Inequality – Radical behaviorist leftist

News have been quick to spread that Andrius Tapinas of Laisvės TV has organised a 5 million Euro crowdfunding campaign of buying a Bayraktar combat aerial vehicle (commonly referred to as a drone) for the Ukraine military in support of its war with Russia. People in Lithuania were actively urged to participate and donate. The crowd-funder was a success and by 2022-05-28 the goal had been reached in 3,5 days. Here I would like to raise an issue with the current campaign that applies more broadly to “voluntary pooling” of resources.

Undoubtedly, military conflict and war demands huge resources and finances. War means destitution for many while being a lucrative opportunity for a select few. Nevertheless, this post is not regarding the general connection of money and war. Criticisms of crowdfunding a purchase of military equipment might:

Raise moral concerns as it is “never right to support war”;
That one should spend the money in peaceful, perhaps domestic, perhaps humanitarian ways;
That one should not support another autocratic regime of Recep Tayip Erdogan in Turkey and it’s military-industrial complex by purchasing Turkish guns.

All of the criticisms above pale in significance when compared to another issue – the lack of progressivity of financing the effort. This aspect is actually dangerous to Putin, Erdogan, Ukraine’s own oligarchs as well as Western business and economic “elites” which is why it is not and will not be widely discussed.

Hype-funding the Bayraktar in particular and crowdfunding in general is not sustainable. With inflation eating into people’s incomes and their savings, with ever-increasing prices of real estate that are reaching astronomical levels, asking those same people to donate seems obscene given the context of increasing wealth-stratification and inequality. Crowdfunding is almost always regressive as poorer people commit a larger share of their finances than richer ones. The only proper way of financing any social endeavor, including defense, is by demanding a larger share from the wealthy, which is most effectively achieved by income and wealth taxation. The focus should lay on millionaires like Matijošaitis, Numavičius and others starting at the list of the wealthiest in Lithuania.

The argument also applies to food banks that are logically, though absurdly, situated in huge supermarkets. The corporations conveniently dodge attention and get hailed as socially-responsible business for allowing social campaigns inside while regular people continue to be hounded and/or shamed into donating. This same can be said regarding platforms such as GoFundMe that cannot and must not be a substitute for a proper social support system.

Speaking more generally, social equality is a necessary condition for peace and stability. This has been known for at least a hundred years – just note the post-war policy considerations at the end of WWII for imperial Japan:

In 1943 and 1945, American researchers assessed that the low distribution of wealth to Japanese industrial workers and farmers had stunted domestic consumption and driven overseas economic expansionism. This was now to be addressed by labor reorganization with higher wages that would promote domestic consumption and facilitate demilitarization. Economic democratization and leveling were not ends in themselves: the underlying policy goal was to combat militarism by restructuring features of the economy that might be conducive to overseas aggression.
Walter Scheidel (2017, p. 67) – The Great Leveler

Thomas Piketty develops the argument further and proposes an antidote:

Whatever the wealthy of the Belle Époque (1880–1914) may have thought to the contrary, extreme inequality was not the necessary price of prosperity and industrial development. Indeed, all signs are that the excessive concentration of wealth exacerbated social and nationalist tensions while blocking the social and educational investments that made the balanced postwar development model possible. Furthermore, the increased concentration of wealth that we have seen since the 1980s in the United States, Russia, India, and China and to a lesser extent in Europe shows that extreme wealth inequality can reconstitute itself for many different reasons, from profiteering on privatizations to the fact that large portfolios earn higher returns than small ones, without necessarily yielding higher growth for the majority of the population— far from it.
To prevent a return to such extreme wealth concentration, progressive taxes on inheritances and income must again play the role that they used to play in the twentieth century when rates in the United States and United Kingdom ran as high as 70–90 percent on the highest incomes and largest fortunes for decades—decades in which growth rose to unprecedented levels. Historical experience shows, however, that inheritance and income taxes alone are not enough; they need to be complemented by a progressive annual tax on wealth, which I see as the central tool for achieving true circulation of capital.
Thomas Piketty (2020, p. 702) – Capital And Ideology

Inequality regimes do not last forever as Scheidel and Piketty explain. The wealthy will pay their fair share – this will happen either in a peaceful manner with significant (one might call exproriation-level) progressive income and wealth tax rates or in massively violent conflicts and political instability. Unfortunately, in the past levelling happened only as a consequence of great violence. I surely would like to see us going the peaceful route for once, but at the moment that prospect does not seem likely.

In the spirit of the concluding post of 2020, a very fitting liberal-minded article has come to my attention – I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People. This can serve as an illustration for the second point – understanding people and reasons for their behavior. Furthermore, this article will let us see why both behaviorist and leftist thought is needed to understand the world.

Misunderstanding of behavior

The political situation described is obviously aversive to the author and no behavior is available to fix it – there we have this so-called “politics fatigue”. Without any better explanation, the text is loaded with labels such as fundamentally different person, good person, callousness, selfish, cruel, etc. Whatever we call another person – we call him that because of some behavior – let Marvin Harris help us once again:

For each such case, cultural materialist explanations reverse the causal arrow and raise additional questions which open the way to nomothetic solutions. Males are aggressive because they make war. They make war because of population pressure and resource depletion. Whites are prejudiced against blacks because blacks are discriminated against. The reason why they are discriminated against has to do with the economic role of unemployed blacks as buffers against white unemployment.
Marvin Harris (1986) – Cultural Materialism and Behavior Analysis:
Common Problems and Radical Solutions (p. 45)

The author lacking a proper theory of behavior unsurprisingly does not know where to look for reasons of any persons behavior – therefore it is misunderstood, misattributed and there isn’t a large probability of future investigation. We can point out the irony of empathy – while it is said “I don’t know how to convince someone how to experience the basic human emotion of empathy.”, in a way shown in this post, the author himself lacks understanding.

Misunderstanding of finances

A label often attributed to the likes of the author is a “liberal”. What this often means is calling for more “personal responsibility”, “individual choice and actions”. This is evident in the text:

“Personally, I’m happy to pay an extra 4.3 percent for my fast food burger if it means the person making it for me can afford to feed their own family. If you aren’t willing to fork over an extra 17 cents for a Big Mac, you’re a fundamentally different person than I am.”

“I’m perfectly content to pay taxes that go toward public schools”; “If I have to pay a little more with each paycheck to ensure my fellow Americans can access health care? SIGN ME UP.”

This sentiment surrounding taxes and money is misplaced. While the author would state that everyone must pay their fair share, the word “fair” is crucial. With increasing income and wealth inequality health care and education funding should not be provided by those who don’t have that much themselves. In other words – without progressive taxation there will be no adequate and fair funding. Just like charities – average citizens are encouraged to share the crumbs while the majority of the proverbial cake is safe elsewhere (probably in an offshore). Charities/foundations used for tax write-offs by rich donors is yet another absurdity.

Some good old radical behaviorist leftist clarity

We can say the author’s mind is in the right place – universal health care, proper wages, adequate funding of the education system is advocated. What the author lacks is a proper theory of behavior – the problems discussed in the piece cannot be solved merely by dialogue or discussions. The political situation, the divided society arise because of material conditions, because of still deeping inequality and only in addresing these is where the solutions lie.