The Reagan Myth: Conservatives and Greed

When we talk about this country's values and beliefs, we tend to think that we are a caring people who want government to help in those cases of poverty and disability that leave people homeless and hungry.  We tend to think of ourselves as a caring nation, but that may be becoming more myth than reality. 

Ever since Ronald Reagan and the ascendancy of the right-wing faction in national politics, there has been a tendency to tone down talk of altruism (anything that isn't market business is sometimes labelled "socialism" and treated as inherently evil under the free marketarian ideology propagated by the Chicago School boys) and a tendency to paint "competition" and "profits" in god-like colors, along with all the baggage of greed and self-centeredness that accompany them.

This free marektarian mixture of greed and selfcenteredness has become so pervasive that it colors the way many think about programs for the homeless, "entitlements" like social security and medicare benefits for the elderly, and medicaid for the uninsured.  It factors into tax policy, in that the trickle-down approach is used to justify elimination of progressivity in the tax system and the claim that competition is the heart of capitalism is used to justify eliminating any taxes on business that "distort" competition or make it difficult for US multinationals to compete.  Tax policy seen through this lens is merely a routine application of free marketarian ideology--less taxes on the rich, so the rich can make more money competing, and (hopefully) some of the riches will leak down to everybody else in the country.

This needs to change.  We have experimented, really since Reagan, with increasing focus on profits and growth, without any focus on how the benefits are distributed.  And we've seen that it doesn't work.  We have increasing inequality, and falling standards of living for the overwhelming majority, while the ultra rich have income and lifestyles that are almost unimaginable for the rest of us.  We've done that at tremendous cost for the society as a whole--one that is now the largest debtor nation in the world, with its debt owned in large part by rival countries like China and India; one that is fighting too many wars for too weak reasons at exorbitant cost because of the extension of Reagan's "privatize and deregulate" orthodoxy to almost every governmental endeavor, including warmongering, at the great benefit to those crony corporations called on to execute no-bid contracts, paid for sloppy performance, and paid much more than government workers had formerly been paid to do the same jobs.  (I understand that some Blackwater security guards make many times what an Army soldier would have made for the same work.)  Corporatism, in other words, is destroying the value system that made this country great, and destroying the economy and government to boot.

There is a piece in Salon from August 7 that is worth reading.  It is Thomas Frank's How Conservative Greed and Corruptions Destroyed American Politics.  I will just call your attention here to the following paragraph excerpted from the piece, though I would substitute "free marketarians" for "conservatives" to be more accurate in condemning the corporatist state approach that Reagan began and the Bushes have continued.

Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect from Washington.

***

When conservatives appoint the opponents of government agencies to head those government agencies; when they auction their official services to the purveyor of the most lavish "golf weekend"; when they mulct millions from groups with business before Congress; when they dynamite the Treasury and sabotage the regulatory process and force government shutdowns -- in short, when they treat government with contempt -- they are running true to form. They have not done these awful things because they are bad conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds follow naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition.   And, yes, there has been greed involved in the effort -- a great deal of greed. Every tax cut, every cleverly engineered regulatory snafu saves industry millions and perhaps even billions of dollars, and so naturally securing those tax cuts and engineering those snafus has become a booming business here in Washington.

***

As we make our rounds of conservative Washington, we glimpse something much greater than single acts of incompetence or obstruction. We see a vast machinery built for our protection reengineered into a device for our exploitation. We behold the majestic workings of the free market itself, boring ever deeper into the tissues of the state.

Comments

[beth]

At the heart of altruistic government policies is coersive taxation.

Yes, the GOP is bankrupt. So are the democrats. We need to return to first principles.

Liberty. Freedom of contract.

The governments job is *not* to achieve your definition of "good." It is to allow everyone to achieve their own definition.

[Gegner]

You hit the nail right on the head, the purpose of government is not to maximize the advantages of the myopic few but to keep those animals in check.

Humanity is a social species, albeit, not without its share of 'selfish individuals'.

That said, I'm in agreement with Heinlien's theory, "Those who do not value the benefits of civil society should have those benefits withdrawn from them."

And Heinlien didn't believe in prisons...so punishment for a lack of regard for the rights of others was a bit more severe...exile.

Commerce does not exist to benefit the owner but society as a whole.

We can extend this idea a step further and wonder why we have 'opposing' political parties...when we're all (theoretically) on the 'same team'.

What use is a system of commerce that has zero regard for the health of the society that gave birth to it?

It's time to put an end to 'debt driven' society and replace it with a 'labor driven' model.

There is no such thing as 'unprofitable, socially necessary work'...as the wretched capitalists well know.

[Nemo]

"anything that isn't market business is sometimes labelled 'socialism'"

Um, no. Altruism is when you give your own wealth to the poor. Socialism is when you take my wealth by force and give it to the poor... Or anybody else. The distinction is extremely simple and clear, assuming you know the difference between disposing of your own wealth and stealing somebody else's.

Incidentally, it is still socialism whether the recipients are unemployed deadbeats or Wall Street investment bankers... So don't think I am defending the Republicans here.

Incidentally, you seem to use the word "we" a lot. Who do you mean by that word, exactly?

[LindaMBeale]

Nemo (of "self-evident.org"):

You conveniently miss the point--that "socialism" is (mis)used as a negative label to condemn any collective altruistic actions, without any indepth consideration, and that "capitalism" is treated as a per se good, even though the ideological form practiced by the radical Friedmanites has in fact been at the core of enormous, long-lasting economic and societal harms, from Argentina to Russia, from Chile to Ecuador, from South Africa to Nigeria, and in our own South.

You incorrectly treat altruism as purely an individual act (and consider it worthy) while "socialism" you label as theft. Wrong.

Altruism is also a society, through social measures, joining together to give of its aggregate wealth to the poorer among the group.

You've clearly bought into the Friedmanite mantra that greed is good, that as a citizen you have no obligations to other citizens, and that accumulating wealth at whatever cost to the overall good of society is fine. That is a recipe for disaster.

Fact is, you have obligations to others because the society has made whatever wealth you acquire possible.

A society will generally either work together to redistribute resources to ensure that people at the bottom are protected (we Americans have since the 1940s strongly supported the idea of the state providing a safety net to help people to fare well) or it will redistribute resources upwards to ensure that the ultra wealthy at the top continue to accumulate wealth no matter what happens to everyone else. Since Reagan, there has been a rich and powerful coalition, made up of families like the Walton heirs and other multimillionaires, working with people like Norquist, DeLay, Cheney and the other corporatist enablers to get people to accept the latter--it is variously called Chicago School economics, trickle down, supply-side economics, or greed.

But thankfully, there are large numbers of Americans who don't accept that brand of winner-take-all "disaster capitalism" and who want the mix of public and private that Keynes considered the only workable economy in the long term. The group that recognizes our obligation to others among us is growing, and growing more vocal every day. Count me in. The "we" is that overwhelming majority of Americans who are decent people and realize that we owe a collective obligation to the weak amongst us.

[LindaMBeale]

Beth

Your anarcho-liberatarian approach would result in poverty, environmental degradation, lack of basic resources for the majority of the population, and general misery for all but the few who start out in the status quo with significant wealth.

It is the state that makes possible some balance between the "winner take all" ethos and the "compassion for those who don't already have anything" ethos. That is not theft, since what you acquire is dependent on collective action to start with. "liberty and freedom of contract" as you offer them are mere words to move the masses who have little to accept an enormous restriction on their freedom by the haves (large corporations and their owners), who could set their own terms and do whatever they wanted without restraint in that world (which existed in the post-civil war era until the labor and other protective laws were enacted under Roosevelt). The world you espouse sounds to the naive like it offers freedom, but in reality it offers a kind of slavery to a corporate empire that cares not a whit for the individual cog in the wheel.

[bobby b]

"Commerce does not exist to benefit the owner but society as a whole."

Commerce exists.

It exists whenever two or more entities wish to trade, and then do so.

Anything beyond that simply sets out your own individual wishes and dreams.

I can type "your BMW exists not for your own benefit, but for the benefit of all BMW lovers who are typing this post."

But when I take your BMW, it's still theft.

Theft backed by my sincere wishes, certainly. But being robbed by a sincere thief is likely as personally rewarding as being shot down with a pretty gun.

[bobby b]

"Fact is, you have obligations to others because the society has made whatever wealth you acquire possible."

"Acquire"?

If I make a product, or perform a service, or create an intellectual property, and someone else has decided that what I offer will satisfy them in some way to such an extent that they're willing to see if they have anything that I want so that we can trade, than I have not "acquired" any wealth. I have created wealth.

When you limit your concept of wealth as you have, I can understand why you would consider that my success must impose upon someone else a loss.

[LindaMBeale]

Bobby,
Your response to Gegner echoes again with free marketarian ideology that is not based in the way economies or societies really work. Commerce doesn't exist in a vacuum--it works when there are stable laws and systems that permit most of the participants to enjoy a variety of choices and opportunities, without being forced to work for a particular employer or have no work at all, or to buy from a particular supplier, or to permit a particular entity to exploit resources. Nations without stable laws and the other restraints on free marketarian approaches tend towards hugely unequal societies where a few haves control almost everything.

Commerce doesn't manage well without a restraining state. That is because the state is the only way the little people can unite to prevent the powerful from merely exercising their power to take from the weaker without commerce. Slavery is an example of the kinds of distorted relationships that ensue when some are empowered and others not.

No society has ever been successful when it exists only for those who already have resources. What works are mixed economic systems--that is, economic systems that allow a good deal of freedom and flexibility for transactions among individuals yet utilize the power of the collective (the state) to restrain the worst in the greedy impulses while establishing a stable set of situations in which contracts and transactions can flourish. The free marketarian ideology that the Chicago School and its proponents at the WTO and IMF have pushed on nations against their people's will for four decades is not that kind of mixed economy. The chicago boys in Argentina supported a brutal dictatorship, gleeful that it would allow them to throw millions out of work and into poverty.

I am constantly amazed at how many people spout the free marketarian ideology without understanding its consequences for freedom and commerce. In fact, the libertarian, free marketarian ideology--that treats taxation as theft by the state and ignores the way that the state earns the right to share in the productivity of its citizens--is most compatible with the military-corporatist state (fascism) and dictatorship. Milton Friedman, the fringe economist who developed the free market ideology, befriended Pinochet in the 1970s and used the dictator's power to impose an economic system that the majority of the people opposed. That is the reality of free marketarian ideology.

[LindaMBeale]

Beth
Saying that taxation is coercive, or that any state altruism is supported by coercive taxation, doesn't advance any argument against taxation or against altruism. Yes, taxation is coercive. So are rules against murder, rules that require drivers' licenses for drivers, and rules that require draftees to serve in military service. When citizens are part of a collective group (an organization or a state), they cannot act as a collective without resources. You pay dues to your clubs and organizations of which you are a member, you pay tuition to become a member of a university class, you pay taxes to support the public services that the state provides you as a citizen of that state.

[LindaMBeale]

Bobby,

Take your example. You labor to produce an "intellectual property". Without a state that provides a framework for evaluating and protecting that intellectual property, the counterparty need not engage in commerce with you, but may instead merely copy your work, or clobber you over the head and take your work.

Yes, if labor is used to create a product (or added to an already existing product), then the additional value created by that labor creates wealth, which once acquired (by conversion of the labor to a product that can be further used) can be accumulated or can be expended.

Much of wealth, however, is not created by labor but acquired by merely trading up and leveraging already existing wealth.

Either way, whether acquired through productive labor or through the leveraging of already existing wealth, wealth requires a stable context that provides choices. A laborer who is not permitted to use the natural resources around him unless he owns them cannot create wealth. If the status quo has already distorted the ownership of resources so that there is a significant inequality, the laborer's choices may be enormously diminished or nonexistent. He may be forced to work for a wealthy employer who exploits his labor for an amount far less than its value in order to gain more for himself. Environmental rules, safety rules, health support, stable contracting contexts that prevent "contracts of adhesion"--all these things are essential to commerce at its most basic level of labor to produce items for trade.