There were a couple of book reviews in last Sunday's NYTimes that I
found particularly interesting. Neither is directly related to the teaching
of psychology, but they're not THAT unconnected either.
The first was Jonathan Miles' review of Iain Levinson's "A Working
Stiff's Manifesto". Levinson writes "There was an unspoken agreement between
me and the Fates that, as I lived in the richest country in the history of
the world and was a fairly hard worker, all these things [a house, a wife, a
serviceable car, a fenced-in yard] would just come together eventually". But
to his surprise, he discovers that despite a college education and a stint
in the Army, that he has become "an itinerant worker, a modern-day Tom
Joad". Despite the political rhetoric about work bringing dignity, Levinson
finds that "It's surviving, but 'surviving' sounds dramatic, and this life
lacks drama. It's scraping by".
I found that a pretty good description of the world of the hard working
peon in the United States. Of course, the point is somewhat blunted by the
fact that Levinson is now a published author whose work is reviewed in the
New York Times Book Review, but surely his story illustrates the fates of
many others not so fortunate or skilled.
-----------------------------
The more interesting review, though, was of a book titled "The Myth of
Ownership: Taxes and Justice", by Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel. Murphy is
apparently a NYU professor of law. Nagel is _the_ Thomas Nagel, a quite
well-known NYU philosophy professor, a writer in philosophy of mind and in
ethics and justice. The myth the book exposes has to do with the "robust and
compelling fantasy that we earn our income and the government takes some of
it away from us". That belief is of course part of what made arguments for
the recent massive U.S. tax cuts so compelling. The myth "results in
widespread hostility to taxes, and a political advantage to those who
compaign against them and attack the I.R.S.".
The reviewer (David Cay Johnston) writes:
"This fantasy grows from the acceptance by all sides in the tax debate that
gross, or pretax, incomes are presumptively just and therefore the proper
moral base line to begin debate. The authors say pretax incomes are morally
insignificant, an idea they confess is hard to sell. They argue that
'individual citizens don't own anything except through laws that are enacted
and enforced by the state' because without government there would be anarchy
, an endless war of all-against-one that would diminish incomes and wealth,
not to mention life itself".
and later
"Murphy and Nagel say using pretax incomes as the basis of debate defies
logic, since 'one can neither justify nor ciritcize an economic regime by
taking as an independent norm something that is, in fact, one of its
consequences'. To them, acceptance of pretax income as a moral base line
means that 'serious public discussion of economic justice has been largely
displaced by specious rhetoric about tax fairness' resulting in a 'radical
climate' of tax proposals favoring the rich".
In plain English [my words now - P.C.S.], the basic idea is that
government is instrument in creating and maintaining conditions that allow
an economic free market (to the extent that there is such a thing) to the
exclusion of a more generally free market in which physical force is as
valid a currency as wealth and law. There is a cost to maintaining those
conditions. We pay that cost in the form of taxes (well, some of us do...).
Those taxes are not removed from the economy - they are part of what allows
there to be an economy in the first place.
Besides being a fascinating argument in itself, I find this a perfect
illustration of how silly it is to claim that the media in the United States
have a "liberal bias". Through the entire debate about the recent tax cuts,
the Republicans in the U.S. claimed that "we're letting you keep YOUR
money". I never heard that claim (that it's "your money") refuted, despite
the fact that there are two good arguments that it is in fact NOT "your
money" (the Murphy/Nagel argument above, and the fact that we're running a
huge debt and therefore have already spent that money). The conservative
spin was never questions, and instead we had that "specious rhetoric about
tax fairness" (and that "radical climate"...). I can' only imagine the
reaction were one of the media outlets to raise this question of
ownership...
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
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