Monday, April 14, 2014

Deborah Boucoyannis — Contrary to popular and academic belief, Adam Smith did not accept inequality as a necessary trade-off for a more prosperous economy

The assumption that Adam Smith accepted inequality as the necessary trade-off for a more prosperous economy is wrong, writes Deborah Boucoyannis. In reality, Smith’s system precluded steep inequalities not out of a normative concern with equality but by virtue of the design that aimed to maximise the wealth of nations. Much like many progressive critics of current inequality, Smith targets rentier practices by the rich and powerful as distorting economic outcomes.
London School of Economics
Contrary to popular and academic belief, Adam Smith did not accept inequality as a necessary trade-off for a more prosperous economy
Deborah Boucoyannis | Assistant Professor at the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia
(h/t Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism)

As Michael Hudson continually beats the drum on, classical economics was chiefly concerned with economic rent. This was an overriding concern at the time of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The chief topic of Enlightenment social and political philosophy was achieving liberty and equality of persons. Classical economists realized that economic rent underlay the social and political structure of feudalism.

Marx did, too, and he did not think that the issue could be resolved satisfactorily under the classical liberal assumption that property rights are the basis of human rights owing to the emergence of class power and the ability to extract economic rent it affords.

This set the stage for the debate between classical liberals and humanist over the primacy of property rights or human rights.

The fundamental assumption of the Declaration is biased toward classical liberalism:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed....
This was counterbalanced by the addition of a Bill of Rights to the constitution that incorporated human rights as constitutionally guaranteed.



4 comments:

Matt Franko said...

"they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,"

From where in hell did they come up with that one?

And this is funny they say one of these "rights" is "liberty" and then they immediately assert that to secure this "liberty" so-called we institute government ... which then the libertarians freak out and start talking about "swat teams" and "coercion", etc...

How can we have an absolute "right" to "liberty" when we at the same time we say we only have anything via 'endowment' from a "Creator"

???????

Its like the Pledge: "One nation, under God... with liberty..."

??????

If we are "under God" how can we be also "at liberty"?

This thinking/writing is oxymoronic....

rsp,

Tom Hickey said...

The traditional natural rights/natural law theory is based on the Great Chain of Being. What the Creator endows creatures with is "natural." The founding fathers were Christians or Deists. For them "natural" implied transcendental.

"Natural" has a different meaning today under the Positivist view of matter being fundamental and everything being built up from physics. For scientific materialists, "natural" implies immanent in matter as the structure of matter. Obviously the basic issue here is that the fundamental structure of matter is now widely accepted among scientists as probabilistic, and therefore the reality built on matter is stochastic. Difficult to argue for natural laws from this starting point.

Tom Hickey said...

And this is funny they say one of these "rights" is "liberty" and then they immediately assert that to secure this "liberty" so-called we institute government ... which then the libertarians freak out and start talking about "swat teams" and "coercion", etc...
If we are "under God" how can we be also "at liberty"?

This thinking/writing is oxymoronic....


This is a problem for classical liberalism stemming from Locke and the Anglo tradition. Hegel noticed it and developed a concept of liberalism in which freedom is based on realization of the necessity of nature, so that freedom is conceived as self-determination rather than simply freedom to choose.

For Hegel the key is that freedom of will is rational, will being the rational appetite as opposed to the animal. The basis of rationality is regularity, invariance, i.e., "law."

For Kant, the moral law was categorical in the sense of just given. The categorical imperative is modeled on the Golden Rule of the NT.

For Hegel "right" flows from the rational nature of being. Being rational means having a logic (logos). Being is law unto itself that unfolds itself to itself through the historical progression of becoming. For Hegel metaphysics is "the science of logic." History is the unfolding of the internal dynamic of being in time. History concretizes time the abstract universal, which atemporal (eternal). This satisfies Kant's dictum that experience without concepts is empty and concepts without experience are blind. History is the "life" of being. Hegel was not an abstract idealist, for which he had criticized Fichte, for example.

In the contemporary view, history is contingent, whereas in Hegel, history is based on the internal dynamic of being, hence necessary. Some argue that Hegel was deterministic and other not. I don't think that it can be shown that Hegel did not think that the particulars of history were contingent and suspect that he did.

However, he held a great man theory of history, too, and the Zeitgeist is manifested through them. Again, while there may be some contingency associated with the particulars, they don't arise accidentally but rather rise to the need of the time and they are recognized at least subliminally, as representing it.

However, the outline of historical development in Hegel is providential and there is a plan that it follows, which is inherent in the structure (logic) of being. The notion that history in entirely contingent for Hegel seems to be to contradict everything that Hegel was writing about.

The point is that these issues were thought out in great deal at the time of the development of liberalism. Now most people have forgotten about it and just adopt some prevailing view. They probably are completely oblivious to the weak points and contradictions.

Anonymous said...

We do tend to see everything from a ‘human-centric’ point of view.
Matter and energy are opposite poles. ‘Energy’ is just a label for something that is generator, operator, destroyer (G.O.D.) of the universes: “one Boundless Immutable Principle; one Absolute Reality which antecedes all manifested conditioned Being …. Beyond the reach of any human thought or expression”. [HPBlavasky]

Energy strikes matter (brought into pre-existence) and consciousness is the result.

Energy contains within it all of the evolving qualities that create all of the evolving forms in which it is manifest, from the macro_universes measured in ‘light years’ down to the micro_universe of the ‘fiery lives’ (atom). Being human centric we interpret and label some of these qualities as rights. We try to understand these through thought, history and experience – however they are only fully understood through the agency of Being.

Mind is constrained by concepts. Being is ‘free’ in that it is a part of something that is Ultimately free. Freedom is a feeling: - whether you are on a battlefield, locked up in gaol, or sitting on a beach watching the sunrise without a cent in your pocket – if you feel a feeling or freedom in your heart; you are free! Freedom is a quality of our inner being. This freedom, this inner being, this feeling – can soar high above you: know things, understand things, experience things that the personality cannot. That is why knowledge of the Self has always been respected. This is evolution: - the return path of energy, creating changes in consciousness (which result in changes in form) on its way home.

Of course physical circumstances conducive to being able to feel freedom are also necessary: it is difficult to feel the freedom that is at the core of every human heart, if you are being tortured or starved to death; or working like a little robot every-day!