Refuting Straw Liberals
Oct 10th, 2011 | 20 responses
WASHINGTON — It’s not often that a sound bite from a Democratic candidate gets so under the skin of my distinguished colleague George F. Will that he feels moved to quote it in full and then devote an entire column to refuting it. This is instructive.
The declaration heard ’round the Internet world came from Elizabeth Warren, the consumer champion running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. Warren argued that “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own,” that thriving entrepreneurs move their goods “on the roads the rest of us paid for” and hire workers “the rest of us paid to educate.” Police and firefighters, also paid for by “the rest of us,” protect the factory owner’s property. As a result, our “underlying social contract” requires this hardworking but fortunate soul to “take a hunk” of his profits “and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
In other words, there are no self-made people because we are all part of society. Accomplished people benefit from advantages created by earlier generations (of parents whom we didn’t choose and taxpayers whom we’ve never met) and by the simple fact that they live in a country that provides opportunities that are not available everywhere. The successful thus owe quite a lot to the government and social structure that made their success possible.
Will is a shrewd man and a careful student of political philosophy. I am a fan of his for many reasons, but more on that in a moment. In this case, he demonstrates his debating skills by first accusing Warren of being “a pyromaniac in a field of straw men,” and then by conceding the one and only point that Warren actually made.
“Everyone,” he writes, “knows that all striving occurs in a social context, so all attainments are conditioned by their context.” Indeed. He gives us here a rigorous and concise summary of what she said.
Will then adds: “This does not, however, entail a collectivist political agenda.” In intellectual contests, this is an MVP move. Having accused Warren of setting fire to straw men, Will has just introduced his own straw colossus.
There is absolutely nothing in Warren’s statement that implied a “collectivist political agenda.” Will simply ascribes one to her by quoting a book published 53 years ago, “The Affluent Society,” in which the economist John Kenneth Galbraith spoke of how corporate advertising could manipulate consumer preferences.
From this, Will concludes that liberals hold a series of terribly elitist beliefs and that by extension, Warren (who is, conveniently, a Harvard professor) does too. Will’s straw liberal is supposedly committed to “the impossibility, for most people, of self-government”; “subordination of the bovine many to a regulatory government”; and a belief that government “owes minimal deference to people’s preferences.”
Well. On the one hand, this is a tour de force. My colleague has brought out his full rhetorical arsenal to beat back a statement that he grants upfront is so obviously true that it cannot be gainsaid. Will knows danger when he sees it.
What Warren has done is to make a proper case for liberalism, which does not happen often enough. Liberals believe that the wealthy should pay more in taxes than “the rest of us” because the well-off have benefited the most from our social arrangements. This has nothing to do with treating citizens as if they were cows incapable of self-government.
Will, the philosopher, knows whereof Warren speaks because he has advanced arguments of his own that complement hers. In his thoughtful 1983 book “Statecraft as Soulcraft,” Will rightly lamented that America’s sense of community had become “thin gruel” and chided fellow conservatives “caught in the web of their careless anti-government rhetoric.” He is also the author of my favorite aphorism about how Americans admire effective government even when they pretend not to. “Americans talk like Jeffersonians,” Will wrote, “but expect to be governed by Hamiltonians.”
In light of my respect for Will, it seems only appropriate that I close by offering words of admiration — for him, and for Elizabeth Warren. Will doesn’t waste time challenging arguments that don’t matter and he doesn’t erect straw men unless he absolutely has to. That Warren has so inspired Will, our premier conservative polemicist now that William F. Buckley Jr. has passed to his eternal reward, is an enormous tribute to her. And remember: On the core point about the social contract, George Will and Elizabeth Warren are in full, if awkward, agreement.
E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com. (c) 2011, Washington Post Writers Group
20 Responses to “Refuting Straw Liberals”
Warren is making an observation (and an argument) that I’ve often made over the years. She got it exactly right and the truth of it got under Will’s skin, hence the attempt to deflect and counter
“Will knows danger when he sees it.”
And yet he felt compelled to walk right into it. No dice George.
Warren’s comments are true, but the controversy should be over what she didn’t say. What are the implications of her statement? While successful people owe some debt to society, the questions should be how large should that debt be and how far the government go to collect on it? We already have a progressive tax system, is Warren’s statement sufficient grounds to make it more progressive?
Moreover there are competing arguments to her statement that are also true. Parents should be able to will their estates to their children. Initiative, hard work and success should be rewarded. Much of the success of the US is based on capitalism. The US is largely based on principles set up to protect the individual from unreasonable government intrusions.
As Dionne says, Warren makes the proper case for liberalism. Equally valid cases can be made for conservatism and capitalism. The question then becomes where is the reasonable point on the philosophical continuum that the US should place itself? That will continually be decided by our system of elections and will shift over time.
This is a fairly common debating tactic, if you can’t refute an argument push it down the slippery slope to try to turn it into an argument that you can refute.
Even his favorite strawman, a ”collectivist political agenda” has to be knocked further down the slope,
Somehow you have to believe Mr. Will would seriously object to his philosophy being characterized as an “individualism political agenda” that asserts an individual’s achievements are purely those of the individual alone, that he owes no debt to society or any other individual, even if the individual’s major achievement in life, as with the majority of the wealthy in the United States, was choosing the right parents.
This absurd argument is the reciprocal one to the argument Will made. That it seems more ridiculous than Will’s only speaks to how accustom we are becoming to such absurdities from the right these days.
It is important to remember that we passed the flatter tax not just to let people keep more of their money. The tax cuts were sold as a solution to stimulate the economy, to increase employment and to let the money trickle down through society. The money would be invested and those investments would benefit society more than if it had been payed in wages.
The tax cuts were sold as benefiting society as a whole, collectivism. This is a fact.
After thirty years it is plain to see that they have failed to improve and enrich society as a whole. It is easy to see that they have only enriched the already rich.
Society has the right to call a stop to a failed program, doesn’t it?
You said it, DaGoat. EJ misses the mark again. He is out of his league taking on Will.
The key is the part Merkin quoted, derided as a straw man, and then failed to refute.
Okay, my liberal friends, if that statement isn’t true, what principle does define how much society is allowed to take?
DaGoat says:
“Warren’s comments are true…..”…….only in the limited context that, yes, all car-driving, home-owning citizens pay gasoline excise taxes ostensibly used for road building and maintenance and property taxes to operate schools and community protection services regardless of the extent of their personal usage thereof.
While all libertarians and conservatives concede the factual existence of this funding scheme, I suspect just about everyone of them would prefer switching to a use-based funding scheme to apportion the costs more fairly to those who DO make more personal or commercial use of those services. With respect to road usage, that is already occurring to the extent gasoline purchase taxes are the sole funding source. Certainly, public schools could be converted to a tuition based revenue model and achieve more fairness based on usage. Ironic to Warren’s underlying logic, I doubt any conservatives and libertarians would object to this funding-based-on-utilization conversion, but liberals certainly would.
Nonetheless, to me personally, Warren’s plain-as-daylight-to-all-but-Dionne-and-Spencer “strawman/men” is that persons who have maybe, could be, might have, leveraged a business success making use of some of, maybe sometimes, a portion of those services now owe an additional INCOME-BASED tax beyond what they already contributed. Warren, Dionne and JSpencer go on to insult the intelligence of creative and talented people everywhere by offering not an iota of logical argument for this beyond implying a nod of their head to their usual liberal dogma of “this how we do it”.
George Will does sort of leap beyond just this classic liberal malusage of cranial synovial fluid to go on to create more of an attack on the arrogance of liberals to presume they get to decide what’s “fair” by applying the, yes, dictionary definition of collectivism, all personal income is somehow granted a apriori claim by government.
So, if Will is indeed creating a strawman argument, liberals should be able to step forward now and contend that taxation based solely on ability to pay is not one of their beliefs.
I no longer respect George Will.
Today I heard him raise a scenario comparing the 1968 election to the upcoming election, whereby he analogizes a loss to the Democrats by the voters reaction to the liberal demonstrations.
He cites the voters in 1968 as voting Republican rather than Democrat as a voter reaction to the liberal demonstrations then. WRONG and HE KNOWS BETTER!
The voters voted Republican then because Nixon promised to flat out leave Vietnam. Robert Kennedy still would have kicked his arse anyway but he was murdered that year. However we see the treachery of the Republican party as after election Nixon creates the Peace with honor mantra and continues expands the war.
George Will, along with his Republican partners in crime are frightened to death of these unscripted, unfunded, unorganized, purely grass roots liberal demonstrations directly against the conservative cause.
Conservatives are on the wrong side of “what is right” no matter how many people they pay to repeat their propaganda.
DaGoat, success in this country is rewarded. Its rewarded fabulously. Raising the taxes is not going to change that. Progessive taxation is not going to change that. My god, we don’t have to wonder or guess at this because we already lived through it. We had higher taxes back in the 90′s under Clinton. Things were really good, we made more money as a nation than ever before, even the 80′s. Despite the higher personal income tax people had more money to spend, therefore markets were strong as the middle class had buying power and used it. The rich made money because the companies were doing well because people had money to spend on their goods and services.
Then we cut taxes. As predicted by just about everyone on the left, the deficit spun out of control, and the flow of money to the top of the food chain accelerated rapidly. The middle class has less money to spend, businesses have few customers, they shrink because there isn’t enough demand, lay off workers, viscous cycle.
Were there other factors involved, sure. But none were more clear cut, or more reversible than the Bush tax cuts.
Boy would that be a bag of ass! It would guarantee a permanent underclass akin to India’s caste system.
Public schools were created to educate the masses and improve all our lot together. Taking that away would be disastrous, even worse than our current public school failures.
As it stands, exorbitant college tuition (a scandal if I ever heard one) is or soon will be out of reach of the middle class, a situation both worsening and worsened by the debt crisis. http://washingtonpolicywatch.org/2009/07/30/high-tuition-high-aid-college-financing-the-middle-class-squeeze-and-student-loan-debt-explosion/
“Boy would that be a bag of ass! ”
Yup, a bag of ass indeed. So would make use-based fees for things like roads. Then you’d get geographical isolation as well as educational striation.
“Boy would that be a bag of ass! It would guarantee a permanent underclass akin to India’s caste system. Public schools were created to educate the masses and improve all our lot together. Taking that away would be disastrous, even worse than our current public school failures.”
Are you a product of the “failed” public school system? Your inability to stay with the point of the OP would certainly lead me to believe that. If you want to discuss social outcomes, then wait for a post that makes social outcomes the topic and pontificate away.
For about the fourth time…….give us your logical (and not ideological) support for how taxing one’s income is the most fitting tax for one’s usage of roads and schools.
That’s a period at the end of the last sentence.
As someone who isn’t against raising taxes if we need them, but who doesn’t believe in raises taxes just to “get the rich”, I have to say Warren’s statements set up various strawmen of their own.
Her comments clearly imply that those who “make it” get a free ride on the societal system they enables economic sucess. She says (emphasis hers) it something the rest of us pay for. In fact, the rich pay a lot of taxes.
They also imply that conservatives object to paying taxes for roads, police, etc. While their have been some objections to Obama’s call to stimulate the economy with infrastructure spending (not the least because the last time he said this, not that much actually went to infrastructure), conservatives are generally fine with this.
In the end she argues that the rich should be willing to pay some taxes to support the infrastructure that enabled their sucess, but the premise that they don’t, and aren’t willing to, is debatable.
Here we have a bunch of TMV commenters responding to an article written by E. J. Dione in response to an column written by George Will in response to comments made by Elizabeth Warren, and yet no one has bothered to include the relevant links to either George Will’s column or Elizabeth Warren’s comments so that either can be read in context.
So I’ll help y’all out.
A link to Elizabeth Warren’s comments (with accompanying YouTube video) can be found here.
A link to George Will’s column can be found here.
“give us your logical (and not ideological) support for how taxing one’s income is the most fitting tax for one’s usage of roads and schools”
He must have been dazed and dazzled (as was I) by your logical and so well-supported assertion that libertarians and conservatives agree with you that other ways would be better. I mean, if there’s any argument that’s bulletproof, it’s that libertarians and conservatives agree with casualobserver. Just understand that in the light of such clear and cogent argument, it’s really tough to come up with anything that can hold a candle.
The number of times I have heard “conservatives” on blogs and in comments sections of various newspapers and magazines say that taxation is theft and that they as individuals should not have to surrender one thin dime for the sake of maintaining anything but national defense and similar “appropriate” government functions would be hard to count. Yet the conservatives posting here attempt to pretend that those don’t exist.
Actually, davidpsummers, you are wrong. The first time he proposed spending on infrastructure the conservatives howled about it. Not one of them that I am aware of said anything to the effect of “Fine, but let’s make sure that’s where it really goes.”. They were too busy dissing the idea that government infrastructure spending would help because it would, after all, only be temporary stimulus because the government can’t create jobs. That’s certainly what I was hearing from pretty much every Republican and the overwhelming majority of conservative pundits as well as comments in the blogosphere and media.
That was partially knee jerk partisanship (not that the Democrats are any better, “End the Two Party System!” and all that) and part a view that it would be all boondogle and no actual in frastructure. All but the most radical conservatives I read don’t put forward the philosophy that _all_ taxation is bad nor do they say that having police and roads is bad.
Wow, and to think SteveK was lecturing me on how the liberal writers around here are better able to stay on topic.
No one is pretending that there are no people who hold such an extreme view of taxation, Jim.
To recap, George Will claimed that liberals’ operating principle is that society is allowed to take as much from citizens as it feels like. EJ Dionne called that a strawman view of liberals, without telling us all what their actual principle is.
Then Merkin did the same. Allen gave us an ad hominem about George Will. Slamfu, Barky, and Roro argued that higher taxes would do some good, which may be true but is tangential to the original issue. Now you’re off attacking positions that are both unrelated to the OP and that no one took.
It’s pretty clear none of you can refute Will’s “strawman” argument any more than Dionne could.
“Somehow you have to believe Mr. Will would seriously object to his philosophy being characterized as an “individualism political agenda” that asserts an individual’s achievements are purely those of the individual alone, that he owes no debt to society or any other individual, even if the individual’s major achievement in life, as with the majority of the wealthy in the United States, was choosing the right parents.”
Well said merkin. I recall seeing some data a year or so ago depicting a breakdown of the wealthiest Americans indicating how and where they got their wealth. The percentage who didn’t generate it but merely inherited it was quite an eye-opener.
Um, what?
First, you’re the one who went off-topic.
Second, I was challenging one of your ideas as being faulty (which, in typical attack-dog hypocritical fashion, you misdirected the criticism by attacking me instead of simply proving your point).
Third, I have no idea what this “fourth time” nonsense is about. I was never interested in debating whether income taxes were right, I was simply pointing out that I think your idea of tuition-based primary & secondary education is idiotic.
Fourth, income taxes don’t fund schools, at least directly. It varies state-by-state, but usually it’s property taxes or grants from state governments , which comes from state taxes ( via whatever mechanism the state collects them, which may include income taxes). And theoretically we already pay for roads via a non-income-tax method, gasoline taxes (although there is no lock-box so it’s fluffy).