Steve Den Beste had an interesting throwaway comment today. He said: "If you want a bigger pie you have to accept that it will be divided unevenly, because that is the incentive for making the pie bigger." This reminded me of something I've wanted to write about for some time: David Chandler's L-Curve site.
(For those who care, this appears to be neither David Chandler the liquid theorist nor David Chandler the physical chemist, nor David Chandler the management consultant.)
The implication of the "L-Curve" is that in the U.S., income is highly unequally distributed, and wealth even more so. Mr. Chandler uses a stark depiction of these facts to ask questions such as: "Can democracy meaningfully exist where the distribution of wealth, and thus the distribution of power, is this concentrated?"
But several questions are begged here. First is the obvious assumption that wealth and power are equivalent. I don't deny that there's some correlation between wealth and power, but I doubt it's linear. Even minimally wealthy people have basic civil rights, and extremely wealthy people are occasionally convicted of crimes and sent to prison (ask Michael Milken). Certainly there is value in being wealthy if you are going to be a criminal defendant (ask O.J. Simpson or John Walker Lindh), but even Mr. Chandler doesn't seem to argue that we've become a lawless society where the wealthy trample the poor.
A more interesting point is that Mr. Chandler doesn't provide the statistics on income distribution in any other nation. I doubt you'd see anything different anywhere in the world: in the capitalist "West" (say Germany, Japan, the U.K.), in South America or Africa, or in the few remaining allegedly Communist nations -- notably China. Perhaps in China you'd have to account for non-monetary perks specially, but I expect that you'd still find that there's a wealthy/privileged class and a mass class, which is the fundamental point ofthe article.
Even more interesting -- and much more disturbing -- is that Mr. Chandler seems to be seekinga a cure for the L-curve. "A truly democratic society needs to find ways to manage the economy to benefit the population as a whole. This is not being done." A truly democratic society can decide to take your popsicle away and split it into equal shares. This is not being done because we have property rights, a concept from English common law which Mr. Chandler may not be familiar with. I wonder how the inequity he describes could be cured without undermining one of the fundamental freedoms -- the right to property -- described in our founding documents. (In particular, the 5th Amendment states "No person .. shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law....")
Even if the government were to seriously attempt to remedy this inequity, and the Constitutional problems could somehow be overcome, I am convinced that it would be a bad idea to try. This is for the reason den Beste gives in the quote above: the only reason that there's a lot of wealth distributed unequally is that it's not possible to have a lot of wealth distributed equally. It's possible to have a little wealth distributed equally, but once you get past the point of bare survival, extra production will only happen with appropriate incentives. And the only incentive that appears to work is private property, i.e, "allowing" the producer to keep most of the fruits of his labor.
What is it? A convenient name for the union of current academic thought on a variety of subjects. John Fonte puts forward the name and gives the general summary. Steven Den Beste comments on Fonte's article: he finds it a good summary of a philosophy he disagrees with. Max Sawicky strikes back with something like a point-by-point commentary on the main points of the ascribed Transnational Progressivist philosophy.
Let's look at one such point/expansion/response set:
Fonte writes:
The Key Concepts of Transnational Progressivism(1) The ascribed group over the individual citizen
The key political unit is not the individual citizen who forms voluntary associations and works with fellow citizens regardless of race, sex, or national origin, but the ascriptive group (racial, ethnic, or gender) into which one is born. This emphasis on race, ethnicity, and gender leads to group consciousness and a de-emphasis of the individual’s capacity for choice and for transcendence of ascriptive categories, joining with others beyond the confines of social class, tribe, and gender to create a cohesive nation.
Den Beste expands on this:Groups are what matter, not people. You are "Black" or "Christian" or "Mexican" or "Afghan" or "Sunni", you are not yourself. You also don't get to choose your group; it's inherent in what you were when you were born. Someone else will categorize you into your group, and you will become a number, a body to count to decide how important that group is. And your group won't change during your lifetime.
Sawicky responds:"Groups are what matter, not people." Politics and public policy necessarily refers to groups. Governments don't construct a package of rights, responsibilities, benefits, and taxes for each individual separately. The interest in the sort of group that SDB names -- nationalities, ethnic groups, or religions -- stems from historic discrimination against them. Inveighing against groups is just another way of saying government ought not to do much. This would be a perfectly respectable position if it was presented forthrightly.
I believe that Sawicky is genuinely attempting to rebut Fonte and Steven Den Beste (see his whole post for full context), so I will take his words at face value.
Sawicky states without justification that "politics and public policy necessarily refer[] to groups". This is not, in fact, the case in the U.S. U.S. law governs individual behavior and provides for the punishment of individual lawbreakers; Group punishment is not allowed. Our governments (state and federal) may not "construct" "packages of rights" for any individual; but neither do they construct them for groups, because they guarantee the same rights to all.
The only time that I can think of that our laws refer to groups are in the cases of class actions and discrimination law, which I will take up separately.
A class action (defined here) allows the law to deal with a group of plaintiffs as a single plaintiff. However, in order to be a member of the class, you must be able to document that you suffered from the allegedly tortious behavior of the respondent. This is hardly a general use of group identity in our law or public policy, because group identity (in the sense that we're discussing, especially as described in the TP article) is external, ascribed, and fixed at birth (e.g., being Catholic), while membership in a lawsuit class depends on individual circumstances (e.g., working with asbestos insulation).
Sawicky claims that "The interest in the sort of group that SDB names -- nationalities, ethnic groups, or religions -- stems from historic discrimination against them". But in discrimination cases, the interpretation of the law usually used is the reverse of what Sawicky seems to claim. The "equal protection" clause of the 14th Amendment means precisely that you may not use group membership to discriminate. This is the classic case against Affirmative Action, and it's been the law of the land since the Bakke decision in 1978. Sawicky claims that group membership is important because of discrimination, but in our law, group membership is important only because it must explicitly be disregarded.
Ultimately -- and I know that this is a harsh judgment -- Sawicky appears in the quoted paragraph to be arguing not about what is, but rather about what he wishes were the case. He has accepted the ideas of the "left" (as he describes it) which den Beste calls Transnational Progressivism, and uses these ideas to claim that our politics and public policy refer to groups, even though our laws are neither written nor interpreted in this way.