Earning

This is as yet an incomplete thought.

I've heard a few times, both in person and on various media outlets, some person, or persons reciting, as a sort of rallying cry, "I earned what I have." This is a sort of response that comes up from the right when confronted with the threat of redistributive taxation, etc.

Earning is a funny word. It has multiple meanings; the meanings can basically be divided into two groups and then a third which would seem (perhaps deceptively) to be in the middle. On the one hand we have the monetary sense, in which earning simply means an increase in money, for instance, an account earns interest. On the other, we have 'earn' as being used as meriting or deserving reward.

Now, when somebody is said to have earned a wage, or to have earned a living, there is some odd juxtaposing between these two broader meanings of the word earned. This came to mind awhile back when a friend of my family vehemently denounced Obama and his redistributive policies, stating that he had earned what he had. So here is a funny thing; on the one hand, there is no denying that he 'earned' it, in the fully monetary sense. He rendered a service and was given compensation for it. On the other hand, he is saying, basically, that what he has received (purportedly, all of it) he deserves.

The frightening conclusion (to my mind) is that the economy, apparently, decides on its own what people deserve. Given the recent rise in 'market fundamentalism' as a general philosophy, it is no more surprising than it is disturbing. Taken to its extreme, it basically says that a free market economy will always decide what people deserve. Given this belief, it is no wonder why all taxation would be decried as an injustice.

Also falling out of this belief of 'earning' is the oddity of what we might call uneven markets. So, for instance, if 'earning/deserving' is based upon how hard you have worked, one might ask why it is that you have more than, say, your ancestors. Do you work so much harder than your forefathers that you deserve all the amenities of modern society while they did not? The truth is, if any earning has been done, then it was done for us, in the past, by our predecessors. God knows that I do not do enough work today to have built this house, with its air conditioning, its television set, a modern oven, indoor plumbing, etc., and I dare to say that no man living today can in good conscience say that he has (though I'd wager that many would say just that).

Here is the third way in which the phrase, "I earned it," is odd to me. It requires others. If you go into the woods, hunt for your own food, build your own shelter, do everything for yourself through the good will of Nature, then there is not really a proper way in which you can say you 'earned' what you have. On the contrary, you did not earn your hovel, or your dinner, or anything else that you have, you created it yourself from whatever the land has provided for you. In this sense, where you did not 'earn' your house, because you actually built your house, we are actually precisely closest to seeing what a person, by his own work, by his own two hands, merits.

And yet since we are social creatures, capable of sharing work, of sharing burdens, we can have a much easier existence than we can have on our own. Thus it is only in a social context, where you actually receive more than you possibly could have created on your own, that we can speak of earning, deserving a certain place in that society based upon how much we have put into it. Considering the chaos of a free market, the fact that much of what we have today is thanks to the hard work of others from the past, and still from others today who work very hard for very little pay, thanks to quirks in our monetary system or simple exploitation of workers, we really cannot say we have 'earned' what we have when others who work as hard, or harder than we do, have much less.

To recap, if somebody says "I earned this," we cannot immediately jump to "I deserve this." If there is to be a social or moral dimension to the word earn, which is implied by the use of the phrase, then social merit, as opposed to cold market science, must be considered, and therefore, redistribution must be considered as a possible correction to the injustice of uneven earnings.