Are these people serious?
The local news story on our very own “Occupy Wall Street” protest last Saturday in South Bend included a photo of two protesters, one holding a sign saying “Tax the Bankers” and the other holding a sign saying “Tax the Wealth.” Here’s my take on that, from this comment on a post at a relatively new group blog by academics titled “Bleeding Heart Libertarians”:
I also take liberty to be of far more importance than equality. All other things being equal, however, “equality” of wealth and power is a value, and is conducive to liberty. The checks inherent in power balances is conducive to liberty. I’ve put it this way before: I don’t want the State to steal from the rich to give to the poor, but so long as it insists on stealing, I’d rather it steal from the rich instead of the poor. This is largely a vain hope, however, because it is the very nature of the State to steal from the poor to give to the rich. The deleterious effects of its long history of doing so is why we should have a “preferential option for the poor.” We can even recognize that if the State against its nature started stealing from the rich instead of the poor this might go some distance towards repairing some of the inequalities the State itself has created. (I’d suggest, though, that if the State persisted long in thus acting against its nature this would likely eventually spell its happy demise.) I happen to subscribe to the Georgism of Steiner et al., but I think the term “left libertarianism” encompasses not only them but others who are biased towards equality. Indeed, I take a righteous bias in favor of equality to be the very essence of the “left,” as defined, for example, by Karl Hess. And aren’t BHLs also defined by that bias? Who is your heart bleeding for? The poor, and the suffering which typically attends poverty? That strikes me as a bias in favor of equality. Granted, BHLs can define themselves any way they want, and I’m not completely clear on the definition yet. Note that a bias in favor of equality doesn’t equate to a belief that actual equality of wealth and power is a practical or desirable goal. Part of the attraction of Georgism is that it approximates an actual equality in the use of natural resources, to which every person born into the world has an equal right. Such a recognition of the natural and equal right to natural resources would tend towards equality of wealth and power, while still leaving individuals free to earn and accumulate wealth unequally according to their disparate and unequal talents and drives.
Then there’s this, from the local news story on the “Wall Street” protesters:
Katie Robbins and Michael Obregon went to the protest with their two daughters, ages 1 and 4.
“I want to be able to take care of my family,” said Robbins, 27. “We don’t even want the American dream. We just want a safe home, affordable health care.”
But the old recipe of hard work and playing by the rules isn’t working, she said.
The family is surviving on about $35,000 in annual income, they estimated. Obregon, 39, works full-time at a distribution center and is also a full-time student studying business at Indiana University South Bend. Sometimes they must choose between paying the electric bill or going to the grocery store.
Robbins said people just tell them to work harder.
The counter-point to that is this post titled “How I live on $7,000 per year” at the Early Retirement Extreme blog by a guy named Jacob, who writes:
Okay, that does it. I’m getting tired of the pervasive media articles that detail how people are “surviving” or “barely managing” on what qualifies as average or definitely median household incomes. This is like writing a articles about 5’10″ guys who are “struggling” with their height issues complete with tips and tricks on how to cope with the shortage. Ha!. For the record, 5’10″ is the average height of a US male. Fun fact: This is also the median, since there are few 12′ tall guys to skew the distribution.
The waterfall that finally crushed the camel was this yahoo article which discusses how a single person “survives” on $20,000/year, but that’s just one out of many. In particular, it followed an initial article on how a family survives on $40,000/year. This is pretty close to the median household income in the US! It means that about half of everybody, that’s 150+ million people, is currently living on LESS than those amounts. Surely, that’s no secret, and surely that’s not very remarkable either.
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