"The Good Thing" - Talking Heads
A straight line exists between me and the good things.
I have found the line and it’s direction is known to me.
Absolute trust keeps me going in the right direction.
Any intrusion is met with a heart full of the good thing.
I have adopted this and made it my own:
Cut back the weakness, reinforce what is strong.
Watch me work.
Over the last several weeks, I've seen posts and articles by libertarian twits Will Wilkinson, and Tyler Cowen, suggesting that people on the left don't really believe in hard work and, as a result, encourage economic failure among those we purport to wish to help. Both seem to think that there is some widescale plan on the left to devalue the work ethic and discipline as a result of our resentment of the wealthy. What is needed, according to these men who toil in the harsh fields of think tankery and academia -- both by the way affiliated with taxpayer-sponsored George Mason University -- is a belief in the efficacy of individual effort and a return to a culture of discipline.
Several thoughts leap to mind. First, do these two really think they work harder than say a home health care worker or a bricklayer? One can make the case I suppose for many virtues of being on the tenure track at a state university or suckling on the teat of the Cato Institute, but character building hard work wouldn't leap to mind for me. Second, what policies is it that liberals are supposedly endorsing that subvert hard work? A return to Clinton level income taxes? Higher taxes on wealth earned by capital appreciation -- to put it on, say, the same level as money earned by the sweat of one's brow? I haven't recently seen anyone advocate for a widespread dole which will keep the indolent in Cadillacs, T-bone steaks, and lottery tickets. Or is that how Wilkinson and Cowen view unemployment compensation or Social Security or Medicare?
This may be difficult for Messrs Wilkinson and Cowen to appreciate, but there are many of us on the left who are both more economically successful than they are -- I'm pretty sure my annual tax bill exceeds Wilkinson's income -- and have worked harder -- as a young associate I sometimes worked for weeks without a day off and slept on the floor of my office on multiple occasions -- and yet, we understand that our success is laden with luck. The luck of having born into a given family, the luck of having had certain people help us along the way, the sheer random timing of certain human connections, the unearned blessing of having been born during a given economic era, and hell, the random luck of being blessed with a talent or talents that can be -- forgive me -- "monetized" in this society. The flip side of recognizing one's own luck is to understand the many misfortunes that can come the way of any one of us. Hence, the support for a society in which people do not starve on the streets, become homeless, or lack medical care simply because of misfortune -- up to and including the misfortune of perhaps being born a loser.
Cowen concludes with this bit of tripe:
Nonetheless, higher income inequality will increase the appeal of traditional mores — of discipline and hard work — because they bolster one’s chances of advancing economically. That means more people and especially more parents will yearn for a tough, pro-discipline and pro-wealth cultural revolution. And so they should.
As I have pointed out here before, the parental culture in most liberal states is actually one that emphasizes academic success and discipline and attempts to steer children away from things like early marriage and child-rearing. Cowen grudgingly acknowledges that it is the red states in which this ethos lags. But the notion that a return to tough love in the family and sufficient respect for wealth is going to transform the economic prospects of people in the current environment is fatuous stuff -- especially coming from someone who purports to be an economist.
What do you think?
