Abstract
Andrew Stark’s Drawing the Line seeks to clarify and find common ground regarding private market-based and public sphere oriented values in contemporary discussion. The sections of this book concern place, primarily gated communities and schools; health, concerning public and private health insurance issues; and welfare.
Based on interviews and documents, Drawing the Line does not distinguish two forms of political and legal behavior and language. One form consists of the struggle among interests and interest groups (or classes or status groups) for advantage. The language of such struggles in contemporary contexts may be cloaked in populist terms or “substantive justice.” Whatever the public discourse, the strategic game, for example, in tax politics is quite straight forward and everyone understands though few articulate it clearly: make someone else pay for the price of civilization i . This is political action.
The second form of behavior and language—upon which Stark wants us to focus—is that of formal rationality, that is, the channels of legal discourse that allow disputes to be settled in courts or legislatures rather than by guns, riots, or meaningful elections. This produces a different kind of discourse, legal to be sure, but basically what one might term “pretextual” as in the use of a pretext to cloak a motive. Such uses are not all ignoble. For example, the “pretext” of public health once produced a substantive bounty in working conditions in industries (e.g., apparel) where women workers were disproportionately employed.
This work does not distinguish serious theory from lawyerly gamesmanship. A tax or land use lawyer with municipal or gated community clients will find useful and thoughtful examples, turgidly explicated, from which to consider strategy and precedents. On the other hand, most of the discourse bears the same relation to social reality as appellate briefs do to life on the streets.
Consider for example the marvelous case of Hidden Hills, a gated community in California, which raised homeowners’ association dues to pay for parks, trails, and golf courses. These dues are not tax deductible as is the property tax on federal and state income tax forms. However, it was in residents’ interest for the cost of some public functions to be tax deductible. To maintain control over them, the community incorporated as a town. Trash collection and public safety were among the services the town administered. However, public law requires municipal buildings to be open to all – even nonresidents. So the town moved the town hall outside the gates of the town, maintaining the homeowners’ association headquarters inside the gates. The result was that some functions, formerly dependent on the homeowners’ association are now paid by taxes and deductible; and the town hall conforms to public laws of access. Other functions remain private, are restrictively accessible only inside the gates—parks, roads, horse trails. So the affluent Hidden Hills residents can deduct from their taxes some municipal functions, but they are able to exclude the public from access to the community and its recreational facilities. Nice work—we assume the consulting lawyers were well-rewarded.
Now examine a multinational corporation with plants in numerous countries. These factories send goods to subsidiaries in other nations for sale. The firm’s books record high prices for the internal transfers when the commodity is coming from a lower tax environment, lowering its nominal profits in the higher tax environment. This is known as transfer pricing and it boosts higher after-tax profits.
Stark finds the case of municipal Three-card Monte to occasion long reflection on the boundary of public and private, and in intestinally-twisted logic an equal dependence on the logic of the market and public goods. Others find the second case reason to reflect on the limits of sovereignty in a world of globalized flows of capital. Both are simply cases of greed and more importantly power (aided by clever lawyers, no doubt) using each crack in a crumbling wall of public interest and popular power to leverage more advantage.
The bottom—life on the streets—involves deepening inequality that motivates the rich to flee from the consequences of poverty. In retrospect, the creation of separately incorporated suburbs surrounding immigrant industrial cities was highly similar, though today’s gated communities are more medieval in their anticipation of siege.
In a chapter on the boundary between private and public in education, Stark engages the problem of parents’ private financial contributions to public schools. The questions of interschool equity (as between rich and poor neighborhoods) and intraschool equity (as between contributions that benefit only one’s child versus a whole school building) are finely dissected in terms of which behavior is truly charitable versus which is selfish. This is a question which one would not have thought to be central to educational policy or issues of equity. The larger matter, though, is interdistrict equity (e.g., city vs. suburb). That of course might involve state level tax policy – not discussed by Stark. Some states’school funding formulas, for example, give school districts substantial per pupil bounties for low income children. In Massachusetts the FY’11 increment for grades 1 to 8 low-income students is $3,167 per pupil—apparently the highest such poverty factor in the nation. More like that, and more of that might take some of the grinding pain out of the equity discussion.
The book more nearly borders interesting on health insurance issues – but even here much of real life escapes attention. Stark raises in detail the issue of the tension between deepening public coverage for the poor versus extending coverage for more people. Public sphere values noted here are actually political calculations—Stark says including more people builds support for programs—true enough but not a value-based argument. The assertions about private market-based arguments are all about efficiency—as if advocates for the public sphere do not consider such matters. In one thought experiment, Stark’s gloss on knowledge about health insurance is particularly trying. Noting that Vermont’s State Children’s Health Insurance Program kicks in at 300 percent of poverty ($52,000)—around median income – Stark is concerned about crowding out the private market. He wonders then if 83 percent of a population with private insurance might opt for public. But only nine percent of the population buys private insurance directly, about 68 percent through employers. Notwithstanding the attempt to force the discussion through the public/private value meat grinder, the real elephant in the room is universal coverage and the ways to finance it—and the essay does not try to even take the first bite of that one.
A final section on welfare adds no particular light on finding a public/private common ground, but the conclusion briefly approaches the point: Stark notes how American politicians “pragmatically” combine arguments – of course – that is because politics is about interests!
As for the main point: looking for common ground between public and private regarding values appears, from this effort, no more fruitful than categorizing all forms of conservative policy as “neo-liberal” or “privatization.” In both cases the categories hold less than they seem. What remains of value for sociologists—especially those who study law—are some detailed examples of boundary issues in health insurance, property taxation, and education.
