If Republicans Love States’ Rights So Much, Why Do They Want to Be President?
Michael Kazin
If Republicans Love States’ Rights So Much, Why Do They Want to Be President? September 20, 2011
Whatever their differences, the leading Republican candidates all swear that they love states’ rights. If elected president, Rick Perry vows to “try to make Washington as inconsequential as I can.” Mitt Romney declares his faith in the Constitution, which, he says, declares that the government “that would deal primarily with citizens at the local level would be local and state government, not the federal government.” Michele Bachmann “respect[s] the rights of states to come up with their own answers and their own solutions to compete with one another.” With lots of help from the Tea Party, the Tenth Amendment which, not so long ago was familiar mainly to constitutional lawyers and scholars, may now be as popular as the First or the Second. But, what this resurgence of federalism overlooks is not just the historical consolidation of federal power but also the inanity of attempts to reverse it.
For most of U.S. history, the primacy of federalism was taken for granted. Except during major wars, states exerted far more power over the daily lives of their residents than did any of the three branches of a national government located in a swampy river city on the Mid-Atlantic seaboard that most Americans had never visited. In the nineteenth century, as the historian Gary Gerstle explains, states funded canals, highways, and railroads. They decided which groups could vote and which could not. Some tried to regulate working hours. Others outlawed a variety of private acts—interracial marriage, drinking, and theater-going. In 1837, Illinois even forbade “playing at ball or flying of kites” as public nuisances.
All these policies fell under the legal sanction of “the police power,” which one influential Massachusetts judge in 1851 defined broadly as insuring the “good and welfare of the Commonwealth.” For its part, the Supreme Court, until after World War I, rather consistently ruled that the celebrated protections of the Bill of Rights—from the freedom of speech and the press to the right to a speedy trial—applied only to acts by the federal government and not to those of the states.
But, by the middle of the twentieth century, this arrangement no longer served the needs or desires of most Americans. During the Great Depression, state revenues, based mainly on property taxes, plummeted. The federal government stepped in to provide relief, and citizens everywhere began to count on Washington to keep the economy afloat and their Social Security checks arriving promptly. Then World War II and the cold war bound Americans to a national-security state that financed education for veterans and interstate highways as well as aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. In the 1960s and ’70s, Congress passed laws to safeguard the civil and voting rights of every citizen, regardless of where he or she might live. Policies to protect the environment and regulate hazards at the workplace further diminished the sway of state governments. The Supreme Court, even with a conservative majority, has done little to reverse these changes.
Yet, states’ rights never lost its appeal to that minority of Americans who are ideologically committed to lambasting the federal state as both overweening and ineffective. (It should come as no surprise that these conservatives were so alarmed at the emergency measures taken by the Bush and Obama administrations to address the financial meltdown of 2008: the formation and rapid growth of the Tea Party was the predictable result.)However, any Republican elected to the White House in 2012 will find it impossible to lead a headlong charge back to the past, and not just because of the difficulty of undoing a half-century of tradition and Supreme Court precedent.
Voters unhappy with the inability of the federal government to restore prosperity may like the sound of “states’ rights.” But how many would trust their governors and state legislators to pay their Medicare and Social Security checks on time and at current or higher levels? How many really want 50 separate immigration policies or 50 different standards for what constitutes clean air and clean water? Or the possibility that a state, seeking to lure business away from its neighbors, could cut the minimum wage in half and not requiring employers to pay for overtime?
When you look more broadly at their promises, the GOP hopefuls reveal the emptiness of their own rhetoric. Bachmann, never a paragon of consistency, supports a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, as well as the right of individual states to legalize it. In 2007, before Romney got in trouble for his Massachusetts health care law, he predicted, “that all these states … who follow the path that we pursued will find it’s the best path, and we’ll end up with a nation that’s taken a mandate approach.” Rick Perry favors federal action to stop gay marriage and restrict abortion—and, last month, asked President Obama to speed up aid to stop wildfires from burning up whole sections of his vast state. Like a lot of other Americans, these ambitious conservatives like to rail against Washington in the abstract but cannot imagine how the nation would operate without a strong central government. And the specifics of their smaller hypocrisies are underscored by one giant irony: They’re all running for president.
The U.S. has long ceased to be a country in which most people look to their state instead of to the national government to address and solve their most vital problems. State pride is pretty rare these days, except for residents and alumni who dress in the old-school colors and root hard for a college football or basketball team from a major public university.
Of course, state governments still perform a vital role in education and economic development and can still be “laboratories of democracy,” sites for testing out new policies that aren’t yet ready for national consumption. Progressives who cheered when New York legalized gay marriage and look forward to the day when Vermont begins operating the single-payer health care system it passed this spring can hardly object, at least in principle, when red states pass laws they abhor. But, as an alternative philosophy of governance in a modern nation, states’ rights is very wrong. In fact, it’s ridiculous.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Elizabeth Warren-Great Candidate/Great American
by Jonathan Cohn from TNR
One worry about Warren, the Harvard Law School professor challenging incumbent Republican Senator Scott Brown, is that she won’t be able to connect with average voters. As you’ll see, that very plainly that is not the case. But pay close attention to what she says about progressive taxation, starting at about 50 seconds into the video:
I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.”—No! 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 didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.
Now look, 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.
These days, when you hear Democrats defend proposals to raise taxes on the wealthy, usually they argue about the numbers. We need more revenue in order to maintain vital government services, those who can afford to pay more should pay more, etc. And that’s fine as far as it goes.
But there’s also a philosophical rationale for progressive taxation. Two, actually.
One is the role that luck plays in life. As I wrote a few weeks ago:
Almost by definition, people who are successful have benefited from some measure of good fortune. That fortune can take the form of obvious, material advantages--like access to advanced technology and good schools. Or it can take the form of more subtle, but still important, assets for moving forward in life--like good health or loving parents.
Yes, a good work ethic will take you far. And I know many well-educated professionals convinced that nobody works as hard as they do. (I’ve been known to indulge the thought myself.) But I’ve met many people at the bottom of the income ladder who work just as hard, for far less reward. Between 1980 and 2005, the richest 1 percent of Americans got more than four-fifths of the country's income gains. Does anybody seriously believe that the other 99 percent didn't deserve to take home a much larger share?
The other argument is the one Warren makes in this video: Every person’s success is a product, in part, of investments that Americans made, collectively, going back generations. As she says, it was the taxpayers who paid for the schools, the roads, the scientific research, the first-responders, and all sorts of other public goods on which every business – and, indeed, every American – depends. Those who benefit the most from these investments don’t merely have the ability to pay more for them. They have an obligation.
And this argument isn’t simply about taxation. It’s also an argument for making more of these investments going forward. It’s worth spending government money on infrastructure, schools, and other public goods – even if it means paying for them, eventually, with higher taxes – because we all stand to benefit from them.
To echo Steve Benen and Greg Sargent, Warren’s candidacy is one of the most exciting political developments of recent months – and not simply because of what it means for Massachusetts.
One worry about Warren, the Harvard Law School professor challenging incumbent Republican Senator Scott Brown, is that she won’t be able to connect with average voters. As you’ll see, that very plainly that is not the case. But pay close attention to what she says about progressive taxation, starting at about 50 seconds into the video:
I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.”—No! 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 didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.
Now look, 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.
These days, when you hear Democrats defend proposals to raise taxes on the wealthy, usually they argue about the numbers. We need more revenue in order to maintain vital government services, those who can afford to pay more should pay more, etc. And that’s fine as far as it goes.
But there’s also a philosophical rationale for progressive taxation. Two, actually.
One is the role that luck plays in life. As I wrote a few weeks ago:
Almost by definition, people who are successful have benefited from some measure of good fortune. That fortune can take the form of obvious, material advantages--like access to advanced technology and good schools. Or it can take the form of more subtle, but still important, assets for moving forward in life--like good health or loving parents.
Yes, a good work ethic will take you far. And I know many well-educated professionals convinced that nobody works as hard as they do. (I’ve been known to indulge the thought myself.) But I’ve met many people at the bottom of the income ladder who work just as hard, for far less reward. Between 1980 and 2005, the richest 1 percent of Americans got more than four-fifths of the country's income gains. Does anybody seriously believe that the other 99 percent didn't deserve to take home a much larger share?
The other argument is the one Warren makes in this video: Every person’s success is a product, in part, of investments that Americans made, collectively, going back generations. As she says, it was the taxpayers who paid for the schools, the roads, the scientific research, the first-responders, and all sorts of other public goods on which every business – and, indeed, every American – depends. Those who benefit the most from these investments don’t merely have the ability to pay more for them. They have an obligation.
And this argument isn’t simply about taxation. It’s also an argument for making more of these investments going forward. It’s worth spending government money on infrastructure, schools, and other public goods – even if it means paying for them, eventually, with higher taxes – because we all stand to benefit from them.
To echo Steve Benen and Greg Sargent, Warren’s candidacy is one of the most exciting political developments of recent months – and not simply because of what it means for Massachusetts.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
David Brooks is Unwell
David Brooks Is Unwell
Timothy Noah from the TNR
What Class Warfare Looks Like David Brooks Is Unwell Are Corporations People Or Aren't They? September 20, 2011
When Did ‘Trickle-Down’ Become a Respectable Idea?David Brooks has indigestion because President Barack Obama, whom Brooks rather likes, wants to raise taxes on the rich. "He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries." Why is that a half-truth? Because "the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S."
Oh, please. The top 10 percent pays nearly 70 percent of all income taxes because the top 10 percent makes half the income--49.74 percent, including capital gains, before the recession and only slightly less now. (My source is the World Top Incomes Database, a fantastic Web resource put together by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Facundo Alvaredo and Tony Atkinson. Share it with the class warrior in your life.) The relevant statistic isn't what proportion of the nation's taxes comes from the rich. It's what proportion of the rich's income gets paid in taxes. Brooks cites a Congressional Budget Office report that says people in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income in taxes to the federal government. Boo hoo. What he doesn't say is that back in 1979, on the eve of the Reagan revolution, the richest 1 percent paid 37 percent of their income in taxes to the federal government, even though its share of the nation's income was much lower than it is now (34 percent, including capital gains). Effective tax rates on top earners didn't change as much as many people think during the past 30 years, but they did go down (except for a brief uptick in the early Clinton years). For the very richest Americans, the drop was more precipitous. As recently as 2000 the 400 richest Americans paid 22.3 percent of their adjusted gross income in federal taxes. In 2008 (the last year for which data are available) they paid 18.1 percent. Again, this occurred while their income share was going up, not down.
Obama isn't even talking about making the rich pay a higher proportion of their income than the middle class in taxes. God forbid! He's merely saying (with his proposed "Buffet Rule") that the rich shouldn't get away with paying a smaller proportion. In doing so, he is repeating "the populist cries that fire up liberals but are designed to enrage moderates and conservatives," according to Brooks. He is being "mean and intransigent." Have our politics really reached the point where the president must turn a deaf ear to a billionaire (not a "millionaire") who suggests that he shouldn't be paying proportionally less in taxes than his secretary? Jeez, demagoguery ain't what it used to be.
Timothy Noah from the TNR
What Class Warfare Looks Like David Brooks Is Unwell Are Corporations People Or Aren't They? September 20, 2011
When Did ‘Trickle-Down’ Become a Respectable Idea?David Brooks has indigestion because President Barack Obama, whom Brooks rather likes, wants to raise taxes on the rich. "He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries." Why is that a half-truth? Because "the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S."
Oh, please. The top 10 percent pays nearly 70 percent of all income taxes because the top 10 percent makes half the income--49.74 percent, including capital gains, before the recession and only slightly less now. (My source is the World Top Incomes Database, a fantastic Web resource put together by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Facundo Alvaredo and Tony Atkinson. Share it with the class warrior in your life.) The relevant statistic isn't what proportion of the nation's taxes comes from the rich. It's what proportion of the rich's income gets paid in taxes. Brooks cites a Congressional Budget Office report that says people in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income in taxes to the federal government. Boo hoo. What he doesn't say is that back in 1979, on the eve of the Reagan revolution, the richest 1 percent paid 37 percent of their income in taxes to the federal government, even though its share of the nation's income was much lower than it is now (34 percent, including capital gains). Effective tax rates on top earners didn't change as much as many people think during the past 30 years, but they did go down (except for a brief uptick in the early Clinton years). For the very richest Americans, the drop was more precipitous. As recently as 2000 the 400 richest Americans paid 22.3 percent of their adjusted gross income in federal taxes. In 2008 (the last year for which data are available) they paid 18.1 percent. Again, this occurred while their income share was going up, not down.
Obama isn't even talking about making the rich pay a higher proportion of their income than the middle class in taxes. God forbid! He's merely saying (with his proposed "Buffet Rule") that the rich shouldn't get away with paying a smaller proportion. In doing so, he is repeating "the populist cries that fire up liberals but are designed to enrage moderates and conservatives," according to Brooks. He is being "mean and intransigent." Have our politics really reached the point where the president must turn a deaf ear to a billionaire (not a "millionaire") who suggests that he shouldn't be paying proportionally less in taxes than his secretary? Jeez, demagoguery ain't what it used to be.
Monday, September 19, 2011
Labor Lost?
Delving more closely into the nature of learning, we find that learning is more than just the gathering of information. Confucius discusses the relation of learning (hsüeh) and thought (ssu).
"The Master said, 'Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous'" (Analects II:15).
The relation of learning and thought is critical to Confucius. Learning is the acquisition of knowledge. Thought is the capacity to reason, understand, synthesize and ultimately apply the knowledge acquired.
The passage suggests that knowledge for knowledge's sake is "labor lost" and any attempt to understand without adequate knowledge is counterproductive and even dangerous!
Knowledge without thought is perilous indeed. My, my, are we not at the heart of much of today's problem?
From Rodney Taylor, Professor of Religious Studies at the U of Colorado
"The Master said, 'Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous'" (Analects II:15).
The relation of learning and thought is critical to Confucius. Learning is the acquisition of knowledge. Thought is the capacity to reason, understand, synthesize and ultimately apply the knowledge acquired.
The passage suggests that knowledge for knowledge's sake is "labor lost" and any attempt to understand without adequate knowledge is counterproductive and even dangerous!
Knowledge without thought is perilous indeed. My, my, are we not at the heart of much of today's problem?
From Rodney Taylor, Professor of Religious Studies at the U of Colorado
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Why We Don't Let People Die
Why We Don't Let People Die
Jonathan Cohn
Senior Editor
The big drama of this week’s Republican debate was over whether front-runner Rick Perry would stumble. But the most interesting moment turned out to involve a man nobody thinks can win the presidency: Ron Paul.
CNN host Wolf Blitzer asked Paul whether he was prepared to let an uninsured 30-year-old with cancer die, just because that 30-year-old could not afford the treatments. Paul gave a long, convoluted answer about responsibility. But a handful of audience members were less ambivalent. They blurted out “yes”—as in, yes, they would let the 30-year-old die.
The self-selected audience that attends Republican debates isn't exactly representative of the country as a whole. But this also isn’t the first time I’ve heard people attack universal health insurance, in principle, because it supposedly absolves people of individual responsibility—whether it’s the responsibility to stay healthy, the responsibility to seek timely medical care, or the responsibility to make the right choices about health insurance.
Of course, the proper boundaries of responsibility are a frequent subject of debate in American politics. In the 1990s, the argument over welfare reform was all about responsibility—and whether people had an obligation to work if they wanted financial assistance from the government. The consensus was that, yes, those who wanted assistance needed to be more responsible about their own lives.
But attitudes about medical care have always been a little different. As a practical matter, few of us are prepared to allow a somebody die when life-saving treatment is available, just because that person isn't prepared to pay the bills. As Ezra Klein put it the other day, “we do not want to look in people’s pockets for an insurance card when they fall to the floor with chest pains.”
We've actually written this expectation into law: The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) prohibits hospitals that accept Medicare (i.e., virtually all hospitals) from withholding such treatment. But the idea that providers of medical care have this sort of obligation goes back much farther than that, as Howard Markel, a leading historian of medicine from the University of Michigan, explains: “It is part of the standard “social contract” doctors have long had with their patients and society at large… most famously it emerges from the teachings of Hippocrates—and in particular the Oath.”
I happen to agree with this attitude: We shouldn't let people die, just because they can't pay a medical bill. Partly that's because I recognize the role chance and misfortune play in our lives. A child born into a family without health insurance couldn't have done something different to get covered. Yet, as Paul Krugman pointed out on Friday, if that child gets sick, that child is going to suffer. An adult with an inherited conditions, even a relatively mild one, didn't choose to be born that way. But inherited conditions are pre-existing conditions—and can make it impossible for people to get affordable insurance.
To be clear, the people without the means to pay for medical care aren't always, or entirely, victims of circumstance. Years ago, when I started interviewing people about their experiences with the health care system, I always hoped to find that perfect story of somebody who, through no fault of their own, was wronged by the system. But those stories were less common that I'd expected. Frequently the people I met had made at least one mistake. Some didn’t spend enough time looking for charity or public insurance options. Some checked the wrong box on a form. Some stopped paying for insurance when they could have stopped paying for something else. Some ignored medical warning signs.
But you know what? We all make those kinds of mistakes in life. The problem for these people was that they happened to make a particular kind of mistake—a mistake about their health or how to pay for their medical care—that led to unusually severe consequences—like losing their life savings or, in the worst cases, losing their lives. Maybe the people in the audience on Tuesday would shrug and say those consequences are appropriate. I wouldn't. My definition of a decent society is one that protects people not only from bad luck, but also, in some circumstances, from their own bad judgment.
Jonathan Cohn
Senior Editor
The big drama of this week’s Republican debate was over whether front-runner Rick Perry would stumble. But the most interesting moment turned out to involve a man nobody thinks can win the presidency: Ron Paul.
CNN host Wolf Blitzer asked Paul whether he was prepared to let an uninsured 30-year-old with cancer die, just because that 30-year-old could not afford the treatments. Paul gave a long, convoluted answer about responsibility. But a handful of audience members were less ambivalent. They blurted out “yes”—as in, yes, they would let the 30-year-old die.
The self-selected audience that attends Republican debates isn't exactly representative of the country as a whole. But this also isn’t the first time I’ve heard people attack universal health insurance, in principle, because it supposedly absolves people of individual responsibility—whether it’s the responsibility to stay healthy, the responsibility to seek timely medical care, or the responsibility to make the right choices about health insurance.
Of course, the proper boundaries of responsibility are a frequent subject of debate in American politics. In the 1990s, the argument over welfare reform was all about responsibility—and whether people had an obligation to work if they wanted financial assistance from the government. The consensus was that, yes, those who wanted assistance needed to be more responsible about their own lives.
But attitudes about medical care have always been a little different. As a practical matter, few of us are prepared to allow a somebody die when life-saving treatment is available, just because that person isn't prepared to pay the bills. As Ezra Klein put it the other day, “we do not want to look in people’s pockets for an insurance card when they fall to the floor with chest pains.”
We've actually written this expectation into law: The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) prohibits hospitals that accept Medicare (i.e., virtually all hospitals) from withholding such treatment. But the idea that providers of medical care have this sort of obligation goes back much farther than that, as Howard Markel, a leading historian of medicine from the University of Michigan, explains: “It is part of the standard “social contract” doctors have long had with their patients and society at large… most famously it emerges from the teachings of Hippocrates—and in particular the Oath.”
I happen to agree with this attitude: We shouldn't let people die, just because they can't pay a medical bill. Partly that's because I recognize the role chance and misfortune play in our lives. A child born into a family without health insurance couldn't have done something different to get covered. Yet, as Paul Krugman pointed out on Friday, if that child gets sick, that child is going to suffer. An adult with an inherited conditions, even a relatively mild one, didn't choose to be born that way. But inherited conditions are pre-existing conditions—and can make it impossible for people to get affordable insurance.
To be clear, the people without the means to pay for medical care aren't always, or entirely, victims of circumstance. Years ago, when I started interviewing people about their experiences with the health care system, I always hoped to find that perfect story of somebody who, through no fault of their own, was wronged by the system. But those stories were less common that I'd expected. Frequently the people I met had made at least one mistake. Some didn’t spend enough time looking for charity or public insurance options. Some checked the wrong box on a form. Some stopped paying for insurance when they could have stopped paying for something else. Some ignored medical warning signs.
But you know what? We all make those kinds of mistakes in life. The problem for these people was that they happened to make a particular kind of mistake—a mistake about their health or how to pay for their medical care—that led to unusually severe consequences—like losing their life savings or, in the worst cases, losing their lives. Maybe the people in the audience on Tuesday would shrug and say those consequences are appropriate. I wouldn't. My definition of a decent society is one that protects people not only from bad luck, but also, in some circumstances, from their own bad judgment.
Capitalism and Marx
by John Gray (British writer)
Karl Marx may have been wrong about communism but he was right about much of capitalism, John Gray writes.
As a side-effect of the financial crisis, more and more people are starting to think Karl Marx was right. The great 19th Century German philosopher, economist and revolutionary believed that capitalism was radically unstable.
It had a built-in tendency to produce ever larger booms and busts, and over the longer term it was bound to destroy itself.
Marx welcomed capitalism's self-destruction. He was confident that a popular revolution would occur and bring a communist system into being that would be more productive and far more humane.
Marx was wrong about communism. Where he was prophetically right was in his grasp of the revolution of capitalism. It's not just capitalism's endemic instability that he understood, though in this regard he was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours.
More profoundly, Marx understood how capitalism destroys its own social base - the middle-class way of life. The Marxist terminology of bourgeois and proletarian has an archaic ring.
But when he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we're only now struggling to cope with.
He viewed capitalism as the most revolutionary economic system in history, and there can be no doubt that it differs radically from those of previous times.
Hunter-gatherers persisted in their way of life for thousands of years, slave cultures for almost as long and feudal societies for many centuries. In contrast, capitalism transforms everything it touches.
It's not just brands that are constantly changing. Companies and industries are created and destroyed in an incessant stream of innovation, while human relationships are dissolved and reinvented in novel forms.
Capitalism has been described as a process of creative destruction, and no-one can deny that it has been prodigiously productive. Practically anyone who is alive in Britain today has a higher real income than they would have had if capitalism had never existed.
Negative return
The trouble is that among the things that have been destroyed in the process is the way of life on which capitalism in the past depended.
Defenders of capitalism argue that it offers to everyone the benefits that in Marx's time were enjoyed only by the bourgeoisie, the settled middle class that owned capital and had a reasonable level of security and freedom in their lives.
Marx co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels In 19th Century capitalism most people had nothing. They lived by selling their labour and when markets turned down they faced hard times. But as capitalism evolves, its defenders say, an increasing number of people will be able to benefit from it.
Fulfilling careers will no longer be the prerogative of a few. No more will people struggle from month to month to live on an insecure wage. Protected by savings, a house they own and a decent pension, they will be able to plan their lives without fear. With the growth of democracy and the spread of wealth, no-one need be shut out from the bourgeois life. Everybody can be middle class.
In fact, in Britain, the US and many other developed countries over the past 20 or 30 years, the opposite has been happening. Job security doesn't exist, the trades and professions of the past have largely gone and life-long careers are barely memories.
If people have any wealth it's in their houses, but house prices don't always increase. When credit is tight as it is now, they can be stagnant for years. A dwindling minority can count on a pension on which they could comfortably live, and not many have significant savings.
More and more people live from day to day, with little idea of what the future may bring. Middle-class people used to think their lives unfolded in an orderly progression. But it's no longer possible to look at life as a succession of stages in which each is a step up from the last.
In the process of creative destruction the ladder has been kicked away and for increasing numbers of people a middle-class existence is no longer even an aspiration.
Risk takers
As capitalism has advanced it has returned most people to a new version of the precarious existence of Marx's proles. Our incomes are far higher and in some degree we're cushioned against shocks by what remains of the post-war welfare state.
But we have very little effective control over the course of our lives, and the uncertainty in which we must live is being worsened by policies devised to deal with the financial crisis. Zero interest rates alongside rising prices means you're getting a negative return on your money and over time your capital is being eroded.
The situation of many younger people is even worse. In order to acquire the skills you need, you'll have to go into debt. Since at some point you'll have to retrain you should try to save, but if you're indebted from the start that's the last thing you'll be able to do. Whatever their age, the prospect facing most people today is a lifetime of insecurity.
Markets are a volatile business At the same time as it has stripped people of the security of bourgeois life, capitalism has made the type of person that lived the bourgeois life obsolete. In the 1980s there was much talk of Victorian values, and promoters of the free market used to argue that it would bring us back to the wholesome virtues of the past.
For many, women and the poor for example, these Victorian values could be pretty stultifying in their effects. But the larger fact is that the free market works to undermine the virtues that maintain the bourgeois life.
When savings are melting away being thrifty can be the road to ruin. It's the person who borrows heavily and isn't afraid to declare bankruptcy that survives and goes on to prosper.
When the labour market is highly mobile it's not those who stick dutifully to their task that succeed, it's people who are always ready to try something new that looks more promising.
In a society that is being continuously transformed by market forces, traditional values are dysfunctional and anyone who tries to live by them risks ending up on the scrapheap.
Vast wealth
Looking to a future in which the market permeates every corner of life, Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto: "Everything that is solid melts into air". For someone living in early Victorian England - the Manifesto was published in 1848 - it was an astonishingly far-seeing observation.
At the time nothing seemed more solid than the society on the margins of which Marx lived. A century and a half later we find ourselves in the world he anticipated, where everyone's life is experimental and provisional, and sudden ruin can happen at any time.
A tiny few have accumulated vast wealth but even that has an evanescent, almost ghostly quality. In Victorian times the seriously rich could afford to relax provided they were conservative in how they invested their money. When the heroes of Dickens' novels finally come into their inheritance, they do nothing forever after.
Today there is no haven of security. The gyrations of the market are such that no-one can know what will have value even a few years ahead.
Austerity measures to reduce Greece's debt has sparked riots This state of perpetual unrest is the permanent revolution of capitalism and I think it's going to be with us in any future that's realistically imaginable. We're only part of the way through a financial crisis that will turn many more things upside down.
Currencies and governments are likely to go under, along with parts of the financial system we believed had been made safe. The risks that threatened to freeze the world economy only three years ago haven't been dealt with. They've simply been shifted to states.
Whatever politicians may tell us about the need to curb the deficit, debts on the scale that have been run up can't be repaid. Almost certainly they will be inflated away - a process that is bound to be painful and impoverishing for many.
The result can only be further upheaval, on an even bigger scale. But it won't be the end of the world, or even of capitalism. Whatever happens, we're still going to have to learn to live with the mercurial energy that the market has released.
Capitalism has led to a revolution but not the one that Marx expected. The fiery German thinker hated the bourgeois life and looked to communism to destroy it. And just as he predicted, the bourgeois world has been destroyed.
But it wasn't communism that did the deed. It's capitalism that has killed off the bourgeoisie.
Karl Marx may have been wrong about communism but he was right about much of capitalism, John Gray writes.
As a side-effect of the financial crisis, more and more people are starting to think Karl Marx was right. The great 19th Century German philosopher, economist and revolutionary believed that capitalism was radically unstable.
It had a built-in tendency to produce ever larger booms and busts, and over the longer term it was bound to destroy itself.
Marx welcomed capitalism's self-destruction. He was confident that a popular revolution would occur and bring a communist system into being that would be more productive and far more humane.
Marx was wrong about communism. Where he was prophetically right was in his grasp of the revolution of capitalism. It's not just capitalism's endemic instability that he understood, though in this regard he was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours.
More profoundly, Marx understood how capitalism destroys its own social base - the middle-class way of life. The Marxist terminology of bourgeois and proletarian has an archaic ring.
But when he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we're only now struggling to cope with.
He viewed capitalism as the most revolutionary economic system in history, and there can be no doubt that it differs radically from those of previous times.
Hunter-gatherers persisted in their way of life for thousands of years, slave cultures for almost as long and feudal societies for many centuries. In contrast, capitalism transforms everything it touches.
It's not just brands that are constantly changing. Companies and industries are created and destroyed in an incessant stream of innovation, while human relationships are dissolved and reinvented in novel forms.
Capitalism has been described as a process of creative destruction, and no-one can deny that it has been prodigiously productive. Practically anyone who is alive in Britain today has a higher real income than they would have had if capitalism had never existed.
Negative return
The trouble is that among the things that have been destroyed in the process is the way of life on which capitalism in the past depended.
Defenders of capitalism argue that it offers to everyone the benefits that in Marx's time were enjoyed only by the bourgeoisie, the settled middle class that owned capital and had a reasonable level of security and freedom in their lives.
Marx co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels In 19th Century capitalism most people had nothing. They lived by selling their labour and when markets turned down they faced hard times. But as capitalism evolves, its defenders say, an increasing number of people will be able to benefit from it.
Fulfilling careers will no longer be the prerogative of a few. No more will people struggle from month to month to live on an insecure wage. Protected by savings, a house they own and a decent pension, they will be able to plan their lives without fear. With the growth of democracy and the spread of wealth, no-one need be shut out from the bourgeois life. Everybody can be middle class.
In fact, in Britain, the US and many other developed countries over the past 20 or 30 years, the opposite has been happening. Job security doesn't exist, the trades and professions of the past have largely gone and life-long careers are barely memories.
If people have any wealth it's in their houses, but house prices don't always increase. When credit is tight as it is now, they can be stagnant for years. A dwindling minority can count on a pension on which they could comfortably live, and not many have significant savings.
More and more people live from day to day, with little idea of what the future may bring. Middle-class people used to think their lives unfolded in an orderly progression. But it's no longer possible to look at life as a succession of stages in which each is a step up from the last.
In the process of creative destruction the ladder has been kicked away and for increasing numbers of people a middle-class existence is no longer even an aspiration.
Risk takers
As capitalism has advanced it has returned most people to a new version of the precarious existence of Marx's proles. Our incomes are far higher and in some degree we're cushioned against shocks by what remains of the post-war welfare state.
But we have very little effective control over the course of our lives, and the uncertainty in which we must live is being worsened by policies devised to deal with the financial crisis. Zero interest rates alongside rising prices means you're getting a negative return on your money and over time your capital is being eroded.
The situation of many younger people is even worse. In order to acquire the skills you need, you'll have to go into debt. Since at some point you'll have to retrain you should try to save, but if you're indebted from the start that's the last thing you'll be able to do. Whatever their age, the prospect facing most people today is a lifetime of insecurity.
Markets are a volatile business At the same time as it has stripped people of the security of bourgeois life, capitalism has made the type of person that lived the bourgeois life obsolete. In the 1980s there was much talk of Victorian values, and promoters of the free market used to argue that it would bring us back to the wholesome virtues of the past.
For many, women and the poor for example, these Victorian values could be pretty stultifying in their effects. But the larger fact is that the free market works to undermine the virtues that maintain the bourgeois life.
When savings are melting away being thrifty can be the road to ruin. It's the person who borrows heavily and isn't afraid to declare bankruptcy that survives and goes on to prosper.
When the labour market is highly mobile it's not those who stick dutifully to their task that succeed, it's people who are always ready to try something new that looks more promising.
In a society that is being continuously transformed by market forces, traditional values are dysfunctional and anyone who tries to live by them risks ending up on the scrapheap.
Vast wealth
Looking to a future in which the market permeates every corner of life, Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto: "Everything that is solid melts into air". For someone living in early Victorian England - the Manifesto was published in 1848 - it was an astonishingly far-seeing observation.
At the time nothing seemed more solid than the society on the margins of which Marx lived. A century and a half later we find ourselves in the world he anticipated, where everyone's life is experimental and provisional, and sudden ruin can happen at any time.
A tiny few have accumulated vast wealth but even that has an evanescent, almost ghostly quality. In Victorian times the seriously rich could afford to relax provided they were conservative in how they invested their money. When the heroes of Dickens' novels finally come into their inheritance, they do nothing forever after.
Today there is no haven of security. The gyrations of the market are such that no-one can know what will have value even a few years ahead.
Austerity measures to reduce Greece's debt has sparked riots This state of perpetual unrest is the permanent revolution of capitalism and I think it's going to be with us in any future that's realistically imaginable. We're only part of the way through a financial crisis that will turn many more things upside down.
Currencies and governments are likely to go under, along with parts of the financial system we believed had been made safe. The risks that threatened to freeze the world economy only three years ago haven't been dealt with. They've simply been shifted to states.
Whatever politicians may tell us about the need to curb the deficit, debts on the scale that have been run up can't be repaid. Almost certainly they will be inflated away - a process that is bound to be painful and impoverishing for many.
The result can only be further upheaval, on an even bigger scale. But it won't be the end of the world, or even of capitalism. Whatever happens, we're still going to have to learn to live with the mercurial energy that the market has released.
Capitalism has led to a revolution but not the one that Marx expected. The fiery German thinker hated the bourgeois life and looked to communism to destroy it. And just as he predicted, the bourgeois world has been destroyed.
But it wasn't communism that did the deed. It's capitalism that has killed off the bourgeoisie.
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