A Question of Justice?
HUNDREDS of millions of people in the world are
forced to endure lives of abject poverty‑poverty so acute that those
fortunate enough to live in the United States, or Europe or the rich
industrialized parts of Asia can scarcely comprehend its meaning. Surely there
is no more commanding moral imperative for people in the West than to urge each
other, and their governments, to bring relief to the world's poorest. And what
a tragedy it is, therefore, that many of the kind souls who respond most
eagerly to this imperative bring to the issue an analytical mindset that is
almost wholly counterproductive. They
are quite right, these champions of the world's poor, that poverty in an age of
plenty is shameful and disgusting. But they are quite wrong to suppose, as so
many of them do, that the rich enjoy their privileges at the expense of the
poor‑that poverty, in other words, is inseparable from a system, capital
ism, that thrives on injustice. This way of thinking is not just false. It
entrenches the very problem it purports to address. Symptomatic of this mindset is the widespread and debilitating
preoccupation with "global inequality". Whenever the United Nations
and its plethora of associated agencies opine about the scandal of world
poverty, figures on inequality always pour forth. (Such figures, though. are
always higher than the likely reality: see pages 73‑75.) It
is not bad enough, apparently, that enormous numbers of people have to subsist
on less than a dollar a day. The claim that this makes in its own right on the
compassion of the West for its fellow men is deemed, apparently, too puny. The
real scandal, it seems, is that much of the world is vastly richer than that.
The implication, and often enough the explicit claim, is that the one follows
from the other: if only we in the West weren't so rich, so greedy for
resources, so driven by material ambition‑such purblind delinquent
capitalists‑the problem of global poverty would be half‑way to
being solved.
Equity at a price
Certain ideas about equality are woven into the
fabric of the liberal state, and quite inseparable from it: first and foremost,
equality before the law. But equality before the law, and some other kinds of
liberal equality, can be universally granted without infringing anybody's
rights. Economic equality cannot. A concern to level economic outcomes must
express itself as policies that advance one group's interests at the expense of
another's. This puts political and ethical limits on how far the drive for
economic equality ought to go. (Strictly practical limits, as well, since too
noble a determination to take from the rich to give
to the poor will end up impoverishing everyone.) It also means that perfect
economic equality should never be embraced, even implicitly, as an ideal.
Perfect economic equality is a nightmare: nothing short of a totalitarian
tyranny could ever hope to achieve it.
The preoccupation bordering on obsession with
economic equality that one so often encounters at gatherings of anti globalists, in the corridors of aid agencies and in
socialist redoubts in backward parts of
the world reflects a "lump of income"
fallacy. This remarkably tenacious misconception is that there is only so much global income to go around if the
United States is consuming $10 trillion worth of goods and services each year, that is $10 trillion worth of goods and
services that Africa cannot consume.
But goods and services are not
just lying around waiting to be grabbed
by the greediest or most muscular countries. Market economics is not a zero-sum game. America consumes $10 trillion worth of goods and services each year because
it produces (not counting the
current-account deficit of 5% or so
of the total) $10 trillion of goods and services
each year. Africa could produce and consume a
lot more without America producing and consuming
one jot less. It so happens that the case for more aid, provided of course that it is well spent, is strong but
the industrialized countries do not need to become any less rich before Africa can become a lot less poor. The wealth of
the wealthy is not part of the problem.
To believe otherwise, however,
is very much part of the problem. For much of
the 20th century the developing countries were
held back by an adapted socialist ideology that put global injustice, inequality and victimhood front and center.
Guided by this ideology, governments
relied on planning, state monopolies, punitive taxes, grandiose programs of
public spending, and all the other apparatus of
applied economic justice. They also repudiated
liberal international trade, because the terms of global commerce were deemed exploitative and unfair. Concessions (that is, permission to retain trade barriers) were sought
and granted in successive negotiating rounds of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. A kind of equity was thus
deemed to have been achieved. The only
drawback was that the countries stayed poor.
Towards the end of the
century, many developing countries -China
and India among them-finally threw off this victim's mantle and began to embrace wicked capitalism, both in the way they organized their
domestic economies and in their approach to international
trade. All of a sudden, they are a lot less poor, and it hasn't cost the West a cent. In Africa, too, minds are
now changing, but far more slowly. Perhaps
that has something to do with the chorus that
goes up from Africa's supposed friends in the West, telling the region that its plight is all the fault of global inequality, "unfair trade" and an intrinsically
unjust market system.
People and their governments
in the West should heed the call of compassion,
and respond with policies to help the world's poor, and indeed to advance the opportunities of the (much less
desperately) poor in their own countries.
Expressed that way, the egalitarian impulse is a good thing, worth nurturing. But a compassionate regard for the
poor, as any good Marxist will tell you, is a very different thing from a zeal
for economic "justice". That zeal, despite the exemplary fate of the
socialist experiment at the end of the
20th century, guides a great deal of thinking still. And it continues to do nothing but harm.