Elders (part 2)

In our modern wealthy societies, we tend to overlook the profound inequalities that exist between generations.  Children and adolescents certainly do not enjoy equal standing in our society—they are denied influence and other rights of citizenship.  For good reason.  Their brains are not yet mature—they do not have the experience, maturity and reasoning capacity to make the best decisions required of responsible citizens.  Then again, neither do many of the adult members of our polities.  (Those who read this will undoubtedly agree, though thinking of entirely different people.)  The dividing line between minors and adults is crude, somewhat arbitrary.  There is probably no way of avoiding this without creating other intractable inequalities, though we may be able to find ways to render the distinction less arbitrary.

Adult citizens face additional generational inequalities.  Those near the beginning of their working lives receive lower wages relative to older workers but also the fewest public resources of almost any age group (unless they happen to be in university, in which case they are probably receiving very substantial public subsidies).  They are least likely to be covered under public health-care plans and are furthest from receiving social security (and might legitimately wonder if they will ever receive benefits more than forty years away).  They are less likely to enjoy public mortgage assistance and child benefits.  But we tend not to worry too much about these specific inequities.  They’re young, for Pete’s sake, in the prime of life!  Many of us would give our right arms to be in their shoes again.  And we fully expect that most citizens will experience elevations in status and wealth as they age.  They will gain their first taste of political power in young adulthood, professional prestige as they acquire education and experience, economic advantage as they accumulate wealth and resources.  So perhaps such particular inequalities liable to change with age do not deserve too much of our public concern.  But still, the lack of enrollment in public health plans can be an expensive problem in the long term.  Young adults cost relatively little in present health spending.  But health treatment foregone in these years (regular checkups, screenings, vaccinations) will lead to greater costs in the long term.  From the public cost perspective, we would do better to catch them now while they are cheap to treat.

But the real inequality among adults occurs at a specific birthdate.  Those who pass this arbitrary boundary enjoy disproportionate and expensive privileges.  They receive public pensions, discounts and subsidies for all manner of things—meals in restaurants, public transit (though as a group they are among the wealthiest), publicly-funded health care (though it is more expensive and less efficiently used than it would be for any other group), and reduced taxes (including absurdly low estate taxes).  All this despite a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth.  They retain such privileges because they are more keenly aware of their shared interests, better motivated to exploit the democratic system to their demographic advantage, and aware they face almost no resistance from the rest of society.  Older voters, who have already paid off their mortgages, tend to support conservative and inflexible zoning laws, which can make housing nearly unaffordable for those new to the market—yet these young voters somehow fail to hold their elders responsible for these financial roadblocks.  Elders are exceptionally good at gaining public sympathy, which is why it is nearly impossible to point out the fairly obvious truth that their rising share of the population will soon make their privileges an unaffordable burden to everyone else.  They are steadily rising as a proportion of society, and those about to join them have as much reason to fight for their privileges as those presently benefitting.

But how dare you suggest spending less on such a venerated and vulnerable group as the elderly?  Consider a few possible reasons.  They, of all interest groups, have had the most time to anticipate and prepare for the needs of their old age.  They cannot claim they were taken by surprise.  And they are not all, or even most of them, as vulnerable as they would have you believe.  Many are using public resources to fund their care while their personal resources are left mostly untouched—they would prefer to pass these to their heirs, and the heirs would prefer to receive them, so keep their mouths shut.  Reducing privileges to the interest group as a whole does not necessarily mean abandoning those individual members within the group who really are in need and without resources.  But if the members of this larger group are to enjoy expensive benefits, they can be expected to contribute appropriately.  They might even run down their savings before receiving the full measure of public help.  Run them down?  What of their heirs?  They are another interest group, and we may ask if they should receive free benefits which are actually being funded by the rest of society?

But the better answer is that we are not insisting that their benefits be taken away, only that they wait until other, needier groups have received theirs.  Public spending devoted to elders is spending diverted from other potential users and recipients, the more truly vulnerable parts of society—particularly the health and educational needs of children, those who cannot advocate for themselves but will nevertheless be expected to bear the rising burden of future seniors and present policy errors.  Public money spent on children is money better spent, in light of the rewards to society at large.  They will reap greater and longer working lifetimes for smaller present investments and will thereby have more opportunities of repaying their benefits in future contributions.  So it is more efficient to put public money first into young families, child care and nutrition, headstart programs, as well as more diverse educational opportunities.  And yes, it is efficient to spend it on other people’s kids.  Public spending on younger generations will have a much greater payoff for society as a whole and far into the future.  Comparable spending on seniors will not.  This does not mean that seniors should be neglected or pushed off the public rolls, but rather that children should be given first priority in public spending.

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Elites despise inheritance taxes and will fight against them with all their considerable resources.  The reason is clear—elites wish to perpetuate the inequalities of the present into the future by favoring their genetic offspring.  (Their genomes are entirely in agreement on this point.)  And these elites have managed to convince many non-elites that untaxed inheritances somehow benefit them too.  Perhaps the latter are persuaded that they will yet achieve wealth to pass on to their progeny.  But the argument is disingenuous, from a statistical perspective.  Most of the non-elites will never acquire much to pass on, and they will lose more in public services (including resources for their own children) than they will gain by passing on their own small accumulations to their offspring.

Yet the more important argument is about equality.  If we properly value the ongoing practice of democracy (which requires the political equality of citizens), then we will have to use public means to safeguard the equal standing of citizens.  This does not mean that we must actively root out and destroy all existing differences between citizens, but it does mean that we must willfully inhibit the processes that amplify and perpetuate these differences over time.  Elites will use whatever means they have available (including the hiring of lawyers, funding of politicians and crafting of clever laws) to perpetuate their existing advantages into future iterations of their genome.  Their advantageous control of resources gives them the means to accomplish this.  Passing on the most substantial inheritances possible—so that their offspring will control more resources than their peers—is one such means.  And it is a strategy with which the rest of us might easily sympathize.  Nevertheless, we must resist it, with determination and consistency, by means of the firm application of law.

Why go to such trouble of resisting what remarkably few seem to see as a problem?  Consider a word that matters to conservatives—patriotism.  If we genuinely value this shared commitment to citizenship—which is all that patriotism can really mean—then we require a fundamental equality of citizens.  They must be equal in their commitment to their society, in their rights and responsibilities, in their voices, in their ability to contribute to the common prosperity, and in their access to public benefits and resources.  Again, this does not necessarily mean that everyone gets exactly the same of everything.  It may not mean economy-harming levels of taxation.  But it does mean fairer and more efficient forms of taxation.  This will include substantial inheritance taxes.  For those who argue that wealthy individuals have earned (that is, morally deserved) their fortunes through talent and hard work (itself a disputable claim), there is still no coherent justification for allowing such individuals to pass on profoundly unequal control of resources to heirs who have done nothing (apart from accidentally inheriting a genome) to earn them.  If hard work and economic striving are properly to be valued and encouraged, then there can be no patriotic excuse for allowing heirs to enjoy a free ride, an unearned advantage over other citizens.  A fair society demands that we tax the estates of the deceased (who have no continuing interests and therefore cannot be harmed) in favor of the living—all the living members of a society.  So let us call this tax what it is—an unfair advantage fee.

As with all potential policies, interested individuals will change their behavior to thwart the intentions of such a policy, if successfully turned into law.  Those with wealth they wish to pass on to heirs will do everything in their power to prevent this wealth being taxed.  And the more wealth they have—that is, the more their personal power and the greater their advantage over the rest—the more they will be motivated to avoid the intent of the law.  They will hire the cleverest advisors, accountants and legal teams to find ways out of their civil obligations.  First they will launch a rhetorical campaign against the policy—perhaps find ways to call their resistance patriotism.  Then they will try to defeat the proposed legislation by recruiting sympathetic politicians or finding more reliable champions to run for office, and then placing sympathizers on the committee drafting the bill.  And they will use their rhetorical powers to convince poorer compatriots that the tax will not be in their interest, even when it clearly is.  In many wealthy democracies these strategies have succeeded.  And even when they fail and the legislation passes, the elites find ways to leave the least taxable wealth for the state to find—such as moving wealth off shore, beyond the reach of taxing authorities.  So we must anticipate these strategies, take steps to defeat them.  Governments and citizens must steel themselves for a long fight.  Those who have advantage can be counted on to use their unequal resources to defend these inequalities, now and into the future.  The greater their advantage, the more they will fight to perpetuate it.  Ultimately, if our democracies are to remain such, compromise will be needed.  A fair and prosperous society does not have to remove every advantage enjoyed by the privileged, but an enduring democracy must fight against the relentless tide of privilege.  It need not tax inheritances into oblivion—which seems unlikely to succeed in any case—but it needs to tax them more aggressively than it does at present.  And a patriotic citizenry should be willing to find a grand compromise between public need and private ambition.  At least such a contest will slow down the relentless growth of inequality.

Conservatism is not really about defending tradition or preserving a venerable and virtuous past.  It is about preserving present advantage into the future, perpetuating the unequal status quo, which the advantaged will call justice and declare to be the proper order of things.  Conservatism is fundamentally concerned with the defense of inequality and privilege.  Conservatives have proved very successful at recruiting non-conservatives into their cause by making them believe that they share in the benefits of this present, unequal order.

Let us summarize.  First, those with power and advantage will, as a rule, use their power and advantage to gain more power and advantage (for example, by demanding tax cuts), and to secure their power and advantage into the future (by creating an advantageous narrative about hard work and justice).  Second, this expansion and perpetuation of advantage is not to the benefit of society at large, since most citizens are (by definition) not advantaged and will necessarily give up influence and benefits for the sake of the ascendancy of the privileged—most immediately in that they will give up more in public benefits than they will gain in tax reductions.  Therefore, it is incumbent on the non-privileged (the majority) to resist this tendency of the elite to promote their narrow privileges.  Democracy will supply the means—so long as the citizenry at large are careful to resist self-serving elite propaganda.

How to break this historic trend?  There is perhaps one interest group that can manage it.  Just one vulnerable and incomparable interest group able to draw attention away from the presently advantaged.  Who might this be?