7 comments

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  BillKorner

  3 years ago

  There's more than a grain of truth to Will's point here. Congress may hold hearings on oil industry profits being too high, but they are not going to take back the 14 billion dollars in subsidies they gave out last year. Attempts by the SEC to regulate CEO pay were part of what led to the excesses of stock option compensation that further increased CEO salaries. Etc.
  
  But the underlying premise of the argument is:
  
  The institutions of government could not do anything else but foster inequality. It is impossible for the people to control government and make it work toward their interest in less economic inequality... with all that implies for the strength of democracy.
  
  This capitulation, if you can call it that coming from a libertarian, is unwarranted. If our system were not biased in favor of protecting the wealthy, it would be possible for us to elect a Congress that would (for example)
  
  (1)give payroll taxes a progressive rate structure,
  
  (2)enforce tax laws against business and investors instead of juts against wage/salary employers, and
  
  (3)institute a federal voucher that would fund all public school students equally.
  
  Partially there is a failure of political will that explains why we don't adopt such policies even though they would pretty straightforwardly benefit a majority of the population. But, more than that, the reason is that the resigned electorate rightly assumes these changes to be impossible in the face of the current system in which candidates supporting these ideas could not get funded or otherwise supported.
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  Dallas

  3 years ago

  Will,
  
  I am a little confused on who you're referring to when you say non-libertarian egalitarians. Are there libertarian egalitarians? Who are they?
  
  In the Cato Unbound discussion, Schmidtz didn't seem to be an egalitarian--neither did Singer or Palmer.
  
  Do you have any libertarian egalitarians in mind?
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  Will Wilkinson

  3 years ago

  Dallas, Palmer, Schmidtz, and I are all libertarian egalitarians. As Schmidtz points out, there are lots of dimensions of equality. And it's just part of what it means to be a liberal to be egalitarian with respect to power. There are no natural rulers. People ought to be equal with respect to the distribution of legal rights, and those who would give some people special legal rights, such as the right to coerce via the state, carry a very heavy justificatory burden. This is the egalitarian doctrine par excellence. Part of the libertarian argument is that redistributive egalitarianism is an illiberal doctrine, inconsistent with the fundamental liberal equality in power among citizens.
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  Bartine

  3 years ago

  ... so, 'power corrupts'
  
  The minority who control or can gain control of government power ... will do so to further their own self-interest -- at the expense of the majority not in power.
  
  Thus, the egalitarian & democratic status of a society is inversely proportional to the power of its government. Who knew ??
  
  The old "Iron Law of Oligarchy" says the same thing.
  
  What's new ??
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  BillKorner

  3 years ago

  The idea that all liberals (and at least some non-liberals) are egalitarian is not original to Schmidtz or any of the Cato bloggers. One of the more comprehensive recent works that explores that idea is Amartya Sen's "Inequality Reexamined". Did anybody cite that?
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  Robert Schwartz

  3 years ago

  In the Soviet Union, they were called the Nomenklatura.
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  MDM

  3 years ago

  Will,
  Nice post. Two things that might be added to your analysis. First, there is, of course, the "Bootleggers and Baptists" dynamic. Once egalitarian/public interest claims are taken as a valid reasons to increase the size, scope, and power of the state, there is an incentive to use this rhetoric as a cover for rent-seeking.Second, I think for at least some redistributivist egalitarians, democratic politics is seen as the realm of cooperation, whereas the market is seen as the realm of zero-sum conflict. Thus playing the statecraft game may seem like a better bet for registering the voices of the weak, whereas the marketplace is seen as the realm of the strong. Thus Chomsky the "anarchist," for instance, has advocated an increase in the power of the federal gov't and prefers gov't agencies to corporations ("private tyrannies") on the grounds that at least gov't agencies are open to democratic accountability, while private firms are not. Go figure.
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