Handouts

Welcome friends!

Can we talk about handouts?  I was reading some online comments the other day to just remind myself how conservatives talk about economic issues and one recurring theme or perhaps more accurately meme involved the idea of opposing “handouts” as for example in the phrase “the reason I consider myself a conservative is that I don’t like handouts.”  Seems reasonable.  Who likes handouts?  Maybe I should be a conservative.  However, it then occurred to me that like much of conservative ideology the proposition as stated is empty rhetoric with all the substance existing only in the unstated details.  It’s rather like people who defend their ethical beliefs on the grounds they believe in supporting “goodness” misleadingly implying those who disagree with them must support “badness” and leaving it up to critical readers to take the logical and necessary next step of asking what exactly they mean by goodness.  Because of course real ethical debates are never or seldom about supporting or not supporting goodness in the abstract are they?  They’re about differences in how one defines what is good, what behaviors one considers good.  That’s what creates the problems.  Seems similar to what we have with this concept of a handout.  One isn’t really saying anything at all when one proclaims one’s opposition to handouts unless one takes the next step and explains what one has in mind and why one opposes them.  Absent that it’s really just an empty gesture, a bold stand against all the straw men supporting handouts.

So let’s get a bit into the details of what we might be talking about when we talk about handouts shall we?  For me the word “handout” has a pejorative ring to it that suggests something that is not ethically justified.  As such, I would suggest it’s impossible to separate the concept of a “handout” from one’s thoughts on distributional issues.  That is to say, I think the most reasonable interpretation of a handout is a distributional result that one feels does not have proper ethical justification.  As such I would suggest a generally market-based system of the sort we have here in the USA is rife with handouts.  Assuming one believes the distribution of economic power should have something to do with the behavior of the individuals in question the biggest handout of all would have to be our traditional system of inheritance.  By setting up a legal system in which one’s economic power depends on parentage rather than personal merit we’re basically setting up a system based on handouts to arguably undeserving people.  Another common sort of handout would be the sort of nepotism one sees in family owned companies in which owners install their offspring in management positions no matter their relative merit.  Again, it certainly appears to be a system of handouts allocating economic power in a way that has no convincing justification in terms of individual merit.  Another sort of handout would be tax codes that favor the wealthy both indirectly by giving them a tax bill smaller in terms of practical hardship or disutility than the tax bill for the less well off and also directly by allowing them various deductions and write-offs that can reduce their tax bill to zero as was apparently and famously the case for our resident billionaire president Mr. Trump.  More expansively I have to wonder if distributional results based on anything beyond individual effort are entirely justified on an ethical basis and hence a form of handout.  Let’s take inborn talents or abilities like intelligence.  Although they presumably allow one to contribute more per unit of effort one needn’t do anything particularly noteworthy or laudable to receive such gifts of nature so why exactly should they be rewarded by our distributional system?  Perhaps even the returns on inborn talents and abilities are in the nature of a handout when considered in terms of individual merit as opposed to contribution to society?  So, yes, like many online conservatives I suppose I also consider myself to oppose handouts, which is simply to say I think our distributional system should have some ethical justification although the exact principles may be open to discussion.  But in my case my opposition to handouts leads me to reject rather than endorse conservatism.  Odd isn’t it?

Now of course one suspects although one can never be certain many conservatives would disagree with my examples of handouts.  Presumably they believe those distributional mechanisms and results are entirely justified in ethical terms.  What they tend to have in mind is an entirely different category of distributional policies typically departing from either our existing distributional arrangements or some favored subset of those mechanisms typically what they consider market arrangements.  So for example if we as a society vote to provide a poor person with publicly funded medical care then many conservatives likely believe that person has received a handout of exactly the sort they oppose.  Although I can see some reasonable ethical debate might be involved I would suggest health care may be something we might consider a public good and available to all so in this example I would oppose classifying such results as handouts and see them instead as perfectly justified distributional policy.

I’ve tried to think a bit about other definitions of the word “handout” that don’t involve the thorny ethical component.  The only real alternative I was able to come up with is that despite the pejorative ring one may interpret the word “handout” to refer to anything that alters what would otherwise happen under whatever distributional arrangements we have in place.  For example let’s say we set up a system whereby all profits from more efficient production go to CEOs and stockholders, but some workers organize and demand and receive a share.  I suppose in that case one might say workers managed to get a “handout” not in the sense they did something devoid of possible ethical justification but simply that they ended up with more than they would normally have gotten under existing distributional arrangements.  In that case, opposing “handouts” would translate to opposing any alteration of the existing distributional patterns no matter how ethically justified or unjustified those arrangements may be.  That’s fine.  In that case what I just described as handouts from my perspective would not be handouts and the non-handouts I hypothesized might be considered handouts from a conservative prospective would be handouts.  So it solves that problem.  But of course in that case the sentiment that one “opposes handouts” seems oddly amoral.  One is saying one supports the results of current distributional arrangement regardless of whether they’re ethically justified or not.  Seems a bit odd.  Indeed, it’s hard for me to interpret such a statement without inferring some implication that supporting whatever distributional arrangement one happens to have has its own ethical significance in the sense that regardless of whether it’s good or bad or ethical or not it’s what we have and the most important overriding ethical principle is to not alter whatever we have.  But honestly I can’t imagine anyone taking such an ethical principle seriously.

So let’s summarize.  Everyone with ethical beliefs relating to distributions, so let’s just say everyone, will naturally dislike handouts defined as distributional changes having no ethical justification, so expressing one’s disdain for handouts is essentially expressing nothing at all.  The real difference between liberals and conservatives does not involve how they feel about handouts in the abstract but what they feel constitute handouts, and getting to that issue involves discussing distributional issues.  In other words, what we have with the conservative complaint against handouts is basically yet another instance of conservatives wanting to argue in favor of their distributional beliefs without doing the hard work of actually presenting relevant arguments.  As such it’s rather similar to the standard misinterpretation of economic theory I’m always banging on about by which economic theory is made to appear to address or even resolve distributional issues it never really could.  Indeed, it’s hard to avoid the feeling one of the founding ideas behind conservative ideology is to always avoid discussing distributional issues plainly and honestly.  That to me is reason enough to fight against conservative ideology.  We can discuss any distributional issues we like but let’s hold the line against any dishonest and manipulative ideology that tries to argue about distributional issues in indirect and misleading ways rather than honestly and honorably after the fashion of liberals and leftists.

Send In The Clowns

Welcome friends!

I read one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time the other day so I thought  I might as well share it this time out.  I’ve been so heavy and serious lately I feel it’s high time I lightened up a bit.  The piece was about how most people here in the US feel the current Congress is the worst in their lifetimes.  Wait, that’s not the funny part.  The funny part is that voters have apparently determined to address this thorny issue by voting in additional Republicans thus allowing them to gain control of both the House and Senate.  It’s funny because the obvious and direct cause of most of the dysfunction in Congress over the past several years has been the Republican Party itself, so one can’t help but wonder how these voters are connecting the dots if, indeed, they perceive any dots at all and have any interest in connecting them.  Really, I want to know how voting in additional Republicans will render Congress more functional.  Do you know?

I’ve probably mentioned before, but I might as well review.  I think there are two primary features of the current Republican Party that make it the mighty engine of dysfunction that it has become... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Social Conservatives, The Liberal Ethos, And A Funny Dream

Welcome friends!

I know I’ve been writing quite a bit about religion recently but maybe I can do just one more before I give it a little rest and turn to some other issues?  Because I wanted to talk this time about a little article I read a few years ago by conservative columnist Michael Gerson that I thought really demonstrated the conceptual difficulties many social conservatives seem to run into when they try to make sense of the liberal and secular humanist worldview.  This particular article was mostly about some sort of argument some people were having at some time about the influence or lack of influence of something called “dominionism” within conservative circles, which is something I’ve never actually heard about and don’t have any particular interest in delving into.  So let’s skip the ninety percent of the article that dealt with that topic and just go on to the bit that caught my eye, which was the very last paragraph in which Mr. Gerson concluded his discussion with what I believe is a rather common conservative perspective on liberalism and secularism.  In Mr. Gerson’s language, “…[S]ecularists often assume their view is the definition of neutrality and thus deserves a privileged public place.  The argument that religion is fundamentally illiberal thus provides an excuse to treat it illiberally.  Pluralism is defined as the silencing of religious people.”  One hears this sort of thing all the time from conservatives but honestly I think it’s all based on a bit of conceptual or possibly even linguistic confusion.  So let’s try to clear up a few things, OK?

Recall I’ve argued before that the core of the liberal ethos for me is the notion that we should allow one another do what we like unless our actions impinge in a serious way on other people in which case we need to get together via the democratic political system, debate about the ethics of whatever the situation happens to be, and come up with some kind of resolution.

Now to avoid any possible confusion about the issue let me just say I think it’s perfectly fine to have a debate about the liberal ethos and about whether there should or should not be a private realm in which government does not intrude, but let’s just be a little careful about how we talk about this issue.  If we define government neutrality in this case to mean the government is simply not involved and thus neutral with respect to whatever private decisions someone may wish to make in this private realm, then what we’re debating is whether the government should or should not be neutral in the context of this private realm.  In that case, I don’t think it would make a lot of sense to suggest those who support the liberal ethos are just assuming or pretending their position is more supportive of government neutrality than the opposing view.  Under this definition of neutrality, those who support the liberal ethos would be more supportive of government neutrality with respect to the private realm and the religious position that government should be involved would be less supportive of government neutrality.  Indeed, that’s what the whole debate would be about: the pros and cons of government neutrality in the private realm and the definition and boundaries of that private realm.

But there are other ways one might define neutrality and that’s where I’m afraid things start to get a little muddy.  If one defines government neutrality not in terms of government interference or lack of interference with the person actually doing some activity in the private realm but in terms of the consistency of the government’s activity or lack of activity with one or another ethical position such as that expressed by the liberal ethos or by various religious theories of the more intrusive kind then of course there could never really be any such thing as government neutrality because either government activity would be consistent with a given ethical system or it wouldn’t.  Either the government would get involved in the private realm or it would not.  In that case then yes, it would certainly be misleading to suggest the liberal ethos was about government neutrality.  Indeed, there would be no such thing as government neutrality.

Now I personally think it makes a lot more sense to think about government neutrality in the former sense and to think about the ethical debate over the liberal ethos as being in part about whether government should or should not be neutral with respect to activity taking place in the private realm.  It just seems a little odd and confusing to me to say the government is not really being neutral when it lets someone do whatever he or she wants because the idea that government should do that is consistent with some ethical systems and not others or with the wishes of those who support some ethical systems and not with the wishes of those who support others.  To me that way of thinking is just so confusing because it really just pushes everything back a level.  After determining there is no such thing as government neutrality under this definition of neutrality we would then still have to talk about whether government should allow people to do whatever they like in the private realm, although we’d obviously have to come up with some other terminology to describe what the government would be doing in that case.  I mean come on, we’re never going to get anywhere at that rate.

Another problem with trying to transmute a debate about the liberal ethos into a debate about religion is that the relationship between the two issues is just very loosey goosey and thus liable to generate confusion.  For example, someone who supports the liberal ethos would logically support the right of someone who wishes to apply religious precepts to his or her own behavior in the private realm because under the liberal ethos that would be the latter person’s personal choice.  So it just seems a little weird to me to suggest that someone who supports the liberal ethos in this context is setting himself or herself in opposition to religion in some global sense.  I mean, yes and no.  I know I’ve argued plenty of times that many religions tend to have some (well, OK, usually a lot of) difficulty with the liberal ethos and a distinctive feature of many religions is that they don’t really make any distinction between the private realm and public realm.  Instead, they typically provide some rules and precepts one is supposed to follow in one’s private and public life and those rules sometimes explicitly or implicitly involve one’s ostensible responsibility to get other people to follow those same rules never mind about the ethical or religious views of those other people.  But religion doesn’t have to be that way.  I think there are plenty of religious people, at least in this country, who manage to hold religious views and yet reconcile those views with the liberal ethos using the general proposition that religion does not give one carte blanche to meddle in other people’s private affairs and that everyone is ultimately responsible for their own ethical and religious choices.  In other words, I think it’s a little confusing to suggest the reason secular liberals don’t want government intruding into the private realm is that religions typically support that type of thing and they are opposed to religion.  To my mind it’s more that liberals don’t want government intruding into the private realm because of their social ethics and views on the proper relationship of the government and the individual and one of the things they find troubling about many religions is that those religions advocate systems of social ethics that are inconsistent with those views.  In other words, I think trying to make it be all about religion is putting one’s cart before one’s horse.

So let’s move on to the second potentially relevant context under the liberal ethos: the realm in which one’s actions have a significant effect on other people and we therefore need to get into a debate about the ethics of the situation and decide how we think we should resolve it through government action if necessary.  (That’s the way of civilization, anyway.  I suppose we could also just let the people in question duke it out however they might and may the best man or woman win, which I suppose one could say is the way of anarchy, but you know I’m not a big fan of anarchy, right?  Actually I’m not that bad a shot but my martial arts skills just aren’t where they need to be just yet.)  Now in this context I don’t think the liberal argument is that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with trying to apply one’s religious views to the issue at hand.  I think it’s typically more about the merits of the religious thought being thus applied, which I think is rather a different issue.  That is to say, liberals and secular humanists typically have their own liberal and secular ways of thinking about these issues, which they obviously feel are superior to the religious way, and they are engaging in the sort of debate one would expect and encourage in that situation.  Appeals to authority and supernatural goings on are just not very compelling bases for ethical systems for many people.  Nor do I think many liberals would conceive of government as being neutral in this case.  If we’re using government to resolve an interpersonal conflict of this type then someone is going to win and someone is going to lose.  They both can’t get what they want.  That’s the whole problem.  So the resolution can hardly be neutral with respect to the interests of the parties to the conflict.  I suppose it could still be neutral in other ways, such as applying the same resolution regardless of the identities of the people involved, but that’s yet another issue.  And since we don’t have neutrality with respect to the parties that are actually involved how easy it must be to get a little confused and start talking about a comparable lack of neutrality with respect to third parties advocating various resolutions to the conflict.  And how easy in that case to attempt to apply the same argument to activity taking place in the private realm where third parties may of course still have different ideas but there is no compelling direct interpersonal conflict that would call forth government activity in the first place.  Wait a minute, is that what’s going on?  Shifting perspectives combined with shifting contexts that render the shifting perspectives sometimes significant and sometimes not?  So tricky to keep these things straight.

Well, my head is starting to hurt just a little bit so let me wind things up with an amusing little dream I had the other night that touches on some of these issues.  In this dream I was sitting in a cafe in central Tehran one sunny afternoon sipping some delightful mint tea and listening to a fascinating monologue by someone calling himself Abu al-Gersoni and in walks this cowboy.

al-Gersoni:  Verily, the government should chop the head off anyone who fails to observe correct behavior in his or her private life!

(Applause and ululating from the crowd.)

Cowboy: Dag nab it all, don’t y’all ever think about yer personal freedom?  The gubment should allow people to make their own choices with respect to behavior that’s got no significant impact on other people.  Why don’t you give that a try some time?

al-Gersoni: The corruption of the West has indeed affected your reason my strangely dressed friend.  By suggesting the government should act in a way that is consistent with your beliefs and not mine you are arguing against my personal freedom to have the government do as I wish.  I say to the government, kill!  You say, do not kill!  But the government can only do one, can it not?  Thus, how can the government support the personal freedom of us both?  Your theory that government could ever be consistent with personal freedom is a sham!

(More applause and ululating, plus someone fires a gun into the ceiling.)

Cowboy: Yep, I reckon you’re right pardner.  If you think about it thataway the gubment really is just a tool people can use to force other people to do what they want, such as allowing other people to do what they want!  There ain’t no such thing as personal freedom or gubment neutrality when it comes to personal behavior!  It’s them lying liberals agin’.  I’m a goin’ home, buying me a bigger gun, and joining that thar Tea Party!  No more gubment!

al-Gersoni: That’s not really where I was going with it but sure, I suppose that works too.  The main point is that the only choice is anarchy or an oppressive authoritarian state.  Conservatives of the world, unite!  Wait, that didn’t come out right.  Let the camel of conservatism eat in all our gardens!

(Applause, ululating, whooping, and more shooting.  A lot more shooting.)

That was the end of the dream.  I awoke in a cold sweat with this great hankering for a falafel burger.  I know, it was weird.

References

Michael Gerson.  August 22, 2011.  An unholy war on the Tea Party.  http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-08-22/opinions/35271813_1_michele-bachmann-dominionist-bachmann-or-perry.

Tea Party Pooper

Welcome friends!

From what I’ve been reading the Tea Party is shaping up to be a real factor in the mid-term elections this year.  Which is a little weird when you think about it.  After the rather dismal if not downright frightening performance of the Republicans the last time they held the reins one wouldn’t immediately think to look to what is essentially the radical wing of the Republican Party as a likely source of answers, but it turns out that many conservatives are doing just that.  What’s all that about?

Well, it’s obviously a protest vote; not much question about that.  Like many of the rest of us the Tea Party folks are angry, but their anger seems to be leading them down a rather surreal path.  Now, confused liberal that I am, I would have thought that people might be a little angry because government regulators under the last Republican administration were asleep at the wheel and allowed dubious, risky, and apparently all but incomprehensible financial instruments to proliferate, which made a few people in the financial industry very, very wealthy, but which ultimately led to widespread bad investments in a hugely speculative real estate bubble that, when it finally burst, nearly sent us into a repeat of the Great Depression (and did, in fact, send us into a sort of Great Recession, which still has had very serious consequences for many, many people)... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!