The deterioration I’m referring to is sometimes the handiwork of likable men and women who appear to be good-willed and generous but who in reality have no concern for anything beyond their own driving ambition. They, too, will do whatever it takes to win. One day in the spring of 2016, on a corner near my home in Berkeley where I was waiting for the traffic light to change, I began a conversation with a well-dressed man who was also waiting to cross the street. He introduced himself as John Stumpf. His suit and tie seemed so out of place in Berkeley that I asked him what he did for a living. He explained he was CEO of Wells Fargo Bank and was on his way to a meeting. I mentioned that I had been in the Clinton administration and was not a fan of the Wall Street bailout. We decided to continue our conversation and arranged to have a coffee together the following week. I found Stumpf to be charming and self-effacing. He asked me how I thought Wells Fargo could do a better job letting the public know it wasn’t one of those “big bad” Wall Street banks and was making a major effort to be responsible and responsive to its customers and the communities it served. I offered a few ideas, worth no more than the coffee he treated me to. Afterward, I remember thinking how fortunate it was for Wells Fargo to be led by such an admirable person.
A few months later, after news reports of widespread consumer fraud, Wells Fargo admitted to putting millions of its customers’ deposits into credit card and bank accounts that the customers had never requested, plunging a number of them into default. As a result of their damaged credit ratings, these customers had to pay an extra $50 million to borrow money. The bank also acknowledged it had charged another half million customers for auto insurance they neither needed nor sought, pushing more than a quarter million of them into delinquency on their car and insurance payments, and leading to nearly 25,000 wrongful vehicle repossessions. The bank had also enrolled thousands of customers in online bill-pay services they never wanted, charging them nearly a million dollars in fees. As if this were not enough, the bank then argued in federal court that its bilked customers had no right to sue the bank as a group, but had to rely on individual arbitration that would likely cost them more in legal fees than any damage reward they might receive.
Before all of this came to light, the bank’s top executives—led by Stumpf—ignored the accumulating evidence of fraud. The bank’s profits were soaring (it became the fourth most profitable U.S. corporation in 2016). In calls with Wall Street investment analysts, Stumpf repeatedly touted Wells Fargo’s ability to sell more and more products to customers. While the frauds were occurring, the value of Stumpf’s own stock holdings rose about $200 million. Stumpf was not, it turned out, someone who was concerned about his customers and communities. In many ways, Stumpf was just a more charming version of Martin Shkreli. He was another who had chosen to enrich himself whatever it took, whatever the consequences, the common good be damned.
CHAPTER 2
What Good Do We Have in Common?
THE COMMON GOOD consists of our shared values about what we owe one another as citizens who are bound together in the same society—the norms we voluntarily abide by, and the ideals we seek to achieve. It is a way of thinking quite opposite to that of Martin Shkreli, John Stumpf, and several other of today’s more notorious business and political leaders. A concern for the common good—keeping the common good in mind—is a moral attitude. It recognizes that we’re all in it together. If there is no common good, there is no society.
Some thinkers and philosophers have attacked the idea of a common good. They argue it’s too easily hijacked by dictators and demagogues who want to use it to justify their tyranny and to squelch individual freedom. “The common good is an undefined and undefinable concept,” wrote Ayn Rand, a “moral blank check for those who attempt to embody it.” When the common good of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, she wrote, “it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.”
Rand was a Russian émigré to the United States whose father’s business had been confiscated during the Russian Revolution. Her most influential writing occurred in the 1940s and 1950s, in the shadow of European fascism and Soviet communism. She was best known for two highly popular novels that are still widely read today—The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957)—and for other writings and interviews in which she expounded her views about what she called the “virtue of selfishness.”
Rand saw government actions that require people to give their money and resources to other people under the pretext of a “common good” as steps toward tyranny. She believed that “man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself,” as she said in a 1964 interview. Medicare, for example, might be desirable for the elderly, she argued, but when others are forced to pay for it they are on ground that could as easily justify “the enslavement, and therefore, the destruction of medical science, the regimentation and disintegration of all medical practice, and the sacrifice of the professional integrity, the freedom, the careers, the ambitions, the achievements, the happiness, the lives of the very men who are to provide that ‘desirable’ goal—the doctors.”
It was far better, in Rand’s view, to base society on autonomous, self-seeking, and self-absorbed individuals. To her, the only community that any of us has in common are family and friends, maintained voluntarily. If we want to be generous, she thought, that’s fine, but no one should have the power to coerce us into generosity. And nothing beyond our circle of voluntary associations merits our trust. No institutions or organizations should be able to demand commitments from us. All that can be expected or justified from anyone is selfish behavior, she thought. That behavior is expressed most clearly through the acts of selling what we have to sell and buying what we want to buy in a free market. For her, the common good did not exist.
Rand’s philosophy was updated and formalized in 1974 by Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick in his best-selling book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Nozick argued that individual rights are the only justifiable foundation for a society. Instead of a common good, he wrote, “there are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives.” For Nozick, it logically followed that “using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more….Talk of an overall social good covers this up.”
When Rand and Nozick propounded these ideas, they seemed quaint if not far-fetched. Anyone who lived through the prior half century had witnessed our interdependence, through depression and war. After the war we had used our seemingly boundless prosperity to finance all sorts of public goods—schools and universities, a national highway system, and health care for the aged and poor (Medicare and Medicaid). We rebuilt war-torn Europe. We sought to guarantee the civil rights and voting rights of African Americans. We opened doors of opportunity to women. Of course there was a common good. We were living it.
But then, starting in the late 1970s, Rand’s views gained ground. She became the intellectual godmother of modern-day American conservatism, especially its libertarian strand. President Donald Trump once said he identified with Rand’s character Howard Roark, in The Fountainhead, an architect so upset that a housing project he designed didn’t meet specifications he had it dynamited. Others in Trump’s circle were influenced by Rand. Atlas Shrugged was said to be the favorite book of Rex Tillerson, Trump’s secretary of state. Rand also had a major influence on Mike Pompeo, Trump’s CIA chief. Trump’s first nominee for secretary of labor, Andrew Puzder, said he spent much of his free time reading Rand. The Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, required his staff to read Rand.
Rand fans are also found at some of the high reaches of American business. Uber’s founder and former CEO, Travis Kalanick, has a
lso described himself as a Rand follower. He applied many of her ideas to Uber’s code of values. Kalanick even used The Fountainhead’s original cover art as his Twitter avatar.
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I believe Rand, Nozick, and their more modern incarnations are dangerously wrong. Not only does the common good exist, but it is essential for a society to function. Without voluntary adherence to a set of common notions about right and wrong, daily life would be insufferable. We would be living in a jungle where only the strongest, cleverest, and most wary could hope to survive. This would not be a society. It wouldn’t even be a civilization, because there would be no civility at its core.
Americans sharply disagree about exactly what we want for America or for the world. But we must agree on basic principles—such as how we deal with our disagreements, the importance of our democratic institutions, our obligations toward the law, and our respect for the truth—if we’re to participate in the same society. It’s our agreement to these principles that connects us, not agreement about where these principles lead. Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century British statesman and political thinker who is the philosophical founder of modern conservatism, saw the common good as “the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages.” It is the source of civic virtue.
To take the most basic example, we depend on people’s widespread and voluntary willingness to abide by laws—not just the literal letter of laws but also the spirit and intent behind them. Consider what would happen if no one voluntarily obeyed the law without first calculating what they could gain by violating it as compared with the odds of the violation being discovered multiplied by the size of the likely penalty. We’d be living in bedlam. If everyone behaved like Martin Shkreli, much of our time and attention would have to be devoted to outwitting or protecting ourselves from others. We would have to assume everyone else was out to exploit us, if they could. Every interaction would need to be carefully hedged. Penalties would need to rise and police enforcement to increase, in order to prevent the Shkrelis among us from calculating they might have more to gain by violating the law and risking the penalty than by abiding it. And because laws can’t possibly predict and prevent every potential wrong, they would have to become ever more detailed and exacting in order to prevent the Shkrelis from circumventing them.
Even then we’d be in trouble. We couldn’t rely on legislators to block or close loopholes because the Shkrelis would bribe legislators to keep them open, and Shkreli legislators would certainly be open to taking such bribes. Even if we managed to close the loopholes, we couldn’t rely on police to enforce the laws because the Shkrelis would bribe the police not to, and Shkreli police would also accept the bribes. Without a shared sense of responsibility to the common good, we would have to assume that everybody—including legislators, judges, regulators, and police—was acting selfishly, making and enforcing laws for their own benefit. I know it’s hard to imagine, but even a president of the United States could act like Shkreli.
The followers of Ayn Rand who glorify the “free market” and denigrate “government” are fooling themselves if they think the “free market” gets them off this Shkreli hook. The market is itself a human creation—a set of laws and rules that define what can be owned and traded, and how. Government doesn’t “intrude” on the “free market.” It creates the market. Government officials—legislators, administrators, regulators, judges, and heads of state—must decide on and enforce such laws and rules in order for a market to exist. Without norms for the common good, officials have no way to make these decisions other than their own selfish interests.
Over the years, public officials have decided that you cannot own human beings, nuclear bombs, recipes, or the human genome. You’re not permitted to buy sex, babies, or votes. You can’t sell dangerous drugs, unsafe foods, or deceptive Ponzi schemes. You mustn’t force other people to sell or buy anything from you. By the same token, you have to pay your debts, unless you are allowed to reorganize them under bankruptcy (even then, you’re allowed to use bankruptcy only under certain conditions). Other market rules cover everything from what can be copyrighted or patented to whether contracts can require arbitration of disputes, whether specific proposed mergers and acquisitions create too much market power, and whether employment contracts can prevent employees from working for a competitor.
Hopefully, government officials base these sorts of decisions on their notions about the common good. But if Shkrelis were making and enforcing such rules, they’d be based on whatever it took for these Shkreli officials to gain personal wealth and power. The “free market” would be a sham, and most people would lose out in it. (As we will see in the pages to come, something close to this has in fact occurred.)
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Truth itself is a common good. Through history, one of the first things tyrants have done is attack independent truth-tellers—philosophers (Plato), scientists (Galileo), and the free and independent press—thereby confusing the public and substituting their own “facts.” Without a shared truth, democratic deliberation is hobbled. “Alternative facts” are an open invitation to what George Orwell described as “doublethink,” in which the public is so confused it cannot recall the past, assess the present, or contemplate the future. As poet and philosopher Václav Havel put it, “If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth.”
Yet in a world populated by people like Martin Shkreli, we could not trust anyone to be truthful if they could do better for themselves by lying. We couldn’t count on any claim by sellers of any product or service. Internet-based “reputational ratings” would be of little value because Shkreli raters would be easily bribed. Transparency would be impossible because Shkrelis would hide the truth and mess with all indicators of it. Journalists would shade their reports for their own selfish advantage, taking bribes from advertisers or currying favor with politicians. Teachers would offer lessons to satisfy wealthy or powerful patrons. Historians would alter history if by doing so they gained wealth or power. Scientists would doctor evidence for similar selfish motives. The truth would degenerate into a cacophony of competing factual claims.
We couldn’t trust doctors or pharmacists to give us the right medications. We couldn’t trust bankers and accountants not to fleece us, restaurants not to poison us, lawyers not to hoodwink us. All ratings would be gamed. Professional ethics would be meaningless. If we couldn’t believe anything we heard, we would find ourselves in a permanent state of bewilderment. As Augustine said, “Nothing at all of human society remains safe, if we shall determine to believe nothing, which we cannot grasp by full apprehension.”
The common good is especially imperiled when a president of the United States alleges that millions of unauthorized immigrants voted illegally, when there’s no evidence they did; that the news media cover up terrorism by Islamic extremists, when nothing suggests they do; that his predecessor in office illegally wiretapped him, when no facts back up such a claim; and that his journalistic critics peddle “fake news,” without evidence of such duplicity. Such baseless claims mislead and confuse the public. They erode trust. They fuel conspiracy theories. They can lead to a vicious cycle in which opportunists use the prevailing distrust to propagate more lies, for their own purposes. Alex Jones, best known for suggesting 9/11 was an inside job and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was “completely fake,” has said, “The public doesn’t have any trust in the system. They believe the social contract is broken”—which is exactly what has enabled people like Jones to gain influence.
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Most basically, the common good depends on people trusting that most others in society will also adhere to the common good, rather than lie or otherwise take advantage of them. In this way, civic trust is self-enforcing and self-perpetuating. As James Madison put it when advoca
ting the Bill of Rights, the mere knowledge of its existence would “extinguish from the bosom of every member of the community any apprehensions, that there are those among his countrymen who wish to deprive them of the liberty for which they valiantly fought and honorably bled.”
History has shown that the more commitment to the common good there is within a society, the more willing are its inhabitants to accept disruptions that inevitably accompany new ideas, technologies, opportunities, trade, and immigration. That’s because these inhabitants are more likely to trust that the disruptions won’t unfairly burden them, and that they stand to gain more than lose by them. This sort of virtuous circle is more likely in societies that promote political equality and equal opportunity, because people who have an equal voice in setting the rules and an equal chance to get ahead naturally feel more assured that their concerns will be addressed and that changes can work to their advantage.
But when that trust is undermined or was never there to begin with, disruptive change can generate widespread anger and fear, and even political upheaval. Under these circumstances, virtuous circles can reverse themselves and become vicious cycles. If those who feel left behind view the system as rigged against them, they can push open societies into becoming closed and autocratic. Where a sense of common good is lacking, demagogues can use the anger and fear accompanying disruptive change to turn people against one another rather than address the traumas that made them angry in the first place. Societies experiencing economic stresses and widening inequalities are particularly vulnerable to tyrants intent on undermining democratic institutions by lying repeatedly, accusing critics of conspiring against “the people,” fueling racial and ethnic divisions, and inciting rabid nationalism.
The Common Good Page 2