Re: Funding Priorities to Please Us All (fwd)

["ÁÎ×Ó¹â HenryC.K.Liu ¹ù¤l¥ú" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> 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.

Your points are very valid.  There are however two separate perspectives: that
of a consultant (to improve) and that of the theorist (to dispense truth). My
statement was cast more in the former role.  In the US context, with its
unique political and economic systems, history had shown that growth with
redistribution has more than once saved capitalism.  Mild doses of socialism
have been the penicilline of the virus of capitalist excess.  Also, the
evolution of finance capitlism from industrial capitalism requires a
reapplication, if not rethink, of marxist notions.

>
> >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.
>

Not quite.  In absolute terms, the poorest American has an income (even
purchasing power) higher than the middle class of many other economies.
Poverty is a social state as well as a financial level.  Its characteristics
include measures of social disillusionment, hope, rage, rejection of
establishment justice, etc.  In addition to raising income (which is very
inportant), reducing the gap between social norm and social percetion of
reality is equally important.  In that sense, the right's emphasis of equality
of opportunity is valid, provided it is not used as a excuse to tolerate
absolute poverty.

>
> >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.
>

Philosphically yes.  Operationally no.

>
> >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.
>

True.  But in the American context, revolutionary expectation is the romance.
The problem with the Clinton prosperity is that wealth polarization increases
faster than the rising tide.  That is not progress and it has economic and
political costs that will have to be paid down the road.

Henry