Contra Carson: In Defense of The Inequality of Wealth and Income

This piece was written by my close friend, fellow philosopher, and co-worker Jacob Roundtree. His blog can be found at ww.jacobroundtree.com. I implore you to check him out. 

The notion that an unhampered market economy would feature a significantly lower degree of economic inequality than that found in our statist economic order has no foundation in the teachings of economics. The Carsonian doctrine that the market process tends towards the equalization of incomes is an arbitrary opinion founded on the whimsical preferences of its adherents. It is highly possible and I think quite probable that a more unequal distribution of income would prevail in an unhampered market economy than would in our present economic order.

The libertarian must not concern herself with the level of economic inequality, per se.

As libertarians we are fundamentally committed to erecting the social order that preserves the liberty of all persons and as such provides all with the environment in which they can fulfill their humanity. In other words we are ultimately concerned with the dignity and well-being of all peaceful people. Economics teaches us in no uncertain terms that an unhampered market necessarily tends towards the greatest satisfaction of the desires of all participants.

When discussing the issue of income distribution what worries us is a maldistribution, which is not necessarily an unequal distribution. If, for example, the state intervenes into society, so as to equalize incomes, we would have a wholly unjust distribution of income. So for the Carsonians to at all focus on the question of income inequality is for them to completely misunderstand interventionism’s devastating and corrupting effects on the market order.

Interventionism is a hazard because it disintegrates the social bond by undermining the market’s institutional framework. The inequality of income that emerges from the interventionist process is a by-product and not of central concern.

Not only do the Carsonians mistakenly see economic inequality as a problem, but they fail to recognize the essential role it plays in the market process.

As Mises argues, the market distributes income according to the contribution each individual makes to the satisfaction of consumer wants. Consequently the market aids individuals in the discovery of their comparative advantage and incentivizes them to contribute the maximum effort to the social system of production. Without such an unequal distribution, either political authorities would have to compel individuals by force to contribute their share or the system of social cooperation would completely disintegrate.

As Mises contends, “only because inequality of wealth is possible in our social order, only because it stimulates everyone to produce as much as he can and at the lowest cost, does mankind today have at its disposal the total annual wealth now available for consumption.” (Liberalism 2005, p.12)

Mises goes on to show that economic inequality performs another indispensable social function in the form of luxury consumption. Mises begins by identifying luxury as a relative concept insofar as it “consists in a way of living that stands in sharp contrast to that of the great mass of one’s contemporaries.” (Liberalism 2005, p.13)

As he argues, luxury consumption effectively subsidizes the production, innovative development and introduction of new consumer goods to the market. Consequently, luxury consumption affords entrepreneurs the means to discover production methods by which they can mass produce innovative products. Mises presents several examples of formerly luxurious items that are now mass consumer goods, including the fork, the automobile and the bathroom.

So the next time one of the newly fashionable left-libertarians wants to think he’s standing with the masses by decrying the luxurious lifestyle of the rich, he should consider the following words of wisdom from Mises:

“Luxury consumption provides industry with the stimulus to discover and introduce new things. It is one of the dynamic factors in our economy. To it we owe the progressive innovations by which the standard of living of all strata of the population has been gradually raised” (Liberalism, p.13)

Jacobroundtree.com (The Social Rationalist) CHECK IT OUT

Reaching for Rice Cakes

Sorry Friends and Followers, It's been a while. My computer is on the fritz, I can't access any of my photography at the moment- there won't be too many pictures for a while. Here is some thinking I've been doing.

      In his poetic teaching, "Painting of a Rice cake," zen master Dogen illuminates the nature of the relationship between emptiness and phenomena by breaking down the seemingly inherent dualism between the two conceptualizations. Dogen describes the fundemental interdependence between 'truth', and the image of truth; the two concepts are intrinsically embedded in each other's existence, they cannot be thought of as seperately. Dogen believes that the image of truth, or the "painting of a rice cake", and the rice cake itself, do not oppose one another. Neither dharma is more valid, neither is more capable of actualizing realization; the picture becomes reality, and reality becomes the picture. The thickly interpenetrating non-duality of reality is the philosophical teaching Dogen is striving to express; he achieves this end through a myriad of imagistic language, complex extended metaphors, and enigmatic, yet undoubtedly meaningful and artistic analogies.

      Dogen begins by providing a breif description of arising, the popping into existence a manifestiation, and along with it a plethora of other, non-obstructed and not obstructing existences both tangent and absolutely different to each other. No manifestations, no dharmas, come forth with opposition to each other, rather, they cause one another, and thus, in a sense, they bestow upon one another attributes and actualities vis-a-vis their interpenetrating existences. This interpenetration is not reserved to humans, or sentient beings, but rather it permeates and envelops our enviroments. Thus, mountains, roads, rives, buildings, and paintings are exchanging existential characteristics. Dogen references the act of penetrating one of these concepts; to realize that mountains are doomed to crumble and that buildings are complete fabrications, this penetration doesn't take away the validity of their inherent characteristics. People summit mountains, and live in buildings, and give meanings to paintings, music, and drama as part of our everyday activity, thus  these dharma-characteristics, realized through their actualization, are penetrated but still exist; and are both empty and full the same time.

      Dogen quotes an ancient Buddha as saying that "A painting of a rice cake doesn't satisfy hunger." On one hand this statement is making an important point; that it is not enough to read and to study the sutras; one must actively participate in one's own enlightenment.  However, if "satisfying hunger" is seen as an aspect of validity, or confirming reality, this statement  is like saying  that since Jude Law didn't 'really' die at the end of Hamlet, the audience's thirst for meaning is  left unquenched. The invalidation of the performance or the painting based on its illusory nature doesn't take into account the fact that  the audience still reacts to the experience with psychic weight;  they despair, rejoice, chuckle, and sob. The reality of these neuropsychological responses to an artistic event can be compared to the real potential for meaning creation and realization in the painting a rice cake. To invalidate the painting because it cannot satisfy hunger is demonstrating first-level emptiness of this particular dharma; to make this claim is slipping into means-end thinking. Dogen's reponse to this claim of the painting's emptiness breaks down dualism by going into second-level emptiness, the emptiness of emptiness, and thus understands that, although the painting is empty, emptiness permeates reality; the painting is real, and since it is real, it is equally valid and capable of leading to realization- the terminus of all suffering.

      The second-level emptiness Dogen invokes is based on the insistence and reliance of emptiness on phenomena. Without any phenomena to percieve, there is nothing to be empty, without any perception from which to perceive, there is nothing that is empty. Emptiness is not an absolut. Dogen is vehemently against establishing absolutes because of their tendency to lead to strict dualism. Rather, emptiness's existence is relative to the phenomena that are there; the phenomena thus guide and shape the emptiness around it; they are postive and negative spaces working together to produce a cohesive reality: yin and yang. For Dogen, everything is empty and everything is full; this is true both of the picture of the rice cake and the rice cake itself; they are both witnessed via a limited perspective, in a confined context, yet they both are the all inclusive total cause of existence, they both have dharma power. Because of this inherent parallel between the rice cake and the painting, when talking in terms of actualization, all rice cakes are paintings of rice cakes. All are limited, all are subjective, all are total, all are actualized constructions in the moment.

      Having established the nonobstructive, nondualsitic existences of the rice cake and the painting, Dogen questions perspective and representation by inspecting the metaphor of a painting, examing a painting as a microcosm for the universe. Dogen observes that in a painting, very much like the human perspective, there exists a certain, fixed frame of reference. The only way to determine the characteristics of one item in the painting is to compare it to another. A giant monolith can look like a toothpick depending on its contextual enviorment. We assign values to things by comparing them to one another, relational thinking is our conventional way, it is not empty, its trajectory is guided by schematic perceptions. The entire universe is a painting, with phenomena and empty space colliding on the canvas. They cannot be picked out, the syntheses of the two creates a unique painting with a distinct, dynamic frame. Our experience arises from this painting, our experience is thus a painting, and contains all of its perspectives limited subjectivity.

      If we take the notions of satisfying hunger as a metaphor for meaning-creation, the only means to fulfill the hunger will be through a "painted" rice cake of some form, a representative fabrication of our own that contains the meaning we decide to allot it. Dogen advises his monks in this address to progressively construct a system of fabrication that leads to fulfillment and the elimination of dukkah. Existential satisfaction is fashioned from the self, it doesn't emanate from some external absolute. Ultimately, we can create what fulfills us, but that doesnt make the process of finding fulfillment empty or invalid; the ability to be fulfilled is latent inside a person from the moment one is thrust into the universe. Finding fulfillment and attaining realization is not to be found by striving for absolutes or resigning to nihilistic relativity; fulfillment will not be found solely in the rice cake nor the painting of the rice cake. Rather, by cultivating a true wisdom of the interdependence of the painting and the cake itself; and by flowing and cooperating with the inherent emptiness in the phenomenological world we can come up with a truly creative, non-dualistic meaning system that follows the Buddhist ideal of the middle way.

Cheers,

Jack

Practicing Physics with a Philosophy of Nature

The biggest names in modern philosophy, and the most remember in modern science, Newton, Descartes, Bacon, Locke, etcetera, were prominent positivists at the cusp of the industrial revolution. These thinkers held that there exists objective reality, that our minds are able to grasp that reality by reasoning through our empirical senses, and that it was humankind’s job to dissect nature and to master it. The idea that humans are able to observe nature implies that humans are outside of nature, however, much forgotten German idealist philosopher, enemy of the mechanistic empiricists, and reactionary to Kant dared to develop a new system of philosophical inquiry.

Schelling saw that modern science promotes a view of the world that is unsustainable because the system makes fundamentally corrupting presuppositions about the human condition. Modern science saw human beings as pinnacles of creation, as God’s manifestation on earth. Man could do no wrong so long as we were looking for truth; the ends (truth) justified the means (using the earth as a means). This fundamentally closed metaphysical manifest destiny understood nature as a collection of resources that solely to make human life better. The essence of science and the trajectory of our relationship with the natural world to them was simply to manipulate and control it.  Schelling’s philosophy of nature, however, provides a metaphysical infrastructure of a very different kind insofar as it allows for organic growth to take place and the adoption of a reciprocal relationship between man and nature to unfold.

 Rather than the cold separation of a mechanistic positivistic dualistic philosophy, philosophy of nature has key metaphysical differences that allow for a more creative, holistic, sustainable, and organic system of meaning. How is this done? Through Schelling’s legendary speculative physics. Speculative physics is physics practiced with the backdrop-contextualizing qualification that we know only the self produced; knowing, in the strictest sense, is therefore a function guided by ideas, a priori, before experience. How can science take place in this kind of a environment, where our senses are not capable of representing realty?

 Schelling’s answer is this: although we project ideas and patterns onto reality, the reality of patterns reciprocally and inevitably project onto our ideas; we cannot help but see patterns, because patterns exist in nature, with our without a reasoning human mind to rip the patterns out of context and label them. Accepting the necessity of working in patterns and thinking with purposiveness, physics can continue to be practiced with a more examined methodological approach, and a two way system of validity that make sure that no matter what happens in the scientific foreground; the nature bound backdrop must be cared for and cultivated as well. A much more healthy, yet just as pragmatic, system of thought.