What Does Social Justice Mean in City Politics?
When I say that the social justice should be a primary goal of public policy in Philadelphia, I make some people happy. These are the people who recognize that a quarter of our population is poor and that unemployment rates in some sections of the city reach depression-like levels; that poverty and unemployment create the hopelessness that leads about half our school children to drop out before they graduate from high school; and that hopelessness is among the main causes of the drug epidemic and high crime rates. To talk about social justice, for me, is one way to point to the need for the city to address the difficult conditions faced by so many of our citizens.
But talking about social justice makes other people nervous even though they may be sympathetic to plight of so many of their fellow Philadelphians. For when they here politicians talk about social justice, they imagine great new programs that redistribute income from the rich to the poor by raising taxes on the rich and providing aid to the poor. And they know that no city, let alone Philadelphia, is capable of the kind of redistributions we would need to lift the incomes of everyone in Philadelphia over the poverty line. The kinds of tax rates we would need to do this would be so high that we would undermine the economy of the city, with the unintended consequence of making life worse for all of us. They argue that redistribution on a massive scale, if it is possible at all in a global economy, is only possible for the Federal government.
This anti-redistributive argument is often thought to be a product of conservative thought. But, it is, in fact, a staple of the leftist analysis of the political economy of cities that was prominent in the seventies and remains so today. This leftist analysis says that when capital can move from one location to another, it is impossible for local governments to tax it at high rates without harming their own economic life. (I bet you didn’t know that Brett Mandel is a disciple of the Italian structural Marxist Nicos Poulantzis.)
We’re All In This Together: Common Goods and Social Justice
This argument against redistribution makes sense, as far as it goes. But it seems to me that there are other, much more plausible ways for contemporary progressive to think about social justice in a city like Philadelphia—ways I have been trying to articulate with the slogan “We’re All In This Together.” What I’ve meant by this slogan is that there are progressive approaches to public policy that would benefit everyone in the city by improving our economy and quality of life. At the same time, however, these policies would have the added benefit of particularly benefiting the poor and working people in the city. That is to say, public polices that benefit everyone have the happy by-product of reducing inequality, providing the poor and working with more opportunity, and dramatically improving the communities in which they live. And, as I have argued, unlike mid-twentieth century liberalism, the new progressivism thinks of poverty and inequality not primarily as the problems of individuals but as problems of communities.
I’ve already given many examples of such public policies. I have argued that aggressive anti-crime strategies would benefit everyone and especially those who live in lower income communities. So would efforts to stimulate economic development in our commercial corridors and to bring new high technology businesses into Philadelphia. Policies that deal with the negative consequences of gentrification, such as inclusionary housing, would ultimately benefit everyone by enabling the working people we need in the city to remain here, while also creating neighborhoods that are attractive to new middle income residents. I’ll be writing soon about other examples of these kinds of public policies: Improving our schools, benefits everyone and especially those with lower incomes. And making the Department of Licenses and Inspections more effective, efficient, and fair would especially benefit low income neighborhoods because they are much more likely to be ignored by the department than middle and upper income neighborhoods.
Another, prosaic example can be found in the next post, on our sewer system.