I’ve been having to confront the notion of “egalitarianism” a lot in recent days and weeks.
In part this is because I’ve been reading The Dawn of Everything, a history of the world that reads like a version of Moby-Dick. I mean by that the obsession with writers David Graeber and David Wengrow in their search for the Great White Whale of the perfect egalitarian society. Was it some of the North American Indian tribes? Was it the “mega-sites” in the Ukraine that flourished several thousand years ago? Whatabout the early agriculture in Mesopotamia before the warrior culture started in the hills to the north of the river basins? It’s gotta be out there somewheres!
Then I read “What’s Left of the Right, Part 5” in The Circulation of Elites and he is all worried about the Gini Coefficient and how various modern versions of socialism or the “unfettered market” do or don’t promote inequality.
Then I’ve been reading a couple of recent poasts by Curtis Yarvin at his Gray Mirror Substack where he is dealing with a couple of attacks made against him. Of course, Yarvin, spawn of lefties and State Department functionaries, advertises himself as a proud reactionary. That’s a red rag to a bull with our lefty friends, so you’d expect silly lefties to get all riled up and want to dispatch him with a good old slashing article of the type celebrated in the olden time by Anthony Trollope.
Look, I think that extremes of inequality are probably not a Good Thing, particularly if the people on the short end are starving to death. Or, as right now, the homeless in Seattle are dying off from fentanyl poisoning.
For instance, the Circulation of Elites chappie notes the self-serving advocacy of upper classes. It could be the worship of the free market by libertarians, or the advocacy of central planning by lefties. Or “improvement” by landowners. Or the globalization of production by corporations. All of which impinge on the lives of ordinary people that want to live in the old way. That was true of French peasants after the French Revolution, and it was true of Captain Swing rebels in England in 1830. And the Rust Belt in the US after 1980. And the decline of “good union jobs” in manufacturing. And the unrestricted immigration into the US that intensifies the competition for low-wage jobs.
My problem is that, unless the political system limits itself to a little tinkering around at the margins, chances are that it will Make Things Worse.
If you protect an industry from foreign competition with tariffs, how much is enough? I’d say that it’s OK to give a little assistance, but in the long run, that industry and its workers and its investors and its managers have to compete on the world market. And maybe it is better for them to face the foreign competition now rather than later. And in the end, as with the apocryphal buggy-whip makers or hand-loom weavers, they are outta here anyway.
And whatabout the poor helpless oil industry after the glorious triumph of the Green Transition?
I understand how the French peasants were cruelly treated by the Paris revolutionaries, and how their new rationalism tore up the traditional rural community. Only, of course, rural peasants were probably in a better situation than the urban poor. And the problem of rural peasant was still there when Zola wrote La Terre in the 1880s about how French farmers were being put out of hearth and home by cheap grain from North America.
We humans are social animals and benefit enormously from living in human communities. And when we live in comfortable prosperity it is agonizing to see that prosperity threatened by anything, whether from competition, from robber barons, from greedy bankers, from price gougers, from sauntering politicians, or a foreign invader.
Hey, whatabout the latest from the Biden administration proposing to limit rent hikes!
Yeah. On the one hand we want to be protected from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. On the other hand we say: “don’t tax me, don’t tax thee, tax that fellow behind the tree.”
Really, I don’t have much problem with billionaires and inequality. I just wish they wouldn’t go to Davos in their private jets and then say we’ve got to stop making gas-power cars and cooking with gas stoves. I’m talkin’ to you, Bill Gates.