Identity and the State

President Obama made headlines recently for a speech in which he emphasized the societal foundation of any person's success.  Unfortunately for him, though I believe revealingly, he fell victim to the soundbite era: "If you’ve got a business - you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen."

"And Mr. President, if you become the president, who made that happen?"  This would be a weak question: I believe that Mr. Obama's strongly stated beliefs originate in his own experience, that of accepting and working in the machine.  I suspect his irritation - at "guns and religion", at those challenging ACORN and other interest groups, at the steadfast unwillingness of the American people to give in to his vision - is honest, that it is the bafflement of one who has accepted a view of the world and found it not held as widely as he expected.

On a superficial level, the President's viewpoint is attractive and reasonable.  It contains some idea of a community, working together, holding to a common good; it presents some echo of the polis which, idealized by Plato and Aristotle and Cicero (if in different ways), resounds through the centuries of Western history and still informs the world today.

But Mr. Obama's view has a weak point: a crisis of mis-identification, or at the very least a crucial identification which he has failed to convince the United States' people is either crucial or a true identity - and perhaps more damningly, he has failed to understand that the point is still under debate.

For Mr. Obama, as for much of the academic, legal, and political elite he has grown to belong to,  the people, and specifically the will of the people, is identified with the government instituted by the people.  He does not follow the earlier understanding, where the government was the representative of the people; or even the older idea that the government stands above the people (by breeding or divine will - or both) and is therefore responsible for them.  A representative who represents poorly can be changed.  A father, judge, or a commander, held up as such by the thinnest string of theory or tradition, can be called to account and shamed - or deposed.

Instead in this modern conception, the government cannot be held in check by theories.  A government defined as "the people's will" simply by the fact of its existing as the government has nothing that can be called up against it except natural or divine law, and those having been busily undermined in the name of "reason" and "tolerance" and "relative morality" because everything originates with the people's will - which is, as we already found, simply the government.

I believe President Obama is confused by backlash against his policies.  As the chief executive, he appears is the supreme embodiment of the popular will which is to be enshrined, and he has been busily enacting all the policies he knows are best.  The fact that law and tradition stand in his way is not to be considered an obstacle, in his view: laws change.  In the President's view, I suspect reality changes.  He does not understand, does not know what to do with, a people who believe in lasting truths, in an actual rule of law because it is the law, in not a good or good policy or today's best option but in the Good.

Yet this philosophical confusion is not really the most damning indictment of his speech and his policies.  After all, if he is right - that is to say, if my speculations about Mr. Obama's worldview are correct, and that worldview is itself factual - then he is doing the right thing, and is merely a poor politician, or at least a tactless one.

The worst problem with his attempted solutions is that even on his own terms, it ends up either backwards or tyrannical.  If we take the more positive view, we stop to ask him who these people were that helped.  Certainly, a state of peace is maintained by the government, the servants of the people: the soldiers, police, road crews, and so forth.  But these are for maintenance only.  The next question leads us to the practical problem faced by these bureaucratic-faced dreamers: who takes us beyond subsistence, and who pays the ones who help us to subsist.  The awkward fact that President Obama has yet to acknowledge is that it is the successful men - the Mr. Romneys and Mr. Gateses and, yes, Mr. Obamas of the world - who help the rest of us: by paying outsize shares of taxes, by hiring and training workers, by providing necessities and comforts and then even luxuries.

This puts us in their debt: it is not right to go demanding that "the rich" pay "their fair share" when they already pay, relatively speaking, that and more; when they not only provide those moneys to the government but in the private sectors hire and pay us who are not so wealthy - and to return to the public arena they largely, for good or ill, provide our government from their number.  It may happen, in this day or in a time of war or or stress, that we need not only a normal contribution from these men but an unusual one: but justice demands that, even if we ask it, we ask it - however formally and with whatever force of law behind it - recognizing that we take from them for a common good or need, and not as if demanding a debt owed to us personally.

This is the charitable view: that President Obama, used to seeing so much given out regularly, has forgotten it is given, and sees it only as taken and that by right.

The uncharitable view - which I hesitate to ascribe to him, but you will see argued by others, I have no doubt - is one that reduces to serfdom any private person who is not himself an agent of the government.  More than mere forgetfulness, or blowing on some wind of the age, this would assert that the government has the right and duty to demand whatever is "necessary" - and has forgotten the older theories of reciprocal duties, so that now all is owed to the government, and the government's dole is charity.  And here we find the sinister descendant of what I mentioned above as Mr. Obama's probable political philosophy: we observe that the government has become the State, and the Will of the People, and the actual people reduced to so many resources to be commanded to produce.  No doubt Mr. Obama considers his a benevolent guidance, but he gives no indication that he sees any right of anyone to disagree with that guidance.

The Democratic Premise

Support for democracy can roughly be defined as a belief that experts are unnecessary in government.  Many people are not experts in anything, and we find those people who have acquired expertise of some sort in many different fields.  Even among the experts in the "correct" fields for government, the studies of law, politics, and the like, we find disagreements, to say nothing of character and personalities differences or problems.  This is to say, even if the people of a democracy were to listen to the scholars of government, which course they might choose to follow as the one handed down from the wise men is less than clear on most issues.  Further, by the very nature of the thing any argument for a pure democracy puts government among the things that most people know how to do, at least more or less: which is to say, among a list of things like raising children, helping the needy, finding work, settling arguments, and so forth.

By a corollary of sorts – the strict logical connection is difficult to draw, but the analogy is not hard to see – a democratic government will by nature be a fairly limited one in its functions.  After all, if most people know how to do the things government does, most people will already be doing them for themselves.  On the other hand, the extent of the government is by definition as great as possible.  The result would seem to be that in a democratic government – if any such beast were ever found – the line between the public and the private would be blurred.  By way of example, I might suggest the New England colonies, at least up to the mid-1800's.  I was deeply intrigued, reading the first part of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America earlier this year, by his observation that the majority of governmental functions, especially in New England, were carried out by each town separately: his account gives almost the impression that most of the citizens of any given town carried some governmental function, even apart from their votes.

Further, it is clear that any governmental action which begins to prefer some people's judgment to others – not in the natural way of listening in fact to the scholar for an opinion on the law, but by the artificial method of elevating some class into a special legal station – has abandoned the heart of democracy, which is equal voice in and treatment by the government.

Defining democracy is different from determining whether it is in fact a workable system of government.  The expert opinion, if I can still use the phrase without irony at the end of this piece, has tended to be that it in fact is not so possible, whether you look at Plato's philosopher-guardians or the American Founders' careful checks and limits and balances.  If I were to draw any immediate application – and this piece is meant as a definition and therefore a starting place, not an argument by itself – it would simply be this: given the meaning of the word it is strange that the modern states which claim to be "democracies" are characterized by huge governmental structures of regulations, and quite often preferential legalisms (whether we're talking earmarks or loopholes).

Tax Math

I noted when I got my last paycheck that the combined Federal and Virginia income tax withholding came out to almost 17%. Intellectually, I knew this already, and as I have had paychecks before I've seen it before, but something about that number made me sit up and notice this time. Maybe it's because I've been actively teaching mathematics now, so the number-crunching part of my brain is in constant gear.

What I suddenly realized is this: that 17% number is a sixth of my salary. So, realizing that I actually only get five sixths of the total money, for every five people like me, we're paying the various governments enough to hire the sixth person in line. Does one out of every six workers actually work for some government? I was thinking no, initially, until I started counting up government positions: legislatures, police, public school teachers, military, etc. Suddenly that number seemed a lot more plausible.

Funnily enough, the most reputable source I can find on a quick search suggests it's actually... one out of every six. Which is to say, if everyone paid my 17% tax, we may pay the people but we have insta-budget-deficits from the fact that revenue isn't high enough to support the government's infrastructure.

Of course, I'm well aware that in fact people who make a bunch more money than I do pay a lot more in taxes, and that probably covers at least some of the overrun. (On the other hand, the deficits history suggests any large government magically acquires more than offset that.) But what really concerns me here is that we're at a point as a society where for every five private citizens we've got a sixth being paid to mind everybody else's business. I'm not sure what an appropriate number would be – I'm inclined to think every twenty or fifty or something as a maximum – but the actual number seems way too high.