27 Sep 2009
Notes of a Political Life, 2
Not the least of the products of a state convention such as yesterday's in Corvallis is the conversation among the participants, occasionally rising to a certain degree of intensity, on political theory and practice.
In the car driving south from Portland on Interstate Five were Seth Woolley, state party secretary, Chris Henry, executive director of the Portland Metro chapter, Kathy Bushman, former state co-ordinating committee member, and David Osborne. And me.
At a lull in the interaction among passengers I turned on the radio, and we all immediately recognized the voice of the speaker: Ralph Nader was describing his new book on National Public Radio. He spoke for perhaps ten minutes about that of which all of us in the car were already aware: he imagines that progressive politics in this reactionary age might be saved by the generous intervention of American billionaires.
He finished, the interviewer thanked him, and I shut off the radio.
Kathy's reaction was the first to be articulated: the 'trust-fund babies' she had met in undergraduate school were, she recalled, a self-centered, tight-fisted lot, completely unable to imagine obligation to a wider community. As a consequence she advocated a 100% estate tax, forcing children of the wealthy to rely upon their own merit for livelihood.
Every parent in the entire society, I rejoined, would be in that case moved to figure a way to get around such a law. Rich people work to earn money in large part in order to be able to provide it to their kids: if you limited the possibility of inheritance to some reasonable amount -- I threw out an estimate by mentioning two million dollars -- then I could support it; but not otherwise. I myself expect to leave money to my own two boys when I die.
Seth, a senior software engineer, had a more mathematically sophisticated version: by law you would be allowed to leave to your children only as much as any child in the entire society could, on average, expect to receive from their family. When I said that people don't support their own children as average social units, Seth explained that he was basing himself on the widely-praised 1971 work of Harvard professor John Rawls, /A Theory of Justice/, in which society defines fairness as treating everyone with as high a degree of impartiality as practical.
It's very likely that Seth was the only one of us in the car to have read the work of this influential thinker, awarded a medal by President Clinton. You cannot, I said, legislate a society which puts to one side the feelings of parents for their children: the Soviet experiment has already amply demonstrated the dangers of that.
We concluded the discussion with the agreement that practical implementation probably required adaptations which would bring our positions quite close together. Still, it was a pleasant surprise to find this morning, in a review of another Harvard professor of philosophy's book (details available upon request) the sentences: "He returns to an old charge against the late John Rawls. In 'Liberalism and the Limits of Justice' [1982] Mr Sandel argued that Rawls's celebrated account of social justice downplayed the moral weight of family feeling, group loyalties, and community attachments. . ."
You don't need to go to Harvard philosophy classes. Just get in the car on the way to the state convention of the Pacific Green Party.
By Michael Meo
by Mike Beilstein on 28 Sep 2009
Mike replies
I believe I read Francis Fukiyama quoting Aristotle as saying, "Family is the ultimate obstacle to justice." This seems right to me. Possessions are limited temporally by our mortality. We only continue possessions by having family to hold those possessions beyond our life span. Another interesting question about ownership is, "What is the nature of those things we "possess?"" Possession is not a physical concept. It is only a societal construct that arises out of a social agreement that it exists. Bill Gates may physically reside in a 40,000 sqft home, but he only "owns" it because society agrees to that concept and institutes real physical obstacles to use by other members of society. So if Bill and Melinda Gates leave $50 billion to their heirs, what are they actually transferring? They are only transferring the societal consensus that the "property" exists prior to their demise. Should the individual who "owns" property be allowed to determine the future allocation of that property? Or should society which creates the property, through consensus that it exists, be the determiner of its allocation? Are we ruled by the phantoms of the past or real people who are still breathing?
by Seth Woolley on 28 Sep 2009
Seth responds
I suppose I should defend both myself and Rawls. I gave a few reasons for my support of a 100% estate tax, but you seem to have latched onto Rawls. My point in bringing up the mathematical equivalent interpretation of a 100% estate tax to a partial estate tax that uses the tax as a direct subsidy of those who are born was a thought exercise to move it into terms I felt could better fit the idea to a follower of Rawls. I didn't get to fully explain why I thought of Rawls and why I brought up that isomorphism (mathematical re-expression). Note that my reformulation wasn't intended to be meaningfully different than a 100% estate tax in goal.
A 100% estate tax might never happen due to what can only be described as an inherently greedy genetic drive (in a Dawkinsian Selfish Gene sense): our genes, co-evolving with a "selfish gene" (not individually selfish, but actually a gene that is selfish for itself), as Hamilton's population genetics showed, select for things that may benefit our children and those to whom they are related (a.k.a. kin selection). It's natural that those who think that they can provide personally for their children an advantage over the average would be inclined to desire to be able to make society allow such an advantage. Those who feel that they're unable to provide resources below the average (all billionaires included) would naturally feel that society shouldn't allow such an advantage. I believe I could provide for a hypothetical offspring much more than what the average receives, however, I don't believe that is fair for the newly born. Why is my newly born entitled to the benefits of my resources and my own work? The answer is sheer accident. Rawls wanted people to think about that. Isn't that a bit unfair? We might agree that it is in unfair. We might also agree that due to sociobiology, it's difficult to work around that unfairness.
Rawls' idea is a bit more nuanced than either of us had a chance to describe. Properly formulated, we should really ask people what people would like to see of their society if they weren't able to see the outcomes of their initial conditions when born. It's really quite a democratic theory of justice, not a technocratic one (where some ideologues construct the perfect society). He's really saying a democratic poll of all with a certain ignorance of their place in the future society is what constitutes justice and fairness (this is all purely hypothetical of course, as that ignornace cannot be implemented after the fact). When taking in that context, it might be the case that if everybody were asked, because of said selfish gene, they would all agree that blood relations should receive some advantages in society. But I doubt a properly educated society would come to such a conclusion if they knew that the same society they are constructing would allow an exponential benefits curve to be applied -- that the rich are exponentially richer than the average or the poor. If society were to have that property, the rational choice would be to limit estate taxes to 100% to ensure fairness, as that benefits everybody.
However, there is another choice -- society need not be constructed based on an exponential curve, but what if the result were that reality is instead a non-exponential benefits curve -- the rich are only linearly (tending towards logarithmicly) richer than the poor. If that were the case, the selfish gene would in fact select for the better odds -- the risk may in fact outweigh the reward. How could we achieve such a system? I propose that if we had a reasonable but very high estate tax that makes the benefits curve linear rather than exponential, it might satisfy both the selfish gene and Rawls' theory of justice.
I still think, since I can overcome my own selfish gene, that I would choose a 100% estate tax for how I would vote for my own society, but I hope you see now that his further framework can also be used to see how we can in a democratic way come to a compromise among the weights and measures, since his theory isn't all about a single issue, but how the people would weight all issues -- including kin selection.
Maybe in a Rawlsian world, society would choose a 90% estate tax instead, if that is how the sum of computations people make about the weights turn out. I would consider that group choice Rawlsianly fair.
by Kathleen Bushman on 28 Sep 2009
Notes of a Political Life, 2
I should make it clear I habitually exaggerate a point in order to provoke thought and discussion. I still have far more questions following our discussion than I have answers. Is it moral to allow one man to pass on a 40,000 square foot MacMansion to his children while thousands of children & teens remain homeless? If it is the responsibility of a father to pass on enough so that his children are less likely to suffer extreme material deprivation,how much money is necessary to ensure their material security? Doesn't the usually extraordinary educational opportunities which children of the elite enjoy mean they are, in any case, unlikely to face any great financial distress? Is it moral that an excellent university education was wasted on a man like GW Bush? - or the Boeing heiress & others of my acquaintance? Why is it that a man like GW Bush had access to our country's best schools when there must have been more intelligent and gifted individuals of his generation who did not have those same opportunities? Finally, does a man or woman who has enjoyed exceptional educational opportunities here owe our society something in return? I remain convinced that a child who has inherited so much money that they are not motivated to work, contribute or produce are a dead weight on society. Don't Americans pride themselves on living in a meritocracy? - as silly as it is for us to think that. Finally, I read about a sociological study which claims that Europeans are now more likely to rise out of the economic class into which they were born than are Americans.