Tag Archives | Ethics

How Inequality Shapes Our Lives

Those of us who regard socioeconomic inequality as a serious problem are often accused of “envy,” as though such concerns were simply a matter of begrudging someone else’s having more cookies than we do.

I think this reaction misses the point in a number of ways; let me say just a bit about just one of those ways:

stupid "class envy" ad

Suppose you forget to pay your power bill (or your phone bill, or your cable tv bill, or your internet access bill, or your credit card bill, or whatever). What happens? Your provider disconnects you, and you’ll probably have to pay an extra fee to get service reestablished. You also get a frowny face on your credit report.

On the other hand, suppose that, for whatever reason (internet glitches, downed power lines after a storm, or who knows), you suffer a temporary interruption of service from your provider. Do they offer to reimburse you? Hell no. And there’s no easy way for you to put a frowny face on their credit report.

Now, if you rent your home, take a look at your lease. Did you write it? Of course not. Did you and your landlord write it together? Again, of course not. It was written by your landlord (or by your landlord’s lawyer), and is filled with far more stipulations of your obligations to her than of her obligations to you. It may even contain such ominously sweeping language as “lessee agrees to abide by all such additional instructions and regulations as the lessor may from time to time provide” (which, if taken literally, would be not far shy of a slavery contract). If you’re late in paying your rent, can the landlord assess a punitive fee? You betcha. By contrast, if she’s late in fixing the toilet, can you withhold a portion of the rent? Just try it.

Now think about your relationship with your employer. In theory, you and she are free and equal individuals entering into a contract for mutual benefit. In practice, she most likely orders the hours and minutes of your day in exacting detail. As with the landlord case, the contract is provided by her and is designed to benefit her. She also undertakes to interpret it; and you will find yourself subjected to loads of regulations and directives that you never consented to. And if you try inventing new obligations for her as she does for you, I predict you will be, shall we say, disappointed.

These aren’t merely cases of some people having more stuff than you do. They’re cases in which some people are systematically empowered to dictate the terms on which other people live, work, and trade. And we generally take it for granted. But it’s not obvious that things have to be that way.

When it comes to diagnosis and prescription, those of us who worry about socioeconomic inequality go in two different directions. Some identify the free market as the cause of such inequality, and government regulation as the cure; for others, it’s precisely the other way around. I’m obviously with the latter group; all the phenomena I mentioned are made possible by systematic restrictions on competition. Libertarians need to spend more time focusing on liberty as the solution to these pervasive asymmetries of power, rather than giving the impression that they find them unproblematic.


Alabama Philosophical Events, Past and Future

Pensacola Gulf Front Hotel

Pensacola Gulf Front Hotel

The schedule for next month’s Alabama Philosophical Society in Pensacola (which looks to be our biggest yet) is now online. Abstracts will be added later.

Auburn University

Auburn University

(I had planned to present a paper on the extent to which the Problem of Good, i.e. of reconciling the existence of goodness with the universe’s having been created by an all-powerful malevolent being, is symmetrical with the traditional Problem of Evil, but then I discovered that more work had been done in this area than I’d realised, and that what I had to add wasn’t sufficiently original, so at the last minute I recycled my piece on Godwin instead.)

Also online is a pair of talks that Kelly Jolley and I gave back in 2002 at an Auburn Philosophical Society roundtable on the subject of The Idea of the University.


Up With Teleology! Down With Anarchy! Sideways with the Hypothetical Calculus!

Ludwig Boltzmann

Ludwig Boltzmann

Three more blasts from the past (all a bit more recent than my blast from Oscarville):

First, two papers I wrote for a science course in college: “The Temptation of Ludwig Boltzmann” (a short sf story exploring the implications of Boltzmannian probability theory – though Amazon thinks it’s something else) and “Evolution: Chance or Teleology?” (an essay on the spontaneous growth of physical order).

Next, a blast from my statist past: “Financing the Non-Coercive State,” an essay I wrote in (though not for) grad school, in which I decisively refute free-market anarchism!


The Politics of Equality

The following letter appeared in today’s Opelika-Auburn News:

Peace Freedom Equality Etc.

To the Editor:

Elizabeth Rutland writes that the debate over gambling needs to focus on the moral issues (Sunday, “Bingo issue is a matter of morality, not legality”).

I agree, but I think she misses the major moral issue: Is it moral to ban gambling? Do we have a moral right to interfere with the possibly mistaken personal choices of other people, using the violence of government to subordinate their judgment to our own?

The answer is no. Other people are not our property. It’s a sin to treat them as though they were.

In the words of Jesus: “Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them; but it shall not be so among you.”

Roderick T. Long

(The tone of Ms. Rutland’s letter led me to believe that Jesus was an authority she might think highly of.)

This reminds me that my second reply to Carol Robicheaux, sent on June 4th, was never published. Here it is:

Bonaparte enthroned

To the Editor:

I thank Carol Robicheaux for her polite response (May 31) to my letter.

At the time of the American Revolution, its supporters were challenged to name any recent successful examples of representative democracy. They couldn’t; nearly every developed country was a monarchy.

Contrary to what the challengers were implying, though, this wasn’t because representative democracy is unworkable; it’s because until 1776, monarchists had forcibly suppressed every attempt to establish such a system.

Robicheaux likewise challenges me to name a successful modern large-scale anarchist society. Obviously there hasn’t yet been one, for the same reason.

However, there are many modern examples of people living under governments while autonomously organizing every public service from roads to security to healthcare, without government involvement, and indeed despite government’s actively hostile attempts to suppress such efforts.

“How, and with what resources,” Robicheaux asks, could people could do this? I answer: how and with what resources does government do it? Government has no resources of its own; it simply redistributes other people’s resources, mainly from poorer to richer.

Am I out to abolish “rules and structure,” as she says? No, anarchy is the abolition of rulers, not of rules. We’re not against institutions, we’re just against giving any institution a force-backed monopoly.

Robicheaux thinks most people are well-intentioned and capable, but worries about those who aren’t. So do I. That’s one of the reasons I’m opposed to giving some people power over other people – because people who aren’t well-intentioned or aren’t capable can cause a lot more trouble when they wield political power.

She doesn’t explain what she thinks is “problematic” about working within the existing system while working toward a better one, so I’ll have to leave that point unaddressed.

Roderick T. Long


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