> > Brad DeLong wrote:
> >
> > >But at the moment there isn't enough to give everyone once-a-year
> > >vacations at Kapalua Beach in Hawaii a broadband connection to the
> > >internet, or a large-screen TV-VCR on which to watch their own
> > >copies of "Don Giovanni," "Casablanca," "The Seven Samurai," and
> > >"The Rules of the Game" when it strikes them.
So, Brad, to push the question I asked that you never answered (we aren't rich enough for justice, do you really believe that?): most people who have thought about justice have regarded it as a way of dealing with scarcity. Hume says that if we are too poor, we cannot make ourselves be just, and if we are rich beyond imagination, it doesn't matter if we are, we all get what we want anyway.
As far as I can tell, your view is that we cannot afford jsutice until we have overcome scarcity, that is, until we don't need justice any more. As long as we need it because we cannot all have everything we want, we cannot have it. You realize, of course, that this puts off treating people decently not one or two generations, but, as I suspected, forever, because unlike our communist friends here, I agree with you that we will never overcome scarcity.
Ina ddition, doesn't it make you worry, as one of the beneficiaries of the position that the rich can screw the poor until that glorious day. never to arrive, when they have created so much wealth that they can give it away without missing it, that your attitude is basically, "I'm all right, Jack," that it's so cynically self-serving that it deserves a very long hard look and an enormously skeprical attitude?
To push a question Gerry Cohen has been pushing lately, I think wrongly, but it applies to you, why are you entitled to be well off in the circumstances? You are not contributing to creating wealth so that someday, on your view, the poor in Oakland and Calcutta will be able to live decently, if only in two or ten or a hundred generations. You are sitting around teaching privileged kids at Berkeley. No reason you shouldn't teach, but what do they pay you, $150,000? What are you doing not giving it away to those less fortunate at least down to the level of diminishing marginal returns, say the median family income of $35,000 for a family of four. Or if your family is larger or smaller, that size. I am just guessing, that is probably a lot higer than the level of DMR, but surely if you gave away $60,000 after tax a year to Oxfam, it would do more good than your keeping it, and on your own theory, why are you entitled to wallow while others suffer, and you not even helping their graet-great-grandchildren to look forward to a better life?
--jks _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com