I here repeat Churchill's paradox. Private property is the worst all systems. The problem is there is no other one that can do better. -Zizek
Let's examine this for a bit, because I certainly agree with Zizek's sentiment here. I believe that the maxim, "To each according his need, from each according to his ability" is certainly a great ideal, but it just plain utopian. After years of political philosophy and intellectual pondering, the single most overwhelming conclusion to come out of my studies was that the utopian state was destined to create the opposite. Whether it was Lenin in "State and Revolution" theorizing the withering away of the state to the absolute justice of the worker's state as the Vanguard of the revolution quietly ducked out (yeah, right), Thomas More's impossibly confining "Utopia," or Plato's "Republic," the concept of the perfectly just society is simply impossible and is a severe misreading of human nature. If we have learned a few things about the human soul, I would say two of the key maxims would be that "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" and that if you want to create behavior, you must incentivize it. Human beings are at the most basic level driven by the instinctual and evolutionary focus on self-interest, which ultimately results in self-preservation and survival.
The precise moment that one believes that they can tame or retrain these instincts, mold behavior through education, or convince society to behave as one will is the moment that one sows the seed his failures. Countless iterations of communism and various utopian ideals have failed -- including the anarchy that mimics the very chaos that caused the need for the security a social contract in the most fundamental Hobbesian sense. Society needs conflicting wills to balance each other out because they will never truely be aligned.
Madison, writing in Federalist #51 (oh God did I go to CMC), wrote: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."
Madison, learning from the failures of direct democracies in Greece and the inability for utopia to take hold in society, realizes that the only successful governments and thus
societies are ones that rely on checks and balances at all levels and trusts no one. The American government is based on the idea that politicians will be corrupt, men are flawed, and that by having factions cancel each other out society can progress. Sure, in certain eras the Zeitgeist of the people has taken the government in negative directions, but the overall Hegelian motion of history has shown that the United States has progressed in reason, human rights, and has generally learned from its mistakes. Maybe the US has shat on Washington's parting advice of advocating neutrality and is a top candidate to go the way of the Roman Empire, but the US has been a model in the way it has dealt with human nature and is a MODEL for all democracies. Regardless of whether or not you seriously believe in the current state of the union, the philosophy of the founding fathers and the Constitution is certainly not the flaw here.
Where in God's name do you get to private property? You may be asking yourself this question (it's fair) and I must respond in the most roundabout possible way. Private property is the same conclusions about human nature applied economically. We could hope that people would be less selfish here than in government, but evidence has shown that people are more selfish here. In situations where the incentive to produce drops, amazingly so does production. When one is guaranteed a salary regardless of performance, why work hard? The market does an incredible job of allocating resources, rewarding efficient behavior, and through its meritocracy assigning people to where they are most valuable. It's not flawless and lacks the ability to self-regulate in a depression (thanks Mr. Keynes), but I am not advocating a laissez-faire economy (and neither should anyone else). Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek, two of the most celebrated and cited free market economists, both believed in a social safety net.
The knock on capitalism is the inequality of wealth, and it's a hard one to dispute. There will be Bill Gates in a capitalist society, but everyone will be better overall. Society can never plan supply and demand the way a market naturally does it and the overall progress of a society is almost always stunted by a planned economy. You have to buy the maxim that a rising tide brings up all the ships (that is horribly misquoted). However, I believe that while capitalism is the best because it accounts for human nature, is relatively self-policing (but don't get me started on these mega-inefficient super corporations), and is the only system that works (seriously, I stand by this, show me something that works better; free-market economies will have a 100% saturation rate in the next 200 years), it is not sufficient on its own.
As I hinted at before, capitalism has an inability to get itself out of a depression and needs government help as well as regulation at times, but it also by definition creates haves and have nots. The extreme poor, the minimum number of unemployed, and those whose skills do not fit into a capitalist economy well will always exist in this system, it is inevitable. I read a Buddhist economist (I really wish I remembered who) who believed in the market but asserted the absolute predictability of these conditions require capitalism to fix them. If you are consciously creating a group of people who will be unable to survive, you are ethically required to help them. I would advocate strong economic incentives in the process, but I would have the economy support homeless shelters, unemployment (but properly thought out and incentivized), but most importantly focus on maximizing equality of opportunity. Because not everyone can have the advantage of college educated parents prodding them in the right direction, governments need to focus on the root of the problem by developing better schools, better scholarships and college programs for the poor, and focusing on job skills and marketable ones post-college for people. I know it sounds cheesy, but if you give a man a fish... is absolutely true here. Yes, there are still people who will bottom out, which will not be avoidable, but you can minimize and still support that number with the proper incentive structure.
Essentially, capitalism may be flawed, but it cannot be topped currently in the marketplace of ideas, so we're stuck. We must equalize the opportunity as much as possible, but not confuse that for equality of conditions. One is oppressive, the other is just. Let people fend for themselves, but let them be well-equipped to do so.
I don't have a 10 point plan or anything, but these are my thoughts. I'd like some feedback, please leave a comment if you have any.
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Excellent post, Craig. While I agree with everything you've written here, I comment to add a few supplementary arguments that you may have discounted for the sake of argument.
Regarding the impossibility of utopia, I couldn't agree more, but this result may come from an almost tautological set of presumptions about the definition of either happiness or utopia. The literature on utopia characterizes each proposed model system as a carefully planned society, arranged to meet some "perfect" ideals that have been put forth by the thinker. Given that individual conceptions of happiness, virtue, and the good life in general inherently differ, anyone who disagrees with the presupposed ideals will find the society unsatisfying. Indeed, Plato's Republic is meant to evoke visceral disagreement at many of its suggestions--the communal raising of children comes to mind. Such tension was intentionally created by Plato to expand on his theme of the incompatibility of pure philosophy and politics (given that the former deals with "eternal things" and the latter deals exclusively with "the particular"). Of course, the best evidence that this Plato's central thesis is the death of Socrates; Plato characterizes Socrates' well-known political sedition (which went far beyond "subverting the Athenian youth") as a witch hunt, in which Socrates valiantly chooses martyrdom instead of compromising with the political demands of the mob. All of this is to say that most philosophers have historically had this professional bias against the concept of utopia, since the political changes required to arrive at utopia are laughably implausible without a significant change in human nature, as even Marx knew. Political philosophers since Hobbes (and especially the positivists) have believed that they could reconcile the two, but the mere fact that almost none of these suggestions have ever been wholly implemented reinforces the compromising nature of politics.
Of course, the main advance from this standstill in utopia theory was Rawls. The idea of a dynamic definition of a utopia, based specifically on liberal respect for the inevitability of differences in perspective, represents a significant reconciliation between the tensions you talk about--and of course it justifies the system that you and Rawls both find inevitably necessary. Hegelian liberals would approve.
I would also suggest the possibility of an ex ante moral justification for private property, without having to rely on human nature's need for incentives as an ex post justification, which was uncoincidentally the foundation for the United States' political philosophy. Though Locke is often remembered for his more political concepts of essentially liberal democracy, the foundation for these ideas is Locke's theory of property. His first postulate is that humans have property in themselves, and property in the derivative products of themselves (i.e., their labor). The second is that in the state of nature, no one has any rights to anything other than themselves. However, as soon as humans "mix their labor" with other objects in nature, they have created a right to "property." The same result is reached in the common law, where the concept is typically described as "the right of first capture," suggesting that the person with the best claim to some object is necessarily the person who first mixed his labor with that resource. Locke's theory posits both a positive moral right to possess private property, which still preserves the concept of incentives, albeit in a much less pessimistic and controlling frame of mind. Indeed, Rand (whether she admitted to it or not) reveled in industrial and engineering marvels because they represent an apex in the capabilities of human labor vis -a-vis our surroundings, all guided by the positive incentives to "capture."
Of course, the concept of first capture is connected to the bleaker assessment of human nature by way of Darwinian competition and sexual selection, as eloquently articulated by Schopenhauer, whereby all of human action is a byproduct of the urge to survive. On that level, your analysis is perfect. If we do not take account of the core truths of human nature, we are bound to create systems that will fail. Indeed, this suggests that the only feasible systems are those that are dynamic enough to accommodate human dynamism (see the Federalists--yes, I too went to CMC).
And now that I have done all my writing for the day, I'm going to start working on my own blog.
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