Tag Archives: Thomas Sowell

How much money is ‘too much’?

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Thomas Sowell makes a great point in response to Obama’s rather bizzare statement that “at some point, you have made enough money”.  Sowell address this rather benign-sounding remark by pointing out that:

There is nothing wrong with my deciding how much money is enough for me or your deciding how much money is enough for you, but when politicians think that they should be deciding how much money is enough for other people, that is starting down a very slippery slope.

Politicians with the power to determine each citizen’s income are no longer public servants. They are public masters.

…Once you buy the argument that some segment of the citizenry should lose their rights, just because they are envied or resented, you are putting your own rights in jeopardy — quite aside from undermining any moral basis for respecting anybody’s rights. You are opening the floodgates to arbitrary power. And once you open the floodgates, you can’t tell the water where to go.

Now, some of you may read this analysis and say: well, we limit rights of individuals all the time, just because we limit this one right doesn’t mean we put all of our rights in jeopardy.  Well, you might be right.  Maybe we can still have some rights and not others… but who will get to decide what rights those will be?  And how many of them will we have?

If someone can just categorically say that he or she dislikes the freedom to earn the income you are capable of… and turn this personal preference into a moral axiom… what other personal preferences could just as easily be turned into axioms?  Could the right to other personal property be repudiated?  What about the right to political speech?  What about the right to due process?  Could we at some point have “too much” due process?  What about Children?  China already has proven THAT personal right can be trampled pretty easily if enough power is influenced on a population… what about our right to practice religion?

But these questions aside… assuming we got past the rather uncomfortable political conflict I just addressed;  assuming we accepted that government SHOULD have this prerogative… How are we to weigh and evaluate the value of one right vs the other?  Do we have a coherent framework to make this balancing process fair and equitable (and perhaps more importantly… subject to the will of society as opposed to the whim of those in power?)  I ask this rather rhetorically to point out that for those of you on the left… who are comfortable with Obama’s statement… you had better have ready answer to this question because if you don’t… than you have lost the debate.  If you don’t have a solution or a philosophy on balancing rights (and a way to enforce this process on those in power)… than we are not subject to anything other than the whims of those in power and Sowell would therefore be not only right but justified in his argument.

Now, philosophical arguments aside, I think the more important question is really this: what KIND of politicians do we want to be governed by?  Public masters or public servants?  I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer the latter.

via ‘Enough Money’ – Thomas Sowell – National Review Online.

Cosmic Justice – book review

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cosmic justiceOne of the major benefits of being done with lawschool and the bar exam is that I finally get to read — not what I HAVE to read — but what I WANT to read.  This disconnect has been going on for so long now that I have (literally) 10 books in a stack just waiting for me to read.

The first of these books is called “The Quest for Cosmic Justice” by Thomas Sowell.  Described by David Mammet (screenwriter, playright, director) as “Our greatest living philosopher”, Sowell certainly challenges all who read him and is exacerbates those who don’t.  His book explores the causes of (and failures that result from) a vision of justice held by many on the left — a vision dominated by what Sowell refers to as a pursuit “cosmic” (as opposed to traditional)  justice.  Cosmic, in this instance, refers to a desire to rectify inherent or “natural” inequalities. Sowell puts it this way:

Traditional justice can be mass-produced by impersonal prospective rules governing the interactions of flesh-and-blood human beings, but cosmic injustice must be hand-made by holders of power who impose their own decisions on how these flesh-and-blood individuals should be categorized into abstractions and how these abstractions should then be forcibly configured.

For Sowell, these inequalities are not necessarily desirable, but are realities caused by far more complicated circumstances than any politician can fully understand — or fully prepare for.  Sowell points to scores of examples including welfare, poverty, usually made worse by the policies of the self-appointed elite.

We must begin with the universe that we are born into and weigh the costs of making any specific change in it to achieve a specific end.  We cannot simply “do something” whenever we are morally indignant, while distaining to consider the costs entailed…

What, after all, is an injustice but the arbitrary imposition of a cost– whether economic, psychic, or other–on an innocent person?  And if correcting this injustice imposes another arbitrary cost on another innocent person, is that not also an injustice?

As soon as one starts asking whether the costs to one segment of society outweigh the costs to another segment, the process of creating “cosmic justice” becomes nothing more than a crude balancing of the equities, a fight for federal dollars — a corrupting process that almost never provides real relief.  In fact, the pursuit of social justice is not necessarily even an appropriate term:

In pursuit of justice for a segment of society, in disregard for society as a whole, what is called “social justice” might more accurately be called anti-social justice, since what consistently gets ignored or dismissed are precisely the costs to society.

The Quest for Cosmic Justice is not a learned treatice by any stretch of the imagination, it is in many ways a series of simple explanations about why social justice fails… and how we should approach issues of inequity instead of an analysis OF inequity.  Even so, I think what is so important about the book is the categorical framework Sowell suggests: Social justice is really anti-social justice, cosmic justice has nothing to do with “justice” at all but is instead the re-distribution of wealth to fix natural inequalities.  Conservative need to start approaching the world through the filter of these concepts… and hopefully we will convince others to do the same.