A Brain dump on the role of Fairness in Society and history.

In Mr. Bush�s primetime press conference in April 2004, he used the word �free� �freedom� or �liberty� some 153 times while not using the words �fair� or �fairness� even once. Correspondingly the Press Corp used the words fair or fairness some 6 times, though only in the context of qualifying their questions, and free or freedom not once. In current debates, fairness gets short shrift: it is the forgotten principle in the American polity. History demonstrates � getting this straightened out is of supreme importance.

The lack of consideration given to the principle of fairness is at the source of the chasm between President Bush and our allies. The only time one seems to hear the term fairness out of republicans these days is when they are talking about the tax burden endured by the wealthy. Indeed, tax is one area that illustrates the importance of the principle of fairness, but history hardly takes Mr. Bush or the republicans� side.

Hindsight and Circumspect:
In his book �Structure and Change in Economic History� Professor of Economic History and Nobel Laureate Douglas North suggest that the Roman Empire fell because the wealthy and powerful used their influence to avoid paying taxes. Rome�s tactical advantage with its barbarian foes had narrowed. Rome therefore needed to enlarge its army to hold back the barbarians, enlarging the tax burden. The growing tax burden was pushed down upon the classes that could least afford it. The Empire collapsed and a 500 year Dark Age descended upon Europe.

The phenomina described here is not unique to Rome, various accounts along these lines describe the fall of ancient Egyptian kingdoms, ancient Athens, medeavel Japan, Byzantium, Hapsburg Spain, Ancien France.

About the time Europe was recovering from the dark ages a similar event occurred in medieval Japan. Japan balkanized into tiny state-lets ruled by thugs and itself, descended into a prolonged dark age.

In a somewhat similar vein, the Byzantine aristocracy, held back adequate funding for their military out of fear military pretensions. The self weakened Byzantine army lost to the Turks at the battle of Manzikurt forcing Byzantines to vacate Anatolia for the first time since the Persian Empire and precipitated the call for the crusades. Byzantium never fully recoverd. From that point on the Byzantine Empire began its contraction until its complete experation in 1453.

These societies did not fall to superior foes (and in the case of Japan there were none), they simply collapsed. What is striking is the totality of their collapse and that the people who had the most to loose by the state�s collapse, the wealthy and powerful, were also the ones that refused to pay to ensure the states perpetuation. (It takes a state apparatus to have property rights to protect and have wealth, poverty requires no state at all).

These cases illustrate the folly that befalls a society that becomes unhinged from the principle of fairness, where wealth becomes too concentrated and tax burdens mal-apportioned.

America was conceived in liberty and the liberal principle of freedom, most especially the principle of free contract. The principle of free contract lies at the nexus of liberal philosophy’s political and economic components – both, coincidentally, articulated in 1776 in the American Declaration of Independence (political liberalism) and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (economic liberalism) (That is, classical, philosophical liberalism [libertarianism], and the use here should not be confused with the current usage of the world “liberal” in current American political dialog).

In 1776, most persons earned their living through contractual relations between individuals bargaining on fairly even playing fields. In 1776 freedom was fairness. After 1862 and the invention of the modern, statutorily based limited liability corporation, the idea that freedom was fairness increasingly became incongruent.

The corporation was a fantastic innovation: a financial cooperative that facilitated increases in productivity where economy and organization of scale were an important factor – that is, where sized mattered more than individualism. Corporations quickly came to deliver goods and services at an undreamed of level of utility. But the corporation also had a downside, it distorted what had once been a fairly balanced bargaining playing field on which contractual relations had been negotiated in favor of the corporation. Individuals increasingly bargained with powerful corporations for their earnings. Size gave Corporations bargaining power disparity over the individual. In a society so thoroughly based on free contractual relations, the playing field was no longer level, and society soon became distorted by disparity in wealth. America experienced the gilded age with unheard of concentrations of both wealth and squalor, a characteristic that permeated the entire western world until World War I.

This period, from 1862 through 1914 represents the first global age, liberalism�s high tide. Parliamentary constitutional government existed everywhere, including China, Japan, Russia and Germany. The strains of World War I triggered the collapse of liberal systems (especially the liberal economic system in 1929) in many countries. Reactionary systems emerged on the left (communism) and right (fascism) challenging liberalism for the balance of the century. Liberalism prevailed against these challenges, but only after it began to address its own problems with unfairness.

Most of the first world, our allies, learned the lessons of the 20th century � the idea that the principle of freedom has to strike a balance with the principle of fairness: forming a sort of check and balance against the excesses of the other and creating more stable, less brittle societies. Because of the mythology of America�s birth, that freedom and fairness are the same, and having avoided the worst of the 20th century�s calamities, a portion of American society, such as the neoconservatives, has yet to recognize this lesson. (They are the western worlds last holdouts to a tied of history that has brought peace and prosperity to the rest of the first world.)

The lesson of a terribly bloody 20th century should be: that societies that are based solely on the liberal principle of freedom, if they become too unfair, become top heavy and, like standing up in a dug out canoe, are highly unstable and prone to calamity. (The collapse of the liberal economic system in 1929 was the result of a perfect storm scenario dominated by concentration of wealth.) To liberal society then, the principle of fairness functions like an outrigger that when tethered to liberalism and the principle of freedom, makes what was once immensely unstable, immensely stable, in fact, nearly unsinkable.

(This nautical analogy takes on an almost mystical quality when one considers that in 1912, at the near highpoint of this age, the Titanic, itself a metaphor for the age in its modernity, size and technology, sank � foreshadowing a century that had started with so much promised from liberty and science [empiricism] � few then could have foresaw the calamities that the 20th century had in store, but in hindsight the Titanic was an appropriate foreshadowing for what would be a century characterized by a manic quality of good and evil, fantastic and horrific, wonderful and woeful. One wonders if the World Trade Center is an equally powerful foreshadowing.)

The dirty little secret of the neoconservative movement is they want the principle of liberty to govern without balancing it out against the principle of fairness because such a single threaded philosophy allows for what they are really after, a further concentration of wealth and power � history proves such policies are sheer folly of the most epic proportions.

Fairness was an issue during the long ideological cold war with Communism, but America was careful not to let its society become too unfair, or else contribute to an argument for Communism and against Capitalism.

Improtance of Fairness in the war on Terrorist Islamic Extremist:

Today we are fighting another drawn out ideological war, against terrorist who want to return the world to the medieval character in which Islam first emerged and throve while the rest of the world struggled in a dark age. For Muslims fairness is an issue.

Islam is constructed around a set of communitarian and religious ethics that have much to do with fairness, mutch to do with duties an individual owes to God and Community, and little to do with liberty, at least in the way we understand it � desert communities could never afford the luxury of individualism. Bush�s promise of the virtue of liberty falls on deaf ears because they have no cognizance of it from their experience, let alone as a virtue, let alone a sacred virtue. While promising liberty he threatens to take away fairness, as they have come to experience it. To Muslims, it appears as if Bush is offering nothing while taking away something that can only result in unfairness, corruption and debauchery. And that�s not contemplating issues of nationalism or tribalism.

Islam’s initial inspiration and rise was, in part, a reaction to an outsized disparity in wealth. In 610 Mecca was a prosperous trading city, but wealth became increasingly concentrated and poverty abounded. As we all know from the movie �It�s a Wonderful Life� when such conditions occur, people�s hope declines and increasingly they turn to self destructive, short term gratification, drunkenness and debauchery. Islam�s impermisiveness towards drinking and sex is one reaction to this condition. A ban on usury, that is income from interest (ie. one form of capital gains), is another.

Conclussion: The Triumph of Liberalism?
While western liberalism has defeated all prior challenges, it is hubris to assume success. While we believe we will prevail, we as yet don�t know for sure as to how. A good start is to recognize the ideological dimension and address the issue of fairness in our own society. As one General in Iraq is reported to have said, �this is a battle of ideas and you have to make sure that you�re idea is better than their idea.�

Islam represents a system that was originally designed to go up against and beat a system akin to our own. From a vastly inferior base, Islam defeated a mercantile society that had mal-apportioned distribution of wealth. The more unfair we become, the more brittle our society, the more inspired our adversaries, the more we look like Islam�s traditional enemy: Great Satan indeed. If we don�t have the political will to address unfairness � how will we prevail in the long battle of hearts and minds?

Wow.

Hard to say more than that! And certainly it does not bode well, though to many it seems apparent that America is a superpower in decline even though it appears we are still strong (fall of Rome, yadda yadda).

On Bush’s mentioning fairness–just as a minor point, I mainly refer to his use of the “fairness” argument when first selling the tax cuts in 2000 & 2001: he said that the wealthy should get bigger tax cuts because they paid more taxes, and so the way he divvied up the cuts was “fair.” Of course, he was speaking counter to the progressive tax philosophy; he cut taxes for the wealthy disproportionately more than for the middle and lower classes; and most importantly, he left out the fact that while taxes had risen for the middle class over the prior 20 years, the wealthy had accumulated vast tax cuts during that same time–so over time, the tax cuts for the rich were even more disproportionate.

(The claim also went contrary to the conservative arguments in 1993 when Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy only marginally; the right wing claimed raising taxes on the rich wouldn’t matter because what they paid accounted for so little of the total tax bill. Remember the claim that if we taxed the richest 1% at a 100% tax rate, it wouldn’t fund the government for a single day? But now, the same right-wingers argue that the rich carry most of the tax burden. Arguments of convenience.)

Every time I consider this issue, I recall a political cartoon drawn by an artist almost one hundred years ago. It featured two men sitting at a table. The men were dressed in coats and top hats, much like the “Monopoly Man” character we are familiar with, pocket watches and all. The two men are laughing uproariously at a piece of paper that one of them held. The paper bore three words: “Tax the Rich.”

That pretty much says it.

Yes, of course the Republican will use the word “fair” when it comes to tax cuts for the rich. After all, its their money, its only fair that they get to keep it. They worked hard for it.

In the end Republicanism is just political Calvinism.

The assumption is that all wealth comes to us by way of virtue, hard work, inventiveness, entrepreneurialism, contributions to society. This is patently false. The Fact is, what one makes is strictly a function of ones bargaining power. And while not all bargaining power is unfairly distributed, in the aggregate, as stated above bargaining power has been largely unfair as a result of the invention of the corporation creating distortions in society.

Unfair bargaining power leads to unfair distribution of wealth. No doubt, if you are wealthy you like hearing George Bush and Rush Limbaugh talk about how you get what you deserve and vis versa. And thus tax cuts for the rich are only fair. The rest of the time you’ll here Limbaugh spouting, “but life is not suppose to be fair.”

True enough, but in the relations of men, it is outside our power to determine who is innately supperior, there fore we say everyone is equal – its only fair. I society is not fair one soon arrives at revolution or social collapse, or both. People, especially working class people, will not throw their bodies on the shores of the next Omaha beach that comes along to protect unfair distorted society, or to ensure the comfort of the comfortable. That is the definition of corruption.

Lets assume Rush is right, though he is patently wrong, and that a guy like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates got their money by providing virtue to society. In that case we can look at the social economy that they harvest their wealth from like a toll road: The farther you traveled the more toll you pay to support the road, same with society, the more money you make the more you benefited from the infrastruture of society: Roads, Education, Power Lines, Internet, Sewers, consumers healthy and wealthy enough to spend money and an immense array of infrastructure along with a state that recognizes property rights. Under this arguement its only fair that you pay more.

Finally there’s the business of maintaining a system that allows people to accumulate wealth. The more you make, the more that system is worth to you. Poverty does not require a state, immense wealth does, therefore as one moves away from poverty towards wealth the value of the state increases, therefore paying more taxes makes sense and is fair. Shifting tax burdens down market, because they can, puts society in needlessly in jeopardy and the wealthy are the most exposed.

Unfair distribution is not healthy for society and it causes needless suffering and social dystopia – like the fact that the American social contract involves incarceration of 2 or 3 million of our citizens and 45 million working people live without health insurance and as many probably are ill clothed and their children poorely educated and/or attended too, creating a marker for increased incareration rates in the future. (is this dystopia or just stupidity?)

Now, how to make Americans more cognizant of all this phenomina is another thing. And how to make otherwise religious people aware that the wealthy and powerful are using religion to manipulate them into endorsing an unholy and immoral and socially destructive social contract is also, another thing.

According to some, our democracy is 200 years old and as such is running on borrowed time anyway: the old addage a democracy eventually realizes that it can vote itself free from paying taxes, thus soon inviting collapse. It would seem we are doing this: the Grover Norquist “starve the beast then drown it in a bath tub” is not neoconservative but more accurately neoanarchist – eliminate government. This is exactly what we are talking about when we talk about social/societal collapse.