The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

44 apologythat that other person does not exist for you....The socialist or liberal egalitarian. ..rather than the Nozickian libertarian . ..is ...more plausiblyaccused of ‘selfishness.’” 106 No left egalitarian has explained how such takingssquare with Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative:“So act as to use humanity, both in your own person and in the person ofevery other, always at the same time as an end, never simply as a means.” 107Taxing Peter to pay Paul is using Peter for Paul. It is corrupting. Moderngovernments have been encouraged to think that any abuse of Peter is justfine, that Peter is a slave available for any duty that the ruler has in mind.A little like nonmodern governments.And, second, the existing governmental programs to help the poor aretoo small to do their alleged job, for the excellent reason that the relativelyrich arrange this to be so. Think for a minute about the statistics in thedistributive-justice argument. If the one-third and more of national incomethat the American government collects actually went to the poor, wouldthere be any American poor? Of course not.Imagine that as much as a quarter of the one-third went to the poor—below the fraction I suppose people have in mind when defending governmentsof the twentieth century as “helping the poor.” That’s 1 ⁄3 × 1 ⁄4 = 1 ⁄12 ofgross domestic product, earmarked in such a hypothetical world for transfersto the poor. That would be about $1,000 billion.According to the official definitions of numbers living in poverty, 34 millionAmericans do, over 10 percent of the population. The poverty figure,though it has fallen dramatically since Presidents Kennedy and Johnsondrew sharp attention to it in the 1960s, appalls me as much as it appalls you.It is important to realize that some of the poor are in fact temporarily so.The optimistic news is that according to a tracking study of 50,000 Americanscollected by researchers at the University of Michigan and reported ina 1999 book by W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm, only 5 percent of thosewho started in the bottom 20 percent in 1975 were still there in 1992. 108 PeterGottschalk and Sheldon Danziger take a much less optimistic view of thestatistics, noting that the “mobility” of a bourgeois teenager working parttimeis not what we want to measure. They find much less mobility measuredmore relevantly, 1968–1991. Yet even by their reckoning some 60percent who started in the bottom fifth got out of it. 109 That figure is similarto the rate at which Britons and Americans in the third quarter of thetwentieth century moved out of unskilled occupations. 110