The Public Policy

...Census reports...

...Although they call for boldness of imagination, futurologues usually do not think beyond the known and the familiar...

...One wonders, of course, why this should be the case--and this in turn raises a whole series of other questions...

...But to argue, as did many supporters of the sage from South Dakota, that the current distribution of income in America is somehow "evil" is patently absurd...

...Kristol discusses the same phenomenon in more general terms in an article for the Wall Street Journal entitled "The Frustrations of Affluence...

...And one begins to suspect as well that their dissatisfaction must reflect something other than mere disapproval of the way income statistics read in U.S...

...Second, the fact that those who did criticize the candidate attacked his specific figures, and not the more general idea that income needed to be redistributed...

...And not surprisingly, a number of American academics have returned from visits to these countries with glowing reports of happiness and collective progress...

...Today, it takes substantial amounts of money to make a person (above the working-class level) only a little better off...

...Apparently, that goal itself is no longer at all controversial in liberal circles...

...calls for more responsibility in the control of public expenditure, and the imposition of extra taxation until the desired anti-inflationary effect is achieved...

...of distinct yet interconnecting social classes and so on...

...Kristol, in an article in Commentary called "About Equality," has eloquently addressed this point as well: "Inequality of income is no greater today than it was twenty years ago, and is certainly less than it was fifty years ago . . . . Though there has been a mushrooming of polemics against the inequalities of the American condition, most of this socioeconomic literature is shot thi'ough with disingenuousness, sophistry, and unscrupulous statistical maneuvering...

...of governing and opposition parties...

...Two of the more interesting of these indications are presented by B. Bruce-Briggs and Irving Kristol...

...Has income distribution in America become less equal...

...they did not allow, for example, the existence of a free intellectual community whose ideas and concepts would interact with the ideas and concepts of the spiritual and temporal power, thus influencing the structure of institutions...

...Granted, improvements can be made...

...This episode, however, is more than just a commentary on the lack of strategic brilliance exhibited by the 1972 Democratic nominee for president...

...McCmvern himself was alternately bemused and befuddled by all the furor: at one point he expressed perfect amazement that many of the assembly line workers he talked to thought his tax package "unfair," at least for people making more than $50,000 a year...

...Briggs, in a recent article for the Public Interest, points out that the only type of housing whose cost is rising relative to income is in upper-middle-class areas--because more Americans are becoming bunched in the middle income ranges where they can begin to bid on such housing, hence driving up the price...

...I suppose this concern for heroics and inspiration is fine if one wants to indulge it...

...Kristol states that the Public Interest (which he edits) has been trying for some time to get one of the critics of income distribution in America to write an article attempting to define a "just" distribution of income...

...Even in the culturally brilliant medieval Islamic world, the philosophers were limited to speculation within their profession, and the state never had recourse to their ideas...

...The "bigger" and the "better" seem to form the horizon of their predictions...

...Compared to his effort, the Bow Group, such youth ginger groups as Pressure for Economic and Social Toryism, are insignificant...

...No doubt, America's most vocal social critics would prefer a more heroic, selfless, inspiring vision of the common good than that which prevails in western bourgeois democracies...

...The Inarticulate Society of the Future Even while they protest every aspect of the industrial-consumer society, the new scientists of futurology imperturbably describe the society of the twenty-first century in ways not essentially different from ours today...

...And more generally, what is specifically ~'western" (from the point of view of a phenomenological analysis of political life and institutions) in the West over against the societies of the third world and also the modern communist societies...

...In any event, McGovern soon started backtracking on his ideas while Republicans rejoiced at yet another blunder, McGovernites cursed yet another example of the "backwardness" of the American people, and historians added yet another cubit to McGovern's stature as the most naive man to run for the presidency since William Jennings Bryan...

...On the contrary, income seems to be getting more equal, and those who criticize the current distribution are unable to formulate what would constitute a just distribution in any event...

...Let us distinguish three spheres in the world today which, it seems to me, are tending centrifugally away from the articulate (western) model of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...

...rather, it expresses a genuine dislike for bourgeois, commercial society, with its belief that personal security, personal liberty, and the opportunity for steadily increasing material prosperity constitute the essential elements of the common good...

...But public policy, unless it is suicidal, has an equal right (and indeed, an obligation) to dismiss them...

...of government, institutions, and church...

...It strikes me as having considerable substantive interest as well, for two reasons...

...These reforms, argued McGovern, would not only yield a "fairer" tax system, but would also promote a "more equitable" distribution of income in America...

...To the American liberal intellectual, such a crass, mundane, self-centered formulation of the philosophic basis of a society will never appear morally sufficient or be personally satisfying...

...In the course of George McGovern's abortive quest for the presidency, the Senator advanced a set of proposed tax reforms which, he asserted, would have high priority in a McGovern Administration...

...According to Kristol, technoloKy has made many things much cheaper in this country, thus bringing an improved standard of living within range of an increasing number of people...

...One begins to suspect that the people who are so critical of the existing distribution of income in this country really have little idea of what they would like to see in its place...

...If someone has drawn up such a standard, I have been unable to locate it...

...A society founded on such a basis will accordingly be viewed as illegitimate...

...Kristol argues persuasively that those who are most critical of income distribution in the United States-whom one could broadly and loosely categorize as intellectuals--are in reality engaged in a class struggle with the business community for status and power...

...Let us call societies where several of these phenomena exist articulated, and let us note--here only very summarily--that most nonwestern societies, together with archaic ones, did not allow themselves to be so divided or internally differentiated...

...Conceivably, one could disagree with the above arguments...

...A brief answer can only state that western ideas have created an articulated society, whereas the more traditional societies (archaic, tribal, sacral, the oriental despotisms, etc...

...This period was the apogee of western influence, and when the futurologues show themselves so optimistic regarding the future world soci10 The Alternative November 1973...

...Whatever his ultimate success will be no one can tell: but he does represent the return of the tough Conservative, in that his economic policies will require the abandonment of much of the tender, paternalistic policies adopted by both parties since the war...

...What frustrates the affluent, then, is the difficulty, in this increasingly egalitarian society, of purchasing those "distinctions" that the upper 15 percent of the income strata used to be able to command automatically--e.g., a live-in maid, or a summer home on the Cape...

...What it does reflect is quite fascinating...

...Now the point I wish to raise after these few preliminaries is whether an intellectually honest futurology ought not to imagine our various societies as going towards new forms of inarticulateness...

...The battle between his ideas and those of Heath will determine the future of British Conservatism...

...Yet, one hundred years ago most Americans were boasting of the historically unprecedented equality that was to be found in their nation, whereas today many seem convinced that inequality is at best a problem and at worst an intolerable scandal...

...Can one specify what would constitute a "just" or "equitable" distribution of income...

...But over and above...

...For the problem is not really income at all...

...they merely enlarge the size and swell the statistics of the present...

...And, of course, no cause is served when we speak of the entire planet as having one kind of future, that is, when we are carried away by the contemporary yet provincial thinking of the West...

...The first question is difficult to answer with any statistical certainty...

...He is also the repository of the liberal economic heritage of the nineteenth century--stressing free enterprise and the intimate interconnection between freedom and economic freedom--in the Tory Party...

...The three spheres are the western world proper, the communist countries, and the third world...

...or to state the matter somewhat differently, the belief that the current distribution of income in America is somehow "bad" and "inequitable" is ceasing to be a radical idea and is becoming instead part of mainstream liberal doctrine...

...It follows, then, that almost no conceivable redistribution of income will satisfy those who criticize America most severely in this area...

...The likely permutations of that battle need to be worked out elsewhere--the chances of politics and the likelihood of success for either side require separate consideration--but the point to grasp now is that Powell, virtually alone, has created such debate about Conservatism, such distinctively intellectual Conservative debate...

...all this he is a nationalist...

...Kristol further states that no one will write this article for him...

...It is only in the West that one may speak of society as not coincident entirely with the state...

...McGovern's tax package immediately came under a lot of fire, in large part because many people found the abovementioned figures unreasonable...

...Apparently, the Senator felt such views represented a gross misreading of one's class interest...

...And finally, what posture should public policy take toward this increasing criticism of current income distribution...

...and I believe that nationalism is the most important characteristic of British Conservatism...

...But this struggle does not reflect mere power lust...

...Is it perhaps because some new, morally compelling standard has been formulated which spells out, in keeping with the sympathies of our more enlightened age, what should constitute a just distribution of income...

...of spiritual and temporal power...

...Such visions, one might point out, are precisely what is venerated in the worker's paradises of Russia, China, and Eastern Europe...

...In other words, I do not wish to step out of the presently existing general frame of reference...

...Even those commentators essentially sympathetic to the candidate's aims felt that he had misjudged the feelings of most Americans in this area...

...And the reason why I speak of the nineteenth and twentieth century "model" is that these 200 years saw western concepts of politics and government penetrate the third world (colonialism) and the empires of Russia and China (Marxism...

...There is a perfect right to make such accusations (though one might hope for more intellectual honesty on the part of the accusers...

...nevertheless, it would still strike me as an extraordinarily difficult proposition to assert that income in America has become less equal in the last century...

...The reason is that middle-class people now have to compete with workingclass and lower-middle-class people for those 'good things in life' they had always aspired to...

...Since he is also a democrat, he defies the paternalistic heritage of Salisbury, though he is intellectually a very similar kind of politician...

...and probably of the country...

...As Professor Seymour Martin Lipset has demonstrated, by almost any socioeconomic indicator one would select, American society is as best we can determine more equal than it was one hundred years ago...

...have been relatively undifferentiated...

...First, the fact that large numbers of individuals in intellectual and academic circles wholeheartedly accepted and supported McGovern's ideas in toto...

...however, there are clear indications that income in this country is continuing a long historical trend of becoming more evenly distributed...

...The problem is rooted instead in a basic disagreement over the philosophical basis of a good society...

...Few would argue that opportunity is completely equal, and few would quarrel with some redistribution of income as prerequisite to assisting the most needy elements of our society...

...In truth, as we have seen, this is an indictment less of income distribution than of the philosophical basis of American society...

...Concrete observation ought to come, I think, to the aid of imagination when we speak of the future...

...If income has not been getting more The Alternative November 1973 9 unequal, we are back where we started --wondering why so many people have become convinced that inequality of income is now a problem...

...But most of us are considerably more impressed with the fact that the "crass, mundane, and self-centered" bourgeois society of America has yielded the highest and the most equally distributed standard of living in history...

...It may be forgivable when western futurologues try gently to impose their own vision on the rest of mankind, but it is obvious that the rest of the world has its own traditions, and that the passing of years and decades will remove rather than thicken the recently added layer of western usages and institutions...

...Nor did the official religious establishment...

...In Kristol's words, "A hundred years ago, it took a relatively small amount of money to make a person much better off...

...In comparison with third world societios, what was the nature of this "added layer...

...Besides closing what he called "unfair" tax loopholes for the rich, McGovern wanted to tax annual income over $50,000 at a rate of at least 75 percent, and sought a 100 percent confiscatory tax on any inheritance over $500,000...

...And if such is one's view of a society, he will see everywhere the signs of that illegitimacy...

...Some of us would even go so far as to argue that the equally unique degree of personal freedom in this country is actually a rather heroic thing for a society to achieve...