From: OPE-L Administrator (ope-admin@ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu)
Date: Sun May 23 2004 - 11:25:15 EDT
Jurriaan has left the list again but sent a reply to my earlier post from today./ In solidarity, Jerry ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@hetnet.nl> Sent: Sunday, May 23, 2004 10:57 AM Thanks. There is no "one perfect method" for ensuring that public funds are spent in accordance with a mandate given by taxpayers who retain control over tax collection and spending schemes. In raising this question, I am merely suggesting that this is one of the core problems of democratic theory, i.e. what forms of accountability work best from the point of view of the goals and values of a society. The true moral significance of "accounting", apart from its economic necessity as a reporting and evaluation method, is precisely "accountability", i.e. the obligation to report on responsibility taken for what one did with somebody else's money, delegated by others to spend for collective purposes. In California, some budget issues are resolved through referenda's, and these referenda's provide the mandate to spend funds. But whether or not this provides a satisfactory method for responding to the real wishes of the population is open to debate. It is possible however to specify a series of criteria for ensuring both efficiency and effectiveness and moral integrity. This significance of the taxation issue for socialists, apart from income distribution issues, is of course primarily one of how public finance can best be organised, such that it is responsive to popular-democratic controls and mandates, without becoming totally inefficient or ineffectual because people constantly change their mind about social priorities or seek to decide the allocation of resources at the wrong level (it would obviously be stupid to get parliamentarians to decide on the details of a bus timetable). That is to say, this question is really inseparable from the formation of a new morality for the development of human society, such that there can be some sort of rational relationship between short-term and long-term goals as regards societal development, but this new morality itself cannot really be implemented, until a social contract exists which guarantees every citizen survival at a basic level, and thus guarantees social security at least at a minimum level. If one group constantly denies the right or ability of another group to exist, you cannot think about long-term priorities for the survival and prosperity of all. To my knowledge, the first person to explicitly advocate social assistance to the level of a basic minimum income was Juan Luis Vives, a Spanish-Jewish humanist (1492-1540) living at approximately the same time as when Columbus discovered America. His ethical argument really implies, that once the surplus-product of society is, through increased productivity, large enough to sustain the whole population securely, then the social morality of a society should no longer be based on the imperative of short-term survival (this has been technically achieved), but be based on the long-term survival of the human race, and for the rest, on the opportunities for human development, and a competition about the most desirable alternatives for human development rather than a competition for survival. The conservative reply to this is essentially that a guaranteed minimum income destroys the stimulus of the survival instinct, which creates the consciousness of an obligation and a duty to "provide for one-self". I can reply to this argument in great detail, but lack the time to do it just this minute. But anyway point is this distorts the whole argument since the wealthy themselves have a guaranteed income from asset ownership, a security which in many if not most cases they did not earn by their own labour, and really this ideology about "survival of the fittest" and so on is an ideological reflex of competing capitalists and groups of capitalists caused by a system of generalised private property relations. What really destroys the survival instinct is the inability to take charge of one's life, because immoral social relations permit others to intervene without consent in adults' lives - in ways which are immoral in the precise sense that they do not honour the positive intentions a person has for shaping his own destiny, and erode or destroy his confidence or will in being able to live it. If you would actually look at research you would find that the way people perceive things when they have a guaranteed minimum income, is that they have a problem of how to get ahead, i.e. the struggle is to validate their own idea of how they want to develop their life within the framework of what is socially tolerated. That is, just because you can survive, doesn't really mean much, because it creates the challenge of how life could be something more than surviving. Very few people are "lazy" about their lives as a whole, they all have an urge to create, produce something, experience new things and so on. They are "lazy" only in some parts of their lives, i.e. in respect of tasks they don't really like to do, or have little interest in doing, but which must be done. That is what social sanctions are for, to enforce that these tasks are done anyhow. But to say that forcing people to survive from day to day is, as a general rule, the best form of social sanction, is a very dubious argument, because it may only reinforce a social outlook that, given its great wealth, human society is irrational in its organisation and this just adds to the incidence of criminality (the most basic index of immoral behaviour that we have). Jurriaan
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