Krugman Can Keep His Egalitarian & Humanitarian Merit Bages

Perhaps my problem is that I am ultimately more willing to forgive human beings their particular tribalisms than Will Wilkinson is. His insistence that everyone join him in his rarefied, bird’s eye view of the global human economy strikes me as silly in practical terms, not to mention morally obtuse in those circumstances where his view would require Group A (the American working class, in this case) to fall on its sword for the sake of uplifting Group B (immigrants). Laying down political demands that this or that bunch of people should all behave like Christ in order to move us closer to global capitalist solidarity doesn’t really fly under most circumstances, particularly when you’re a think-tank intellectual ensconced at the Cato Institute, and they’re the working class.

And while I confess I have not read through Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal to the part Will is lambasting, so I can only go off of what I know of Krugman from his other writings, this bit still strikes me as horribly unfair:

What Krugman never says about immigration is that it is the most powerful engine of economic mobility and equalization there is. This make it obvious that Paul Krugman is not especially concerned with poor people or with economic equality. He is evidently not even especially concerned with poor people in the United States if they can’t vote. He seems to think it is at least worth considering keeping some of those people out of the country — keeping them poorer — if that would help achieve the redistributive politics he prizes. What kind of egalitarian is that?

Perhaps it makes Krugman an egalitarian aware of the brute reality that the franchise is the only political power every citizen without question has, and thus one of the few powers that can be leveraged to the betterment of citizens who are not at the top of the economic food chain. Will states, somewhat condescendingly it seems, that, “In Krugman’s view, if the working class contains many members without the franchise, it is itself disenfranchised.” But what other view could one possibly take of the matter? Voting is, by definition, a power that only applies in great numbers, and like it or not, immigration as it currently operates in America dilutes that power. Now, my preferred solution to this problem – and the preferred solution of a good deal of libertarians, as far as I know – is to simply make the path to citizenship much, much easier (i.e. if you show up, you’re in). But the political reality is that it ain’t gonna happen, at least not any time soon. Which brings us to this:

Imagine a choice between two policies. Policy A would leave the level of redistribution just as it is, but would allow a much larger volume of immigration. Policy B would leave immigration as it is, but would increase the level of redistribution from rich to poor citizens. Which policy should a humanitarian favor? There can be no doubt: policy A. Which policy should an egalitarian favor? Well, Policy A will increase nation-level inequality by increasing the proportion of the population near the bottom of the income distribution. But why is this of any moral significance? If we take the set of people in the U.S. at time 2, and follow them all back in time to t1, when everyone is in whatever country he or she was in then, and see whether inequality has increased or decreased among this group of people, we will see that it has decreased a great deal, and that almost all of this decrease will have come from the poor becoming richer in real terms, and not from the rich losing income to taxes. If it were necessary to limit redistribution in order to make a greater volume of immigration politically feasible, then egalitarians and humanitarians ought to be for it.

But no one is purely a humanitarian or purely an egalitarian, nor are those the only concerns at play here. There is also the health of the world’s democracies to consider, without which the economic benefits of immigration – for immigrants or anyone else – won’t count for much. In answer to Will’s question on the moral significance of wealth inequality, there is a strong argument to be made that it can badly distort, if not thoroughly destroy, the democratic process, regardless of what a given country’s wealth is in real terms. That’s why the business-owning classes and economic conservatives are all in favor of allowing illegal immigration to continue apace. It greatly aids their desire – which is perfectly natural under capitalism – to bleed workers for every ounce of production they can while compensating them as little as possible. This vastly increases their economic power relative to everyone else, which under current law translates easily into political power, and which they obviously have no qualms about wielding to further their self-interest. It isn’t hard to imagine the current wealth inequality, when combined with massive influxes of low-skilled labor, resulting in some form of corporate oligarchy either in America or abroad. (Assuming we’re not effectively there already.)

Also, while it may be currently necessary to either limit redistribution or limit immigration, that is a political reality only. Meaning we aren’t actually limited to Policy A or Policy B. There is also Policy C – increasing both the level of redistribution and the volume of immigration – if the political consensus can be changed. That’s a pretty tall order, and will probably require negotiations between Policies A and B in the interim. So, contra Will, as long as Policy C is out of the equation, having a hard time choosing between A and B does not place one outside the “egalitarian and humanitarian” venn diagram.

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And yes, this paper does look like a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t change the fact that the nation-state remains the primary avenue for the human race to implement any kind of collective policy. People do matter more than places, but peoples’ ability to govern themselves will remain inextricably tied to place for the foreseeable future. It isn’t inconceivable that globalization and the continuing rise of communication technology could eventually shift the foundation of governance away from nations and onto amorphous, non-state communities. But this simply serves to re-emphasize my earlier point that Will’s suggestion, which seems to be some version of allowing the differentiation between nations to dissolve into the market, is a very bad idea. Rather like the way the American constitution leverages the various governmental branches against one another to prevent tyranny, so the nation-state remains one of the human races’ few avenues for heading off concentrated corporate power, and its tendency to subsume individuals to its goals. Which means that if the nation-state goes, some form of community-based governance paradigm, existing separately from the market, and with certain inevitably contingent and tribal characteristics, is going to need to take its place. And this whole “community vs. the whole” argument will begin all over again.

~ by Jeff on March 30, 2008.