The talking heads have been bloviating for decades now about the function of government vis a vis a so-called Welfare State. The Right claims that having the government “take care of” people is a violation of the American tradition of independence and self-reliance and will sap our resources, both fiscal and moral. The Left has argued that such government programs are there to protect people who have few resources from the depredations of the wealthy and an economy that fluctuates as a normal element of its functioning and that it is the responsibility of the better-off to aid those who are left without recourse in such a system.
That’s the basics of the debate. The Right says no, people should look out for themselves. The Left says many people can’t and it isn’t right to let them starve in the streets. The Right says it has no desire to see anyone starve in the streets but rejects the idea that others are responsible for the perhaps bad choices of individuals who have been unable to take advantage of an open system. The Left counters by pointing out the system is not as open as the Right believes and built in to its workings is the inevitability that a certain number of people simply won’t be able to participate. Even if the Right then agrees, they assert that it is not the job of the State, using tax payer money, to off-set this imbalance. The Left says it is if people vote for it and even if they don’t there’s a moral imperative involved. The Right counters that the State is not the instrument for pursuing moral imperatives.
Well.
Let me be up front here—I think the Right has it wrong. They base their philosophy, if that’s what it is, on an idea of equality that is unsupportable. In the narrowest sense, they argue that our system is open to the extent that everyone has an equal shot at some measure of success and if they fail it is either because they were lazy, foolish, or unlucky. The government can functionally do nothing about any of that.
The argument falls apart on its face. Equality in this country is a principle concerning representation before the State. The State in this sense is the community as a whole, both public and private. The ideas that we are not born to a Station in life which determines at the outset how far an individual might go through his or her own efforts. It was never intended as an assessment of talent or a measure of will or a guarantee of achievement. It is only a promise of access. Because people are not equal as individuals.
They aren’t and there’s not much point in arguing about it. Intelligence, physical attributes, proclivities, all these things vary widely throughout any population group and to argue that, if somehow we could take away all social obstacles, everyone would be exactly the same is absurd.
The Right seems to argue that because this is true, the rest of us have no responsibility for the fundamentally unequal achievements of any one, or group of, individual.  They discount social obstacles. Not completely, because when an individual rises above a certain level, reaches the precincts of success, and has done so from straitened beginnings, many on the Right like to point to that individual as an exemplar of succeeding in spite of the circumstances of his or her life. So there is a tacit recognition that social conditions matter, but only as an ennobling aspect to a Horatio Alger story. The question really is why those conditions keep so many others down, but that, as much as the successful individual’s achievement is credited to personal qualities, is a matter of personal failure, not attributable to anyone else.
Which seems to make success and failure a matter of choice. Exclusively. Ergo, the tax payer, through the medium of the State, has no responsibility for such failures.
This can only be true if the assertion of equality is true as an innate quality.
The reality is quite different. Opportunity is not equally distributed. It depends on where you are born, where you go to school (if you go to school), who your friends are, your religion, your ethnic group, your gender, your health, the laws in place in your community, the local economics, how much money your parents have, local environmental conditions. What you are able to do is determined as much if not more by those parts of your life in which you have no say whatsoever as any kind of innate ability, quality of mind, or willful intention.
Yes, there are many examples of individuals born into situations which would seem to guarantee failure who succeed. They are remarkable and should be recognized. But the Right has elected to see them as the normative factor rather than the vaster numbers of those from the same background who did not succeed. Why? They claim that the exceptional is the nominal and blame the true nominal conditions on personal failure on the part of all those who are not exceptional, then defend a status quo in which no community responsibility is justified to address the conditions which act as both barriers and weights on people left behind by the exceptional.
Why?
One argument put forward is that the tax burden to redress social conditions is onerous and ends up punishing success. But this argument only has merit if the individual so encumbered has no obligation to the community that allowed his or her success. This leads us to a further statement, Libertarian in nature, that says personal achievement does, in fact, owe nothing to the community, that simply the decision to act is something unique and the effort to succeed is separate from anything the community may provide or contribute, making the successful entrepreneur, for instance, a completely self-made individual.
If true, then morally the argument is sound. That individual could claim that what he or she has made has been made entirely apart from the community, that the community then takes advantage of that work and therefore owes the builder, and the builder owes nothing in return. Certainly not to those who failed to achieve on their own.
This is sophomoric philosophy at best, the credo of selfish people.
Why?
I’ll let this stand for a few days for anyone who might read it to mull over. Comments are welcome.
Let’s not forget the United States Caste system, where something like 97 or 8% of all people remain in the same economic class they are born into. That alone speaks volumes about this self-serving delusion that people have equal opportunity and only if they just would try hard enough they would be a millionaire.
Let us not forget that in our country the government largely works to promote and protect the interests of the rich and powerful. It had been this way since the country’s founding. Not only is it not a level playing field; the government is actively working against the interests of the majority of citizens and for big business and the wealthiest one percent. Case in point: no cut in teacher salaries would be needed in Wisconsin if the governor had not given massive tax breaks to the already-wealthy under the excuse of “promoting business.” This is what “conservatives” stand for–making the rich richer and the poor poorer. So the argument that we all ought to be able to achieve is hollow at the start.
Carolyn,
Spot on. I’ll be getting to that in the next couple of installments. But that this is what happens is the case doesn’t interest me so much as why and how the very people who are victimized by this often support exactly such action.