LINING UP OR PAYING

Experience seems to indicate that most people tend to think of business as simply business and they give its effects on other cultural realms short shrift.  But how a people do business – or act economically – reflects and affects the whole cultural landscape in which it operates.  It definitely affects a people’s sense of what is right and wrong.  This posting approaches this relationship from a recurring aspect in life everyone confronts, standing in line.

          This blog has visited this concern before.  A general description of it can be found in the posting entitled, “Being Efficient and/or Moral?”[1]  The reader is invited to look it up.  It mainly claims that efficiency is served by introducing a pricing system to the inevitability of having to stand or otherwise wait on a line – TSA, fast-food restaurants, supermarkets, etc. – but despite efficient outcomes, it can and does pose moral questions or challenges.  This posting attempts, while sticking to the issue of line-waiting, to broaden the concern that the earlier posting posed.

          Generally, the question of lines can be narrowed to a choice:  abiding by the “first come, first-served” principle or custom or allowing those who really want the product or service to pay for an earlier access to it.  This paying can take various forms – it can even include paying others to stand in line for an ultimate buyer or buying a “scalped” ticket from someone who bought the ticket for the purpose of reselling it. 

The goal is two-fold:  attain the good or service and avoid the discomfort of waiting and/or standing.  The standing option can be referred to as the ethic of the queue and the second as the pricing option.  Overall, with the adoption of capitalist thinking, natural rights dispositions, and a shifting toward secular thinking, pricing has taken over from relying on nonmarket norms.  Michael Sandel[2] shares his thoughts over this distinction.  Here, this posting begins with two arguments he points out regarding the pricing option, its advantages.

          The first one reflects the natural rights view; that is, “[i]t maintains that people should be free to buy and sell whatever they please, as long as they don’t violate anyone’s rights.”[3]  So, this libertarian notion sees laws hindering or outlawing people being able to scalp tickets to sporting events or concerts as unjustified intrusions on people’s rights.  As long as one is considering the actions of consenting adults, governments or possibly corporation policies should not get involved.

          If this sounds a bit short-sighted or overly simple, there is another argument.  The second argument has a more utilitarian standard.  Assuming no one is coerced to sell or lease a good or service, each party is getting what he/she wants.  Enough of that happens, and voila, people in general are better off than they would have been if such activities were prohibited.  While some might still think this is too simple, at least there is a concern for the common good.

          What are some complications?  Well, and admittedly a lot of this is presented on a theoretical plane, by allowing scalping there are negative consequences; that is, they really counter the common good.  How?  By using up or abstracting scalped tickets from the market, this lowers the supply of non-scalped tickets – and decreases the available supply of the product.  This, in turn, pushes the price of the product higher and takes it out of the reach for some – usually lower income people.

          One response to this critique is that by upping the price, the supply is better reserved for those who want the product most – they are the ones who are willing to pay the higher prices.  But again, this is not necessarily true.  One can have someone who values it more but cannot purchase it because of a lack of money to afford the item. 

Therefore, pricing, at best, can be considered an imperfect measure of who values the good or service the most.  Further, if one believes goods and services should go to those who want them most – who are willing to sacrifice the most for them – standing in line might be a better measure.  And besides, are utilitarian standards the best bases by which to determine the distribution of all goods and services?

And here is where things can become more general, beyond standing in lines or not.  How about access to politicians – like members of Congress?  Should the government charge a special tax to provide that access to people?  Some might argue that meaningful access is already up for sale not in the form of taxes, but in the form of campaign contributions.  Be that as it is, many consider the role of contributions – what the courts have ruled as a form of speech – as an unfair advantage for those who can pay.  Or is it, “pay to play?”

Bottom line, ordinary citizens are to varying degrees deprived equal access and the interests of those groups are more easily dismissed in the tumble of Congressional deal-making.  One can justifiably claim, this whole “business” diminishes the quality of a democracy.  In acknowledging this reality, this blog has argued that one of the advantages of a federated system is that it affords a multitude of governmental access points.  If one cannot play or pay at the national level, there is the state or local levels where the price for consideration can be significantly more reasonable.

Sandel points out:

We often associate corruption with ill-gotten gains.  But corruption refers to more than bribes and illicit payments.  To corrupt a good or a social practice is to degrade it, to treat it according to a lower mode of valuation than is appropriate to it.  Charging admission to congressional hearings [for example] is a form of corruption in this sense.  It treats Congress as if it were a business rather than an institution of representative government.[4]

This posting is not an argument for dismissing markets and pricing options in general.  Many advantages are derived from applying that approach to most products.  Chief among them, as pointed out above, is efficiency.  And one can readily identify how many (most) aspects of life are better with markets than without.  But as with most things, there are limits and one should be able to acknowledge where and when markets fall short.

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[1] Robert Gutierrez, “Being Efficient and/or Moral?”  Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics, December 15, 2017, accessed September 12, 2019, https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2017/12/being-efficient-andor-moral.html .

[2] Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy:  The Moral Limits of Markets (New York, NY:  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012).

[3] Ibid., 29.

[4] Ibid., 34.

THE STUDY OF POLITICS CANNOT BE EASY

Why are humans political?  Various scholars offer various answers to that question.  Jonah Goldberg attributes politics, more or less, to a natural tendency to acquire what one wants.  A lot of politics manifests itself, according to him, by people taking what they want or protecting themselves or those who are similar to themselves from others taking what they want.  Political leaders are simply stationary bandits who have understood that they can steal more if they allow their victims to produce and take from them little by little in the form of taxes.[1] 

This is a fairly grim view.  But there are other views.  According to Daniel Elazar, there are three reasons.

Human … concern with politics focuses on three general themes; the pursuit of political justice to achieve political order; the search for understanding of the empirical reality of political power and its exercise; and the creation of an appropriate civic environment through civil society and civil community capable of integrating the first two themes to produce the good political life.[2]

This language is not grim at all; it’s almost noble.  It is not divorced from reality – see the second theme – but attempts to draw that reality, and its related practicalities, to normative values and principles.  Elazar goes on to claim that it is federalism, as a mental construct concerned with governance and politics, that encompasses all three of these themes. 

Here, one is helped in understanding the origins of political theories to reflect how the various views fall among categories of theories.  For example, there are organic theories.  They are theories that analogize political – usually national – arrangements as organic entities with a head – the political/governmental organ – and the rest of the polity being made up of the other elements of the body politic.  That is, each individual or group functions to provide its contribution to the health of the overall organic whole – the polity – much like organs in a human body.

          Another category of theory is the natural rights category.  These theories basically rely on the natural proclivity of people to make choices that advance their individual interests.  People never knowingly choose against themselves, but they vary greatly on how to define their interests.  At times, they might choose to “sacrifice” what ostensibly would counteract their interests, but not in how they see their realities and their options.  For example, a loving mother will sacrifice her life to save her child because living with the knowledge she did not would be worse.

          But usually the stakes are not so drastic or negative.  Instead, people choose between or among options that offer positive outcomes or between positive and negative outcomes.  The person picks the best choice he/she can act on and/or afford.  Of course, as pointed out above, some choose illegal options in which, perhaps being unable to afford an option is not much of a concern.

          Federalism, according to Elazar, in its treatment of governance and politics accounts for these categories.  It borrows from organic theories in that, in ways that will shortly be described, highlight the collective – preferably referred to as the communal – sense that people rely on the combined resources of a population to accomplish their combined and individual goals and aims.

          It also parallels natural rights’ individualism in that federalist polities are the outcome of individuals or individual groups coming together, as equal parties, to agree on terms by which a new arrangement is formed to accomplish or advance identified purposes.  Within this arrangement, each party retains his/her/their integrity as a choice-making entity capable of forming consent with others.

          While federalism does draw from both views, it defines the key aspects of such an arrangement in its own way.  For example, liberty is not natural liberty – a liberty akin to what animals have, doing what immediate desires call for – but federal liberty that can be best defined as the right to do what one should do in terms of the agreement that sets up the federation under which these parties have joined.  A federation depends on its participants willfully acting in accordance with its initial agreement.  That is, each entity is a willing partner.

          So, by this combination, a student of politics cannot solely rely on behavioral – seek rewards and avoid punishments – analysis of political behavior – study that utilizes positivist methods (statistical analysis) – or rely on purely historical study that looks back at what and how the organic whole reacted to prior challenges.  All methods need to be used.  Federalism does not preclude the value of varied approaches to the study of governance and politics.[3]

          Teachers of civics who are guided by the federalist construct – federation theory – are assisted by the use of these combined concerns – of reality and the normative – and can deal with not only the “what” and “how” questions, but also with the “should” questions.  That is, within this basis for the study of governance and politics, students can readily deal with values questions.  By doing so, teachers can introduce moral questions.

          But, as this blog has often pointed out, federalist thought, which during most of the nation’s history, was the dominant view, the natural rights view holds dominance today among the American populous.  But Elazar offers some hope for those who would want a reemergence of federalism.  He writes:

Federalism is resurfacing as a political force because it serves well the principle that there are no simple majorities or minorities but that all majorities are compounded of congeries of groups, and the corollary principle of minority rights, which not only protects the possibility for minorities to preserve themselves but force majorities to be compound rather than artificially simple.  It serves those principles by emphasizing the consensual basis of the polity and the importance of liberty in the constitution and maintenance of democratic republics.[4]

Or, stated another way, federalism leads to a view of governance and politics that adds grand nuance to its related processes.  It allows for suitable complexity that is less likely to short-change what is facing a people at any given time.

The current political hoopla questions Elazar’s claim.  At the time of his writing these words, the world seemed to be approaching a global perspective.  Since then, nationalism has made a comeback.  Whether that new leaning has been established is highly questionable – the western nations seem to be at a determining point.[5]  It turns out, for example, Britain is facing such indecision with its Brexit effort.  There are already well-established institutions – various global attributes and elements – that seem to have been baked into the realities of western politics – or is it global politics? 

Exiting those realities are proving difficult and Elazar’s judgement has not yet been proven wrong.  “[P]eoples must live together whether they like it or not and even aspire to do [so] democratically … [P]eoples and states throughout the world are looking for federal solutions to the problems of political integration within a democratic framework.”[6]  Federalism is not an easy option, but neither is politics or being political.

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[1] Jonah Goldberg, Suicide of the West:  How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy (New York, NY:  Crown Forum, 2018).

[2] Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism (Tuscaloosa, AL:  The University of Alabama Press, 1987), 1.

[3] While this is true, federalism does have a bias toward historical study – a lot of it comprising of historical document analysis.  In terms of using federation theory as a guide for civics instruction, historical reviews seem most appropriate for the bulk of such study.

[4] Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism, 1.

[5] The next round of elections among the western democracies will be telling on this score.

[6] Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism, 2.