The Quest for Cosmic Justice

  The very attractiveness of cosmic justice in the close personal relations and mutually felt reciprocal obligations within a family makes it a seductive danger as a government policy of “entitlements” (implying no reciprocal obligations) in a large, impersonal society. The alternative to political crusades and government programs is not that we should “do nothing,” as it is sometimes thoughtlessly phrased. There has never been a moment in the entire history of the United States when nothing was being done to offset the undeserved misfortunes of the poor and the disadvantaged. Indeed, as Milton Friedman has pointed out, the period of the greatest opposition to the role of government in the economy in the nineteenth century was also a period of an unprecedented growth of private philanthropy. It was also a period of private social uplift efforts by volunteers all across America. Such efforts, incidentally, had a dramatic effect in reducing crime and other social ills such as alcoholism, so these were hardly ineffectual gestures. Indeed, they were far more effective than the more massive government-run programs that began in the 1960s.

  Organized philanthropy and individual efforts to help those born into less fortunate circumstances have been as widespread among those who have opposed political “solutions” as among those who have promoted them, even if the former have not paraded their compassion as much as the latter. Only when Adam Smith’s personal records were opened after his death was it discovered how much of his modest wealth had been given away to help others. Milton Friedman has set up a foundation to promote school vouchers, in order to try to rescue children whose parents are too poor to enable them to escape the inferior education they receive in public schools. Numerous other conservative individuals have done similar things, including those whose fortunes went into the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations, where others later changed the focus to promotion of a very different vision from those of the donors. Such plain facts may be surprising to some only because they do not fit the prevailing vision, however widely or however long they have fit the facts.

  The question is not whether undeserved misfortunes shall be addressed. The question is whether they will be addressed politically, rather than in the numerous other ways in which they have been, are being, and will be addressed, usually without the high costs, counterproductive results, and dangers to the whole fabric of society that the politicizing of such misfortunes has produced repeatedly in countries around the world. At a minimum, it is necessary to understand the distinction between establishing prospective rules for the behavior of flesh-and-blood human beings toward one another and trying ad hoc to retrospectively adjust the cosmos to our tastes.

  Not only does cosmic justice differ from traditional justice, and conflict with it, more momentously cosmic justice is irreconcilable with personal freedom based on the rule of law. Traditional justice can be mass-produced by impersonal prospective rules governing the interactions of flesh-and-blood human beings, but cosmic justice 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 to fit the vision of the power-holders. Merely the power to select beneficiaries is an enormous power, for it is also the power to select victims—and to reduce both to the role of supplicants of those who hold this power.

  One of the crucial differences between political and non-political ways of dealing with undeserved misfortunes is that the non-political approaches do not acquire the fatal rigidities of law nor require either the vision or the reality of helplessness and dependency. Nor does it require the demonization of those who think otherwise or the polarization of society. Moreover, the amount of help and the circumstances of help can be tailored to the individual circumstances of the recipients in a way that is not possible when the rigidities of law create “rights” to what others have earned, independent of one’s own behavior or the role of that behavior in the misfortunes being suffered.

  Most important of all, attempts at bettering the lot of society in general, as well as the unfortunate in particular, need not take the form of direct aid at all. Rather, these efforts can more effectively take the form of creating economic and other circumstances in which individuals can themselves find “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Such an approach does not seek to feed the hungry but to establish conditions in which no one has to be hungry in the first place, circumstances in which there are jobs available for those willing to work. Its emphasis is not on helping those in poverty but on getting them out of poverty and preventing others from falling into poverty.

  Economic development has been the most successful of all anti-poverty policies. It was not very long ago, as history is measured, when such things as oranges or cocoa were the luxuries of the rich and when it was considered an extravagance for the President of the United States to have a bathtub with running water installed in the White House. Within the twentieth century, such things as automobiles, telephones, and refrigerators went from being luxuries of the rich to being common among the general population, all within the span of one generation.

  Material well-being is of course not everything. Justice matters as well. But, whatever one’s vision of a just world, what is crucial is to recognize that (1) different visions lead to radically different practical policies, that (2) we shall continue to talk past one another so long as we do not recognize that cosmic justice changes the very meaning of the plainest words, and that (3) whatever we choose to do, it should be based on a clear understanding of the costs and dangers of the actual alternatives, not simply the heady feeling of exaltation produced by particular words or visions. Recognizing that many people “through no fault of their own” have windfall losses, while those same people—and others—also have windfall gains, the time is long overdue to recognize also that taxpayers through no fault of their own have been forced to subsidize the moral adventures which exalt self-anointed social philosophers. Victims of violent crimes have been forced to bear even more painful losses from those same moral adventures.

  There is no question that a world in which cosmic justice prevailed would be a better world than a world limited to traditional justice. However, it is one thing to rail against the fates, but no one should confuse that with a serious critique of existing society, much less a basis for constructing a better one.

  There is an ancient fable about a dog with a bone in his mouth. He looked down into a pool of water and saw a reflection that looked to him like another dog with another bone—and that other bone seemed to be larger than his bone. Determined to get the other bone instead, the dog opened his mouth and prepared to jump into the water. This of course caused his own bone to drop into the water and be lost. Cosmic justice is much like that illusory bone and it too can cause us to lose what is attainable in quest of the unattainable.

  II

  The Mirage of Equality

  Many a man has cherished for years as his hobbysome vague shadow of an idea, too meaninglessto be positively false ...

  —CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE

  Equality, like justice, is one of the most fateful—and undefined—words of our times. Whole societies can be, and have been, jeopardized by the passionate pursuit of this elusive notion. There is nothing wrong with equality in itself. In fact, there is much that is attractive about the idea. At the very least, glaring inequalities are unattractive, even for those who accept them as either inevitable, like death, or as the lesser of alternative evils. But to equate the attractiveness of the concept with a mandate for public policy aimed at equality is to assume that politicizing inequality is free of costs and dangers, when in fact such politicization can have very high costs and very grave dangers. The abstract desirability of equality, like the abstract desirability of immortality, is beside the point when choosing what practical course of action to follow. What matters is what we are prepared to do, to risk, or to sacrifice, in pursuit of what can turn out to be a mirage.

  Processes designed to create gr
eater equality cannot be judged by that goal but must be examined in terms of the processes created in pursuit of that goal. It is the nature of these processes—including their addictiveness and the never-ending strife they can engender if equality proves to be impossible to achieve—which creates the dangers. In short, the problem is with the mirage, not with the realization of an idea that seems unlikely ever to be realized.

  MEANINGS OF EQUALITY

  One of the reasons why equality may be impossible to achieve is that merely defining it opens up a bottomless pit of complications.

  Numbers may be equal (2 + 3 = 5) because they have only one dimension, magnitude. But equality among multidimensional entities, even inanimate and abstract entities like the Gross National Product, may be impossible to define—much less achieve—when one nation’s GNP includes much more of products A, B, and C, while another nation’s GNP includes much more of products X, Y, and Z. Only by finding some common denominator that can be applied to these disparate assortments is it possible to say which country has the higher total GNP—and even then, this common denominator may be so arbitrary that it cannot command the acquiescence of those whose definition is different, and who therefore cannot regard equality as defined by this arbitrary standard as being anything other than inequality by the standard they prefer.

  In the case of determining which country has a higher Gross National Product, the first country may have a higher GNP if the common denominator is the price of goods as measured by using official exchange rates, while the second country may have a higher GNP if the test is which country could actually purchase all of the other country’s GNP in the international marketplace and still have something left over. By the first criterion, Japan has a higher per capita output than the United States but, by the second criterion, the United States has a 25 percent higher per capita output than Japan.1

  Since human beings are even more multidimensional, defining equality among them becomes even more problematical and ultimately arbitrary, quite aside from the subsequent difficulties of achieving whatever equality might be defined.

  Economic equality, for example, may be achievable only by political measures which require vast concentrations of power in a relatively few hands in government—and even this momentous exchange of economic inequality for political inequality may leave untouched the vast spectrum of other inequalities in intelligence, talent, physical appearance, charm, articulation, etc., which may have more influence on many individuals’ prospects of happiness than the economic inequalities that have been addressed at such high cost. However, since economic inequalities are a central focus of those seeking a more egalitarian society, it may be useful to explore some of the difficulties in merely defining and determining how much economic inequality exists already, quite aside from the costs and dangers in trying to change the economic system in some fundamental way, in hopes of more egalitarian results.

  Economic Equality and Inequality

  Ironically, economic inequalities, which are widely regarded as far more serious than inequalities in sports, for example, are far less well documented or even well defined. It has long been a common practice in sports statistics to follow the same individual over a period of years, but this is a relatively new departure in statistics on income inequalities. Even now, most of the statistics that are thrown around concerning “the rich” and “the poor” are aggregate statistics about income strata as of a given moment, even though most Americans do not stay in the same quintile of the income distribution for as long as a decade. Given this transience of membership in the various income brackets, it is possible to understand some otherwise puzzling statistics on the lifestyles of “the poor.”

  People in the bottom quintile of the income distribution spend nearly two dollars for every dollar of income they receive.2 Two-thirds of the statistically defined “poor” have airconditioning, and more than half own a car or truck. More than one-fourth of “the poor” own two cars and/or trucks and hundreds of thousands of them own homes costing more than $150,000.3 Puzzling as such anomalies might seem if we were discussing an enduring class of genuinely poor people, they are understandable in a statistical category which includes many transients. In any given year, many entrepreneurs may be earning not only low incomes but negative incomes as their businesses incur losses. Professionals, entertainers, and others may also suffer off years that leave them in the bottom 20 percent for that year. Many members of high school and college graduating classes enter the labor force in the middle of the year, earning only about half of what they will normally be earning when they work the entire year. Unless they find very high-paying jobs, their half-year earnings may well leave them statistically among “the poor.”

  Middle-class or wealthy people are unlikely to divest themselves of all the accoutrements of their lifestyle just because they are having an off year, especially when they have financial resources and/or credit that will see them through till their situation improves again. In short, many of those in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution are not “poor” in any meaningful sense and do not live like people who expect to remain there. Since only 3 percent of the American population remains in the bottom quintile for as long as eight years, it is hardly surprising that so many of those who are defined as being in poverty as of any given year do not act as if they are.

  In contrast to the carefulness with which sports statistics are kept, most statistics about “the poor” totally ignore their financial assets. Thus someone with a million dollars in the bank, or who owns property worth several million, will be counted among “the poor” during off years in his business or profession, when his revenues for a particular year barely exceed his costs for that particular year, or when his net income for that year may be negative. Politically or ideologically, of course, incentives are to maximize the number of people who can be counted as “poor,” in justification of movements or policies ostensibly aimed at reducing poverty.

  The radically different picture produced by following actual flesh-and-blood human beings over time, as distinguished from looking at statistics for a given moment in time, applies not only to “the poor” but also to “the rich.” The typical Hollywood movie version of the rich—someone born in a mansion, heir to a fortune, educated in snooty private schools and Ivy League colleges—bears little resemblance to actual millionaires studied in the 1990s—or in the 1890s, for that matter. A 1996 study found that four-fifths of all the American millionaires studied earned their fortunes within their own lifetimes. So did an 1892 study.4

  The social origins of a group of individuals with net worths of $10 million each or more was inadvertently revealed at a gathering sponsored by a financial organization, where exquisite food and drink had been prepared for a group more like the Hollywood millionaire or “the rich” of political rhetoric:

  To make sure our decamillionaire respondents felt comfortable during the interview, we rented a posh penthouse on Manhattan’s fashionable East Side. We also hired two gourmet food designers. They put together a menu of four pâtés and three kinds of caviar. To accompany this, the designers suggested a case of high-quality 1970 Bordeaux plus a case of a “wonderful” 1973 cabernet sauvignon. . . . During the subsequent two-hour interview, the nine decamillionaire respondents shifted constantly in their chairs. Occasionally they glanced at the buffet. But not one touched the pâté or drank our vintage wines. We knew they were hungry, but all they ate were the gourmet crackers.5

  These multimillionaires were clearly in an unfamiliar setting, based on a lifestyle very different from the way they actually lived. Unlike Hollywood movie millionaires, most American millionaires do not have a lavish lifestyle. The average cost of their automobiles—$24,800—is only a few thousand dollars more than that of the average American’s automobile and is well below the cost of such luxury cars as the Cadillac or Lexus.6 Twice as many American millionaires have a Sears credit card as have a credit card from Neiman Marcus.7 Most have never paid as much as $400
for a suit. For every millionaire who buys a $1,000 suit, six or more non-millionaires buy one.8

  In short, neither the rich nor the poor match the classic picture of a class into which people are born, live, and die—and in which they maintain a lifestyle born of that permanence. The persistently rich and persistently poor, put together, are not a major segment of the American population, though political issues are often framed as if they were. As already noted, only 3 percent of Americans remain in the bottom 20 percent for as long as eight years. Only 3.5 percent of the American population have a net worth of one million dollars or more,9 even though net worth literally includes the kitchen sink, as well as other household assets, clothing, pension fund equity, and other assets that could not be turned into ready cash. Nevertheless, even with this generous definition, both the rich and the poor—put together—add up to less than 7 percent of the American population. Nevertheless, great political and ideological battles are often fought as if these were the central groups in the society, rather than the other 93 percent who are in no meaningful sense either rich or poor.