At Marquette
University’s On the Issues forum last Monday, Mike Gousha, without throwing a
hardball, asked Congressman Ryan to explain, and maybe defend, his comments on
the “economics of envy.” And a very peculiar defense he made.
The first thing
he said is clearly wrong: the “envious” classes do not drive and did not invent
class conflict – and the latter certainly not lately. Class conflict is an historical
feature of every civil society, from the time when class structures were
primarily social, though modern times, when they became primarily economic.
Only primitive societies have social roles without having stratified social
classes. Naturally, people being what they are, conflict has run unabated
during that whole time, though it is less noticeable in times of prosperity or
national emergency. But it takes two to tangle: no one class started it.
Next, why ascribe
bad emotions to the class thus singled out as driving the conflict? If you
wanted to use a loaded e-word, you could call it the “economics of
exploitation” instead. And if you wanted to better express the emotion the working poor feel, you would
call it the “economics of oppression,” not envy.
That’s because
people who work for a living don’t necessarily envy, to use Mr. Ryan’s example,
Craig Culver. They don’t want that kind of responsibility; they know their own
limitations. For the most part, they just want to work for a fair wage and go home
to their families at the end of the day. You don’t have to use an emotionally
loaded word at all; you can use a morally loaded word and call it the economics
of injustice. A living minimum wage, that enables workers to help pay for their
children’s college education and save for their own retirement, is an issue of
social justice, not bad emotions.
Finally, I’m
not suggesting that equality of opportunity is not a good thing or that it does
not, in large measure, exist in our society. What people like the working poor,
and those who sympathize with them, are saying, is that by itself it’s not
enough.
This is Mr.
Ryan’s blind spot. Plainly he’s out of sympathy with a class of society he can
bad-mouth so plausibly. It goes with the Republican territory. Likewise, to use
one of columnist Eugene Kane’s expressions, the term “economics of envy” is a dog whistle
audible only to the bourgeoisie. It causes them to think of people who really are shiftless, and lump those people
with people who do want to work and
will work for almost any wage they are forced to accept. That makes it easier
to ignore injustices to the latter.
