By Jerry Bowyer
Saturday, May 10, 2014
Continuing my interview with the great philosopher
Michael Novak about his book, Writing From Left to Right, Novak talks about the
working class commonsense he learned from his family growing up as a Democrat
in Johnstown and McKeesport. He captures an attitude about coercive income
equality programs which has almost completely been lost in the Democratic
coalition. The transcript is below.
Jerry: “Is that maybe one of the ways in which that old
union democrat base of the party inadvertently invited in the new left: the
resentment against management? I remember a lot of that. That’s still around,
[and] that still dominates the world that I live in of Western Pennsylvania:
resentment against the wealthy, a kind of a class reverse-snobbery. I mean, it
seems to me socialism could have invaded the Republican Party or the Democratic
Party but those union democrats, in my opinion at least, kind of left the door
open a little bit. Maybe they didn’t like when the socialist intellectuals
shoved their way in, but to some degree those union democrats gave them an
opportunity (in my opinion, [but] I’d like to hear yours) by having such
negative views towards management, [and] such negative views towards capital in
general and towards people who were wealthier than they were.”
Michael: “That probably was stronger in Pittsburgh from
everything I know and read, and even [from] some family connections. It wasn’t
Johnstown; Johnstown’s a smaller place, and while there were clearly felt
resentments between those who lived up on the hill — as we used to put it, ‘the
hills that towered above the city’. Johnstown’s the kind of city [where] on all
sides it’s surrounded by hills… not Rockies, but they’re considerable and they
block out the sun. It’s not until ten in the morning that the sun gets to shine
downtown up over the hills, and then at four in the afternoon it’s disappearing
behind the hills on the other side. Anyway, there was animosity going up
towards the people living in the hills but not that much. It just was
diminished and people from the valley started moving up — I think my father was
one of the first ones to do so — started moving up on the hills. My father said
things to me like, “Michael, never envy the rich. Just look around. They tend
to lead such unhappy lives.” That I thought was a pretty common view: “Don’t
envy the rich, you have your place, you can do better things than they can do
and you live happier lives.””
Jerry: “It’s almost a Solomonic insight, a kind of
Ecclesiastes insight. “The trouble of wealth.” You write a lot in the book
Writing from Left to Right about envy and covetousness as destructive.”
Michael: “Yeah, most destructive in the world. Most
destructive forces in the world.”
Jerry: “There’s something in Proverbs, another Solomonic
insight: “Envy rotteth the bones.” I don’t think it’s just a medical
observation, [envy] probably rotteth the bones of society as well, that kind of
class resentment.”
Michael: “I was getting an honorary degree with the great
conductor Rostropovich, and he told me a really funny story coming back in the
limo to the airport; we were talking about envy and he said, “There were three
Europeans, caught by a cannibal king, who were going to be boiled in oil on a
following Wednesday, but over the weekend he allowed each of them to live out
their wishes [or] fantasies. So, the Frenchman wished for a weekend in Paris
with his mistress, no questions asked and no promises made. The Englishman
wished for a couple of afternoons to walk through the fields of Oxfordshire
with his colleague, reciting Keats and Shelley. And the Russian wished that his
neighbor’s barn would burn down.” You’re only happy when you bring everybody
down to your level, and I think that’s a lot of what’s going on now. There’s a
lot of articles these days about growing inequality and there are two features
of them: one is [that] they try to separate the top one percent out from the
other 99 percent… well, that gives you a horribly exaggerated view of things
because there’s a terrific spread right on up that ladder and an awful lot of
the people born very poor – Andrew Carnegie himself included– became wealthy
and then that family died off and their descendants experienced downward
mobility. There’s this churning in America.”
Jerry: “From shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three
generations. Is that the old saying?”
Michael: “Something like it. Maybe more generations…”
Jerry: “Maybe four.”
Michael: “Even if you go back to the founders, you know,
the Washingtons and Lees and Lodges and Cabots – most of those families have
died out. Most of those families are not big players today. This is a country
of tremendous downward mobility but with a certain nobility, a certain calm and
acceptance. I love that churn in America and I expect – and the figures show –
that in every ten year period people in bottom twenty percent… more than half
of them are no longer there. And we accept in this country almost ten million
immigrants legally every ten years and who knows about the illegally, and most
of them are out of poverty within that time. They’re poor for a few years and
then they’re out of it, but then new ones come in to replace them. So one thing
about the stability of our poverty figures is we’re constantly being inundated
by poor people. Good thing.”
Jerry: “Right. In other words, by being a welcoming
society we’re going to have a bottom. So we shouldn’t be rhetorically punished
for being hospitable by allowing low-wage, low-skill immigrants to come to the
country by being beaten up by inequality statistics or Gini indices or
anything. That they’ll take account of the fact that actually it’s our openness
and compassion as a society that’s led to that [or] that helped lead to that.”
Michael: “The other thing I notice in these figures is
that in showing the inequality most of the people who stress that and try to
point that out actually make it up, partly because they use numbers which don’t
show the taxes people who earn income are paying.”
Jerry: “Right. Those are never after-tax income
distributions.”
Michael: “And then they also don’t show the welfare
benefits that have been put in place since the 1960s. So it gives a really
false view of what’s happening in this society.”
Jerry: “One of the things that’s so crazy about that is
[that] it’s used to justify more transfer payments, but transfer payments can
never solve the problem because the statistic doesn’t take into account the
transfer payment. So you can never redistribute your way out of that if the
redistribution is not counted as income to people at the bottom.”
Michael: “Yeah. It’s discouraging to people who think
that these redistributions are working less well than they actually are because
the opponents keep saying, “Nothing has changed, it’s getting worse.” Well,
holy smokes, we just laid out thirty billion or X trillion dollars and it
didn’t do any good? That’s not right.”
Jerry: “And the other thing is [that] those income
distributions never include an age adjustment so comparing a 55 year old to a
20 year old is not really an apples to apples comparison when it comes to the
amount of wealth they’ve accumulated in their lifetime.”
Michael: “That’s right.”
Jerry: “Let’s come back to envy a little bit. Given the
fact that envy is sort of a dominating impulse of socialism – do you agree with
that, that envy is kind of the moral impulse behind socialism?”
Michael: “Well, I think it’s deeper. In the ten
commandments the Lord forbids covetousness at least five times.”
Jerry: “Seven.”
Michael: “Seven it could well be. I’m just a poor
Catholic, I’m not as good as some people on the Scripture.”
Jerry: “We Protestants, maybe we read it a little more. I
don’t know.”
Michael: “Alas, I think that may be true. But in any
case, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife; thou shalt not covet thy
neighbor’s goods,” and it just goes on and on. That must be the most besetting
sin. And I think it stays the most persistent sin, the desire for what is
others’, because it’s so hidden. You know when people are hateful [or] violent;
you can see it. But when people are envious, they don’t call it envy. They just
call it ‘the longing for equality’ or ‘social justice’.”
Jerry: “’Fairness’.”
Michael: “Yeah, ‘fairness’. They all sound so good but
you can tell what the underlying motive of it is. If it’s to bring down the
people on top, that’s socialism. If it’s to move the whole society upwards,
that’s the democratic republic.”
Jerry: “Right. Whenever I run into someone who sort of
focuses on income inequality I try to figure out [if it is] mainly about floors
or mainly about ceilings. If it’s putting floors under the poor, wonderful!
Sign me up. If it’s about putting ceilings on top of the rich, then I just
don’t see what benefit that is to anybody.”
Michael: “Microsoft, Bill Gates… If you want to put a
limit on people, he’d be the one you’d have to put a limit on. But, my gosh,
those of us who are however so poor [and] going to college or high school
usually find those supplied to us or we’re given help in buying the computers.
Now in school we’re learning computer skills – we wouldn’t have that sort of
thing without the Bill Gates of this world. And when you think of the millions
of people that he’s been served, [it’s] okay that he gets a penny for every one
of those. He deserves it. What can he do with it? He’s going to invest in what
he calls “good projects”. Whether you agree with his choice of good projects or
not, he’s going to put it back into charity. He can’t eat it, he can’t take it
away with him, and so there’ll be a building at the University of Pittsburgh or
University of Wisconsin built in his honor.”
Jerry: “Every billionaire lives below his means. So
that’s charitable, you know. The difference tends to be charitable donations.”
Michael: “That’s in America, I have to say. The rest of
the world doesn’t seem to have that custom. You know, they pay so much in taxes
that they’re not likely to put more into philanthropy in other countries.”
Jerry: “Yeah, that’s a good point. If you give on April
15th then that’s less you’re going to give, say, at the end of the year.”
Michael: “Yeah. Let Uncle Sam do it.”
Jerry: “Since envy is as pervasive as you say – and not
just pervasive across the human race but pervasive longitudinally, throughout
human history – that suggests to me that these constant declarations that
socialism is dead, or socialism is over because we know it doesn’t work, seem
to be maybe a little optimistic. Because if the driving force is envy, a vice
which is a permanent part of human nature, instead of being just an honest
mistake in interpreting the data, then new data for people for whom the vice of
envy has made them data-immune don’t abandon the dream of socialism because
they don’t abandon the vice that lies behind it.”
Michael: “Well, there’s a lot of truth in that. Italy,
where I lived for two or three years off and on… There’s a wonderful joke I’ve heard
which is about the Greens. They say the Greens are like tomatoes: they begin
the summer green but by the end of July they’re red, and that means that
typically the Green impulse – whatever its good intentions and good sentiments
are – ends up in creating more and bigger government and intrusive government
trying to manage peoples’ affairs. It ends up being socialist. It’s socialism
by another root.”
Jerry: “And it lives on something in us. This is not
imposed on us entirely; there’s an envy in us that makes that politically
plausible and popular despite all the contrary evidence.”
Michael: “Well, I don’t so much link the environmental
movement to envy. All those who rage about equality and inequality almost
always aim at the rich and humiliate them and that tells me [that] they’re not
for equality. They’re moving from resentment.”
Jerry: “A point you make in your book is that the global
warming hypothesis does fit an already existing anti-market, anti-business kind
of mental space in the left; whatever the evidence is contrary or against, that
it sure does conveniently fit with people who want to bash business
executives.”
Michael: “Yeah, but you know, I’m stunned by the fact
that in Washington D.C., where I’ve lived for the last 31 years – not now, but
did – there are more raccoons all over the city than there were in George
Washington’s times. And even the deer come through the big culverts under the
roads and are a bit of a menace on military roads and a few other places. And
Pennsylvania is overrun with deer compared to anytime in the past. And you
know, if you fly over the United States, the east coast, you see so much
woodland, so much green.”
Jerry: “And it’s increasing. Forestland in the United
States is increasing on an annual basis.”
Michael: “But this green is creeping even into the
cities, right from the air as you see it. So there’s something very good going
on in the American environment, whatever faults there are to be pointed out and
corrected. Again, I judge literature of this sort by whether it’s fair to the
realities, whether it’s noticing all the places in which we’ve made progress or
it’s playing upon that American guilt which we are frail to.”
Jerry: “Yes. I agree with what you’re saying about the
environment and yet, as the environment improves, the virulent nature – the
zeal – of the environmental movement glows hotter and hotter.”
Michael: “That’s sort of normal for the course, I think.”
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