The story of the past quarter-century ? a convenient starting marker would be the election of Margaret Thatcher on May 3, 1979 [footnote omitted] ? has been the triumph of what is loosely called neoliberalism, a belief in open markets with minimal restraints on trade between nations, free movements of peoples, and the dismantling of huge state-owned enterprises and regulatory bodies. This has been a very wonderful thing, and I shouldn't like to leave you with any misunderstanding as to how I feel about it. I am old enough to remember the previous regime, at least in England, and believe me, neoliberalism is way better than what went before.I very much like John Derbyshire. His occassional essays for National Review and NRO are pithy and even elegant. His Calvin Coolidge novel is excellent. I very much want to read his mathematics book, though I have no interest in the subject matter. When it comes to the beauty of of prime numbers, I am as a blind man in a convention of the deaf.
As is the nature of all human things, though, the new synthesis has generated a new antithesis. Neoliberalism has its dark side. When neoliberalism was first promoted in China by Deng Xiaoping, it was launched with the slogan: "To get rich is glorious!" So, indeed, it must have seemed to the cowed, brutalized survivors of Mao Tse-tung's 30-year experiment in egalitarian communism. And so it is: Personal wealth produces a great deal of vulgar display and vapid hedonism, but it also patronizes great art, gives the leisure for public service, and supplies the wherewithal for works of charity.
The dark side of neoliberalism is inequality. Every country that has embraced the new order has seen the gap between rich and poor grow wider. Not all of us have entrepreneurial talents; not all of us ? very few of us, in fact ? have the ability to get rich. Now of course, a rising tide lifts all boats, and the neoliberal order has blessed not only those who enriched themselves, but hundreds of millions of others, too. Not only has it lifted us up, it has supplied us with a plethora of goods and services that did not exist 30 years ago, and that would never have been brought into existence by any state-managed bureaucracy, or any Dictatorship of the Proletariat, or any of those labor-industry-government partnerships so fondly imagined by leftist economists of the 1970s.
But what the heck is he talking about. He doesn't want us to mistake his love of neoliberalism, one of the crowning achievements of which is the free movement of people. Well, gee, John, how could we have come to make that mistake? (Tangentially, hasn't it been fun these last few weeks to watch NRO lambast the President for his immigration plan, on the one hand, and argue that conservatives must support him, on the other?)
Like many conservatives, Mr. Derbyshire is uncomfortable with democratic capitalism. In this, his name is nicely poetic. Like Tolkien, he harks back wistfully to the way things (never) were when happy little Englanders lived their preindustrial lives like the hobbits in their Shire. It's too bad, we can hear him grumble, that freedom leads inexorably to Donald Trump. And, of course, it is unfortunate, but would he be any happier if he as carefully watched how any of us spend our money. For that matter, do conservatives really like to see more money being frittered away on modern art, or the hallways of power being stocked with the leisured rich, or the creation of more mega-foundations, spending the wealth of the Fords, Rockefellers and Carnegies? Have we all become such socialists that we take for granted our right to an opinion on what other people do with their property?
If so, we should be sobered by Mr. Derbyshire's timely demonstration of where this notion leads as he attacks neoliberalism's downside: income inequality. First, says who? In the United States at the moment, income inequality is largely, though apparently not solely, caused by immigration. [The preceding sentence was changed. See the comments. DGC] We're importing poor people, because we're just not making any of our own, any more. The rich certainly are richer than they've ever been, but so are the poor. I doubt that he would argue that actual economic inequality is greater in the West than it was under Communism. Second, so what? Income equality isn't a good thing. Depending upon how ruthless the government is, it is either a pipe dream or the excuse for great evil. If political rights belong to everyone equally, why does "justice" have anything to say about the distribution of income (not wealth, by the way) at some particular point in time. I've never been poorer than when I was in college, but any compassion spent on me then would have been wasted.
Freedom is freedom; the idea that it should be curtailed if we don't like where people choose to go led to the worst of the last century. This is where Mr. Derbyshire goes wrong. He implicitly accepts the centrality of the state in modern life. Our safeguard from excess and depravity is not the state, but can only be a culture that rejects excess and depravity. Political freedom can only survive if the greater nation, expressing itself not through the police or regulation, but through censure and shame, limits our choices by limiting what we choose, not what we are free to choose. The alternative is the freedom of license, which, damaging in itself, will be followed by repression.
Thus, the importance of religion in the United States. Religion says that the rich man and the poor man are equal in the sight of G-d. From this flows our idea of the importance of political equality. Religion says that man has been given free will and can use it even to disobey his Creator. From this flows our idea of freedom. Religion says that man has an inherent dignity. From this flows our idea of inalienable rights. Religion says that man is imperfect and not perfectable. From this flows our idea of limited government and our skepticism of efficient government.
Liberals often ask what is it that conservatives wish to conserve? It is this culture, which teaches that the measure of a man is how he acts, not what he earns or buys.
2 comments:
There's actually very little income inequality in America, if we compare apples to apples, as you allude to in your line about being a starving student.
I've written quite a bit about this topic, so if anyone cares I can post the essays and links to supporting docs, but essentially, using U.S. Census Bureau and Dept. of Labor statistics, we can see that if we exclude the bottom 20% of American households and the top 5%, in terms of income, the 75% of American households that remain have an income ratio of only 1:8 betwixt the very lowest and the most high. That's not bad at all.
Further, among those households headed by a person who was employed full-time for at least six months out of the year, excluding again the lowest 20% and highest 5%, the income ratio for the remaining 75% was a startlingly tiny 1:4.5.
That's practically Communism.
Also, as one might expect, those under the age of 25 are greatly over-represented in the bottom two income quintiles. Most of them don't stay poor or near-poor.
Also over-represented in the bottom two quintiles are the retired, for whom a low income may not be a problem. They often have low housing costs, owning their homes free and clear, and often substantial savings and other assets to draw from, if need be.
Now, although I see nothing whatsoever in the above to be alarmed about, it could still be a problem if there were little income inequality, but almost everyone made slave wages, and the top 5% were plutocrats.
However, that's not the case either. The median American household has an income of $ 55,000/yr, and doesn't live in a high-cost-of-living area, such as Cali, Jersey, NYC and tri-state metro area, or Seattle/Tacoma. 80% of American household have incomes of above $ 19,000/yr, which at the low end is not the lap of luxury, but neither is it near-starvation.
Meanwhile, although America's minting new millionaires faster than ever, 90% of American millionaire households have a net worth of $ 3 million or less, and typically the bulk of their wealth is in the form of a house or small business. They don't have staggeringly large incomes.
So, although we should continue to work on helping people avoid or get out of poverty, to address that bottom income quintile, the overwhelming majority of Americans have extremely egalitarian incomes, with full-time-earner household income equality being quite similar to the distribution ratios for the whole of Swedish society.
Oro: That's great. Thanks. And when you figure that a large number of people in the lowest quintile are immigrants (legal and illegal) who chose to come here because even being in the lowest quintile in America is better off than being in their home countries, you really come back with nothing much to worry about. America has quintiles, not classes.
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