Down in the basement at McDonalds, or why equality of opportunity is a bogus goal

 

I've never understood the popularity of the American belief that the intervention of the state in the political economy should be limited to the goal of “levelling the field” to provide opportunity for all at the start, while ignoring the inequality of outcome.  It seems a contradiction in terms. How can you "level" the playing field, and at the same time allow any unequal outcome? These are in direct contradiction with one another. Any 'playing field' in which one of the players gains a significant advantage will be vulnerable to that player using some part of his power or wealth to 'unlevel' the playing field to his advantage. There is no rule of any type, there is no power that will prevent this. The problem is thinking of the playing field as a sort of board game. You play monopoly and you accept the outcome as 'fair'. The problem of course is that in life, unlike monopoly, you don't fold up the board after the game is over and begin it all again - in other words, the economy isn't a series of discrete games that are iterated at zero.

This is the fatal flaw in the liberal détente with the social democratic ideal:  "equality of opportunity", which presents itself as pragmatism, is actually wildly utopian. The idea that comforts the liberal thinker is that when it succeeds, it will dissolve itself. This is the story behind the goofy, Larry Summers-esque gesture of pretending that those who make it into the Forbes 400 list will fall in the next generation as other movers and shakers from the bottom battle their way forward. This is, in itself, nonsense – the Duponts, the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Goulds are still up there in the multimillionaire/billionaire class.  Behind every member of the Forbes list of billionaires you will find plenty of investment from older wealth. But  the larger point is that those who succeed most do so in a system that allows them ample leaway to make sure that we as a collective never go back to zero, where there is equality of opportunity for everyone. Our idolized 'competition' is limited to those in the lower ranks - for among the wealthiest or the most powerful, the competition is, precisely, to stifle and obstruct competition in as much as it injures wealth or power. D’Angelo has it right in The Wire, a famous scene in which he and his crew are eating McNuggets as they sell their drugs:

“Wallace: Man, whoever invented these, yo, he off the hook.

Poot: You think the man got paid?

- Who?

- Man who invented these.

-Shit, he richer than a muthafucka.

D’Angelo: Why? You think he get a percentage?

Wallace: Why not?

D’angelo: N…, please. The man who invented them things? Just some sad-ass down at the basement at McDonald's, thinkin' up some shit to make some money for the real players.

Poot: Naw, man, that ain't right.

D’Angelo: Fuck "right." It ain't about right, it's about money.”

This groundlevel view understands money is not right.

My objection here should spell out the structural dilemma here. In trying to build an economy with a non-interfering state that only guarantees that the ‘playing field’ is leveled, you are building, in reality, a massively interfering state. There is no point at which equality of opportunity will, as it were, work by itself. This is because the economy does not exist as a chain of discrete states – rather, what happens in time t influences what happens in time t1. The board game metaphor, however, exerts an uncanny influence over liberal thinking. From Rousseau to Rawls, the idea of an original position has, unconsciously, created the idea that society is very much like a board game. That is, it has beginnings and ends; a whole and continuous game came be played on it; that game will reward people according to their contributions. And so on. Here, classical liberalism still has a grasp on the liberalism that broke with it to develop the social welfare state. Both liberalisms, for instance, can accept that the price of an apple is not ‘earned’ by the apple, but both bridle at thinking the price of a man – his compensation – is not ‘earned’ by the man. It must have some deeper moral implication.

As we have all abundantly discovered, the liberal hope, in the sixties, that the social welfare system would so arrange the board game of society that equal opportunity is extended to all, and in so doing  dissolve itself – was based on the false premise that the players all recognize a sort of rule in which they would not use their success in making moves to change the rules of the game. The reactionary economists, that is, the vast majority of the tribe, attribute this to an inertia in the machine, i.e. the laziness of the worker.  But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the incentive in this ‘board game’ – success consists precisely in changing the rules in your favour. It does not consist in getting rewarded for one’s contribution to the aggregate welfare of the players of the game. The billionaire is of a different kind than the saint.  He is of the same kind as the drug dealer. And each, to use Spinoza’s phrase, must continue in their being in order to be at all.