MJD asked Alan E. Johnson:

I am interested to hear your take on Pinker's book "Enlightenment Now" as a whole, but I am even more interested in hearing your take on the ethics of economic inequality that he discusses in the book. Here is a link to an article that is an adaption of what he wrote in the book on the subject: http://bigthink.com/big-think-books/steven-pinker-enlightenment-now-inequality-happiness Do you agree with Pinker?

Alan E. Johnson Pinker's argument about inequality is standard libertarian doctrine with which I have been long familiar, having been a libertarian fellow traveler from about 1973 to about 2001. I would agree with his statement as a very abstract proposition. all other things being equal. But all other things are not (and have never been) equal—either in the United States or elsewhere. The very wealthy have rigged the economy, through laws (or the absence thereof), fraud, and other predatory practices, against everyone else such that we have the greatest economic inequality since the years before the Great Depression. And that economic inequality is deleterious to the economy as a whole, as the stock market crash of 2008 and ensuing Great Recession proved. See, for example, All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera. Now the libertarians will say that practices such as those leading to the 2008 crash were unlibertarian. For example, libertarian theory (except for anarchocapitalism) argues that the government should promulgate and enforce laws against fraud (see, for example, Ayn Rand, who eschewed, however, the "libertarian" label). In practice, however, the wealthy usually get away with it (hardly any individual was prosecuted for the fraudulent practices leading to the 2008 debacle). Why? Because the governing class has been bought off by the wealthy. We have a plutocracy, not a democracy. Among many other books, see also Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, which I have reviewed here, and Tula A. Connell's Conservative Counterrevolution: Challenging Liberalism in 1950s Milwaukee, which I have reviewed here.

The utopian libertarian vision is very pretty, but it ignores political and economic reality. I started having serious doubts about it in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The clincher for me was the 2008 crash, which demonstrated that libertarianism was "just a theory" (to channel, ironically, a standard antievolution trope) that had no basis in historical reality. It just gives the extremely wealthy (the Kochs, for example) a figleaf to justify their predatory practices, legal and otherwise.

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