The U.S. seems to me to be in a peculiar and schizoid place with respect to its purported cultural values. On the one hand, the importance of personal responsibility is touted. Typically the personal responsibility meme is laid against the tableau of meritocracy. The notion being that the U.S. is a meritocracy; therefore, personal responsibility is of the highest value since the only way a meritocracy can work is if individuals are allowed to achieve or fail according to their abilities and efforts. This personal responsibility/meritocracy notion squares with the historical antipathy Americans have outwardly expressed toward monarchy and aristocracy. Obviously the aristocratic form of social organization is antithetic to the meritocratic vision because it places birthright above ingenuity.
On the other hand, many public policies that provide a mechanism for ensuring that the U.S. remains (at least in name) a meritocracy are derided as unfairly punishing the successful among us. The estate tax is an example. The very persons who fetishize personal responsibility are often the same ones that decry the estate tax, which they inartfully call the "death tax." The idea behind the estate tax, aside from producing revenue for the government, is to prevent the establishment of a landed gentry of sorts in the U.S. The notion that individuals should be responsible for their achievement has long been a staple of American ideology. The estate tax furthers this idea by attempting to prevent the intergenerational transfer of wealth from becoming the de facto method of achieving success. If Henry Ford built an automobile empire through his ingenuity and efforts, shouldn't the path be cleared for other persons of equal ingenuity and effort be given an open playing field in which they can parlay their ingenuity and efforts into similar success rather than allowing the children of Henry Ford to reap the benefits of their father's individual efforts without having to match the efforts themselves? If no policy exists to make the intergenerational transfer of wealth more difficult, then the meritocracy will be diminished and in its place an inherited aristocracy will arise. The space available for individuals who have not inherited wealth to build their own corporate empires will be diminished.
The difference in attitudes person's have toward their families versus public policy in the abstract explain the schizoid views to a point. Anyone who has had a child understands that when a stated policy preference will have a specific negative effect on his or her child, he or she will almost always choose the interests of the child over the policy preference. Frankly, this is how society should work as long as the family remains the basic unit of social organization. The same logic applies to the estate tax: it makes perfect sense that persons who are able to give an inheritance to their children will want to do so with the least encumbrance possible. Parents are supposed to take care of their children.
However, the individual case should not determine the general. The estate tax is designed so that only estates considered large will be taxed. The threshold for taxation is intentionally set by policy makers at a level that should not prevent persons from taking care of their offspring through the mechanism of inheritance. The threshold for taxation is intended to be set at a point where an estate is large enough that its unencumbered transfer will do more than take care of the kids. The policy behind the tax is that we should not allow so much wealth to be transferred that the beneficiaries will be able to remove themselves from the productive economy. In essence, we have the tax so we do not have a class of individuals who are positioned at the highest reaches of success without having made an individual contribution to that success. In plain English, we want persons to be responsible for their own success.
Much of the demonization of the estate tax is a chimera anyway. If one has enormous wealth, the estate tax will not prevent that person from leaving enough behind so his or her children will never have to be productive members of the economy. The scions of the enormously wealthy will never have to work if their deceased parents do not want them to. Let's face it: if Steve Jobs leaves the bulk of his estate to his family, even if the maximum estate tax is applied and the estate has no mechanism to avoid the tax in it entirety, his family will be left with enough to live for generations without having the need to get a job. There are still Rockefellers living off the largesse of John D.'s estate.
Critics of the estate tax point to persons of lesser means who nevertheless have large enough estates to be subject to taxation. The charge against the estate tax is that it is unfair to hamstring these persons from the unencumbered transfer of inherited wealth to their children. These are not the Steve Jobs's or Warren Buffets's of the world who have so much that the estate tax does not in effect matter. What of the argument that the estate tax is unfair to them?
The answer is quite simply that fairness in the context of the estate tax should be measured in the equality of opportunity that it promotes across society rather than the fairness to an individual decedent. If we are going to have a policy that attempts to prevent the establishment of a wealth-based aristocracy, a line must be drawn somewhere. The line will invariably be seen as unfair to those who lie on the side of the line to which the tax is applied. That is no argument against it, though. If the tax fulfills its functions, the effect will be that few persons will be able to remove themselves from the productive economy and live off their inheritances without working. This is the point of the tax. I would think that the advocates of maximizing the personal responsibility of U.S. citizens would embrace the estate tax insofar as it results in greater numbers of persons having to find productive means to care for themselves. Living off a trust fund requires no personal responsibility for one's own welfare.
The idea of a meritocratic society driven by the acceptance of personal responsibility is an attractive one. In practice, though, the very proponents of the idea often advocate policies that allow for the diminution of personal responsibility. The estate tax is a good example. If it is offensive for the mythic "welfare queen" to live off the public dole without having to work, then it should be similarly offensive for trust fund kids to be able to live off the inherited dole without having to work. If we are going to be a nation that touts personal responsibility as one of its ideals and chief attributes, then we should be consistent in requiring personal responsibility from every member of society, not just the least fortunate.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Friday, October 7, 2011
Saul Bellow in The New York Review of Books
My first Bellow book was Henderson the Rain King. I fell in love with Bellow's writing almost instantly. The New York Review of Books has a two-part series in which the transcript of a talk Bellow gave in 1988 is being published. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/oct/27/jewish-writer-america/
A sample, "One's language is a spiritual location, it houses your soul. If you were born in America all essential communications, your deepest communications with yourself, will be in English--in American English. You will neither lie nor tell the truth in any other language. Without it no basic reckonings can be made. You will not reflect on your own death in Hebrew or in French. Your English is the principal instrument of your humanity. And when the door of the gas chamber was shut many of the German Jews who called upon God for the last time inevitably used the language of their murders, for they had no other."
Quibble with Bellow's universal assertion for American English among those born here if you must. Still, the point about language being a spiritual location is a beautiful one worth considering. The passage is typical, to me, of Bellow's ability to meld the literary, the philosophical, and the pragmatic assessment of the situation in which we find ourselves.
A sample, "One's language is a spiritual location, it houses your soul. If you were born in America all essential communications, your deepest communications with yourself, will be in English--in American English. You will neither lie nor tell the truth in any other language. Without it no basic reckonings can be made. You will not reflect on your own death in Hebrew or in French. Your English is the principal instrument of your humanity. And when the door of the gas chamber was shut many of the German Jews who called upon God for the last time inevitably used the language of their murders, for they had no other."
Quibble with Bellow's universal assertion for American English among those born here if you must. Still, the point about language being a spiritual location is a beautiful one worth considering. The passage is typical, to me, of Bellow's ability to meld the literary, the philosophical, and the pragmatic assessment of the situation in which we find ourselves.
Taxation with Representation
Vanity Fair has a good article about Alexander Hamilton, government debt, and the Tea Party's skewed take on history. http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/11/debt-and-dumb-201111
It still does not cease to amaze me that the Tea Party associates itself with a movement that was ostensibly based on a government that was taxing citizens who did not have representation in that government. I am waiting for someone to explain for me how a movement in a representative democracy can hold any claim to legitimacy when it does not lack representation. If it so happens that the Tea Party position is a minority one then the movement's complaints are anti-democratic to the extent the movement advocates implementation of its policies without a majority in Congress or control of the White House. If the movement cannot get a majority of representatives elected who share the movement's views, then those views by right should not be implemented. That would be the essence of a representative democracy, right?
It still does not cease to amaze me that the Tea Party associates itself with a movement that was ostensibly based on a government that was taxing citizens who did not have representation in that government. I am waiting for someone to explain for me how a movement in a representative democracy can hold any claim to legitimacy when it does not lack representation. If it so happens that the Tea Party position is a minority one then the movement's complaints are anti-democratic to the extent the movement advocates implementation of its policies without a majority in Congress or control of the White House. If the movement cannot get a majority of representatives elected who share the movement's views, then those views by right should not be implemented. That would be the essence of a representative democracy, right?
Friday, September 9, 2011
Cost-Effectiveness of Homeland Security Expenditures
There is a good series going on this week at www.slate.com regarding the cost-effectiveness of homeland security measures since 9/11. I realize that this is a bit off the stated topic of this blog, but is a good read and a reminder that reason should be a strong counterweight to emotion in public policy-making. The best line from today's article: "Overall, by far the most cost-effective counterterrorism measure is to refrain from overreacting." Which is also sound policy since the goal of terrorism is to induce the fear that causes overreaction.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Public Education Is a Public Good
Why do so many Americans accept the premise that corporations offer a model for and would be good stewards of public education? Received experience suggests this should not be true. If we accept the premise that public education is a public good and should be open to all, the corporate model will necessarily fail. I will start off by asserting that I do not believe American public education is in a crisis and point to Diane Ravitch's piece in The New York Review of Books for further explication. Nevertheless, large cohorts of American students are under performing. The cohorts that are under performing are those beset with poverty, disability, or English language deficits. In the corporate model, the typical response to a large subset of under performing or inefficient employees is to trim the fat, which everyone knows is a euphemism for firing employees until the organization reaches is desired level of efficiency or competence. The obvious problem with public education is that we cannot simply fire the under performers.
Let's say we describe the students as "consumers" and the teachers and administrators as the employees of a "corporation." If we accept that public education is a public good that should be available to all children, we still are in a quandary under the corporate model. No matter how we restructure the teaching profession and the administration of public education, we require an enormous workforce. It would be impossible to fire huge swaths of teachers in under performing schools without having some mechanism in place for replacing them. In the current debate, I have seen nothing that offers a reasonable solution to this quandary.
The answer cannot simply be to ramp up charter schools and voucher programs. If the education of all children shifts to different delivery mechanisms, the size of the employee-pool necessary to deliver the services will remain fairly constant. This begs the question: where are we going to get the teachers to replace the ones that are fired? I do not see any plans to fund training and education for large numbers of new teachers to replace the old set. In all likelihood, the only thing that would happen is that existing teachers would float around from school to school because the increased numbers of students would require that alternate mechanisms for delivering education search the available pool of minimally qualified employees to deliver those services. The only discernible effect is that public school teachers would find themselves in an unstable labor market with decreasing remuneration and benefits, as they jump from public, to charter, to voucher/private schools.
The above paragraph assumes that many of the teachers teaching in public schools today are under performing or inefficient. I do not accept this premise. I simply raised the argument for the sake of teasing out the logical consequences of applying a corporate model to the realm of public education. Rather, the main impediment to academic success for under performing students remains impoverishment. I actually have no quibble with some of the more intensive charter school and neighborhood programs that have achieved success in educating poor children. The insight that those programs provide, though, is that the path to success involves the schools acting to a larger degree as parens patriae. The best schools fare well because they take over much of the middle class parenting role that leads kids in middle and upper class communities to have academic success. The irony of this is that to succeed on a large scale, this approach would require a massive influx of funding to allow existing schools to do this. If one wants to level the playing field for poor students, then the school will have to function as the de facto family for them. This would mean longer school days and the provision of social and medical services to ensure the health and welfare of the children being educated. I do not hear many voices advocating a significant ramp up of public education funding to allow schools to act as the primary "home" for disadvantaged students, though.
Another factor to consider is that corporations have not exactly proved themselves to be good stewards of the public good. The financial crisis is the most obvious and recent example of why I do not want to trust my son's education to the corporate model. Maximizing shareholder profits drive corporations, even when gaining short term profits, however spectacular, is at odds with the long term health of the corporation. This is a greed-driven business that has little room for the long view, the also-ran, or the less fortunate. A steward carefully and responsibly manages that which has been entrusted to him, her, or it. The financial crisis has demonstrated that corporations are not careful or responsible even with the little that has been entrusted to them. Why on earth would we want this model to be applied to the education of American children?
Applying the corporate model to education frightens me. Public education requires acceptance of the fact that it is public and not a private, market-driven good. We educate our citizens because we recognize the lasting social good that an educated citizenry provides to the entire nation. Of course there is an economic benefit: well-educated citizens also become productive employees. The problem is that the corporate model contains no room for the public good. The market rewards some, punishes others, and leaves many behind. Is it acceptable to have a society that applies this ethos to the education of its children?
Let's say we describe the students as "consumers" and the teachers and administrators as the employees of a "corporation." If we accept that public education is a public good that should be available to all children, we still are in a quandary under the corporate model. No matter how we restructure the teaching profession and the administration of public education, we require an enormous workforce. It would be impossible to fire huge swaths of teachers in under performing schools without having some mechanism in place for replacing them. In the current debate, I have seen nothing that offers a reasonable solution to this quandary.
The answer cannot simply be to ramp up charter schools and voucher programs. If the education of all children shifts to different delivery mechanisms, the size of the employee-pool necessary to deliver the services will remain fairly constant. This begs the question: where are we going to get the teachers to replace the ones that are fired? I do not see any plans to fund training and education for large numbers of new teachers to replace the old set. In all likelihood, the only thing that would happen is that existing teachers would float around from school to school because the increased numbers of students would require that alternate mechanisms for delivering education search the available pool of minimally qualified employees to deliver those services. The only discernible effect is that public school teachers would find themselves in an unstable labor market with decreasing remuneration and benefits, as they jump from public, to charter, to voucher/private schools.
The above paragraph assumes that many of the teachers teaching in public schools today are under performing or inefficient. I do not accept this premise. I simply raised the argument for the sake of teasing out the logical consequences of applying a corporate model to the realm of public education. Rather, the main impediment to academic success for under performing students remains impoverishment. I actually have no quibble with some of the more intensive charter school and neighborhood programs that have achieved success in educating poor children. The insight that those programs provide, though, is that the path to success involves the schools acting to a larger degree as parens patriae. The best schools fare well because they take over much of the middle class parenting role that leads kids in middle and upper class communities to have academic success. The irony of this is that to succeed on a large scale, this approach would require a massive influx of funding to allow existing schools to do this. If one wants to level the playing field for poor students, then the school will have to function as the de facto family for them. This would mean longer school days and the provision of social and medical services to ensure the health and welfare of the children being educated. I do not hear many voices advocating a significant ramp up of public education funding to allow schools to act as the primary "home" for disadvantaged students, though.
Another factor to consider is that corporations have not exactly proved themselves to be good stewards of the public good. The financial crisis is the most obvious and recent example of why I do not want to trust my son's education to the corporate model. Maximizing shareholder profits drive corporations, even when gaining short term profits, however spectacular, is at odds with the long term health of the corporation. This is a greed-driven business that has little room for the long view, the also-ran, or the less fortunate. A steward carefully and responsibly manages that which has been entrusted to him, her, or it. The financial crisis has demonstrated that corporations are not careful or responsible even with the little that has been entrusted to them. Why on earth would we want this model to be applied to the education of American children?
Applying the corporate model to education frightens me. Public education requires acceptance of the fact that it is public and not a private, market-driven good. We educate our citizens because we recognize the lasting social good that an educated citizenry provides to the entire nation. Of course there is an economic benefit: well-educated citizens also become productive employees. The problem is that the corporate model contains no room for the public good. The market rewards some, punishes others, and leaves many behind. Is it acceptable to have a society that applies this ethos to the education of its children?
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
The Anti-Union Farce
I am sick of hearing how unions make America less competitive. The BLS Union Members Summary from January 21, 2011 (before the effects of the attacks on public sector unions have been fully realized) demonstrates that 11.9% of American workers belong to a union. In the private sector only 6.9% of the workforce is unionized. To blame union workers for America's economic problems is a canard. When 93.1% of private sector workers are not unionized, it is difficult to see how unions have anything to do with America's competitiveness. We should all be asking Republican politicians, corporate America, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce when we can expect to see the jobs materialize now that we effectively have a non-union private sector workforce.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
As for public sector unions, they represent workers in government. As such, the unions ought not to have an impact on the private sector's competitiveness in the global market.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
As for public sector unions, they represent workers in government. As such, the unions ought not to have an impact on the private sector's competitiveness in the global market.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Happier Than Before?
I puzzle at the reflexive patriotism that seems to have become a requirement of sorts in this country. We are asked to celebrate soldiers and the military without criticism because they are somehow responsible for our freedom. This assertion seems questionable because the apparatus of our society, socio-economic and otherwise, is what gives us whatever freedom we may in fact possess. In this regard, our freedom, as it were, is essentially a fixed feature of the established social order. If our freedom faces a threat, the threat is not an existential one from hostile third parties. Any threat to our freedom is, paradoxically, from the jingoism that has swept the nation, from the jingoism that vilifies dissent, difference, and debate. Besides, for most of us, Yeats was right: all of this fighting in the Middle East and Central Asia will not likely "bring them loss/ or leave them happier than before."
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Thursday, June 23, 2011
I Know Who John Galt Is
John Galt is a fictional character. Basing a moral philosophy on a work of fiction is daft. Basing economic policy on a work of fiction is dangerous. Thanks for the memories of Rand-influenced economic policy, Alan Greenspan.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Nobody Knows Anything and We Believe Them
Marcia Angell has an excellent series going in the New York Review of Books regarding the scant evidence that psychiatric medications offer anything but an "activated placebo effect" and why their use has grown so explosively.
This article is more profoundly depressing that depression. I often marvel at the way in which allegedly erudite persons deride the religiously faithful when even the erudite cling to faith tenaciously. Does it matter if the faith to which one clings is the opinion of medical experts or a sacred text if neither have any demonstrable indicia of validity?
Laissez Faire Is a Joke
Stated simply, the purpose of this blog is to demonstrate that libertarianism and free market economics tend neither to promote liberty nor economic freedom but rather function as tools to justify gross inequity and selfishness. A good place to start considering the hypocrisy of libertarianism and free market economics is this Stephen Metcalf article in Slate.com: http://www.slate.com/id/2297019/
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