By Jack Kerwick
Thursday, December 19, 2013
As President Obama and Pope Francis remind us, so-called
income “inequality” remains an obsession for leftists the world over. When discussing
this topic, those of who value liberty—and sense—would be well served to bear
in mind Confucius’ admonition: “When words lose their meaning, people will lose
their liberty.”
“Capitalism,” for example, as F.A. Hayek notes, was
invented by German academic and self-described “convinced Marxist,” Werner
Sombart. Friedrich Engels commended Sombart on being the only German professor
to have achieved a genuine understanding of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.
“Capitalism” conjures, and is meant to conjure, an image
of a consciously designed system intended to serve the interests of a
minority—the owners of capital—at the expense of the overwhelming majority of
us—the laborers. Clearly, the word itself cooks the case against such a system.
“Free market economy” is also problematic in that it
implies the existence of something that exists over and above the sum total of
the countless transactions of the billions of individual human beings that
comprise it. It is not “the market” that determines the price of a product.
Rather, product prices are the function of patterns formed by untold numbers of
people freely seeking the satisfaction of their needs and wants.
“Free enterprise system” is another common term not
without its challenges. It is better than both “capitalism” and “free market
economy,” it is true, but it still suggests a premeditated system designed to
marshal all agents into the service of one grand enterprise, the realization of
a “unitary hierarchy of ends,” as Hayek characterized it. Plus, with the word
“enterprise” in its name, such a system sounds as if it is for the benefit of
entrepreneurs—and most people don’t see themselves as entrepreneurs.
“Distribution,” as has been long remarked upon, is as
misleading as any a term when it comes to describing the property arrangements
of a free association of human beings (a “free society”). This nefarious word
is meant to have us think that there is some agent or committee of agents
responsible for divvying up shares of money from some preexistent pile and
distributing them, arbitrarily, to the rest of us: some get more, some get
less.
Of course, this is a gross, indeed, a childish,
misunderstanding of how income comes about in the real world—even in societies
whose governments aren’t self-divided like that under which Americans live. No
government has one red penny that it hasn’t extracted from someone who first
earned it.
There is one final term that liberty’s apostles must
challenge. Interestingly, to my knowledge, no one has yet to mention this
point, but there is none that is as crucial as this.
It is imperative that liberty lovers stop referring to
“income inequality” as if there is any sense to it, for “inequalities” in
income are nothing more or less than differences in income.
Between any two human beings all manner of differences
can be found. Among large numbers of human beings the differences promise to be
staggering, and when those human beings make their dwelling in a “free
society,” their differences from one another will be infinite. Ironically, it
is just those who insist upon the moral imperative of rectifying differences in
income who otherwise are admonishing us to celebrate our differences, or our
“diversity.”
And this is one reason why they will never abandon the
word “inequality” in favor of the more honest term of “difference” when
speaking of differences in income. Yet there is another.
“Equality”—equality before God and/or under the law—has
been a moral ideal in the West for centuries, at least since the dawn of
Christianity. This ideal has enjoyed a particularly privileged position in the
American imagination since the founding. The champions of “redistribution”
exploit this fact by assuming, a priori, that differences in income are
violations of the moral ideal of equality. That is, they assume that income
differences are “inequalities” and, thus, immoral.
That this is their strategy can be seen from the fact
that, to paraphrase a respondent to another one of my pieces, differences in
the price of labor (income) are treated as “inequalities” to be rectified while
differences in the prices of other goods never are even remarked upon. We never
hear about “price inequality.” We never hear about how unjust it is that
individual pencils cost but pennies to purchase while a brand new Mercedes cost
tens and tens of thousands of dollars.
Another kind of inequality that leftists not only find
unobjectionable but for which they pine is inequality in power. This is telling
for two reasons.
First, it is the left that has always insisted that
individual freedom is a sham unless individuals have the power (the material
resources) to fulfill their needs and wants. Secondly, it is the left that
actually constricts the power of individuals by allotting ever greater—indeed,
in principle, unlimited—concentrations of power to the few, i.e. government
actors. After all, if income is to be “redistributed,” someone has to be
empowered to redistribute.
Thus, greater income “equality” necessarily means greater
power inequality.
And the latter in turn necessarily means less liberty.
For far too long, liberty’s defenders have subtly
reinforced the position of their opponents by using the latter’s terms. It is
high time that we recognize—and call out—these terms for the ideological
devices that they are.
No comments:
Post a Comment