Progressive Taxation Not Only Redistributes Wealth to Mobilize Demand and Secure Economic Prosperity But Also Secures the Scene of Consent Without Which There Can Be No Peace

I would add to the argument voiced in the last post that not only are there economic reasons to shift the tax burden from the 99% to the 1% to better mobilize the virtuous cycle of consumer demand, but that there is also a profound ethical case to make (beyond the obvious and decisive point that there is no concentration of effort, talent, or virtue among the richest of the rich, far from it, corresponding to and hence providing even a whiff of justification for the concentration of wealth and power to them in society) that connects quite directly to that economic case.

In a nutshell, what I am pointing out here in this post is that neither prosperity nor peace are "spontaneous orders" -- as market ideologues would have you think in their apologiae to the plutocratic status quo and to the maintenance of the rule and loot of incumbent elites -- but administrative accomplishments indispensably indebted to government, and more specifically indebted to a progressive taxation that redistributes wealth to mobilize demand as well as to fund a constellation of general welfare entitlements (ideally far more substantial than the United States can boast of today) to secure a scene of informed, nonduressed consent without which commerce is inevitably invested with menace, exploitation, and fraud.

Especially since the crappy romance novelist and pseudo-intellectual Ayn Rand added her awful voice to the plutocratic movement of organized Big Business interests that emerged to combat the New Deal, right wing ideologues have incessantly insisted that since contracts are voluntary (by definition, whether or not in fact) this means that if all social forms were to be assimilated to the form of transactions of for-profit enterprise violence would be eliminated from the world.

This is why libertopians endlessly crow about "the non-initiation of force" while at once defending so much of the savage inequities and exploitation and environmental devastation of our extractive-industrial order. Correlated to this first nonsensical position, these same ideologues also go on idiotically to insist, of course, that any and every actual or proposed government intervention into for-profit enterprise, every regulation, every subsidy, every effort at oversight amounts to the introduction of violence into this nonviolent "spontaneous order" -- disavowing the fact that markets actually consist of laws, norms, and infrastructural affordances indispensably indebted to that very government in every instance in every moment, and hence that what happens to pass for a "market" in any given place at any given historical moment is contingent, artificial, and the furthest imaginable thing from "spontaneous" in any sense.

I think it is impossible to overestimate the rhetorical force of this ethical claim that freedom and free markets are one and the same. But, of course, these ideologues are making the claim that market relations are definitively non-violent even though the most superficial survey of the scene of enterprise instantly and overwhelmingly reveals a world so suffused by poverty and precarity and ignorance that it might be said with better justice, precisely to the contrary, that the typical market transaction is predicated on a duress amounting to the threat of force (the prospect of mortal penury or exposure to the terms of a criminal underworld of conspicuous violence for oneself and those loved ones one helps support if one refuses the terms of a labor contract however unfair its terms) and /or a misinformation amounting to fraud (due to unequal access to reliable information, unequal access to salient connections or supports when the fraud isn't even more explicit as still unindicted banksters lying about the soundness of their bundled risks and refinance packages certainly was to the near ruin of the whole global economy) of at least one of the parties to that transaction.

Behavioral economics has amply documented (if Keynesian "animal spirits" hadn't already driven home the lesson for those who lack any acquaintance with literature or whose inexperience with actual humanity hadn't already made the point more than obvious) that human beings are not calm consequentialist computers indulging in perpetual objective cost/benefit analysis, let alone reasonably characterized as profit maximizers in any sense (setting aside the question whether "profit maximizing" is reasonably identified with "rational self-interest," all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding), and hence that claims about "optimally efficient markets" are laughable daydreams spinning out equations and pie charts in sublime indifference to the charnel house of stubborn parochialism and superstition and cronyism and fraud that is underregulated capitalism in the actual world.

All this is added, recall, to the altogether absurd fantasies of "spontaneous order" as an apt description of a state-ordered legal fiction or of "optimally ethical markets" suffused though they are by anguish, misinformation, and corruption. Hanauer's point that if we truly don't want to tax the "job creators" this really would mean it is imperative to shift tax burdens onto the rich and away from everyday consumers because these consumers fuel the dynamic on which creative entrepreneurs and useful enterprises depend for their own flourishing and success is an important one, but only one of a host of inter-related insights all of which point to the comprehensive incoherence of the right-wing market ideology that has shaped public discourse for over a quarter century to our utter devastation. If a more steeply progressive taxation then goes on to fund programs to ensure universal healthcare, education, general welfare, equal recourse to the law, then it is plain that not only do we need to tax the rich to fuel the very economic dynamic plutocrats pretend is "spontaneous" but to secure a scene of actually informed, nonduressed consent to commercial transactions otherwise prone to abuse and distress and misinformation, and hence to secure the very virtues of nonviolent commerce plutocrats would also pretend is "spontaneous."

Plutocrats disdaining the incremental democratization implemented by organized labor, the New Deal, the Great Society, the Civil Rights movement, multicultural commonsense spun and disseminated through a virtual reality of think tanks and lobbyists and Hate Radio and Republican nonsense a host of deceptive platitudes celebrating the freedom and nonviolence and efficiency and meritocracy of market orders that were in fact profoundly circumscribed, unequal, fraudulent, distressed, inefficient, unsustainable, corrupt, all the while whomping up white-racism, homophobia, anti-intellectualism, hysteria about political correctness to divide people who work for a living from one another's shared interests.

Everything they said was always obviously a stupid lie and the promotion of all that stupidity and deception has done more damage than can ever be paid for and brought the whole planet to the brink of world-ending environmental catastrophe. But, fine, the stupid lies of the right seem finally to have lost much of whatever allure they had for whatever reason, Movement Republicanism is marginalizing itself into madness and the wholesome browning, secularizing, planetizing of the people is shifting the pendulum back to progressive populism (ha ha fuckers you never did get to gut fatally the flagship programs of the New Deal and the Great Society, you never did kill Roe v Wade, we won the Culture Wars, you didn't get to impose your white-racist homophobic Christian fundamentalist authoritarianism even at the height of your power, for all the waste and ruin and pain you fuckers caused you didn't get what you wanted and it's all over for you now!) and we've got to move on, we've got to clean up this mess, we've got to help those who are hurting, we've got to educate, agitate, and organize in the service of fact-based policies that facilitate equity, diversity, consent, sustainability, democracy. Apparently, possibly in the nick of time, openings are re-appearing in which the good work can begin again.

What a desolation these last thirty years have been politically (and as a person engaged in queer politics I was lucky enough to be party to some of the few victories for justice and progress that took place in this debased plutocratic know-nothing epoch!), what a breathless wonder of creation and common good the next thirty years must be!