What are the Poor Entitled to?

In the Reagan "perestroika" of the Federal Government, taxes were reduced and spending increased, producing Guinness Book of Records deficits. Business magazines publish editorials saying "Reaganomics", is working "Supply-side economics" has not failed, and the continuing prosperity is proof of it. All of this somehow proves Keynes was wrong. Keynes advocated public spending to get the economy going. If we have astronomical trade deficits and a large public debt, it's okay because business is happy, interest is low and everybody is making money. It is as if public spending on the military is not public spending, but spending on education and social welfare is public spending. We are not only seeing Voodoo economics described as sound fiscal policy, we are seeing the country sold to our creditors and having it described as "sound business investment in the United States," further proof of the economy's vitality. There is no mention that our creditors, fearing the drop of the dollar or inflation are converting their cash to the only thing we have of value to them...the country.

Distorted National Values

The debate between the debt and public spending and the shift of priorities transferring public monies to defense contractors and public debt holders instead of providing services to the middle class or the needy has distorted our national values and perverted our democratic system. Nothing illustrates the turning on their head of our national values more than an editorial in the New York Times of Sunday April 24, 1988.

The editorial writer asks, "What are the poor entitled to?" the question while it sounds arrogant actually leads to a discussion of means testing. According to the editorialist, if we transferred money only to those persons who need it we will spend our tax money more wisely and reduce the debt. So tax credits for the poor and means testing with subsequent taxation of those not in need should answer the question. Except that's not the problem.

Reaganomics transferred billions of dollars to people who could not possible need the money making the differences between rich and poor greater than in previous years. Spending which merely transfers money entrenches the structural rich and the structural poor.

The Unalienable Rights

There always will be differences between the wealthy (the 10% of the families who own 90% of the assets of the country) and the middle class and the poor. Leveling these differences is not the object of a free society. There should be no constraints, other than necessary progressive income taxation and antimonopolistic regulation, on the accumulation of wealth. Where a difference must be made is in the enfranchisement of all citizens, particularly the poor, and handicapped. Citizens should not be barred from the fruits of the economy and the "good life" through lack of education or employment opportunity. A Federal government insensitive to the enfranchisement of all citizens is not complying with the prime directive... ("to obtain these [unalienable] rights, governments are established among men..)"

The poor are entitled to their unalienable rights in concert with all other citizens, rich or poor. The Declaration of Independence gives us our unalienable rights and the Constitution says we are the sovereign. According to the Declaration the obtaining the unalienable rights is why we have government in the first place and that is what the sovereign gets in exchange for the grant of authority the government gets in order to govern. We the people ordained and established the government that collects taxes and makes transfer payments to the rich and poor and pays President Reagan's salary.

Means Tests for the Sovereign?

There is no means test to be the sovereign. There is no means test to be endowed with certain unalienable rights. We are born with these rights. We, the sovereign, ordain, and establish the government to establish Justice, to insure the domestic Tranquility, to provide for the common defense, and to promote the general Welfare, perfect the Union, and secure the Blessings of Liberty. We expect the government we establish to provide the ecological, economic, intellectual, and legal environment so that all citizens can enjoy their unalienable rights. Entitlements as money is a pretty shabby return to the disadvantaged sovereign for a most valuable grant of authority to govern.

Jefferson specified three of the unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but said these were among others.

Consider the unalienable rights to be what it takes to survive and thrive in our society. We have to be specifically ethnocentric. We have to talk about our Declaration, our Constitution, our nation, our society, not the individual states but the nation as a whole, the Federal union.

To survive and thrive in our society all citizens must have at least the following unalienable rights:

• Life
• Liberty
• The pursuit of Happiness
• Health
• A Humane Environment
• Humane Nutrition
• Humane Habitation
• Education
• An Equal share of the commonwealth
• Participation in Free Enterprise
• The Right of Residency and Movement
• The constitutional Guarantees of citizenship.

There may be others. One would have to give serious consideration to privacy as an unalienable right.

These rights can be defended ecologically and philosophically as providing what it takes to survive and thrive in our society.

These rights are the fundamental bedrock of our culture, society and nature. Deprived of any one of them the individual is severely disadvantaged.

Education and Health are Basically Generic

Examine education and health, for instance. If we have our priorities straight we will see that these two rights should be supported before defense. Without health there is nothing, and education is the progenitor of our society, not a product of it.

Which is more important to the nation, the University of Michigan or General Motors? The answer is obvious — with a University of Michigan you can get a General Motors, (and much more as well), but with just a General Motors you cannot get a University of Michigan.The University of Michigan and all other educational institutions are generic to our being as a nation, they are process institutions. General Motors is a commodity, and like other commodities it can be bought and sold on the stock market. What's true of General Motors is also true of General Dynamics, General Electric, McDonald Douglas, General Mills, and Lockheed and the rest of the Fortune 500 et al. After the basic biological problems of health, environment, nutrition and habitation are solved, nothing is more important than education. That is once we have healthy bodies with food, clothing, shelter and a healthy environment, education is the most important function sustaining our society.

For a country trying to lead the free world we have the destructive notion that health and education are not rights but commodities that must be bought and paid for. Pricing education out of the reach of the poor sovereign is the ultimate form of discrimination.

There are lots of ways to provide quality health and education but first they have to be recognized as essential needs and as big ones — bigger than the defense problem — and we have to allocate the nation's resources accordingly. Education alone will change the nature of welfare, and warfare. (In The Roman Empire and in Europe in the Middle Ages only the rich went to war. Now it's the educated 18 year old male, unless his family is influential.) Education is not welfare it is an unalienable right. An uneducated person who can not cope in the society may need welfare, but the welfare system comes into play only after the education system has failed. Disadvantaged and handicapped persons form a special group and simply must be assisted no matter what. Education makes people self sufficient, lack of education makes people dependent, hence poor.

The Magnates got Greedy

According to George Ostrogorsky, The History of the Byzantine State, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1969, the Roman Empire fell because the magnates got greedy and alienated the lands of the peasant militia. The system of wealth production was impaired and the military was weakened. Will our system fail because of the greed of our magnates? Will our poor increase in number, will the middle class be further eroded, and will we continue to have an economy of borrowing from foreigners and selling our capital assets to them in order to excuse the citizens from paying the paying taxes to support basic government functions? When we straighten out our priorities and consider it not only wise but prudent to levy taxes to pay for government, instead of just printing and selling more government bonds (the new printing press money) and when we discover that the strength of the nation lies not only in its arms but in its intellect as well, we will be on the road to realizing our position as the leader of the free world.

The No Pain Economy

Here is the reason the public debt and the trade deficit do not cause pain. The dollars placed in circulation by the public debt and the trade deficit consist of large blocks of money no ordinary individual would ever see in this or any other life time. The dollars in the hands of our creditors are seeking scarce commodities, but not the kind of commodities the average citizen would be apt to buy. They are buying stocks in great quantities on the N.Y. Stock Exchange and have driven the price to the doubling of the Dow Jones index in a few short years. Our creditors sold vast amounts of their holdings in October of 1987 in protest the the lessening, i.e. inflationary value of the dollar.

What to do with such huge amounts of money. Why not pay 40 million for a Van Gogh painting. Poor Van Gogh didn't have 40 sous and his paintings a hundred years later sell for prices he couldn't imagine. Well why not buy some real estate, like half of downtown Los Angeles, or most of the State of Hawaii, or some companies. Probably most of the corporate raiding is financed by U.S. bond holders. What better use for gobs and gobs of money than to buy a few corporations.

If you as an individual do business in this world you will have to put up with soaring inflation since there simply are not that many goods available at any one time to get rid of all the cash. This inflationary trend has extended down to the level of middle class home buying and it expresses itself not in the rate of interest for the mortgage but in the basic price of the house, as more and more of the debt and deficit money find its way to the lower reaches of the economy. The increased prices for housing reflects the bond holders buying up real estate. The interest rates reflect the availability of cash and there is lots of it. (What difference does it make if the home mortgage interest is low if the house price is out of reach. A million dollar house at no interest is not available to ordinary people).

At the top of the economy where tons of our paper money is in action inflation is rampant. At the low end of the economy, the prices of food and the commodities of ordinary life are spared, probably since no one knows how to apply such large amounts of money to the low end of the scale. Since we don't live at the high end of our economy, unless we are trying to buy a house, we feel no pain. But as they say in Star Trek, "That's all happening in another dimension."

American Fair Play

We can not carry a Ronald Reagan legacy of hate for social programs merely to excuse citizens from paying taxes. We cannot just keeping printing more government bonds which are being redeemed with the capital assets of the nation. We are losing control of our national productivity base and our financial markets. We must get back to the basics of American fair play. When we do we will find our true strength in having all Americans healthy and educated so that they can contribute to our society. Spending for defense does not enlarge the tax base, spending on health and education does. We need a set of "Reagan-Deficit-Reduction-Taxes" (gasoline, cigarettes, alcohol) and we need an international trade policy that curtails the current predatory policies of our trading partners, for instance William Buffet's import certificates (green stamps). We need a set of national priorities that will unite us in attaining our national political and economic goals and a rich, rewarding life for all the citizens of this once richest and now greatest debtor nation.

... Ted Sudia ...

© Copyright 1988
Institute for domestic Tranquility