The Morality of Being Rich

Ran across a post by Andrew Sullivan this morning that touches more or less directly on my post about Frans de Waal's article on "Morals Without God".

Sullivan's post is a continuation of an earlier post on taxation of the very rich. It starts off with a reader's comment, and note Sullivan's response:

As a liberal, I don't have any problem acknowledging that many of the wealthy people in our society have worked hard to earn what they have. What I question is whether their financial rewards are proportionate to their work, given that the creation of wealth is the product of collaborative efforts far more often than it is the product of individual acts of genius. What I also question is why conservatives so often forget that many people of ability work very hard and do not accrue such wealth. If it is a question of hard work, tell me Andrew - who works harder than a single mother employed at Wal-Mart?

I don't deny that. But if an entrepreneur works just as hard but because he's smarter or more driven or more innovative, I think he deserves as much of his rewards as is compatible with a basic safety net and core public goods. After all, he is the person whose success makes taxation possible at all - or rather far more successful than if there were only Wal-Mart workers. But I am content with inequality as the price of freedom, and do not believe the government should punish people for being successful.

Sullivan completely blows off his reader's point that success is very seldom an individual affair. That wouldn't fit in very well with what I suspect is his underlying Randian premise that it's the supermen who create all the wealth and who therefore should reap all the benefits. I don't think he's ever said any such thing outright, but that seems to be a subtext to much of his political/economic thought -- although he does seem to be moderating a bit now that the right has thrown him out on his ear for being rational. (Sullivan does recognize the provision of a safety net as a legitimate purpose of government, among other things -- a definite weakening in his libertarian cred.)

The "taxation as punishment" idea is a stance that's pervasive on the right, and Sullivan reinforces it later:

The successful already pay the bulk of the taxes. I just don't see why tax hikes should be framed as some kind of revenge on them, or long-overdue comeuppance.

This round of the libertarian anti-tax hike polemic (and can I point out once more that it's not a "hike," it is merely allowing a temporary tax cut to actually be temporary?) seems to have started with this post, in which Sullivan wrote:

Most of the tax hike is going to come from people like me; and I don't like it, and do think it adds a disincentive to work harder.

First off, if your tax bill is a major determinant of how hard you work, there is something wrong with you. Secondly, it's not a "tax hike" -- see above.

I don't understand where this whole idea of "taxes as punishment" is coming from, quite frankly. The imputation is that the left, somehow, is enjoying a great amount of glee in "sticking it" to the rich. I suspect there's more than a little projection in Sullivan's attributing that idea to the left, in a sort of reversal: I don't really know anyone, liberal or otherwise, who derives that kind of satisfaction from the idea that the rich pay more taxes. It's really playing the victim card on the part of those who are not being victimized. (His misreading of DougJ's post, below, is just that -- a misreading. I make no guesses on whether it's deliberate or just clueless.) There is a hint of the origins of this, on Sullivan's part, at least, here:

His fellow blogger Doug J pulls no punches:

Why the fuck does it matter what Democrats are willing to acknowledge about how hard some rich people work when they’re not proposing a marginal tax rate much over 40%? For God’s sake, isn’t it enough that we don’t tax rich people much, now we have to get down on our knees and tell them how great they are for working so hard? And what would fellating these geniuses accomplish anyway?

Doug J - with his snarl at the rich - proves my point. As a moral matter, I see no reason why people who work hard shouldn't keep as much of their earnings as possible, and the only reason to tax them is to provide a safety net for the unlucky and sick and poor, and to fund essential functions of government (defense, law and order, public works, education, basic scientific research, etc). But my real point was about making the case for the necessary evil of such taxation in a civil and constructive way.

DougJ's snarl doesn't prove shit, except that maybe he's a little bit out of patience with the likes of Sullivan demanding that we treat the privileged classes (of which Sullivan, by his own admission, is a member) with respect verging on subservience. As for making the case for the "necessary evil" of taxation, why the hell should we need to? Especially in light of this finding from de Waal's essay:

Chimpanzees and bonobos will voluntarily open a door to offer a companion access to food, even if they lose part of it in the process. And capuchin monkeys are prepared to seek rewards for others, such as when we place two of them side by side, while one of them barters with us with differently colored tokens. One token is “selfish,” and the other “prosocial.” If the bartering monkey selects the selfish token, it receives a small piece of apple for returning it, but its partner gets nothing. The prosocial token, on the other hand, rewards both monkeys. Most monkeys develop an overwhelming preference for the prosocial token, which preference is not due to fear of repercussions, because dominant monkeys (who have least to fear) are the most generous.

I think that in the right-wing libertarian arguments against graduated taxes -- or any taxes at all -- we're seeing a perversion of our natural impulses.

Let's go back to Sullivan's contention that ". . . if an entrepreneur works just as hard but because he's smarter or more driven or more innovative, I think he deserves as much of his rewards as is compatible with a basic safety net and core public goods." Let's try a reality check: is Sullivan proposing that the CEOs and other officers of financial services corporations responsible for the present depression were "more innovative" and thus deserve their hundred-million-dollar bonuses? Or for that matter, any of those executives from any industry who are making a million or more a year in compensation? I don't see a lot of innovation coming out of these people. What I do see is an expectation of rewards that amounts to privilege much more than an expectation of fair compensation. (The awarding of enormous "retention bonuses" in an industry in which no company was hiring is, I think, indicative.)

Full disclosure: I've worked with and for a lot of very rich people over the years, almost all of them what we call "lakefront liberals" in Chicago. Every single one of them, including a futures trader who regularly made or lost a million dollars in a day, subscribed firmly to the belief that they had been fortunate and very highly rewarded, and had a responsibility to give something back, which they did, both in resources and in time. And they were all Democrats.

I realize that someone is going to come back spluttering about voluntary giving to charities. Let me point out one central problem with that: there is no charitable organization big enough to handle the kind of things we're talking about here -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, disaster relief on the scale of something like Katrina (a royal eff-up in that case, but that's the end result of a noxious combination of right-wing thinking and rewarding incompetence -- um, excuse me, I mean "party loyalty.")

What I find most reprehensible about the values of the spoiled brat brand of libertarianism, and even more, those of the teabagger sockpuppets, is that they make a lot of noise about "personal responsibility" but that concept never seems to translate into actual responsibility toward anyone. (Although Sullivan, at least, admits that we need government, but he seems uncomfortable that those who derive the most benefit from it should foot most of the bill.) It's the end result of St. Ronnie's "Greed is Good" philosophy. And it's all based on fairy tales of how "entrepreneurs" have all earned it. Bullshit.

Even chimpanzees can do better than that.