Post what you want, when you want it. Self-linking is even better than maple bacon.
- To quote Feministe: The Best Thing You Will Read Today: A column on princesses, ultimate fighting, bikinis and gender roles.
- 18 Killed in Wave of Homophobic Violence in Puerto Rico – COLORLINES
- “Claims that children need both a mother and father presume that women and men parent differently in ways crucial to development but generally rely on studies that conflate gender with other family structure variables. We analyze findings from studies with designs that mitigate these problems…”
- In defense of Canada: Canadian doctors aren’t flocking to the US, Canadians aren’t flocking here for health care, doctors aren’t less satisfying practicing there, hip replacements in the US are quicker because our single-payer medicare system is fast, and more.
- Electronic cigarettes don’t give off smoke, but some areas are starting to ban them – The Washington Post The faster e-cigarettes spread among smokers, the healthier Americans will be.
- Super Obvious Secrets That I Wish They’d Teach In Art School
- David Simon, creator of The Wire, had a witty response to the Attorney General.
- Wrongful Convictions: How Many Innocent Americans Are Behind Bars?
- On the Set of Ghostbusters – The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man
- Just believing in the American People doesn’t make 5% growth for a decade a viable policy goal.
- The recovery/deficit-reduction deal the two parties should, but won’t, strike
- The Senate is doing less than ever before. Republicans blame the Democrats for not proposing more legislation. Democrats blame the Republicans for the virtually automatic filibuster, making proposing new legislation pointless. I think the system is broken.
- Wedding Dress Made From Parachute That Saved Groom’s Life
- Portland Gets Trans-Inclusive Healthcare. Hooray for my home!
- Rick Santorum demonstrates hypocrisy of ‘intolerant homosexuals’ lie
- The “massive” new oil discovered in the Gulf of Mexico is only massive by current-day standards; if this is what now counts as “massive,” that proves that we are running out.
- An Orthodox Jewish basketball player, Naama Shafir, can’t play in Europe because she wears a t-shirt under her tank top to comply with religious modesty rules. I agree with Abe Foxman. I wonder if there are any Orthodox Jewish male basketball players in Europe, and if so if they’re permitted to play while wearing skullcaps?
- “I’m not racist, but…” (“I search public facebook posts for “not racist but” and post examples of how not racist people are.”) and “I’m not sexist, but…” (you get the idea).
- Leaked! Herman Cain’s New Campaign Video “We are the Real America” is Seeking Actors: Here is the Call for Extras. Unintentionally hilarious. Example: “Upwardly Mobile Black Professional. He is a slight to small framed African American who wears glasses. With a clean cut look (no dread locks or other ethnic haircut) he is very excited and charmed by Herman Cain’s presence. They will likely embrace each other and exchange a high five.” What kind of person hires someone to pretend to be his black friend?
- New lion cub born in zoo. The cuteness! It burns, it burns!
- The Pentagon’s $435 hammer was apparently not as wasteful as I’ve assumed; it was odd accounting practices, not overpaying for hammers.
- “…a substantial portion of the higher tax burden that Europeans pay is really illusory. They are really just paying their health insurance premiums through their taxes rather than through lower wages, as we do.”
- The Gender Pay Gap Starts Right Out Of College
- Miami Police Beat, Threaten, Point Guns At, Arrest Citizen Videographer
- Richard Wiseman has a small gallery of Erik J’s photoshopped photos. This one in particular I thought was great.
- Decriminalizing Drugs in Portugal a Success, Says Report – TIME
- Ballgame posts his reaction to the problematic issues surrounding the anti-circumcision referendum
I post my reaction to the problematic issues surrounding the anti-circumcision referendum in California. The leader of the effort has published a comic book (discussed here at Alas) which has prompted allegations of anti-Semitism.
Barry, did you mean to link to the gallery?
Ballgame–I almost word-for-word agree with your post.
I’m not in San Fran, but if a similar proposition reaches more of California, I’ll be voting for it.
Thanks, Mandolin.
Mandolin, the photo was the link, but I guess that was hard to know. :-) I’ve added a link in the text.
Ballgame, I agree too. It won’t surprise me if the comic book derails this proposition — it’s not only anti-semitic, it comes with brightly colored visuals that are easy to include in videos and in mailers.
Tina Fey comments on Tracey Morgan’s homophobic monologue:
As ballgame notes, Hess has single-handedly put opponents of infant circumcision in a serious dilemma. I don’t live in SF, but given Hess and given the likely unconstitutionality of the initiative – and for that matter its complete ineffectiveness in preventing infant circumcision – I would vote against it, even though I would very much like the practice to end.
mythago, are you saying a) that this initiative will likely be found to be constitutional by the courts if/when it comes before them, or b) in mythago’s understanding of the constitution, this is unconstitutional?
If “b”, would you think that if there were a religion which removed the ear lobes of baby girls as part of their rites, and a subsequent legal prohibition banning that practice, that prohibition would be unconstitutional? (I’m using the example of ear lobe removal and not FGM because — as I would hope everyone would realize — ear lobe removal would be far, far less traumatic and injurious than male circumcision is, and yet I would suspect that more than a few people here would recoil at the notion that girls’ bodies could not legally be protected against even this low level of disfigurement if it were done under the aegis of religion if the “male circumcision is constitutionally protected” threshold was the legal standard.)
BTW, I ask this knowing and appreciating that you’re against male circumcision. I’m not trying to play ‘gotcha’ here, but hoping the example might prompt some people who think circumcision for religious purposes is a constitutionally protected activity (like some of the bloggers at Harpyness appear to do) might reevaluate their position. And I am curious where you fall on the question.
Ballgame–see, this is the part where I don’t really agree. It’s not that little girls bodies are sacrosanct, really and truly; at the point in which circumcision was normalized among gentiles in American society, clitoridectomy was also considered a reasonable treatment to prevent masturbation.
As I have said in the past, I think clitoral nicking has the potential to be a compromise that creates real progress.
Anyway, I suspect I would be significantly less likely to care about lobe removal. I mean, it doesn’t really exist, so it would be hard to evaluate in context–and context matters–how would the peoples feel about it? What would be its social consequences? (Most obviously, it seems likely that such an obvious marker would make group identity easier for outsiders–possibly provoking violence–and make conversion more difficult.) (ETA: because it would be visible on dressed adults, if that wasn’t clear.)
With FGM, ritual replacements like clitoral nicking have been shown to help in some regions–I don’t suppose we could use the same logic here? Pass the knife, draw some blood, and that satisfies the ritual (until the male can, as an adult, make his own decision to complete it)?
I don’t see cutting off earlobes as particularly problematic. I don’t see it as particularly worse (or better than) circumcision, ritual tattooing, or a lot of other things. More to the point, i don’t see either of those things as having anywhere NEAR the effect on the life/liberty/happiness of kids, as do lots of other parental decisions.
And although that isn’t the precise analysis, it’s sort of relevant. Generally speaking there’s a pretty big constitutional hurdle for interference with parental decisions regarding their kids, and an even bigger constitutional hurdle (under modern law) for said decisions when they stem from a widely-practiced religious belief.
[shrug] the reality is that the anti-circ folks have yet to demonstrate that there’s any particularl harm to it, other than a generalized “it is always horrible to change kids’ bodies without their consent” or “anti-modifications to body” theme. Mostly it relies on a sacrosanct-body model, which is inherently moral and not rational in nature. Hopefully the courts won’t fall for it.
I’m not sure what, exactly, you’re disagreeing with, Mandolin.
It seems to me that two salient questions here are:* 1.) What forms of permanent bodily modification are protected by the constitution in the context of religious practices performed by adults on children? 2.) Given the current social and political realities of the U.S., what is the best approach to reducing or eliminating the harms caused by male circumcision/FGM performed on minors?
For question 1, I would assume that just about everybody here would agree the constitution does not protect the rights of parents to, say, remove a child’s hand or leg as part of a religious ritual. I suspect that a lot of people here would have no problem with the notion that the constitution protects the rights of parents to, say pierce the ears of their children as part of a religious ritual. (I don’t know if I would agree.) There is a wide range of possible modifications between those two possibilities, and it isn’t clear to me how or why you draw the line between what is and is not protected by the constitution’s free exercise clause.
As far as question 2 is concerned, I’m ambivalent. On the one hand, there ought to be a legal recognition of how circumcision is a violation of a baby’s fundamental rights. On the other hand, given the likely political reality of extremely strong resistance to any legal prohibition of the practice by a substantial part of the Jewish community, I don’t know if a legal prohibition is the best strategy to pursue. I think your approach of what I assume would be educational efforts to encourage radical but voluntary physical harm minimization in the procedures themselves has a lot of advantages.
So I’m not sure where we really disagree.
* Obviously this whole discussion is U.S.-centric.
Exactly. This isn’t about whether I think it should or shouldn’t be protected, but what the courts are likely to do. If you’re interested in how the courts make those calls I’d recommend reading Church of Lukumi Babalayu Aye v. City of Hialeah and Employment Division v. Smith.
(By the way, Hess’s efforts really boost such a challenge, because his comic books are helpful evidence that the ban is targeted at a particular religion and its practices rather than being a neutral regulation.)
Wow, good point, Mythago.
That seems to me to be a good argument for circumcision opponents to vote against this initiative. Even if you think a legal ban is the way to go, this specific ban initiative is not just socially but legally tainted by its association with antisemitism.
If I was a judge, and the people arguing against the ban claimed that the ban was rooted in antisemitic attitudes, and then they showed me the comic book… I’d find that pretty persuasive.
mythago, I agree with you and Amp. Hess’s materials here may be a fatal judicial liability for the law he’s trying to get passed.
Ballgame, perhaps I misread you–I thought you were saying that invoking any cultural mutilation practice that involved girls would automatically trigger an “ew” response because there’s an American cultural belief in the necessity of bodily integrity for female children. And I don’t think that’s really the case–the female body is certainly constructed as mutable and mutilatable. That the constructions aren’t exactly parallel b/w male and female children isn’t really surprising since a lot of these things are about creating and enforcing differences between the constructed genders (which is actually the motivation for both FGM and MGM in a number of cultures), but it doesn’t indicate a veneration of female children’s bodily integrity.
That’s all abstractier and bigger words than I probably needed to use, but it is late, and I am tired.
BTW, I did some research several weeks ago relating to a brief exchange we had on feministe about gendered suicide techniques, and the first five or six links I found were basically split between our positions. I meant to post on it, but… novel, writing, busy-type stuff… sorry.
ETA: Plus I got discouraged after Feministe closed the thread, in as much as I wasn’t sure there would be a point in continuing the discussion over here… mostly b/c I wasn’t sure how to link the two threads together or something. I’m not a very good blogger, I fear.
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Mandolin wrote:
If I remember correctly, adult male converts to Judaism who have not been circumcised are not required by Jewish law to be circumcised as part of their conversion. A ritual drawing of blood is considered sufficient. (But I might be misremembering.)
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I’ve updated my post in response to some of the feedback I’ve gotten over the past day (including mythago’s point about Hess’s anti-Semitic materials possibly jeopardizing the constitutionality of his referendum, should it pass). Same link.
Well, Mandolin, there’s three different contexts here. There’s the U.S. back when non-religious circumcision began to take hold (the late 19th and early 20th centuries). No great respect for women’s bodies then, judging by the existence of clitoridectomies and some of the more gruesome aspects of the beginning of gynecology.
Then there’s the general U.S. culture today, and the specifically feminist culture of the U.S. today (which would include most of the Alas community IME). I would certainly be surprised if the majority of Alas readers thought that if a religion incorporated the ritual removal of baby girls’ earlobes in its practices, that rite would be constitutionally protected. (I don’t know if that would also be true of the broader American culture as well, though I suspect it might be.)
I’d be interested in knowing what you found regarding male and female suicide rates, should you ever get around to posting about same.
gin-and-whiskey:
Wow. In the world I would like to live in, permanently altering a person’s body without their consent (excepting medical exigency) would be a convincing argument.
But clearly this isn’t that world.
Okay, so since I know that there IS harm, what I take away from this is that we have not adequately demonstrated it. And I have to wonder, what will that take?
We have well-documented anecdote, in the famous case of David Reimer. Quick synopsis: David Reimer was born male-bodied, and effectively lost his penis during the cauterization of his circumcision. Since there was no way to give him a functioning penis, Dr. John Money counseled the parents to have him undergo sexual reassignment surgery and raise him as a girl. Dr. Money was a proponent of the notion that children will adopt whatever gender role they are given, and he trumpeted the Reimer case as proof. David was raised as a girl, but never accepted his gender role, and as an adult transitioned back to male. After years of depression, he committed suicide at age 38.
So, circumcision did a lot of harm to David Reimer, which Dr. John Money made much, much worse.
But that was a freak accident, right? I mean, how often do circumcisions have medical complications?
Wikipedia has a tidy summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision
A thread over at The Volokh Conspiracy, which I admit I have only scanned, has actual surgeons speaking generally about complication rates, in the context of a discussion on circumcision:
http://volokh.com/2011/05/23/proposed-san-francisco-circumcision-ban-and-religious-freedom/
Even taking a lower bound on the complication rate, say, 0.2%, how many complications is that?
Lessee… in the US, we produce about 4 million babies annually. Figure roughly half have penises, so that’s 2 million. If we circumcise them all, that’s … 400,000 (four hundred thousand) complications annually.
Complications can include discomfort in urination, incontinence, urinary tract infections, urinary fistulas, cysts, necrosis of all or part of the penis, and skin bridge formation, where the damaged tissue adheres someplace it shouldn’t, often the glans of the penis.
Wow. How come we don’t hear about THAT?
Well, probably most of the complications are minor, easily resolved with a bit of aftercare.
And we’re talking about penises, so it’s easy to see why no one talks about this. But that just means that people aren’t aware. It doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem caused by elective surgery.
Ampersand, in response to Mandolin’s excellent point:
Yup. Visual evidence is extremely persuasive. So much so that there are rules of evidence which can and do exclude evidence which is too gory, because it will prejudice the jury right out of their ability to think rationally.
In my experience, judges find visual evidence far, far more persuasive than verbal testimony.
Perhaps the anti-circumcision folks should buy billboard space to show images of circumcisions gone wrong… oh, but we can’t do that, because, well, penises. Say bye-bye to the public’s ability to think rationally, such as it is.
It’s a toughie. How DO you demonstrate the harm? Because really, once you get someone to actually look to see if it’s there it’s hard to miss. And so the real problem is overcoming the public’s squeamishness enough to get them to actually think about it. But it’s hard to keep them on track long enough to consider the issue, because
penis!
Grace
Oh, forgot to include this in my recent post, but I can prove definitively that circumcision is bad using the magical science-confounding power of Anecdotes:
For people who say there’s no loss of sensation: I know a guy who got a full circumcision in his twenties. He told me that he experienced a loss of sensitivity in the glans of his penis, which he attributed to the regular contact it now gets with his undies, where before it was sheltered by his foreskin.
Also, I know several women who have enough experience of penises to generalize and knew me well enough to be willing to talk about it, and most of them reported that, on average, men with with foreskins were more sensitive and gentler lovers than men without foreskins, though there were exceptions. They attributed this to the fact that, as far as sensation went, the men with foreskins had more (ahem) “skin in the game”.
So, for what it’s worth, anecdotes.
Grace
Grace, 0.2% of 2 million is 4,000, not 400,000.
…you’re right.
Okay, that’s truly embarrassing. Good thing I had those anecdotes handy so that I could be definitive.
[Grace hangs her head in shame at failing a dirt-simple multiplication problem and skulks away.]
Grace
This reminds me of that old joke about the Jew who gets on a train and finds his friend reading a copy of Der Sturmer. When the astonished and offended man asks his friend why he is reading such an anti-Semitic rag, the friend replies that *this* newspaper talks about how the Jews rule the world, the Jews control all the money supply, the Jews have their fingers in every pie – why the heck *wouldn’t* he want to hear news like that?
(In other words, it would be nice to believe that America is “feminist” and the majority of people are simpatico with Alas. But c’mon. I live in Liberalbubblestan and it’s not even like that here.)
As far as courts go, ballgame, it’s not clear to me with your earlobe example whether you are asking people for their predictions about what the courts are likely to do, or what they think the courts should do; in fact you seem to be conflating those things, and they’re not, or at least shouldn’t be, the same.
I can see I was a bit casual in my wording there, mythago. I meant, ‘the specifically feminist part of U.S. culture,’ not ‘U.S. culture is specifically feminist.’
A fair question … I suppose, strictly speaking, I was asking about what ‘Alas folk’ would think the courts should do.
Grace: It’s a mistake most of us make at some point.
It’s a bit of a “have you stopped beating your husband yet?” question. The implied accusation is that Alas readers would feel differently if it were the ritual removal of baby boys’ earlobes.
My belief is that the courts have a strong status quo bias – they’re more likely to be sympathetic to laws banning practices if the practices in question seem strange to judges.
So I think courts would find that legislatures have the right to ban ritual earlobe removal. And they’d also do so if the hypothetical ritual were targeting boy babies’ ears. But they probably wouldn’t find that legislatures can ban foreskin removal. They’d find some rationalization to differentiate foreskins and earlobes (probably the dubious claims that foreskin removal leads to better health), but really, their ruling would be based on that foreskin removal is ordinary practice in judges’ circles, while earlobe removal is not.
As for what I think courts should do, I’m not sure.
I like the idea of courts ruling that childhood earlobe removal — and childhood foreskin removal, for that matter — is unconstitutional, because parents are stewards of their children’s bodies, not owners. Parents aren’t free to do whatever they please to their kids’ bodies; instead, they have a responsibility to keep the body as intact and healthy as possible, until the child becomes old enough to make their own body decisions.
But I worry that if the government embraces the “steward” logic, they’ll use it to punish parents of fat kids for being “bad stewards.”
Finally, I’m not sure if I really want a legal ban on removing the earlobes of children, in your hypothetical example. It would depend on the practical outcome of the ban: does the ban mean that earlobe removals stop being done, or does it mean that earlobe removals are done by amateurs in unsanitary conditions?
While that’s true, there are still laws and stuff. So judges would, very broadly speaking, have to decide whether the state had some interest in banning earlobe-cutting, and whether the law in question was targeted at the First Temple of the Lobeless. Which would mean a lot of examination behind the purpose for the ban, as well as examination of the practice itself, the risks to the baby from earlobe-cutting, and so on.
What I think the courts should do is follow the law, which I realize puts me in the minority pretty much everywhere. :P
That was what I meant, yeah. Thanks, Barry.
And we were doing so well there for a while.
*sigh*
I can’t for the life of me see where there’s the slightest ‘have you stopped beating your spouse yet?’* aspect to my hypothetical, Amp & Mandolin. I wasn’t making any accusation about how ‘Alas folk’ might feel about the removal of baby boys’ earlobes. If I have to Justify All Unspoken But Potential Attitudinal Divergences before I ask a hypothetical, well that will take a lot of words. Now, do you really want me to be even wordier than I already am?? Surely you jest!
At any rate, regardless of whether or not I suspect some ‘Alas folk’ of harboring Male Earlobe Hacking Sympathies, I was pretty certain that none harbored any Female Earlobe Hacking Sympathies, and indeed I’m pretty damn sure that most mainstream feminists are strongly sensitized to Manifestly Unfair Double Standards That Adversely Affect Females. I suspected that many here would not quietly accept the notion that some religion somewhere could disfigure the ears of baby girls (while leaving the ears of their baby boys alone) while the state was held constitutionally powerless to intervene.
So yes, it is actually a significant stipulation in my example that the hypothetical religion in question prescribes the hacking of Female Earlobes Only. Under that scenario, do people believe that the First Amendment should prevent a state from stepping in and stopping the practice?
I appreciate and agree with many of your thoughts about the whole Earlobe Protection Act of 2012, Amp, though I think your wording is a little off. Strictly speaking, it isn’t a question of whether earlobe removal is unconstitutional … it’s a question of whether earlobe removal is constitutionally protected (as a religious practice). The significance of this nitpicking is that I’m not sure Being A Bad Parent Who Raises Overweight Offspring is a constitutionally protected activity … I think the reason we don’t have laws against it has more to do with Our Legislatures Haven’t Gone That Far Beyond The Pale Yet.** (Of course I could be wrong … maybe there’s some sort of constitutional protection here from the implied privacy concept … Griswold … absence of compelling state interest, etc.)
* Kudos for the gender switch in the ‘spouse-beating’ meme, though. Goddess bless you! ;-)
** Is it acceptable here to use the metaphor that something is ‘crazy’ or ‘nuts’?
“Constitutionally powerless to intervene”? Of course the state can intervene. But to uphold such a law the state would have to show that the law was of general applicability – probably a bit tricky in the case of the Earlobe Preservation Act – and that it had a serious interest in prohibiting the religious practice anyway. Whether it affects just boys or just girls or both is really not relevant to whether the Establishment Clause permits the practice.
I think that the general consensus here is that while most of the posters here (even those of us who may be crazy or nuts) aren’t offended by the analogies, we understand why others are (and also that avoiding those metaphors is a way to show respect for disabled people broadly, but those involved in the anti-disablism movement specifically). If you can come up with an alternative, that’s preferable.
Re: earlobes: I get your reasoning now after several iterations. Thank you for taking the time.
In other words, you assumed we’d feel differently about baby boy’s earlobes being hacked off than baby girls. Just as I said.
Rather than Getting Pompous and Using Lots Of Capital Letters, why not say “sorry about that” and let it go? The world doesn’t end if you admit you made a faux pas.
Of course they don’t have that responsibility at all, in our laws or the laws of any other country out there. Not only can you hit your kid legally–the bar for abuse is pretty high–but you can basically ruin your child’s life without governmental interference.
That’s the least of your problems. because if the government embraces the “steward” logic it will basically become a Big Brother to all parents out there.
Fat isn’t the example I would have chosen. But I’ll say it again: parents have enormous control over their children, and are (currently) permitted to do an enormous number of things which will permanently and significantly affect their life.
No, they’re not “owners.” But they might as well be.
How do you imagine making a legal exception for circumcision as prohibited, out of the many various things which parents do (or don’t do) to and for their kids? And why would you choose that one?
Again, I wouldn’t have chosen this example, but my understanding is that certain types of obesity are strongly related to childhood eating habits and foods, and I’m positive that obesity-related deaths exceed circumcision-related deaths. Or if you want a really simple one, you could always ban smoking in private homes containing children. Or you could ban alcohol consumption in the home. And so on.
In the end I’m having a lot of trouble believing the spin that it’s about the kids and not about the individuals’ personal dislike of circumcision.
Sailorman–do you think that parents who have a religious belief in prayer instead of medicine should be obligated to give their children medical treatments for, say, type I diabetes?
Sailorman, is there a case, apart from circumcision, in which parents can legally cut off a child’s body part that won’t grow back, without medical necessity? I can’t think of any, but I may be failing to think of something obvious.
I suspected that many here would not quietly accept the notion that some religion somewhere could disfigure the ears of baby girls (while leaving the ears of their baby boys alone) while the state was held constitutionally powerless to intervene.
In re: this and Amp’s most recent question…
AFAIK it’s perfectly legal for parents to take an infant or toddler (of any gender) to the mall, to an accessory store (not, you’ll note, a medical facility), where an unlicensed teenager can use a non-sterilizable, reusable plastic gun to shoot blunt-tipped chunks of metal alloy through the child’s earlobes, a practice that obliterates a very small but not negligible chunk of the lobe (and creates a blood-plasma spray onto that reusable plastic gun).
A practice, I should note, which I personally find repulsive and shocking. And which, as far as I know in the United States, is exclusively practiced on girls.
is there a case, apart from circumcision, in which parents can legally cut off a child’s body part that won’t grow back, without medical necessity?
Medical procedures performed on intersex infants/children, or even on children whose genitals don’t conform to social norms about “typical” size (which Anne Fausto-Sterling notes is a difference of millimeters when we’re talking about infant boys and girls.) Clitoral reduction in infants is not medically necessary and can cause a lifetime of pain and loss of sexual sensation.
Re: 23, “The Gender Pay Gap Starts Right Out Of College”
I looked up the study. They compared starting salaries of men and women right out of college who had the same academic majors. The majors were rather broadly drawn, though. For example, they used “Education” instead of “Primary Education”, “Special Education”, “Engineering” rather than “Mechanical Engineering”, “Electrical Engineering”, etc. So first off I was wondering if there would be an effect wherein men and women gravitated to different subdivisions of those majors that would give a better analysis.
Then I noted that women were actually getting paid more than men in Engineering. There was a note:
I wonder if such a thing might apply in reverse to any of the other academic majors – say, Education, where the male/female ratio was very high (men get offers 33% higher than women), and account for some of the skew. There does not seem to have been any attempt to see if this concept applies to any of the other majors.
So, first, even though their methodology is more granular than most I don’t think it’s granular enough. The second to me is that this is a stand-in for the real data. The idea of going down to the level of the broad major categories was to eliminate the effect of things such as more men in engineering vs. more women in education. What is needed to do a study like this not on the job qualifications but on the actual jobs that people are applying for and getting. We need to see if women with the same qualifications as men are getting lower offers in the same jobs.
I am minded of an example in my own family. My daughter and my son both got degrees in engineering. However, my son chose to pursue employment in engineering. My daughter did not. Are women more likely than men to choose such a career path? Are women more likely to seek jobs with not-for-profit corporations than men are? It’s an interesting study as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.
Also – I saw a comment at the link that men are more likely to negotiate their salary levels than women are. I wonder if this is true, or if employers have the perception that this is true and thus offer men higher salaries to avoid negotiations?
I believe Amp has previously discuss studies that find it is true women are less likely to negotiate, but also less likely to succeed when they do, because of the “he’s assertive/she’s a bitch” problem.
One in six australian female university students are raped :
http://www.dawn.com/2011/06/10/one-in-six-australian-female-students-are-raped-survey.html
“In most cases of sexual assault (56 per cent) the offender was a friend or acquaintance, and in 22 per cent of instances the woman knew the perpetrator intimately, it reported.”
“Rarely were the assaults investigated, with only two per cent of women taking the matter to police, mostly because they thought it was not serious enough to report.”
Rape is damn serious, if you ask me.
I was just thinking about this when I read Richard’s post. He commented:
And that made me wonder. Is “exploited” the proper term? Is it even applicable here?
I think of ‘exploited” as being applicable in situations where someone is forced to do something because they have very few other options. But adjuncts aren’t usually in that category, are they?
Professors are extremely well educated people who are generally in the top ranks of intelligence. That alone makes them difficult to really exploit: they’re smart enough to know what they are doing, and they’re educated enough to be able to do something else. And (especially in the case of adjuncts) the other opportunities aren’t necessarily a significantly lower paying job; you can probably beat their yearly earnings by working at your local Gap store.
Making matters more complex is the fact that the adjunct situation hasn’t significantly changed in a while. Many of these people–again, some of the best educated and intelligent people in the country–knew what they were in for when they signed on.
So can we reserve ‘exploited’ for people who really are, you know, exploited? And stop using it for people who have lots of other options, which they choose not to take?
I think of ‘exploited” as being applicable in situations where someone is forced to do something because they have very few other options. But adjuncts aren’t usually in that category, are they?
Spoken like someone who’s never tried to cobble together full-time work by teaching 7-10 classes per quarter/semester at multiple institutions spread around a geographic area, for maybe $1500-$2500 per class, with anywhere from 20-100 students per class, with no health benefits, no certainty of re-hire from semester to semester, no office, no faculty development money to maintain licensure or advance in the field, and the student loans that come with a PhD to pay.
And no, there isn’t always a bunch of other cushy jobs available. I spent six months unemployed last year because I lost my job at the wrong time of year for full-time hiring. If I hadn’t gotten the ONE offer I got starting this calendar year, I’d be that adjunct, barely able to pay my rent while working myself into a nub. My uncle, with two doctorates, worked that way for YEARS until he got a full-time position his last few years before retirement. I have watched multiple friends work this way, and it is a nightmare.
At my last full-time job, I took on adjunct work on top of my full-time work to pay my student loans. With the time it took me to do curriculum development, and my refusal to evaluate graduate students using multiple choice tests and my insistence on substantive writing assignments (because I am in a field where part of my ethical obligation is to ultimately protect future consumers of our graduates’ services), I figured that I could probably have earned as much hourly wage, if not more, working at Whole Foods. I certainly could have earned more bartending. At the same time, the private not-for-profit school I taught at charged tuition that was 3-4 times what the state schools charged.
I don’t think that speculating on each others personal experience, skills, and motivations is going to end well on either side, so I’m not going to respond to that jab. I don’t really know why you went there, but let’s stick to generalities, shall we?
Now:
Forgive me for pointing this out. But “no certainty of future employment” is the standard for pretty much every nonunion worker, which is most people, including me. The lack isn’t exploitation. No office: likewise. No faculty development money: likewise. (those include me, too.)
High student loans: This is a bit like “no future employment.” Plenty of people have high student loans (which sucks) and plenty of people can’t easily pay them (which sucks.) I’m one of them. But those are generally applicable; they have nothing to do with adjuncts in particular.
Is everyone who is working somewhere other than their dream job being exploited? Of course not. So if my English-masters friend is working as a landscaper for decent money because she can’t get a faculty job teaching English, that’s not exploitation. And if she would rather be an English adjunct than work as a landscaper, it doesn’t become exploitation.
I could make the same amount of money doing something else which would be less stressful and simpler. I don’t want to. That doesn’t mean I’m being exploited where I am.
Well, no, but I never said there were. If you’re looking for available alternatives they don’t need to be cushy, they just need to be non-exploitative.
Adjuncts make $25,000-$35,000/year in most circumstances, in the context of working serious hours and putting in a hell of a lot of largely-uncompensated travel time and car miles.
If you’re a highly educated and literate person with a drive to succeed, who is willing to travel and work long hours, it’s not incredibly hard to make $25-35k per year at a job other than adjuncting. It’s probably easier than adjuncting.
Does it suck? Yes! I’m not suggesting that adjuncting is easy. I wouldn’t want to be a full time adjunct. If I wanted to do it, I would.
I’m suggesting that it isn’t exploitation, even if it sucks. “Sucky” and “exploitative” are not the same thing. To be exploitative there needs to be more than simply feeling like the job sucks.
This is basically my point.
(1) Amy Adjunct could work somewhere else, if she wanted to.
(2) The alternative jobs are not those which are generally considered per se exploitative; plenty of people hold them happily. Nobody is saying “you don’t have to adjunct; you can deal drugs or sell your organs instead!”
(3) The wages at the alternate jobs are similar to–or higher than–than adjuncting.
Viewed in that context, Amy Adjunct has other valid opportunities, which she doesn’t want to do. If Amy makes a voluntary and fully educated choice to adjunct, how is the result exploitative? You can’t CHOOSE to be exploited, or it’s not exploitation, for the same reason that consensual S&M isn’t criminal assault.
I am not a fan of high tuition. But generally speaking I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for the argument, especially at the PhD level. People make a choice of whether to attend school for a PhD, what to study while they are in school, and where to go to school. The resulting PhD grads are some of the best educated people in the world. What, they can’t realize how much they’re paying?
The biggest exploiters are arguably the schools themselves. They turn out more PhDs than there are jobs.
I dunno. I think it’s fair to say that D.C. exploited Superman’s creators; D.C. took advantage of their desperation to work in the field they loved to take something they didn’t really deserve (ownership of the character), and to extract labor that was worth a lot more than what they were paying.
Taking advantage of their love of academia to pay them less than their labor is worth is a form of exploitation. It’s far from the worst form of exploitation imaginable, but it’s not nothing, either.
Sure, Amp. There are exceptions to pretty much every rule; perhaps Superman’s creators are in that category. But I’ve listed a variety of pretty specific reasons why I believe that applying the “exploited” label to adjuncts is dead wrong. Would you like to respond to those?
I ask because I’m having trouble seeing why adjuncts would be a special exception, and I’m having trouble seeing any realistic general rule which would support adjuncts as “exploited” and not have that label apply to a huge number of NON-adjuncts.
-Working at a lower paid job because they love it? Lots of people do it.
-Working at a job which doesn’t necessarily pay them back for the cost of their education? Very common.
-Failing to get the job they want? Probably describes half the country.
-Thinking they are worth more than they get paid? Nearly universal.
-Producing work which is similar to people that are paid much more? Extraordinarily common.
-Working hard for their money? Normal.
-No job security? Standard.
-No ability to do whatever they want professionally, with few limitations and no repercussions? Won’t even touch that one.
-Caught between the choice to do what they want, and the choice to do what pays the bills? Yeah: welcome to the world.
Calling that exploitation is to render the word meaningless. You know who gets exploited? Day laborers. Minimum wage workers. People who lack knowledge, power, education, and–most important of all–OPTIONS. Those are the people who I often represent. I know what exploitation looks like, and adjuncts, generally speaking, aren’t in that category. Neither are law school graduates, for what it’s worth:
I’m a lawyer. The job market sucks for lawyers right now. If I wanted to find a job right now, I’d have a hard time. If I wanted to find a job that I liked in the legal field, I’d have a much harder time—it might not be available at all.
Plenty of attorneys I know are working as restaurant managers (or the like) because they can’t get a job. Are THEY exploited? Hell, no: who gave them the right to have the job they want? There’s nothing wrong with working in a restaurant. I’d do it if my business crashed.
Other attorneys I know have chosen to work for extremely low pay–$25,000/year isn’t uncommon–because they would rather work as a lawyer than do something else. Are THEY exploited? Hell, no: they’re employees; they don’t have business risk or investment; they can get another job if they want.
Other ones have changed what they do to try to keep their income up. Maybe they love real estate but they are doing drunk driving. Maybe they love appeals but are handling divorces to pay the bills. Are THEY exploited? Hell, no: they weigh the pros and cons, and make their choice. They may not be happy, but they’re not exploited.
In fact, not only aren’t attorneys exploited, they’re generallylucky. Whether or not they have a job, they are highly educated and widely employable. That can’t be said for most people. It’s better to be out of work with a J.D. and writing/speaking skill, than it is to be an out of work welder when there aren’t any welding jobs.
Pretty much all of those examples would apply to PhDs, MBAs, JDs, and everyone else with a high priced graduate degree, starry-eyed goals of work, and an imperfect job.
Do you want to call that entire category of people ‘exploited,’ and if not, how do you except for adjuncts? Frankly, I would hope that most of those folks would be too embarrassed to claim exploitation for doing what they want. That’s entitlement on steroids.
I do a lot of consumer law and I get a lot of requests for pro bono or reduced-fee work. I find that it’s extremely simple to decide who gets denied. There’s a whole host of people who are perfectly comfortable asking me to provide them services for free, while driving a car 15 years newer than mine, living in a house more expensive than mine, retaining their expensive memberships, and/or refusing to take a “demeaning” job that is “beneath them.”
yeah, fuck that. Make whatever choices you want, but don’t expect me, or society, to pay for them.
You know who gets the free services? People who need it. The guy who fell off a scaffold and broke his leg, so he went into foreclosure because he couldn’t work for 6 months and had no savings, and who keeps applying to every open job but getting denied? HE gets the pro bono time. He’s earned it.
Adjuncts are like the rich folks. They are standing under a shower and complaining that they’re getting wet, while refusing to get out of the tub. In times when lots of people are desperately doing anything to try keep their life out of the shithole, it’s bullshit to give that “but I don’t WANT to!!” privilege a second glance, much less call it exploitation.
Big Corn Eats GOP
The article goes on. The bottom line is that subsidizing the production of ethanol from corn, requiring it to be used in gasoline and paying oil companies to do so hasn’t contributed to making us energy independent, hasn’t developed an ethanol industry that is able to exist without subsidies and hasn’t helped reduce pollution. What it does do is raise food prices not just for Americans but for Mexicans and others as well – at a time when our reserves of corn are at their lowest in years and when the spring weather will most likely bring us a low corn crop. Yet the GOP, who are supposed to be against government interference in markets, didn’t get this passed (as it would have with the 8 Democrats who supported it).
Yeah, there is broad agreement across wonks of both parties that ethanol subsidies are teh suck. The problem is that Iowa wields power to decide the next president all out of proportion to its size, and Iowa means corn. Thus the subsidies continue, lest a candidate come out of the Iowa primary with less-than-sterling ‘buzz.’
It’s yet another reason to reform our electoral system in several ways, including simultaneous 50-state primaries and a one-citizen-one-vote system doing away with the undemocratic state-by-state electoral college that values the votes of residents of Wyoming more than the votes of Californians.
—Myca
Part of the problem, G&W, is that you seem to assume that exploitation must by definition be a rare condition, and therefore if you can show that traits I think are exploitative are not incredibly rare, that proves I’m mistaken.
But I’m not sure I buy that exploitation is by definition rare. I do think it varies in degree — someone who is literally enslaved is obviously being exploited far worse than an adjunct, for example — but we can acknowledge that difference without the word losing all meaning. That said, I think your logic is off: you list a lot of individual traits of adjuncts, pointing out that they are common. But is the combination of traits in the adjunct market (see below) really all that common?
I’d guess not — or only to the degree that anyone who is a restaurant manager is exploited. I’ve never worked in a restaurant, so I don’t really know much about it.
I think once thing that distinguishes that from an adjunct is that the attorney is not using her high-priced, hard-won law skills as a restaurant manager. Yes, some skills gleaned in law school (issue-spotting, say, or negotiation) might come in handy, but you don’t HAVE to have a law degree to manage a restaurant. If all the lawyers said “I will not manage another restaurant unless I’m paid what an attorney is worth,” the restaurants would simply hire non-attorneys.
The higher education system as a whole, on the other hand, absolutely needs the qualifications adjuncts have to function. And they take a TON of money from the adjuncts in exchange for providing that training. But, increasingly, the higher ed system is not willing to pay the adjuncts a fair wage for the specialized qualifications the adjuncts provide to the system.
The system as a whole functions by making thousands of young people believe they have a future career if they only work hard and pay extraordinarily high tuition. The carrot they dangle in front of those young people is the prospect of a meaningful career. But the system is dependent on yanking the carrot away, paying most of those young people peanuts, and making the career paths unavailable.
I do think that sounds like exploitation.
I’m not saying that the system should be set up to give free carrots away. I think it should be set up so that those who have a talent for teaching, and pay their dues, and work hard, can make a reasonable career. That’s not the same as a guy with a BMW asking you to work for him for free, is it?
The system as a whole functions by making thousands of young people believe they have a future career if they only work hard and pay extraordinarily high tuition. The carrot they dangle in front of those young people is the prospect of a meaningful career. But the system is dependent on yanking the carrot away, paying most of those young people peanuts, and making the career paths unavailable.
I think there is a distinct bait-and-switch going on in academics that makes the treatment of adjuncts ethically questionable, at best. At some point, I guess you could argue that this becomes common knowledge and anyone pursuing teaching at the higher levels should know better, but the disappearance of t-t or even full-time, salaried teaching jobs has been a gradual change that many newer PhDs could be forgiven for not having anticipated.
So, while it’s not like a day-laborer who does physically hazardous work for low pay and no benefits, but neither is it like a lawyer choosing to go into public-interest law, knowing that they won’t make anything like the money of an attorney doing corporate contract law.
And I say this as someone who voluntarily went into a chronically underpaid profession with terrible work-life balance that isn’t remotely worth the price of the education necessary to get in the door. And also one that is undergoing large-scale structural changes that are further degrading the working conditions and salaries.
I don’t think it has to be rare; I think it has to be both non-minute and unfair.
“Help these adjuncts, they’re exploited!” is a rallying call that carries in it the assumption that the exploitation is relevant because it’s different in some way from everyone else. If pretty much every worker is exploited in some way, and if “exploited” is basically used as a synonym for “not working at a job of one’s choice for the pay of one’s preference,” then who cares?
I don’t get this. I posted a variety of examples, including an example of an attorney who works their ass off for $25k/year. You’ve ignored that example, and are “distinguishing” from something that is obviously different. Why? It doesn’t make sense. Use the “low paid lawyer” as a comparison instead.
Well, there are lots of people (hi!) who would like to work as an adjunct. In fact, there are far more of those people than there are adjunct positions. And many of those people would take a voluntary pay cut in order to adjunct.
So when I consider your ranking of “fair,” it seems obviously wrong: there are apparently some significant benefits that you are ignoring. Could be personal, could be political, could be the potential of future work. But in any case, you’re wrong.
The market considers the adjunct wage to be MORE than fair, given the applicants. I consider the adjunct wage to be fair. Everyone who wants an adjunct job instead of their own (more highly paid) job considers it to be fair. Those adjuncts who turn down alternate work for more money also, apparently, consider it to be fair.
Who are you going to believe: a few self-interested adjuncts or the rest of the country?
I think it has to be both non-minute and unfair
So it’s a race to the bottom; as long as I can find somebody substantially worse off than the putative exploitee, they aren’t really being exploited?
Here’s the thing you wanted me to address:
I just don’t know enough about this to say if I consider this exploitation or not, which is why I didn’t respond to it.
I don’t know if this is expected to be a permanent, lifelong condition (that is, if there’s little to no hope of any but a tiny minority of lawyers eventually finding better legal jobs), I don’t know if the job has benefits, I don’t know if this is just a product of the lousy economy or if there are a lot of dirt poor lawyers, I don’t know if career lawyer jobs are systematically being replaced by adjunct-like positions that no one would get a law degree for if they knew that’s what they’d be doing. I don’t know if there’s a similar sort of bait-and-switch effectively going on.
It’s POSSIBLE that it’s exploitative, but — as I think was made plain in my previous comment — it’s not just any one factor that makes something seem exploitative. Certainly, if the lawyer in your example is in a situation that strongly parallels the adjunct situation in a whole bunch of ways, then I’d say yes, that is exploitative.
Amp, let me see if we can find any agreement, because so far we’re not getting much. Do you agree that people don’t really have a “right” to a particular job, be it as an adjunct or something else? And do you agree that adjuncts are, by and large, comparatively well-placed (as compared to the rest of society) to earn a decent living wage doing some job which isn’t per se exploitative?
Also, out of curiosity: I know I can’t be the only one who has done something that made me happier and paid me much less. How it is that you’re ignoring that?
That’s not at all what I said.
It is minute and fair because, for the average PhD, [number of available, survivable, decent paying jobs] and [number of available, survivable, decent paying jobs other than adjuncting] are both fairly large numbers, and are very close in magnitude.
Imagine that all colleges stopped hiring PhDs, forever. You’d have foreclosed a single, difficult, and limited (it’s never been a sure or easy thing to be a HE professor) career path, while leaving open all the others. For an average PhD, “all the others” is a VERY good number of jobs.
And you wouldn’t have to waste the degree; PhDs have value other than as a tenured or adjunct professor. You can teach elsewhere (be it community ed, high school, or whatever.) You can use your skills to produce, write, edit, etc. You can bask in your new-found knowledge, happy that you have improved your life through education. You can offer your skills to the community for free. In some cases you can work in a non-academic field and make use of your skills and knowledge for a hell of a lot of money. (there may be some PhDs which are entirely useless outside of academia, but I can’t name one off the top of my head. can you?)
And that’s not even getting into the gazillion things that they can do which DON’T use their PhD.
So is it a race to the bottom? I don’t think so. It’s just a recognition of the reality that a mega-rich person who feels poor because they “only” have $100,000 in the bank is, by most measures, not poor. And a highly-educated person who feels exploited because their preferred job is difficult to get for higher wages, and because they don’t want to take another one of the jobs that they could easily get is, by most measures, not exploited.
Sure, you can talk about relative exploitation in some contexts. Adjuncts are more exploited than “underpaid” college presidents who “only” earn $200,000. Great; so are first year mid-firm associates who “only” get $95,000/year and work 3200 hours/year for their salary. But when you look at it through a real world lens, none of those people are exploited.
It’s just an entitlement mentality. Some people have it; some don’t. Entitlement is what lets the college president think she deserves a high salary, and the recent law grad think she deserves a high paying job because she was on law review. And it’s what lets a PhD think that they deserve to be hired in academia, for a reasonable amount of money, instead of hiring all of the other people who would happily work there for less because they like the job.
gin-and-whiskey, frankly, what you appear to be saying is that educated middle-class folks need to STFU and stop calling themselves exploited because they’re not unskilled day laborers for fuck’s sake and THOSE people really ARE exploited.
And you’re looking in the wrong direction.
The question is not whether less-advantaged people are far more exploited (they are) or whether the English adjunct could go bag groceries (he could); it’s the behavior of the exploiter that’s the issue.
mythago:
Thank you! I just haven’t had the time to post further, since I am in the throes of dealing with everything I wrote about in my “Thick of it” post. So thank you, thank you, thank you!
And it’s what lets a PhD think that they deserve to be hired in academia, for a reasonable amount of money, instead of hiring all of the other people who would happily work there for less because they like the job.
Are people earning their livings as adjuncts really “happily work(ing) there for less because they like the job”?
All the full-time adjuncts I’ve ever known (as opposed to someone who does something else for a living and teaches one or two classes in their subject area as a side job) have been treading water, waiting for tenure-track positions to open up.
Increasingly, though, institutions aren’t replacing t-t departures with t-t hires, and instead are using adjuncts to teach more students for less money (while charging students more money for tuition).
Of course no one individual is entitled to a t-t job in academia. But institutions are consistently replacing full-time jobs with job security and benefits with contract work with no security or benefits, such that if you want to work in a field, you have no choice but to take poorly paid, insecure work – not just for the first few years of your career, but indefinitely – I would argue that the working conditions have become more exploitative in that field.
I don’t really understand the argument that just because some people are willing to do it, even though they could technically do something else, that makes it automatically fair and non-exploitative. That was the argument in the 19th century against every innovation in worker protections.
If the standard is that the worker could do something else, what would it take for a working situation to be “unfair”?
I see oh so many reasons why this is not exploitative. I’ll try a new one.
Adjunct work, as a part time job, isn’t bad pay. It’s interesting, challenging, and offers many personal and professional perks which are difficult to get outside the field. When you take intangibles into account, the value offered by the job is reasonable. And although it doesn’t offer any long term commitment to the employee, neither does it require one. That’s a benefit, too.
The problem is that full time adjuncting is extraordinarily difficult to do. It takes a lot of time and energy. And because the benefits of adjuncting don’t scale as you add classes,* the value you get by holding the position decreases as you come closer to full time. Similarly, long term adjuncting is difficult to do.
If you want to live life as an adjunct, you are fighting on two fronts: you’re making a full time career out of jobs which are inherently part time, and you’re making a permanent career out of jobs which are inherently temporary. You’re trying to shoehorn a square peg into a round hole. But you’re not doing it because you have to; you’re doing it because you want to.
But if full time adjuncting is hard: so what? I don’t see that as a problem; at least not a problem of exploitation. The colleges don’t hold the responsibility for offering full time positions. Neither do they hold the responsibility for making personal decisions on behalf of the adjuncts: if you want to do the square-peg-round-hole thing, that’s all on you.
Would it be nice if colleges would hire people full time instead of part time? Yes! Or, at least, it would be nice for those people who want to work as full-time adjuncts, and it would be not-nice for those people who want to have another job and occasionally teach. In my view, there’s nothing wrong with curating a collection and teaching an occasional art history class, or with running an office and teaching an occasional law class.
But in any case, the move from full time to part time is driven by a hell of a lot of factors and there’s nothing inherently wrong with it from a financial point of view. (There may be other issues, but that’s a different thread.)
* If you want to be around students; if you want to teach; if you want to say you’re a teacher; if you want to be at at college; if you want to pad your resume; if you just want to keep a toe in the pool, you can get that without full time work. You certainly don’t get four times the benefits if you teach four classes. That’s only a sampling of the intangible benefits of adjuncting (not applicable to everyone, of course) but it serves to illustrate the point.
I think that’s apples and oranges.
Let me give a non-academic example. I work at a newspaper, where I receive an hourly wage to write articles. If they called us in tomorrow and told us we would now be contract workers and paid $50 an article, and if that arrangement became SOP in newspapers around the country, that would represent a significant change for the worse in my working conditions and that of most reporters. That some people chose to work as freelancers and that some of those freelancers write as a side gig because they like the glamor of seeing their name in print or because they think they have something to say just has shit all to do with it.
This discussion has made me remember my first job, where it was made clear to us that we were never to turn in a time card with more than 40 hours on it, even though no one there could get the work done in less than 45 or 50 hours a week. Setting aside the fact that that’s illegal (and it seems to me we are talking about exploitation in a moral or ethical sense, not a strictly legal sense), I think that’s still exploitative, even though the wage I earned was typical for young reporters at a newspaper that size and I technically could have gone and done something else (like work for the other newspaper, where no woman who got married would ever get another raise) and I had a college degree and had to wear hose and close-toed shoes to work. But hey, we were willing to do it for the privilege of working in journalism, so I guess it was just fine.
This is a great question, and one that needs answering.
—Myca
Note: just edited
OK, we finally agree on something!
Now: Is any individual entitled to a TT job in academia? It may be a stupid thing to eliminate tenure, but do you think that collectively, at least some would-be professors are entitled to that job?
Let me try to clarify something. because at heart it’s not clear whether we agree on the existence of a “no exploitation” category but disagree about the presence of adjuncts in it, or whether we disagree on the existence of the category at all.
Do you think that exploitation, as a term, is properly used to describe anyone whose working conditions have become worse? Would you apply it to corporate heads, people making a lot of money; people in power; NBA head coaches; self-employed businesspeople who are forced to reduce their profits; etc?
Or do you think–as do I–that the term is only applicable to some people?
Simple: the “something else” has to be bad, unfair, unwarranted, problematic, etc. That generally means that there shouldn’t be a fair number of people who want (having their own, valid, non-exploited, choices) to do the “something else.”
“Take this job or starve” = problem.
“Take this job or get sent to the front” = problem
“Take this job or go into prostitution” = problem
“take this job or go work for minimum wage with an abusive boss” = problem
“take this job or manage a Gap” = not a problem.
“take this job or work in an office” = not a problem.
Do you seriously not see the difference there? If you start using subjective analysis where you say “oh, but they’re a PhD; it’s demeaning and inappropriate to work at a Gap” then you’re basically privileging their choices. You’re falling into the “poor little rich person” trap.
And those arguments against worker protection were invalid then, because in the 19th century, for the average (usually unskilled) worker, the “something else” wasn’t acceptable.
My argument relies on distinguishing between “alternates available to the average worker in the 19th century” and “alternates available to the average PhD-educated person in 2011.” Your argument relies on conflating them. Mine is better.
Well, no. That’s pretty much the lament of every print media employee out there.
You may WISH it was irrelevant, because you have a full time job in writing. But in fact it’s very relevant.
People like to see their name in print. And some of those people are perfectly good writers–some of them are better than the full time folks. And many of those people like it so much that they will write for free (!) just so that they can see their name in print, or know that others are reading what they have to say, or to hang on their wall, or to impress their friends, or to develop a readership for their future paywall-enabled blog.
You may feel superior to them; you may wish you were superior to them. Perhaps you are, personally. But that doesn’t change the reality that, if you can get skilled writing for free, it’s worth less.
Do you know that there are volunteer positions that are so sought-after that people basically have to pay to volunteer? In a world where that takes place, how is it surprising that people will produce quality writing for free?
How much do you think I’m out of pocket a year from Scouting? Probably a couple of grand, at least. There are lots of different volunteer positions in a great many organizations that you basically end up paying to perform. As a matter of fact, I’d say that if you do almost anything significant in a volunteer position it’s going to end up costing you money.
Sounds like academia is following the Wal-Mart formula – hire a bunch of part-timers instead of fewer full-timers. Makes it a lot cheaper as long as you keep the hours under the local State’s cutoff over which you have to offer benefits.
There’s a lot of articles being referenced in the right-wing blogosphere regarding how people are looking at whether academia is headed for an educational bubble – when people decide that getting a college education is not worth what you pay for it. This will actually favor the public schools. But it’s really going to whack the private schools (except, perhaps, the very top ones like MIT, et. al.) where people are leaving school with $50,000 or $70,000 or even $100,000 of debt and a BA that won’t help them get a job where they can both pay the debt and pay the rent.
How does a school with big tuition bill but not a big rep deal with this? They’ll have to drop personnel expenses. Given that they’ve saddled themselves with tenure they can’t fire the most expensive professors, so they have to go after the non-tenured ones. At some point some of them will start to re-examine the whole tenure concept. They’ll also have to look at forcing everyone to do more teaching and less time on non-teaching work.
My argument relies on distinguishing between “alternates available to the average worker in the 19th century” and “alternates available to the average PhD-educated person in 2011.” Your argument relies on conflating them. Mine is better.
First of all, my argument doesn’t conflate them. My subjective judgment call about where the line falls is different than yours. But more importantly, my my argument is more about the relationship between the employer and the employee than it is about the alternatives available to a particular person. I think my argument is essentially a social contract argument (which might be one that you find completely irrelevant/illegitimate).
Anyway, yes, I think there are people who would not fall into the exploited category, even if their situation got worse, mostly people in management positions whose jobs are not physically dangerous, but I’m also viewing exploitation along a spectrum, from “not at all,” through “kinda, sorta” and “man, that sucks,” all the way to “holy shit I didn’t know that still happened.”
But I’m more concerned with what the employer is getting out of it than I am with the alternatives available to the worker. People who work on oil rigs are pretty well paid, from what I understand, and they don’t have to work on oil rigs. They could do something else that paid less. But if a multinational oil company takes short-cuts with safety protocols to make even more money than they otherwise would, I would consider those workers to fall somewhere on the exploitation spectrum.
Or let’s take bike messengers. In Chicago, which is the city I’m familiar with from having several friends who were bike messengers there, every company paid its messengers on a contract/per-delivery basis. This created an incentive for every messenger to take a lot of risks to make as many deliveries as possible in order to earn a living wage. But because they were contractors, the owners of the company got out of paying workman’s comp. And none of them earned enough to buy health insurance on the private market. If they got hurt on the job, they were out of work and out of luck.
But no one has to work as a bike messenger. Many of the people I knew who did that kind of work did it because they enjoyed working outside, enjoyed riding, and enjoyed a certain kind of status/glamor that attaches to it within a certain subculture. They could have worked in a coffee shop or walked dogs or washed dishes in a restaurant, but instead, they worked as bike messengers.
To me, that they had less dangerous alternatives is not that relevant. Nor is the fact that some people take stupid risks on their bikes for no compensation whatsoever. What matters to me is that they are encouraged to take risks so that the company can make more money, then when those risks cause them to get hurt on the job, they are left to fend for themselves, again so that the owners of the company can make more money. It’s all perfectly legal, but I still think it’s wrong and exploitative.
Circling back to writers, I am well aware that not only do people write for free, but people actually pay to have their work published. Regardless, someone writing for free on their own blog for their own satisfaction is not exploited, but someone writing for free for Huffington Post is being exploited because someone else is making money (a ton of it) off of their labor.
I suspect you are not persuaded in the least, but I hope I’ve made my position a little clearer.
People like to see their name in print. And some of those people are perfectly good writers–some of them are better than the full time folks. And many of those people like it so much that they will write for free (!) just so that they can see their name in print, or know that others are reading what they have to say, or to hang on their wall, or to impress their friends, or to develop a readership for their future paywall-enabled blog.
You may feel superior to them; you may wish you were superior to them. Perhaps you are, personally. But that doesn’t change the reality that, if you can get skilled writing for free, it’s worth less.
I don’t get paid for what I do because I’m the best writer ever or because I’m a better writer than everyone who is writing for free. I get paid for what I do because I cover things that most people who write for free don’t want to cover. Lots of people write for free. Very few people sit in city council meetings from first gavel to last for free. Very few people check police reports every day for free. If a newspaper has an expectation that it will be a “paper of record,” it’s more fair to its employees to pay them an hourly wage or a salary than to pay them on a per-story basis.
That people can advertise for free on the Internet is way, way, way more relevant to my future job security than the existence of freelance writers.
FWIW, the adjunct law professor and the adjunct-anywhere-else professor are two different creatures entirely. Being an adjunct law professor for anything other than LAW (Legal Analysis and Writing) classes means only grading one exam a semester, and pretty much making students teach the class through the Socratic method. There’s no wonder there are very few open adjunct positions for law schools…you don’t even have to leave your main line of work!
For other types of adjunct professors, they end up with an entirely different deal.
Also, the main point is that the university/college/HE institute is driving down the worth of the tenured teachers already there by replacing them with adjunct faculty who aren’t of the same quality, like replacing Chingona with a freshman who blogs on Live Journal. But they’re selling it as the same product to students who are paying ever-increasing tuition, which in turn drives down the quality of the education and of the institution granting the degree. Once the quality of your graduates go down, your school loses face, etc. It’s exploitation from the top, not necessarily only of the workers, but of the trust in the institution.
And perhaps that is sometimes relevant, but I don’t think it’s relevant here.
Unlike companies, schools don’t really generate profits for people. They recycle the money (it’s a lot more complex than that. But generally it’s true.) So how do you justify the “but the employer is making a killing” defense when the employer’s income isn’t going to a corporate stockholder, but is going into the general fund of a registered nonprofit? It’s not like there’s someone in admin who says “oh yay, less money for you and more for me.” It’s more that hiring adjuncts allows the school to fund, perhaps, more tenured professors elsewhere. Or to keep tuition down. Or whatever.
If you want to except for-profit schools, go ahead. they’re usually pretty slimy anyway.
But at heart I think you’re just making an argument that a person with a certain set of skills is basically entitled to have a certain type of job. If so, i guess we’ll just have to disagree .
Man, you know … she explained precisely what her argument is, and what her objections to your argument are, and neither of them were this.
Between that and your, “you may feel superior to them; you may wish you were superior to them,” stuff, I’d like to ask you to back off a bit, and try to be a little fairer and less needlessly inflammatory.
—Myca
But at heart I think you’re just making an argument that a person with a certain set of skills is basically entitled to have a certain type of job. If so, i guess we’ll just have to disagree.
That’s not my argument, and if you’re going to insist that it is, I’m not going to expend any more energy convincing you otherwise.
I do think we’re better off as a society and individually when a wide range of fields and endeavors offer employment on fair terms that allow workers to earn a living wage and have reasonable job security. If every field goes the way of Wal-Mart, which seems to be the trend, I think we’re in deep shit.
But that’s not remotely the same as an argument that people with X education/training are entitled to X job.
And I will note that this isn’t the first time you have insisted that you know what someone else *really* thinks because it suits your stereotypes of the people in this community. It’s obnoxious.
Actually, as I recall, GNW, you’ve been banned for it once already, under your previous handle.
Cut it out.
It’s unfair and intellectually lazy to keep arguing against a point your opponent has already said isn’t theirs, just because you’ve got a good argument ready for it.
—Myca
ETA: this pile-on doesn’t make much sense. I reread my comment and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Did you misparse it? I’m not talking about someone else’s state of mind, i’m talking about an argument.
1) If you want to say “I think people are entitled to a living wage,” and
2) you acknowledge that adjuncts can satisfy that criteria by means other than adjuncting; and
3) but you don’t take #2 into consideration when you conclude that adjuncts are mistreated, so your solution is to cure adjuncting rather than to help adjuncts leave;
then in my view you are inherently supporting a view that adjuncts are entitled to stay, or have, their position. In other words, you’ve turned “entitled to a living wage” into “entitled to a living wage in the job of one’s choice.”
this is a crucial distinction for me. I would–in some cases–agree that people are entitled to a living wage. but I would never agree to the latter .
A position that alternatives are irrelevant to judging the situation, is inherently a position that you can’t discount problems by looking at avoidability, which is inherently a position that the job-holder is entitled to stay put and demand that things be fixed. When you take mitigation out of the picture, it’s a different analysis.
So, yes: if you really think that the available alternatives are irrelevant (and it seems that many people do) then it seems that we have a fundamental disagreement and it’s probably not worth discussing more. And I think that said disagreement is rooted in a different view of what people are entitled to have. What’s so obnoxious about that?
This? This is not what we were discussing. If it WAS what we were discussing, it would be a radically different discussion, because we would largely be in agreement. Your paragraph seems pretty much right.
Neither were we discussing the question of whether it is wise for HE to use adjuncts, and if it will unduly affect HE. That was in a different thread, not this one. For all I know we’d agree there, too.
In this thread we were discussing the specific question of whether the term “exploited” is properly applied to adjunct professors. That’s it. And we radically disagree on the answer, both in application and reasoning.
So yes, I concur that the above paragraph has absolutely nothing to do with entitlement to a particular position (either generally or specifically). Neither do I think that you are a proponent of generalized entitlements. I believe, however, that an insistence on analyzing adjuncts in particular without regard to the alternatives available to adjuncts in particular, and/or an off-handed discard of those particular alternatives as unworthy, is linked to entitlement in this particular analysis. It may also be worth noting that I believe some (though by no means all) of the arguments in support of tenure to be similarly based in some form of entitlement, but that I do not think that about most other worker/employer issues. Academics is a pretty unusual field.
Oh, come on. If this is a pile-on, then adjuncts are totally exploited.
For the record, I wouldn’t have banned you the first time, and I don’t think your behavior is particularly ban-worthy. But I’m not a mod here. I will say that the tone I get off the vast majority of your comments is “Everyone is a blithering idiot except me.” For that reason, I’ve generally avoided engaging with this iteration of you.
Yeah. I just made a tone argument. I’m not telling you to change. I’m just telling you how you sound to me, and that your tone might have something to do with how other people are reacting to you.
Anyway, I was going to make one more go specifically at the adjunct issue, just in case I could be clearer, but it is complicated because academics is weird, and I’m finding that I’m too tired to really put it together right now. If I still feel compelled in the morning, I’ll have at it.
There is a difference between arguing that the people who are adjuncts are, on a large social scale, not exploited because, since they are not forced to be adjuncts, since there is no institutionalized social mechanism that tracks them irrevocably into that job, they can choose other employment that will pay them a better wage (which is an argument I think I sort of agree with) and arguing that the academy exploits (in my opinion horribly) those people who work as adjuncts. My argument in the Thick of It post, and I think other people’s argument here is about the latter; G&W seems to be arguing the former.
“Yeah. I just made a tone argument.”
eh, it’s also related to the telling other people what they think, and general worst-faith readings he gives to other commenters.
And you seem to be mapping the current sturm und drang of newly-minded T14 law graduates (“where is that $160K job I am entitled to?!”) onto anyone with a degree.
I guess my objection even goes past this. Give a worst-faith reading if you like … at first. Once they’ve clarified that that’s not what they’re saying, insisting that it is is just rude.
Just as an FTR, banning may have been the wrong word for me to use, since it was a temporary, “take a break and come back when you can be nice.”
—Myca
chingona:
On the topic of tone arguments, I have just in the last 24 hours been thinking a lot about them. In another thread I would have a concern about derailing, but this is an open thread! Callooh! Callay!
Ahem. So, tone arguments. Broadly, I think we can separate them into legitimate and devious, and label as “devious” the ones which most people mean when they say “Tone Argument”. The difference between the two is pretty straightforward, and familiar to most counselors and mediators: “I” language versus “you” language.
Devious: “The tone of this conversation is unpleasant, and you should change how you speak or [people won’t hear you / your cause will suffer / there will be suffering in Guilder].”
Legitimate: “The tone of this conversation is unpleasant, and therefore I am going to spend my time elsewhere. (There may or may not be a rationale offered: [I am feeling triggered / It is costing me effort to hang in which I could spend with my kids / This book I want to read is much more enjoyable / whatever]).
The Devious Tone Argument is a judgement upon another, and an instruction in how she should behave, while a Legitimate Tone Argument is an expression of personal agency. There has to be a Legitimate option, or we would be saying that it’s never okay for someone to make a personal safety call based on tone.
Chingona, you made a tone argument, but it’s basically legit, and explicitly so:
It could be argued that you veered into devious with …
… but I think you avoided it by a frog’s whisker with the set-up.
There are subtler elaborations: if the original poster has asked for advice on tone, that will slap the slider hard toward Legitimate; if the replying poster is an ally trying to point out a potential problem, that will tend to push the slider toward Legitimate; if the replying poster is posing as an ally and getting Terribly Concerned, that will tend to push the slider toward Devious; if the original poster was not actually interested in advancing a cause, and was instead simply expressing rage or other emotion, that will remove the slider from the string and make the Tone Argument as relevant as a bicycle to a fish; etc.
Presented in the hope that this was not already blindingly obvious to everyone else…
Grace
Hmm. I will consider changing my tone. I don’t actually think that, either in the “I’m a freakin’ genius!” or “everyone else is a freakin’ idiot!” version. It’s not simple to change my tone, though; this is how I present.
Okay, Popeye. I’ll take you at your word on that.
As for the adjunct issue, I would say I mostly agree with Richard and with Simple Truth. On further consideration, I would not say that adjuncts as a group are exploited because the term adjunct describes a lot of different kinds of people who are not in analogous situations. (In particular, non-academic professionals who teach a few classes primarily because they enjoy it and secondarily for a little extra money are not exploited.) I do think that when universities give individual adjuncts teaching loads that are the equivalent of that taught by full-time employees or greater, and they employ them for years on end, but they never create a full-time position (t-t or otherwise) that the adjunct could apply for, they are behaving in an exploitative way. (In general, I’m suspicious of arrangements in which someone is functioning like an employee but the employer refuses to actually employ the person.)
On I-5, at exit 72 in Washington there is a billboard owned by a far, far right libertarian. I used to enjoy his messages and look forward to the laugh I’d be getting when I drove by. Until about 2003 or so. That’s when I began to hear his clearly disassociated from reality and morality rants coming from the mouths of the mainstream right. It wasn’t long until I began dreading the message I was going to see and flipping the bird at the billboard when I got there.
As I was heading towards it this weekend I was thinking, “What awful thing does he have left to say that I haven’t heard over the last decade or so?”
Without further ado, here’s the next thing you’ll be hearing from the GOP & it’s far right mouthpieces:
“Should people who receive entitlements be allowed to vote?”
Guilty!
Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty!
And one “not guilty” and two hung counts. I don’t think they’ll re-try him on the hung counts. Illinois will soon have the distinction of having two ex-governors sitting in Federal prison on felony convictions simultaneously. One of Blago’s convictions is for attempting to sell the Senate seat that President Obama left on his election to the White House to the highest bidder.
Some commentary from the media on how this kind of activity isn’t politics as usual. They’re wrong. It is politics as usual. That’s the problem! Funny how these guys keep getting elected, but juries have no problems seeing them for what they are.
Without further ado, here’s the next thing you’ll be hearing from the GOP & it’s far right mouthpieces:
“Should people who receive entitlements be allowed to vote?”
Nope. As long as the principle is adhered to consistently. For at least ten years I’ve thought that people who derive the majority of their income from government sources should not get to vote.
Offhand, that would be (many) entitlement recipients, the military, civil servants, teachers, military and civil service retirees, employees of defense contractors, cops, and lots of other groups. In partisan terms I’m not sure which party this would favor on net.
However, while in principle I have no objection to this kind of a rule (just about anything non-discriminatory that limits the franchise is good), in practice it goes against the grain of our form of government. And in purely practical terms, it would be unduly burdensome to compute just who is eligible to vote.
Accordingly, a much more efficient way of achieving a similar end would be to weight votes according to the total taxes paid by an individual to the level of government where they are voting. One effective vote per dollar paid would make it easy. I get 2500 or so votes in my county (#$!!@ property tax), a thousand or so votes in my state-level elections, and a varying level of votes in Federal elections depending on how well I did in the year prior. Every year your taxing authorities send you a certificate showing how much you paid that year, and you bring that certificate in with you when you visit the polls.
A fundamental flaw of democracy is that people can vote themselves free bread and circuses – whether that b&c comes in the form of AFDC or military boondoggles. “Taxpayers rule” would serve as a powerful countercurrent to that flaw.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
mendollars are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.Do we really think that an Oligarchy is the bestest form of gubmint?
Seems to me that that position is anti-American.
OMG, Robert. That’s appalling. “[A]nything non-discriminatory that limits the franchise is good.” Wha? Teachers and soldiers shouldn’t be allowed to vote??? Political influence directly based on wealth (as indicated by taxes paid)?*
I can’t even grasp what underlying political philosophy could be invoked to justify these outrageous notions. Jake Squid is right.
* Sadly, in Citizens United and Arizona Free Enterprise the Supreme Court has essentially validated the rule of wealth (as indirectly measured by campaign spending).
If Robert’s idea of voting based on taxes paid came into play, I wonder if it would have some unexpected consequences?
For instance, would Republicans start supporting higher capital gains taxes, so that the folks who pay the highest capital gains taxes (believed to be more conservative voters) would have more votes?
What about when someone voluntarily contributes money to pay down the debt? Does that money count for voting, and if so, would people begin contributing large amounts to pay down the debt?
And would charitable donations go down, as people become less eager for tax deductions?
Jake, we wouldn’t end up with an oligarchy. (At least, no more of one than we already have.) The bulk of Federal taxes, and thus the bulk of votes, are and would be paid by the middle and upper-middle classes. A bourgeoisarchy, perhaps, but the super-rich wouldn’t gain any power by this measure that they don’t already have. Bill Gates already has a million times more influence on the government than I do (conservatively); giving him a million votes to my one would not alter that dynamic.
Ballgame, he who pays the piper, calls the tune. What’s appalling about that?
It’s how nearly every just human enterprise operates; the people who contribute the most, have the most say. In fact, progressive crusaders often critique capitalist organizations for NOT following this general principle. We all know that the line workers at Ford have more to do with the company’s success than do a handful of overpaid executives, and we criticize the corporate culture for not spreading power around more democratically. This proposal would take power away from people who are net drains on the government (welfare recipients, defense contractors) and transfer it to people who work hard and pay the taxes from which all those great social benefits are funded.
Amp, the game-theory implications are indeed fascinating. There would certainly be less support for cutting taxes on one’s own constituents – and wouldn’t that be a nice change? (“We DEMAND that we be allowed to pay our fair share!”)
As far as charity goes, I think we would see a definite decline in “charity”, but not a particular decline in charity, if you know what I mean. IE, fewer Look-How-Wonderful-I-Am foundations, but no fewer donations to Goodwill and shifts taken at the soup kitchen.
And I would certainly say that voluntary contributions to the state should count for the vote totals.
Oh, and Ballgame, the underlying political philosophy is very simple – so simple that it doesn’t even have its own school, but is rather a component of every functional philosophy:
Power and responsibility must be commensurate.
Power without responsibility – the voter who has everything to gain from government expenditure but contributes nothing towards that expenditure – is cataclysmically unviable over the long term.
Responsibility without power – the voter who contributes significantly towards the state but has little say in the management of that state, or a say that is swamped by the say of the non-contributing – is a recipe for shirking, opting out, and the shedding of civic virtue.
Only when these things are balanced, however roughly, is there a viable lifespan for the political organization.
Whoa. Didn’t these goal posts used to be in the endzone? How did they end up on the 50 yard line?
Here’s what you SAID, Robert:
(Emphasis added.)
In your universe, apparently, teachers, soldiers, and cops don’t pay taxes. And apparently none of them work hard, either (since they would all be disenfranchised under your political philosophy). That isn’t the universe we all live in.
Of course what you’re saying NOW (about transferring power to people who ‘work hard’) is somewhat less profoundly immoral than what you said originally … but that’s because it’s fundamentally inconsistent with what you said originally and what your political philosophy really boils down to (i.e. ‘money rules’).
Under this notion, if one family were to somehow end up owning 90% of the wealth in a country, and therefore paid most of the taxes, they would control both public and private life, and your ideology claims that the remaining 99.99% of the rest of the population would literally have no (peaceful political) recourse to change the situation. There’s an F word for this ‘political rule by the wealthy’, and it isn’t “feminism.”
ballgame is correct in pointing out that you have disenfranchised a large chunk of middle and upper-middle class taxpayers by excluding teachers, policemen, firemen, civil service retirees, all other retirees receiving social security and medicare and so on. Suddenly the bulk of votes is a lot less bulkier than you state in the above quote.
I’m not excluding them. You’re conflating two different proposals.
One proposal is that people who get their main paycheck from the government can’t vote.
The other proposal is that people get votes in proportion to what they pay in taxes, regardless of the source of income.
Under this notion, if one family were to somehow end up owning 90% of the wealth in a country, and therefore paid most of the taxes, they would control both public and private life, and your ideology claims that the remaining 99.99% of the rest of the population would literally have no (peaceful political) recourse to change the situation.
An extremely unlikely scenario. Even under the most despotic of one-man systems, nothing even approaching that level of concentration of wealth has ever been seen in human history.
The counterfactual is that, under the current system, if one group of people who depend on the government for their livelihood reaches 51% of the population, they can also control public life by taxing the minority into oblivion. This hasn’t happened, yet, but is a far more plausible hypothetical than your own.
I thought you were making a single proposal.
So what ballgame points out is true of your first proposal, right? And true of the proposal suggested by the sign I quoted, right?
Are you advocating that system?
Robert, I think part of the problem is that you’re effectively defining “responsibility” as “pays taxes.” As if a person being supported financially by their spouse, who raises children and volunteers for the community, is contributing nothing at all. That makes no sense.
Nor do I think it’s true that the correlation between high earnings and acting responsibly exists. By far the people who have earned the most in recent years have been folks who work in the financial sector. But they don’t act responsibly, they don’t take responsibility for their errors, and they’re the first in line for government handouts after they’ve destroyed the economy. They already have far too much political power; we should be looking for ways to decrease that, not to increase it.
I can’t imagine it’s an accident that under this system, a disproportionate number of women would be disenfranchised (since even as the number of stay-at-home parents shrinks, the disproportionate majority are women), as well as racial/ethnic minorities since they have been even slower to find work in this “recovery” than whites have.
One of the reasons it’s unlikely, Robert, is that we haven’t had a society embrace (for any length of time) the foolish political ‘principle’ that you appear to be advocating. Long before it gets to that point, society will either collapse economically or descend into civil war.
My point, however, was not to explain what was ‘likely to occur,’ but to illustrate the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of your proposals. Under the constraints of your proposed ‘money = votes’ political system, once a group of people — no matter how tiny — controls 51% of the wealth/revenue of a polity, they can effectively disenfranchise the overwhelming majority of the population who now literally have no (peaceful) recourse under your proposed system.
That hasn’t happened yet. But our political structure has been lurching inexorably in that direction since the onset of Reaganism. Under capitalism, wealth will naturally aggregate into fewer and fewer hands unless there is activist intervention to prevent this on the part of the state. In the U.S. today, wealthy elites control most mass discourse and the only two viable political parties (the left and right wings of the ‘property party’, as Chomsky once described them). There are important differences to the two parties, but both vigorously defend the interests of their corporate benefactors, public protests to the contrary notwithstanding (though there are some Democrats who I think would dearly love to buck the trend if they could).
I also agree with Amp’s 2:36 p.m. comment.
Jake, the principle is that all men are created equal. The idea is that they all start out on equal footing under the law. But they don’t stay that way, nor did the Founders of this country expect them to. What they expected is that some people will have more intelligence than others, some people will have a stronger work ethic than others, etc., etc. Some people will end up wealthier than others, or with more power than others, etc., no matter what kind of legal rules you create. The idea they had was to try to make sure that the government wouldn’t step in and grant privileges under the law to one group or another. The fact that people would, on their own efforts, amass privileges was pretty much counted upon.
Ballgame:
Yes, they do. But their salaries are paid by tax money, so they directly consume more than they pay. Not that I advocate taking the franchise from them, but that’s the principle here.
Neither George H. W. Bush nor George W. Bush, to cite two prominent examples, amassed privileges on their own efforts. But, under the wacky sign’s proposed system, they are entitled to more power.
I haven’t amassed the privileges I have on my own efforts, neither have you nor anybody you know nor anybody in the elite circles of US power. We all had help from others and, perhaps, luck of birth – among other instances of luck – to amass those privileges.
I don’t believe that the founder’s statements support the disenfranchisement of less effective earners. If I read them correctly. Nor do I believe the founder’s statements support voting in proportion to wealth. That’s just indefensible if one wishes to be called pro-American.
It’s fairly well established that conservatives oppose democracy. This isn’t a surprise. This isn’t a new position. Yes, it’s awful, but look at the source.
—Myca