Earned Pay vs. Need-Based Pay--or, Justice vs. Injustice

A couple of years ago, major bank CEOs appeared before a Congressional committee. One CEO, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, was asked a stupid question by an ignorant Congresswoman, Katie Porter. According to CNN,

Freshman Rep. Katie Porter stumped multimillionaire JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon during a hearing Wednesday with a simple question: How are workers supposed to make ends meet?

The back-and-forth occurred during a House Financial Services Committee hearing featuring the CEOs of several major banks on Wednesday. Porter, a California Democrat, shared the story of a JPMorgan Chase employee – making a fraction of what the company’s top executives are paid – who is running a $567 deficit each month because her salary is insufficient to cover basic expenses.

“How should she manage this budget shortfall while she’s working full-time at your bank?” Porter asked Dimon.

Dimon’s answer was basically that he’d have to think about, and would need to check the math. The hypothetical employee’s salary is $16.50 per hour, plus benefits. Porter used the exchange to demand that Dimon’s bank pay employees enough to make ends meet, regardless of any other considerations. 

With Dimon’s disappointing response leaving much to be desired, Michael Dahlen, writing for The Objective Standard, suggested How Jamie Dimon Should Have Answered Representative Katie Porter. 

As you’d expect from TOS, Dahlen suggested a good, hard-hitting moral and economic lesson to Congresswoman Porter. I give Dahlen a thumbs up. But I thought I’d take a crack at an answer myself. I composed my rough draft before reading Dahlen’s article, just to compare for myself. I must say, I think I did a very credible job. Here is my “How Jamie Dimon Should Have Answered Representative Katie Porter”:

First, let me say that a job is a two-way street. It’s based on mutual self-interest. We, as an employer with particular concerns, have as much right to do what’s best for our business as the employee has to do what’s best for herself in the context of her life and concerns. Ideally, both can find common ground and advance our respective interests together by the prospective employee accepting our job offer.

As to our policy, the employee is paid according to her productive contribution to our business, not her needs. As she gains knowledge, skills, and experience, she has the opportunity to advance in pay and position. In the meanwhile, she’ll have to figure out how to get by. Her life is her responsibility. 

We do “provide a way for families to make ends meet.” We offer jobs--good paying jobs with opportunity for advancement. But we don’t give handouts. If we pay people by need, rather than productiveness and competence, then soon enough there will be no business and the jobs, including mine, will be gone. Then how will she make ends meet? If a person doesn’t have to earn her pay, and instead get paid according to whatever she claims are her needs, then all incentive to excel at her job evaporates--along with the incentive of all of the other employees, whose competence suddenly doesn’t matter, only their needs.

Yes, I make vastly more money than her. That’s because my responsibilities and productiveness are vastly greater than hers. In fact, hers and the jobs of all 250,000+ JP Morgan employees depend on my ability to do my job competently. The only just and objective method of setting pay rates for all of these employees is merit, as judged by management and, ultimately, the judgment of the market; i.e., our customers, the ultimate end of our business. Anything other than a merit-based standard will ultimately result in inferior products, harm to our customers, and finally the loss of our customers. Need is neither just nor objective as a standard, and thus is not rational or sustainable. 

I started by emphasizing that a job is a two-way street. And as it turns out, such a relationship of mutual self-interest turns out to be win-win. Both sides advance their own well-being, based on mutual agreement. Our employees' jobs depend on a fair and rational pay policy just as much as our business does. 

I wish more businessmen would stand up for their right to exist, not just on economic grounds, but on moral grounds as well

Related Reading:

No Conflict Between People and Business

"Greed" is a Two-Way Street

If We’re to Have Labor Laws, Should They Work Both Ways?

Is ‘Common Good Capitalism’ a One-way Street?

On the Purpose of a Corporation by the Business Roundtable, PART 1

On the Purpose of a Corporation by the Business Roundtable, PART 2

‘Anti-Racism’, or the re-Mainstreaming of Racism

In her essay The Age of Envy, Philosopher Ayn Rand observed an insidious premise taking hold in the culture. She observed:

 

Today, racism is regarded as a crime if practiced by a majority—but as an inalienable right if practiced by a minority.

 

“Today” for Ayn Rand was July 1971.* That double standard has today, in 2020, reached a fever pitch in the form of the so-called "Anti-Racist" movement. But the premise actually dates back to the 1960s New Left uprising. 

 

Given the prominence Rand accorded the role of ideas in shaping human events, she would not have been surprised that there is a theory that only white people can be racist because whites are the majority and a minority can’t possibly oppress a majority. Just google “Only White People can be Racist” and you’ll get some exposure to this theory. If you disagree with the above statement, then how do you explain Affirmative Action and racial “diversity” programs, which specifically use skin color as a criterion of judgement, but only to favor “minority” individuals (people of color) at the expense of majority (white) individuals. Yet this blatantly racist practice is called “racial justice” while the opposite is called racism.

 

Articles like the one-sided ‘Being anti-racist is a verb, so it requires action’: Don’t stop demanding racial equality — how to become a lifelong ally by Meera Jagannathan are suddenly everywhere. The article views every perceived slight of a black person as ipso facto evidence of “racial injustice” perpetrated by whites (a textbook racist assumption that no genuine anti-racist would make). The author, with a straight face, goes on to give several instances where race should be a criterion of judgement as long as it favors some black person. Everywhere around us, we see evidence of the double standard. 

 

Or you can consider sociologist Dr. Robin DiAngelo’s theories on “White Fragility”, in which she “teaches” white people that they are racist whether they know it or not or regardless of the fact that they don’t engage in racist speech or actions. I’ve listened to clips from her talk on 'White Fragility', though I haven’t gotten up the stomach to listen to the whole thing straight through. If you’ve thought things through and decided that racism is evil; if you’ve re-evaluated past conscious or subconscious racist attitudes, and corrected them; if you’ve rationally adopted individualism as your guiding philosophy; If you’ve adopted a political philosophy of color-blind law: None of that matters. According to Dr. DiAngelo, you are still racist, as determined by your experiences living as a white person. 

 

You are racist due not to your character, but to your skin color. DiAngelo basically denies the two attributes that separate us from the rest of the animal world, reason and free will. So anything you say, believe, and do mean nothing. Your racism is genetically programmed into your white skin. It’s a prescription for unearned guilt, and a direct attack on the Enlightenment  premise that every individual has the power to shape his own character and soul.

 

DiAngelo herself, of course, doesn’t identify her own blatantly biased theory as racist. But like all forms of determinism, DiAngelo’s theory is self-refuting. If I as a white person can’t believe my own rational anti-racist individualism because my “true” character is predetermined by prior causes beyond my control, then on what basis should I take a word of DiAngelo’s ideas seriously, since hers are no more the result of her rational faculty than mine?

 

I submit that Dr. Robin DiAngelo and the whole Anti-Racism movement is designed to re-mainstream racism for the purpose of “evening the score” based on color tribalism. The white race subjugated the colored race, so now it’s time for the colored race to subjugate the white race, regardless of the guilt or victimhood of any individual member of either skin color. This, to correct historical injustice perpetrated by long-dead perps. It is a regression to something that the Enlightenment and the birth of America were designed to consign to the dustbin of history, tribal revenge. It is collectivism at its worst. Where does it end? It ends with a socialist America: The whole “Anti-Racist” movement to re-mainstream racism is really to lay the collectivist groundwork for socialism.

 

Racism is the idea that a person’s character is shaped not by his conscious choices but by his body chemistry (blood, skin color, genetic make-up), and should be judged accordingly. There’s no question that blacks have been the prime victims of racism and legal subjugation through most of American history. But law, not private behavior, has always been the driver of systemic racism. Those laws are gone. While effects of those laws linger, racism has been dying away since the 1960s and America today is the least racist it has ever been--and I know this from my own experience. Reigniting racism will never be anti-racist. Collectivizing racism as white only just perpetuates racism, because fundamentally racism is collectivism (group identity) and the only antipode to collectivism, and thus racism, is individualism.

 

* [Originally published in the July 1971 edition of The Objectivist, The Age of Envy appeared in the book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, as well as the expanded version Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.]

 

Related Reading:

 

Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice—Craig Biddle

 

The 'New American Socialists' Dilemma: The Declaration is as much anti-Socialist as anti-Slavery

 

The ‘1619 Project’ Fraud Begins its Poisonous Infiltration into American Politics

 

The Collectivist Left Appropriates an Inhumane Christian Doctrine to Obliterate Americanism

 

AMERICA: A RACIST NATION? BY ANDREW BERNSTEIN

 

Related Viewing:

John McWhorter: America Has Never Been Less Racist -- ReasonTV

'Social Justice' Collectivism in American School and Culture

A For the New Intellectuals post by Anoop Verma:

“You’ll sit enthroned and enshrined, you, the little people, the absolute ruler to make all past rulers squirm with envy, the absolute, the unlimited, God and Prophet and King combined. Vox populi. The average, the common, the general. Do you know the proper antonym for Ego? Bromide, Peter. The rule of the bromide. But even the trite has to be originated by someone at some time. We’ll do the originating. Vox dei. We’ll enjoy unlimited submission—from men who’ve learned nothing except to submit. We’ll call it ‘to serve.’ We’ll give out medals for service. You’ll fall over one another in a scramble to see who can submit better and more. There will be no other distinction to seek.”

~ Ellsworth Toohey, whose life is devoted to creating a collectivist society, addressing one of his victims, Peter Keating (from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead)

A recent family encounter immediately came to mind. I left these comments:

During a recent family picnic, I sat (suffered) through a recording of my brother-in-law’s commencement address to the 2018 graduating class of the Rhode Island high school he principals. His speech lauded the students who “studied” “social justice,” “sustainability,” and “renewable energy.” On individual “achievement,” he reserved his highest praise for a student who logged 3000 hours—that equates to 1-1/2 years of full time work @ 40 hours a week—in “community service.” (That’s no misprint. 3000 hours in 4 years.) That was the only part of the speech that was interrupted by cheers from the audience! The speech was generally classic Left collectivism. My brother-in-law was quite proud of it.

Ellsworth Toohey is alive and well.

----------------------------------------------------

I often hear about indoctrination in America's schools. I get anecdotal evidence from time to time; in an article, a conversation with a friend or teacher, something one of my grandchildren say. But my brother-in-law’s speech is “straight from the horse’s mouth” evidence of systematic collectivist/Leftist indoctrination. I want to focus on so-called “social justice.”

“Social justice” is collectivism and is particularly insidious and evil. “Social justice” holds that only groups based on some common characteristic—race, gender, sezual orientation, national origing, the catogories keep expanding—count, with each member judged according to average group statistical outcomes current or historical, and then assigned victim or oppressor status according to his group regardless of his individual choices, character, or circumstances. The goal is to equalize outcomes through economic redistribution and regulation, taking from “oppressor” groups and giving to “victim” groups. It’s always about the group, not the guilt, innocence, actions, or actual injustice or victimization of individual people.

Real justice applies only to the human entity that actually exists--the individual. But the individual doesn’t matter to “social justice.” He is an inconsequential cog in a group machine. It doesn’t matter whether the success you achieved was earned or not, whether you were lazy or ambitious. It doesn’t matter whether you are racist or not, or whether you were ever a victim of racism or not. In the case of actual oppression, such as against blacks in earlier America, it’s not enough to correct the injustices (such as repeal of Jim Crow Laws). You are what your group is deemed, victim or oppressor, in perpetuity, until the “injustice”—including past injustices that you had nothing to do with—has been “corrected” (reversed, actually) or until average equal outcomes are realized—the equality imposed by government policy; i.e., by force. It’s the collectivist mindset that leads straight to massive injustice, including genocide.

I’ll give you another personal example of the “social justice” mindset, this time relating to a specific event.

My wife was explaining to a leftist friend about how unfair it is that our daughter must pay school taxes even though she homeschools her four children. Our friend’s retort? “She’s lucky she can do it. But I believe we have a moral responsibility to those less fortunate.” Does it matter that our daughter is a victim of injustice perpetrated against her by her own government? Doesn’t that qualify as “less fortunate?” No. Because she’s “lucky”--that is, capable and willing to make the extraordinary effort to take on the responsibility of educating her own kids. Who are these “less fortunate” others? Who knows. Who cares whether their “less fortunate” status is due to bad circumstances beyond their control, their choice to send their kids to public school, or lazyness, or incompetence, or just lack of interest in their kids’ education.

Who cares even who they are? To the collectivist, it’s all about some abstract grouping, not real people with real circumstances. Our daughter is a real victim of a real injustice, yet “thrown under the bus” for an abstraction, “those less fortunate.” Collectivism is a moral escape hatch--an end run around an actual moral judgement. It’s merely an individual. How does a mere individual compare to the “greater good” of taking care of the “less fortunate?”

“The rule of the bromide.”

“Social justice” is anti-justice. Social justice in fact makes real justice impossible, because it shifts the focus away from real, actual, living, breathing, thinking human beings. It’s a repudiation of the dignity and autonomy of the individual. “Social justice,” like all forms of collectivism, is a moral escape hatch--an escape from having to treat people fairly. The ultimate goal of the Social Justice movement is, of course, socialism—the social system of greed, powerlust, envy, and hatred of and desire to destroy success and achievement. This is really what the school indoctrination is all about--to condition the young to reject individualism and accept the basic premise of collectivism, thus paving the road, a back road, to a socialist America.

Related Reading:

Collectivism Generates Irrational Hatred

The idea of ‘Protected Classes’ Does not Advance Individual Liberty

Collectivized 'Rights' versus Individual Rights—Ayn Rand

Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice—Craig Biddle

Related Viewing:

How Social Justice Warriors Rationalise Their Hatred For Life & Humanity—Yaron Brook

“Social Justice” is an Assault on Justice—Craig Biddle

Prager U. VIDEO: What is Intersectionality?—Ben Shapiro