I wrote this in response to a friend’s comment on something
I had shared on yesterday’s Hobby-Lobby supreme-court-decision story.
“Social fabric is woven by interlacing our interests with
those of others. Even when I am warm, someone else might need the blanket we
wove together.”
I am here to see if I can expound on this a bit.
Facebook is a source of a lot of inspiration and frustration
for me, I must admit. I hate seeing that someone I thought walked on water as a
teacher years ago, has political opinions that are almost entirely the opposite
of my own. On the other hand, I love it when I see that someone I have not seen
in years has weathered the political polarization storm that has hit the United
States in the last 35 years and still offers up thoughtful ideas, and I must
admit, who agrees with me.
Irrespective of whether we agree with one another or not,
though; one fact remains: we are all alive at the same time and even if we live
in different states or nations, we want mostly the same things – life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness. Some people seem willing to pursue liberty at the
expense of their life or happiness. Some appear to only care about happiness –
defined essentially as entertainment. Some have a definition of life I have
trouble recognizing, that is; to even die as a martyr for a ideology, in some
cases ostensibly to get to some sort of better life in the one they presume
follows this one.
When people live together in one nation, as many of my
friends and I do; we share common citizenship as well as common humanity. Those
of us who are U.S. citizenship or are hoping to obtain citizenship, share –
whether we like it or not – common interests. If the air where you live is
polluted, the water where I live is fouled, there is a mass killing in which
your loved ones are involved, your daughter, sister, wife or mother needs birth
control; it affects us all, because we could all easily swap these and other
unwanted conditions tomorrow.
Most of the money I have “made” in my life has come from the
taxpayers of Tennessee. The exceptions are many, but they did not last as long
as my jobs in Tennessee. These other sources of income have been: McDonalds,
Emerson Electric, IBM, Valvoline Oil, Central Baptist Church in Maysville, KY,
First Southern Baptist Church in Terre Haute, IN, Newnam Funeral Home, the
state of Kentucky, and my sister’s father-in-law. All of the money I have
“made” has been money I have co-made. How is it possible for one person working
as part of an organization of hundreds or thousands of people to imagine she or
he has “made” that money on his or her own? That would be like saying each of
us must pay off individually, our share of the national debt. Can you honestly
say how much of the national debt you owe - is due to what you have done or not?
Do you see how our economic system is much clearer on what
we are each due and much less clear on what we each owe? If accounting could be
done perfectly, we would have a clear understanding of both.
A CEO who makes 10 million dollars a year, has a clear
understanding of his or her (usually his) income. What he will not know is how
much of that 10 million is due to the efforts of others, to
political/legal/economic connections he has that others do not have,
infrastructure provided for his company by tax payers, so that the company
profits are large enough to pay him his salary/dividends, law enforcement
provided by public money that keeps him safe and so on. If we could do full
accounting - not simply account for each person’s income but trace that income
back through all the channels from which it came- I would not have to put
“make” in quotes when I write about it, but we would all know how much our
effort effected what we “made” and how much the efforts or presence of others
effected what we “made.”
This sort of full accounting would do away with the notion
of personal income and reveal that all income is derived collaboratively. It's just that we do not have an accounting system
sophisticated enough to reveal this fact and since we do not; we are free to
pretend that all the money we “make” is ours to keep. People often rail against
income redistribution as socialism, as if all income distribution were not socialist.
People also love to talk about personal responsibility, as
if it is the only sort of responsibility. In truth, we have both personal and
social responsibility. In fact, I would go so far as to say, we only have
social responsibility, since anything I do personally will affect others either
directly or indirectly.
Those of us in the U.S., live in a nation with five percent
of the population but one that contributes around 20% of the greenhouse gases
into the atmosphere – the ones causing global climate change. Our accounting system again, does not allow
the amount each of us contributes to this problem, to be measured – although
there are crude measures you can find on the internet - and we cannot really
ever separate it all out, because so much of what I do, I do as part of an
organization of people – the place I work pollutes en masse; or as a community
of people – the place I live pollutes en masse. In fact, we are only beginning
to do environmental accounting at the aggregate level, let alone address it at
the individual level.
Perhaps someday when the accounting problems are fixed, we
will be able to measure exactly the value each of us is adding during our lives
and how much it is costing the planet to support us. Let me be the first to
hazard a guess: we will all be lucky to break even.
