Shuffle to the Left

The democrats, for their part, are most clearly half-socialist. They tend to want greater government control where socialists have traditionally wanted greater control, in the economic sphere. It is, after all, a question of values, and ultimately the value most sought by the democrats is “justice” – more precisely, “redistributive justice.” There is little doubt that the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer. The census is expected to announce soon that about 45 million Americans, or about one is seven of us, fall below the poverty line – that between 19 and 20 percent of children live in poverty – and that those impoverished are disproportionately black and Hispanic. Few, I think, will cheer when the report comes out, but oddly the report will appear in an election year when democrats, those most likely to take steps to redress the imbalance, are also most likely to take fire for the increase.

Nevertheless, the democrats, generally speaking, want to insure that all get a fair share of the great American pie, and since, within our republic, the only means available to redistribute wealth is the tax code and the resultant federal budget, their reputation as “tax and spend” is partly deserved. Assuming that all other matter were maintained at the status-quo, tax increases would be needed to pay for the social programs and entitlements, and those increases would disproportionately impact middle class tax-payers. There is no reason for the status quo to prevail, and recent moves by the democratic to end the tax exemptions for the those Americans earning over $250,000 a year will have some robin hood effect, even if those effects will only have marginal impact. The recent bail-out program for the banks, however, seems a betrayal of faith, particularly as planned bonuses for the executives of the same sinking banks seemed to go forward without hesitation. The health care plan, at least in its intent, seems to be within the faith, extending entitlements with a blind eye to all differences, with the one possible exception of income – any inherent differences that might likewise impede progress in redressing economic disparities between peoples. Whether black or white, Hispanic or Polish in origin, gay or straight in sexual proclivities, Muslim or Christian in religion does not matter, unless of course it is to take affirmative action to compensate for past or present intolerance of the individual qua individual.

Implicit in the half-socialism of the democrats, of course, is a recognition that “economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest,” as Hayek put it, but rather “the control of the means for all our ends.” As Hayek goes on, “the ultimate ends of the activities of reasonable beings are never economic. Strictly speaking, there is no ‘economic motive’ but only economic factors conditioning our striving for other ends. What in ordinary language is misleadingly called the ‘economic motive’ means merely the desire for general opportunity, the desire for power to achieve unspecified ends” – to achieve, in the words of Jefferson, “happiness.”

Any attempt at redistributive justice – any attempt to insure a more equal distribution of opportunity and the power to achieve unspecified ends – would be fine, of course, if it actually left the ends unspecified. Ultimately, it cannot, at least not without justifiable public outcry. If the government were to simply increase my opportunity – if it were to give me a check for $500, I could use it to buy a prostitute or use it to buy groceries for my children – whatever increased my store of “happiness.” Ultimately, however, few would argue that it is better, from a social perspective, if I were to spend the money on groceries for my children, rather than a prostitute, who in turn might spend it on groceries for her children, or a drug habit. No one knows up front, and since it is, in part at least, my wealth that is being redistributed, I might want some say, however dilute, in how it is spent. As it turns out, redistribution of wealth works best within formal electoral democracies, in part because one can count on the electorate to exercise outrage and demand controls, and so it is that government largess, always comes with strings attached. It is a redistribution of wealth for groceries, for health care, for education, or some other socially sanctioned purpose, as it should be. And of course, as those who have come to the tea party know, the control doesn’t end with the specification of purpose. It is not merely money for groceries, but for specific types of groceries, and there are forms to be filled out and hoops to jump through to secure it, and so it goes.