In case my prior post was a little too cryptic, apologies: I was referring to the argument that Roosevelt saved capitalism from a violent communist revolution with the New Deal, and that therefore free market types should bow down in gratitude to Dear Leader. This argument is, as far as I can tell, advanced entirely by people who also believe that its programs are a moral imperative.
There are two problems. The first is that a program that must give people money so that they will not kill/imprison/etc the donors may be practical, but it is also immoral. This means, it seems to me, that you can either claim that the New Deal is a sort of broad spectrum Dangeld, or that it is a moral necessity, but not both.
The second is that this is not necessarily a good argument for New Deal programs. If the concerns are merely practical, then perhaps the New Deal was the more cost effective way to buy peace; but perhaps not. This could just as well be an argument for rich people buying bigger and better guns than poor people. Even rich people are, presumably, entitled to shoot back.
I think most of the people who make this argument are, in fact, being sophistic; they aren't particularly interested in saving American capitalism, but they think that the people to whom they speak might be persuaded by this remarkably stupid and amoral argument. I have, obviously, a mixed opinion of the New Deal. But I find this particular "logic" an unbelievably offensive slur against my country.
« Damned if they do, damned if they don't | Main | Another way to think about Paulson » Save us, FDR!25 Nov 2008 11:43 am Comments (48)
I'm having trouble seeing how the practical argument undercuts the moral argument. Let's say that some high school wimp has stolen some property of the toughest guy on the high school football team. One might make the moral argument that the property should be returned; but if the wimp isn't listening to the moral argument, one might fall back on the practical argument that the wimp is likely to get his ass kicked if he doesn't return it. 
The only communist threat in the 30's was due to espionage. In 1932, before FDR and at the height of the depression, the CPUSA realized that it had no chance at power via democratic means and focused in burrowing in rather than taking over. FDR did not save us from communism. The other danger was from fascism. And that danger peaked in 1935, with FDR attempted cartelize and corporativize the economy and undermine the Supreme Court.
Megan, Have you read “FDR’s Folly” by Jim Powell? I read it recently, and it’s a very well done account on how the New Deal actually prolonged the Great Depression. I’d strongly suggest checking it out, because someone with your libertarian leanings should not have very mixed feelings on the New Deal. This book should clear it up for you.
a program that must give people money so that they will not kill/imprison/etc the donors may be practical, but it is also immoral Sez who? Lots of people think the guy threatening you has a right to take what he's demanding, then it is moral to hand it over. If I wake up at 3:00 am to find you heading out the window with my money and I demand the money back at gunpoint, by some standards (e.g. yours and mine) it would be moral of you to return the money. And lots of people figure that anybody who has money in a reasonably free economy has, in effect, "stolen" it from the poor. So there you go.
Well, the Michigan Nat'l Guard had machine guns placed on the roof of Ford's River Rouge plant during a UAW strike during the Depression. So at least some people actually on the scene thought a serious revolution was a possibility. That came after decades of 'Red Scares' that went back to Sacco and Vanzeti. (You can tell from the spelling that I haven't researched this; it's off-the-top of an old man's head.) It's easy to look back now and think that the way things happened is the way they HAD to happen. To people actually living in the midst of chaotic times the worst and unlikely outcomes sometimes seem very possible.
In the early 30's the unemployment rate was close to 25%, local government, which then provided subsistence for out of work families, was out of money, and the banking system was crumbling. Without FDR we might have gotten Huey Long or somebody worse. The New Deal saved American capitalism, and I'm sorry if saying this offends Megan McArdle.
The UAW is not now and never has been a communist organization. An analogy - the 'establishment' in the '60's and 70's was terrified of the Black Panther Party, undertook a campaign against them that involved violence and illegal acts such as had not been seen since the first red scare back in the 20's. And 'give poor minorities money or they'll riot' was one of chief the rationales for the welfare and social programs of the Great Society. Nevertheless, and depsite their revolutionary rhetoric, there was no chance that the Black Panthers were going to take over the United States. LBJ didn't save us from the Black Panthers.
McNamara: "Lots of people" are wrong, if they believe that. Just as "lots of people" were wrong when they thought that blacks were inferior and fit only to be property, or any number of similar historical examples; that many or even most people believe something doesn't make it so, even in the real of morals or ethics. If they believe, whether innocently or willfully, that free exchange leads to "injustice", they're simply wrong in either case. Perhaps more effort should be spent to explain to them why and how they're wrong, but they're wrong in any case - and while their disagreement with right is of practical concern if they have enough votes or arms to enforce it, it is no less wrong from the philosophical and ethical standpoint.
Eh? A slur against your country? It might be a weak argument (or maybe not, I haven't read extensively -deeply I mean- in specifically American history), but a slur? That's bloody nonsensical. Given where other democracies (albeit weaker continental ones with less depth) headed under systematic collapse, it is hardly a slur to posit that a successful government intervention saved American free market orientation from either a red or a right-statist de-evolution or whatever. Or at least headed off a realistic risk as it were. Could be wrong, but unless you have some magical belief that Americans are inherently less susceptible to extreme solutions/political turns under extreme conditions (of course this is possible, Americans do seem to be afflicted by messianism of a very peculiar sort), it hardly seems a slur, at worse perhaps a mistaken argument.
Brock, your argument collapses right at the "let's say", where you posit stolen property. Introducing THAT rather changes any moral calculus. The case here is more like the tough guy is kind of hungry and wants some of the wimp's lunch money. If the wimp gives him some out of the kindness of his heart, that is one thing. But arguing the tough guy is only going to dunk the wimp's head in the toilet anyway before he takes what he wants kind of makes you think the wimp had better spend his money on a switchblade.
This is a very misleadingly simplistic response to a not-very-incendiary point. The Great Depression created social and economic turmoil of such a profound nature that, had it not been addressed through some kind of intelligent governmental action, some kind of violent breakdown and/or revolution could well have occurred as a result. Taking steps to remove the basis for that kind of social and economic upheaval isn't "buying peace" from some stick-up artist, and it's no more immoral than building a levee to protect a city from a flood that you know very well is coming.
The first is that a program that must give people money so that they will not kill/imprison/etc the donors may be practical, but it is also immoral. This means, it seems to me, that you can either claim that the New Deal is a sort of broad spectrum Dangeld, or that it is a moral necessity, but not both. What Brock said. The consequentialist argument doesn't undercut the moral argument, it's simply irrelevant to it. (It may or may not be a good argument on its own terms, but it neither establishes nor disproves that the New Deal was moral.) Don't you hang around with philosophers? The blogosphere seems to be riddled with them.
Guys: The consequentialist argument is not irrelevant to the moral argument if you believe (as Megan says she does) that redistribution to prevent violence is immoral and not just ammoral. The New Deal cannot be both moral and immoral.
It seems to me that a broad spectrum Danegeld might be considered a moral necessity by some sorts of absolute pacifist.
The consequentialist argument is not irrelevant to the moral argument if you believe (as Megan says she does) that redistribution to prevent violence is immoral and not just ammoral. The consequentialist argument is irrelevant to the moral argument unless you believe that a redistributive policy that was moral in the absence of any threat of violence would become immoral as soon as any person threatened violence if the policy was not carried out. I suppose that's a possible belief, but it's not a very likely one.
Is a person paying "protection" money to a gangster threatening to destroy their business behaving immorally? The gangster obviously is, but that's not in question here. I think, but am not certain, that the analogy works.
Or, is a person paying taxes on threat of being imprisoned if they don't acting immorally? They're responding to a threat of violence, after all.
LizardBreath: No. Neither is the person being robbed at gunpoint acting immorally for turning over their purse. They are acting ammorally in response to the threat of violence. The person holding the gun is acting immorally. A better analogy is this one: Bill believes that John is going to kill Rick because he wants Rick's car. To prevent this, Bill puts a gun to Rick's head, and says: "Rick, give me your car, or I will shoot you." Bill then transfers Rick's car to John, averting Rick's death. Did Bill act immorally by utilizing a threat of violence as a means to accomplish redistributing Rick's car to John, in order to avoid violence? Megan's argument (applied to this hypothetical) is that, if your answer is "yes" (Bill acted immorally), then you cannot claim that Bill was compelled to act as he did by moral considerations. Or put differently, there is no such thing as a purely "practical" argument that Bill should redistribute the car. Consequentialism is normative. The consequentialist would argue that Bill OUGHT to redistribute the car on grounds that threatening violence is preferable to actual violence.
The point of LB's case (and why it's better than mine) is, I take it, that their pre-existing obligation to pay their taxes doesn't cease to exist because a threat of violence compels them to do it. Megan's argument for undercutting requires that it does.
The thing with infrastruction is that it must be built for growth, and it must be maintained. The problem with New Deal infrastructure is that it was built for existing demand. It wasn't until closer to the 40s that it was built for excess capacity and connected vital locals.
I realize there is currently a program on the right to vilify FDR, now that their program to rehabilitate Richard Nixon has not gone well. But this is especially insipid, even for Megan. I thought your previous post was about how dark-skinned people were rumored on Drudge, etc, to be prepared to paint the White House black by any means necessary. The idea that the New Deal was intended in part to head off support for communism in the US is hardly even debated by historians -- it's pretty much taken for granted. When your definition of "historians" expands to hacks like Amity Shlaes, I can see where you would start to get all bug-eyed.
FDR didn't "save" capitalism necessarily through redistributionist action. However American Democracy did need saving during the Depression and FDR deserves much credit for its preservation. This is due as much to his moderate temperament as to any economic policy--though that is not to say his economic policies didn't help. Megan gets this entirely wrong. The social safety net and work programs weren't a bribe to the working class, they created a sense that we were all in it together and would pull through together. This blended with Roosevelt's personal style and appeal to hold off left or right wing extremism. Anyone with basic historical knowledge knows that extremism swept the globe in the 1930's. With Spain collapsing, all of the large democracies were taking drastic steps to preserve their way of life. Britain formed the National Government, France had the Popular Front, and we had the New Deal. Strong action and a steady hand were needed to maintain our system and Roosevelt was the right man at the right time. It isn't an insult to the country to suggest that we are susceptible to extremism. It was a danger everywhere, even in countries with strong democratic traditions. It would take a certain amount of arrogance to assume that we are inherently different.
Washerdryer:
BTW, what "pre-existing obligation to pay their taxes" are you talking about? The only action-compelling "threat of violence" I see is coming from the government. The "practical" New Deal argument as I understand it is that the goverment was justified in forcing redistribution backed by government force in order to avoid private violence in the form of massive social unrest. Public violence to prevent private violence. It can be persuasively argued that redistribution is a moral imperative, on consequentialist grounds. But it cannot be persuasively argued that redistribution is a practical imperative whether it is moral or not.
"I think most of the people who make this argument are, in fact, being sophistic; they aren't particularly interested in saving American capitalism, but they think that the people to whom they speak might be persuaded by this remarkably stupid and amoral argument. I have, obviously, a mixed opinion of the New Deal." Conrad Black is hardly uninterested in saving capitalism. If I remember correctly, all the promotional blurbs on the back cover are from prominent conservative thinkers, (George Will etc.)
There seems to be around here the idea that there is some kind of divine right of property. There is not such a thing. Somethijng is yours as long as you can defend it yourself , or pay somebody to do it (tribute to the wardlord or taxes to the goverment). Morality has nothing to do with it. French & russian royal families believed they had the divine right to rule, and look how that ended.
"There seems to be around here the idea that there is some kind of divine right of property. There is not such a thing. Somethijng is yours as long as you can defend it yourself , or pay somebody to do it (tribute to the wardlord or taxes to the goverment). Morality has nothing to do with it. French & russian royal families believed they had the divine right to rule, and look how that ended."
From our American perspective, it should seem obvious that foisting poor health coverage (or denying it altogether), allowing wages to stagnate and decay and mistreating/ ignoring/abusing/outright buggering your millions of workers might lead to those workers voting for a President who just might take a harsh approach with some businesses. Understanding cause and effect should be a conservative virtue, no?
I don't think it is necessarily immoral to redistribute. Money is just a way to track economic activity, if money isn't vital, perhaps it's best to move it so place it will actually be used. Maybe what we need is a wealth tax on money invested in treasuries and hard commodities.
Henry: Or, something is yours if you can kill or disable the person currently holding the "something" that you want, thus taking it from them, right?
Money going into, not invested in. That would be immoral, changing the rules after the fact.
All these are different ethically: 1) We can help our neighbors. 2) We can vote for politicians who promise to tax us to help our neighbors. 3) We can vote for politicians who promise to tax other people to help our neighbors. 4) Our neighbors can vote for politicians who promise to tax us to help them. 5) We can be in the business of advocating that politicians tax people to help our neighbors, whether or not the taxes are levied or anyone is actually helped. #1 is clearly ethical.
But I find this particular "logic" an unbelievably offensive slur against my country. I'm kind of stuck on this bit. Suggesting that one goal of the New Deal was to avoid civil disorder is a slur? Who's supposed to be insulted here?
In other words, Megan's conflict depends upon the proposition that it is immoral to redistribute. This is totally wrong. "This means, it seems to me, that you can either claim that the New Deal is a sort of broad spectrum Dangeld, or that it is a moral necessity, but not both." The analogies have been an attempt to understand this purported conflict. E.g., if paying taxes isn't immoral, why does the fact that a person is doing it because of their fear of government violence make it immoral.
Let them eat cake.
Actually, it seems that the system has rewarded some people far, far, far more than what they are truly worth, and contariwise, it has rewarded a great many people much less than their commensurate productivity. So there is nothing at all wrong, morally or otherwise if 're'-distribution allocates resources the way they purportedly should have been allocated. No millions or billions for 'Chainsaw' Al, or Mozillo, or . . . you get the picture.
Thank you all for a most enlightening discussion! While I agree that it isn't an optimistic view, drawing a circle around the United States and saying that (as The Lounsbury had it) they are somehow inoculated against violent uprising is to ignore the history of assassination, domestic terrorism, gun-related death, and the links between entrenched poverty and violence. It is not particularly offensive to suggest that everyone has a breaking point, nor to suggest that a fairly homogenised population might arrive at that point more or less as one. Assuming that a failed America would be in no way similar to a failed African state is winningly patriotic, but perhaps a teeny bit naive. Do I think it'll happen any time soon, or that it is a sensible way to promote a New New Deal? No. Absolutely not. What is offensive is not that Americans might reach the point of revolution, but rather that it will come when Mom and Dad can't afford to buy little Timmy a PS3. I wholeheartedly support Megan in the belief that humanity (not just America!) is a little more resilient than that. What I have to say about the justification of New Deal projects will irritate Libertarians everywhere, so, in advance, my apologies. People are lazy. If they see a chance to make more money for less work and defer the less tangible costs (environmental, a collapse in infrastructure, etc) they'll do it. Telemarketing, spam, useless USB powered gizmos, they are the economic equivalent of empty calories. If you hire a personal trainer to remind you of your fitness goals, can you blame them for doing their job?
WasherDryer: I'm not sure we're saying different things. I'm saying that Megan is essentially manufacturing the conflict by positing that redistribution to prevent social unrest is immoral. Megan's error is that her premise is a conclusion and she doesn't argue for it. If you disagree with her premise--on consequentialist grounds, for example--then there is no conflict. What is right also is what is practical if you reject the premise/conclusion that redistribution to prevent violence is immoral. On the other hand, it does not do any good to claim that the "practical" argument is not related to the "moral" argument. Indeed, the "practical" argument is a normative argument, or else it has no weight. Finally, if you accept Megan's premise/conclusion that redistribution is immoral (even if it is narrowly applied only to redistribution as violence prevention), then you cannot make a pragmatic argument for the concededly immoral course of action with a straight face. Right?
Work from the assumption that private property is a legal invention, promising government action to ensure sole usage rights to some material object, that is vital to human freedom. Assume that, in a particular version that does not admit disproportionate taxation, they're doomed to collapse and result in no one having private property rights at all. FDR brought a modified version that allowed for disproportionate taxation (which already existed anyways, to a lesser extent), while still keeping the core essence of giving a private user sole use of the material object over other individuals. If that's the relevant part that is important to human freedom, then FDR surely deserves credit for protecting freedom. Of course, that's just restating what happened in terms of property as a convenient legal fiction that furthers human freedom. If you buy into the idea that property rights per se are tantamount to liberty, then of course you'll take issue with it. Then again, I've always had a hard time seeing how someone equating property with freedom can believe in taxation of any sort.
Trashing FDR and the New Deal - and they say the Republican Party is out of ideas! I don't see what any of this has to do with the current financial crisis seeing as how the only "New-New Deal" thus far enacted has been to bail out a bunch of incompetent MBA hacks, debt hustlers and hedge fund failures who, while holding up Atlas Shrugged as their talisman managed to drive institutions such as Citbank to the bottom of the ocean. The New Deal left behind such engines of future prosperity as the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority. The 2008 bailouts give us Megan McArdle saying, 'well, it didn't do a damn thing, but it was worth a shot'. Seriously - conservative libertarianism is a joke.
Given what was happening around the world at that time the threat of a communist revolution had to be taken seriously.I would argue that Marxism was the dominant economic philosophy during the interwar period. Many people at that time believed that maintaining a global capitalist system required the perpetual marginalization of industrial workers. The communist revolution in Russia led to a proliferation of communist parties throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America many of which would eventually seize power. Fascism also arose out of the same Marxist worldview. The coalition of extreme nationalists, the church, business owners and wealthy landowners that supported is basically a mirror image of the elements of society that embraced Communism. The Social Democratic model that emerged in Western Europe and to a lesser extent in the USA was a necessary development given the global climate. By defying the Marxist notion that a capitalist society required a subjugated working class. Given the global context, FDR shouldn't be viewed as a singular hero who saved America from communist revolution. Instead the new deal was one part of a trend towards social democracy that affected many countries. While the US may not have been vulnerable to a violent revolution it is highly likely that some additional countries would have fallen under communism or fascism without the rise of social welfare states
Re: Redistribution cannot be pragmatically required if it immoral since morals trump pragmatism. Not necessarily. There is such a thing as a "necessary evil" even if moral purists have fits over the idea. Consider: slaughtering innocent people is never moral, but in wartime that inevitably happens and yes, some wars must be fought.
@Henry You are correct. Your property is yours only so long as you protect it. People pay taxes to government to secure protection for their property - It's actually the only reason government should exist. However, that doesn't change the question: Is it moral for the government to use violence (the only power government has) to take some of your property and give it to someone else in the name of protecting the rest of your property? @ScentOfViolets Your first sentence is correct. Your second...not so much. In any market that is controlled by a central authority, there are idiots and criminals who make more money than they should. They do it using graft and corruption - Hookers and blow for regulators and politicans makes many people with inferior products and services rich and protected. By the same token, there are honest and hardworking people who get shafted because they refuse to play the "hookers and blow" game. Unfortunately, we find that hookers and blow not only buys the criminal a market for their product and service, it gets them protection from taxation as well. Taxes on protected entities are either outright non-existent, or riddled with loopholes allowing them to escape payment. The taxes they *are* required to pay are merely passed on to consumers as part of the cost of their business or service. And when the dust clears, the honest man is the only one paying the taxes - both directly through taxation and hidden in the inflation and added costs for products and services. So you have criminals at the top getting rich using regulatory schemes and laws purchased from the politicans and regulators passing on all the taxation to the honest people in the middle who pay more than fifty percent of their income in direct and hidden taxes to ensure that the crimnals on the bottom don't revolt and kill them.
Paying people not to kill us is immoral? If so, then our approach in Iraq and the "success" of thre "surge" have been immoral.
Nick2, that is a simply outstanding summation of our political/economic culture, except that it must be noted that a substantial percentage of the people in the "middle" are no more honest than those at the top or the bottom. Most of them have grey hair.
ScentOfViolets: "Actually, it seems that the system has rewarded some people far, far, far more than what they are truly worth, and contariwise, it has rewarded a great many people much less than their commensurate productivity." As I pointed out to you before, there is no useful measure of individual productivity across the economy (1). In fact, I think you will be hard pressed to define it in a meaningful way. You have no way of knowing whether or not people are being rewarded commensurately with their productivity, and you know this. Myself and others have explained this to you. So why do you keep repeating this claim? (1) Just to avoid confusion, we can and do measure other things on the individual level, like wages and working hours.
Given what was happening around the world at that time the threat of a communist revolution had to be taken seriously. Which countries went communist in the 1930s? Which countries in the English-speaking world went communist ever? Or is America for some reason more likely to turn into a totalitarian dictatorship than, e.g. Canada or New Zealand?
ad, Opposition to communism was the glue that held together the coalition of Nationalists, Church leaders and business owners who supported the fascists. Communists and Fascists both accepted the same assumptions about the nature of the economy. The conflict between these ideologies played out throughout Europe, the Spanish Civil War being an obvious example. It was only because of Fascist opposition that Communism wasn't much more widespread before WWII. During the 20's and 30's many communist parties that would gain power after WWII emerged. However, both systems were sharp rejections of the democracy and market capitalism. The Swedish Social Democrat government in 1932 was the first democratic government to have any success fighting the great depression. At a time when it was clear that the economic orthodoxy was wrong, social welfare systems, including the New Deal, were necessary to dampen the appeal of totalitarian regimes. There is no reason to place the US or the English speaking countries in a bubble apart from the rest of the world.
Re: Is it moral for the government to use violence (the only power government has) to take some of your property and give it to someone else in the name of protecting the rest of your property? Yes, unless you are a total anarchist and do not believe we should have either a military or a police force.
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Well, the more charitable interpretation of this pro-New Deal argument is the FDR saved us from people like Huey Long (or Juan Peron), who would have immensely damaged the economy, but who (at least in Long's case) did not particularly intend to obtain power through violent or extra-legal means.
Posted by y81 | November 25, 2008 12:02 PM