Egalitarianism is in vogue in Western policy. From progressive tax rates to caps on executive pay, people like to see some sort of injustice in the fact that there are rich people and poor people. I will not here talk about the societal and economic ramifications of such policies (these have been well dealt with by Mises, among others), or justify income disparity morally: the fallacy of equating justice with equality of income or outcome has been long since exploded by Robert Nozick and others (cf. the Wilt Chamberlain argument, for example). Instead, I will look at the moral and philosophical presuppositions that are necessary to an egalitarian worldview.

The egalitarian tends to justify leveling and redistributive policies on the basis of equal humanity. All men are created equal, they say, so why ought so much inequality prevail in our world? Their arguments may be wrapped in complex sophisms like arguments from marginal utility (for example John Stewart Mill), but ultimately all coherent and general arguments for income leveling (excluding place-particular arguments where inequality may be engendering political unrest, for example) must have recourse to the equal humanity of all men. Any consequentialist argument is necessarily fallacious, for redistribution and leveling in a market society are always and necessarily detrimental to overall productivity (Edit: See comments for clarification).

What this philosophy does, in so many compassionate-sounding words, is disparage the intrinsic worth of a man to the worth of his paycheck. They see it as an affront to the dignity of the janitor that the CEO makes so much more. In doing this they must completely deny any supereconomic worth that a man may have. Not only does this completely disregard any conception of the metaphysical, it says that certain men have the authority to determine the human worth of other men. Though their goal is to remove that authority from those who currently wield it, by saying this authority exists, they in reality desire to arrogate it to themselves, as if they could reign benevolently as philosopher kings. For if such an office of the determination of the worth of other men exists, it cannot go unfilled.

In doing this, they throw away the very cornerstone of modern society: equality before the law. Equality before the law requires that men have no authority to determine the intrinsic worth of another. By giving men this authority, whether wielded by capitalists or by themselves, suddenly the law is allowed to give preferential treatment to one individual over another: we regress to feudal and monarchial law, the only difference being that instead of the rich being favored, the indigent are favored. Indeed if men have an intrinsic supereconomic worth which men have not the authority nor the means to know, what legs are there left for egalitarian policies to stand on?

In addition to the question of intrinsic worth, the question of identity is also relevant to egalitarian philosophy. Its answer is equally stultifying.

if I meet someone new and ask him to tell me about himself, he’ll probably start off by telling me where he works and what he does for a living. This is a fine, if indirect, way of getting to know who he is, assuming his occupation is indicative of his interests and passions: that’s what I want to know when I ask that question. The problem arises when the egalitarians assume some sort of right to a job – and a high paying one, at that. This engenders a mindset which sees a job as something external given to you, probably but not necessarily related to your passions. This is true alienation of labor (I’m going to appropriate that term, since it’s much more appropriate in this sense than in the one in which Marx meant it): the more force we apply to egalitarian impulses as a society, the more we replace passion with duty; the less choice one gets; the less room there is for ambition. Europe is incredibly socially languid for exactly this reason: egalitarian philosophy has castrated economic ambition, and where Americans look for satisfaction in their jobs, Europeans look for security and stability.

In an egalitarian society, when I meet the new guy and he tells me where he works, his answer is now completely irrelevant to my question: what he does has no bearing on who he is. Or rather, had no bearing, for he comes to accept the egalitarian premise and defines his worth and identity based on what he does, or, based on what he has been told to do. This would be despair, except that people come to think of it as normal.

Let us not then affront the human dignity of the poor by collectivizing the responsibility for their well-being. Instead if we have any care at all, the responsibility is ours as individuals to give, not as a society to expropriate from the rich, as if we could absolve ourselves of responsibility that way.

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profit earned… The perpetuation of the returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises and pays requires an ever-increasing flow of money from investors in order to keep the scheme going.
Wikipedia, Ponzi Scheme

This post is intended to expand on the philosophical ramifications of a sociocentric theology. Whether Christian or not, the only feature required for the applicability of this post is the belief in the happiness of others or of society as a whole as a final moral end.

This is an incredibly common view, both among believers and outside the Church. Among those to whom the question of the identity of God is unimportant, it’s only natural to see the sociocentric portions of all major world religions as more or less identical: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Even those without so much as a philosophical thought in their head mostly subscribe to some form or another of the theory that the goodness of a person is tied to how he treats other people. The vast majority of people who would consider themselves “good” (more than likely the vast majority of people in general) justify the claim with reference to their treatment of other people.

The happiness of other people is thus made out to be an end in itself (that is not to say that it may not be an end at all – for how theocentrism subsumes the goals of sociocentrism and autocentrism see The Ends of Faith). This works in practice – it has worked for the entirety of human history, and as far as we can see it will continue to work: but its working is not a necessary feature of the universe.

The movie Children of Men is set in a world in which it does not – it cannot work: humanity is suddenly infertile, and the human race is dying off. Part of the brilliance of the movie is its portrayal of the existential horror of the collapse of that moral system. A sociocentric morality can abide as long as there is a posterity to bequeath one’s life to: The perpetuation of the rewards that a sociocentric morality promises and pays requires a perpetual flow of people into the world in order to keep the scheme going. It does with our lives and labor what a ponzi scheme does with our money. The investor depends on future investors to pay his financial returns; the social moralizer depends on future posterity to be the beneficiaries of his life and thus pay his moral, spiritual, or karmic returns.

Chaos reigns in the world of Children of Men because their moral referent – other people and posterity – is suddenly revealed in all its mortality and transience. As long as human extinction is not on the visible horizon, we can pretend that posterity is immortal; that the value of our moral referent is absolute in some respect. We can pretend that we are valuable as long as there is an infinite posterity with some continuity to our own.

This is the delusion of sociocentric morality. It tries to rise above autocentric morality by attaching itself to something outside and above itself. But where autocentrism does not have to concern itself with the permanence of its referent (after all if the self was of primary import in life, the death of the self makes further questions of value irrelevant), sociocentrism burdens itself with the necessity of a permanent external referent, even though the permanence of its chosen referent is as illusory as the profits of a ponzi scheme.

Thus sociocentrism, though coming with a high-minded guise, is a necessarily unstable philosophy which must either fall to autocentrism, theocentrism, or if it is stubborn to hold out against either side, nihilism.

The one thing that kept me for so long from the ideas of so called Austrian economics was its believers. It’s a group which isolates itself not only from mainstream economic thought, but from mainstream thought in general. Now having read most of the way through its main text, Mises’ Human Action, I can see why this might be the case.

Human Action is by no means a trifling book. It has, as The Economist put it, “the impetus of a first-rate polemic; and the impeccable coherence of Euclid”. It is indeed a brilliant book, but it is also primarily a polemic. It spends as much, if not more time exploding economic fallacies as it does laying down its orthodoxy. Each chapter is aimed at a specific doctrine of socialists, interventionists, and bad philosophers. In this way, by the time one gets through the book, one gets the feeling that economic fallacy is pervasive and the reader is an island of truth now laden with the charge to make disciples of all nations.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Economic fallacy is pervasive, and if we are committed at all to “social justice” separate from simple charity, market reform is the only way to achieve it (more on that in a future post, possibly). The problem comes when the ideology is seen as a package deal. The disciples of Mises reject theories of natural law and morality separate from chosen ends, and yet disassociate themselves from all disagreement as if they were the disciples of Ayn Rand. Anyone with better sense than an Objectivist ought to be able to recognize the value of coalitions: as someone I knew put it, “Conservative, minarchist, and anarchist are all striving for more liberty, and until we get to the point where one of you says ‘enough liberty’, we’re fighting together”.

But as bad as the isolation is as such, that’s not the end of the problem. This isolation, mixed with a mistrust of authority engendered by the modern West’s history of bad policy, leads many Austrians to associate with groups even more isolated than themselves. Crackpot conspiracy theories of all sorts thrive under the umbrella of Austrianism: anti-vaccination groups, the Zeitgeist folks – each one of these discredits Austrianism by association.

I suspect, in fact, that the attraction is reverse: the isolationism of Austrianism attracts the existing crackpots to its economic ideology. If this is the case, Austrianism needs an aesthetic makeover: Mises may be rigorous, but Hayek is more presentable. Let Mises be the foundation and Hayek the spokesman, for his works are far less polemic, far less isolating, but no less potent.

Furthermore, isolationism builds up a hedge of aphorisms which are unintelligible to the outside. “The Fed enslaves us” means nothing without explanation how, and for most people is far too dramatic to take seriously. “Gold standard now!” sounds awfully radical when one neglects to explain why exactly monetary inflation is bad. To this date I’ve never had anyone tell me the key insight to that, which is that inflation is uneven, distorting the price structure and causing malinvestment, despite the fact that every Austrian I’ve known has pontificated on the value of the gold standard. Economics departments assume inflation is even across all prices and thus doesn’t matter. Indeed it wouldn’t matter if inflation were even. The gold standard means nothing without that insight, and everyone seems oblivious to the fact that people don’t actually know that (or perhaps most Austrians don’t know that, and have been convinced far too easily). Dramatic aphorisms without justification just make one seem all the more cultish.

As a further testament to the better presentability of Hayek, compare the times in market circles that you hear “spontaneous order” to “consumer sovereignty”. The first is Hayek’s (for which he won a nobel prize), and is always the subject of much discussion. The latter is the foundation of Mises’ entire work, and yet is hardly ever spoken of except indirectly. The ideas as such are not bad – indeed, I suspect Consumer Sovereignty in the marketplace may even be the more innately intuitive idea of the two. The problem is that those most familiar with the latter idea become polemics themselves – they approach discussions as with an enemy. Hayek was keenly aware of this point, which was the entire premise of The Intellectuals and Socialism: It’s not (necessarily) the case that people are malicious or deliberately disingenuous, and it does a disservice to your ideas to treat the opponent as if they were. Innocence until proven guilty is a good rule of thumb in discussion as in justice.

Mises mocks the Marxians for the pseudo-religious nature of their teleology, thinking of themselves as the intellectual elect to whom it is given to usher the masses deluded with false consciousness into socialist utopia. How much more shameful is it then that we should be guilty of the same sin? There is more economic sense in the world than one might guess, though not necessarily in the purity that the isolationist might desire. Make allies, elaborate your aphorisms, and “never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity”.