Meritocracy

Meritocracy, a society ruled by those possessing merit, is founded on the belief that merit is or should be the only measure of personal and social value. Meritocracy is a foundation belief of libertarians. The term first appeared in 1958, but the same notion was prevalent in the 19^th century when it was called social Darwinism. In the 21^st century it has again become a virulent doctrine heavily influencing every thing from economic policy to education.

There is much in our cultural history to suggest that merit has merit. If you look at the advances that human beings have made, especially in the last 400 years, they were discovered or initiated by a miniscule portion of the human beings that existed over that period. We, as a culture, express our belief that a person has a right to everything he or she creates or legally acquires, that is, he or she merits whatever they legally acquire. However, let us ask how merit functions as a social philosophy, which is what libertarians and their founder Ayn Rand intend.

Merit is one among a number of human virtues. One of the problems of any social philosophy founded on a human virtue is that the resulting society almost inevitably winds up as an authoritarian one, usually a dictatorship. Plato, for example, argued that knowledge was the primary human virtue. His proposed state, elucidated in his work entitled The Republic, eventuated in a monarchy ruled by a philosopher king. Merit, however, is but one among a number of human virtues such as empathy, generosity, etc. Additionally it can be found in some human beings combined with selfishness, a lust for power or incompetence in areas in which the meritorious person has no competence. In short merit, like many other human virtues, is a lousy criterion by which to allocate wealth and power. Yet merit along with a notion of unmitigated freedom is the rubric under which much of this nation's business and allocation of its resources are conducted. In these and other areas merit has replaced need and equality.

Let us now contrast what I shall call social virtues with these personal virtues. Among social virtues are equality, fairness and empathy. The libertarian and the massive political right wing condemn these virtues, often as socialism, as governing principles because, they say, they can lead to dictatorship. While this is true, it is also true of their free market capitalism, as witness Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Pinochet even had Milton Friedman, the father of free market capitalism, as an advisor. The point here is that any political economy can lead to dictatorship; hence, this criticism is irrelevant. The only way a democracy can avoid becoming a dictatorship is by constant citizen vigilance.

Among the insufficiencies of the libertarian view are the internal conflicts of an ethos predicated on notions as vague as "merit." Presumably, in the current libertarian view, the "merit" of Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers, Bill Gates, George Soros and take your pick of Wall Street financiers, say Timothy Geither, is that they all made a bundle of money far in excess of what they could personally need. I included George Soros , even though he supports liberal causes, because he made his millions gambling on the continuously changing values of the world's different currencies. On the basis of human need and well being this is one of the most deleterious uses of money, differing little from the Wall Street casino mentality that produced our current finance-generated recession. In 1921 Thorstein Veblen, one of the more gifted thinkers this country has produced, wrote a book titled The Engineers and the Price System. In this book Veblen explored the conflicts between what he called "business" and "industry." Business was solely interested in making money. Industry, in which he included workers, was interested in making things. Veblen pointed out that industry was often hampered in its efforts to make things, especially new things, by the profit concerns of business. A current example would be the Koch brothers fighting clean energy technology in order to protect their fossil fuel business. Libertarians have no way to choose between the merit of money making and the merit of production without going outside their sacred merit-based ethos to social values such as human welfare. Of course, what Veblen called industry in his day has been largely taken over by what he called the price system. Major industries became more interested in making money than making things. Hence through exporting our "making" capability to the cheap labor of China et. al., the major segment of our economy moved from manufacturing to finance.

Perhaps more basic to the failings of libertarianism is its destructiveness. Libertarianism, like ideologies in general, suffers from focusing on one human virtue to the exclusion of any others thereby creating the basis of an authoritarianism, which now characterizes our society, although it is generally disguised as the rule of money. When the Supreme Court deemed corporations to be persons with all the rights of a person, including supporting the political candidates of their choice, it was clear that we no longer had a democracy, we now have a plutocracy, which is the arbitrary rule of the many by the wealthy few. At a deeper level we are witnessing what happens, as it so often does, when personal virtues (the merit of making one's fortune) are made public virtues (this is the way society should be run.)

The bottom line in all this is that converting private virtues into public virtues leads almost inevitably to arbitrary government and is a dangerous and often unrecognized enemy of democracy. The individual values of freedom and merit are the two most prominent examples of what happens when individual values are made into public values. We need to understand what is happening when Murdoch and the Koch brothers and their Cato think tank push merit and freedom. In view of the propaganda we daily and voluminously face it is imperative that people understand that there is no virtue in wealth otherwise Donald Trump would be a paragon of virtue. It must be equally realized that excessive wealth is destructive of democracy and is a constant threat to the social fabric. We need to ask whose merit and whose freedom. We need, in short, to return to our social values and find expression for our private values within that social context lest our species perish from this earth.

Bob Newhard

Reflections on the Killing of Osama bin Laden

As I thought about the killing of Osama bin Laden I wondered what has happened to this society in the last 60 years. At the end of World War II we sought to reestablish the rule of law on a war-shattered planet. We brought to justice the malefactors in a war that had killed millions, wounded many more, and massively displaced populations. As heinous as the crimes were we did not summarily kill these practitioners of terror. With bin Laden we made no attempt to capture him and bring him to a trial in which the world could hear the evidence and judge the verdict. Instead we summarily killed him, even though others in the building were handcuffed. He was unarmed. We dumped his body into the ocean, an act that Muslim clerics condemn as against their religion and which, they fear, will incite further violence against the United States. In short, we had become our enemy. This was an act of barbarity that the America of 1946 did not tolerate, although we did tolerate incinerating thousands of innocents with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When World War II was over President Roosevelt sought to eliminate colonialism by establishing the United Nations in which all nations would have a voice. He tried to create a mechanism for peace. This time, Bush, one of the worst presidents we have ever had and his imperialist buddies sought to dominate the rest of the world. How could we be so retrograde?

One answer is that we are now dealing with terrorism, not states with defined borders and their armies. While this is true it is, in my view, insufficient as an explanation. We knew we were dealing with terrorism from the beginning, yet we said we were going to war with them. The fact that terrorism made all the difference between our behavior at the end of World War II and our behavior in killing bin Laden should have called forth a different approach. The fact that it did not betrays the worst sort of societal manipulation to lead us into the bloody morass we have created. The fact that 80 well trained men carried out the mission makes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan starkly irrelevant in necessity and tragically calamitous in their results. Prior to the attacks on the Taliban and the uncalled for invasion of Iraq many people drew attention to the fact that the responsible reaction to the 9-11 attack was a global police action, which would have resulted in an operation much like the one that located him and could easily have captured him had not the Bush and now Obama administrations had other goals in mind. The Obama administration has said that they did not want a trial during which bin Laden could stir up additional enmity. The same could have been said of the Nazi criminals, but we deemed preserving the rule of law was more important than not stimulating continuing Nazi propaganda. Nazism did not die and still has many adherents in Germany,France and the United States. Similarly the summary killing of bin Laden will not staunch the animosity of many of those of his persuasion toward this country. Keeping Chalmers Johnson's articulation of blowback in mind, we have done nothing to reduce terrorism, much less understand it and seek a way to defuse it. For those of good will, stopping this misuse of terrorism to justify our own terrorism, e.g. drone attacks, must be an ongoing and accelerated process.

Bob Newhard

Democracy and Human Well Being

At a recent group discussion of public employee pensions I noticed that the issues revolved around who deserves what and who pays for it, not what is good for society. This, in my judgment, is another manifestation of the "me generation," still hanging on. While I understand the above concerns, they are misconstrued. Had the focus been on society rather then the differing individual claims, it could have been seen that the real problem is a gross maldistribution of wealth that is a social cancer that will kill our democracy if it is not redressed. As I have noted before, wealth is power and concentrated wealth is concentrated power. In democracy, which is based on distributed power, i.e. the citizens, such accumulations of wealth are deadly. A democracy demands a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth to insure the independence of the citizen. Jefferson understood this when he argued for a nation of small farmers whose farms would provide them with a measure of independence that the factory worker did not have in the industrial society preferred by Hamilton. As our nation became a manufacturing-dependent one, we had to find a surrogate for the family farm to control wealth concentration to a degree that it would not threaten democracy. We did this with a graduated income tax. We have, however, largely destroyed the effectiveness of the graduated income tax by capping that tax at a ridiculously low level, i.e. a million dollars in an era of multibillionaires and by granting massive tax breaks to the wealthy. We have also allowed tax havens for the wealthy in which massive amounts of profit provide no tax revenue at all.

This effort to persevere democracy by preventing excessive wealth accumulation has the added economic benefit of making the society's wealth more productive by insuring that said wealth will be spent on actual human needs and not on the disruptive, often disastrous, speculations of the very rich. Again, this becomes axiomatic without any concern for equity between individuals. The motive is the preservation of democracy.

As evidence that the pursuit of democracy, requiring an equitable distribution of wealth, leads directly to a public ethos of citizen well being we need only look at the state of our democracy and citizen well being under FDR's New Deal. Income taxes on the wealthiest among us were high, reaching slightly over 90% for a time after World War II. It was 70% as late as the 1970s. As a result we were able to afford the GI Bill allowing millions to get a college degree and subsidize loans so that returning veterans could afford their own home. This era also saw an unprecedented rate of building public schools and libraries and a high level of job security. When Ronald Reagan came to power, and since, we have seen the reverse. Money locked up in the coffers of the rich and their corporations does not go to improve the society as evidenced by a level of college tuition that ordinary people cannot afford, the closing and privatizing of public schools and homes being torn from people because of the shenanigans of an unregulated financial market, to mention just a few.

It is, to me, politically axiomatic that a democracy will far more likely target its resources on the well being of its citizens than will any other form of government. It is also axiomatic that the increasing destruction of democracy that we have seen since Ronald Reagan will move increasing amounts of wealth into the hands of ever fewer people, thereby weakening our society as a whole to the point of a dictatorship, known under George W. Bush as a unitary presidency. Having observed that wealth is power and concentrated wealth is concentrated power, I will add Lord Acton's observation that “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Bob Newhard