You Don't Own Your Money! (How to Defend the Welfare State)

Vicente writes here against the evil right-wing "your tax dollars are paying for $3 iced lattes for lazy postal workers in Miami" rhetorical trick. I don't think he quite expresses the full degree of wrongness involved here, so I'll take a crack at it.

The minor point: This technique is the Republicans' way of dealing with a really profound political problem: They must lower taxes (since that's what we vote them in to do), but they can't cut the military budget (because they're politically invested in a constant state of war) or services (because Americans love every particular manifestation of the nanny state even if they hate the idea of it). The $3 lattes function as an imaginary source of the savings necessary for substantial tax cuts. I am agnostic on whether the technique is profoundly cynical or somewhat less cynical but profoundly dangerous. The cynical interpretation: Republicans will not cut spending but will lower taxes, because when an American voter is asked whether he wants lower taxes or more social security he always answers "Let's do both!" The deficit will of course continue to increase, and when asked about this Republicans will blame "government waste" (lattes) or, if push comes to shove, lazy poor people. The dangerous interpretation: Republicans will in fact destroy the welfare state whatever the political cost; accusing the government of frivolous spending is the first step to destroying it, and by the time Americans realize that it's not just poor black people who are getting screwed it will be too late. (In other words, we'll soon know whether the Tea Party is sincere. I for one hope not.)

(By the way, just so we're all on the same page here: Democracy doesn't work because voters are selfish and very stupid. Or rather, it works just to the extent that the elites who determine political discourse are too honest to exploit the stupidity and selfishness of voters. To understand the modern Republican party we need to determine whether it is run by (1) an elite which is cynical enough to promise whatever voters want to hear in order to maintain power or (2) a group of people who are just as stupid and selfish as their constituents. For example: Who in the Republican Party really doubts the existence of global warming, and who merely finds it convenient to do so? Obviously there's no clear line to be drawn here-- they probably don't know themselves what they really believe-- but there sure is a gradient, as can be seen by the Tea Party vs. Republican Establishment infighting. Which would you prefer were the case?)

The major point: The only way to defend the welfare state is to keep making the point, over and over again, that the whole question of what the government is doing with "my money" is wrongheaded for the simple reason that you have no right to your property. That any of us can "own" property is the product of a very particular social arrangement which is constructed and maintained by government and social consensus in myriad ways. CEOs own yachts not because their work somehow produced the yacht or its equivalent value, but because a vast number of people did a thousand different things (build yachts, regulate the NYSE, become police, keep the CEO's schedule) to produce a social system in which yachts are distributed to some and not others. The government is the organ of that social system as a whole; as such, the government has an absolute right to whatever value is produced by that social system.

This is important to remember when you're defending the welfare state-- for example, when you're claiming that the government should continue to fund state colleges. The point isn't that we should take money from the CEOs in order to compensate poor students for some perceived injustice, because they "deserve" a chance to become CEOs themselves. The point is that the social system is right now arbitrarily deciding to give some fool a yacht and may very well arbitrarily decide to go distribute its surplus somewhere else-- on frivolous cultural studies classes, for example.

When we fall into the trap of defending the welfare state as though it were some sort of justifiable but unfortunate burden on the rich, we have already vastly underestimated what a government can do. The government is a social mechanism for distributing socially produced value; as such, it's our tool for making a society that works the way we want it to. Which is why we don't need to prove that the unemployed "deserve" some benefits because they've been screwed somehow; we can just shrug, say that we're sick of seeing so many yachts around, and give them some money. If some of them use it to buy Cheetos or pink nail polish or flat-screen TVs, well-- CEOs spend money foolishly, too, and it's not their goddamned money either.