Tax Lawyer's Blog

“Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.”

 - Friedrich Nietzsche -

Professors James Maule and Linda Beale have responded on their blogs to my recent post titled Two Professors, an Angry Bear and Hate the Rich Syndrome.

I know it’s hard to fathom, but the arguments I made in that post seem to have done little to persuade either of them to my point of view.

As usual, Jim and Linda make some powerful and provocative points in their rebuttals. 

Let’s examine them.

Professor Maule’s Rebuttal:

If a Wealth-Dominated Congress is So Great, Why Are Taxation and Other Policies Such a Mess?

First, let me concede that in my own exuberance I mischaracterized Ms. Beale’s concurrence with Mr. Maule as “exuberance.” It was, as the Professor said, merely “simple agreement.”

Professor Maule writes that my argument rests on a faulty premise:

[Pappas] presumes that “our legislators” are “ordinary Americans” who are not “incapable of understanding the plight of the average American” because they “know what it’s like to struggle” and because “through diligent study, hard work and intelligence they managed to lift themselves from the ranks of the ordinary and the mediocre.”

That’s not my premise at all. What I said was that the mere fact that a Congressman is wealthy does not preclude his understanding of the plight of ordinary Americans. I did not say that our legislators were ordinary Americans.

In fact, I said the polar opposite:

Professors Maule and Beale have it wrong. Rather than elect legislators of ordinary intelligence, education and financial success we should continue to elect those who have demonstrated that they possess those traits to an extraordinary degree. Entrusting the operations of the government to the merely ordinary is a recipe for disaster.

Mr. Maule, of course, disagrees with me on this point (emphasis added):

Pappas asserts that, “we should not elect legislators of ordinary intelligence, education and diligence.” Why not? Ordinary folks tend to bring far more practical experience and common sense to the table than those who have lived inside academia or some other sheltered place before turning to life in the world of politics.

But here the Professor himself relies on a faulty premise (see emphasis in the above quotation) to arrive at the conclusion that ordinarily intelligent people would make better legislators than extraordinarily intelligent ones. He assumes – as do most people¹ - that the possession of a formal education precludes the possession of common sense or “street smarts.”

I think the opposite is true. It’s more likely that a formally educated, successful person has common sense and street smarts because those are traits that tend to cause someone to recognize the value of a higher education and embark on a plan to obtain it.

And does Professor Maule truly believe we should have legislators of merely ordinary intelligence. I wonder, for instance, what he thinks of Sarah Palin, who has been roundly vilified by the left for her ordinariness? Does Mr. Maule think her ordinariness makes her exceptionally qualified to be the President of the United States or maybe a congressman?

Fortunately, I can close on a point of agreement. Here’s Maule on the subject of money in politics:

[T]he point is that the process, including the need for huge amounts of money, shuts out a lot of people who would do a much better job than Congress has done for the past several decades. Congress should be a representational body. It has become a club dominated by the wealthy. The wealthy members of Congress tend to be those who have been there for a long time, and those holding that sort of seniority are the ones who control the Committees, who dictate the legislative process, who cut the deals in the back rooms, and who run the show.

I agree with the Professor that we should take the the money out of politics, but I  disagree that we should take the money out of politicians. 

Footnote:

¹ It’s become a cliche to insult a highly educated person by saying “he’s book smart, but he lacks common sense.” Perhaps those lacking a formal education entertain this delusion merely to feel better about themselves.

Professor Beale’s Rebuttal:

Too Much Wealth? More Dialogue on the Issue

I don’t think Professor Beales hates individual rich people, but I do think she dislikes them as a concept and a class. And, as I will point out later, I think her writings bear this out.

Ms. Beale says that the following statements I made in my post are “blanket assertions”:

 1.  American millionaires… know what it’s like to struggle [because] their ‘unordinariness’ is less a byproduct of their wealth than it is a by product of the fact that, through diligent study, hard work and intelligence, they have managed to lift themselves out of the ranks of the ordinary and mediocre.  

2.  Why is it difficult for left wingers to acknowledge that wealthy people got that way through perseverance, hard work and sacrifice?

Now, to be sure those statements are generalizations, but I intentionally made them because Ms. Beale habitually makes the opposite generalization. If you read her blog, as I do every day, you can’t help but notice that she assumes – although she may not explicitly say it – that the rich generally owe their richness to serendipity and circumstance rather than to vigilence and virtue.

Here’s are a few examples (emphasis added and I tried to keep the comments in context without reposting the entire article):

… clearly much of the way wealth is accumulated is through greedy policies (firing workers, rather than reducing dividends to owners and salaries to upper class managers; moving from one locale to another to exploit a pool of needier workers; breaking unions to be able to offer even less in benefits, polluting rather than undertaking environmentally sound measures, etc.). To the extent that wealth is acquired by exploiting the poor, the naive, and the gullible or by polluting the world we live in or by taking subsidies from communities and then leaving them holding the (empty) bag, there is something wrong and we should point it out….  give employees some power to push back against the greed of millionaire CEOs and owners, etc.).  

… the fact that someone is or isn’t a millionaire has very little to do with whether that person has worked hard, shown perseverance and sacrificed…. That is why I have chosen as the theme of this blog “democratic egalitarianism”–a philosophy that encourages policies that are directed towards sustaining democratic institutions and that recognizes that every policy will be redistributionist though many redistribute upwards (from middle class workers fired to managers and owners with higher capital gains that are preferentially taxed) rather than  downwards (from the wealthy to those in the lower middle and lower classes). 

So, if I am generalizing that the rich have earned their wealth, Ms. Beale is certainly generalizing that they were born with silver spoons in their mouths or schemed and cheated to get their wealth. My generalization about the rich is, therefore, merely a rejoinder to her generalizations about the rich.

One need look no further for evidence of Ms. Beale’s anti-rich bias then her contention that firing workers is a greedy policy. This contortionist way of attacking the wealthy disregards the rather obvious fact that only those who have employees are in a position to fire them. It seems Ms. Beale thinks it’s more noble to have never have hired someone than it is to have hired them and, later, because of a change in business circumstances, fired them.

I wonder if the Professor believes, as do the anti-capitalists, that the hiring of employees, like the firing of them, is evidence of greed. You know, because businesses only hire workers to exploit them for their own profit.

This is the kind of thinking that annoys me about progressives. In their anti-capitalist, anti-big business frenzies, they refuse to pat the back of the rich businessman who creates jobs, but will drill him in the kneecaps posthaste when he closes a factory or lays off workers in order to keep his business viable.

Ms. Beale says she favors “egalitarian democracy.” If she means by the use of the word “egalitarian” that we should try to ensure that everyone has the same economic, social and civil rights, then I have no quarrel with her. On the other hand, if by egalitarian she means the actual removal of economic inequalities among people, then we will continue to disagree because that usage is merely a euphemism for collectivism  – which, as you may recall, has been tried before with exceedingly disastrous consequences.

Lastly, Ms. Beale takes exception to my criticism of Angry Bear, Tom Bozzo’s contention that the “rich are different:” 

[Pappas] missed the point entirely of my fellow Angry Bear Tom Bozzo’s post, which suggested it worth noting — in considering what makes someone “rich”– that there are some who live off of capital income from financial assets and that salary as a percentage of income goes down precipitously as capital income goes up precipitously, which creates a significant cut off point in determining who is “rich” at the intersection of the two rapidly changing lines….

Now read what I said in my original post:

Mr. Bozzo – who in perfect wealth-redistribution form says that “the boundary of the rich is being set too high” by the Obama administration -  suggests with a straight face that anyone who has a nice life and isn’t working is “in fact rich.” And, rather amazingly, Professor Beale agrees with him.

This is pure nonsense. In 2006 the average per capita income in the United States was $36,714. That means, according to Mr. Bozzo, that any non-working person who makes $36,715 a year is a rich man (and, presumably, should stop whining when the government raise his taxes). Who in his right mind would consider a man making $37,000 a year wealthy, regardless of whether or not he worked to make it?

It seems never to have occurred to Bozzo and Beale that the rich man may have worked 90 hours a week for 25 years in order to afford his current life style while the pitiable poor man may have wasted his time playing pool and getting soused at the local pub?

Collectivists want to drop the “boundary of the rich” because that will make it easier for them to justify even greater redistributions of wealth in the future.

If I am guilty of anything, it’s understanding Mr. Bozzo too well. In any case, it would have been impossible for me to mistake the gist of his argument because he unambiguously stated it:

1. The boundary of the rich has been set too high; and
2. If you receive the annual income of the average American and don’t have to work you are rich.

Now go read Mr. Bozzo’s article and judge for yourself whether I missed his point.

Steven Pinker: On Conservative vs. Liberal Weltanschauung

Liberals and conservatives simply see the world differently.

Several years ago I read Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, in which he talked about the conservative, or Tragic, vision of the world versus the liberal, or Utopian, vision of the world.

Here’s Pinker explaining the two world-views in an interview with UPI’s Steve Saller:

Saller: What is the Tragic Vision vs. the Utopian Vision?

Pinker: They are the different visions of human nature that underlie left-wing and right-wing ideologies. The distinction comes from the economist Thomas Sowell in his wonderful book “A Conflict of Visions.”

According to the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in virtue, wisdom, and knowledge, and social arrangements must acknowledge those limits. According to the Utopian vision, these limits are “products” of our social arrangements, and we should strive to overcome them in a better society of the future. Out of this distinction come many right-left contrasts that would otherwise have no common denominator.

Rightists tend to like tradition (because human nature does not change), small government (because no leader is wise enough to plan society), a strong police and military (because people will always be tempted by crime and conquest), and free markets (because they convert individual selfishness into collective wealth).

Leftists believe that these positions are defeatist and cynical, because if we change parenting, education, the media, and social expectations, people could become wiser, nicer, and more peaceable and generous.

I hold the Tragic vision which, according to Pinker (and Sowell) makes me a conservative. Professors Maule and Beale hold the Utopian vision, which makes them liberals.

But, as Dave Mason said,

[T]here ain’t no good guy; there ain’t no bad guy; there’s only you and me and we just disagree.

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