Re: Funding Priorities to Please Us All (fwd)

[xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Henry wrote:

>A case can be made that growth produces a non zero sum game of
>distribution.

just a minor point, Henry...

Although I am not fully convinced by your statement, Roemer makes a
similar argument by revisiting Rawls' theory of distributive justice to
argue that capitalism should not necessarily be a zero-sum game. AS you
probably know, Roemer redefines Marxist theory of exploitation not in
terms of surplus transfer, but in terms of unequal access to the means of
production and external resources. Other social liberals like Rawls and
Dworkin, Roemer works without resort to Marxist egalitarian denial of
moral right to property ownership. If we rectify the circumstanmces of
people and loss suffered by them as a result of unequal distribution of
"property", Roemer argues, there is no reason that people won't be better
off in a hypothetical situation of distributive equality.

However egalitarian it sounds, Roemer's twist of radicalizing liberal
distribution (formal equality) seems paradoxical to me. That is also why
new socialists arguments seem suspect to me too. On the one hand,
Roemer criticizes Marx's focus on surplus on the grounds that it
emphasises too narrowly on labor as "self-ownership" and presupposes that
people are and should be entitled to the products of their labor. On the
other hand, Roemer intentionally or sub-consciously misreads Marx for he
can not see that it was in fact this "abstract labor" Marx was
criticizing--the liberal notion that people produce as "individuals". As
we know, Marx refers  to Adam Smith as the Luther of political economy. He
finds his identification of labor as the source of man's self-creation
correct, yet incomplete. Too quickly welcoming neo-classical economy,
Roemer can not see Marx's main argument here: people never produce as
individuals, but only as members of a definite forms of society, and only
as personafications and bearers of social relations under particular
historical circumstances. There is no hypothetical type of society which
is not founded upon a set of relations of production. We start with the
concrete, historical and empirical, and end in the abstract, not vice
versa. As if MArx is not saying all these, Roemer mistakenly attributes to
Marx what he sees in radical individualist type libertarians. New
socialists unfairly read Marx as if Marx has an essentialist notion of
labor and atomistic theory of labor value. Basically, I support their
critique of new-right wing economists, but resort to Rawlsian liberal
justice to criticize libertarians by finding unsubstantiated similarities
between them and MArx is not a remedy to problems of capitalism here.

>Let us recognize that while poverty is an
>absolute enemy, wealth is not at all an enemy.


No, wealth is the source of national power (I am just kidding!!)

>It is not revolutionary to make anyone poor, including the rich.
>The purpose of even the most radical revolution is not to create more
>poor people by making the rich poor.

may be, you are talking about socialism for middle classes here.


>There are two ways to redistribute wealth.  One is the Robin Hood way:
>taking from the rich to give to the poor, without changing the
>structural causes of poverty.  Another way is to make the poor as rich
>as the rich.

they are essentially the same, Henry.

>To achieve this second way, economics has to abandon the principle of
>scarcity and adopt a principle of abundance.

I am emphatic about the need for abundance. however, we should not be so
optimistic and utopian about it. otherwise, we may be falling into the
problem of romanticizing socialism which was not Marx's intention.. for
example, certain resources are inherently limited (eg., space), and recent
problems like enviromentall crises have revealed the emprical limits to
other resources we depend on (depleting oil reserves). Moreover, there is
no guarantee that cartain kinds of inequalities, harms and conlflicts
won't arise with an abundence of certain resources. who knows? In my view,
the problem is capitalism and the class system it entails, not resources
per se.



Mine