There are always multiple windows open on my web browser. One has an assortment of tabs for this site; another has a half-dozen tabs for other sites I constantly visit; still another, the tabs for whatever stories I am working on that day; another for a handful of humor sites that get perused during lunchtimes. Then there are always a few
detritus windows, a random assortment of old news stories that I saw at one point and knew I had to do something with, but never got around to.
Stories stay in these last windows for days, or weeks, or sometimes months. I never want to simply bookmark them and shutter them up, because I know I will forget about them. Nor can I quite pin down what so irritated me about them, or what I thought they might suggest in terms of wider narrative. So there they sit, until I either use them or give up on them. The most ancient of the current links at the moment is this one, from last August, about ongoing libertarian efforts to give up the trappings of government and live offshore on rafts constructed without building codes and governed without laws—like the movie Waterworld, it will cost vast sums of money and almost certainly end in disaster. Also like Waterworld, I really want to see it happen, if only for the camp value. There is also this one, the text of Rick Santorum's old speech about Satan taking over America piece by piece. It struck me as something that ought to be picked apart line by line, it was so full of condescension, spite, and delusion, but finding the stamina to actually do it has so far eluded me.
Amidst this mild clutter is one window that contains three tabs, each linking to a story I happened to read in sequence, one right after the other, in early January. The first was a particularly asinine Washington Post column by George Will. Will has two modes of writing, a snobbish but at least intelligible one reserved for when he is trying to be serious, and one that is strictly meant for the rubes, I think, insipid and insincere. The money quote from this particular column was one of the latter:
The left's centuries-old mission is to increase social harmony by decreasing antagonisms arising from disparities of wealth -- to decrease inequality by increasing government's redistributive activities. Such government constantly expands under the unending, indeed intensifying, pressures to correct what it disapproves of -- the distribution of wealth produced by consensual market activities.
This is toward the larger assertion that liberals like big gubbermint and are especially keen on "redistributionist" gubbermint, a supposition that Will supports by entirely ignoring all historical instances of conservative-backed government bloat and "redistribution," presumably under the No True Scotsman doctrine, and thus simply asserting it to be true. This is Will at his dullest, but those sentences above about
the left's centuries-old mission were, I thought, intriguing.
(Continue reading below the fold)
As it turned out, the very next story I happened upon was this one, dated a few days later by Paul Krugman:
Last month President Obama gave a speech invoking the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt on behalf of progressive ideals — and Republicans were not happy. Mitt Romney, in particular, insisted that where Roosevelt believed that “government should level the playing field to create equal opportunities,” Mr. Obama believes that “government should create equal outcomes,” that we should have a society where “everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk.”
There is Mitt Romney, channeling the same argument as Will, and with the same presumption on what the silly liberals want (yes, yes, what are the odds). But Mitt Romney is a dolt, and so it comes out more crudely. But Krugman goes on:
Americans are much more likely than citizens of other nations to believe that they live in a meritocracy. But this self-image is a fantasy: as a report in The Times last week pointed out, America actually stands out as the advanced country in which it matters most who your parents were, the country in which those born on one of society’s lower rungs have the least chance of climbing to the top or even to the middle. [...]
The failure starts early: in America, the holes in the social safety net mean that both low-income mothers and their children are all too likely to suffer from poor nutrition and receive inadequate health care. It continues once children reach school age, where they encounter a system in which the affluent send their kids to good, well-financed public schools or, if they choose, to private schools, while less-advantaged children get a far worse education.
Well now, that seems a rather different thing. For all the talk of redistribution, and unfairness to the rich, and punishing of success, it turns out that we are doing rather poorly when it comes to that whole bit about
creating equal opportunities. Equal
outcomes are of course impossibilities but, as Krugman says of Romney, "someone who really wanted equal opportunity would be very concerned about the inequality of our current system."
The third story I read, also from the same day:
Jarvis is in seventh grade, and doesn’t know where he’ll go to high school — or even where he will be living — when he graduates from junior high, hopefully next year. [...] Jarvis, like thousands of other students in Chicago Public Schools, is homeless.
He is just one of more than 10,660 students who were homeless at the beginning of the school year. That’s 1,466 more than at the same point in the previous school year, according to a CPS tally.
And since the last school year ended with a record 15,580 students with nowhere to call home, the current surge means this school year is on pace to be another record breaker. [...]
Nationally, 1.6 million U.S. children lived in homeless shelters, motels, with relatives or other families or living on the street in 2010 — a 38 percent increase since 2007 [...]
Those three stories have sat in a browser window for nearly two months now. They are clearly connected. They clearly have something rather pressing to say about
what liberals want, and
what society should do, and what constitutes
opportunity. Regardless of any eventual policy discussion, one cannot plausibly assert that a child commuting to school from a homeless shelter has the same
opportunities as Mitt Romney's children, or even the same opportunities as a child with a bed of their own. One cannot simply discount report after report on the number of children who may not have a reliable source of decent food, aside from shelters or school lunch programs, or whose medical needs go unmet. Pundits blubber on and on about how poor people might own
televisions, or poor people might own
refrigerators, apparently supposing that the purchase of home electronics renders families impervious to becoming poorer later on (what a lovely and simple fix it would be, if all that was necessary for permanent financial security was to buy someone a VCR or toaster oven, then calling it done). There seems almost no understanding of how a family might flit into or out of poverty as a result of changing circumstances; the worst that can happen to a pundit, I suppose, is that they are forced to change venues, but it never seems to dawn on them that there are people whose paychecks barely cover the best of times, and that having those paychecks suddenly cease can toss people into the worst of times very, very quickly.
So Mitt Romney, multimillionaire, says that Obama seeks "equal outcomes," not "equal opportunities," and wants an America where "everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk." George Will says the age-old goal of the left is to "increase social harmony by decreasing antagonisms arising from disparities of wealth," which is a fancy way of saying that the poor are just jealous of the rich and that liberals are just coddling them. There is no apparent room in either abstraction for people like Jarvis. Both of their viewpoints seem to rely on the supposition that Jarvis and students like him do not exist. We cannot say that a homeless student is enjoying equal opportunites compared to everyone else, nor can we presume that the boy's real problem is that he is simply antagonistic toward wealthy Americans. We do not, obviously, have equal outcomes. We do not, obviously, have equal opportunities.
The larger question, then, and the one that represents the truest form of the debate, is what we believe the minimal level of opportunity should be, for even the worst-off Americans. Does even the worst-off child have the right to meals? The right to school? The right to a warm place of their own to sleep, and do homework, and play? If they have a cavity, ought we establish a right for them to get it filled, or are they out of luck? We drone on about the sanctity of life; well, here are lives. Are they sacred? How sacred?
Will questions why no one is truly questioning the notion of redistributionist government (because he is a cranky, insincere old fart, he hypothesizes it is because liberals can't defend it and so don't try. And no, drawing a diagram of the logic involved here will not help). The true reason is because all of civilized society has accepted that we will not simply let poor individuals die on our streets, not because it is "unaesthetic," as Will supposes, but because most of us are not fucking monsters. We accept as moral duty that we will provide some minimal level of human rights, and of shared support and opportunity, even if it costs each of us a bit of hard cash to do it. All of us, aside from the usual cadre of cranks that every generation is saddled with, have accepted these as self-evident truths. The only discussion—the only discussion—is how much support to give. Some assert religious reasons for assisting the poor; others assert purely secular ones. Economic cases can be made as to how much profit society can gain from enabling its least fortunate members. The doctrine of moral hazard is used to oppose benefits that seem too generous. Conservative, liberal, and moderate, secular and religious, the strictly rational and the shamelessly irrational alike; the entire debate centers upon that one central spot of ground, on the notion of fairness, and equality, and rights, and obligations towards our our fellow man. The rest is bunk.
That is not to say, of course, that the public debate truly is waged there. As both Romney and Will so inelegantly demonstrate, the most fiery rhetoric usually dodges that central point rather completely. Will baldly states in his closing paragraph that "[p]eople are less dissatisfied by what they lack than by what others have. And when government engages in redistribution in order to maximize the happiness of citizens who become more envious as they become more comfortable, government becomes increasingly frenzied and futile," thus dispensing with all notions of human rights and dignities in favor of his the poor are just envious argument. Romney would call Jesus himself a communist, rather than engage on the central question of whether or not we are adequately caring for our most downtrodden citizens, and whether or not we have done better in the past or worst, and whether other countries do better or worse, and why that might be.
So there those three stories sit on my computer desktop, all of which were written in the span of a few January days. A story about the damn redistributionists; a story about how America measurably fails its poor; a concrete case around which to question ourselves on what, as a society, we believe equal opportunity to mean. Someday I still intend to write an essay about that. It seems like there is a larger point that can be gleaned from the comparison, but I am still not satisfied I can do it justice.