Jeff Graubart. AFFEERCE:
A Business Plan to Save the United States and Then the World
(Second draft -- 2013).
[Disclaimer. This is a paid
review. I was assured by Jeff Graubart that negative reviews were
fine – he expected only honesty. And I received 40% of the payment
up front, with the rest to come after writing the review.]
Graubart's vision
of a future society, like the whole of Gaul, is divided into three
parts:
We need free markets on steroids and we need universal entitlement on
steroids. If you can’t see past what appears to be an absurd
contradiction, then you haven’t put that together with the third
thing that is essential for the survival of the planet: reproductive
control: parents must pay for their child’s entitlements before
they are allowed to give birth or adopt. These are outlined in the
fundamental relations.
For Graubart,
these three basic features of his proposed society are a three-legged
stool. Without all three of them, it won't stand. Remove any one, he
warns, and the result will be barbarism.
The first feature,
the free market itself—the maximum possible degree of economic
freedom—is a goal for Graubart in it's own right. But without a
universal entitlement, a totally free and unregulated market will
lead to barbarism through the concentration of capital, technological
unemployment and mass impoverishment, and eventually class war and
revolution. And without reproductive control, the universal
entitlement will lead to an underclass breeding out of control for
the sake of the additional entitlement money their kids will bring
into the household, and eventually to mass impoverishment and social
bankruptcy from overpopulation.
I don't see either
of these outcomes as necessary or inevitable absent his proposed
remedy, and therefore for me the chain of logic by which the three
parts of his agenda cohere into a whole is weak (as I will explain
later in this review).
Graubart explains
the basic principles in more detail with the acronym AFFEERCE, with
AF standing forAlternative Family, FE for Free Enterprise, E for
(Universal) Entitlement, RC for Reproductive Control and
E for Enlightenment.
Alternative Family does not mean you have to run off and join a
commune or have a 5-way sexual relationship. You have every right to
structure your family on 1 man + 1 woman + children. Or you can
choose to live alone....
Free Enterprise means laissez-faire. It means government keeps its
hands off business. It means no minimum wage and no inflation. It
means no corporate income tax of any kind. It means the marketplace
will determine if monopolies should form and the effectiveness of
collusion. It also means no civil rights protection and no right to a
job....
Universal Entitlement – ...Entitlement is not based on need. A
billionaire receives the same entitlement for food and housing as a
pauper. Each person in a family of 50 receives the same dollar
amount
for food and housing as a person who lives alone.
Personal entitlements include nutritious food, safe shelter,
unlimited free education, and quality medical....
Reproductive Control – Families must pay the present value for a
lifetime of entitlements before they are allowed to adopt or raise a
child. This is approximately $600,000 but it is tax free. However,
this goal might not be met for a century or more. In the beginning,
families might pay only half the cost of entitlement or $300,000
before being allowed to adopt or raise a child. Even this amount
might be phased in over 100 or more years.... Regardless of cost, if
the parents cannot pay, the child will be placed with a family that
can afford the child....
Enlightenment – In a free society, all religions, spiritualties,
beliefs or lack thereof, are welcome. The AFFEERCE enlightenment is a
reliance of the truths in nature following the deconstruction of
postmodernism....
The postmodern age will lead to the synthesis between objectivism and
subjectivism; an age of the union of science with spirituality, of
mind and body, of freedom and entitlement, of Eros and Agape.
About the last
item, Enlightenment, I have little to say, because metaphysics and
epistemology are pretty far outside the subject matter I feel
competent to discuss. Before I finish up with a detailed critique of
the logical connections between the three major parts of Graubart's
agenda, though, I will take some time to comment on the other
individual components of AFFEERCE with my own positive and negative
observations.
Graubart's
Alternative Families are quite similar to what I've written about
elsewhere as “primary social units.” Rather than “Alternative
Families,” I think “households” might be a more apt
description, since many of them bear a closer resemblance to what we
would think of as multi-family cohousing projects. They exist mainly
as economic expedients for pooling incomes and risks, and reducing
costs of living by minimizing the unused spare capacity of housing
and household capital goods that normally exists when separate
nuclear family households predominate. Of course large Alternative
Families can also function as polyamorous sexual units or group
child-rearing institutions, but they don't have to. And people can
still form families based on one couple with children, but the
economic incentives in Graubart's society would be strongly in favor
of larger household units.
Graubart's picture
of how a Free Enterprise economy would work is, in my opinion, one of
the weaker parts of his book.
The main way his
Free Enterprise economy deviates from the real article is the VOS:
In AFFEERCE, a government agency, The Bureau of Standards, through
volunteer standards groups, wil coordinate industry standards, and
require that industries either adopt the standards of the industry,
or display in a consistent way across all industries, those standards
that are violated, the VOS. Omission of violated standards from the
VOS and failure to properly display or get customer sign-off on the
VOS constitutes fraud. The VOS is a legal document that protects
against liability, so businesses will pay inspection agencies to
certify their VOS.
* * *
Once you have properly revealed how your entity deviates from
acceptable standards, you no longer are liable for that deviation.
* * *
Each category of enterprise has an associated set of standards
determined by volunteer consumer and business standard’s groups
(VSG’s) whose members are members of these enterprises or engage in
the marketplace with these enterprises. The Bureau of Standards
coordinates these VSG’s, and makes suggestions for consistency
across types of enterprises, but does not control the set of
standards.
* * *
Secondly, any business that does pollute would have to indicate the
extent of its pollution on its VOS. Should the pollution markedly
exceed the amount disclosed, that would likely constitute fraud. The
VOS is a public document that limits liability. There are no
officials to bribe or arcane EPA regulations to hide behind.
This strikes me as
a poor alternative to the use of a fully liberated tort law and a
wide variety of self-organized reputational systems for punishing
corporate malfeasors. But Graubart's attitude toward such approaches
is quite dismissive.
The point is that there are literally billions of cases where fraud
is ambiguous. Certainly an industry can collude on a set of
standards, and even display an “Underwriter’s laboratory” type
of seal, but there is nothing to prevent another business, or even
one of the companies from producing the product at less cost by
violating those standards and selling to customers who have neither
the time nor energy nor inclination to study labels.
* * *
The argument that bad practices will quickly destroy a business is
false. Companies change names. People are mobile and do not spend
their time researching companies. Even major news exposés can be
lost amongst the information overload....
Graubart, in
critiquing the standard libertarian vision of a free market
regulatory state, frequently refers to the “objectivist” position
on this or that, seemingly taking the Randians as a stand-in for
libertarianism in general. I get the impression that he has little
exposure to the free market tradition or libertarian literature
outside the Objectivist milieu, and in particular I get no indication
that he's familiar with such writers on the mechanics of a free
market regulatory regime as David Friedman or Morris and Linda
Tannehill.
I think Graubart
underestimates the extent to which a liberated tort law, in its full
vigor and without liability caps and other forms of right-wing “tort
reform” promoted by business lobbyists, would strike fear into the
hearts of potential defrauders and malfeasants.
A genuinely
libertarian common law of torts would restore the notions of
liability that existed before state court judges changed the law to
make it more business-friendly in the early-to-mid-19th century (as
recounted by Morton Horwitz in The Transformation of American
Law). Before these
judge-made modifications to the classical law of torts, it wasn't
necessary to prove negligence. If you did something that resulted in
an unforeseen harm to your neighbor, you were liable for it,
regardless of intent. And “standard business practices” weren't a
defense—if a new business imposed negative externalities on
neighbors who were already there, it was liable for them.
The 20th century
regulatory state further weakened what civil damages were available
to punish corporate wrongdoers. In many cases regulations like the
EPA's environmental standards were dumbed-down,
least-common-denominator standards that preempted common law
standards of liability and created safe harbors against civil
liability. So a company that destroys the watershed of an entire
region through mountaintop removal, or poisons the air and water of
surrounding communities and creates a cancer cluster by fracking, can
say “Hey, we meet the EPA regulatory standard” and use that as a
shield against liability in court.
I also
think—something about which I'll have more to say below in my
evaluation of his argument for the necessity of the Universal
Entitlement—that Graubart underestimates how drastically a genuine
free market economy would differ from our present one in structural
terms. He seems to envision an economy still characterized by lots of
corporate firms and an atomized society with lots and lots of
anonymous transactions in the cash nexus.
But I believe
that, absent state subsidies to long-distance transportation and
economic centralization, and to large-scale enterprise and hierarchy,
the pressure would be overwhelmingly toward decentralization and
relocalization, and more demographically stable localities. The great
bulk of manufactured items that are now imported from large factories
across the United States or sweatshops in China would be produced in
small garage factories with the surrounding neighborhood or community
as their primary market. A great deal more—especially in the way of
foodstuffs and clothing—would be produced in the informal economy
of the large household itself, or informal barter and gift networks
of multiple households. Rather than one-off transactions on the
anonymous cash nexus, most economic exchange would overlap with the
social ties of neighborhood and community, with people producing for
customers they know by face and name.
In such a society,
where most enterprises depended on repeat business from their
neighbors, and selling dangerous or tainted goods that resulted in
harm would get you assessed damages by a jury of your angry
neighbors, both reputational and tort mechanisms would carry a lot
more weight.
The Universal
Entitlement is Graubart's version of a proposal that's been around
for a long time (basic income, guaranteed minimum income, negative
income tax, citizen's dividend, social credit, etc.).
And I find it
attractive, at least as a transitional measure. As Graubart points
out himself, a guaranteed minimum income would do away with the
entire welfare state bureaucracy at federal, state and local levels,
with its enormous administrative costs. But I find it far more
attractive when packaged, as it is in proposals by the
Geolibertarians, with a funding system based on taxing economic rents
(primarily the site value of land) and negative externalities (i.e.
Pigovian taxes on pollution and resource extraction). A libertarian
society in which the welfare state was replaced by a universal basic
income funded by a tax on unearned wealth, the regulatory state was
replaced with prohibitive taxes on emissions of CO2 and toxic
chemicals, and the market was otherwise completely free, would at
least be a huge step in the right direction.
So I'm somewhat
surprised that Graubart reinvents the wheel with a funding mechanism
based on a 70% flat tax on consumption, instead of these other, more
attractive funding proposals.
Of course
Graubart's flat tax isn't nearly as regressive in practice as it
sounds. First of all, it's a tax only on consumption spending over
and above the Universal Entitlement, which is slightly over $1000 a
month (and includes food, housing and healthcare among other
necessities). So for those in the bottom three quintiles of the
population, at least, a 70% tax on consumption over $1000 a month
would probably be less than the total federal and state income tax,
Social Security and Medicare payroll tax, and state and local sales
and property taxes, that they're paying now.
And the
consumption tax is only a temporary expedient for paying the
Universal Entitlement while Reproductive Control (enforced by a
requirement to pay the entire capitalized lifetime value of a future
child's Universal Entitlement, $600,000, up front before having a
child) is phased in. As Reproductive Control is implemented—Graubart
proposes to gradually work up to the full $600,000 per child over
many years—the consumption tax will be steadily lowered and
replaced by revenue from the payment for having children.
The Universal
Entitlement is deposited into an account that can be accessed for
spending via a universal biometric identification system. An
individual, say, buying food or clothing, or paying rent from this
account simply swipes their hand, speaks or submits to a retinal scan
to make a cashless payment. The Entitlement cannot be transferred
from one person to another, with one big exception: between members
of an Alternative Family. The Alternative Family, with its formal
legal charter and bylaws, is the official building block of the
AFFEERCE society, and all its members' Entitlements are shared within
the family unit as a condition of membership.
The Transition.
One thing I like about this
book is, it's one of those visions of the future that falls within
the category of (in the words of the Wobbly slogan) “building the
structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Graubart's book, first and foremost, is an appeal for investors (see his website at
http://www.affeerce.org/). He
intends to build lots of miniature local AFFEERCE societies as
business corporations with joint land trusts as a platform for member
households and business enterprises. These nuclei he calls
“...AFFEERCE nations,” or “AFFEERCE enclaves that develop under
the current government of the United States.”
Of course, the third and fundamental problem of all movements is how
do we bring such a society about? There is only one sure way: a
business plan. Relying on both the profit motive and the AFFEERCE
spirit, AFFEERCE will grow into a corporation so large and powerful,
it will swallow Washington whole. I promise you, when the time for
capitulation comes, the people of the United States will vote nearly
unanimously to turn power over to the AFFEERCE Nations. And until
that fateful day, the United States Government and the AFFEERCE
Nations shall coexist in complete harmony.
* * *
Keep in mind that AFFEERCE nations will form within the United States
of America and be subject to its laws: most importantly, the code of
the Internal Revenue Service. While our tax lawyers will utilize
every loophole, and our representatives will work to make the code as
favorable as possible for the AFFEERCE nations to flourish, AFFEERCE
is built on honesty. The VIP will issue 1099s for every AFFEERCE
citizen, and maintain automatic withholding into a dollar-denominated
tax account....
...In pre-capitulation AFFEERCE, the AFFEERCE nation is a privately
held corporation....
These AFFERCIANADO pioneers will form an AFFEERCE land corporation by
purchasing shares and electing a board. The land corporation can buy
contiguous foreign land, register it as AFFEERCE territory,
optionally develop the land, and sell AFFEERCE territory to citizens
(encumbered by an AFFEERCE lien).
I find this very
attractive. The classic example of this approach was Ebenezer
Howard's Garden Cities, to be built on cheap colonized land in the
countryside, and developed with funds from a land value tax on the
appreciating real estate values. Dmytri Kleiner's “
VentureCommunism” takes a similar approach. So does the movement in Vinay
Gupta's short story “
The Unplugged,” based on “buying in at the
bottom” and building a comfortable subsistence lifestyle on the
superior efficiency of small-scale high technology. The idea of an
alternative economy movement forming as a voluntary association
within the existing capitalist society, relying for its inputs
primarily on the waste byproducts of inefficient corporate dinosaurs
and doing a far better job efficiently extracting value from them,
and growing within the belly of the beast until it ultimately takes
over from within, is something that I find—to repeat—very
attractive.
My main difference
from Graubart on this score is I don't think it's necessary for such
an alternative economy to ever take over the state or other
institutional framework of the old society. No need for capitulation,
or for the United States to formally amend the Constitution to make
the new economic order the law of the land. The state and the large
corporation exist for purposes that will be obsolete in a free
society with cheap small-scale production technology, horizontal
network communications and peer-to-peer organizations.
The Logical
Necessity for the Universal Entitlement. The
Universal Entitlement is necessary in a free market economy, Graubart
says, because without it the natural trends of the free market will
impoverish the great majority of the population and create an army of
paupers ready to pull society down around their ears. “Universal
entitlement allows for a free market economy, and it is the only
thing that does.” The reason is simple technology:
there is no
question that given enough innovation, a single skilled human being
can operate a machine that will do the work currently done by tens of
thousands of workers. Massive wealth will be created. Where should it
go? To build prisons for the unemployed underclass whose clergy
instructs them to reproduce?
Graubart's
technological unemployment argument, I believe, is based on a
misunderstanding of technological history. Technological
unemployment, like the wage system itself, presupposes a specific
technological model: capital-intensive mass production, using
expensive, product-specific machines—conventional factories, in
other words, in just about every particular except the radically
reduced need for people to work in them. They seem to be
talking about something like a GM factory, with microcontrollers and
servomotors in place of workers, like the Ithaca works in Vonnegut’s
Player Piano. If such expensive, capital-intensive,
mass-production methods constituted the entire world of manufacturing
employment, as they were in 1960, then the Graubart's technological
unemployment scenario would indeed be terrifying.
But in fact the
technological changes of recent years are destroying the material
rationale not only for the wage system and factory system, but for
technological unemployment. That rationale, originally, was a
technological shift from individually affordable, general-purpose
craft tools to extremely expensive, specialized machinery as the
dominant means of production. Such machinery could only be afforded
by rich people, who hired poor people to work it for them. The
revolution in desktop information technology and cheap garage-scale
digital machine tools is reversing this trend: We’re going back to
(a much higher-tech version of) cheap, general-purpose craft tools.
When the
predominant means of production are individually affordable, the very
distinction between being “employed” and “unemployed” becomes
meaningless. A larger share of work becomes ad hoc and project-based
rather than employer-based, and indeed a great deal of work shifts
back to its original understanding as something you do to feed
yourself rather than something you're given by an employer.
At the same time,
the terminal crises of the corporate economy and the technological
destruction of its material rationale are already to many of the
kinds of changes that Graubart associates with his Alternative
Families.
Large families allow some members to take on risk and provide a
greater division of labor for startups.... Each additional family
member allows a more efficient use for the total housing, food and
sundry entitlements, thereby creating wealth.
* * *
Most importantly, that which will render all of Marx’s arguments on
alienation and commodity fetishism moot is the freedom of the
alternative family in an AFFEERCE society. Because of the
entitlements, the division of labor and the economies of scale, every
AFFEERCE family is free to form their own society. Each individual
has a right to work at their own speed. Labors of love can be turned
into small profits that large industrial giants would never even
consider. Communes receive huge food and housing entitlements every
month and they are free to combine pagan ritual with the harvest and
still make money. What is important to each of us takes center stage
in our lives. We are the means of production, and we shall not be
alienated from ourselves.
According to the
neo-Marxist James O'Connor, in Accumulation Crisis,
the historic tendency of capitalism, during cyclical crises, has been
for unemployed and underemployed workers to shift a portion of their
needs satisfaction to self-provisioning in the informal and household
sector. And given that we're now in a crisis that's not cyclical
but structual, there
is a long-term shift toward increased satisfaction of needs through
self-provisioning in the household and informal economy. As Ralph
Borsodi showed eighty years ago, even then it was more economical in
terms of total unit costs to grow and can one's own food than to buy
it at the supermarket, or to make one's own clothing with a sewing
machine. Since then the revolution in desktop information technology
and tools for the home workshop has increased the share of production
that can be undertaken at home, or in a neighborhood cooperative
workshop with shared tools.
At
the same time, the large household of an extended family or multiple
families has a long history as a unit for pooling risks, costs and
income. And in the years since we hit Peak Employment in 2000, there
has been a drastic increase in multi-generational households.
I
expect this only to rise in coming years, as both the state- and
employer-based social safety net become hollowed out and are forced
to retreat from social life. I expect a rise in primary social units
like extended family compounds, multi-family cohousing projects,
urban communes, neighborhood barter and sharing systems, intentional
communities, friendly societies and lodges, mutual insurance systems,
networked employment platforms like guilds and cooperative temp
agencies, and a wide variety of other expedients, to replace the
risk-, cost- and income-pooling functions currently provided by the
state, employers and capitalist insurance policies.
I
expect to see a society coalesce, over the coming decades, much like
a high-tech version of the medieval peasant commune (e.g. the English
open-field system or Russian mir),
in which one is born into a primary social unit that supports its
children and gives adults who choose to stay an aliquot share in the
common productive land and access to the workshop, and either
undertakes production in such facilities for common consumption or
contributes income from an outside wage job in return for a
guaranteed right to food and subsistence. In such a primary social
unit (say a multi-family compound of twenty people) only a few might
work at outside wage employment to earn the “foreign exchange” to
buy goods available only on the cash nexus, others might work feeding
the family by working in intensive raised-bed gardens or caring for
chickens and guinea pigs, or working in the workshop. Surplus
specialty crops or craft goods the household specializes in might be
exchanged for other household surpluses in the neighborhood barter
network.
In other words,
the natural economic trends of shifting to an informal economy will
replicate the effects of the Universal Entitlement.
As I argued above,
I think Graubart drastically underestimates just how radically a
genuine free market economy—one without state-enforced privileges,
artificial property rights or artificial scarcities of any kind—would
differ from our current one.
And while it will never be the case, as it is today, where the lower
40% of the population has .2 percent of the wealth in a truly free
society, there is a level of inequality that has been shown to favor
optimal success in business, science and economics. It is based on
the work of Joseph Juran and named after Italian economist Vilfredo
Pareto. The Pareto Principle shows that a natural and optimal
inequality will tend to occur, where 20% of the population has 80% of
the wealth...
* * *
Currently, the top 20% of the population has 93% of the wealth, not
the Pareto 80%.
I don't think
Pareto was situated to make any such pronouncement, based on the
observation of actually existing capitalism—a system in which the
actual distribution of wealth reflects mainly rents on state-enforced
artificial property, and the predominant model of business enterprise
reflects massive state subsidies and entry barriers.
The elimination of
direct and indirect rents on “intellectual property” (including
the waste and planned obsolescence from the effect of patents on
criminalizing modular designs with open-source replacement parts and
ease of repair), the elimination of the portion of land rent that
results from absentee title to vacant and unimproved land, the
elimination of the portion of interest that results from entry
barriers to cooperative banks and alternative barter currencies, the
elimination of licensing, zoning and safety code barriers to running
home microenterprises (micro-bakeries, hair salons, restaurants,
daycare, unlicensed cab services, etc.) using the spare capacity of
ordinary household appliances, legal barriers to self-built
vernacular housing, etc., would both drastically lower the income of
the top tier of the economy and also drastically lower the threshold
for comfortable subsistence.
Far from
technological employment, I think technological changes will lead to
a society where employers have trouble hiring workers for enough
hours or at a low enough wage to make a profit, because they face the
nightmare scenario where they're competing with the possibility of
self-employment and self-provisioning. This is the scenario that led
to the Enclosures 250 years ago, when capitalist farmers in Britain
complained that cottagers with independent access to a living on the
common were unwilling to work as many hours, or for as low a wage, as
the farmer desired.
There will still
be differences in wealth from energy and effort, skill, and sheer
entrepreneurial ability in anticipating and meeting needs. But there
will no longer be the massive wealth resulting from compound returns
on artificially scarce land and capital, or living off the rent of
one-hit wonders by using patent and copyright to criminalize
competition.
Instead of our
present wealth differential of boulders and dust, the range will be
more like good-sized rocks and pebbles.
Barbarism, in
short, is not the only alternative to the Universal Entitlement.
The Logical
Necessity for Reproductive Control. Graubart
concedes that the idea of children as a source of wealth was
originally one associated with pre-industrial societies with
labor-intensive forms of production, extreme poverty, and high
mortality rates. He concedes that this state of affairs ended when
childhood mortality fell, children ceased to be an economic asset in
the household, and income came mainly from adult employment outside
the home. But “[y]ou might be surprised to find out that in a truly
free society, many of the reasons to have children in pre-modern
times will come back in a thoroughly modern context.”
Unfortunately,
Graubart's actual argument seems to consist almost entirely of a
priori reasoning from his assumptions about human nature—assumptions
that sound a lot like the anecdotes from a Ronald Reagan speech ca.
1970 about “welfare queens” driving Cadillacs and buying T-bones
with food stamps. To show that this is not hyperbole or
mischaracterization on my part, I produce an unusually long series of
examples below:
Universal Entitlement creates
a society where children add to the wealth of a household. If the
household has little wealth to begin with, children would be treated
as income. Without reproductive control to both fund entitlement and
prevent unlimited births, resources would be depleted, taxpayers
would rebel, and reactionary forces would lead us to barbarism.
* * *
Every additional child means at least $625 per month extra coming
into the household. Families without a source of income could use
bearing children as a path to wealth. This is not only an
evolutionary catastrophe, but one that must inevitably lead to a
collapse of society.
* * *
The result of the conflict between Children=Wealth vs.
Children=Poverty is that educated, middle class families are having
fewer children and the impoverished are having more, and that
imbalance can only grow more acute.
* * *
It is a simple fact of human nature: If having a child increases your
wealth, some people will have as many children as they can. It is
argued that women do not want to return to the era where they were
baby factories. Women today are far more interested in a career and
their own personal development. But this attitude is in an age where
Children = Poverty. In an AFFEERCE society, it is precisely the women
who do not have careers who will be enticed to increase their wealth
in the easiest way they can.
* * *
However, if we forego reproductive control, like the pigeons, the
population will grow exponentially. And even if the economy is able
to keep up, the limited resources of the earth will not.
* * *
Now the taxpayer is assured the privilege of paying for nutritious
food for your child, and for the social worker who will make certain
you are feeding your child properly. But the social worker only comes
twice a month, and you can feed the kids well on those days. In the
meantime, you can get 75% on your link card for crack. Now the kids
are screaming because they’re hungry, but it doesn’t bother you.
You don’t have a care in the world, feeling oh so nice on the
taxpayer’s dime. You figure if you had enough kids, perhaps there
would be enough to get high every day of the month, and still fool
the social worker. What can citizens do to stop this theft?
Absolutely nothing! Families can churn out babies, one after another.
There is no recourse....
Graubart himself
goes on—in quite head-scratching form—to apparently concede in
passing that all this loaded ideological language is a mere
“diatribe,” perhaps not to be taken as based on actual evidence
or logical necessity. But then he continues:
But the diatribe is important because it is an archetype of the
truth. It is a fear hidden not far below the surface in many of us.
And in other countries, the truth is even more apparent. In India,
there are children who will blind or dismember themselves to increase
their chances of getting something to eat.
Um, so is it true,
or isn't it? Since his argument for the stark choice between
Reproductive Control and barbarism seems to hinge on it being
actually true and not just a useful myth, I will analyze it on the
assumption he actually means what he spent so much time saying.
First of all, his
very model of a society in which households are polarized between
comfortable, educated people who exercise restraint and uneducated,
impoverished breeders desperate for the six hundred bucks each child
would bring, presumes—as I've already discussed at considerable
length—a society much like our own in many respects. But I think
it's much more likely a free society would be characterized by a more
nearly even distribution of wealth.
Second, I'm
extremely skeptical that multi-generation families of welfare mothers
having children simply for the measly amount of income support they
bring from the state exist beyond the level of statistically
insignificant anecdotes. I think Graubart seriously underestimates
just how much personal effort and equity is entailed in carrying a
child to term for nine months and then spending years with a baby and
toddler in the house. And to the extent that there's a grain of truth
in it, it's only true because 1) the state has manufactured an
artificially large destitute underclass by forcibly shutting off
access to opportunities for production and comfortable subsistence;
and 2) there are people living with the almost unimaginable levels of
destitution that would make six hundred-odd bucks a month seem worth
the incredible personal investment of pregnancy and motherhood.
To the extent that
this phenomenon really does exist, it results not from the incentives
of the welfare state (as described in neoconservative lore by Marvin
Olasky), but from the fact that northern cities were flooded by
former black sharecroppers who'd been tractored off their land after
WWII. They were essentially in the same predicament as the Okies
who'd fled to California half a generation earlier, only without even
the availability of migrant farm labor to make a living. In other
words, it wasn't the presence of the Great Society, but the absence
of forty acres and a mule, that created welfare families.
Assuming a society
in which Graubart's Universal Entitlement is in place, and every
person already alive is guaranteed shelter, groceries, clothing and
healthcare far superior to what WISC or food stamps will afford
today, the incentive to have children for welfare money (to the
extent that it actually exists to a significant degree outside
fevered Tea Party imaginations) would be far less than at present.
In short, the
economic incentives that result in reduced birth rates in mature,
prosperous societies would remain largely intact or even be
strengthened. Reproductive Control is not the only alternative to
barbarism.
Conclusion. For all my disagreements with this book, I do share one broad agreement with Graubart: the overall prosperity and happiness of a society in which subsistence no longer depends on one's willingness to accept work on whatever degrading and exploitative terms it is offered, in which people are free to exercise their full creative faculties taking advantage of productive opportunities afforded through association with their family, friends, neighbors and equals, where the labor threshold for comfortable subsistence is low and leisure is plentiful, where everyone sits under their own fig tree and vine and none makes them afraid.
"One of the officers began to remove us physically without the use of weapons. And Lieutenant John Pike ordered them to stop, raising his pepper can and saying ... 'Leave them. I want to spray these kids.'"
