We left off with the Right wing idea that creative individuals owe the community nothing. By creative here, I refer to builders—industrialists, bankers, corporate giants, what in an earlier age might have been called Robber Barons. (I said in the first post that I have a point of view and a critique, that this would not be an unbiased set of posts.) I characterized this as sophomoric. It is, in fact, best codified by the writings of Ayn Rand, who wrote some interesting novels and a great deal of philosophical defense of greed. Rand is a hero to those who wish to see themselves as above it all, apart from the masses, a singular individual with gifts and abilities far beyond those of mortal men…
Forgive me, the temptation to hyperbole was irresistible. I have no illusions, however, that very many people on the Right will bother to read this. If they read the first one, they will likely have decided where my leanings are and that reading further would be a waste of their valuable time. They would be wrong, on both counts. They really would not know what my leanings are and I suspect anything that even by a smidgen opens someone to the possibility of a new point of view is a total waste of time.
Please note, I have been using the term Right in discussing certain folks, because I genuinely believe that there is a conservative viewpoint that is perfectly valid and important to the political discourse. We need both voices. But the voice on the Right of late has not been the voice of conservatism except by accident. I’ll get back to that, probably in a later post.
The basic argument of autonomy in these instances runs this way: “I took it upon myself to develop, create, and build something which did not exist before and which has been found useful by others. Had I not built it, it would not exist. The community did not build it, did not hire me to build it, did not even suggest it. I built it, therefore I can claim sole authorship and the benefits to be derived from what use the community makes of it morally devolve to me. Having built it, I offered it to others for a price. If they did not want it, found it not worthwhile, they had the freedom to ignore it, to not pay me, and I would have had to go elsewhere or do something else for compensation. I owe them no more than the work itself, for which they compensate me in an arrangement devised to our mutual benefit. Beyond the price of my services, and the requirement that I provide said service/product at that price, I owe nothing further.”
In this way, the individual entrepreneur justifies his or her anger and displeasure over taxation or other community “interferences” with his or her business. In this view, the individual and the community are like two separate island-states, negotiating over a specific resource, the one providing it, the other paying for it. In this scenario, it is absurd for the community island to lay a burden on the individual island for anything not having to do directly with the product being offered, i.e. a widget.
Simple. Actually, simplistic. It ignores everything to do with how the entrepreneur reached the point of being able to create the widget and offer it for sale and it ignores everything that happens after the widget becomes part of the daily life of both the community and the individual. It treats the construction of the business—a notable achievement, not to be undervalued—as an event which occurs in isolation from the world in which it seeks to exist.
Functionally, this description of the entrepreneur is closer to Robinson Crusoe than Bill Gates. If you go off to a spot of land all by yourself and with your own hands build your home, grow your food, make your own clothes, and take care of your own needs with what is available to hand, then you can make a decent argument that you are the sole creator of your life’s work. But that requires you to be a bit of hermit and that’s where the similarities break down altogether.
We don’t do anything without the work of other people being involved, to greater or lesser degrees. But more importantly, we have no possibility of doing something like building a business without work already in place done by thousands if not millions of people we don’t know but on whom we will depend for any kind of success we might desire. And I am not talking about the simple metric of The Market.
At its most basic, the community has provided the builder with a place and a circumstance in which what has been built has meaning. The community allows it to exist, makes use of it after its built, probably provides assistance in the building, and then guarantees that you may benefit from what you’ve built in ways that make it worth while. I’m not talking about money, although that’s part of it. What good is the most beautiful bridge in the world if no one wants to cross it? Or there’s nowhere to go once you do cross it? Without that community, be it a neighborhood, a village, town, city, or country, what Robinson Crusoe might want to build has no meaning other than to himself and even that, probably, not for very long.
The Right seems to be trying to assert the Robinson Crusoe argument of entrepreneurship, as if that community is irrelevant. More precisely, they act as if everyone in a community is just another Robinson Crusoe, doing their own thing for their own reasons, regardless of any connections to anyone else. By making the argument that “What I’ve built is mine! Just like whatever you build is yours! You have no right to what’s mine!” they are trying to put forward a model of human relations that would make everyone their own little state and everything they do is subject to contract negotiations with everyone else around them. It reduces responsibility to a matter of terms rather than a dynamic and strips everyone of any moral connection with anyone else.
This is not to claim that individuals cannot be abused and overburdened by the community. An obverse claim that the individual does nothing and can claim nothing of his or her own has many examples throughout history and can extend so far as to claim that there is no such thing as The Individual. This is idiocy in the other direction, but I hesitate to say it is to the Left, at least not anymore.
The shifting context of what we label Left or Right can be baffling when the history is examined. At a time when “conservative” or Right Wing politics rested squarely with The State, Leftist ideology was squarely in support of the individual in opposition to the status quo—which makes the American Revolution appear to be a Leftist event. Individual freedoms were part of the goal sought by the rebels and the cause for the drafting of the Bill of Rights.  It needs to be remembered that during the Constitutional Convention, a vote of ten to zero defeated a proposal to appoint a committee to draft exactly such a bill. Federalists opposed specifying individual rights and it emerged that this action became the single largest barrier to ratification. Federalists maintained that a Bill of Rights was unnecessary because the only powers delegated to the federal government would not threaten liberties. They further argued that an incomplete Bill of Rights would be dangerous because it would imply the abandonment of liberties not listed. (Hence the inclusion of the Ninth Amendment, which is often troublesome, often ignored.) Despite their opposition, in order to achieve ratification a promise that the first congress would take up the matter was made.
Most Federalists ran for office in opposition to a Bill of Rights. The pattern was therefore set early on that the national government tended to be oppressive of individual liberties, even though by the mid 20th Century this was clearly not the case as the federal government became the guarantor of personal freedoms in the face of local violations and oppressions.
However, the Federalist opposition to a Bill of Rights sheds light on another trend in our history that is today manifesting itself mightily, and that is the arrogation of privilege to a select group of self-appointed “true” citizens. We can see this most clearly in an event that almost toppled President Washington’s image and nearly split the country. The Whiskey Rebellion is one of the first and most often misunderstood challenges to aggregate authority and underscores everything that followed pertaining to individual liberties versus collective power—but furthermore anchors the trend toward separating out people who “mattered” from those who don’t. I’ll get to that next time.
