Discussion Group Report

"As the income and wealth disparity between classes has grown in recent years, and American society has become increasingly fractured, I fear that our collective conscience has seriously eroded. 'To have is to deserve' seems to be our moral motto," opines Richard S. Gilbert in his article, "How Much Do We Deserve? A Look at Distributive Justice," in the November/December, 2001, issue of UU World.

"Yet at the deepest levels of our being," he continues, "we who take pleasure in our unparalleled prosperity are vaguely anxious that millions of others in our midst are living in poverty." There is a question of distributive justice, defined by the Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics as the "virtue by which goods and burdens of the community are distributed with due proportion among citizens." Is a distributive ethic possible, one that will be fair to all people and at the same time produce abundance to be shared?

Gilbert thinks there is. In our specialized world, he believes, economics seems totally divorced from moral analysis. He proposes that ethics and economics be rejoined in a common dialogue in which the economic system should be the servant, not the master, of humanity. He proposes six canons, or principles, as tests for the justice of our economic policies, drawing on principles developed almost 80 years ago in Father John Ryan's landmark book, Distributive Justice. These canons strive to balance the lofty requirements of economic ethics and the hard requirements of an efficient economic system. They are as follows:

NEED: He says, "All human beings have the inherent right to have their basic human needs met before any economic surplus is distributed to others. Simply stated, the basic needs of the poor transcend the superfluous desires of the rich in moral importance." This principle is affirmed in religious and philosophical traditions from Plato to the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures. It is based on the idea that all human beings are worthwhile. Human beings are not to be used as a means to some higher end. They are ends in themselves. This canon recognizes the individual as a center of freedom with the ability to make real choices. Self-determination requires a minimal economic package, however. To exclude some members from that community because they have not produced enough is to erode the community's foundation in human solidarity. A society may be judged by how it treats its poorest, weakest, and most vulnerable people.

PROPORTIONAL EQUALITY: Every human being should be limited in his or her consumption of income and wealth by the principal of sufficiency. This is an ethic of limits, a floor based on need and a ceiling based on proportionality, as articulated in Plato's Laws. Robert Reich in The American Prospect points out that the average pay of a chief executive in the U.S. rose 18% in 1999 to $12 million. At the other end were 1) 400 janitors in Los Angeles protesting wages of less than $16,000 a year, 2) More than 2 million Americans earning between $7 and $8 an hour working in nursing homes, "bathing and feeding frail elderly people, etc.," and 3) 700,000 home health care aids who earn $8 to $10 an hour. By comparison many law firms pay first year associates $120,000 plus a signing bonus, and Wall Street investment banks pay more than $75,000 a year for financial analysts. Reich says the policy of the Federal Reserve Board, which raises interest rates to check inflation, makes life harder for the people on the bottom rungs of the ladder, who end up paying more for first mortgages, car loans and other borrowing. "This year the richest 2.7 million Americans, comprising the top 1 percent will have as many after-tax dollars to spend as the bottom 100 million put together, and they'll have 40 percent of the nation's wealth." These examples of extreme inequality attack the democratic egalitarian ideal as well as common sense standards of decency," says Gilbert. "The class warfare under way in the United States undermines the principles of proportion and balance one might expect to see in a truly prosperous society." Thorsten Veblen indicated the corrupting potential of excessive income and wealth. It is based on an ethic of "enough." Beyond a certain level income is not only superfluous but morally and spiritually corrupting.

CONTRIBUTION TO THE COMMON GOOD: Work that served the community should be valued more highly than work that serves only a few. A study by the National Opinion Research Center evaluated 90 occupations in terms of social value. Physicians, who ranked second in social value, and college professors, who ranked seventh, are close in social value and work in professions that require the same amount of education and training. Yet physicians, on average, earn more than twice as much as professors. Sherwin Rosen in the 1983 issue of The American Scholar asks if the principle of payment by contribution has been abandoned. According to Rosen, "the distribution of earnings is far from proportionate to the distribution of ability...How can it be that many a mediocre free agent [in professional sports] earns far more than the Secretary of State or the President of the United States. The average family can hardly afford to attend professional sports games, which are often held in stadiums using tax dollars because the ticket prices are too high.

Gilbert suggests that contributions that can be shared by the citizenry at large should take precedence over those enjoyed by the elite. He does not naively expect that this view has a chance of becoming public or private policy, but nonetheless the issue should be engaged. It would prompt a fascinating exercise in values clarification. The principle is that people who work in the service of the community must be rewarded more generously than those who work to further self-aggrandizement. Carol Gilligan in In a Different Voice, points out that the U.S. economy is based on the perspective that the world is composed of individuals in conflict with one another over claims to resources. This represents the male ethos. The feminist view, however sees the world as an arena not so much for conflict resolution as for preserving connections. This ethos is grounded in human attachment, the principle of caring. A distributive ethic needs to factor in this community-building value.

PRODUCTIVITY: Productivity is well established in the American economic and moral psyche and needs mainly to be disestablished as a canon of divine right. It is a useful and important principle of distribution--but not a sacred one. Why? To the extent that one's remuneration is based on the skills one has acquired through a lifetime, this canon gives an unfair advantage to those who have backgrounds conducive to acquiring those skills. Economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis reported in 1997 that children from the wealthiest 10 percent of the population are 27 times as likely as children from the bottom 10 percent to be in the top 10 percent in terms of income. Society should work to ameliorate, not to compound, the natural inequity in people's genetic ability to succeed. A just economy will encourage productivity among all its citizens who are able to produce economically. American society stresses incentives for the affluent at the expense of incentives for the poor. The plight of the working poor, the relatively high tax burden on the poor, and the social welfare system, which still tends to discourage people from working by dropping medical and other benefits for those who take jobs--all contribute to a reduction of productivity. People with limited ability nevertheless deserve to have their needs met because they are likewise members of the human community.

EFFORT AND SACRIFICE: It seems fair to reward effort, leisure being a form of income; but what about those who, by virtue of genetics or environment, are unable to work? Some people, for example, the very young and the very old or people with disabilities, are able to contribute relatively little economically, yet they should not be excluded from the community. Caregivers in the family who perform the tasks of maintaining a home and caring for children and elders, the costs of which would be enormous on the open market, are on the low end of the income scale. Also, unpleasant or unsafe working conditions should be considered in determining economic rewards.

SCARCITY: Rewarding the scarcity of a particular talent fails to recognize the joint inputs that mark so many economic endeavors. In professional sports, one superstar may be highly rewarded when the team wins a championship, but in most cases there is a kitty that is shared by all team members. The profit-sharing plans of some businesses could be said to follow a similar system of economic reward. Clearly, people with valuable skills must be rewarded. Given the realities of human nature, incentives must be included in any realistic economic scheme. Gilbert suggests only that the canon of scarcity find its proper place. Given an affluent society, it is quite possible to remunerate people by means of the other canons and still have a surplus from which to reward those who have rare skills.

Gilbert suggests the following steps for a more equitable distribution in the American economy:

1. Increase the Earned Income Tax Credit to bring the working poor up to the poverty level.
2. Transfer the minimum wage into a living wage.
3. Implement welfare reform that ends the cruel arbitrariness of a five-year time limit, putting more emphasis on the "carrot" (programs for education, child care, health coverage, and job training) than on the "stick" (attitudes and action that regard getting people off welfare rolls as more important than getting people out of poverty).
4. Develop an affirmative action program that stresses class more than race or ethnicity, but still recognizes the underlying discrimination in American culture.
5. Create a social policy that is "front loaded," that recognizes that investing in human resources early on makes far more sense than applying draconian sanctions later.
6. Institute tax reform that guarantees true progressivity, seeks to maintain a top-to-bottom quintile ratio of not more than five to one, and makes the payroll tax more progressive by raising the upper limit on which these taxes are paid.
7. Create more effective taxes on wealth, involving maintaining the inheritance tax, but indexing it for inflation.
8. Legislate a negative income tax, a system of income maintenance for people with the lowest wages, which will provide a floor under all Americans. Low marginal tax rates will also provide strong incentives for workers at lower income levels.