Simply Not That Complicated
to save Liberal society
Liberal society is failing. By “Liberal society” I mean one with democracy and the rule of law with maximizing liberty as its primary concern. (To my mind, that implies the presence of a market-based economy.) By “failing” I mean it is becoming ungovernable.
The reason Liberal society is failing, I’m saying, is that the tension inherent in taking liberty and equality to be ‘the twin pillars of justice’ for society is creating an unbridgeable chasm in our politics. It is that growing rift which is making the nation ungovernable.
Any geopolitical entity that is ungovernable will undergo a revolution (i.e. transformation) of some kind. A Liberal nation that undergoes a revolution will lose both democracy and liberty unless a way can be found to preserve them and concerted action is taken to put the nation on that different path.
As I see it, saving Liberal society requires taking only two simple steps:
- recognize mutual respect as the ethic of Liberal justice;
- apply mutual respect to the economy, via a democratically distributed income.
Of course, being simple and being easy can be two different things — as most people who have tried to hit a golf ball straight can attest.
It escapes me how anyone can object to mutual respect as the ethic of Liberal justice. Does it not strike everyone as being intuitively correct?
A requirement of mutual respect does also follow from a belief in equality. Applying it to the governance of society would maximize liberty as a practical matter, in the course of living life.
Besides following from a belief in equality — or because of that — mutual respect is present, explicitly or implicitly, one way or another, in the thought of every Liberal philosopher ever: from John Locke to Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Immanuel Kant to G.W.F. Hegel to the utilitarians (led by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, then his son, John Stuart) to the pragmatists (primarily William James and John Dewey) to John Rawls to the ‘discourse ethics’ of Jurgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Appel, and Bruce Ackerman. It is even mirrored in Marxism: economic exploitation is the antithesis of mutual respect. Mustn’t even postmodernists at least refrain from castigating it? Mutual respect is, after all, all about recognizing the ‘other’ as one human being to another.
Some people respond that ‘respect must be earned’. There is respect that can only be earned, but for people who believe in a basic moral equality among human beings there is respect that every human being is due merely by being human. Everyone deserves to be taken into account. At a minimum, mutual respect as the ethic of justice means no human being is to be killed, harmed, coerced, lied to, cheated, or stolen from by any other human being.
Mutual respect as the ethic of justice even follows from observation within material existence. Human beings have no choice but to effect choices. Therefore respecting one another’s capacity to choose, beginning with choosing whether/how/to what extent to be involved whenever any choice is being effected, is to recognize another as a fellow human being; to act otherwise is to assert some status pertaining to the beings involved that cannot be verified within material existence. No human being can be expected, much less required to accept any such assertion.
Mutual respect already governs democracy as we know it. Freedom of speech means that every citizens can participate — be taken into account — in that process. All citizens also share the right of peaceable assembly. Other political rights are restricted in various ways, but those restrictions are universal: they apply to all citizens, meaning no citizen is arbitrarily barred from exercising those rights — from being taken into account.
That brings us to step 2., applying the ethic of mutual respect to the economy. We can borrow from the political process to establish a democratically distributed income. It would not be paid to all citizens, but any citizen could become eligible for it. The money for the income would be crated as needed: like a right, it would be free of cost. The total of that income would form the supply of money (as currency) for the economy. The same process could used to fund government.
There is, of course, more to that proposed paradigm, but the outcomes it promises are absolutely, positively guaranteed because they are built into the structure of it. Those outcomes are:
- the existing economy completely stable and fully self-regulating (with built-in safeguards against inflation)
- a bulletproof income for adult citizens that would not involve taxes or debt, to be based on the current median income (so in the U.S., say, $15/hr.; $600/wk.; $31,200/yr.)
- no unemployment (at no cost to anyone)
- no poverty (without having to redistribute anything)
- no taxes (of any kind)
- no public debt (at any level of government)
- more sustainability (even without additional regulations or any changes in behavior because demographics would govern output — passively)
- all with no limit on income/wealth.
All of that could be accomplished in any nation with a single legislative Act — in the U.S., one Act of Congress. With that, all of the major the socio-economic issues that divide us politically left and right would be resolved.
Materially, the ultimate goals of both the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ in this country would be accomplished. In the abstract each side would have to accept one compromise: the former would have to accept that redistribution isn’t part of the solution and the latter would have to accept that the solution involves applying democracy to the economy (not a dogmatized notion of liberty).
Given what follows from that paradigm, surely neither of those is a rip-you-heart-out concession. Our Liberal society would not only be saved, but would be the best it has ever been.