Why I Left The Right

Steve, who has a little corner of the teapot tempest called “Rabid Sanity”, wrote about Barack Obama’s Social Security plan. As often happens in our haste to write stuff while also leading normal lives, Steve misinterpreted the Obama plan, asserting that he wants to eliminate the Social Security tax for anyone making less than $250,000. In fact, Obama wants to create a donut hole, taxing incomes up to $102,000, then applying no tax between $120,000 and $250,000. It’s a horse designed by a committee, but that’s what politics does to logic.

Steve also goes on to make some larger statements that do well to point out basic difference in right and left-wing outlooks.

For instance, in asserting that those making over $250,000 shouldn’t pay a FICA tax, Steve gives us the trickle-down litany:

Besides, what are they going to do with that approximately $75k anyway? Sure, they might not buy a new car this year causing unemployment in the auto industry, or they may not construct a new house causing further contraction in the construction industry. Or they may not invest it in a company preventing further enhancements to keep the company competitive, allowing all of that business to be speedily and orderly transferred to China. No, the rich won’t miss that money. But we will.

This is the essence of disagreement between left and right economic outlook – those on the right tend to think that the wealthy create wealth and incidentally bestow it upon us as they pursue more wealth for themselves. That’s why conservatives and libertarians lay prostrate before the wealthy classes.

We of the left attribute wealth creation to the sweat of one’s brow, and see it harvested by clever accumulators who have no particular interest in greater good and want only to accumulate more, no matter the cost to their fellow humans.

Another problem with this proposal: Does it change the basic social contract? For instance, at the moment everyone who works pays into the Social Security trust fund and expect to receive money back when they retire. The more you make, the more you are able to draw in retirement. But all workers would receive something more than just the equivalent of Social Security Supplemental Income [SSI], otherwise known as “federal welfare.”

I had trouble just parsing this. But it’s the logic of illogic – Steve is saying that since workers won’t be taxed under $250,000, Social Security becomes a welfare program, which is what the SSI program is. But that’s a step in the right direction – he tacitly admits that Social Security, as structured, is an insurance program. I’ll take what I can get.

This rending of the social fabric that would turn once proud workers into welfare recipients strikes me as appalling. I can only hope that Obama’s comments on his plan carry the same weight as support for Rev. Wright, or NAFTA, or clean campaigning, or campaign finance reform, or . . . well, you get the drift.

Well, that’s it. That’s all he wrote. I didn’t realize on first and second reading how little there there was there. But he exposes a lot of right wing thought. Their basic impulse is to scoff at any program that works in the general welfare. They misunderestimate us – they think we are all individualists who want nothing more what is good for ourselves, no matter the cost to others. This is the ethos of wealth accumulation and why we find this virus rampant among the wealthy.

People change as they grow wealthy – they become protective of their wealth, suspicious of their fellow humans. Because wealth is power, the wealthy often end up in control of government, and find themselves at war with ordinary people. In other countries this has translated into open warfare, torture, death squads, disappearances and imprisonment. In the United States, where our progressive forebears have given us strong laws to protect ordinary people, we have more power. The process is more subtle. Crafty politicians and their servile economists lure us into seductive reasoning to disown us of our best impulses to care for one another. They’ve given us trickle-down, anti-unionism, and anti-welfare. They fight any collectivist impulse among us. If they were honest, they would openly say that they hate unions, Medicare, Medicaid, and of course, Social Security. “Hate” is not too strong a word.

Steve doesn’t go that far. He’s not openly hostile to Social Security, though he is a fellow traveler of the right and does despair of an collectivist impulse. But in fact, people try to fit in larger communities, and we generally try to care for each other. In larger society, this basic familial instinct translates into welfare for the indigent, and health care for all, and a decent retirement for the elderly. These things cost money, and at are odds with instincts of the accumulators among us.

That’s what the right hates about the left. Conservatives want to remake us into self-serving beasts who are indifferent to one another, who let accumulators accumulate, who are at war with our good instincts. It should come as no surprise that people naturally reject right wing individualist philosophy and tend towards the ethos of greater good. It should also be no surprise that the right wing, in the end, backs authoritarian regimes, oppression and torture. They are ridding us of the disease of collectivism, and the iron fist is the cure. They want to remake us, by force if necessary.