progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

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PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC
INTELLECTUAL
made such a claim instead of the roundabout and not terribly plausible argument that the
elderly poor deserve government aid as a rebate on past taxes…"
Here he is speaking of the Rights of Man sections we had discussed earlier. What make
Paine different than Fleischacker is that Paine is a realist, he is probably a more 21st
century person that the one commenting upon him. Paine worked for the Revolution in
both the US and in France. He fought with Washington and took no pay. He was a bit
naive and did not seek to enrich himself. But his arguments were detailed demonstrating
a clearly focused need and using detailed business like approaches showing what it would
cost, the benefit, the sources of funding and the like. Paine was a progressive but a logical
progressive. He made arguments that are not drawn from some specious speech but from
reality. To the degree that distributive justice has a place then looking towards Paine and
his approach is what one must do. Paine made arguments based upon facts, details, and
consequences, pro and con. Unlike so many others one would look at Paine as one who
did all of his homework and laid out a detailed business plan for the deployment of the
benefits. In short Paine did what Fleischacker has no clue of.
If one looks back to the Progressive era a century ago, one of the most significant
contributions to Distributive Justice in word and deed was Father John Ryan, a mid
western Catholic priest. He wrote his book Distributive Justice in 1916 and strangely for
an American priest he sought approval for release from the Archbishop of Ireland rather
than his local bishop. But that may be a tale in and of itself. Ryan in Chapter 16 of his
work describes the principle canons, actually competing views of distribution, of
Distributive Justice. He lays them out as 131 :
1. The Canon of Equality: All people who contribute to the product should receive an
equal share.
2. The Canon of Needs: That the distribution is proportional to needs.
3. The Canon of Efforts and Sacrifice: That a person receive in proportion to what effort
they made and what sacrifice they made.
4. The Canon of Productivity: Men should be rewarded in relation to what their
contributions were to the product.
5. Canon of Scarcity: Pay in accord with the availability of such a person.
Ryan goes through a great deal of discussion defending and critiquing these various
models yet not one of them relates to the economic models that were becoming quite
clear at the time, supply and demand. Needs and Equality and Sacrifice are intangible and
unworkable. To get a person to work one must pay a competitive wage, even more so in
today's world. There are exceptions. Take Wall Street, there we have a "club" and if
131 Ryan, Distributive Justice, pp 243-253.
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