Richard Posner (photo: wikimedia commons)

Richard Posner writes that income inequality will not affect the bonds of a political community like the United States. Posner is a judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and an influential conservative thinker. His paper, Community, Wealth and Inequality (.pdf), concludes that the level of income, rather than inequality, is the threat. Even by 1997, when this paper appeared in its first incarnation, it was apparent that income inequality was rising in the US. Now, of course, it has reached gilded-age levels, increasing the importance of the question.

His explanation for increased income inequality is the usual conservative meritocratic view: technology has increased the value of the services provided by a few, and decreased the value of the work done by everyone else. He also cites increased competition from abroad and increased occupational mobility.

He is primarily concerned about the threat to political stability posed by a “restive, potentially destabilizing underclass, who though democratically impotent because too alienated to participate in voting and other civic activities are potential recruits for violent protest movements.” He tells us that this group is not dangerous.

In countries in which the vast majority of the population is reasonably well off, and able and willing to finance a formidably large and powerful apparatus for the maintenance of public order, an underclass has no significant political leverage or opportunities.

As long as this “repressive apparatus (a criminal-justice and internal-security system)” is effective and civilized, society will be willing to fund it. I note that members of the underclass whose appeals are before Posner might think he has a predisposition to convict. This leads him to conclude that only where the income is held by a tiny few and the rest of the people are poor will inequality be a problem.

As to the rest of the population, we needn’t worry about income inequality, according to Posner, because it is much less than in eighteenth-century England, a society with wealth concentration levels society that Posner agrees would be problematic. Look at New York City, he says. It has a vast income disparity, but it is stable and democratic.

This is standard fare for the conservative intellectual, a paean to social mobility and the great melting pot, peppered with authoritarianism. I ignore the gibes at the possibility that a sensible democracy might support income redistribution, and turn back to the beginning of the paper where Posner explains what he means by political community: “a group of people whose relations with one another are essentially cooperative rather than destructively adversary.”

Willing submission to democratic government implies a degree of trust of one’s conationals— this mass of strangers of no particular distinction to whom one has entrusted one’s fate—that in turn is a plausible precondition of cooperative relations and hence of political stability.

Posner’s inquiry is only directed at how these conditions might be affected by income inequality. It didn’t dawn on him that while he was writing and appearing at delightful conventions with his intellectual peers, the rich were wrecking the foundations of a democratic society.

First, they unleashed upon the nation a form of destructive capitalism, unrestrained by any consideration other than their personal wealth. They purchased the creation of an economic theory (one to which Posner was for years an enthusiastic adherent) that justified their rapacious behavior. Congress and the executive branch were influenced to accept this nonsense, and changed the entire regulatory structure of the nation so that every economic venue would be a playground for wolves.

Now we live in a society in which there are no restraints on the greed and corruption of the wealthy. No one is accountable for the destruction of trillions of dollars of wealth or the Gulf of Mexico, killings in mine disasters, salmonella poisoning, or any of the countless other examples of economically driven crimes. Punishment is reserved for Posner’s underclass. We are subject to “destructively adversary” capitalism.

Simultaneously the rich funded a group of people who preach that government by Democrats is illegitimate. That group now dominates the Republican party, whose leadership will do absolutely anything to prevent governance by Democrats. They represent a huge number of voters who are unwilling to be governed by Democrats, or by anyone who doesn’t completely agree with them.

Income inequality put trillions of dollars under the control of people who intend to destroy political community. Posner didn’t notice. It isn’t a surprise that one of his most well-known works is entitled: Public Intellectuals: A Study In Decline.