Monthly Archives: January 2003

earned and unearned income

The President’s surprise proposal to abolish dividend taxes is big news.

There are many ways to evaluate the idea, including consideration of the

effects on short- and long-term economic growth, equity, and the federal

budget. The Administration also emphasizes that a dividend tax is unfair,

since the income that was used to buy the shares was already taxed once.

(The response from commentators like Paul Krugman is that there are many

double taxes, including all sales taxes.) Another consideration seems

to be overlooked. I believe we should retain a distinction between earned

and unearned income, and we should be less hesitant to tax the latter.

There is nothing wrong with investment income. But work—purposeful

human effort—is much more closely linked to human dignity and value.

As Pope John Paul II wrote in Laborem Exercens (1981), "Work is a

good thing for man-a good thing for his humanity-because through work

man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also

achieves fulfillment as a human being and indeed in a sense becomes ‘more

a human being.’"

Robert Nozick, the great libertarian philosopher, denied that there was

any moral difference between work and other activities (such as investing)

that produce value. He was reacting to the old leftist idea that labor

alone creates value, and therefore laborers deserve the full price of

their products. It is a scandal of capitalism that some of the reward

goes instead to capitalists, who do not work. In the words of Ralph Chaplin’s

old Wobbly anthem, "Solidarity Forever" (1915):

It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they

trade;

Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid

* * *

All the world that’s owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.

We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.

It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.

This song implies that we should recoup the money that capitalists have

taken from the workers who really made everything. Dividend taxes would

then be a good idea, and the higher the better. Unfortunately, the song

is pretty clearly wrong: investors, managers, and inventors create value,

just as workers do. However, we can still understand labor as morally

different from other economic activities. Compare two people, one of whom

makes a living by digging ditches, while the other profits from inherited

stocks even though she is comatose after an accident. The first labors;

the second does not. An intermediate case is someone who actively invests,

mixing knowledge, intellectual labor, and accumulated capital to generate

wealth. I think that the work aspect of wealth-creation is virtuous, onerous,

and not sufficiently rewarded by the market. This is an argument for policies

(such as dividends taxes) that favor work.

(All this is "auto-plagiarized" from a law

review article I wrote some time ago.

My wife and I went to an event at my 3-year-old’s nursery school today.

She saw me still in my pajamas just before she left for the day, and said

"Daddy, you will get dressed before you come to my school, won’t

you?" This is the beginning of at least 18 years of her worrying

about whether I am about to embarrass her in public.

the Civic Mission of Schools

This was a fairly short work day, because I was helping at home in the

morning and then took a 2-hour lunch to discuss with colleagues the final

grades for last semester’s graduate course. (Three of us taught something

called "The

Proseminar in Politics, Philosophy, and Public Policy," a graduate-level

introduction to the basic tools you need to analyze fundamental social

and moral questions.)

The big thing that is going on at CIRCLE

is our soon-to-be completed joint report with the Carnegie

Corporation, entitled "The Civic Mission of Schools." We

worked all fall to hold meetings and email discussions for about 55 people

who are contributors to, and potential endorsers of, the report. The final

draft is now with these people for their last comments, and they are to

decide whether to endorse. Monday is the deadline. Some participants want

changes; the big debate is about whether it is necessary to run schools

in a more democratic manner. For some of our participants, this is the

key to reform. For others, it is risky and unsupported by research evidence.

We are working to develop compromise language that is meaningful advice

to schools. I remain confident that we will have a solid report with 50

signatories. (Meanwhile, I’m spending a lot of my time on practical details

like layout, copy-editing, scheduling the launch, etc.)

a first blog

Three scenes from my day:

9:10 am: In the Longworth House Office Building, sitting with two congressional staffers, my colleague Carrie, and one staffer’s seeing-eye dog—sharing information about youth voting. Congress has just established a program to promote youth participation in elections: young people will serve as poll-workers or will join in mock votes. The staffers who are meeting with us helped to draft the bill; now they want to make sure that it is well implemented. They seem interested in our data and our list of other people to contact. We suggest that the program needs to focus on high school kids who are not academically successful (because most college-bound students will vote anyway); and there ought to be young people on the appointed board. We are late for the meeting because we went to two incorrect offices before the found the right one—walking by way of various steam tunnels, back staircases, and corridors of power.

10:30 am: In an office loft on hip U Street, in a building occupied by a brewing company, a big gym, and many tech companies. I am in the offices of American Speaks, meeting with several new members of the steering committee of the helping to integrate the new folks into an ongoing organization that they have just agreed to join.

My personal goal is for several groups that use different methods for public deliberation (e.g., interactive websites, large face-to-face groups, simultaneous church-basement   conversations) to hold simultaneous national youth conversations on the following topic: “What should be young people’s role in public life?” Some possible answers: “Politics is irrelevant; young people should volunteer and participate in their families and communities.” “Politics is uniquely corrupt today, so we should await reform before we participate.” “There are new forms of ‘politics’ that we young people are inventing and that are better than the old ones.” “Politics is always a bit dirty and unpleasant, but it’s no worse than usual; and you have to play the game or your interests will be ignored.”

There seems to be considerable interest in the idea of a national deliberative exercise using several methods.

3:15 pm: At a High School in Hyattsville, MD, helping to teach a class on oral history. Our subject all quarter is the desegregation of the County’s public schools. We are three white teachers and our dozen students are African Americans, Latinos, and immigrants. (Exactly half of the day’s attendees were born in Africa.). The discussions are good, but often very intense and emotional. We are meeting today in the principal’s windowless conference room to accommodate an elderly visitor who cannot manage the steps to our usual classroom. The visitor is a retired postal worker and community activist who attended segregated schools in the county, but her younger brother was the first African American student at the high school where we are sitting, and was also part of the first group of Black students at the University of Maryland. Her sister integrated a local junior high school. Her mother (who had an 8th-grade education) sent these siblings alone into all-White schools, so I asked whether her mother was part of a social network of African Americans that  favored integration:

“[Shakes her head] It came from her. My mother always thought that our schools were  second-class. … There were not many people in our community who thought that way. … In the long run, in all instances, [desegregation] was not a better thing.”

I asked her whether she would have desegregated the schools, if she had been in charge of the school system back then: “I probably would have kept them segregated, and I would have demanded that the schools be given equal funding … I think that the teachers I had in the segregated schools were much more dedicated than the teachers I have seen since.”

I don’t know what to think about desegregation, but I believe our students are learning something about how to grapple with a complex, emotional social issue that deeply affects their interests.