In this post, Jack has replied by interspersing his comments into the previous email. If you have read the last post, you can skip all that is in blue (Greg's thoughts) and just read what is in black and italicized (Jack's thoughts).
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Greg:
OK, I'll try inserting responses to your many
questions--good ones, in my opinion:
Jack,
The time has finally come for me
to reply. It's been a hectic few weeks.
For the sake of clarity, I'm
going to try to summarize your main points. You can correct me if I'm
wrong.
1. Humans CREATE wealth
through their own work and effort and ingenuity.
2. Since an individual
creates his own wealth, he or she alone has the right to that wealth. No
one should be allowed to take that away.
3. A proven method of
attaining human happiness is through "earned success" (i.e. the
rewards of hard work). (By the way, I do not dispute that; I would
dispute that it is the only or even the primary means to happiness).
I didn't mean to imply that earned success the
only means to happiness; I just offered it as one where social scientists have
been able to demonstrate a clear correlation--and one that seems to flow
causally.
4. All of the great captains of
industry created wealth out of thin air; they did not steal it from others.
Their actions are morally praiseworthy.
5. A free market system delivers
greater justice and greater happiness to people than any other system.
I want to note, on this one, that no system
delivers PERFECT justice and happiness; but freedom surpasses all others ever
tried.
I realize that I've offered an
oversimplification of your points, but I think that's the basic gist of what
you're driving at.
I think you did a pretty good job.
So here are a few of my own
thoughts. First, are you willing to admit that there are some instances
in history in which the rich gain their riches by oppressing others and using
them as a means for their own end (i.e. increasing their wealth)? An
obvious example of this is slavery. If you are willing to admit this,
then the obvious follow up is "Is this still taking place today and what
can be done about it?"). If you control the means of production and
I do not have any capital of my own save the strength of my own muscles and the
ability of my own mind, then you have me at a great disadvantage. The
starting line is not the same. The scales are already balanced in your
favor. If I'm desperate enough, I will sell you my labor for a small
amount of money in order to feed my family and, in the meantime, you profit
greatly from my willingness to work for you for very little. Thus, YOU
have not CREATED the wealth; I have created the wealth and you have skimmed off
all but a meager hourly wage that you must pay me -- just enough to keep me
coming back. This is, of course, what happens in Southeast Asia and
throughout the world every day. And, in order to increase your bottom
line, you might skimp on maintaining the factory that I work in and after a few
years -- boom -- a roof collapses and I die. Without labor laws to
protect me from you (the captain of industry), what power do I have?
Should not something be done in the name of justice and fairness to
balance the scales?
Now, in your very first expository paragraph
about the limitations of a free market, you have begun by describing conditions
in which a free market has been eliminated. Not such a good test of free
markets.
There are in fact three ways to gain wealth: create
it, steal it, or receive it as a gift or bequest. Only the first
increases the amount of wealth available for all; and free markets maximize
that. What you described fits the many kleptocracies that have always
existed when the strong got away from taking from the weak. A free market by
definition doesn't permit that, and needs structures in place (a
"constitution") that will restrain those whose strength and lack of
conscience enable them to exploit what others have created.
I stumbled across an interesting
statistic the other day: those who are born in the top 1% have a 99.87%
chance of remaining right there in the top 1%. How would you explain this
fact? Are those born in the top 1% that much more intelligent or
beautiful or talented or strong than the rest? I interpret it as a sign
that our common notions of social mobility are a myth.
Your statistic may describe some societies in
which people are not free to create, keep, and rise economically. But it
does not describe the US or any other western democracy. Statistics from
the US census show clearly that households in lower socio-economic levels will
tend to rise to higher levels even after one decade. You always will have
households in the lower quintile; but they tend to be newer ones, headed by
workers who have not yet learned to create wealth very productively. We
have a mobile society.
If we can agree that people do
not all start with equal opportunity (do you agree with at least that?), then
what do you propose ought to be a way that we even the scales? Or is that
even an effort worth undertaking?
I should pause to ask you to use first-person
plural references as thoughtfully as you can. When you say "we"
should do this and that, do you mean you and I and other Christians or Americans;
or do you mean the government by means of force?
Of course people start with different talents.
So equal opportunity can only try to restrain anyone from interfering
with your best efforts to create with what you have. Nothing will even
the scales, unless you use force and discourage people from creating.
Turning to a more theological
argument, I would ask you, "How are you able to create?" You
are right that our human ability to create is a function of our being made in
the image of God. But you run the risk of sounding like Homer Simpson
when he prayed before a family dinner, "Well, God, I worked hard to make
the money to buy this food so thanks for nothing." We are able to
create because we have brain and brawn. Those are God-given. You
are able to be a professor because God gave you a good mind. Thus, in
what sense is the wealth that you create by using that good mind in any way
your own? You mind is on loan from God. Of course, the implication
of this is something that I think you will agree with: we own nothing.
We are merely stewards of what God has entrusted to us. And this is
not mere wordplay or semantics or holy-church-speak. This has
implications for our understanding of property and what we are to do with our
property. I find in the Bible a God who is particularly concerned with
the poor and who demands that his people care for those poor. In fact,
God cared about them so much that he established laws to ensure that sinful
human nature did not forget or neglect to care for his beloved poor.
Let me quote my earlier letter. I didn't
say that what I create is my own. I agree that in the end, all our claims
are subordinate to God's. What I said about what you create was, and I
quote, "you have first claim to, prior to the claim of any human who did
not create it." If you created something, I have no claim on it or
right to take it from you.
Out of curiosity, in your view,
if a human is created mentally handicapped, then how should she or he be cared
for? How much money should they make? Do they CREATE wealth?
If not, what is our societal obligation to them?
Here's a good place to be careful about
"we." Some handicapped persons have little or no ability to
create anything. So they can't "make" money since they can't
"make" anything to trade for money. Does that mean they should
starve, and I should or would let them? Certainly not!
A free environment doesn't restrain compassion
in any way. In fact, it provides the means to enable more compassion, by
producing many times more material goods. But in such an environment, the
decision to help the handicapped or unfortunate falls to those who produced the
wealth. They give voluntarily. They don't sit and hang on to all
they have until an Imperial "we" levies a tax to force them to
practice compassion.
Does this happen? Not in the theories of
those who want a more powerful "we." But in the real world,
where do you find the most voluntary sharing of wealth? The US. How
about Europe? No, the government levies and redistributes, and the total
sharing is far less. When the typhoon hit SE Asia a couple of years back,
the US was criticized by numerous Europeans because "we" didn't give
as much as they did--in absolute terms, or per capita, or as a percent of GDP.
But what they overlooked was that so much of our aid for that disaster
was from private giving; they had only counted government endowments.
When you include private giving (for every country) Americans were by far
the most generous, as they have always been.
If you go back to 1900 or so, the US didn't
have a lot of public tax-funded welfare programs. But we did care for our
poor, using church and community organizations to help them on a far more
individual basis than you'd see now. It was generous, especially
considering that people had much less disposable income from which to share
than w have now. Much of this got supplanted by government programs as a
result of the Progressive movement. One remnant of these early organizations
is the Salvation Army.
I think that the basic,
foundational problem I have with your argument is how it assumes a rigid
individualism. In reality, we are all far more interconnected to one
another than your model seems to assume. The generation of wealth has
many sources. Yes, it can be hard work. But other factors also come
into play -- social structures, geography, inherited socio-economic status,
laws, values, moral formation, social capital, etc.
I don't think I argued that only hard work
produces wealth. It comes, in fact, more from entrepreneurship (broadly
defined). We spot a need and fill it in whatever way we can that's better
than some other way to fill it. Maybe that means developing a skill that
others need and will pay for; maybe it means opening a retail business in a
place where people need certain goods available; maybe it means developing a
new means of transport or communication. The factors you listed will
affect how efficient a person can be at doing this, and how inclined he will be
to do it.
I also have a host of theological
and biblical questions for you. For example, why does Luke teach us that
communal property and sharing was normative among early church members?
How compatible is the Lockean language of private property ownership with
this?
Well, the early church didn't try to eliminate
private property or freedom. Ananias and Sapphira were under no
obligation to share their property, and were not punished for their failure to
do so. But the Christians did voluntarily use their own created means to
help one another. I think that's fully compatible with Locke.
What do you make of Leviticus 25
and the Jubilee laws? There are many others but those seem most relevant
to our current discussion.
I find them curious--an interesting constraint
on rights to real estate. You couldn't make a perpetual assignment of
your right to land granted to your family. Therefore such an
assignment--like a modern sale of land--would become more like a leasehold as
you approach Jubilee year. Again, it's interesting. Am I correct in
understanding that Israel never actually enacted it?
For the record, I am not a
socialist. I believe in much of what you believe -- the right to work
hard and earn your keep. But I also believe that society can and ought to
take certain measures to curb the excesses and abuses of the free market.
Here, look at your use of the word
"society" and see if it falls into the warning I gave about saying
"we" should do certain things. Jesus and the Bible tell us,
everywhere, to use our means to care for the poor. But where does Jesus,
or the Bible, tell "us" to take from others for the benefit of the
poor?
I find the current distribution
of wealth in our country to be morally reprehensible.
I already addressed this. The word
"distribution" is cleverly passive. It suggests that someone
distributes the wealth, and is doing it unfairly. So "we" need
to use force to correct this maldistribution. But wealth is not gained by
access to a "distribution," but by creation. Or by theft.
(That's how the Royal families got theirs, as do those who profit from
government preferences.)
This is because my sense of what
is right and wrong are rooted in the biblical themes of love, compassion,
equality, fraternity, community, the interconnectedness of human life, and a
concern for the common good. I know that you may not list the same
virtues and themes from your own reading of Scripture, but then we enter into
the world of biblical hermeneutics which is a world I most certainly welcome us
to enter if you so desire.
"The quality of mercy is not forced."
That is, a virtue is not a virtue unless practiced voluntarily. An
environment of freedom allows more voluntary action, and therefore more and
better practice of any virtues.
Your turn. (I actually
don't like saying that because I don't believe we are having a competition
here. I'd prefer to think of us as cooperating with one another in
seeking the truth. But perhaps that emphasis on cooperation over and
against competition makes me a liberal softie).
I agree with your idea of using
point-counterpoint to clear away vague notions and zero in on the truth.
I like it. So how are we doing?
Jack
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