Are the three events exactly the same? No, of course they’re not. But that doesn’t mean the similarity isn’t interesting….
AngryBrownButch, in a post about gentrification, quotes a interview with a fashionable New Yorker she heard on the radio:
Q: Now, why do you think a neighborhood suddenly takes off like that?
Melena Ryzik: Well, it starts with the low rents. That’s the key thing –
Q: Big spaces and low rents.
MR: Exactly, exactly. And of course I think there’s also the idea for New Yorkers that you want to be the first person to discover something, so there’s a certain cache in having been maybe the first person or the first set of people living over on the Meatpacking district side of things.
# # #
Dodosville on how Europeans settled America:
In case the Europeans weren’t totally convinced that it was OK to take people’s land by force because they didn’t believe in the Christian God, Europeans also decided to redefine what it meant to “occupy” land in legal terms. This justification was probably for some of the more intellectual Europeans as it was a less crude justification than they are heathens, do what you want to them. So the monarchs, clergymen and scholars if Europe got together and said, well, yeah those people are living on the land, but they aren’t really using the land in the way that’s intended. Civilized people built settlements, planted food in the ground, had cattle and other livestock, chopped down forests in the name of progress, and tried to grow as big as they could. The Indians of the Americas weren’t doing that, well, except for the Inca and the Aztec whose settlements were bigger than most in Europe, but we’re not talking about those people – we’re talking about the hunter/gatherers who live in small tribes – those guys weren’t using the land right and it was an affront to nature and God’s plan that people used it in that way. So since they weren’t using the land the way it was meant to be used, it was terres nullus, or empty land, and everybody has the right to take empty land, by force if you have to. It was just what had to be done – it’s the natural order and all those things.
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From a 1982 article in The Link, by Muhammad Hallaj:
The Zionists’ need to convince the world that their scheme victimized no one required them to maintain the delusion that Palestine was a land without people. When they sought Gandhi’s endorsement of Zionism, their emissary brazenly asserted to him that “Palestine itself was a waste space when we went there… No one else wanted it.” Even after the Zionists created their Jewish state they continued to insist that the Palestinians did not exist. “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them,” Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister, said after the 1967 war. “They did not exist.“
Edited to add: I’ve added bolds to the quotes to emphasize what I was intrigued by: the tendency, in all three situations, to talk about the land as if it were empty and unused. As should be obvious, by noting this similarity I am not saying that the three situations are alike in all other ways.
As a general philosophical position, Susan, those are all good points. And they tend to argue in favor of an individualized account + welfare system, rather than one that tries to balance out all these unknowables in advance. While you can work, you work, and put money aside for your own retirement and pay some taxes to cover other folks; when you can’t work, you get taken care of.
Yes. And I’d like to suggest that what has actually happened has been the working-out of my “philosophical position.”
Because lo and behold, because of unanticipated medical advances, we are all living longer than we had previously expected. And as a result of THAT, the system is in financial trouble big time.
I was born in 1945. It would be interesting to go back to that year and see what my life expectancy was supposed to be according to these clever folks at Social Security. Want to bet that according to current forecasts they were way wide of the mark?
They were conservative, but not wildly off-base. Here’s an interesting page about the history of life-expectancy predictions.
Ask and you will receive. The chart comes from here (pdf). The chart’s underlying data comes from here (pdf).
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I found this assessment to be interesting (from Amp’s link):
Who would really benefit under privatization? Here is that bottom line. A shift toward individual accounts offers the best prospects to high-income individuals, with minimal family obligations, who work for forty years or more without disease or disability, and retire in a financial bull market. Groups that are likely to suffer are
• low-wage workers (notably women and African Americans),
• people whose working years are interrupted by family obligations (women again) or disability (African Americans again),
• dependents of workers, and
• anyone who retires after financial markets have experienced a crash.
Robert, I found your (rather dense) article to be more supportive of my conclusions than of yours.
Jake, these conclusions are what I would expect. The proposed shift to private accounts would be much to the benefit of high-income, financially sophisticated males (race in itself would be irrelevant here, except that a disproportionate number of such males are white).
Not surprisingly, this is exactly the same group which is currently promoting this idea.
This has been a most interesting discussion, thank you. I think we need to stop wage indexing future benefits — stopping the GROWTH in benefits for future retirees, leaving their benefits price indexed to retain the same purchasing power that today’s elderly get. It makes no sense to burden our kids with fatter benefits for us than today’s retirees get (the only exceptoin there is low wage workers whose benefits should probably be increased).
The proposed shift to private accounts would be much to the benefit of high-income, financially sophisticated males (race in itself would be irrelevant here, except that a disproportionate number of such males are white).
Couldn’t you just as well paranthetically say, if you substitute “whites” for “males,” “gender in itself would be irrelevant here, except that a disproportionate number of such whites are male?” I guess I’m trying to say that I just don’t get what you’re trying to say there. Are you saying that race has no bearing on economic/social strata except by pure chance at this time?
Wow, is the benefit ratio really 2:1 for women to men? More ammo for Sim’s theory, I guess.
Jake,
Women do better than men under the current system. Women of all colors and races do better than men of the same color and race, and sometimes better than men of other colors or races as well, largely because of longer life spans.
Robert’s proposed change in structure would benefit high-earning and sophisticated people who have a consistent work history over low-wage and unsophisticated people who do not.
But no one to my knowledge is proposing a race test or a gender test up-front. That’s my point. It just so happens that a high-earning sophisticated person with a consistent work history is overwhelmingly likely to be white and male.
This outcome is not the result of overt racism or sexism. It’s just the result of a particular group (high-earning white males) trying to structure the situation to its own advantage, to the disadvantage of everyone else. If this group could advance its own interest by making a payoff to poor black women, they wouldn’t hesitate to do that. They’re not racists necessarily, and they’re not sexists, necessarily.
They’re just greedy. And selfish.
Is that any clearer?
Now, back in the day, a real 100% he-manly racist would be willing, nay eager, to oppress blacks even though that oppression was to the racist’s personal disadvantage. I’m thinking of the poor-white KKK members whose activities were cheered on by the wealthier members of the community because such behavior kept both poor blacks and poor whites in poverty.
I would distinguish that behavior from the behavior of someone who just, pure and simple, wants a bigger piece of the pie, to the disadvantage of everyone else. I don’t know which is worse, but the latter set is more rational.
Susan:
It’s not accurate to say that “women” would be hurt by privatization, given that the vast majority of women at retirement age are married to men and would share in (and often inherit) any benefits that accrue to their husbands.
That’s one way of putting it. Or you could say that those who support the status quo are trying to structure the situation to their own advantage, to the disadvantage of everything else.
It seems to me that trying to structure the system to allow you to take money from others is greedier and more selfish than trying to structure the system to prevent others from taking your money.
Brandon, you’re assuming your conclusion.
When you talk about “your” money, or taking money from “other people” you’re making the unspoken assumption that in fact the elderly are entitled only to the money – but all the money – they personally paid into the Social Security system, and that getting any more than that out is greedy and selfish. Only true if one accepts your initial assumption.
However, up until now Social Security was never designed to work the way you think it should (garbage talk about “accounts” notwithstanding). Social Security is a system whereby current workers support the elderly for life, on the assumption that these current workers will in their turn receive support when they retire. The “support” level, by the way, is pretty minimal.
“For life” means that the longer you live, the more money you will receive, all other things being equal. You oppose this notion, apparently.
Because women live longer than men on the average, and, again on the average, they make less money while they do work, they tend to receive more in SS benefits than they put in. That’s only “greedy and selfish” if you assume that there are “accounts” somewhere which these women are stealing out of, an absurd fiction.
Your remedy would be to cut off benefits for an old woman who has “out-lived” her previous contributions while clerking at WalMart? So that the CEO can continue to receive his “account”?
Yikes.
Why we should support a tax change which (further) tilts the table in this direction is completely beyond me.
For the record, although I am a woman, I am a high-earning and sophisticated person, and furthermore I am married to a male who is also a high-earning and sophisticated person, so the changes Robert is lobbying for would benefit me personally. That doesn’t make it right, however.
Susan:
I’m know that there are no accounts, and I’m assuming nothing of the kind. My point is that your moral evaluation is not the only tenable one, or even necessarily the best one. And it seems to me that your argument is simple status quo bias: That’s the way the system was designed, ergo we have a moral imperative, or at least the moral right, to keep it that way.
Anyway, I never proposed any remedy. For the record, what I would suggest is to stop all real benefit growth by indexing benefits to inflation rather than wages and indexing the retirement age to life expectancy. Once we do this, the Social Security surplus will begin growing, rather than shrinking, and we can use it either to transition to a system of private accounts, or simply to reduce tax rates and let workers decide what to do with the extra money.
The Social Security crisis is a myth. As our economy grows, it will get easier, not harder, to fund benefits at current levels. The only problem is that politicians have promised to increase benefits faster than is feasible at current tax rates.
Actually, Susan, the changes I’m lobbying for would leave you pretty much neutral. Your retirement account would provide you with a much higher rate of return, but you (as an economically successful person) would start paying buckets of tax to pay for the welfare program for poor retirees.
It’s not about screwing the poor people on behalf of the rich, it’s about ensuring that everyone who can pull their own weight does so, and making the political nature of the system match up with its economic nature. Right now there’s a huge pool of people who are convinced that they are entitled to their retirement income because they paid for it, when in fact they did no such thing and are getting a welfare check. That makes it difficult-to-impossible to make necessary policy changes to keep the system viable.
Brandon is probably right that economic expansion could keep the present liferaft lashed together with baling wire and gum, but it seems more prudent to me to actually build a boat.
Well, as a to-be-retired-person (someday) I hope we fix it, although actually my husband and I have quite a bit saved, and are saving more now that we got the last kid out of ($45K/year) college.
Not everyone has much saved, though, and it is those people who need Social Security. In some form.
Okay, I’ve only read up to about comment #150, so my responses for now will deal exclusively with the first half.
First off, the fact that all land has been stolen does not mean there should be no system of private ownership of land, but rather that that private ownership has no higher moral claim; namely, this means ownership of land cannot be absolutist. All but a select few already believe that the measure of a free society is not the right to not put scrubbers on your smokestacks, so this is mainly a moot point in real life. In cloistered internet forums where wingnuts come to spout all sorts of anarcho-capitalist nonsense, it can take centre stage, however.
Side note, the Georgian argument I believe distils down to a Lockean interpretation of property as having ‘mixed labour with land’, though I could be wrong. So in essence, it’s a moralistic argument. Personally, I don’t need to appeal to dead old men who probably believed in wife beating and kiddie rape to reach the same conclusion.
Robert, once again conservatives flaunt the notes they took in college econ class, as if no one else has ever studied the subject. Yes, neoclassical economics considers labour as a form of capital, but every other discipline, perspective, and basic common sense tells us otherwise. Keyboard warriors can defend the notion that an investor with more assets in investments than a fisherman makes in five years is incurring more ‘risk’ than the latter, and happily lecture to other anonymities on the internet their regurgitation of their first year textbook. I’ve never heard Republican politicians use the same lecture. Curious, that.
The notion that ‘risk’ and ‘delayed gratification’ form the basis of paid work – and thus investment/rental income and wages are morally equivalent – runs into this: those most willing to ‘risk’ or ‘delay gratification’ with their money are those with more money. So in other words, money is rewarded with more money. This phrasing is a direct result of the neoclassical framing of work, not anything else.
I hope Robert’s not repeating the trope that since regular people (such as polymath, allegedly) would be just as profit-driven and cutthroat in some situation X, corporate and landowner power are justified as is. Regular people would be just as domineering and ‘initiate as much force’ given some situation Y, so government power is justified. As is.
Decnavda, you nail it in comment #143. The positive/negative rights distinction turns out only to be so much semantics parlour games upon close scrutiny. Of course, those who insist that there’s something special about free speech but not about free water care neither for free speech nor free water but only about absolute property rights.
The Right understands that private property would not exist (if only in a pragmatic sense) without government, and that the government uses force. They are completely blind as to how the two come together. The government uses force because private property would not exist without it. If the government didn’t exist, private parties would have start initiating some of that force themselves. (nobody.really’s post #149 brings up an interesting legal point: while the government may be an invisible party in most contract negotiations out of practicality, it is by no means required to be. Private contracts thus have no meaning outside of a government’s prerogative to enforce.) Decnavda, you’re absolutely right that enforcement of private property is a positive right and that guaranteed income can be seen as a negative one. The former was a little abstract; I have a more concrete example of the same principle. I remember I provided the due process example in a thread long ago (I have an excellent memory): the ‘right to a fair trial’ is a bundle of positive rights that range from free lawyer’s fees to the ability to inconvenience twelve random citizens with jury duty to the free phone call of Miranda fame. Someone – I think it was Robert – said that these positive rights are employed in defense of a negative right. Of course, this means any positive right anywhere is perfectly all right so long as you can present it as contingent to fulfilling some negative right, which reduces the distinction to wordplay. Guaranteed income fits the bill for the reasons you state.
(In only a slightly more abstract sense, citizenship is also a bundle of positive rights, since many would be contract rights that would have to be negotiated the same way as and perhaps in lieu of wages. This was the other example I gave.)
“As for “rights,” I’m pretty cynical about that. In practice, people have whatever rights their society is willing to recognize and enforce. ”
Exactly, Amp, and neither Decnavda (I presume) nor I are suggesting that our re-wording of positive vs. negative rights supersede the common version. Rather, we’re trying to show that the distinction is meaningless. Unfortunately, many people are swayed with the right-libertarian framing of the story, so we can’t ignore it altogether.
“You want there to be can’t work / won’t work distinction, but there isn’t. The grey area here is at least as big as the category of disability itself. And the distinction creates perverse incentives – again, effort is punished because if it is sucessful it proves the impaired person is not disabled. So society pays disabled people to prove to us that they are helpless.”
Certainly, the mentally disabled are overly represented among the homeless and the poor. Beats me whether and how some people classify mental disability is ‘real’ disability or not.
Michael, that’s another fine anecdote from another conservative basking in the anonymity of the internet. Fact is, in an objective, statistical sense, those hardest on poverty politically are those who have never had to experience it themselves.
Furry, a tax is a tax, regardless of whether it’s federal or not. States and municipal taxes tend to be regressive. Even with federal taxes, many are regressive. The income tax is, along with capital gains and estate, one of the three truly progressive taxes in the US. So you’ll excuse us if we treat ‘the rich pay yada yada yada percent of the *federal income tax*’ (as if that was the only tax) to be incomplete, to say the least.
As a side note, sorry for systematically beating all the dead horses in turn. Just that I’ve not had the luxury to cruise blogs for a while and this all is a discussion I want to be a part of. At least I’ve read right up until the last comment as of this posting.
I don’t think we’re in any fundamental disagreement over anything. Direct handouts of food? I can foresee logistical complications, but I can also see the upside. Labour in exchange for welfare payments? I’ve always maintained that the government can be an employer (among other things) of last resort, so if the Right wants to go along with this, fine by me.
One thing I found interesting was Susan’s comment about inheritances wreaking harm on wealthy heirs by encouraging irresponsible behaviour. That’s an interesting parallel with conservative arguments about welfare, and it’d be worthwhile to gauge a conservative’s sincerity with this argument. Every conservative, of course, says that he really has the best interests of the poor in mind by eliminating dependence. Some mean it. Some don’t. What if we were to transpose the same condescending attitude toward wealthy heirs and heiresses?
At some level, I wouldn’t be averse to a 100% wealth tax for inheritances.