Last night I watched the documentary 20 Feet From Stardom. The film, about back-up singers in rock and roll music, won last year’s Oscar for best documentary feature. Not having seen its competition, I cannot attest to whether I agree with the award, but it was an excellent film, and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys popular music from Motown through the 60s and onward. While I knew some of the back story, I was surprised by how many big hits were backed by the same few enormously talented singers.
The story of one of the singers made a particular point. While we are presented with several women with amazing and powerful voices and an absolute love for singing who sought to come out from their backup roles and make it on their own (some successfully, others not so much so), we encounter one who wasn’t drawn to the limelight in the same way. We see her with gold records, a Grammy and other awards and a lifetime of memorabilia that connect her to some of the biggest musical artists and greatest songs of our time. But, we see her in a small apartment, living a simple and modest life, and are presented with the subtext of the title – why isn’t she rich and famous and living a diva lifestyle? Or even pursuing it for that matter, as some of her peers chose to?
The documentary presents the answer – the spotlight wasn’t for her. She loved, loved, loved to sing, to make music, to be part of that world, but center stage wasn’t for her. While others wanted it and hungered for it, she found contentment living as she did and doing as she did. This difference in choices and desires presents one of the unavoidable disconnects in statist ideology: different people have different motivations.
The old Communist adage, “from each according to his ability to each according to his need,” makes no room for the desires of the individual and no acknowledgment that those desires can vary enormously. Moreso, desire and ability can and often do misalign. As the documentary shows, some with incredible and rare talent and skill may not choose to pursue a life arc that others with equivalent talent and skill choose. How many truly great voices, voices as powerful and soulful as Aretha Franklin’s or Whitney Houston’s, are singing in obscurity in church choirs around the nation, simply because those voices belong to people who don’t want that sort of career or to pursue stardom? What are we to make of the brilliant science student who decided he’d be happier as a police officer, firefighter or plumber? Conversely, what of the person of average ability who chose to aim high, and work three times as had in order to become a top-flight doctor?
There’s a long-running and on-going lament in the political sphere about income inequality and the wealth of the 1%. Statists, social warriors and redistributionists decry what they see as a growing imbalance in wealth. Without considering the validity of their claims, without judging whether the purported inequality is even an issue, we can question whether they’ve considered the diversity of desire and motivation that may underly the inequality they lament.
Statists and class warriors aren’t particularly known for prioritizing or even recognizing the wants and needs of the individual, preferring instead to consider people as members of groups. The enormous differences between Bruce Springsteen and George Soros take a distant back seat to the fact that they’re both part of the 0.1% and to the fact that both have a history of supporting the “correct” side of various causes and issues of the day. The enormous differences between a small business owner and a public-union worker are subordinated to their coexistence in a particular income bracket. The differences between a mathematics PhD who teaches high school calculus and one who works on Wall Street are germane only in that they have wildly different incomes. Someone who earns mid-six-figures while working 90 hours a week and spending whatever vacations he takes glued to his Blackberry is lumped in with a trust-fund brat who spends inherited money partying every night. Two school teachers, one a gay minority woman in a public school union, the other a straight white man in a non-union private school, are considered utterly distinct even if they teach the same material to the same grade level in the same neighborhood and have the same educational background.
We, as individuals, are more diverse in our wants, goals and motivations than in any checklist demographic or socioeconomic category yet, probably because our wants, goals and motivations don’t easily conform to checklists, those wants, goals and motivations are given little or no consideration by the statists, class warriors and redistributionists. While countless factors outside one’s control (e.g. where you’re born, who your parents are, the quality of education you have access to, and simple-right place-right-time or wrong-place-wrong-time luck) factor into one’s life path, so much of what we become, where we go, how we live, how much we earn, how happy we are and who we are is directly rooted in what we want, what we prioritize, and how much effort we want to expend. Certainly, an enormously gifted singer or musician with a burning drive and desire to succeed and become famous is subject to countless whims of fate. Certainly, a singer of middling talent can (and has), via confluence of circumstances, become far, far more successful than a thousand others who are more talented, more motivated and some might say more deserving. We can bewail and lament such injustices, but in doing so we create a hazard. We might be tempted to call for intervention, to demand that injustice be countervailed by government. And, we can stand confident and certain that, in the particular case that raises our ire, we were absolutely correct in our judgment.
On a macroscopic scale, however, corrections of perceived injustices disconnect from individuals. How can we presume to know what’s going on in people’s heads in the aggregate? How do we separate those who are in the lower socioeconomic strata despite their motivations, desires and efforts from those who are in the lower socioeconomic strata because they are perfectly content to be there, because they’d rather live a simple and frugal life? We cannot, so we do not. Statists and redistributionists don’t consider disparate desires and motivations. They simply make presumptions based on one’s occupying a particular economic bracket or a particular job field or a particular demographic, and enact social policy based on those presumptions.
The “free market” i.e. the unhindered interaction of millions of individuals, each pursuing his own desires, can be tough on those whose desires disconnect with the realities of life. If you want to sit around the house all day eating Doritos and watching Netflix, barring some external “accident of birth” means of financial support, you’re likely going to exist in a lower economic stratum than your neighbor who chooses to work hard and build a lucrative career. You may very well be as happy as your neighbor, happier even, in that you’re doing exactly what you want to do while he might feel forced to work that career out of obligation to other choices he’s made (e.g. a family), but eventually you’re going to have to get up off the couch and find a way to earn some money. The pursuit of happiness is available to all of us, but it is constrained by the requirements of life (food, clothing, shelter at the very minimum). So, “market forces” regulate our desires, favoring those that align better with the basic demands of life.
Our statist society, however, will take from your neighbor to give to you, even though your neighbor is being productive and you are not. It does not judge whether such redistribution is justified, whether your relative poverty is the result of outside forces or whether it is of your own choosing. Your desires aren’t relevant. Worse, if your desires are of the sort that conflict with self-sufficiency and the creation of wealth, they are reinforced by a redistributionist society instead of being discouraged by a “free market” society.
We are all free to pursue whatever happiness we desire. There are countless potential impediments to that pursuit, and a healthy and well-functioning society rooted in liberty will seek to mitigate those impediments. In doing so it will nevertheless recognize that those desires are as diverse as snowflakes and recognize that it cannot provide the happiness each of us desires without interfering with others’ pursuit of happiness. A statist society, on the other hand, cannot deal with the diversity of desire. Because it cannot, it does not. It supplants motivations and goals with outcomes, presuming that if one fits into categories A, B and C one should experience a common outcome with all others in those same categories. In doing so, it rewards those whose desires don’t produce a state-validated outcome and punishes those whose desires exceed that state-validated outcome.
We are assured, in the Declaration of Independence, that the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right. Our government, born out of that Declaration, has somehow turned into the enemy of that pursuit, refusing to acknowledge that the form of that pursuit and the form of that happiness is by far the most diverse element of our society.
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