Who Has a Locke on Natural Rights?

It is clear now. He who has the most property wins. Life IS a Monopoly Game in America and perhaps throughout the globe. The object is to amass the best pieces of property, develop their potential worth, and rent them out at good rates of return. If you don’t have property, you lose. When Jefferson threw in the Pursuit of Happiness and took out Possessions from the Declaration of Independence, he assumed mention of possessions was unnecessary. After all, the founding fathers were all propertied gentry, and they were the only folks that counted, then and even now, as it turns out. It seems English philosopher John Locke’s (1632-1704) list of natural rights was right on: Life, Health, Liberty, and Possessions (Property).
We keep hearing about the widening gulf between rich and poor or between whites and people of color, and clearly the Republican strategy to reward propertied people with even more property is winning over any other strategy out there. For instance, while the banks got bailed out for their unfortunate investments in mortgage-backed securities, which were none other than risky loans to people who could ill-afford the houses they were enticed to buy with sub-prime mortgages, the poor suckers who took out the loans suffered while the bankers made out like bandits. “Too Big to Fail” was the mantra rationalization for the big bailouts while “Too Small to Win” was the fate for the soon property-less masses who suffered foreclosure.
The Republicans are making sure right now that the upper 2% of income earners in America are protected from any compromise of their disproportionate earnings by more graduated taxation while the poor folks try to survive on the cheapest food available: fat and fast. (There goes Locke’s inclusion of health as a natural right.) The Republican argument is that increased taxes would shrink jobs, but the fact is that throughout the past three years job growth has stagnated under lower taxation because most companies have outsourced jobs overseas. The holdings of cash that the typical multinational corporation once residing in the United States keeps abroad for fear of having to pay American taxes is a testament to the shift of production away from America and to foreign sites. Moreover, the stockholders are first in line to receive the rewards of profit-making while workers are at best secondary.
Republicans are interested only in preserving the property of the rich, which they assume is rightfully earned. In fact, those so-called earnings are because of the systematic, deliberate laws hammered out over the course of history that preserve the holdings of the rich whether they are tax laws, property laws, or stockholder rights. For example, mineral rights law (split estate) which gives mineral rights owners the advantage of being able to drill for natural gas within 350 feet of your house beneath your surface property is typical of the advantage the corporate rich have over regular folks. You have no say in whether or not they can drill there. They simply can by law.
Now the Democrats are shifting further and further toward the right in order to show some attempt to reduce the truly alarming national debt as well as the equally alarming rate of debt increase plaguing our national economy. But to put the burden of correction on the poor and middle class while the rich continue to distance themselves from the masses economically is the most egregious injustice imaginable. There is no trickle down thanks to corporate labor outsource policy, so taxation became the only way left to create jobs in America and that hasn’t worked either. The private sector simply won’t do it. And there is no incentive to do it.
What we have today is the corporate equivalent of the rich individuals who once upon a time squirreled their fortunes away in Swiss bank accounts. The wealth of America is off-shore, and many corporations are unwilling to bring their money back to the States.
If we lowered corporate taxes (we have one of the highest rates in the developed world at 35%) to something more competitive, would that solve the problem? Perhaps it would. Perhaps more money would flow into the Treasury coffers because corporations would import their profits more readily. So why is that idea not on the table? Why is it all about cutting spending?
But no matter how low we lower corporate taxes, will corporations not continue to seek out places to do business in the developing world where labor is cheaper and tax rates are still even lower? Of course they will because corporations, almost by definition (there are exceptions) are loyal to stockholders first and countries of origin when it is profitable. There is no loyalty unless a particular owner or CEO decides location of factories does not simply go to the lowest bidder. Her decision may include some sense of loyalty to national pride or her particular community. That used to be the case and still is to a select few corporate leaders such as the CEOs of Lincoln Electric or Smuckers.
The irony is that public ownership often brings a diffusion of responsibility and ethics because the ownership itself is so technically broad that CEOs can hide behind a veil of principles that say maximizing profit is all-important. To try to satisfy particular constituencies with other agendas is simply too difficult. Unless the stockholders themselves voice alternative priorities the CEO may pursue, the default priority is always profit. If we can’t hold our politicians accountable to serve the greater good, how can we possibly hold CEOs accountable when their “natural” priority is sheer profit?
Of course profit enables purchase which results in property: real estate, cars, and other stuff. The stock market has rebounded handsomely since 2008. The job market has stagnated. The purchasing power of the propertied classes has grown; the purchasing power of the working class has shrunk.
The fact is politicians, no matter what party, are propertied people. There is not a truly poor or actual working class person among them. It is in their self-interest, therefore, to preserve the status quo, to preserve the propertied privilege of the few over the many. Locke was more down to earth than Jefferson, more pragmatic it turns out. The Pursuit of Happiness is an ephemeral thing; property, on the other hand, is a real estate. As new politicians they may enter the political arena with the idealism of Jefferson, but sooner or later they will succumb to the reality of property as the driving force overpowering any other nod to virtue or altruism.
Therefore, we will continue to be a country not for the people or by the people; we will continue to be first and foremost a country for the propertied. Locke had a lock on what would become reality in America long before Jefferson sat down to write the Declaration of Independence. History has shown that no matter how man tries to move mankind in the direction of equality, property will always be the great separator of even those who allegedly were created equal.

Can You Afford Republican Principles?
By
Bruce A. Blodgett

When I see Republican Eric Cantor (aptly named) singing the tired and downright dangerous song “No New Taxes” even when the majority of the country is behind the idea of restoring a graduated tax code that only barely begins to address the only seemingly sustainable aspect of the economy: the ever-widening gap in income between rich and poor, I think of George Bernard Shaw’s character Alfred Doolittle of Pygmalion. Doolittle is trapped into middle class morality at the end of the play because, for a lark, Professor Higgins had suggested to Ezra D, Wannafeller (thinly disguised John D. Rockefeller) that the most original moralist in England is none other than Doolittle. As a result, Doolittle is “forced” to accept a generous stipend for a half a dozen lectures a year on behalf of the Wannafeller Moral Reform World League and become one who is “touched” by everyone rather than the one who “touches.” Before this all happened, Doolittle was a mere dustman who was free and easy.
Eric Cantor has become spokesman for the self-appointed moral reform society of America which is an apt description for the Republican Party. Unlike Robin Hood, this moral reform society wants to make sure that no matter what happens, the most important principles of property, wealth, and privilege must be preserved at any cost. If the poor suffer, so be it; if the old suffer, so be it; if the struggling masses yearning to be free suffer, so be it. What matters most is preservation or even enhancement of the way of life for the few at the expense of the many. Opportunity is for the quick and the resourced. The rest can live on the trickle down crumbs that haphazardly spill from the pockets of the rich. There is also a religious phalanx of the party that is pro-choice for light bulbs but anti-choice on abortion.
The main difference between Cantor and Doolittle is that Doolittle is a self-proclaimed member of the undeserving poor (before Wannafeller intercedes) while Cantor is a member of the self-appointed deserving rich. In Doolittle’s world there are the deserving poor, undeserving poor, and the middle class; in Cantor’s world, there appear to be simply the deserving rich, the struggling middle class, and the undeserving poor.

Doolittle sets forth his philosophy in Act II:
When asked by Pickering : “Have you no morals , man?”
Doolittle replies: “Can’t afford them, Governor.”
He continues to explain:
“I’m one of the undeserving poor: that’s what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he’s up agen middle class morality all the time. If there’s anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story” ‘You’re undeserving so you can’t have it.’ But my needs is as great the most deserving widow’s that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don’t need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don’t eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement cause I’m a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything….I ain’t pretending to be deserving. I’m undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and that’s the truth.”
When Pickering suggests Doolittle will make bad use of the five pounds he has asked for the sale of his daughter Liza to Higgins, Doolittle replies with a shake of the head at middle class morality: “Not me Governor, so help me I won’t. Don’t you be afraid that I’ll save it and spare it and live idle on it. There won’t be a penny left of it by Monday. I’ll have to go to work as if I’d never had it. It won’t pauperize me, you bet. Just one good spree for myself and the missus, giving pleasure to ourselves and employment to others, and satisfaction to you to think its not been throwed away. You couldn’t spend it better.”
In the next part of the dialogue Doolittle refuses to take ten pounds offered by Higgins because it is too much money and would instill prudence at the expense of happiness. What Shaw is showing is how some self-denigrating poor may actually feel and why they remain mired in poverty; how the inevitable anti-materialistic counter-culture of a particular generation thinks; and at the same time Shaw is questioning the whole idea of the accumulation of wealth producing happiness and what truly and immediately provides employment for others, namely, consumerism.
Eric Cantor’s world is middle class morality on steroids. Undeserving rich is practically an oxymoron. The only possible people in this category would be those found guilty of breaking the law: the Ponzi- schemers, the Mafia, and the insider traders would be the candidates for this rarefied category in Cantor’s world. The deserving rich is almost a tautology. Of course the rich are deserving. Their wealth is a measure of their virtue. It’s been that way since the advent of capitalism. Never mind how the money is obtained, so long as the process is legally protected. If you have accumulated considerable resources, you are in a much stronger position to hold your position because you can afford the best legal defense of both your monetary and schematic means.
If a private equity firm can buy a company, squeeze more profit for investors at the expense of workers’ jobs, then in the name of efficiency that’s perfectly legal and moral in Cantor’s world. For example, if a Wall Street mogul could somehow take a company like Lincoln Electric which guarantees employment for workers in return for meritocratic piece-work wages, that would be just because it would be legal. We are a nation of laws, and just because the law favors the rich and powerful over the little guy, that’s just fine.
So long as Cantor sings “No New Taxes” for the upper 2% of incomes in America, you can bet that not much will change in terms of relative opportunity in America. The divide between rich and poor will continue to mirror the divide in opportunity access for rich and poor as well. The only means available for the redistribution of wealth and therefore opportunity in America is taxation. Industry has proven, by and large, not to be interested in providing the tools by which opportunity may spread across the classes in America. Therefore, only government will. May it do so now by providing funds for retooling the American workforce through grants to community colleges and technical schools utilizing income from increased taxes on the very rich.
We cannot afford to preserve the status quo that enables the rich to become richer and the less fortunate to stagnate. The Republican principles that they hold so dear are killing this culture slowly but surely. Like Alfred Doolittle, we cannot afford the principles of privilege and never could. We have a new generation of Robber Barons who hide on Wall Street and manipulate the markets to their benefit at the expense of the masses. If that is legal, it sure isn’t justice.

Our Puritan Legacy

While reading Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline, I began to realize something startling: Puritanism is alive and well in America. It takes many forms today, but the essential spirit of it is preserved. It allows various groups to attach themselves to beliefs so rigid and adamant that no facts or contrary information need apply. These groups are posited on the right and the left of any issue and inevitably suffer the hubris of certainty. In all cases they are truly anti-scientific in process and instead begin with self-appointed truths rather than hypotheses. Hypotheses are for pragmatists and other promoters of relativism.
On the left there are puritanical environmentalists who would rather see people starve than introduce genetically engineered crops because they are “unnatural” or who would ban nuclear energy in favor of renewable sources such as solar and wind even though solar and wind will assure a continued gap-filling dependence on burning coal that will kill tens of thousands more people than nuclear energy ever has or will.
On the right we have “Gospel of Wealth” true believers who insist that the Market will solve all economic problems and continue us down the road to progress if we can only free it from intervention by evil government. And we have true believer religious fanatics who are certain what God wants us to do and not do who are perhaps the most direct descendants of Puritanism. Finally, there are those who refuse to believe in climate change because Al Gore does.
In either case, the trial and error shiftiness of science with its hypotheses and murky data are not to be trusted. Science is just too full of doubt and uncertainty to warrant serious consideration, unless it reinforces one of our existing beliefs. Then its evidence is selectively plucked from the tree of knowledge, polished until it gules, and presented as an additional commandment, even when additional data and syntheses suggest that the original hypothesis was wrong.
For example, genetic engineering, the process of which actually does occur in nature, is considered evil by the puritan strain of environmentalists who insist that hybridization or cross breeding is the only natural way to develop pest resistant crops. They are so married to their idea of organic, they cannot entertain the notion that genetic engineered food is safer and less risky scientifically and rationally than hybridization is. Hybridization is the equivalent of a sawed-off shotgun approach to advancement as opposed to engineering which is more the rifle and scope approach. (Brand uses the analogy of marrying a whole village as opposed to marrying a spouse without in-laws)
On this 4th of July, as we celebrate our independence from the British, perhaps we can consider gaining independence from the certainty of belief and submit to the slow, deliberate process of science. Just as we get frustrated with democracy at times because we have to put up with all kinds of theories and notions that get bandied about in the general discourse of our nation, we get frustrated with science’s grinding, deliberate method. And yet it is the best tool we have yet developed to move away from ignorance and toward truth. If it does not produce ready answers to everything, we should still listen to what it has to offer, which is far better than some undocumented, untested belief that we latch on to at our probable peril.
The loudest voices preach; the quiet ones consider.