From the Salmon

Streak says:

January 23, 2006 at 8:01 am

While capitalism may not require greed, it certainly encourages it.  Second, I agree completely that our dialogue on this is often misleading.  I have found that criticisms of capitalism usually elicits a suggestion that I prefer socialism, as if those are our only choices. 

Conservatives seem to suggest that capitalism can solve poverty.  I think that it requires a certain amount of poverty, and a constant pool of underpaid and poorly educated labor.  Absent government intervention, I don’t see any way around that. 

Anyway....

Scott says:

January 23, 2006 at 10:02 pm

Well darn.

It’s late, here anyway, and I’ve just read this for the first time.  There’s a ton a things I think I’d like to say and some other I know I want to say, but I actually have a review of the new Elected album due tomorrow and I need to get that done.  Let me just say a few things until I get back these ways.

First and foremost, no need to apologize for the new post.  I actually like it.  I felt almost guilty about bringing all this up on top of the MLK post, seeing as it was a tribute of sorts, but honestly this is a discussion I’ve been wanting to have for some time with someone who thinks like you (i.e. Progressive Christian, sorry for the label).  So at any rate, thanks for breaking this off and I’m really kinda looking forward to this.

Second, on the taxation=theft thing.  I’m not sure that’s what I was trying to say.  The problem I have is when we start saying things like, “So and So has soooo much money, while Such and Such has soooo little.  So and So should have to pay lots of money to Such and Such to level the playing field.” To me, and I admit I may be reading this wrong, but to me this is what I hear when people start talking about redistribution of wealth.  Now this redistribution may be in the form of taxation, and then yes I would probably have to stand by my initial assertions as it being theft, but despite my Libertarian mindset I do not consider taxation itself to be theft.

Lastly, I don’t really want to come across as Capitalism=Christianity or anything like that.  I mean first off, Ted Haggard is a goof and the last thing I want is to be associated with him.  And more importantly when I said “I think that’s a more Godly system than Socialism,” there was probably some frustration there from previous encounters with Liberals who seem to think that Socialism is God’s plan for the world.  Progressive Christians some times come across as though they own the monopoly on caring for the poor and quite honestly it can be really annoying.  I agree with your “market theory is morally neutral” assertion whole heartedly and I’ll promise to not again try and interject God as being the endorser of my political views.

Oh, and actually lastly this:

I know they’re out there, because they put up funny posters in Berkeley.

Actually made me laugh, so thanks for that.

Brandon says:

January 24, 2006 at 12:02 pm

I don’t know, Streak.  The trickiest part of the question is that it’s very hard to say whether capitalism rewards greed or whether a flawed humans reward greed in any number of economic systems.  My point is simply that it’s almost impossible to tell if capitalism is inherintly a bad system, or whether it is a part of flawed human nature that’s responsible for the deficit.

I suppose that I think it’s not so much that capitalism that’s flawed as much as it is human nature.  Given that human nature, a USian capitalism may not be practical.  That isn’t evidence, though, that capitalism is the problem.  As I’ve said before, it might just be the interaction of capitalism and brash individualism.

My 2 cents.

Brandon says:

January 24, 2006 at 8:01 pm

Yeah, I think we’re on the same page.

zalm says:

January 27, 2006 at 2:01 am

Well, well.  I wondered when you’d stop lurking.  If this site becomes known for anything at all, let it be known for the high quality of Brandons that it attracts.

Good points and good questions.  I can’t claim to have good answers, but here are a few thoughts....

The flip side of the problem you describe � the tendency for wealth and capital to become concentrated � is the tendency for more and more people to lose access to capital.  And Biblical instructions like Jubilee or returning land every fifty years or the fallow Sabbath year or prohibitions against lending with interest speak to both of these tendencies, but particularly the latter.

I’m not sure that the solution is to try to follow the letter of these laws today (not that you were suggesting that), since these laws were given to a fairly small, mostly agrarian economy, whereas today’s economy encompasses far more than just agriculture and the inequities we need to address are even more sharp on a global scale than they are locally.  But for people who hold these words to be not only instructive but holy, we should seek to understand the spirit of these instructions and, as you suggest, discuss how to bring that spirit to our societies and our lives.

It seems to me that at the heart of these instructions is God’s desire that everyone have access to the basic capital needed to make a living and participate in their community.  At the same time, in these instructions there’s an acknowledgment that, human nature being what it is, this kind of access is not going to happen naturally.  Or if it does, it’s not likely to last.

I think the two questions you ask are exactly right.  How do we shape our societies and systems to reflect these priorities?  And how do we shape our own lives and our own hearts in this way?

Well, now that I look back, I’ve spent most of my time just restating what you said, and now I don’t have any time to try to answer you, since I’ve got a long day tomorrow and I need to head to bed.  Sorry about that.  I’ll try to do a better job later this weekend.

But I’m glad you spoke up, my friend.  We miss you guys.

zalm says:

January 27, 2006 at 11:01 am

I’m not sure what interjecting myself into the other thread will accomplish at the moment, so I think I’ll keep going with this one.

I guess that when I made that distinction, I was thinking more about the opposite… I imagine someone could read parts of the Bible and find them interesting, compelling, and perhaps even instructive without deeming them to be Holy.

But can it be Holy without being instructive?  I guess it depends on what we’re talking about when we use a word like “instructive.” If we mean “worthy of study,” then I would say that anything Holy is inherently instructive.  If we mean “authoritative,” then yes, Holy texts have an inherent authority that other texts do not.

But if we mean “imbued with specific moral instruction,” I’d have to say no.  I mean, the Bible is a lot of things: history, poetry, song, and moral teaching.  But I don’t know that each passage has a specific moral instruction for me to follow.  Some passages are more imbued with moral instruction than others.  And some moral instruction is more directed at a specific people at a specific time than it is at me.  Again, that’s worthy of study and, by its authority, worth wrestling with.  But I’m not sure it’s instructive.

Brandon says:

January 28, 2006 at 8:01 am

I guess, I just have to say that I totally agree with your ecclesiology on what the Church should be doing more of.  The Church, by and large, is far too scant on spending money on the poor.  That’s a crying shame.

Whilest I may rant about the great need for social programs, I would never say that they should replace what the church does.

I think, though, my disagreement is mostly political.  I just think that a society should be about taking care of its poor through well implemented social programs.

Scott says:

January 28, 2006 at 7:02 pm

Ha. Clever how you use my comments about politicians to make it look like I would go along with such tax brackets.  Not to say I wouldn’t, but I wanted to compliment you on your sweet debate skills.  I also liked your logical comments about “agency” in the other post.

But back to your point.  I have to claim ignorance about the marginal tax rate you spoke about above.  Is there anywhere that goes into that with more detail, such as when it started and how it was determined that a certain amount was too much?

Greg says:

January 29, 2006 at 4:01 pm

Scott - Thanks for your kind words.  Yes, I was being mean at your expense, but this is a debate of sorts, so....  Anyway, I have to come clean and tell you that while the high marginal tax rates that I cite are correct, the reason that I gave for them I pretty much made up.  It’s what I’d like to believe, but I really don’t know and suspect that the real reason is rather different than what I stated above. 

Although maybe not.  There used to be a notion in this country that we should be a meritocracy, not an aristocracy or a (what is the word for power based on capital rather than land?  Is there one?).  Anyway, I know that the estate tax was based on this sort of reasoning - that while it’s good for capital to accumulate in the hands of those with a demonstrated ability to make good use of it, it’s bad for capital to become hereditary (i.e., to accumulate in the hands of people who are simply heirs of people with a demonstrated ability to make good use of it).  There is also a fairness consideration: while those who initially accumulated the capital may have deserved it, their heirs certainly do not, since they had no hand in the earning or creating of it.  The general population (and its representative, the govenment) do, on the other hand, have a claim on that capital, since they produced the conditions (social stability, infrastructure, etc.) necessary for its accumulation.  Clearly you don’t agree with this sort of reasoning, but I think that from an economic efficiency standpoint it make a lot of sense.  Anyway, you have piqued my curiosity about the real reason for those high marginal tax rates.  Time to go a-googling....

Greg says:

January 29, 2006 at 10:02 pm

Plutocracy.  I’ve seen the word, but never really knew what it meant.  Thanks.

And yes, you have the right to do what you want with your own money, but is it really yours?  Would you have the same money had you been born to a poor mother in Sierra Leone?  Nowadays, everyone who was born in this country has what they have mostly because they were born here, and not somewhere else.  Their wealth is as much a product of the society in which they live as of anything with they themselves have done.  So while the dollars may be in your wallet, are they really yours?  Again, it’s an issue of fairness. 

We Americans tend to grossly undervalue the larger society in which we live.  We think that we are a bunch of independent agents each making our own way in the world, and that we sink our swim based on our own efforts.  Such a picture is a gross distortion of reality.  If you were not born into a community you would never develop language, and hence you wouldn’t even be able to think in the sense that most of us understand the word.  Most of what you are and most of what you have comes to you from the larger community - perhaps through the conduit of your parents, but it did not originate with them.  Which is not to say that individual effort and initiative and responsiblity are not important - they are.  But certainly no more so than the community in which you live.

Kyle says:

February 19, 2006 at 2:03 am

(First time poster via BadChristian)

I’m a couple weeks behind, and I don’t know if anyone’s listening anymore, but I did want to address Scott’s libertarian point-of-view about how he decides between tending to support corporations or government based on the differences in how they can, respectively, do good things and how badly they can mess things up.  I guess I have tended to swing toward the progressive side in the last five years or so because of what I see as two important structural differences between government and corporations, namely:

(1) Constituency: Corporations by definition work to gain profit only for themselves (which, of course, means their investors), whereas democratic government by definition (at least theoretically) works to make a just and orderly society (though of course with competing senses of “just” and “orderly") and is chosen by the people.  The fact that the two groups have such widely differing constituencies leads to

(2) How the entity responds to its constituency (i.e., what feedback loops shape the institution): both government and corporations thoroughly affect our daily lives, but our means for addressing how they do so are quite different.  Democratic governments must and, in fact, do (though not as quickly or completely as we’d like) respond to initiatives from the broad public, and safeguards are put in place in order to (ideally) keep the system relatively fair for all people.  Corporations, on the other hand, have no constituency except shareholders; even if you argue that they must respond to the general public in some way so as to ensure their continued profits, that relationship to the public is much more oblique than government’s relationship with the public (even considering that government isn’t nearly as responsive to the will of the people as I’d like), so basically a corporation only has to keep a very small subset of the population happy, and the only definition of “keep them happy” is to bring in more revenue.  If I don’t own stock in Walmart, there’s very little I can do to affect how Walmart coming into town killed the nice independent store that I used to shop at every other week (even choosing not to shop at Walmart doesn’t really do much in a retail market now almost exclusively dominated by corporate outlets).  If I think my taxes are too high, or my tax money is being spent in the wrong ways, I can vote for someone who can help change this issue. 

Since as a poor grad student (and like the vast majority of Americans), I have very little means of affecting how corporations operate, despite the fact that corporations dominate every single aspect of my lived experience, I would say that I (with reservations and much criticism and open eyes) will tend to trust more that institution (i.e., government) which at least has as its substantiating ideal to listen to me and work for my interests.  Obviously this doesn’t mean I think gov’t can (or should try to) solve everything (in fact, I actually think it’s good for a gov’t to be somewhat inefficient to stop it from being too harmful when they make bad choices), but that I’d take (American-style) government over corporate power any day of the week.

P.S.  I know the libertarian rejoinder would be something like this:  “Kyle, you are so naive in thinking that you can actually change government.  In fact, you can’t change the government any more than you can change Walmart.” First off, you’d be right to call me naive; almost any grad student in the humanities has to instill themselves with naivete enough to believe that there might actually be a job waiting for them after they receive their degree.  But getting back to the topic: I admit (as I think my parentheticals indicate) that in practice this may very well be true (as I’m almost certain that my vote has never been the mythical deciding vote in any election).  But in fact, making such a charge at the very least puts corporations and government as equally distant and untouchable entities, which tends to undercut claims in favor of preferring corporations over government.  And even so, government is so structured to respond to the people, and American discourse continually contains (though often in too-small increments) the ideals of gov’t of/by/for the people, in ways that corporations never even attempt to fake, that even if both gov’t and corp. are now constituted as distant and un-influence-able entities, my vote would tend to go toward gov’t b/c of this structural potential.

P.P.S.  A correction for Scott (admittedly a bit exaggerated perhaps, but what to me seems a more honest comparison b/t business’s bad day and gov’t’s ability to bomb “a few thousand innocent civilians”: on a bad day for Big Business X, X finds a way to dump millions of gallons of toxic waste into the water supply of a community of several hundred thousand people, which leads to thousands of them getting sick and a couple hundred getting terminal cancer and the attendant pain and suffering, and the CEO not only “gets paid too much,” but he also gets a raise because he found a way to dump the waste without getting caught, thus increasing profits.  Certainly these profits help him to buy a yacht, which in turn employs more workers, but at what human cost?  Also, in terms of thinking which one is more worth supporting in the abstract, the comparison b/t Big Business X and the U.S. Gov’t only really works if you compare the totality of American Big Businesses with the totality of the U.S. Government (i.e., a hundred corporations’s actions leading to the death of ten people each is really equivalent to U.S. bombs killing 1000, but the comparison is usually inaccurately balanced in such a way as to compare the 10 deaths to 1000 instead of the 10 * 100 deaths to 1000 deaths).
-----