Andy and The Emptiness of Social Justice, Part II: Soft Slavery

     After all his thought, Andy has come upon a stunning realization about ownership and the widespread lack thereof.  There are some basic points which sum up Andy's incapacity to make the difference he thought he could.

1. He is completely dependent on others for everything.

The clear and simple truth about needs is this:  No matter how much money one has, he still gets what he needs from someone else.  Money does not equate to wealth.  Production equates to wealth:  If one has the ability to produce what he needs, it does not matter whether he has money or not, and so long as he can produce what people need, people will give him money for it.  If Andy gives money to the poor and needy, their problems might subside for a little while, but because they are unable to produce anything at all, they will continue to be needy, if not for food, shelter, and clothing then for money to buy food, shelter, and clothing.  What follows from this is that the vast majority of people are needy.  They need someone to give them what they need and they have nothing to trade for it except labor.  A few lucky people might be able to make money without working (just like Andy could by investing his new fortune) but he knows very well that not everyone can do this.  Most people have to work because things need to be produced (and because workers need money), but most people do not produce anything.  "How can this be?" he wonders.  Why is it that most people work but those same people are dependent on others for everything they have, especially the things they need, like food, shelter, and clothing?

2. Others will give him what he needs only out of kindness or obligation.

Everything Andy owns has either come to him as a gift or as an exchange for something else.  He knows that people will be needy so long as they depend on the kindness of others (which usually does not go far).  If he or anyone else is to have any degree of economic security, they cannot simply be charity recipients. Yet the only other way he can get anything at all is by convincing someone that he owes him.  Andy could do this by giving someone money, which is agreed to be worth so much of whatever he wants in return.  Andy has a lot of money currently, but the money he has will be used on consumable things, which means that he will eventually run out of money.  And how does he get more money?  He gets more money by working... for someone else.  The fact about trading is that not only does he get everything he needs from someone else, he even gets his money from someone else.  Before he can trade money for things, he must trade work for money.  This means that before Andy can even think about receiving the things that he wants, he has to find someone to work for.

3. The only thing he can trade is labor.

It is quite obvious that the only thing of value which Andy has to trade is his labor, though his labor has absolutely no value on its own.  In order for his work to be valuable, someone else must decide how he should work, when he should work, and where he should work.  Andy does not really own his own labor:  Before he is hired anywhere, it is understood that whatever his work accomplishes does not belong to him at all.  He has absolutely no say in what to do with his own labor, let alone what to do with the results of his labor.  In exchange for labor, Andy will be paid in money, but he will probably have no say whatsoever in how much money his labor is worth.  If, for example, Andy gets a job making baseball bats, he will not decide what time of day to make bats; he will not decide what shape to make each bat or what color to paint it; he will not decide how much time to spend on each bat; he will not own any of the bats he makes; he will not decide how much each bat is worth; and he will not be paid based on how many bats he makes or how well he makes them, but on how much his manager thinks he should be paid.

4. He does not really own anything.

The fact that Andy does not even own his own labor makes his fifty million dollars seem like an odd puzzle.  Does he not own fifty million dollars?  Well, if by "own" we really mean "can use it however he wants," then no.  If by "own" we mean "nobody can take it away," then no.  If by "own" we mean "can hold it in his hands for a while" then yes, he owns fifty million dollars.  This is how people "own" things.  If Andy buys a beach house and a Lamborghini on credit, then the banks really own those things until he pays them off.  Andy has enough money to buy those things with cash, but even if they are bought and paid for in full, he must still pay to "own" them.  He will still have to pay taxes in proportion to the value of his property.  If he does not pay these taxes, those things will be taken away from him.  Also, depending on the state or town his lives in, there will be many restrictions on how he uses his property, from zoning laws which restrict what the property can be used for to local ordinances which could prohibit anything from cutting down trees to raising livestock.  Thus, not only must he pay to keep his property, he can only use his property in ways others allow him to.

5. It is impossible for him to own anything.

Andy would like to give the poor and needy the ability to be producers, to make what they need and keep it, to acquire basic necessities and to avoid having these things squandered or taken from them.  The hard but simple truth, however, is that not even Andy can have this.  There is no way, not even with fifty million dollars, that he can permanently set himself up with food, shelter, clothing, or any other needs or wants; not because those things get used up, but because he has no way of securing those things for himself.  If he bought a plot of land, built a house, planted a farm, and sewed himself new pants every year, he would still lack two major elements needed for a decent life; security and community.

He would lack security because his land and his house is ultimately State domain:  If he does not continue to pay money to the State for the use of his own "property," the State will reclaim his property. If he uses his property in a way not approved by the State, the state will punish him accordingly.  He would neither be assured to keep his property nor would he have free reign over it.  In short, the only thing "property" is sure to mean is that somewhere there is a piece of paper that associates his name with it.

He would lack community because he could not effectively feed or house or clothe himself without the help of others.  It would be easy to get help if others were trying to do the same thing as him (that is, to really own something) but food and housing and clothing are generally only available from people who want money.  It might be possible for Andy to grow everything he needs to eat and to maintain a house by himself, but that would leave him at a severe disadvantage in the quality of his life, which would easily be remedied if he focused on producing perhaps one or two things he needs instead of everything:  After all, being completely self-sufficient would likely be a hard and lonely life.  Even a self-sufficient man needs community.

If he became a producer of something he could enter the market as a real owner and be able to trade something valuable in place of servile labor.  But community implies a spirit of solidarity in which each member aims to protect the interests of every other member; not out of kindness or obligation, but out of mutual respect.  This community is generally lacking among the few people who actually own things.  In fact, the market is not a community at all, but an arena, a place of fierce competition where the success of one producer is precariously balanced with the potential failure of another.  Andy might be able to become a formidable competitor with a fifty million dollar business, but his goal is not to compete and to win, but to enter into a community and reduce need out of mere appreciation for men.  But because community is almost non-existent, the more people Andy makes producers the less they will be able to compete.

So Andy seems to be left with two options.  Either he tries to make himself an owner, albeit tentatively, and help the market deprive people of property, or subject himself to a soft slavery, in which he is "free" to offer his labor for an arbitrary price so that he can buy what is put in front of him and use things as he is allowed to.

Andy and The Emptiness of Social Justice, Part I: What Fifty Million Dollars Can Teach You

Andy is a sociology major.  He wants to do good.  He cares about social justice and dreams of finding a solution for societal problems, such as drug addiction and homelessness.

For his birthday, one year, Andy receives a lottery ticket as a gift.  He is hesitant, but politely accepts and finds, to his bewilderment, that it is a winning ticket.

Well, what a surprise...

Andy is now the not-so-proud recipient of $50 million, compiled through crushed hopes and desperate irresponsibility.  His friends suggest buying a Lamborghini and a beach house and his family recommends investing in biotech, yet Andy knows that, in order to balance the scales of justice, he must find a way to use this stroke of fortune to help those in need.

Tempting...

He realizes, contrary to his friends’ fantasies, that spending a limited sum of money on luxuries will ultimately result in losing both his money and his luxuries.  Due to taxes, insurance, and the inevitable amount of upkeep a mansion and a sports car would require, it would take not only a gigantic but a continuous flow of income to maintain such a lifestyle. Money is fluid, his parents tell him.

His parents’ advice is to find a way for his money to make money:  That is, if he wants to keep his fortune, he must find a way to produce a fortune.  With so much money, they say, it should be easy enough to invest it in ways that will at least maintain his wealth for the future.  Andy is a thoughtful young man, and this advice strikes him as practical, but ultimately self-serving.  He decides to conjure up a plan to use the money in a way that will benefit mankind, beyond himself, yet in a way that will last like any wise investment.

He considers a few ideas that he has entertained, in the past as only daydreams, yet now very much within his reach: 

He imagines that, were he simply to give away his whole fortune to the poor and needy, it would flow away even more quickly than if it were to be poured into a garage full of Lamborghinis; not because the poor are principally irresponsible, but because money is gone once it is spent.  $50 million could feed an entire country for a year, maybe five years, then it would be gone, and both he and the poor would be back where they started.

Perhaps, he reasons, he could build schools and start scholarships and fund free education.  Perhaps, he reasons, he reasons too much, because the schools he would build would be to empower their students.  Knowledge indeed is power, and the investment he would put into it would likely remain stable, but what kind of power is it?  Education would improve lives by providing skills which would increase chances of employment but, without the opportunity for employment, skills are useless.  He himself is educated and were it not for the grim indifference of luck, he would still be working a part-time job for which he is quite over-qualified.  Education seemed like a noble cause at first, but Andy would like to do more than create candidates for unemployment.

 

Model Employees

If education empowers, but is useless without opportunity, he must create opportunity, he thinks.  But how does one do that?  The needy are in need of a living; the poor are poor not because there is want of charity, but because they cannot support themselves.  Andy is convinced that the answer must be to create jobs.  This is a very difficult problem and he is beginning to understand why nobody else has solved the issue of poverty yet.  To create employment effectively, he must become an employer, he decides.  To become an employer, he must secure a labor-based income for his employees; to do that involves business and production.  The more Andy tries to figure out how to help people, the more his thoughts become entwined in schemes very far from his initial ideas. 

Happy little workers, working happily...

He does not want to believe that creating a business is the surest way to help those in need.  Businesses create value, but they do not generate money.  When a business makes a profit, it is because it takes in more money than its products are worth:  What is an income to one is an expenditure to another.  To create a business would only add one more competitor to the market and might ultimately disadvantage as many people as it would help. 

This much is only speculation, Andy realizes, but he discovers that, when it comes to business in general, some things are certain.  One is that the most successful businesses merely supply what is in high demand and that actually producing those things are, in practice, secondary to making a profit from them.  He also realizes that demand is not often the same as need:  The things we need, like food and clothing, are actually quite common and cheap, whereas the things we demand (i.e. want and pay for) are usually more expensive and hence encourage much business to supply.  If business is the answer, then in order to benefit those who cannot produce what they need, he must supply what others demand, so that he can turn the needy unemployed into employed demanders.

To Andy, this seems to be counter-intuitive, and his suspicion is that it seems counter-intuitive because it is counter-productive.  Why would it not be possible simply to let people produce what they need?  Why could he not somehow turn the needy directly into producers?  Perhaps, he thinks, he should figure out what it is exactly that people need.  He does not think it fair to strive only for the survival of the needy; he wants to encourage a decent quality of life for them as well.  There is certainly a global spectrum of poverty, which ranges from starving expatriates to dispossessed addicts, and even fifty million dollars will not be able to help them all.  Andy begins to become depressed by the thought of a sound fortune with nothing to spend it on.  He decides that five of those dollars can go towards a beer and he makes his way to the local pub.

Later at the pub, Andy beholds a striking revelation as he leaves a fiver on the bar in exchange for his frosty beverage.  He had not even thought of the transaction before he made it, but his new net worth has put transactions in a new light for him; he himself has no way of getting anything, whatever the need or demand, without paying for it.  He could buy virtually whatever he wants, but he still has to buy it.  Why?

Socialism: "You work, we'll decide what you need."

Andy goes for a long walk to mull over this question.  Certainly money makes getting things very easy, so long as one has money, but this is a problem for those who do not have money:  The things that one needs are almost always made for the specific purpose of selling them.  So, if one has no money, he cannot get what he needs.  His last five-dollar purchase has made Andy realize that not even he, with all of his money, can change the way this works.  Necessities cost money, which one makes through employment.  He thinks of a type of employment in which employees are given necessities directly as compensation, but this seems very disagreeable to him, almost like slavery.  Money creates a convenient flexibility of purpose; the choice of what one buys is up to the one who buys it and employers do not have to decide for their employees what they should or should not have.  Of course, employers could not give their employees anything but money anyway, because whatever an employer supplies or produces is usually not a necessity, as Andy has already noticed.  So, he figures that standard employment works best as a money cycle:  Each business sells things to its customers and gives a share of the money to its employees. 

In this money cycle, though, each kind of poverty finds its own kind of problem.  He could fly into some famine-stricken third-world village and hand out hundred-dollar bills, but the money would be useless in a place where there is nothing to buy.  He could approach the homeless in any industrialized city and hand out hundred-dollar bills, but they would likely not spend that money wisely.  He could go to either place, address the people’s needs, and buy things for them, but there are already organizations which do precisely that.  It seems to become more clear to him, but Andy feels that tapping into a money cycle is quite a roundabout way of promoting social justice.  After all his thinking, he is convinced that people should be able to produce what they need, even if the world is too complicated to let that happen now.

When beach houses don't seem like a problem...

As far as what they need, he knows that rations and a tent do not lift a man out of poverty.  He now knows too, however, that three square meals and an apartment do not make a man rich, and neither does a Lamborghini and a beach house.  He knows which of these he would prefer to have, but fifty million dollars have convinced him that the value of money is not relative (as he used to think) but arbitrary.  Money only goes as far as those who want it; that is, it is only good for buying things, but what he buys and why he buys it is up to him and, then again, sometimes it is not.  He has no control over what his money means, just as the poor have no control over what their lack of money means.  If he wants to liberate the poor (and himself) he must liberate them from that which makes them poor; and it is not money.  It is the inability to produce what they need:  It is their absolute dependence on others to supply them with what they need for a price which others determine.

Liberal Arts and Servile Attitudes

 It is a common complaint heard from young graduates of liberal arts programs that their expensive degrees are not providing them ample enough opportunity for employment.  I myself have been admonished by older, more “successful” men that college programs in the liberal arts amount to no more than a waste of time and money.  I often admit that a degree in history or philosophy might indeed prove useless in the “real world” and I understand the frustration of being “overeducated”, but at these thoughts I am reminded of a concept laid out by Josef Pieper in his most famous book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture.  He explains that the liberal arts are “liberal” precisely because they are free from being practical or useful.

This, of course, might sound ridiculous at first, but only until the reader will ask himself just what “art” is.  It is no money-making pursuit, though, sadly, it seems to be the occupation of many so-called “artists” of today.  The concept of liberal arts being both liberal and true art depends on the idea that knowledge is something worth pursuing for its own sake, rather than for the sake of something else.  Knowledge which is gained for the sake of practical concerns, such as gaining money and reducing effort, is called “practical knowledge”.  Such knowledge includes science and technology; engineering, programming, mechanics, machining, and the like.  Art, both seen and heard, philosophy, and history are those fields of knowledge which have very little to do with putting bread on the table:  That is, they are free from having to worry about putting bread on the table.  They are all part of what is truly worthy of our time and effort and even our money.  Bread and effort are obvious necessities for life, but they are less than life.  Pieper did quite well in showing that when every pursuit is reduced to something like a dollar value, we become nothing more than machines.  Every ounce of effort we put out in our daily lives to make a living is the clearest evidence that living is always worth more than what it may cost.  We do not live in order to sustain and produce, we sustain and produce in order to live. 

So, what does it mean to live?  It depends what creature is living.  What it means to live as a cat is not the same as to live as a man.  It does not take deep insight to notice what the difference is.  Animals spend their time seeking food and mates, perhaps even solving problems and entertaining themselves while they are at it, but only humans write and read history, tell stories, paint pictures, sing, think aloud, build churches, and pray.  Only humans do these things; they are particularly human.  The liberal arts, then, are concerned ultimately with humanity and being human.  "Why study liberal arts?"  How absurd this question becomes!  We pursue the arts because in them we are most free, most human, and most alive.

If, dear reader, you are one of those souls who worked hard to obtain a liberal arts degree because you loved it and were subsequently sent out into the world by your alma mater in the hope of making a decent wage by that knowledge, you have been misled.  It might help more to go back and learn something practical to practice instead of condemning the economy for being too weak to support you or hating society for being too simple to appreciate your expertise.  Much joy and gratitude is to be had, however, for knowing what is worth knowing for no other reason than that you wanted to know it.