Family, Lawyers Beat Odds, Earn Big Win

           Walter Jajuga was a successful businessman who was thinking of his three children when he opted into a Prudential group life insurance policy at his company back in the 1980’s.  When he became disabled in 1997, he applied for a number of disability benefits, including a waiver of the premium on that group policy, which would allow his children to collect on the policy even though he stopped working.  He was found to be disabled by his employer, by the social security administration, and twice by Prudential itself (in connection with other benefits he had with them).  What he did not learn until years later, just before his death, is that Prudential had denied the waiver application on the group life insurance policy, and failed to give him notice of its decision.  When he died, Prudential refused to pay out the life insurance benefit to Mr. Jajuga’s children.  After fourteen years, three administrative proceedings, a lawsuit in federal district court and an appeal to the First Circuit in Boston, Mr. Jajuga’s children will receive their inheritance, thanks to the help of a team of local lawyers who took on the insurance giant and won.

            When attorneys Terrence Low, Anthony Canata, Andy Kralios and Susan Sachs teamed up this fall to take the case to the First Circuit, the odds of winning – and getting paid – were slim.  But they believed in the case and relished the idea of taking on Prudential and its team of lawyers from all over the country.  So they began meeting every week in the wood-paneled conference room at Attorney Low’s office, researching, writing and editing a brief that would make their case to the lofty Justices of the First Circuit in Boston.

Attorney Low explained, “I put together a team of lawyers that I thought were smart, dedicated and willing to take on a case because it was the right thing to do even if we didn’t have much chance of success.  Judge Ponser is very well respected, and with good reason.  Getting the Circuit Court to overturn his decision was a long shot.”

The team met every week to discuss their progress over sandwiches from the Cornerstone Café, editing the brief, discussing the best ways to make their argument and grappling with the details that go into a complex legal brief for submission to one of the highest courts in the land.  “It was practicing law the way you hope to practice it when you decide to go to law school,” Attorney Canata said.  “You have a case you believe in where the odds are against you and the issues are complex, but you get to work with some dedicated people and try to make a difference.”

Their teamwork paid off last week, when the First Circuit overturned Judge Ponser’s decision and ordered Prudential to pay out the $300,000 life insurance policy at issue, plus fees and costs.  In announcing the decision, the Circuit Court cited Prudential’s violations of ERISA regulations, chastised it for ‘conjuring’ up new defenses in litigation, and found for Attorney Low’s client in part based on the ‘unexplained inconsistency’ in the company’s disability determinations – all arguments put forth by the team of lawyers from Springfield.  “It was a great decision from our perspective,” said Attorney Kralios.  “We felt vindicated when the Court said that we were right about the law, and went on to make the findings of fact that we thought were there from the beginning.  These kinds of cases are extremely difficult to overturn on appeal.”

Their win may also make it easier for other, similarly situated plaintiffs to prevail.  In reaching its decision, the court rejected Prudential’s argument that the insurance policy at issue had a different definition of the term ‘disabled’ than the policies in which it awarded benefits.  Attorney Sachs, a lawyer who takes on these kinds of cases frequently, believes that the decision may put insurance giants on notice that they cannot blithely dismiss their own, or another agency’s, findings of disability when making disability determinations.  Attorney Sachs summed it up best: “We were right, and we prevailed in a way that left nothing to interpretation.  And that is a really gratifying feeling for a lawyer, one of the best a lawyer can have in the practice of law.”

The End Of Free Market Politics

The rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement signals the end of free market economics as the driving force in American politics.  Since Milton Friedman’s free market ideas starting becoming economic policy during the Nixon administration, we have largely seen political questions through the lens of economic policy, specifically free market policy.  For a generation our political leaders have deregulated in the name of economic prosperity and our national health has been measured in terms of overall economic growth.  We see now, however, that though our economic policies determine the health of our economy, the health of our democracy depends on the fairness of our economic policies.

If you have read The Shock Doctrine, you have followed the tragic arc of Friedman’s “Chicago School” economic policies.  The myth is that selling off the common assets of a nation to private enterprises and deregulating finance and business leads to efficient economies and material progress.  The reality is that the rich and powerful use Chicago School economics to justify the transfer of public wealth into their pockets and to justify their conducting business without regard for the public good.  The system begins from a corrupt concept, namely that the expansion of private property and the deregulation of finance and business are morally neutral decisions.  It leads, inevitable, to a culture of corruption, because it is in the nature of unregulated businesses to exploit for profit when nobody is watching.

It is obvious to anyone who has been paying attention that Chicago School economic theories make for disastrous moral outcomes.  What is also true, however, is that such morally abhorrent policies can only come into being in a country where the rich and powerful unduly influence political and economic policies.  In terms that any free market proponent would understand, no country of millions would support a system that enriches the few and impoverishes the many if everyone had equal influence over economic policies and if everyone was acting in a rational, self-interested manner.  To successfully implement an economic system with such unfair outcomes within a ‘democracy,’ then, there must be undue influence over the elected leaders by the few who stand to be the winners.  In other words, the system must be corrupt.

It is no surprise, then, that 30 years into its experiment with free market economics and deregulation, Americans have lost faith in their political and financial leaders.  The growing political unrest is not so much because our economic policies have derailed the economy.  It is rather that the rich and powerful have derailed our democracy, a fact that has come to light during the financial crisis.

Democracy implies, at the very least, that each and every citizen has a full and equal share in making the decisions that affect our lives.  In a healthy democracy, the economic policies must logically benefit a majority of the people.  An economic policy that results in a wildly skewed distribution of wealth in favor of the very rich indicates either an ignorant electorate or a corrupt system, or both.  The answer to our current crisis in American politics is not higher taxes, growing the economy, increased government spending or corporate tax cuts to provide or spur economic growth.  The only real answer is to fix our corrupt democracy.  The only way to ensure a moral economic policy is to guarantee each and every citizen a full and equal share in deciding our political and economic policies.

In Search of a Fairness Framework

The Occupy Wall Street movement has emerged from a deep feeling of unfairness that is pervasive in America today.  It is not made up of communists, Marxists, anarchists, fundamentalists or any other ideological group.  Instead, it is the coalescence of a growing sense that the income gap in America is unfair and unsustainable.  Within our present system, however, there is no logical way to regulate the way that wealth is distributed across the population.  At the end of the day, the success of OWS requires a new way of doing business, and not just a more even way of divvying up the profits.

OWS has offered no systematic, reasoned way to close the growing income gap because none exists within our current system.  What we [I am in accord with the sentiment behind OWS] are talking about is making sure that the rules we have in place guarantee that everyone has a certain baseline standard of living and an opportunity to succeed.  In other words, we want to guarantee certain outcomes of the economic game that we all play.  And once you decide to do that, there is no logic, no mathematical equation for determining how much should be taken from the rich and given to the poor.  There is no way to determine just what the right mix of taxation and social programs strikes the proper balance, because the only measures are the results that we see in the relative distribution of wealth and the way that we all feel about it.  In other words, we are working in a world of outcomes and feelings, not structural frameworks, rules and systems.

Moreover, it is just this kind of redistribution that makes conservatives reach for their blood pressure pills.  Whether you call it a graduated income tax, modified capitalism or plain old socialism, for the average red-blooded American, redistributing wealth is seen as an unacceptable penalizing of success in a country built on rewarding individuals for their hard work.  And they have a philosophical point.  Yes, our tax code is a graduated one.  Yes, we redistribute money by way of social programs to help those at the bottom.  Yes, OWS is to a large extent a reaction to our system’s institutionalized inequality, the changes in the last 30 years that guarantee outcomes that benefit the wealthy.  But within the framework of our modern economic system of private property, ‘free’ markets and representative government, redistributive tactics to promote more acceptable outcomes are modifications grafted on as an afterthought to a system not designed to guarantee outcomes.  And any serious historian will tell you that institutionalized inequality is built into the game as far back as the dawn of civilization, so tinkering with the modern rules would be a rather shortsighted resolution.

So where do we look for a framework that promotes the full development of individual achievement and fair outcomes?  How can we envision a world in which the OWS movement does not look like sour grapes or socialism, and where the success of Wall Street executives is woven into the public good rather than indicative of our torn social fabric?  As it turns out, recent developments in the study of “noncognitive skills,” things like emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and other aspects of our unconscious selves, may provide one.

For one thing, we now know that we are not the rational, individualized, self-interested beings that economists suppose us to be when creating their models for efficient markets.  In fact, the research suggests that we cannot develop an individuated self without the benefit of lifelong interactions with other human beings.  Humans learned to survive by working together with a common purpose, and it is out of this context that what we call our ‘individuality’ emerged.  As a result, we experience our full humanity by striving with one another, in such a way that individual achievement and status are irreducibly linked to our participation in the group.

For another thing, human beings are hard-wired for fairness.  Everyone from infants to Supreme Court Justices has a built-in sense of what is fair, and an instinctual way of reacting to perceived unfairness.  Whether we philosophize about it or create intricate ways to measure it, the reaction itself is not subject to conscious thought.  We see unfairness and we feel outrage.  When the unfairness is resolved to our satisfaction (again according to some inner feeling not subject to conscious control), the outrage goes away.  If you are looking for real world examples of this, consider how it is that judges, juries, lawyers and defendants agree on what a fair sentence is for a crime.  Or ask yourself how we decide what is fair compensation for a bodily injury due to another’s negligence.  For all of the law’s supposed rationality, we just do not have any way rationally to measure fairness, though we make judgments about it all the time.

Which brings us back to the search for an intellectual framework for the visceral frustrations so many millions are feeling today.  If individuality and common purpose are two sides of the same human coin, then we begin to see the inherent flaw in modern economics, capitalism and the corporate structure.  An economy based on radical individuality and self-interest can satisfy, at most, only part of our human nature.  It will consistently reward our individual success, but will never fully satisfy our need to work together for a common purpose.  We strive, or compete, to actualize our individuality and to survive as individual beings.  But we share, or cooperate, to actualize our greatest possible potential by mutually supporting those without whom we could not be individuals in any real sense, and we do so that we may survive as a community.

The import of all of this is that mechanically redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor does not change the basic problem.  Corporations are designed to seek short-term profits for shareholders.  Private enterprise rewards ‘rational self-interest in the market place,’ otherwise know as ‘greed,’ for those who do not recognize a euphemism when they see one.  Labor unions fight for jobs, wages and benefits, but they only look like they are helping the little guy because in almost all cases they are representing the little guy.  But when labor has the upper hand it will take whatever it can get, just as ownership does (just ask the MLB players union), because that is the nature of the system.  True, governments in the 20^th and 21^st centuries have created social programs to protect at least the weakest among us, but such safety nets are always under attack, and tend to represent the least amount of cooperative help necessary to prevent violent protest against the system as a whole.

Our system of capitalism is broken because those at the top have become disconnected from those at the bottom.  Our system of government is broken because our leaders have become disconnected from the people who elected them.  And those disconnections do not accord with the way that humans were designed to live.  The myth of our modern system, that it allows the maximum fulfillment of individual potential by making people free to succeed on their own talents, is not optimal for human beings, because we were designed to find fulfillment by working together for a common purpose.  The pervasive feeling of unfairness we are seeing is a reaction to a world in which neither those at the bottom nor at the top can feel fully fulfilled, because there is no common purpose in our daily economic lives.  Until a win on Wall Street is also a win on Main Street, and until our political victories advance the cause of the people and not just the pols, we will have done nothing to address the visceral frustration that our present system engenders.  Until work feels like a mission calling upon all of our individual talents in pursuit of a common good, we will struggle to find meaning and bicker about who has what and how much is too much.

Putting Words To Occupy Wall Street

The Occupy Wall Street movement is an emergent event.  It is a spontaneous, mass protest giving expression to the anger and frustration of millions.  What follows is an attempt to put into words the meaning of what we are witnessing –

The ultimate expression of the American experiment in self-government is the Four Freedoms Speech delivered By Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941.  In it, he lays out the foundations for democracy:

“[T]here is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy. The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:  Equality of opportunity for youth and for others. 
Jobs for those who can work. 
Security for those who need it. 
The ending of special privilege for the few. 
The preservation of civil liberties for all.  The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.”

These are the benchmarks against which we measure the health and strength of our American democracy.  They are the principles that guide our self-government; the framework for evaluating our political leaders; the moral parameters for judging the work of our financial leaders and private enterprises.

We see today the failure of American democracy to meet these benchmarks.  The elite have unprecedented advantage and privilege, while too many live either in poverty or insecurity.  We have too little opportunity, employment and security for a nation as great as ours.  The status quo is unacceptable and unsustainable.

We have looked to our political leaders to restore the foundations of our democracy.  They have not done so.  Instead, they have protected the very individuals and institutions that have put it in jeopardy.  They have attacked the traditional programs through which we have maintained the health and strength of our democracy: pensions, unemployment insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other programs.

They have failed us in critical ways for too long.  They have failed to address the rising costs of higher education.  They have failed to prepare entire segments of our population for college or the modern workforce.  They have failed to force our polluters to implement sustainable practices that will preserve our environmental security.  They have refused to limit our military strength in favor of collective international security.  They have refused to require the privileged to make sacrifices, in the form of increased taxes, to secure and stabilize the foundations of our democracy.

We protest against our financial leaders.  We protest their breach of our trust, which led to the present economic crisis.  We protest their continuing pattern of greed. We protest the erosion of our democracy that is a direct consequence of that greed.  We protest the unwillingness of our political leaders to protect us from that greed and its consequences.

We demand that our financial leaders act responsibly.  We demand that our political leaders create and maintain safeguards to restore and ensure the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy.  We demand that equality of opportunity, dignified employment for those who can work, security for those who need it, an end to special privilege for the few, the preservation of civil liberties, and an ever-widening increase in the standard of living once again become the starting point and benchmark of all discussions of social and economic policy.  These are our demands, and they are nonnegotiable.

Two Sides of the Same Coin Leaves America on Edge

The financial crisis has now spawned two protest movements.  Both movements have their roots in a sense of fairness, and both are calling for a moral reckoning.  A full reckoning, however, would show us that we have collectively failed in our moral duty to restrain from out of control spending, in our obligation to build a sustainable way of life that tempers our present desires with a recognition of our long term plans and our common good.  Viewed this way, the two movements – and indeed the two basic views of our political parties – are still stuck in the way of thinking that brought us to this point.

First we had the Tea Party Movement.  Tea Partiers “endorse reduced government spending, opposition to taxation in varying degrees, reduction of the national debt and federal budget deficit, and adherence to an originalist interpretation of the United States Constitution.”  (This, from Wikipedia).  Tea Partiers tend to see government programs and entitlements as wasteful attempts to give to others what they themselves worked so hard to achieve.  They are tired of the government taking their hard-earned dollars and giving them to those who ought to be able to make it in America, as they did, through hard work.  They tend to believe that those who have become successful in America ought to be able to keep what they’ve earned, rather than being forced to give it to the government, which will in turn give it to people who didn’t work for it and don’t deserve it.  Whether on Wall Street or Main Street, they expect people to earn their keep.

Now we have the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Generally speaking, the Occupiers want an end to corporate greed and a system resulting in a more fair distribution of wealth.  We (I tend to agree with their views) tend to see a system that is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful, a system that gives a few people a huge head start and leaves the vast majority virtually no chance get ahead or even to make decent lives for themselves.  We want regulations to make the game fair, and the winnings more evenly distributed, while ensuring that even those destined to lose life’s race can still live with some dignity.

Enter Dr. Peter Whybrow, by way of Michael Lewis’ new book, Boomerang.  Dr. Whybrow, Lewis explains, sees America as a place where everyone, rich, poor, and in between, has lost the ability to self regulate.  Humans, he explains, developed over the course of 3 million years to live in a world of scarcity, and are therefore programmed to “acquire as much as we can of things we perceive as scarce, particularly sex, safety and food.”  Americans, however, live in a society that has “grown rich by devising better and better ways to give people what they want.”  In the face of this culture of temptation our primitive brains cannot self-regulate with a view either to the future or the common good.  As a result, the stockbroker pays himself millions, even while running the economy off the cliff.  The rest of us make our purchases on credit and insist on entitlements.  And the bill is coming due.

The Tea Partiers and the Occupiers are both looking for political solutions to this cultural lack of self-regulation.  In that sense, they are a response not so much to the financial crisis itself, but to our leaders’ culpability for the crisis.  They are protesting against leaders who have been unable or unwilling to impose restraint on Wall Street greed and/or government bloat, leaders who are either complacent or complicit in our overly indulgent lifestyles.  Though one side blames Wall Street (greed at the top) and the other blames government giveaways (greed in the middle and at the bottom), together they complete the picture of a culture bent on wealth at any cost.

But the Founding Fathers created a representative form of government where the leaders are largely insulated from the people who elect them, precisely because they did not trust the people to make prudent, well-considered decisions.  Our Constitutional safeguards are expressly designed so that our leaders can make just the kinds of difficult decisions in our long-term interest and for the common good that they now seem unable to make.  Instead of calling us to our collective moral duty, however, our leaders have taken up the cause of one group against another.  They refuse to tell us the truth: that our culture of temptation and indulgence is a national crisis in need of a collective solution.

In the end, there can be no one-sided victory.  Politically, when one segment of a culture imposes restraints on another, that is not self-regulation, it is domination.  When one group continues to indulge while imposing limitations on another group, that is oligarchy, not equality.  Practically, when some in a free society are able to indulge in everything they want, and the rest of us are able to see and hear their every indulgence on television, on the Internet, in movies and in all the ways available to us 24-hours a day, the rest of us will get it, too, howsoever we can.  Psychologically, blaming the rich, the poor, the unions, immigrants, or others is a projection of our unregulated, unsustainable consumption onto some other group.

This present crisis may prove to be the end of the idea that an ever-growing economy is the solution to all economic problems.  It may also be the end of the idea that we can rationally use the greed of the few to sustain the needs of the many.  It will not, however, be our last reckoning so long as America continues to be the land of instant gratification.

Life Lessons in Litigation

The summer was fun, and my transition from court-appointed criminal work to private, employee disability work has kept me from my blog.  But the transition is now well organized, if not complete, and the summer is over, so it is time to get back to writing.

There is a lesson for those whose profession is adversarial in nature, and it is this: it is a mistake to take the fight as your focus.  Said differently, lawyering is a constant invitation, for lawyers and their clients, to let their cases consume them.  When this happens, we inevitably use the court system to seek vengeance or vindication.  What we usually find is that we have given the case more of our time, money, and energy that it merits, at the risk of losing the balance that is so necessary to a healthy life.

I am not immune to this phenomenon.  Yesterday in court I found myself arguing with another lawyer about the merits of a motion that I had filed.  Somehow, while trying to express my view of the motion and address the points he was making, I found myself wanting to win the argument.  I found myself making a judgment about him – that he was being obstinate – rather than accepting that he simply had a different view of the same facts and law.  As is usually the case, I was no more successful for my expression of frustration at the other attorney.

The temptation for my clients to engage in these kinds of exchanges, of course, is much greater.  These cases are about them – whether they committed a crime, or are entitled to a settlement, or qualify for a disability program – and are therefore deeply personal.  Though I have to respect and understand their position, the fact of the matter is that in almost all situations their cases should not be the focus of their lives.  Yes, there are cases when one is on trial for his life.  Yes, there are ‘bet the company’ lawsuits that will determine the fate of a business.  Yes, there are colossal issues facing all of us, every day, that demand our attention.  And yes, we have enormous reserves of courage to face such challenges, when they arise.  But it is a mistake to tap these reserves in our daily lives, seeking vengeance and vindication in coffee shops and courtrooms, consuming ourselves with fights that are tangential to what is important to us.

In criminal cases, defendants focus on police officers or district attorneys they think are ‘out to get them,’ alleged victims who ‘are ruining their lives,’ or a system that is ‘unfairly singling them out.’  All of this may be true, but it does not change the fact that the case is only about whether there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that they committed a certain crime.  A criminal defendant cannot prove he is innocent, because he is presumed to be innocent.  He cannot ‘get back’ at the police, or their accuser, because the case is not about anyone’s actions except their own.  Likewise prosecutors, victims, defense lawyers and other players in the system who see a courtroom as a forum for personal vengeance or vindication, whose interaction with the courts is a series of fights with their counterparts, are doomed to lives of frustration.

As applied to civil cases, attorney Low summed up this issue rather succinctly recently when he wrote, “It is not the proper function of the civil justice system to seek punishment for another person’s actions, however outrageous. The civil system provides fair compensation for losses.”  Whether criminal or civil, the message is the same: do not expect more from the legal system than it offers, and do not make more of your case than it merits, because the transaction costs of vengeance and vindication are almost always prohibitive.

To drive this point home, I often talk to my clients about the larger context of their lives.  Do you have a drinking problem?  A drug problem?  Well, you have to make sobriety the main focus of your life, because you cannot live a balanced life as long as your next drink or your next high is more important to you than your family, your work or your plans.  Are you a parent?  A boss?  A teacher?  A homeowner?  A caretaker?  Well, a responsible person takes care of the people and things in his life, and that is not possible if you spend your life fighting with people.  Are you stricken with health problems?  Or a set of circumstances that are overwhelming?  Then you need to take care of yourself, and set your life on the most healthful course that you can, and few things are as detrimental to health and well being than a life of conflict.  Are you spiritually tortured?  Or drawn to a higher power?  Then your life must have time and space for your search, time and space that you will not find if you fill it up with anger and conflict.

Simply put, a person with a proper perspective in life has much and more that must come before the fights that we are invited to join in our daily lives.  By keeping our focus on those fundamentally important things, we more easily recognize what we can – and cannot – hope to gain from the conflicts all around us, both in and out of the courtroom.

The Up Side Of Redistributing Wealth

A basic and proper function of government in a modern capitalist democracy is to redistribute wealth.  This basic function has been a part of our governmental system in America since the beginning of the last century, although you wouldn’t know it by listening to the same old arguments for lower taxes and less spending that resurfaced during the debt ceiling debate.  The fact of the matter is that the question of whether or not we should tax wealth in this country has long been answered.  The question of whether or not that wealth should be used for the common good is itself at least three generations behind us.  So whenever conservatives shudder at the notion of wealth redistribution, whenever a Democratic leader is silent on the healthy redistribution of wealth inherent in his party’s agenda, our public discourse is more about deflection than debate.

In the United States, the modern formulation of the government’s role in a more fair and balanced economy came into being in the early part of the 20^th century.  On the revenue side, the issue came to a head with the passage of the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act of 1894 (which included a 2% income tax on income over $4,000) and was resolved with the passage of the 16^th amendment in 1913, which effectively ushered in the era of graduated taxation of all income.   On the distribution side, it took the Great Depression, and the New Deal programs designed to combat it, to bring about programs to protect the poor, the old, the sick and the otherwise vulnerable.  The basic formula as it has evolved is this:  taxes are progressive as necessary, requiring larger payments from the wealthiest, which revenue is in turn distributed to the least among us through the provision of basic food, shelter, clothing, education, health care and other services, with decreasing amounts of assistance for the less unfortunate.

To have a direct discussion about debt and deficits, then, it would seem obvious that we must have it in terms of the present distribution of wealth, so that we can intelligently decide whether, to get our fiscal house in order, what is needed is a larger contribution from the top, or a decrease in goods and services to the bottom.  On this score, a quick glance at the statistics, or simply putting your ear to the ground of the national discourse, will confirm the obvious: the rich in America are getting richer and richer while the poor are becoming poorer by the day.  Framed this way, there really is no debate about how to handle debt, deficits and the debt ceiling today.  To fulfill the proper function of a modern government in a difficult economic time, especially one in which the difficulty is felt only on the bottom while those on the top prosper, the government must use its powers to redistribute wealth and restore fairness to the system.  In a word, it should raise taxes on the wealthy, while protecting the programs already in place to help those in need.

To the extent that the Tea Party, the Chicago School economists or any other group advocates a system that does not redistribute wealth, i.e. to the extent that they suggest a change in this basic formula, they are radicals or extremists.  If their response to a perceived debt crisis is to advocate for a policy that does away with a progressive tax code and removes the safety net of programs now in place, then they are using a crisis as a pretext to further their radical agenda.  The American people must be made to understand that such formulas would lead to a radical departure from present policy, that such ideas challenge our basic understanding of what our government does and should do.

But even if what the political right seeks is aggressive rather than radical policy change, calling for lower taxes and smaller government, a less aggressive redistributive policy, the debate is still one-sided against them.  As it turns out, a healthy redistribution of wealth, rather than the more anemic one advocated by the non-radical right, fosters overall economic growth and individual opportunity.  It is no accident that the strong middle class that resulted from our present redistributive model of government has driven unprecedented economic growth.  The more people who prosper in an economy, the more people there are to drive the economy with increased purchasing power.  As for individual freedom, it is a fact seldom mentioned in the American discourse that there is more upward mobility in many European countries, where greater government redistribution of wealth creates educational and other opportunities for larger groups of people, than here in the U.S.  In short, the argument for lower taxes and smaller government has to be made on either radical or ideological grounds, because on practical grounds the argument has no footing to speak of.

There is a proper place for the arguments from the right within the context of the proper redistributive role of government.  At some point, over-redistribution stifles the incentive to produce at the top and dampens the desire to succeed at the bottom.  Let everyone live in a system that ensures every individual a six-figure income, regardless of employment or production on their part, and soon there would be nobody left out there working and producing the wealth needed to sustain that kind of redistribution.  The argument from the right in the current debate would go something like this:  “Our present economic crisis is the result of a massive redistribution of wealth downward.  Despite the fact that 9.2% of people are out of work, 8.3 million children are without health insurance, 43.6 million people are living under the poverty line, millions of young persons are drowning in school loan debt and millions of families own houses that are underwater, and despite the fact that the wealthy on Wall Street created this economic mess in the first place, nevertheless the problem in this country is that those on the bottom have been given too much for too long, and it is time to cut them off.”  Now that is an argument I’d pay to hear drumming on Fox news night in and night out.

It is simply a fact that our government does, and should, redistribute wealth.  Why this is a political third rail is beyond me.  Why Joe the Plumber became famous just because President Obama told him that spreading the wealth is a good thing I cannot fathom.  Only the radical right suggests divesting the government of its role in bringing about economic fairness.  Only a political leader in the pocket of millionaires, billionaires and multinational corporations could suggest that we need policies that would foster more, rather than less, income disparity in our country today.  And only a public knowingly or unknowingly favoring ideology rather than practicality, that does not understand the present redistributive function of the government and the way we benefit from it, would go along with a further redistribution of wealth upward during the present economic crisis.