The State by Anthony de Jasay

by Anthony de Jasay

  At the same time, liberal ideology fosters the claim that certain rules of equality are still better (more just, or more conducive to other undisputed values) than others, its preference being for distributions which favour the many over the few. If this claim sticks (though as I have tried to show on pp. 150-85, there is no good reason why it should), it is the warrant for redistributive moves which meet the democratic criterion of attracting more self-interested votes than they repel. It bears repeating that redistribution meeting the Janus-faced purpose of favouring the many and getting its instigator elected, is not necessarily "egalitarian" in the everyday sense of the word. Starting off with an initial distribution far removed from the equality of the one-man-one-pay kind, it will be a move towards it; starting off with a distribution where such a rule is already being obeyed, it would be a move away from it and towards some other kind of equality.

  To conclude: analysis of the argument that love of symmetry, which is intrinsic in human nature, is tantamount to love of equality for its own sake, should have helped to focus attention on the multi-dimensional character of equality. Equality in one dimension typically entails inequalities in others. Love of symmetry leaves undetermined the preference for one sort of symmetry over another, one equality over another. Thus, one-man-one-vote is one equality, equal-competence-equal-vote is another. It is only in the limiting case, where all men are taken to have one (i.e. the same) competence, that they are not mutually exclusive.

  Similarly, the rules "one-man-one-tax" or "from each, equally"

  (i.e. poll tax), "from each according to his income" (i.e. flat-ratetax) and "from each according to his capacity to pay" (i.e. progressive income tax with some putative proportionality between tax and the taxpayer's residual means over and above his "needs"), are generally alternatives. Only in the limit where everybody's incomes and needs are the same, are the three rules compatible.

  There is no intelligible sense in which one of two alternative equalities is more equal, or bigger, than the other. As they are not commensurate (cannot be made to yield an algebraic sum), subtracting a lesser equality from a greater one so as to leave some residual equality is gobbledy-gook. Consequently, it cannot be affirmed that a policy change which enthrones one equality by violating another has, on balance, introduced more equality into the arrangements of society.

  It makes perfect sense, however, to prefer one equality to another and to defend this preference on the ground that de gustibus non est disputandum (which is not the same as making an ethical judgement about their relative justice), as well as to allocate one's own preference to that of the majority on the ground that respect for democracy demands it. As a practical matter, people do speak of social and political arrangements being (yes or no, more or less) egalitarian, and though it is not always very evident what they have in mind, we might as well suppose that most often it is this democratic criterion they are implicitly employing. None of this, however, makes the slightest contribution to establishing the claim (to which the "love of symmetry" argument is finally

  reduced) that what a majority will vote for also happens to be morally more valuable or corresponds more closely to the common good.

  3.5.28

  Author: Jasay, Anthony de Title: The State Anthony de Jasay Advanced Search

  3. Democratic ValuesEnvy

  Few endowments are divisible and transferable and few can be levelled.

  No effort to make society drabber will make it drab enough to relieve envy.

  Hayek, invoking Mill, pleads that if we value a free society, it is imperative "that we do not countenance envy, not sanction its demands by camouflaging it as social justice, but treat it... as 'the most anti-social and evil of all passions.' ";*61 Camouflaging it as social justice might not help it anyway. Looked at through a tougher radicalism than Hayek's, the justice of a demand does not imply that someone or other ought to see to its being granted.*62 On the contrary, there may even be an argument that it positively ought not to be granted: social justice, like pandering to other forms of political hedonism, may be held to be anti-social, likely to lead to the corruption of civil society by the state and to a dangerous deformation of both.

  3.6.2 It is equally possible and far more usual, however, to regard envy as one regards pain, as something which should be relieved and whose cause should be removed if possible, without trying to be too clever about distant and hypothetical corrupting consequences of the remedy. If relief from pain is in the here and now, while the damaging effects of drugs are uncertain contingencies at the far end of a somewhat speculative process, it is tempting to go ahead with the treatment. It is, I think, in this manner that envy, despite its altogether un-virtuous connotations, comes to be considered by many if not most people a legitimate reason for altering certain arrangements of society. I propose, though only for argument's sake, to admit the analogy between envy and pain, as well as the closing of the horizon to the distant risk of damage that these alterations may do to the structure of civil society and of its being overwhelmed by the state. If we do this, we will be meeting on its own ground the liberal view of envy as a possibly minor but very straightforward and rugged reason-the last one if utility, justice and love of symmetry all fail-for holding that equality is valuable. The problem we shall then address is by and large this: if relieving envy is a worthy objective, are we committed to reducing inequality (unless a stronger one overrides this objective)?

  As usual, the answer is determined by the manner of constructing the question. In an important article dealing with symmetry of treatment, unequal work and the conflict between non-envy and efficiency, Hal R. Varian defines envy as someone's preference for someone else's bundle (of goods-in one version including also the effort and ability to earn the income which it takes to buy them), and equity a situation where nobody feels any such preference.*63 A sacrifice of efficiency enables the bundles to be equalized, i.e. it can abolish envy. (Needless to say, this is a logical implication, not a policy recommendation.) If effort is a negative good, it may be possible for efficiency to be consistent with equity, for people may not envy a bigger bundle if it takes a bigger effort to earn it. The significant point for our purpose is that all inequalities are reduced to the single inequality of bundles. By equalizing bundles, we can eliminate inequality, hence envy, though there may be a more or less strong conflicting objective overriding the worth of non-envy.

  Less sophisticated approaches a fortiori tend to subsume inequalities under the proxy of a sole inequality, generally that of money. Money is perfectly divisible and transferable. But it is manifestly impossible to make asymmetrical bundles symmetrical

  (e.g. proportional to an agreed attribute of their owners, or simplyequal to each other) if they contain indivisible and nontransferable personal endowments like poise, or presence, or the ability to pass school examinations, or sex appeal. Those whose bundles are poorly endowed in any particular respect presumably resent this just as bitterly as they would different endowments of money. Moreover, the literally countless inequalities which simply cannot be made to conform to some symmetry or equality are closely relevant to the relatively few inequalities (money, or job opportunities, or military service) which can.

  In defence of inequalities, Nozick offers the ingenious argument that envy is really hurt amour propre, and if someone feels hurt in one respect (low scoring at basketball, money-making) he will find other inequalities (linguistic ability, handsomeness) where he will be the higher scorer.*64 If the state, to reduce envy, eliminates a dimension of inequality (e.g. all incomes are equalized), self-esteem will seek comparisons along the remaining dimensions: "The fewer the dimensions, the less the opportunity for an individual successfully to use as a basis for self-esteem a nonuniform weighting strategy that gives a greater weight to a dimension he scores highly in."*65

  This would be an excellent argument against a truly Utopian sweep of egalitarian measures which eliminated or greatly constrained possible inequalities. But such a contin
gency is really quite artificial and need not worry the convinced non-egalitarian. Even Chairman Mao's young cultural revolutionaries with their reputation for forthright methods, could not make much of a dent in the range of inequalities "available" in Chinese society, drab as it may have been when they set out to make it drabber. The most successful egalitarian scorched-earth campaign could not reduce more than nominally the scope for getting one's self-esteem wounded by unflattering, and for getting it healed by flattering dimensions of inequality.

  Nor would rejection of the "wounded self-esteem" view of envy necessarily validate it as an argument for obliterating inequalities.

  For envy may be pain, dis-utility, resentment of an "undeserved" asymmetry, a sense of deprivation relative to the superior endowment of a "reference group," an external dis-economy of the riches of rich people, or whatever, without any of this telling us much about its causal dependence on inequality. There is no reason whatsoever for supposing that it is the Cartesian one of big-cause-big-effect, small-cause-small-effect (so that by reducing the extent of a given inequality or the number of inequalities or both, you could reduce envy, even if it were the case that by reducing the extent of every inequality to nil, you could eliminate it).

  It is no more implausible to suppose other types of causation. An inequality may cause envy as a trigger causes a bang. A bigger trigger would not produce a bigger bang. If inequality is to envy as the size of the trigger is to the loudness of the bang, less inequality will not produce less envy-though absolute equality, if it were conceivable, would presumably produce absence of envy (not that one can ever tell, because the case cannot arise). This agnostic view, if adopted, makes the fight against inequalities in order to relieve envy look as misplaced as was the fight against windmills in order to affirm Don Quixote's chivalry.

  The supposition of lesser-cause-lesser-effect which is the rational basis for expecting envy to be alleviated by levelling, gains credibility from the visible pleasure which always tended to greet acts of pulling down, successful attacks against privilege throughout history. It might, however, be a delusion to see "the implication of a difference" in what is actually "the consequence of a change."*66 If patient A lies in a crowded public ward and patient B in the luxurious penthouse suite of the same hospital, A (and most other public ward patients) may resent B's privilege;

  when B is deprived of his suite and is put in a private room, A may feel pleasure as a consequence of the change. On the other hand, if B was in the private room right from the outset, A's resentment against B's privilege, whatever its intensity, may well be no different than if B had been in a suite; the implication of the difference between suite and room could well be nil.

  The essential point to grasp is that when chateaux burn and heads roll, when the rich are expropriated and the privileged get their come-uppance, the envious may feel elated that justice is being done, that their "relative deprivation" is being redressed. They may draw satisfaction from a single act (expropriation), or possibly a protracted process, though the manifestation of change is less dramatic than in the act (take the erosion of historic great fortunes through taxation). The reverse should also be true. If B wins the lottery, or marries his daughter to a desirable catch, A's feelings (if any) of envy would be provoked by the event, the stroke of luck, the undeserved windfall accruing to B, even if after the windfall B is still the poorer man of the two. On the other hand, a state of affairs (a given inequality) may (or may not) engender envy independently of the sensation engendered by the event, act or process which brought it about.

  The burning of the chateau, the breaking up of great fortunes, or the taking of the rich man's money and its transfer to the poor man will quite likely engender satisfaction in the envious, but only while the drama of the move from one state of affairs to another lasts. Once the chateaux have all been burned, they cannot be burnt again. While the hovel-dweller may have been envious of the chatelain, he now has cause to feel envious of the Jacobin lawyer, his airs and the former Church property he managed to buy for funny money ("assignats"), and nothing permits us to

  suppose that his envy has become less intense as its trigger has changed. But if the inequality is a mere trigger and envy's source lies in enviousness, what is the point in fighting inequalities which will yield to levelling, when there are always many more which will not?

  Regardless of the breadth of levelling measures, any conceivable real-life situation must still contain a sufficiency of inequalities which are impervious to levelling, compensating and which resist any other practical remedy too. Envy is provoked by a person comparing his situation with the situation of certain others and perceiving inequalities. If one perceived inequality is eliminated, and the person is a comparing sort, his antennae are soon bound to make a half-turn and perceive another inequality (in terms of which he is "relatively deprived"), out of the countless ones which might catch his eye, because such scanning is inherent in his need to see his situation in relation to that of others-or else he is immune to envy.

  Demands for narrowing and, at the limit, removing certain inequalities, supported by the promise that envy will decrease as a result, do not seem to have a more compelling claim to being granted than demands which are supported by recourse to utility, justice, liberty, or demands which come uncluttered by any supporting moral argument. The promise of relief from envy is a redundant appeal to liberal credulity. The liberal does not need the promise. He is predisposed to approve such demands anyway. He has an "existential" need to adhere to his own ideology and to recognize in the redistributive policies of the state the production of incontrovertible social value.

  Author: Jasay, Anthony de Title: The State

  Anthony de Jasay

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  4. Redistribution"Fixed" Constitutions

  Self-imposed limits on sovereign power can disarm mistrust, but provide no guarantee of liberty and property beyond those afforded by the balance between state and private force.

  With its key always within reach, a chastity belt will at best occasion delay before nature takes its course.

  In the state of nature, people use their life, liberty and property for purposes adopted by themselves. A long tradition of political thought holds that this sets them at cross-purposes, leading to loss of life, insecurity of property and inability to produce the

  "optimal" assortment of public goods. The extreme form of this view, i.e. that in the state of nature no public goods can be produced, is probably no longer widely held. The state of nature is coming to be viewed as capable and likely to produce some public goods, but not as many and perhaps not as much as civil society endowed with a coercive state.*1 The presumption is that endowed with a state, society is enabled to make the sort of choices which lead to more resources being devoted to public and less to private goods. The modern idea that the state is a device whereby society can more nearly approximate the resource allocation which it really prefers, implies a much older belief that the "general will," or social preference, or collective choice (or whichever species of the genus is invoked) has some ascertainable meaning.

  In coercing them to realize the general will or to give effect to collective choice, the state is competing with its subjects for the use of the scarce resource that is the liberty and property of each. It restrains them in what they may or not not do and forces them to devote part of their efforts and goods to the state's purposes rather than to their own. The same long tradition of political thought suggests that in doing this, the state is in fact forcing them to be happier (or better off) than they would otherwise be, for without at least latent coercion they could not resolve the notorious state-of-nature dilemmas of non-cooperation and free riding. At the same time, competition between the state (which successfully maintains the monopoly of force) and its subjects (whose one strong recourse is rebellion-usually risky, costly and hard to organize) is prima facie so lopsided, so grotesquely unequal, that if the state stops anywhere short of enslaving its subj
ects, cogent reasons are needed to explain why.

  It is hard to formulate anything more crucial to political theory than this question, which has been implicitly answered each time historians have given a satisfying account of the fall of despotism, of stalemate and accord between a king and his barons, or of how a given state has ruled by custom and law, which constrained its choices, rather than by its own discretionary reason which did not.

  This chapter is mainly devoted to the largely unintended consequences of securing political consent by redistribution. The pattern of redistribution develops as a result of both the state and its subjects pursuing, "maximizing" their ends, interacting with each other to produce redistributive outcomes. These must be such that neither party can for the time being further improve his position within them. Broadly speaking, they have to reflect the balance of forces and interests concerned. Formal agreements between the state and its subjects, such as laws and constitutions under which the state is supposed to be restrained from maximizing its ends, either reflect this balance or they do not. If they do, the limits of state encroachment on the private rights of liberty and capital are naturally set by the power of the owners of these rights and a constitution or other formal agreement merely proclaims accomplished facts. If they do not, any such agreement is precarious. In abiding by it, the state is not in equilibrium. Its needs and ambitions will eventually lead it to circumvent, reinterpret, amend or simply disobey laws and constitutions. The better to clarify their role, or rather the reasons for their conspicuous absence from the subsequent argument, I start this chapter with what may seem a digression about the rule of law and constitutions, considered as binding agreements limiting the state's discretion to dispose of its subjects' liberty and property as and when its best interest dictates.