“Property is Theft” Versus “Taxes are Theft”

These two quotes, one from the nineteenth century socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the other from the modern conservative Grover Norquist, represent the two extreme positions in our polarized political debate about wealth and taxes.

The idea of an inalienable natural right to property (mainly agricultural land) has a long history, going back at least to the philosopher John Locke, whose claims on behalf of “life, liberty, and property” inspired our founding fathers (who pointedly changed the word “property” to “the pursuit of happiness” in their political rhetoric, though the property rights even of slave-holders were enshrined in the Constitution).

However, many later theorists have ignored Locke’s qualifiers that property rights are justified only insofar as a person earns them through his (or her) labor, and provided that enough is left over to satisfy the needs of others. Thus, some modern libertarians, like the philosopher Robert Nozick, have asserted that “natural justice” includes an unconstrained property right with no limit, and without a strong requirement that it be based on merit.

The “classical” socialist attitude toward private property could not have been more different. Beginning with the founding father of modern socialism, Jean Jacques Rousseau, socialists have argued that the property of a society belongs to the community as a whole, and the institution of private property is a cultural invention, not a natural right. As Rousseau, put it, “The right which each individual has to his own estate is always subordinate to the right which the community has over all.” Proudhon later wrote a book-length rant against private property, and what another socialist, Claude Henri de Saint Simon, called “The Hand of Greed.”

A middle-ground between these two extreme positions (closer to John Locke’s views) can be found in my book The Fair Society. In brief, our remote ancestors lived in highly egalitarian small groups with very limited personal property and a high degree of sharing and reciprocity. However, in historical times, and in larger societies, private property has become a cultural universal. It falls under the heading of “equity,” or fair rewards for merit and personal achievement, and it has deep roots in human psychology and our evolved human nature.

But property as a form of equity has its limits. It certainly does not include “unearned” wealth -- e.g., inherited wealth, wealth based on various forms of “luck” or happenstance, wealth that others shared in creating, or wealth that is gained in such a way that it causes harm to others or to society as a whole. Indeed, “merit” is a socially determined value; it depends in part on what others (or society) consider to be justified.

More important, wealth that is “superfluous” (in the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ characterization) can only be justified so long as the basic needs of the rest of society have been provided for. The imperatives related to our biological survival and reproduction have a higher moral claim even than earned wealth.

In the final analysis, property is a “social right,” not a natural right. It exists only insofar as the rest of society recognizes and respects it. And if society chooses to set limits on personal wealth and utilize some of it for the common good, this is our collective right. Come to think of it, it’s also a Constitutional right! And if conservative apologists like Norquist object to it, they are implicitly denying the right of the people, and their representatives, to impose “responsible” taxes and, yes, redistribute the wealth as necessary in the public interest. The anti-tax movement is thus profoundly undemocratic, and a cancer on the body politic.

If the power to tax is the power to destroy, as the old saying goes, the opposite is also true; without the power to tax, a society will no longer exist.





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Fairness Deniers

There is a moral equivalent of the climate change deniers out there among conservatives. Some of them are vociferous deniers of the very concept of fairness. One hostile reviewer of my book The Fair Society called fairness “the watchword of today’s radicals.” And Glenn Beck famously rejected social justice as a communist/fascist idea that good Christians should avoid at all costs. What’s going on here?

In simple terms, the idea of fairness represents a threat – a disinterested, external moral value that challenges a conservative philosophy that extols unfettered self-interest as the greatest good. The fairness principle asserts, on the contrary, that the greatest good may well lie somewhere between what is good for you and what is good for me – not to mention all the rest of the me’s in our society. To borrow the utilitarian mantra, the greatest good for the greatest number is not a simple sum of all of our self-interests. What is best in terms of compensation for our corporate CEOs (to cite a current example) is not necessarily also good for the paychecks of the workers. It might be better literally to split the difference.

In fact, there are a great many competing and conflicting needs and interests in our complex, deeply interdependent society, and the pursuit of fairness – finding compromises between our differences – is the only democratic and voluntary way forward. The alternative is likely to be freedom for some and coercion for everyone else. In the extreme, it can lead to what has been happening in Syria these days, and it is where the radical egoism of the fairness deniers could lead us.

Comparing CEO and Worker Pay Scales: “Useless”?

With amazing gall – and a further example of the moral turpitude that pervades our capitalist system -- a lobbying group backed by 81 major companies – from IBM to McDonald’s to General Mills – is seeking to repeal a provision in the new financial reform legislation that would require public companies to reveal the average income of their workers, so that it can be compared with CEO compensation levels. A spokesman for the group calls this information “useless.” So why are they lobbying so hard to avoid publicizing it?

One reason why our CEOs might want to hide this “useless” information is the compensation packages of Fortune 500 companies have continued to balloon in the wake of the Great Recession while the pay of their workers has been stagnant. Our companies have by far the greatest pay gap in the industrialized world. In any other country, it would be a scandal. In 1950, our CEO salaries averaged 20 times that of their workers. In 1970 it was still only 28 times as much. Now it is 320 times as much. The next worse case, Great Britain, has a gap that is only half as large. No wonder our CEOs want to hide it.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The CEO of Whole Foods, for instance, receives 19 times the average pay of his workers, excluding stock and stock options tied to company performance. Likewise, Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer made 40 times the median worker’s pay and Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos got 50 times as much.

Jon Talton of the Seattle Times has noted that our largest companies are achieving record profits but do most of their hiring these days overseas. “It’s a problem that’s not just hurting millions of Americans and their future. It’s doing terrible damage to American capitalism. The honorable exceptions among the chiefs only bring the danger into sharper focus.”

Talk About Armaggedon!

When the health care reform bill was being debated in the Congress back in 2009, the future Speaker of the House, John Boehner, darkly characterized it as “Armaggedon.” That’s nothing compared to the Armaggedon that is facing this country in current “deficit negotiations” (actually an oxymoron, since it takes two sides to negotiate, and the Republicans have refused to do so). This is going to end very badly.

Rep. Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have made it clear that the Republicans will not accept any “revenue enhancements” to close the budget gap that was created by the Republicans themselves (namely, the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy, two unfunded wars and the financial meltdown and recession). Instead, they expect the burden to be borne exclusively by spending cuts that, inevitably, will cause great harm to the poor and the middle class. Two trillion dollars is notx chump change. Medicaid, for instance, now serves some 68 million poor children, elderly and disabled Americans. It is likely to be gutted.

A few days ago, MoveOn.org posted this ironic take on the situation:

REMEMBER WHEN TEACHERS, PUBLIC EMPLOYEES, PLANNED PARENTHOOD, NPR AND PBS CRASHED THE STOCK MARKET, WIPED OUT HALF OF OUR 401KS, TOOK TRILLIONS IN TAXPAYER FUNDED BAILOUTS, SPILLED OIL IN THE GULF OF MEXICO, GAVE THEMSELVES BILLIONS IN BONUSES, AND PAID NO TAXES? YEAH, ME NEITHER…

One of two very bad outcomes seems inevitable at this point. Either the Democrats will cave in to the Republicans’ hard-ball stance and settle for a few token, face-saving revenue enhancements that will make little difference and will leave the bank accounts of the rich and powerful unscathed. Or (less likely), the Democrats will dig in and play out this game of chicken. We will have a brush with national default, turmoil in global markets, and only then see some token revenue enhancements to mollify the Democrats.

Either way, the outcome will exacerbate what is already a deeply unfair society. When will the electorate wake up to what is going on, and do something about it?

A Tale of Two Paradigms

The deep political division between conservatives and progressives in our politics are undergirded by two radically different models of our society that entail very different social values and encourage very different social behaviors. As it happens, both of these models can be found in the works of the pioneer economist Adam Smith.

In The Wealth of Nations, Smith advanced the idea that a competitive capitalist marketplace in which barter, and trade, and the buying and selling of goods and services in pursuit of one’s individual self-interest would, through the workings of an “invisible hand,” yield benefits for society as a whole. In other words, the single-minded pursuit of your own interest will magically benefit everyone else as well. Free markets are sufficient to ensure the general welfare. (Later economic theorists added the claim that “mistakes” may happen in free markets, but they are self-correcting; markets will always seek an equilibrium condition.)

Despite the financial meltdown in 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, this view of society remains the reigning ideology of the political right and, of course, many of the wealthy in our society. To say that this model is self-serving for the “haves” states the obvious. How can it be of benefit to all of us that the top 1 percent of earners in our society take home 24 percent of the total earnings while the top 10 percent take home 49 percent? Likewise, the top 20 percent of the population holds 87.2 percent of all the wealth. Instead of a trickling down, we have had a bubbling up of income and wealth.

The other model of society can be found in Adam Smith’s earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he explicitly recognized a higher purpose for society (I define it as a “collective survival enterprise”) and capitalism was viewed as being instrumental to that purpose; the workings of the marketplace must be subordinated to the general welfare. Smith emphasized the primacy of moral values and, as a stoic and Christian, stressed the importance of the Golden Rule, and of “justice.” In other words, Smith’s later invisible hand model was lifted out of its context by capitalist ideologues.

These two different paradigms have very different implications for our economic and political behavior. The Darwinian-Pollyanna model encourages acquisitiveness, greed, and disregard if not disdain for the “losers.” It is indifferent to the fact that about one-quarter of our population live in more or less dire poverty and that an estimated 50 million Americans experienced “food deprivation” (hunger) at various times last year. It provides a justification for conservatives to demand lower taxes and a dismantling of the safety net. Medicaid, for instance, serves some 68 million Americans, mostly children, the elderly and the disabled.

The “survival enterprise” model assigns a limited role to competition and wealth creation, and stresses the importance of cooperation, along with reciprocity, mutualism, and the norm of fairness. Most important, it assumes a collective obligation to provide for the basic needs of our people – through gainful employment wherever possible but supplemented where necessary with a robust (realistic) safety net. Trickle down will not work without taxes, and government. Let’s get real.


Polls and other studies show that most of us prefer Adam Smith’s “other model.” So did he.

Ayn Rand’s Subversive Philosophy

Ayn Rand’s moral stance in her novel The Fountainhead is actually subversive. In effect, she sets the rights of her creative individuals above the law, and above the legally recognized property rights of others, including especially those “second raters”, “parasites”, and repulsive “masses” that she often denigrates.

In the story, Roark agrees to (secretly) help a mediocre old school friend, Peter Keating, win a large housing development contract on condition that there must be no changes at all to Roark’s innovative plans. Keating agrees and, in fronting for Roark, dutifully inserts a similar “no change” clause into his contract with the client/owner. But as the buildings go up, the owner violates the contract by unilaterally making some cosmetic changes. So Roark sneaks onto the project site one night and blows up all the buildings. Then, after confessing to the act but making a long-winded philosophical justification to the court (excerpted above), the jury acquits him! This is perverse. Roark’s grievance was with his friend. He had no contract with the owner whose property he destroyed, and no legal claim against him. It was Keating who failed to insist upon and defend the “no change” clause. Roark’s recourse was to bring a lawsuit against Keating. But Roark was not bound to act in accordance with the law, or the principle of punishing only the culprit, or even respecting property rights. And neither, it seems, was the judge and the jury! This is frankly absurd, even as fiction. (From The Fair Society, CH 3, FN 3)

Some Thoughts About John Rawls

Philosopher John Rawls occupies a distinctive place in our public philosophy as the person who reintroduced the subject of fairness and social justice into our intellectual and political dialogue with his 1971 book, A Theory of Justice.

Over the years, his bottom-line proposals for equal opportunities coupled with affirmative action, in effect, for the “least advantaged” (AKA the poor) in our society have been exhaustively debated but have had little direct effect on the direction of our public policy. Indeed, conservatives treat Rawls as their whipping boy, a “radical” who purveyed fantasies about fairness. I take a very different approach to fairness in my book and have some criticisms of my own. Here is one of my extended footnotes on my own and others’ concerns.

Some critics have pointed out that it makes more sense (logically) to opt for economic equality. And, in fact, Rawls did just that in an earlier article, but he shifted to the “least favored” in his famous book. Others have questioned whether or not a hypothetical situation with no relationship to the real world -- comparable to an unrealistic thought experiment in science -- can legitimately be used to derive “intuitive” principles for real world application. Still others object that Rawls’s two principles seem potentially to produce self-contradictions. On the one hand, if economic inequalities are allowed to persist, this would constrain the equality of others -- the purchasing power and freedom from want of the have-nots. On the other hand, imposing constraints on allowing the rich to be able to benefit from the fruits of their economic accomplishments represents a limitation on their freedom to hold property.

My own criticisms are more fundamental. Rawls recognized what he called “primary goods,” which he defined as “rights and liberties, opportunities and powers, income and wealth,” but he did not address basic needs per se or give primacy in his theory to their satisfaction; basic needs did not seem to rise to a moral imperative for Rawls. Instead, his principle would assure only that the poor get a piece of the action when the rich get richer. It amounts to a pledge that a rising tide should lift all boats. In a later book, Rawls shifted the rank-ordering of his normative principles and placed basic needs first, above liberty. But his rationale for doing so was curious. He argued that it was justified because meeting basic needs was a prerequisite for freedom. Another criticism I have is that Rawls tolerated inequalities, yet he did not make any explicit provision for “merit” -- rewards for talent, effort and achievement. As various critics have noted, Rawls was not much concerned about fairness as “just deserts.” Nor did he address the free-rider problem. (From The Fair Society, CH 2, FN 14)

Stalking the Fairness Bogeyman

Peyton Young, one of the leading researchers in equity theory, provides this wry comment about the subject of fairness: “When I teach to students, I warn them that the subject does not exist. Among all nonexistent subjects, in fact, equity occupies a distinguished position because it fails to exist in several different ways. The arguments against existence take three different forms. The first is that equity is merely a word that hypocritical people use to cloak self-interest…The second argument is that, even if equity does exist in some notional sense, it is so hopelessly subjective that it cannot be analyzed scientifically…The third argument is that, even granting that equity may not be entirely subjective, there is no sensible theory about it…In short, it fails to exist in an academic sense….Set against these arguments is the fact that people who are not acquainted with them insist on using the word ‘equity’ as if it did mean something. In everyday conversation, we discuss with seeming abandon the equities and inequities of the tax structure, the health care system, the military draft, the price of telephone service, and how offices are allocated at work. For a term that does not exist, this is a pretty good beginning.” (From The Fair SocietyCH 2. FN 7)

Two Other Visions of the “Fair Society”

A reader of my book reminded me that a lot of meaty supplementary material is included in my chapter endnotes, and that some of them might deserve more daylight. So here is one. I will be posting more in the days ahead.

In addition to my own vision of a “fair society,” focused on the notion of a “biosocial contract” and three distinct fairness precepts – equality, equity and reciprocity – there have been two other notable uses of the term. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown adopted it in the fall of 2008 as a political slogan and campaign theme for his (failed) re-election bid, and sociologist Amitai Etzioni has espoused the concept in connection with his research on fairness.

Although there is common agreement about the fundamental principle, Brown and Etzioni used the terms in quite different ways. Brown’s rhetoric was impressive. He called fairness “a cause worth fighting for” and espoused “a fair Britain for a new age.” Why fairness? “We do it because fairness is in our DNA. It’s who we [the Labour Party] are…Labour stands for a fair society.” However, Brown provided no theoretical basis for his vision. It served as the packaging for a set of incremental policy proposals, from free nursery care for two-year-olds to vouchers to allow low income citizens to gain access to the internet. Indeed, it seemed the term did not poll well as a campaign slogan, because it was later dropped in favor of “Building a Better Britain.”

Etzioni’s vision, on the other hand, is more ethically grounded and less programmatic. “We must work together for a fair society: a society where everyone is treated with full respect, recognizing that we are all God’s children.” An accompanying survey – conducted for him by a professional survey research firm in 2004 – provided impressive support for his argument that the norm of fairness has strong backing across the political spectrum. In survey questions related to the fairness of a variety of economic and political issues, “unfair” responses ranged from 52 percent for privacy violations in the Patriot Act to 88 percent for health insurance company denials of medical cost claims by their customers.

Pie-in-the Sky (Part Two)

It turns out that pie-in-the-sky is a kind of early 20th century American equivalent of the infamous phrase “let them eat cake.”

The latter phrase was never actually spoken by Queen Marie Antoinette, apparently, but she was (justly so) a symbol in her day of profligacy among the rich and a cavalier attitude toward the poor. When told that the huddled masses in Paris were hungry and had no bread due to a drought, she was supposed to have said, well then let them eat cake.

The modern version was coined by Joe Hill, one of the leaders of the early labor union movement in this country, the IWW (known as the Wobblies), who championed better wages and working conditions for factory workers. Hill, in a poem, mocked the widespread attitude among the wealthy of that day that the poor can only blame themselves for their poverty in this “land of opportunity.” And if they are hungry in this life, they will get their reward in heaven. “You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”

Funny thing, my book is about making our basic needs – bread/cake/pies – a priority in this life, not in the sweet bye and bye, while the current generation of Ayn Rand capitalists and their neo-classical economist allies are the real purveyors of pie in the sky.

“Pie-in-the-Sky?”

I’ve never really understood this cliché, but everyone knows it’s a bad thing. It’s a sure sign that you’re terminally naïve. Well, it seems that my “pie” -- The Fair Society -- belongs in outer space, according to one reviewer of the book. Maybe this is what the astronauts are eating out there at the space station.

But then, there is something even worse than being called a purveyor of pies. What’s that, you ask? It’s not being called anything at all. The print reviews of my book are now in – all three of them. And this, in itself, says something about the political climate these days. A book about fairness, and how to achieve a fair society, didn’t even get reviewed in the mainstream “liberal” media.

The only major review was in the Wall Street Journal, and it was (not surprising) a hatchet job by Kenneth Minogue, an emeritus political scientist at the London School of Economics and author of the book The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life (no kidding).

Minogue dismisses my book out of hand. “Aspiring immigrants clamor for U.S. visas or clamber over fences to get in. Why would so many fling themselves toward an ‘unfair’ land?” Good question. Maybe things are even more unfair “over there,” or maybe they don’t know the ugly truth about conditions here. Hmmm.

Minogue also treats fairness as some kind of pejorative – “the watchword of today’s radicals” and suggests that I am only a pale imitation of philosopher John Rawls and his fairness fantasies. Minogue claims that I “regret” the fact that Rawls has not been taken up “as a guide to remaking America.” Actually I sharply criticized Rawls’s position and proposed an alternative – a three-element model of fairness -- that has strong empirical support. Indeed, Minogue discounts my chapter-length review of the emergent, multi-disciplinary science of human nature. “Science usually deals in things more concrete than human dispositions,” he says. Oh? I thought he was a “political scientist.” And what about the “science” of economics, where the governing assumption is that “self-interest” is our predominant “human disposition?”

Minogue also raises various issues that he claims I did not give “the attention they deserve,” though in fact all of them were addressed in the book. It’s evident that he didn’t read the book. But these days reading a book doesn’t seem to be a prerequisite for doing a review.

Finally, Minogue accuses me of having a bipolar ethical view that recognizes only self-interest and altruism. (Actually, altruism is a word I use very sparingly; my focus is on fairness.) Minogue tells us that much of what we do is “disinterested.” There are many things that we are motivated to do “just because we happen to want to” with no thought of personal advantage. Well, of course. But food and rent come first. How was he able to get away with this heresy in the unofficial house organ of free-market, neo-classical capitalism? The pity is that a lot of people who might have benefited from reading my book will dismiss it as warmed over Rawls.

Robert De Vogli’s review of my book in the Stanford Social Innovation Review also accused me of being “reductionist” about human motivations. There is more to life than satisfying our basic needs, he tells us. “Our existence has some deeper, more creative meaning than mere survival and reproduction.” This despite a chapter-length treatment of the fourteen domains of primary basic needs and the documentation I provide on how we devote much of our time and energy to satisfying these needs, either directly or indirectly. Of course, this does not exhaust our motivations, but life comes before liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. It is especially disconcerting to receive this criticism from a professor in the University of Michigan School of Public Health who focuses his work on global economic inequalities and how these affect public health. He didn’t seem to see the relevance of my book.

Perhaps least helpful was De Vogli’s allusion to the book as “pie-in-the-sky” and his assertion that “Many will surely be skeptical about this proposal, or simply view it as sheer utopia.” It’s not quite that bad, he says, with faint praise. But you don’t have to waste your time with it.

The third review, by David Spiro, an adjunct professor of political economy at Columbia University, in the new online review, the New York Journal of Books, was more favorable. He got the main point that fairness has to begin with providing for our basic needs – biological imperatives that are inescapable – and that equity (or merit) and reciprocity are also vitally important elements of fairness. Furthermore, there is a set of very practicable reforms that we could undertake to reverse course as a nation and restore some of the fairness we had in our economy and society 50 years ago. What we lack is the political will and the ability to overcome the powerful forces that are pushing us in the opposite direction.

As I point out in the book, my vision of a fair society is definitely not pie-in-the-sky. European welfare capitalist societies like Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and even Germany have achieved a much better balance between capitalism and social welfare without sacrificing the benefits of capitalism. In Sweden, for example, less than one-quarter of its economy is government owned and its dynamic economy has grown faster than ours in some recent years. Think of IKEA, for instance. It’s not utopia, but it is a far more fair society.

Perhaps the best and most generous reviews I have received are the ones that have been posted on Amazon.com by people who have actually read the book (with the exception of a vitriolic one-star diatribe by somebody who obviously didn’t read it). These reviews showed genuine understanding and didn’t have an axe to grind. Maybe they will compensate in some measure for the non-reviews in the traditional print media outlets.

In any event, the issue of fairness will not go away. We need to have a national debate about it – especially now when trillion-dollar fiscal decisions are being made in Washington that will deeply impact the future of fairness – and our future as a nation.

It’s Time for a Full Employment Program

OK all you anti-government libertarians, here’s the dilemma. It’s all well and good to rely on the private sector to provide the jobs, and the income that everyone needs after all to meet their basic needs. But what if the private sector is coming up short – way short?

In fact, some 16 percent of our potential workforce are now unemployed, or under-employed part-timers, or never-employed, some 25 million of us altogether. We are told that there is currently one job opening available for every five job-seekers, half of whom have been unemployed for more than six months.

Republicans with a not-so-hidden agenda tell us that if we cut taxes and government spending, this will solve the problem. We call this chicken poop on our farm, or horse poop. Cutting government spending means cutting jobs – lots of them – and cutting taxes for the wealthy to create jobs has been tried twice before and it didn’t work. Why should it work better this time, in an era of near-record corporate profits, with banks and large companies sitting on cash hordes and investors flocking to put their savings from the Bush era tax cuts into emerging markets? Our income tax burden, already the lowest in the industrialized world, is not the problem.

The root of the problem is weak domestic demand in a seriously wounded economy, with the housing bust still dragging down the private sector rather than leading us out of the recession, as in the past. The only way out of this bind is to give the middle class and the poor more income to spend. And if the private sector can’t do the job, we need to begin looking for another alternative. Otherwise we risk long-term economic stagnation coupled with desperate poverty and even starvation. We have to take collective responsibility for this life-and-death dilemma or we will no longer deserve to be called a nation; we will have become a gladiatorial arena in which the losers go to the wall. “Survival of the fittest.”

You may need to hold your nose, but the obvious solution is something that has never een tried,even though the idea has been around ever since the Employment Act of 1946. Let the government be the backstop, the “employer of last resort,” whose role would wax and wane with the need to take up the slack in private sector job-creation.

One successful precedent is the jobs programs in the New Deal era, such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that focused on infrastructure improvements and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) that built much of the infrastructure in our national parks. Some of the techniques used in those days, like requiring the workers to send most of their earnings home to their families, would help to spread the economic benefits today as well.

Who is going to pay for this? Let’s start with the bankers who got us into this mess then got away scot free and are now enriching themselves again with million-dollar bonuses while furiously lobbying to make the Bush-era tax cuts permanent. Or how about those corporate CEO’s whose compensation packages now average some 320 times that of their workers (compared with 20 times as much in the 1950s)?

There is no lack of useful jobs that could be created – starting with re-hiring laid off teachers and health care workers. What is lacking is the vision and the will.

An Onion is Not a Rose

Republicans have been claiming that their plan to end Medicare as we know it is actually a plan to “save it,” and they have been threatening law suits against media outlets running ads that challenge this lie. Here is what New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has to say about it:

What's In A Name? A lot, or at least that's what Republicans think. Greg Sargent reports that they're demanding that a TV station stop running ads saying that the GOP wants to end Medicare; the claim is that this is a lie, because the new program the GOP wants to impose in place of Medicare is still Medicare.

As Greg says, this is important -- because if they can get away with this, it will amount to a serious infringement of free speech, preventing people from running truthful ads.

Because the fact is that Republicans are trying to end Medicare. The program we now call Medicare is one in which the government acts as your insurer, paying your major medical bills; coverage is guaranteed to all seniors. The program Republicans want gives you vouchers and tells you to go buy your own insurance, if you can. That's not at all the same thing.

...So you can call the new thing Medicare; you could also call an onion a rose. But a non-rose by the same name does not smell as sweet.

Capitalism and Fairness

Capitalism provides a classic example of a double edged sword (Will Hutton, in his book Them and Us calls it a “tightrope”).

On the positive side, capitalism has been a dynamic engine of innovation, economic progress, and material improvements for more than two centuries. It encourages entrepreneurship, risk taking and hard work and it produces socially valuable personal achievements. At its best, it abundantly rewards “merit” (Will Hutton calls it “due deserts”) -- one of the three cardinal principles of fairness. Contrast this to the societies where birth, social class or political influence have been (are) the route to wealth, privilege and power.

The other edge of the sword (when people trip and fall off the tightrope) is that capitalism can easily become corrupted. It can become a rigged game in which wealth and power combine to undermine the role of merit and can lead to exploitation and great social harm. Capitalism can easily morph into predatory capitalism, crony capitalism, mafia capitalism, casino capitalism, and more. As Hutton puts it, “Capitalism without fairness thus becomes toxic.”

In practice, capitalism has often led to a tremendous concentration of wealth among a small percentage of the population, coupled with a spreading wasteland of poverty among the masses. In this country, the top one percent now receives 24 percent of the total personal income, and the top 10 percent receives 49 percent. Likewise, the top 20 percent owns 87.2 percent of the total personal wealth, while the bottom 80 percent owns just 12.8 percent. Meanwhile, at least 30 million and perhaps as many as 75 million Americans are living in more or less extreme poverty. Some 50 million Americans experienced hunger at various times last year. Capitalism can only be justified if it lifts all boats. Today, many of the boats are sinking.

To make matters worse, most of the rich think they deserve it (after all, they’ve earned it!) and think that the poor are impoverished through their own failings; it’s their own fault for being poor. Indeed, wealthy capitalists are in denial about how much of their wealth depends on various kinds of luck, or favorable rules of the game, or a society that provides the knowledge and resources skilled workers and markets for their wealth creation – not to mention our inheritance laws.

Hutton concludes that capitalism without fairness as its guiding principle is likely to be corrupted and become dysfunctional. Fairness is an indispensable moral value. “Sustainable capitalism and society beyond it cannot function without a moral core….Only fairness can keep it on the tightrope.”

Lies, Damned Lies

A friend of mine yesterday pointed out that our politics has become so debased that there is no longer any penalty for lying. In fact, it's the opposite. Lies propelled the Republican resurgence in the 2010 elections. Lies have been very profitable at Fox News. And the Republican plan to end Medicare as we know it is called a plan to "save" it, while the Republicans attack the Democrats for pointing this out. Here is some of the evidence, from today's Progress Report. Hold your nose:


"During yesterday’s meeting with the president, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and others once again asked the president to stop the alleged “demagoguery” of their budget plan. According to news reports, President Obama then reminded them of some of the rhetoric that has been directed at him by conservatives.

In reply, Obama said he was no stranger to cartoonish depictions, reeling off a list of conservatives’ favorite attack points: “I’m the death panel-supporting, socialist, may-not-have-been-born-here president,” Obama said, according to people familiar with his remarks.

And just like yesterday’s reminder about how we built up the current national debt (Bush-era policies), here’s what real demagoguery — from Republicans — on health care looks like, via ThinkProgress’ Igor Volsky:

-REP. JOHN BOEHNER (R-OH): Passage of health reform is “Armageddon” because the law will “ruin our country.” [3/20/2010]

- FMR. SEN. RICK SANTORUM (R-PA): Health reform “will destroy the country” because, “in the next year or so,” America will have to “dramatically cut the military because we can’t pay for it.” [10/23/2010]

- SEN. TOM COBURN (R-OK): “There will be no insurance industry left in three years.” [10/12/2010]

- REP. MICHELE BACHMANN (R-MN): “On page 16, you can read for yourself that no new health insurance policies can be written once this federal plan comes into effect.” [7/17/2009]

- GLENN BECK: “This is the end of prosperity in America forever … the end of America as you know it.” [11/19/2009]

- SEAN HANNITY: “If we get nationalized health care, it’s over; this is socialism.” [11/2/2009]

- REP. PAUL BROUN (R-GA): “That’s exactly what’s going on in Canada and Great Britain today…and a lot of people are going to die.” [7/10/09]

- REP. LOUIE GOHMERT (R-TX): “I would hate to think that among five women, one of ‘em is gonna die because we go to socialized care.” [7/15/09]

- REP. VIRGINIA FOXX (R-NC): “[The Republican plan will] make sure we bring down the cost of health care for all Americans and that ensures affordable access for all Americans and is pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.” [7/28/09]

- SEN. TOM COBURN (R-OK): “I have a message for you: you’re going to die soon…When you restrict the ability of the primary care givers int his country to do what is best for their senior patients, what you are doing is limiting their life expectancy.” [12/1/09]

- REP. MICHELE BACHMANN (R-MN): “Socialized medicine is the crown jewel of socialism. This will change our country forever.” [11/3/2009]