Elizabeth Warren's unplanned YouTube appearance ("nobody in this country ... got rich on their own" and "you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along") has gotten George Will, the Von Mises Institute, (I seem to get 17,900 hits googling "Elizabeth Warren" + site:mises.org -- your mileage may vary), and the right from coast to coast quite steamed up. It looks as if they think they've found a "teachable moment".
George Will draws on a William F. Buckley quip ("a pyromaniac in a field of straw men"), and says she "refutes propositions no one asserts", then refutes a proposition that Warren never asserted: "that the collectivity (Warren’s 'the rest of us') is entitled to take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving". Much of this is pure spin - some creepy thing called "the collectivity" vs the "rest of us", but there is one clear-cut and bold distortion: "entitled to take as much as it pleases"? Where does that come from?
Amartya Sen, in The Idea of Justice
breaks with the idea of the social contract (mentioned elsewhere by Warren), which, according to Sen, anchors our ideas of justice to some grand view of the ideal state and/or society in which contradictory impulses must be rigorously resolved. By "grand view" I do not especially mean one of "big government", but one rigorously based on some theory (whether of of "big government" or government which "gets out of the way").
Will seems to view any concept of "fairness" as incompatible with freedom to create and exchange.
Often, there are two or more values that would appeal to most people's common sense, but there are always situations where one value can only be favored at the expense of the other. In this situation, people who want everything to be governed by a simple and absolute set of axioms (from Ayn Rand and von Mises to Karl Marx) have embrace one value and treat the other as nonexistent or wicked.
Anyone but a highly doctrinaire socialist can see value in the empowerment of individuals to produce and exchange freely, and not to have possessions taken away arbitrarily.
On the other hand, I think that anyone whose mind has not been closed would see a great deal of arbitrary injustice in the world, and feel some urgency about addressing the most exceptional cases. Such closed mindedness can have many origins:
What I am saying is, without even imagining the grand social contract that everyone ought to agree to for making the world as just as possible, you can see cases of unwarranted suffering and dying where common sense and common humanity demand you take some action. I have used the provocative word demand in an emotional sense, meaning to express some disapproval of a person who passed by the drowning man and the rope and did nothing, not that I imagine some ideal world in which that person would be punished as a criminal.
There are so many exceptional cases of people suffering and dying through little or no fault of their own (and yes, the man in the river might have done something stupid to get there), and I think it is wrongheaded and foolish not to vote for (because I believe in democracy, not Big Brother) some actions to help the very unlucky, whether they are born in a desperately poor country, or are children with poor, uncaring, or foolish parents.
Property is a wonderful thing, but it is not a god to be worshiped, as some people do, in my opinion. Like it or not, the reason we can call something "our property", is due to social agreement and to enforcement by a democratic state, and a secure and respectful society which makes it possible to create and exchange, and largely keep what is acquired in that manner. But there is some cost of maintenance of the government and civil society that makes this possible.
Education can assist the children of the poor (through no fault of their own, that is, of the children) to prosper and take part in a flourishing economy. But we all ("liberals" especially), get carried away with patting ourselves on the back and thinking that the things we believe in are virtuous.
Education of our own and other people's children (and for some of us, only other people's children) is also our insurance for not growing old in an ignorant and uncivilized world. Some of us should be wondering if we bought too little insurance, or paid too little attention to its nature and effectiveness. At one time, everyone was solely responsible for the people who would take care of them as they grew older. When this is the case, people will have many children to give themselves better odds. All in all, I don't think it worked very well, and I think some system (which could certainly differ in many ways from the present one) for keeping up the quality (moral and practical) of the children we will have to live with as adults in 10-20 years is a completely practical thing. But if it was completely voluntary, and I could choose whether or not to contribute (and obviously very little would be effected strictly by my choice), we might well, through millions of individual choices, give up on the idea.
There is a very good case, with which I at least 90% agree with, for setting up a world where the hardworking productive adult has more than the lazy or those who want to produce something nobody wants. But what a child deserves is not a function of the quality of their parents. And unless we want to practice enforced eugenics (which I don't and almost nobody does today), we will have to live in a world where the children of the very poor get only as much education (moral and practical) as we are willing and able to provide.
Failing this, we might at worst get a society where no amount of money can pay for "good help" (so much for insuring ourselves by saving gold). Or we may have to keep millions of badly raised and educated adults in prison (We might wish them away -- execution was at one time so much cheaper than having a prison system, but it always had its problems, and now, with so many safeguards in the form of appeals, I think it is the most expensive kind of punishment).
George Will draws on a William F. Buckley quip ("a pyromaniac in a field of straw men"), and says she "refutes propositions no one asserts", then refutes a proposition that Warren never asserted: "that the collectivity (Warren’s 'the rest of us') is entitled to take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving". Much of this is pure spin - some creepy thing called "the collectivity" vs the "rest of us", but there is one clear-cut and bold distortion: "entitled to take as much as it pleases"? Where does that come from?
Amartya Sen, in The Idea of Justice
breaks with the idea of the social contract (mentioned elsewhere by Warren), which, according to Sen, anchors our ideas of justice to some grand view of the ideal state and/or society in which contradictory impulses must be rigorously resolved. By "grand view" I do not especially mean one of "big government", but one rigorously based on some theory (whether of of "big government" or government which "gets out of the way").Will seems to view any concept of "fairness" as incompatible with freedom to create and exchange.
Often, there are two or more values that would appeal to most people's common sense, but there are always situations where one value can only be favored at the expense of the other. In this situation, people who want everything to be governed by a simple and absolute set of axioms (from Ayn Rand and von Mises to Karl Marx) have embrace one value and treat the other as nonexistent or wicked.
Anyone but a highly doctrinaire socialist can see value in the empowerment of individuals to produce and exchange freely, and not to have possessions taken away arbitrarily.
On the other hand, I think that anyone whose mind has not been closed would see a great deal of arbitrary injustice in the world, and feel some urgency about addressing the most exceptional cases. Such closed mindedness can have many origins:
- rigid ideology,
- excessive fear that "the path to Hell is paved with good intentions" (Good intentions frequently don't lead to Hell, and sometimes the path to Hell is paved by obviously bad intentions, like those of Adolf Hitler)
- fear of putting ones foot on the "slippery slope".
- the natural human tendency (often cleverly manipulated) to dismiss people unlike us as not really human.
- the tendency to think "there must be a good reason for it", often assisted by clever rationalizations (e.g. Malthusianism, Social Darwinism, and much religious thought).
What I am saying is, without even imagining the grand social contract that everyone ought to agree to for making the world as just as possible, you can see cases of unwarranted suffering and dying where common sense and common humanity demand you take some action. I have used the provocative word demand in an emotional sense, meaning to express some disapproval of a person who passed by the drowning man and the rope and did nothing, not that I imagine some ideal world in which that person would be punished as a criminal.
There are so many exceptional cases of people suffering and dying through little or no fault of their own (and yes, the man in the river might have done something stupid to get there), and I think it is wrongheaded and foolish not to vote for (because I believe in democracy, not Big Brother) some actions to help the very unlucky, whether they are born in a desperately poor country, or are children with poor, uncaring, or foolish parents.
Property is a wonderful thing, but it is not a god to be worshiped, as some people do, in my opinion. Like it or not, the reason we can call something "our property", is due to social agreement and to enforcement by a democratic state, and a secure and respectful society which makes it possible to create and exchange, and largely keep what is acquired in that manner. But there is some cost of maintenance of the government and civil society that makes this possible.
Education can assist the children of the poor (through no fault of their own, that is, of the children) to prosper and take part in a flourishing economy. But we all ("liberals" especially), get carried away with patting ourselves on the back and thinking that the things we believe in are virtuous.
Education of our own and other people's children (and for some of us, only other people's children) is also our insurance for not growing old in an ignorant and uncivilized world. Some of us should be wondering if we bought too little insurance, or paid too little attention to its nature and effectiveness. At one time, everyone was solely responsible for the people who would take care of them as they grew older. When this is the case, people will have many children to give themselves better odds. All in all, I don't think it worked very well, and I think some system (which could certainly differ in many ways from the present one) for keeping up the quality (moral and practical) of the children we will have to live with as adults in 10-20 years is a completely practical thing. But if it was completely voluntary, and I could choose whether or not to contribute (and obviously very little would be effected strictly by my choice), we might well, through millions of individual choices, give up on the idea.
There is a very good case, with which I at least 90% agree with, for setting up a world where the hardworking productive adult has more than the lazy or those who want to produce something nobody wants. But what a child deserves is not a function of the quality of their parents. And unless we want to practice enforced eugenics (which I don't and almost nobody does today), we will have to live in a world where the children of the very poor get only as much education (moral and practical) as we are willing and able to provide.
Failing this, we might at worst get a society where no amount of money can pay for "good help" (so much for insuring ourselves by saving gold). Or we may have to keep millions of badly raised and educated adults in prison (We might wish them away -- execution was at one time so much cheaper than having a prison system, but it always had its problems, and now, with so many safeguards in the form of appeals, I think it is the most expensive kind of punishment).
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