, strictly speaking, is the effectiveness of “social insurance” policies—although these programs are virtually always ineffective, and work for the harm of those people they supposedly help. What is in dispute is whether these “policies”—i.e., taking away things that innocent persons have earned with their labor, to give those things to others—is just. St. Clair has acknowledged that it is contradictory to justice; yet he claims it is still just to deprive innocent persons of their earnings. Why? No rational reason is given: just an emotionalistic appeal for “the poor” and a lack of imagination. I find this unconvincing.
Interestingly, St. Clair earlier said that stealing things from people who earn them is justified only when another person is threatened with death. I challenged him on this point by asking if he really meant this limit—or if he also believed in, say, government funded education and shelter and clothing and so forth. Turns out he believes in all “social insurance policies.” That slope is awfully slippery to get from one point to the other so quickly!
“[I]n systems predicated on capitalism and free markets,” St. Clair continues, such “social insurance” policies are “virtually essential to give everyone their [sic] fair shake, something free markets alone cannot do.” But St. Clair has not established that the free market cannot give people a “fair shake.” He has acknowledged, I think, the unfairness inherent in stealing things people have earned to give them to others—something that would not occur in a free market. He has acknowledged that there is at least one human being in the world—himself, of course—who would contribute to charity on his own, if the regulatory welfare state did not do it for him; he has failed to establish that others are so morally inferior as to be insusceptible of the same impulse. He has not challenged the historical evidence that the freer market of the nineteenth century coincided with an unmatched wave of charitable activity. Yet he simply asserts that free markets can’t do the job—a job he has also failed to justify in moral terms—of paying the bills of people who fail to provide for themselves, and on that basis, seeks to rationalize a policy of stealing from people who earn an honest living, and giving the proceeds to those who do not.
On the basis of absolutely nothing, St. Clair concludes that libertarianism “has no place for providing for people in need.” But his system has no place for people who work hard to earn an honest living. His system is a system of people feeding off of one another, with those who work the hardest being punished the most, and those most skilled at “needing” getting the greatest rewards; a system in which politically motivated theft from hardworking laborers is excused on the basis that those laborers are “greedy beasts”—while those who hone their “needing” skills are helpless waifs who have fallen into the potholes along the way through no faults of their own. His is a system in which a person might say that “lacking strong protective measures, it is much easier to take wealth than it is to create wealth”—while at the same time choosing to take my wealth, rather than create his own. His is a system of perpetual injustice perpetrated in the name of some allegedly higher good. I don’t mind the perpetual injustice as much as the moral arrogance.
Meanwhile, Liberal Jesus has some questions. “If money can be created, why don’t we all have as much money as we want?” This is a very strange question. The ability to create is indefinite, but obviously not infinite, and not instantaneous. All economic activity is tradeoffs. I can create coffee, by using a coffee maker, but it takes time and work, so I don’t have as much coffee as I want. But if I were to consult only what I want, rather than what I am willing to work for, then the result would be incomprehensible; mere desires are infinite. Wealth creation is a tradeoff of labor for profit, which (fortunately) puts limits on how much activity occurs.
“And why do whites have proportionally more money than blacks?” Well, there are many causes for this: the cultural legacies of slavery and Jim Crow; educational differences; the minimum wage; the drug war; the regulatory welfare state—and so forth. Liberal Jesus says “I suspect that Sandefur would attempt to explain this disparity based on virtue.” Well, that is certainly true of many cases. In many other cases, it is not. Imagining that “true freedom” will result in equality of outcome is unfounded, and absurd, and reflects sloppy thinking about freedom and justice. The question is not whether a richer man has more money than a poor man, but whether they each are secure in what they have justly attained.
“[O]ur current distribution of resources has little to do with virtue and more to do with the fact that you must have resources to get resources,” he continues. Unfortunately, that is true—but it is largely the fault of the regulatory welfare state.
Look, here’s how capitalism works: some people have more money than they need—vastly more money. This is the “surplus wealth” that collectivists complain about, but is the indispensable ignition switch of the economic engine. Without it, we will all starve. The wealthy man does not use all of this surplus—he couldn’t possibly. Rather, he invests it. Some invest it in safe things, by buying gold. But others, who are smarter, invest it in up-and-coming businesses; new ideas; entrepreneurs. They buy into IPOs and provide the start-up capital for new businesses. In exchange for these loans, they reap an even greater profit when the business succeeds—i.e., the rich get richer.
But who are these entrepreneurs who come up with these new ideas? And who does the actual work? It is here that the poorer man has an opportunity. A poor man with an idea pitches his idea to the greedy capitalist, and asks for investment. If the capitalist thinks the idea is worth trying, he invests, and the business starts. The poor man now runs a business for which he needs labor, and he hires his poor friends. The company prospers, and now the poor man is a middle class man, with money of his own to invest.
This is a cartoon version of economic activity in the free market, and obviously the reality is far more complicated, but it is an accurate outline. In the free market, as in all human endeavor, one must “have resources to get resources”—that is, you must earn your bread from the sweat of your face. But the regulatory welfare state deters this activity by limiting the available capital (through “taxing the rich,” &c.) and punishing successful companies. That deters investment, slows job creation, and stifles economic growth—all in the name of helping the poor! But you cannot help the poor by making their jobs illegal or their needs more expensive.
Liberal Jesus, however, clings to the notion that a free market is somehow incapable of what I have just described: “Pure capitalism is oppressive because it excludes the poor from the market based on factors that are beyond their control. In particular, it excludes them based on poor schooling, bad family life, skin color, weak social connections, and lack of capital. People with mental and physical disabilities are also marginalized.” How is any of this any less true of the regulatory welfare state? We today live in a county in which even the most minute economic activity is subject to countless federal and state regulations and taxes; in which redistribution of wealth takes place on a scale unprecedented in human history—a nation so devoted to stealing from the successful and rewarding failure that the government routinely loses billions of dollars; as Matthew Lesko is fond of reminding us, there is a surplus of handouts just waiting for mendicants. We have minimum wages, coercive government-run education, WIC, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, free housing, free clothing, free college scholarships and day care for the poor. And yet American daily life continues to exclude people due to poor schooling, bad family life, skin color, and so forth. Nor have even less free nations demonstrated a decreased susceptibility to these social ills. They are therefore not the fault of the free market.
Indeed, a very strong case can be made that most of these things would be substantially decreased in a freer market. Racism, for example, is very unprofitable. A capitalist in the basketball business would do very poorly if he refused to hire black employees. Any manager who refused to hire, say, Robert L. Johnson, William Mays, or Barbara Manzi, would soon find himself losing to the competition. And people with disabilities will always find life more challenging than those without; but are they better off in a country with less wealth, or with more? Are they better off in a place where they have an opportunity to create a business and create jobs, or where they must depend on the favors of politically-minded bureaucracies? I think the folks at The DisAbled Entrepreneur would have something to say about that.
I thank Liberal Jesus for what is obviously an honest attempt to understand my point of view and share his own. It’s refreshing. But we must all take care not to try to imagine that there can be some perfect system—let alone, that a perfect system can be established by violating the rights of people. Schemes for redistributing wealth to accomplish “fairness” are as old as human history, and they have never—and can never—“work,” if by “work” we mean, making the poor better off. Aristotle writes,
Such legislation may have a specious appearance of benevolence; men readily listen to it, and are easily induced to believe that in some wonderful manner everybody will become everybody's friend, especially when some one is heard denouncing the evils now existing in states, suits about contracts, convictions for perjury, flatteries of rich men and the like, which are said to arise out of the possession of private property. These evils, however, are due to a very different cause—the wickedness of human nature. Indeed, we see that there is much more quarrelling among those who have all things in common, though there are not many of them when compared with the vast numbers who have private property.
More importantly, our moral focus must not be on whether the economic outcome is in keeping with our emotionalistic desires. Our focus must instead be on justice—on securing to each person that which is his own, and not depriving anyone of the justly acquired fruits of his labors. “[T]hat alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.” If a person works hard and comes up with clever ideas, he ought to be rewarded; he deserves his paycheck. If a person fails to provide for himself, or refuses to work, or takes failure as an excuse for giving up, or allows others’ wickedness to defeat him, he should not be rewarded. And under no circumstances must we adopt the notion that I owe another person the fruits of my labor. Each of us has the right to live for his own sake, and not as a tool to serve others.
Comments policy