Does trait anxiety make your more or less likely to support war & aggression?
Recently, one of the grad students in my department gave a brownbag talk about the relationship between fear and aggression. On the one hand, one might expect fear to lead to aggression as one perceives threat to a greater extent and responds accordingly. On the other hand, fear is associated with withdrawal and so we may expect those who are naturally fearful to avoid aggressive actions, such as war.
I analyzed data on our support for war and peace measure (e.g. "War is sometimes the best way to solve a conflict" - Van der Linden et. al 2008) as well as a measure of trait anxiety (e.g. how accurately "get stressed out easily" describes you - from the IPPI BIS/BAS scale). Unfortunately, the analysis I ran isn't particularly conclusive, but part of science is hopefully sharing both conclusive and inconclusive results so that others can build on it. There is a small significant negative correlation (r=-.166, p<.001) between trait anxiety and support for war. From the below graph, this relationship appears strongest in moderates (perhaps because they have made up their minds less about war/peace), but is consistent across groups except libertarians.
The straight lines above are linear relationships and the curvy lines are if we allow SPSS to fit a curvy line to the data. There is a semi-consistent result, but the slopes certainly aren't dramatic. I also ran the analysis for Big 5 Neuroticism and the correlation between that and support for war was even smaller (r=-.052) though still negative and significant (p=.004 since there were 3,041 participants vs. 604 in the above graph).
The take home message? I would say that it seems likely that there is an overall slightly negative relationship between general anxiety and general support for war. However, it seems likely (and consistent with previous research) that in a specifically threatening situation, the results might be quite different as the chronically stressed individual might perceive much greater threat and therefore support war in specific threatening cases to a greater degree than a less anxious individual. I hope to have more to report on this in the future as to what these cases look like and I'd welcome any comments pointing to other relevant research as it's something I'm learning about.
- Ravi Iyer
Religion does not cause racism, but group morality may underlie both.
One of the professors at my university co-authored a recent meta-analysis which found that there is a relatively robust correlation between religiosity and racism. It's hard to dispute the methodology of the study, which included 55 studies with over 20,000 people. Still, I can't help but cringe at what take home message people might get from reading about this study. I can see non-religious schadenfreude and religious defensiveness resulting from a simplistic assumption that correlation equals causality.
Religion does not cause racism, or at least that's my contention. My hypothesis is that the reason they are correlated is that some people who are naturally group oriented gravitate towards religion. Other people who are group oriented gravitate towards racism. There are a large number of things that being group oriented will lead one to gravitate towards....sports teams, the military, marching bands, boy scouts, etc.. Sometimes people who are group oriented will gravitate towards more than one of these groups and so it is not so surprising that we will see a correlation between racism and membership in any of these groups.
I cannot test this hypothesis directly, but I do have some evidence for this. In their paper, they state that "In our meta-analytic review, the paradox of religious racism was traced to the group-oriented motives that underlie religiosity." From a moral foundation theory perspective, we would expect endorsement of the moral principles of Ingroup Loyalty and Authority to correspond to these group-oriented motives. In our yourmorals.org dataset, we don't have measures of racism, but we do have measures of a related construct, social dominance orientation, which concerns agreement to items like "Inferior groups should stay in their place."
In our data, there is indeed a relationship between higher social dominance orientation scores and being Christian (most of the paper's studies used Christians as their religious group). However, when I control for moral foundation questionnaire scores on the Ingroup Loyalty and Authority dimensions, there is no difference between Christians and Atheists on social dominance orientation. It is hard to visualize regression results which 'control' for other variables, but perhaps the below 2 graphs illustrate this point. Basically, one can see that Christians and Atheists have very similar patterns of social dominance orientation at corresponding levels of group level moral concern. The lines more or less overlap.
If there were a main effect of religious group, we would see the blue line consistently above the green line, indicating that at similar levels of group based moral concern, religious people are still higher on social dominance orientation.
Another way to look at the effect of religion is by self reported religious attendance. Again, if we look at the simple relationship, there is a significant positive (Beta=.098) relationship between religious attendance and social dominance orientation. However, if we control for moral foundation questionnaire scores, the relationship actually becomes negative (Beta=-.040, p=.005), indicating that at similar levels of group level moral concern, religious attendance is actually negatively related to social dominance orientation.
How real are these effects? Will they replicate? Our sample is not necessarily representative of the whole world and social dominance is perhaps a poor proxy for actual racism...but at least in this data set, there does seem to be support for the idea that group level morality explains all of the effects of religion on group level dominance, such that we might find similar effects between any cohesive group and racist attitudes, purely as a function of a desire for group cohesion. All moral concerns are double edged swords and can be virtues (patriotic donations of blood after 9/11) or vices when hypermoralized (e.g. racism toward Middle Easterners after 9/11). From this perspective, the fact that group cohesion and the hypermoralization of group cohesion co-occur is perhaps to be expected.
- Ravi Iyer
A Difference Between Democrats and Republicans – The Effects of Empathy on Political Interest
Below is a simple little graph of yourmorals.org data that I thought would be worth posting. Interest in politics is positively correlated with empathic concern in liberals/democrats and not in conservatives/republicans. It's somewhat self-evident in posts like this, or debates about the role of empathy from either the Democratic or Republican side.
Can this difference be used to the advantage of the Democratic party? Perhaps inspiring empathy in the electorate will motivate liberals to be politically active more than conservatives? and how exactly might one appeal to empathy? Perhaps by pushing poverty reduction programs, increases in foreign non-military aid, or putting a human face on health care reform?
btw, empathic concern is measured using Davis' Interpersonal Reactivity Index which contains questions like "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me." The next obvious step is to manipulate empathy and see if it has any impact on political behavior, or at least on the intention to engage in political behavior, as there is only so much that can be inferred from this correlation. Still, it's a promising research lead with interesting potential applications toward inspiring political interest.
- Ravi Iyer
Separating Pro-Peace from Anti-War Attitudes using Moral Psychology Measures
I'm off to SPSP 2010 and will be presenting the below poster at the morality and justice pre-conference. It's based on a scale I found measuring separate war and peace attitudes (Vander Linden et. al, 2008) at the main political psychology conference 2 years ago. The concept is pretty simple...I found scales that predicted pro-war and pro-peace attitudes, controlling for political ideology and the opposite construct. For example, there are many reasons to be pro-peace....one could think war is a bad thing or one could be echoing one's political party's point of view. Theoretically, by controlling for war attitudes and ideology, we get a picture of the kind of person who uniquely likes peace.
Like this Mother Theresa quote:
I was once asked why I don't participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I'll be there.
There is something powerful about being "for" things rather than "against" things that other people believe in. The opposition that the later strategy creates might just lead to the very same kinds of conflict that anti-war protestors seek to avoid.
Reading Palin’s “Going Rogue” & expanding the liberal moral imagination (Lederach & Wright)
I bought Sarah Palin's new book, Going Rogue. As someone interested in moral confabulation, Sarah Palin is an a great case study. She has a very visceral intuitive sense of her own moral opinions (e.g. her opinion on Israeli settlements)...yet she often seems to have no preconceived notion of the source of those opinions. So when the press asks her for the reason for her opinions, she is bound to confabulate a reason more than most. A supporter of her might say that we all use intuitions to reason morally and so her gut level analysis is refreshingly honest. A detractor might say that this is evidence that she doesn't have well reasoned opinions and that our gut is not always correct.
Robert Wright wrote a recent book about zero sum situations, of which politics definitely is one. One side wins and the other loses in every election. In these situations, our gut is going to lead us to demonize the other side, which often is a strategically bad thing to do. To combat this, he (and others like John Lederach) advocates actively exercising our moral imaginations. The idea is that we need to consider other viewpoints to combat our gut reactions to demonize the other side. That takes effort and willpower as our minds are wired to discount the opposing view on any issue. But sometimes understanding the other side is the only way to compromise and peace.
So I am going to try to read Palin's book with an open mind and expand my liberal moral imagination. Maybe there are things we can agree upon or at least maybe I'll learn something about conservative views that I can use. For example, 10 pages into it, I can certainly agree about the need to keep special interests (big oil) out of politics and it seems that will be a recurrent theme in the book. My partisan bias is to point out the special interests she caters to, but perhaps the more adaptive strategy is to take her words at face value. If I really expect conservatives to expand their moral imaginations to consider the perspective of the Muslim world, it would seem hypocritical to be equally unwilling to expand my own moral imagination.
For more on expanding the moral imagination, you can watch the below video, specifically around the 14 minute mark where Robert Wright talks about moral imagination.
What are the basic foundations of morality?
A few years ago, I was fortunate to catch a talk by Jon Haidt at the Gallup Positive Psychology Summit where he gave a wonderful talk about moral foundation theory, which seeks to determine the fundamental systems of morality. I sought to use his scale in my work and using that scale eventually grew into our current collaboration (along with Jesse Graham, Pete Ditto, and Sena Koleva) of yourmorals.org, where the main instrument used in moral foundation theory, the moral foundations questionnaire, is available.
The moral foundations questionnaire measures 5 foundations. The below descriptions are taken from the moral foundations theory webpage.
1) Harm/care, related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. This foundation underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.
2) Fairness/reciprocity, related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. This foundation generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy.
3) Ingroup/loyalty, related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. This foundation underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it's "one for all, and all for one."
4) Authority/respect, shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. This foundaiton underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.
5) Purity/sanctity, shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. This foundation underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).
According to Jon Haidt, "Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible."
Perhaps one of the most compelling parts of the theory is that it invites people to try and posit a 6th foundation. There was even a prize offered by Jon to those who succeeded and a number of possible candidates are listed here.
How can we determine what is or is not a foundation? Some of the criteria are listed on the above webpage. Borrowing from a recent lecture I attended on approaches to develop foundations of 'personality', I would list the below criteria as important.
- Factor analysis/Conceptual Distinction - Factor analysis is the most common way that people empirically determine distinct constructs. The idea is that if two constructs are distinct, questions about these constructs should inter-correlate to form a separate factor from questions about a separate construct. So if questions about Harm load on a separate factor versus questions about Fairness, we can conclude they are separate constructs. I would argue that this is a necessary, but not sufficient test of any new foundation. It is possible to ask questions with enough specificity that anything can be a separate factor. Five questions about harm using a knife will likely load on a separate factor versus five questions about harm by drowning, yet does that mean they are separate foundations. Furthermore, work on moral confabulation and moral intuition leads many researchers to believe that individuals are fundamentally naive about what drives their moral reasoning. As such, direct questions may not be able to illuminate all possible moral systems.
- Cluster analysis - One of the most important applications of moral foundations theory is that it successfully describes the differences between liberals and conservatives in a fairly robust manner. Some personality scale developers take the notion that if a question successfully differentiates classes of people, it's a good question. This is true for the moral foundation questionnaire to a point, but more work could certainly be done. 5 foundations should conceivably posit 5 classes of people (individuals who value each foundation over the other four) and the co-occurrence of many of these foundations is evidence that some current foundations may share a moral system or that these clusters have yet to be identified.
- Evolutionary explanation - One of the most important aspects of moral foundation theory is that it contains a plausible evolutionary explanation of all systems. Evolutionary evidence should include both cross-cultural universality and a coherent evolutionary explanation. The current foundations are well described in terms of their evolutionary roots, having grown out of anthropological field work, and future foundation candidates should be equally well described in terms of evolutionary theory and equally universal cross-culturally.
- Beyond Self Interest - I often think that people who are in front of me in traffic are jerks. Why don't they just get out of the way? If you catch me on a particularly bad day, I may even consider them to be immoral people. But is 'getting out of my way' a moral system? Human beings are notoriously clever at moralizing their self-interest and any candidate foundation needs to go beyond self interest. The relevant question would be whether I would judge the other people to be at fault from the perspective of a neutral third party. Given that I don't routinely chastise drivers for being in the way of other drivers, I would say that my beliefs in this example are not the result of a moral system, but rather my personal self-interest.
- Beyond Harm - There are lots of different ways to harm another person. Some would argue that Harm is too broad a moral category, but as long as Harm is included as a moral foundation, any subsequent candidate foundation will necessarily be forced to answer the question "Is this reducible to harm?". The question which would need to empirically be asked is whether individuals would judge an act to be wrong even if nobody were harmed. This may seem like an easy test, but consider the case of liberty, which is an often brought up criticism of moral foundation theory as something that has been left out. Most people would think that it is wrong for someone to deprive somebody else of their freedom. It's conceptually distinct from physical harm, potentially describes a class of people (libertarians), has an evolutionary explanation (the need for groups to encourage explorers?), and is not just self-interest as I care about other people's liberty, not just my own. However, would I care about somebody else's liberty if they didn't want to be free? It's a difficult question as I think the intuitive reaction is to assume that the person doesn't know any better and really would be better off being free. But what if I was absolutely convinced that they enjoyed captivity...or what if I thought that they actually benefited from captivity. Should they be free? It's a more complex question than one initially might think and shows some of the complexity of developing foundations. Ideally, we should be able to find cases where any foundation is generally used, even in cases where the use of that foundation causes harm.
With that in mind, I would offer these potential modifications of our initial foundations.
- Fairness is a notoriously ambiguous word and can mean many things to many people. Current questions focus too much on fairness as equality, which is possibly motivated concern for the harm experienced by those who experience less equal outcomes. In order to separate it further from harm, I would focus this foundation more on the principle of equity, where people get what they deserve. Equity is motivationally tied to the desire for productivity and so this foundation would then possibly encompass ideas of property rights, sloth and waste, which have been missing from the current taxonomy.
- Concerns about liberty, equality and rights would be moved to the Harm foundation. All of these constructs are things which could relate to the harm caused to another individual, whether it is the psychological harm due to being controlled, the emotional harm due to receiving an unequal share, or the harm to self-esteem when one does not feel like one has any rights.
- Ingroup and authority foundations have tended to predict similar things and co-occur in individuals such that one might doubt the independence of these two factors. As they are currently measured, respecting authority and being loyal could both be considered subsets of a system that might be labelled "being a good group member". Some items which measure authority concern the desire for things to stay the same and a resistance to change, which has been shown to be indicative of conservative thought. Changing authority to this conception and labeling it 'conservation' while allowing ingroup loyalty to encompass other aspects of being a good group member might improve the discriminant validity of the authority and ingroup foundations.
- Many of the other candidate foundations that have been proposed deal with truth, wisdom, honesty, and authenticity. Telling the truth is a moral principle which might survive all of the above tests as it is conceptually distinct, describes a class of people (see The Dignity of Working Men), has an evolutionary explanation (trustworthiness), and is observed when it is contradictory to self-interest and causes harm to others. In conceptualizing this foundation, I might consider including things like simplicity, directness, and being a stand-up guy. This might explain why conservatives have a disdain for liberal academics who are too complex to be trusted and lack practical intelligence that is indicative of being a 'stand-up' guy.
These are merely hypotheses and opinions, so take them for what it's worth. It is also important to note that the fact that it is possible to refine a theory doesn't reduce the importance or contribution of the theory. In fact, the fact that I (and many others) posted about refining it means that this theory has had a significant impact on public discourse and is worthy of refining.
J Street vs. The Weekly Standard: Is it possible to be pro-peace and pro-Israel?
A group called J Street has recently sought to question the wisdom of military action by the Israeli government. Their influence is supposed to be a counterbalance to the traditionally hawk-ish Israel lobby embodied by AIPAC. Many lobbying groups which oppose military action by Israel identify with the groups that Israel has conflicting interests with or inherently believe that war is a terrible thing. J Street is unique in that it is pro-peace AND is pro-Israel, taking the stance that the best way to support Israel is by taking a pro-peace stance. In taking this stand, they are questioning one of the most powerful implicit arguments for military action....that support for military action is related to being patriotic. As a result, groups like the Weekly Standard have been questioning just how pro-Israel J Street really is.
Is it possible to be both pro-peace and pro-Israel? What part of this is simply the moral confabulation of believing that your side (liberal or conservative) is correct and that the other side MUST be unpatriotic? Sometimes we might dislike the opposing viewpoint so much that we question not just their wisdom, but their motives.
To help answer this question, I analyzed some of our data from yourmorals.org to see how identification with one's country (measured using questions like "How much do you identify with (that is, feel a part of, feel love toward, have concern for)...people in my country?") is related to attitudes toward peace (measured using questions like "Peace brings out the best qualities in a society.") and attitudes toward war (measured using questions like "War is sometimes the best way to solve a conflict."). It is worth noting that attitudes toward war and attitudes toward peace are not necessarily the same thing. They are highly correlated (r=-.68) in our sample, but the correlation is not perfect (-1 or 1 would be a perfect correlation).
At first glance, it seems that being pro-peace might be incompatible with identifying with one's country. Consider the below 2 graphs. Attitudes toward peace aren't really related to patriotism. Attitudes toward war are related to patriotism in that people who identify with their country more seem to be slightly more likely to be more sympathetic to the need for conflict.
Given that the distinction between pro-peace and anti-war is difficult, it is unsurprising that from the simple relationships, people are suspicious of people who are both pro-peace and patriotic. However, these relationships are not large and there are many confounding variables, the most obvious of which are your political leanings. Much research in political psychology concerns our motivated reasoning to support our political party's position on any given issue. If we look within each political party, the relationship between being pro-peace and pro-country changes as shown in the below two graphs.
The confusing purple lines above are self-identified libertarians. Let's deal with them later.
The main result if we look at everybody else is that we see that identification with one's country is actually associated with being pro-peace WITHIN each political group. In contrast, in the first set of graphs, being pro-war was associated with identification with one's country when collapsing across all political groups. The results suggest that identification with country is independently associated with being pro-peace if we control for being liberal, conservative, or libertarian. If we control for the variance associated with political ideology, it is not patriotic to be anti-war or pro-war. It IS patriotic to be pro-peace....and the reason people who are pro-peace are characterized as not being patriotic is because the doves and the hawks reside on opposite sides of the partisan divide. This partisan divide also predicts identification with country (conservativism correlates .29 with identification with country). But if we take out the variance due to ideology, peace is indeed patriotic.
Put in the context of the political issue of the day, there is nothing so abnormal about being pro-peace and pro-Israel, but it is unsurprising that critics of J Street are unable to disentangle their partisan leanings from their opinions about the group given the simple pattern of what we see in society. It is worth noting though that questioning the motives rather than the wisdom of the opposing position is not something that is limited to conservative groups like the Weekly Standard. J Street characterizes the Weekly Standard's actions as "thuggish smear tactics", "swift boat" moves, and "unhinged" which is surely a caricature of their true motivations. My advice to J Street would be to avoid such confrontational language as it only exacerbates the partisan divide and makes it more unlikely that others might actually see resonance in their pro-peace, pro-Israel stance.
There is one group for whom being pro-peace is more diagnostic, libertarians. Libertarians make up 10-15% of the population according to recent surveys and 7% of our sample, but it is worth speculating about why group identification is so diagnostic of war and peace attitudes for this group. Using Moral Foundations Theory, war and peace attitudes are predicted by both the ingroup/loyalty foundation and the harm/care foundation. Similarly, patriotism and identification with one's country is a blend of concern about loyalty to one's group and care for those group members. Libertarians score lower on the moral foundations questionnaire on both the ingroup and harm foundations. My hypothesis would be that for libertarians, identification with country is more a function of group loyalty rather than care for other group members (see Ayn Rand's virtue of selfishness). Indeed, the correlation between Moral Foundations Questionnaire-Ingroup scores and Identification with Country scores are higher for libertarians than for every other group (r=.56 for libertarians, .37 for conservatives and .38 for liberals). I would speculate that the fact that libertarian patriotism is more loyalty than care based is the reason why libertarian patriotism is more highly related to pro-war/anti-peace attitudes. More on libertarians to come as I'm working on a paper on libertarian psychology.
Moral confabulation: when you dislike something so much that you make up stuff
I would like to coin the term moral confabulation (ok, I didn't coin it first...there are 23 google results for it...but I'd like to popularize it) and I've now added it as a category on this site. Confabulation is the formation of false beliefs or memories. In the moral realm, one confabulates when ones emotional gut reaction to some event is so strong that it causes one to posit new beliefs that may be at strong odds with reality.
I do not believe that this is just a conservative phenomenon and I hope to illustrate this phenomenon in liberals (eg. social justice may be a confabulation of empathy for the poor). However, I couldn't let this video pass without sharing it.
Sometimes you dislike a group (homosexuals) or a thing (pornography) so much, that reasons why they are bad just keep coming to mind. It's very related to this scenario which affects both liberals and conservatives. Without making any claims about the rightness or wrongness of these objects, I feel that moral confabulation is a phenomenon worth studying. And sometimes giving something a name makes it more study-able. If you know of more examples of moral confabulation, please share.
Robustness of Liberal-Conservative Moral Foundations Questionnaire Differences
All social science research faces questions about the external validity of the results. Much social psychology research is done on students and so the natural question is whether those findings generalize to non-student populations. Even representative surveys of the population face questions about validity due to the assumptions which go into what representative means. Since all measurement is imperfect, one of the main ways to determine the robustness of a finding is to examine many measurements and look for overall patterns. FiveThirtyEight.com did this during the 2008 presidential election and became a national sensation.
The central finding of Moral Foundations theory to date is the split between what liberals and conservatives report caring about. Specifically, Liberals care more exclusively about issues concerning harm and fairness, while conservatives also care about issues surrounding obeying rightful authority, being loyal to one's ingroup, and avoiding "unnatural" violations of one's purity.
How can we tell if this finding is robust? All web servers keep track of referring traffic and so we can analyze the data we collect at yourmorals.org by the source of the traffic. If the pattern holds among people who read the New York Times, people who come from conservative blogs (a minority, but there are some), people who read the Houston Chronicle, people who find the site by typing 'morality quiz' into a search engine, and people who read Libertarian magazines....then it is likely that the pattern is somewhat robust. Of course, these patterns are all among internet samples, so it would be fair to say that if this pattern of liberal-conservative differences holds among all these groups, then it is fairly robust amongst the type of people who use the internet to read about news or politics.
Below are graphs across many of these groups. You'll see the same pattern where as you move from liberal to conservative, the exclusivity of concern about issues of harm and fairness gets less and less.
Democrats and Republicans agree that Justice & Fairness are about Equity, not Equality or Impartiality
I was browsing CNN today and I decided to expand my moral imagination by watching Glenn Beck Speak at the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting. I was surprised how reasonable his message sounded to me, as I my previous impression of him was not good.
I believe that people should be able to get what they deserve too. I don't begrudge small businesses who succeed through hard work. I appreciate hard work as much as anyone. Does that mean that I should switch parties?
None of my posts would be complete without a graph, so I decided to look at some of our data on justice and fairness from yourmorals.org. Below is a graph of how various ideologies would view changing a hypothetical allocation of a reward from ambiguous toward the use of some specific type of justice or fairness.
Equity concerns giving more to those who contribute more. Equality concerns making the distribution more equal. Need concerns giving more to those who need it more. Open information concerns making sure everyone understands the process. Equal voice concerns allowing everyone an equal say in how to make the allocation. Retribution concerns giving less reward to those who violate some relevant group norm. Higher bars indicate that making a change toward that principle is more desirable.
What did I learn from this graph? Liberals do care more about equality and need than conservatives and conservatives do care more about equity and retribution. However, both liberals and conservatives (and libertarians) find an equity based distribution (e.g. "Suppose the company instituted a way of quantifying each employee's contributions, and it then adjusted the bonuses up or down accordingly") to be more desirable to an equal distribution (e.g. "Suppose the company divided the money such that each employee received an equal share.") This somewhat captures how I feel about things. I care about people getting what they deserve, but perhaps I am willing to consider equality and need in some situations as well.
Below is another graph using different participants, which concerns endorsement of abstract principles rather than hypothetical allocations and again, we see that the proportionality principle (e.g. "Whether or not those who contribute more are rewarded more") is deemed most important.
The take home message for Democrats? Stop letting Republicans define policy as choices between equity and equality/need. Nobody is trying to stop small businesses from succeeding...few people want a completely equal society.
Rather, let's see if people are really getting what they deserve in life. Do investment bankers really deserve million dollar bonuses? I don't think they necessarily produce much more than many, and obviously in the past few years, their collective output has been negative. So I see taxing banks to recoup losses as a matter of equity/proportionality, not equality.
How about the working poor who work hard and then are bankrupted by a single medical expense? What percentage of Americans actually make enough money to pay for a chronic illness? We all need health care that doesn't go away when we get really sick and need to use it. So maybe health care isn't a right, but how can one argue with making sure the working poor and children all have health care? Does Glenn Beck's father, who owned a bakery and therefore would have immense trouble buying health care without a large risk pool, deserve health care less than those investment bankers who drove the economy into the ground with high risk derivatives? If not, maybe we should do something about that.
Democrats should welcome a debate about how to really give people what they deserve in life.
- Ravi Iyer