{"id":2293699,"date":"2022-07-01T13:01:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-01T13:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/?p=2293699"},"modified":"2022-07-01T13:15:20","modified_gmt":"2022-07-01T13:15:20","slug":"tocquevilles-worst-fears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/2022\/07\/01\/tocquevilles-worst-fears\/","title":{"rendered":"Tocqueville\u2019s Worst Fears"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Reprinted from Law & Liberty<\/a><\/em><\/h5>\n<\/p>\n

In the introduction to\u00a0Democracy in America,\u00a0<\/em>Alexis de Tocqueville asserted that the history of the world, or at least of the West, exhibited a providential, inevitable movement towards equality. As the scholar Marvin Zetterbaum argued in his book\u00a0Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy,<\/em>\u00a0Tocqueville\u2019s claim was partly rhetorical: by persuading democracy\u2019s conservative opponents in France to accept its inevitability, he hoped to induce them to join in guiding it in a salutary direction, harmonious with human liberty and dignity. By contrast, in the last part of Volume Two of his book, Tocqueville expressed the fear that the principle of equality, if carried to an illiberal extreme, would culminate in a \u201ctutelary\u201d despotism, in which government, even if elective, would deprive individuals of the freedom to act, aiming to regulate all their actions for the sake of what it \u201cknew\u201d was their good.<\/p>\n

Tocqueville found the most distinctive characteristic of American democracy to be the equality of conditions that all citizens enjoyed. By this he didn\u2019t mean that nobody was richer, more politically influential, or more socially renowned than anyone else. But the economic inequalities America exhibited were fluctuating rather than fixed, as people took advantage of the opportunity to rise through their own efforts. Moreover, since all officeholders derived their positions, directly or indirectly, from popular election, Americans were politically equal. Nor could anyone, regardless of his wealth, position, or achievements, afford to look down on his fellows: if anything, those with aristocratic pretensions needed to conceal them from the public. Finally, in Tocqueville\u2019s account, Americans took a direct, active <\/em>role in their governance, with most domestic affairs being decided at the local level.<\/p>\n

Thomas Piketty, a French economist who achieved international celebrity with his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century<\/a><\/em>, begins his sequel to that work by observing a worldwide trend over the past two centuries in the direction of equality. Unlike Tocqueville\u2019s claim in this regard, Piketty\u2019s assertion of that movement in A Brief History of Equality<\/a><\/em> is based on evidence from various portions of the world, although he is chiefly focused on Europe (especially France) and America.<\/p>\n

The March Towards Equality<\/h3>\n

Contrary to its title, Piketty\u2019s book is not chiefly historical. Nor does he exhibit any of Tocqueville\u2019s reservations about the dangers of carrying the egalitarian principle to an extreme. Rather, from the outset Piketty adopts (without any explicit justification) the premise that economic and political equality is an unmitigated good, to be advanced to the greatest degree possible. To recognize the modern tendency towards equality \u201cis not to brag about success,\u201d he remarks, but rather \u201cto call for continuing\u201d its pursuit, recognizing that the movement<\/p>\n

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still has a long way to go, especially in a world in which the poorest, and particularly the poorest in the poorest countries, are preparing to be subjected, with increasing violence, to climatic and environmental damage caused by the richest people\u2019s way of life.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Piketty recognizes that the share of property possessed by the richest one percent of the French population has halved since the end of the eighteenth century. This particularly benefits the middle class, whose share of national wealth \u201cunderwent spectacular growth\u201d during that period. He nevertheless warns that the scope of the march toward equality \u201cmust not be overestimated,\u201d since \u201cthe richest 10 percent\u201d still owned over 55 percent of all property at the start of the 2020s, while \u201cthe poorest 50 percent own next to nothing,\u201d that is, \u201cfive per cent of the national total.\u201d<\/p>\n

Without explaining what he would <\/em>regard as a satisfactory level of equality, Piketty calls for radical increases in the progressivity of income taxation, as well as taxes on wealth itself, to mitigate these alleged injustices. He ordains international policies combining \u201cremedial\u201d justice (to compensate descendants of the victims of slaveowning and colonialism) and \u201cuniversalist\u201d justice designed to reform the world economic system so as to \u201creduc[e] inequalities and ensur[e] that everyone has the most egalitarian access possible to education, employment, and property.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Decommercialization of Human Life<\/h3>\n

As indicated above, Piketty adds to the ground of the redistributionist program laid out in Capital <\/em>an unsubstantiated assertion of imminent global catastrophe supposedly caused by inequality, which forms a recurring motif in Brief History. <\/em>He judges existing policies of international aid to poorer countries to be hypocritical, since the aid is small by comparison with the \u201ccost of climatic change\u201d the richer nations inflicted on the poorer ones, supposedly amounting to \u201cseveral points of the global GDP.\u201d He does not acknowledge that the greater air and water pollution, and alleged contribution to climate change, produced by the world\u2019s richest countries was a function of their industrialization, which contributed vastly more to the world\u2019s wealth than such pollution could have subtracted from it. And of course it is industrially developing nations like China and India that now cause far more pollution than Western nations which have invested much more in combating it. <\/p>\n

But climate catastrophism is not the chief ground of Piketty\u2019s proposals. Rather, those proposals embody a project for achieving a radical expansion of existing welfare-state policies and steeply progressive taxation of both incomes and accumulated wealth so as to lay the foundation of a new politico-economic order Piketty calls \u201cdemocratic, self-managing, decentralized socialism.\u201d This project, at its deepest level, entails abandoning the Lockean\/Smithian principle that private property rights are \u201csacred.\u201d Gone is the liberal policy, enshrined in America\u2019s Declaration of Independence as well as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, that regards the securing of individual rights, including the right to property and to the pursuit of one\u2019s own conception of happiness (so long as one does not violate the equal rights of others), as the primary purpose of government. Piketty aims to remove \u201cvast sectors\u201d of human activity from the \u201dcommercial logic\u201d of voluntary, private transactions. Instead, he would assign to government the responsibility for \u201corganiz[ing]\u201d not only health care and education, but also \u201cculture, transportation, and energy\u201d (with \u201ccultural policy\u201d including such aspects of life as \u201cshow business.\u201d)<\/p>\n

To advance what he terms the \u201chistorical process\u201d of \u201cdecommercialize[ing]\u201d human life (meaning the extension of government-run social-welfare and socialist policies), Piketty applauds the adoption of \u201cvirtually confiscatory tax rates\u201d on income such as existed in the United States from 1950 to 1990 (with an \u201caverage\u201d top rate of 72 percent) as an \u201cimmense historical success.\u201d These policies enabled a great reduction in \u201cthe divergence of fortunes and incomes, \u2026 improving the situation of the middle and lower classes, developing the welfare state,\u201d and improving overall \u201ceconomic and social performance.\u201d \u201cHistorically,\u201d Piketty maintains, \u201cit is the battle for equality and education that has made economic development and human progress possible, and not the veneration of property, stability, and inequality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unhistorical Assertions<\/h3>\n

Piketty\u2019s \u201chistorical\u201d assertions are quite unhistorical. As the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey (along with numerous other scholars) demonstrates in her trilogy Bourgeois Dignity, Bourgeois Equality, <\/em>and Bourgeois Virtue<\/em>, it is the liberation of the peaceful pursuit of individual economic gain from heavy-handed government restraints that made possible the vast improvement in living standards: first in the West and then throughout the world, which Piketty himself acknowledges took place beginning around the start of the nineteenth century. That pursuit, far from venerating \u201cstability,\u201d upset<\/em> pre-existing feudal orders, enabling persons of modest means to rise, even while (as Marx and Engels acknowledged in the Communist Manifesto<\/em>) they tore asunder previous political and economic hierarchies. Nor, of course (as seen in Tocqueville\u2019s America) did it worship \u201cinequality\u201d as a goal. In fact, it is only thanks to the enormous increase in national wealth that it became possible for governments to finance such welfare-state policies as free public education and all sorts of transfer payments to the poor, the disabled, and the elderly.<\/p>\n

It is curious that an economic historian should take at face value the high rates of federal taxation that existed in the U.S. from 1950 to 1990 without acknowledging the vast network of exclusions <\/em>from taxable income that made those nominal rates tolerable. These included, for instance, unlimited deductions for medical expenses, liberal home-office deductions, and income-tax averaging, all of which were eliminated by the 1986 Tax Reform Act, in return for the lowering of rates. To raise tax rates (without such exclusions) on the highest incomes to the levels envisioned by Piketty, along with annual confiscations of a proportion of the property owned by the wealthy, would be an unprecedented expansion of state power. Nor does Piketty, in making these proposals, acknowledge the deterrent to private investment that they would entail.<\/p>\n

Piketty never mentions the economic reasons that led the governments of France and other European countries to abandon their wealth taxes after a few years, including the exodus of some 42,000 French millionaires. Instead of worrying about deterring business investment, Piketty praises the benefit of high tax rates on capital in compelling the rich to live less \u201cextravagant[ly]\u201d\u2014as if, we are tempted to say, they were Russian oligarchs, profiting from Putin\u2019s beneficence. And along the way, as further evidence of the benefit of removing \u201cvast sectors of the economy\u201d from \u201ccommercial logic,\u201d Piketty cites a \u201cfact\u201d that every informed person \u201cknows,\u201d that European-styled \u201cpublic health care systems\u201d are \u201cboth less expensive and more efficient\u201d than the (largely) private American one. But this \u201cfact\u201d disregards the actual fact that European systems keep costs down by rationing, limiting the kind of drugs that may be provided, and causing extended waits for medical care. Additionally, as indicated by his proposal for governmental control of \u201ccultural policy,\u201d Piketty assumes that in every realm of life from economic productivity to \u201cshow business,\u201d \u201cthe state\u201d always knows better than any private individual the right thing to do. Regarding the danger posed by redistributive policies to individual initiative in the artistic, scientific, and philanthropic realms, one needs only to read Bertrand de Jouvenel\u2019s classic The Ethics of Redistribution.<\/em><\/p>\n

There are numerous aspects of both Piketty\u2019s charges against \u201ccommercialism\u201d and his proposals for reform that display a lack of the sort of thinking-through one would expect of a competent economist or social reformer. As part of his critique of the supposed hypocrisy of Western aid to poorer countries, Piketty observes that donor countries received far more from their investments in those countries than they donated in aid. But why should the former not<\/em> exceed the latter? Why would any company make an investment that wasn\u2019t expected to yield a greater net return, even after charitable contributions? And aren\u2019t income-earning private investments also more likely to benefit the inhabitants of poorer countries (providing jobs and technical training) than giveaways that wind up subsidizing authoritarian governments? Similarly, without evidence, Piketty claims that \u201cthe process of development in wealthy countries was based on a major increase in the power of the fiscal state,\u201d that is, of tax revenues, between 1914 and 1980. But how does he explain the massive increases in national wealth that preceded and followed those years?<\/p>\n

The Despotic State<\/h3>\n

Echoing President Obama\u2019s \u201cyou didn\u2019t build that!\u201d remark, Piketty calls for restricting the ability of corporations to enrich themselves through international capital transfers, since their wealth depended on publicly funded infrastructure and \u201ceducational and health care systems\u201d in their host countries (despite his having criticized private health care). And as a means of preventing high earners from contributing to the \u201cconsumer rat race\u201d while leaving scant time for family or civic goods, he urges overcoming the \u201cpatriarchy\u201d that supposedly blocks women from achieving high executive positions\u2014as if encouraging them to participate more fully in the pursuit of executive positions would strengthen families rather than promoting further consumerism.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most revealing of Piketty\u2019s ambitions, recalling Tocqueville\u2019s worst fears, is the repeated emphasis in his chapter on \u201cExiting Neocolonialism\u201d on the need for building \u201cstrong states\u201d in the less-developed nations. Piketty complains that nongovernmental organizations\u2019 provision of direct aid to the people, rather than transmitting it through state officials, \u201cweakens state construction.\u201d (Contrast the writings of development economists like the Peruvian scholar Hernando De Soto<\/a> on how heavyhanded government regulations and corrupt bureaucrats are the chief obstacle to the advancement of the poor.)<\/p>\n

In the end, Piketty is less concerned with promoting either political or individual freedom than he is with building a \u201cstate\u201d strong enough to push \u201cto its logical conclusion\u201d the movement towards \u201creal equality\u201d as he conceives it\u2014based, it would appear, on nothing more than an ambitious intellectual\u2019s attraction to abstract principles. This is reminiscent of the armchair, \u201cliterary politicians\u201d to whom Tocqueville and Edmund Burke attributed the origins of the terroristic French Revolution. Both Piketty\u2019s principles and his policies are a perfect recipe for achieving Tocqueville\u2019s democratic despotism.<\/p>\n

The post Tocqueville\u2019s Worst Fears<\/a> was first published by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER)<\/a>, and is republished here with permission. Please support their efforts.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Piketty is less concerned with promoting either political or individual freedom than he is with building a ‘state’ strong enough to push ‘to its logical conclusion ‘the movement towards ‘real equality’ as he conceives it.” ~ David Lewis Schaefer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":2293701,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2293699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-financial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2293699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2293699"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2293699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2293702,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2293699\/revisions\/2293702"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2293701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2293699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2293699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2293699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}