Spengler, Obama, dissent and distribution.

Re: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB26Aa01.html


What an excellent essay.  Extremely well-written.  And a very interesting fellow, this Spengler:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spengler_%28Columnist%29

I'm not surprised that journalists are turning to Obama's familial background to try to get some insight into his character.  Spengler's right: we hardly know the guy.

I loved Spengler's acidic characterization of anthropologists as "the curators of soon-to-be-extinct cultures," and of how Bush "squandered a great strategic advantage in a sorry lampoon of nation-building in the Muslim world."

But I take exception to one of the fundamental premises of his argument: that the sort of dissent he attributes to Obama (via his mother and wife) equals "hatred of America" or presages “handouts.”  Neither equation is necessarily the case. 

Dissenters usually see themselves as patriots, not traitors.  This isn’t an unreasonable assumption on their part.  One needn’t make any unweidldy value-judgements about whether a culture’s headed in a “good” or “bad” direction at a given time in order to characterize its dissenters as more patriotic than treacherous; one must merely assume that mainstream thought -- received wisdom -- usually deserves critique and can stand improvement.  A reasonable assumption.  And if true, dissenting critique might be wise or foolish, but its motivations are constructive.  And if we WERE to venture into “unweildy value-judgements,” there are a lot of very bright and patriotic folks today, of both political persuasions, who make cogent arguments that America has drifted alarmingly far from its founding principles.

As for handouts, Spengler oversimplifies.  The sort of dissent he alludes to is socialist, ergo obviously top-down redistributive.  What’s NOT obvious is whether that sort top-down redistribution is more expensive, or is worse for the economy, than the sort of bottom-up redistribution we’ve seen a resurgence of since 1980.  Again, one needn’t come down on either side of the (eternal?) debate between supply- and demand-siders; but one SHOULD acknowledge that it’s not cut-and-dried, and that both sides can legitimately critique each other’s (re)distribution policy.

There’s a deeper premise lurking behind Spengler’s position: the fool’s errand of libertarianism.  All societies redistribute.  The very nature of social living -- mere law -- IS distributive.  What constitutes “fair” social interaction isn’t given; it’s precisely what law (social agreement) stipulates.  Every society -- every group living impacting each other -- has to muddle through who gets what of how much there is to go around.  Some societies choose to distribute wealth narrowly, others widely -- but it’s all (re)distribution, and its nature is according to values that we choose, not values that alight on us from an alien planet.