I wouldn't call Will Wilkinson, a political-philosophy wonk (or something like that) at the Cato Institute, one of my intellectual heroes --- his well-justified appreciation for the achievements of "liberal capitalism" is too often marred, I think, by an unjustified identification of the priniciples underlying such a "regime" with the particular institutional forms it has taken in the U.S. --- but he's often an insightful critic (see my post directly below!!); the good thing about all these libertarian bloggers is their outsider status and their disdain for much of mainstream political discourse. I was particularly shaken by a tasty morsel that Wilkinson just threw up on his site, one of those "obvious in retrospect yet totally surprising when laid down in words" storms-and-stresses that I love to run across in my textual wanderings:
[re: the Rawlsian conception of distributive justice and its primary domain of application, the "basic structure" of society] This is, of course, massively confused. The deep objection to this way of thinking is that different basic structures don’t so much determine how stuff is distributed, but determine whether or not there is stuff at all, and how much. ... Because wealth is created and not just moved around, and more wealth is created under certain institutional schemes than others, the question isn’t so much one of distribution as production or creation. The question of whether people live under institutions in which they can realize their capacities and reliably acquire the necessary means to successfully enact their life-plans is mainly a question of what might be called productive justice.
I'm reminded of nothing so much as Marx, in "Critique of the Gotha Program," mercilessly assailing the naive idea of "a fair distribution of the proceeds of labour" as the vision for communist society: before you can get around to handing out checks, he says, you have to deduct from the total social product "cover for replacement of the means of production used up" (including, I assume, depreciation); an "additional portion" set aside "for expansion of production" (note: production is to expand, not stay constant); "reserve for insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc." (Black Swans!); the costs of administration; the costs of public goods like education and healthcare; and the costs of upkeep for members of society who can't do productive labor. "These deductions ... are an economic necessity and their magnitude is to be determined according to available means and forces, and partly by computation of probabilities, but they are in no way calculable by equity." Marx sees such limits as things to be eventually overcome in later stages of communism, but you can't get there without paying attention to the contemporary "means and forces." Production, production, production.
I think we can detach Wilkinson's notion of the priority of productive over distributive "justice" (btw probably not the best term to use here) from his icky belief that all we need to do to fix up the world is to "install liberal capitalism" (wuzzat, exactly?) in every country, as if the Founders aced it for all time in 1787 and now we need only set their elegant clockpunk contraption in motion to ring in the end of history.
Inspiration one: America Beyond Capitalism by Gar Alperovitz. Breaking up wealth > redistributing income. Cooperatives, worker-owned firms, innovative collaborations between government and business. (I may riff more on this book later (preview: it's good/great but it pushes the "consumerism is bad! let's live simple and stop buying pretty things!" button (it's made of postconsumer recycled drywall and it's lacquered with organic pesticides) way too hard for my taste/comfort level/conception of political usefulness).)
Inspiration two: holycrapshit CHINA TO BUY A STAKE IN BLACKSTONE, a huge private-equity firm that is apparently doing an IPO pretty soon. Really, let that news sink in for a bit: nominally communist (and maybe, despite what the haters say, becoming more communist all the time) China is plowing billions of dollars into an American company that does nothing but take over and reignite other companies; T-bills aren't floating the bureaucrats' boats anymore. A bigger effort, "the State Foreign Exchange Investment Company," is apparently on the horizon; the Times opines that if the co. ends up looking anything like Singapore's state-run development operation, it "would effectively create the world’s largest hedge fund." !
The boys at Long or Short Capital (the blog that pays dividends) and the boys they link to harp on the possible dangers and shortcomings of the deal, for both sides --- China might kinda collapse any day now, given the brittleness of its program to inflict a hardened centralized will upon the whole of an increasingly restless (probably) civil society, and Blackstone could explode too (Black Swan Black Swan Black Swan), leaving China, which is committed to holding onto its shares and to not buying into competing firms for the medium-term future, in the super-shitty lurch --- but goddammit I was excited when I heard this gospel. Remember how China and McKinsey are also building a crazy utopian environmentalist city of the future? These people ain't thinking small, ladies and gentlemen; it must be improbably exhilirating, days like these, to be a Beijing functionary.
When will America wake up? The alarm's going off --- it's a clock radio, and NPR is playing Pharrell's remix of the Internationale --- but we keep hitting snooze.
