"See You in Court" Quote of the Day: The Full Geoghegan

Tom Geoghegan pulls together apparently disparate threads of our political condition in order to knit a picture of its underlying structure. That's the true aim of great social criticism—and he does it better than any social critic writing today. This passage below is the essence of Geogheganism—which is the political party I'd declare at the polling place, were the option available.

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It took ten years—almost all of the 1990s—for the median family income to get to the same level that it was, in real terms, in 1989. But in 1999, when we got to the same income level we had in 1989, the "median" family had to work six more weeks a year.

To keep from falling, the 1999 middle class had to work six more weeks a year for free. Not a few more hours—six more weeks! By the way, maybe it's worth pausing to say this: No wonder our GDP keeps shooting up, if the middle class is being forced to work for free.

But all this unpaid extra labor tends to undermine the Rule of Law.

Why? The economist John Maynard Keynes put it best: "Nothing corrupts society more than to disconnect effort and reward." That's what did in the old Soviet Union: no matter how hard one worked, one could not get ahead of someone who did not work at all. All that is what is happening in the United States, too. Of course, in a certain way our country would seem the very opposite of the Soviet Union. Here, if people dont' work, they're going to end up homeless. Then again, if they do work, they may end up homeless, too.

That's the point. Like the USSR, we are slowly breaking the connection between effort and reward. And in terms of the Rule of Law, that's a dangerous thing to do. It's dangerous to push the middle class into questioning the fairness of the rules.

The danger is that people in the middle class will begin to see the world as arbitrary and unfair—unpredictable, a matter of luck, a chance of catastrophe around the corner. It does not matter if they work the extra hours. Over 40 percent of American families have less than $5,000 in savings. One bill, a hurricane out of the blue, can blow everything away.

So, quietly and to themselves, people at the median or below have to wonder, as the country becomes fabulously wealthy: Why play by the rules?

I may even understate the case. The disconnect between effort and reward is much greater than it seems. Some families lost income, though they worked harder. But they became wealthier. How? They made money off their homes. But this is not "effort." It's not even savings. It's just something that happened arbitrarily, to me, but not to many others. The moral is: Hard work doesn't pay.

Let's go back to my earlier example. I doubt many people did actually get back to the same 1989 level of income in 1999. Think of pensions. Fewer working people had pensions, though they worked longer. Or they had bigger administrative fees. Think of health insurance. Fewer people had it. Or they had bigger deductibles. They lost out, even with six more weeks of work. Perhaps our moral character can survive one decade of that kind of thing, but it keeps going.

Why is this so dangerous for the Rule of Law? It's simple. If we do not expect the world to be reasonable and fair, then sooner or later we do not demand or expect those qualities from the law, either. We get used to arbitrariness and unfairness. Sometimes we take a certain glee in it—at least when arbitrary things happen to others. Worse, as fewer of us vote, or even watch the news, we experience the legal system not just as arbitrary but as alien. It's something that is imposed on us. We did not consent to it. We didn't vote.

Worse, the more we drop out, the more arbitrary and unpredictable the Rule of Law becomes. The unions, political parties, and other institutions such as the liberal churches helped us shape a certain legal system. When they began to weaken, the law itself begins to change. It became less rational and predictable. It is not just that people now perceive the law as less rational and predictable. It really is.

Maybe the country will survive it. Maybe the less rational and predictable the law becomes, the more people will go along. They will accept it up to a point, as in backward societies, because they will experience the Rule of Law in the same way they experience the world.