A Crucial Element of Democracy

This is a blog by Robert Gutierrez ...
While often taken for granted, civics education plays a crucial role in a democracy like ours. This Blog is dedicated to enticing its readers into taking an active role in the formulation of the civics curriculum found in their local schools. In order to do this, the Blog is offering a newer way to look at civics education, a newer construct - liberated federalism or federation theory. Daniel Elazar defines federalism as "the mode of political organization that unites separate polities within an overarching political system by distributing power among general and constituent governments in a manner designed to protect the existence and authority of both." It depends on its citizens acting in certain ways which Elazar calls federalism's processes. Federation theory, as applied to civics curriculum, has a set of aims. They are:
*Teach a view of government as a supra federated institution of society in which collective interests of the commonwealth are protected and advanced.
*Teach the philosophical basis of government's role as guardian of the grand partnership of citizens at both levels of individuals and associations of political and social intercourse.
*Convey the need of government to engender levels of support promoting a general sense of obligation and duty toward agreed upon goals and processes aimed at advancing the common betterment.
*Establish and justify a political morality which includes a process to assess whether that morality meets the needs of changing times while holding true to federalist values.
*Emphasize the integrity of the individual both in terms of liberty and equity in which each citizen is a member of a compacted arrangement and whose role is legally, politically, and socially congruent with the spirit of the Bill of Rights.
*Find a balance between a respect for national expertise and an encouragement of local, unsophisticated participation in policy decision-making and implementation.
Your input, as to the content of this Blog, is encouraged through this Blog directly or the Blog's email address: gravitascivics@gmail.com .
NOTE: This blog has led to the publication of a book. The title of that book is TOWARD A FEDERATED NATION: IMPLEMENTING NATIONAL CIVICS STANDARDS and it is available through Amazon in both ebook and paperback versions.

Tuesday, August 4, 2015

MINIMUM DIGNITY

Here’s a civics lesson.  It has to do with the issue of the minimum wage.  The Obama administration has been advocating a raise in the minimum wage:  “It’s time to give America a raise.”  Of course, business friendly conservatives oppose such a move – not surprising.  What’s a federalist’s take?

Well, here is mine.  I believe that central to federalist thinking is the value of collective members having as much as possible – that is, as much as possible within reasonable parameters – equal standing, equal consent.  That is, further, that each member of the collective is not coerced into either belonging or doing his/her expected roles within the collective, any collective.  That goes for a family, a church, a community organization, a labor union, a city, a state, a nation.  When we speak of the larger collectives, such as cities or nations, more abstract means of membership, stake commitments, and coercion are involved.  By more abstraction, a commensurable use of numbers comes into play as trends and averages are used to determine to what degree interactions are based on federated notions of membership and participation.  And with this context, such an issue as the minimum wage takes on importance.

One’s work, in a federated union, is more than just an economic activity.  For most, work takes up significant portions of one’s life; it provides sustenance both psychological and physical.  It is a communitive statement of belonging, contributing, and a source of relative importance within the collective.  To maintain the federalist character of a collective, to the extent possible, each job or career should provide certain assets:  enough remuneration so as to secure survival needs for one’s family, enough education to stay true to the value of equal opportunity, enough entertainment to support mental health, and enough time with fellow family members so that the required time away from them does not become a cause of family dysfunction.  In short, what one makes in terms of pay becomes not just a number on a ledger in some business accounting book, but a statement of human dignity.

Yet this perspective is not shared by all.  If it were, I would say the minimum wage would have, in real terms, kept up with increases in productivity.  Attempts to study this question in terms of “keeping up with inflation” can be tricky.  I prefer my above approach.  Students should be exposed to every which way it is measured – and the internet very easily can help students with that.  But a class can use my “federalist” approach and then can be exposed to an array of conservative arguments against raising the rate.  Below, I offer four such arguments derived from a book review of Arthur C. Brooks’ book, The Conservative Heart:  How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Productive America.[1]

Arguments against raising the minimum wage:

·        The main argument is that if you raise the price of anything, you lower the amount of it being purchased.  That goes for fruit, furniture, or workers’ time and labor.  So, and this is the main offense, it limits the number of people who can “earn success” – the basis of true happiness.

·        Raising the minimum wage will raise the costs of production that will be only passed on to consumers.  So, for example, an industry hard hit by this move will be the fast-food restaurant chains that are frequented heavily by low income customers.  It is, therefore, low income people who will be paying these increased costs.

·        Minimum wage increase will not hit, to a large measure, those who are meant to be benefited.  This is because a raise in the minimum wage will go to individuals above the poverty line.  Half of the beneficiaries live in family households that make over $35,000 a year and a quarter go to families that make over $75,000 a year.  A mandated raise in the minimum wage is ill targeted, missing, to a significant level, the low income population it is meant to help.

·        Last (at least in terms of this book’s offering), raising the minimum wage is not as good a policy in helping the working poor as providing earned-income tax credits which will increase the take-home pay of such workers.  Credits do this by finely targeting the benefit to those who need it.  I find this curious in that a lot of conservative rhetoric is geared toward that portion of the work force who “don’t pay taxes.”

Students can review the literature about measuring the minimum wage over time, discuss the various ways of evaluating government policy concerning the minimum wage, and then review, discuss, and evaluate the conservative arguments against raising the minimum wage using a federalist criterion I provide above.

By and by, can conservatives come up with one policy position that does not equate to higher profits for businesses?  Just asking.



[1] Mankiw, N. G.  (2015).  Compassionate conservative.  The New York Times, Book Review section, August 2, p. 10.

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