Anti-social economics, mooching, and basic rights
In a 23 September 1987 interview with Woman’s Own, a magazine published in the United Kingdom, at the time Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher stated at several points that “there is no such thing as society.” In her view, all that exists are individual persons and the “tapestry” of their interactions.
Thatcher received her degree from one of the colleges of Oxford University, so I must ask her forgiveness in citing the on-line Cambridge Dictionary—the O.E.D. alas being behind a paywall—for a definition:
Society: a large group of people who live together in an organized way, making decisions about how to do things and sharing the work that needs to be done.
Her declaration may have come as a surprise to the members of the Royal Society, who despite objections of many of the members elected her as a fellow for her promotion of research. Some would say that her speech to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children a little over a year after her Woman’s Own interview was itself an act of cruelty, given the effects of her economic policies on the poor of Britain, with child poverty in particular doubling over the years of Conservative Party rule from 1979 to 1997. Still, she did not give the impression of speaking to an imaginary room.
Here I do not ask her forgiveness, since she was given to flourishes of wit at the expense of her opponents, but I will try to understand what exactly she was claiming. I make this effort because I ran into a similar assertion recently from a contemporary libertarian, offering evidence that Mark Antony was right to say that the evil we do lives after us.
She did not appear to have a hard solipsist notion in denying the existence of other human beings, given her addition about individuals and the tapestry that we form. Her comments were in regard to the welfare state as it existed in Britain at the time she took office, expressing her belief that the dole had gone too far in extending benefits to those who were not what Alfie Doolittle calls the deserving poor. Later in the interview, she attacks the notion that society is to blame if children have problems, which in context appears to mean that they suffer from neglect, but goes on to imply that no collective is to blame if a child grows up to commit crimes, a position that will be familiar to many in the right wing of today’s politics.
My bottom line reading of her remarks is that she wants to absolve people with money from any sense of guilt in those without similar resources run afoul of the law, be it an economic principle or an enacted statute. Libertarians express this with less charm and cultural polish, rejecting the idea that anyone owes anything to anyone else, outside perhaps of family duties—especially in the view of some that women in the family way must carry that condition to term. But there is in particular no moral obligation to pay taxes.
It is among the deniers of social obligation that I find the real moochers, a favorite slur among libertarians, not in the rolls of welfare recipients or the footprints of migrants coming to escape poverty and tyranny and find a better life. Thatcher is often cited for her claim that socialists always run out of other people’s money, but she ought to have considered exactly where this money comes from. The pound sterling ceased being backed by gold during the First World War and permanently in 1931, and the value of a fiat currency is based on the economic credibility of the country that issues it—the Cambridge Dictionary includes countries as examples of societies.
Society, of course, is made up of individual members, and as I explained before, I do not subscribe to the doctrine that the basic social unit is class. This may be what Thatcher had in mind by denying the existence of society, and if she had been more careful in her phrasing, I could find myself in a rare moment of agreement with her. Basic rights—be they self-defense, speech, bodily autonomy, and the like—must be exercised one by one by one. But groups also have rights, so long as individual rights are not violated, and one of those is to employ the blessings that collective effort produces. The Internet, for example, on which I have these discussions with libertarians, is a product of taxpayer dollars and pounds and francs spent to fund laboratories and educational institutions, and while conversing with people who want to demolish any social structure that is not in their view voluntary is not the best argument for the value of what society produces, you and I, Dear Reader, are having this exchange as a consequence as well—evaluate that as you see fit.
To deny the existence of society as a moral entity that contributes and deserves contributions in return is to reject the world we all live in. It is a desire to enjoy the benefits of society without acknowledging that we each owe back as a result. And libertarian sociology and economics undermines support for basic rights, since the self-interest of those rights gets equated with the selfishness of demanding to receive without equivalent giving.
Society certainly exists, and it is the product of its members. People like Margaret Thatcher want to turn it into the horror of the few living as parasites on the many, and some in reaction call for the forcing of us all into limiting molds of group identity, but there is at least a third possibility, societies in which we all live as ourselves and as members of one great common purpose.