the "social contract"
Elizabeth Warren, who's now running for the Senate in Massachusetts, recently said this:
"There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. . . . You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."
Though I think being generous after succeeding is a good thing and to be encouraged, the notion that she puts forward that some part of success is literally owed to society is too muddle-brained not to address. What were considered to be rich people existed, after all, long before roads or general education. The key difference is that "rich," today, looks different from how "rich" would be defined if roads, educated people and so on had not been there. Wealth is largely composed of advantage, and that which is a benefit to everyone is an advantage to no one. True, roads and publicly paid-for education benefit those who become rich, but they also benefitted equally everyone else with whom the rich competed and continue to compete, and who were therefore harder to get richer than. That means that, credit-wise, the whole thing is a wash.
Or to put it more succinctly, circumstances get no credit for anyone having gained advantage by adapting to them. Nor do they get credit for not being worse and requiring more adaptation.
Which is not to say that I think education or roads or, say, the EPA, are bad things. I support taxes to pay for them, up to a point, because I like the things we get that we can't build individually. But manipulating the physical world is one thing, because it has limits and deals with the visible and measurable, and manipulating the social world something quite different, because it has none and deals with the internal, unmeasurable and often selectively self-reported. What Warren is attempting to do is to use the success of government in the former to justify potentially an infinite expansion in the latter. We have, after all, only her implication that the "social contract" is not now being met; no unmanipulable metric exists to limit its expansion. Does the "social contract" require we act as the world's policeman, with our massive military budget a necessary concomitant? The idea of some amorphous "social contract" that takes whatever shape and most especially whatever degree is required to reach the speaker's desired goals-- effectively, a way of disguising intuition and emotion as law-- is one I reject.
"There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. . . . You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."
Though I think being generous after succeeding is a good thing and to be encouraged, the notion that she puts forward that some part of success is literally owed to society is too muddle-brained not to address. What were considered to be rich people existed, after all, long before roads or general education. The key difference is that "rich," today, looks different from how "rich" would be defined if roads, educated people and so on had not been there. Wealth is largely composed of advantage, and that which is a benefit to everyone is an advantage to no one. True, roads and publicly paid-for education benefit those who become rich, but they also benefitted equally everyone else with whom the rich competed and continue to compete, and who were therefore harder to get richer than. That means that, credit-wise, the whole thing is a wash.
Or to put it more succinctly, circumstances get no credit for anyone having gained advantage by adapting to them. Nor do they get credit for not being worse and requiring more adaptation.
Which is not to say that I think education or roads or, say, the EPA, are bad things. I support taxes to pay for them, up to a point, because I like the things we get that we can't build individually. But manipulating the physical world is one thing, because it has limits and deals with the visible and measurable, and manipulating the social world something quite different, because it has none and deals with the internal, unmeasurable and often selectively self-reported. What Warren is attempting to do is to use the success of government in the former to justify potentially an infinite expansion in the latter. We have, after all, only her implication that the "social contract" is not now being met; no unmanipulable metric exists to limit its expansion. Does the "social contract" require we act as the world's policeman, with our massive military budget a necessary concomitant? The idea of some amorphous "social contract" that takes whatever shape and most especially whatever degree is required to reach the speaker's desired goals-- effectively, a way of disguising intuition and emotion as law-- is one I reject.