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The Occupy Wall Street protest at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan has raised questions about wealth and inequality in the United States. But American culture has long approved of wealth produced through a strong work ethic and an entrepreneurial spirit.
Nonetheless, as someone from a conservative and libertarian background, I find that I am hearing too much talk about riches and not enough about values. It’s worth recalling why so many Americans have respected the wealthy in the first place.
The United States has always had a culture with a high regard for those able to rise from poverty to riches. It has had a strong work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit and has attracted ambitious immigrants, many of whom were drawn here by the possibility of acquiring wealth. Furthermore, the best approach for fighting poverty is often preciselynot to make fighting poverty the highest priority. Instead, it’s better to stress achievement and the pursuit of excellence, like a hero from an Ayn Rand novel. These are still at least the ideals of many conservatives and libertarians.
The egalitarian ideals of the left, which were manifest in a wide variety of 20th-century movements, have been wonderful for driving social and civil rights advances, and in these areas liberals have often made much greater contributions than conservatives have. Still, the left-wing vision does not sufficiently appreciate the power — both as reality and useful mythology — of the meritocratic, virtuous production of wealth through business. Rather, academics on the left, like the Columbia University economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Jeffrey D. Sachs among many others, seem more comfortable focusing on the very real offenses of plutocrats and selfish elites.
In short, the traditional, pro-wealth cultural vision has a great appeal for me. But I must admit that it is showing some wear and tear, which may partly be why the criticisms made by the demonstrators at Zuccotti Park have so much resonance.
The first problem is that higher status for the wealthy can easily lead to crony capitalism. In public discourse social status judgments are often crude. Critical differences are lost, like the distinction between earning money through production for consumers, as Apple has done, and earning money through the manipulation of government, which heavily subsidized agribusinesses have done. The relevant question, in my view, is not about how much you have earned but about how you have earned it. To further confuse matters, many right-wing Republican politicians supported corporate bailouts and corporate welfare far beyond what was necessary to stabilize the economy, in doing so further muddying the difference between productive and predatory capitalism.
The second problem is that many conservatives have become so attached to their cultural vision that they have ceded sound, technocratic reasoning to the left and center. For instance there is a common willingness among conservatives to defend the
Bush tax cuts, even though the evidence does not show much of an economic payoff.
Conservatives’ own culture, and the sheer desire to validate wealth, discipline and reward through law and the tax code, may have convinced them that the tax cuts have been beneficial. Measuring the actual effects of a tax cut isn’t always their main concern, even if they sometimes cite such numbers for rhetorical purposes. They feel in their bones that antagonism toward the rich is a dead end and so don’t favor highly progressive taxes.
That rhetorical line appeals to tax-weary voters, and seems part of a core conservative vision, but it is treading on dangerous ground because it moves away from testable theory: those tax cuts have already been in place for many years, yet it remains to be seen when or if they will spur the economy.
The third problem is that the pro-wealth cultural vision may be overly optimistic about human willingness to embrace the idea of responsibility.
Conservatives often believe that much of the poverty in the United States is an issue of insufficient discipline and conscientiousness. In this view, not all children grow up inculcated with a strong enough devotion to education and career. Yet how can such a culture of discipline be spread? At least as far back as John Bright, a classical liberal in Victorian England, it has been argued that society should grant respect to business creators and to stern parents who instill discipline. And today, conservatives often say that supportive economic policy, including lighter taxation and greater freedom from regulation, will support this vision.
BUT are such moves, when carried out, actually shifting popular culture in a properly disciplined and conscientious direction? Not really. In fact, in the United States, the red states, where conservatives are more powerful, tend to have higher divorce rates and weaker educational systems than do blue states. Many Americans have not been personally persuaded by all the talk about pro-wealth and pro-discipline norms, least of all in the geographic strongholds of conservatism.
The counterintuitive tragedy is this: modern conservative thought is relying increasingly on social engineering through economic policy, by hoping that a weaker social welfare state will somehow promote individual responsibility. Maybe it won’t.
For one thing, today’s elites are so wedded to permissive values — in part for their own pleasure and convenience — that a new conservative cultural revolution may have little chance of succeeding. Lax child-rearing and relatively easy divorce may be preferred by some high earners, but would conservatives wish them on society at large, including the poor and new immigrants? Probably not, but that’s often what we are getting.
In the future, complaints about
income inequality are likely to grow and conservatives and libertarians won’t have all the answers. Nonetheless, higher income inequality will increase the appeal of traditional mores — of discipline and hard work — because they bolster one’s chances of advancing economically. That means more people and especially more parents will yearn for a tough, pro-discipline and pro-wealth cultural revolution. And so they should.
It remains to be seen how many of us are up to its demands.
Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University.
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