It has been said that “a rising tide lifts all boats”. That’s great if you have a boat. If you don’t have a boat, the rising tide won’t help you. Maybe you can get a job scraping the barnacles off of someone else’s boat. And if you have a crappy boat that is barely seaworthy, lifting it on the rising tide won’t change a thing. It’ll be that much harder to salvage if it sinks.
I have been told by some libertarians I have known that income disparities between the very rich and the poor and middle class should not be any of my concern. That would just be “politics of envy” or “class warfare”, both of which are presumably such bad things that playing these cards forecloses all discussion.
I am supposed to assume that the very rich got very rich because of the miracle of the free market and their superior ability to work within it. Good for them! The very poor must be plain lazy and stupid or they would be very rich, too. Disparities in income aren’t problems; they’re s sign that the system is working. It’s a feature, not a bug!
But when has this ever been the case? The Kings of Egypt were no more virtuous than the legions of slaves that they exploited, and it wasn’t the free market that made them rich and powerful. The aristocrats and gentry of pre-industrial Europe didn’t work their way up to their exalted status by taking advantage of the free market. If the distribution of wealth in our society today comes to resemble that of 18th century England more than the America of the 1960s, why would anyone assume that this is any more a product of laissez faire than it was back then?
If there were truly free markets and no advantages given to the well connected, what would the distribution of income and wealth look like? I bet it wouldn’t look like what we have now.
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3 comments:
Well stated. The terms "libertarian" and "free market" don't mean what they used to--at least in some circles. Class iniquity is both a prerequisite and product of capitalism. A society of truly free individuals who are free to negotiate market transactions or walk away from them would make capitalism impossible.
I looked at the question of wealth distribution in a hypothetical free market in my essay, Let the Free Market Eat the Rich. In it, I argue that there are deep rooted state supports for subsidizing the maintenance and persistence of wealth aggregations. In a market where these costs have to be internalized, aggregated wealth very quickly depletes itself. Free societies may even find a natural point of wealth where diminishing returns enter beyond that point and accumulation is heightened below that point.
I think your argument comparing wealth disparities between feudal and capitalist societies is really good, though!
Whoops, the article is
here.
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