You Don't Deserve Your Salary

Here's an interesting article from Chris Colin. It's a nice rejoinder to a comment on a recent thread about some poor banker only making a million a year (if that doesn't pull liberal heartstrings I don't know what will--a point I make seriously as a leftist critical of liberalism).

Link: No Offense, but You Don't Deserve Your Salary.

You, for instance, with the prestigious banking job. You might argue that you went to school, put in long Saturday nights at the library and made great sacrifices to get this job, and indeed that you continue to put in hard work. Or you, with the groovy sculpture commission, after all those years toiling in obscurity: Surely your creativity and perseverance have earned you this minor recompense allotted by our society.

But I argue that we do these things because we were taught to. Or because we inherited certain genes. Or because life conspired to put us on the track that led here. So what if our work ethic is better than that of the guy down the hall? Any talents, work ethic, intelligence or ambition strike me as qualities we inherited or learned along the way — or else cultivated thanks to other qualities we inherited or learned. A person who pulls herself up by her bootstraps, in other words, is a person lucky enough to have that determination, grit, inclination, whatever.

So given the capricious and arbitrary nature of this arrangement, isn't it capricious and arbitrary whatever rewards we get? Or don't get, for that matter: If we were unlucky enough to have been born in a poor, starving village in Africa, could anyone say that we didn't deserve material comforts?

I agree that no one deserves a salary. I wonder, though, if a neoliberal would offer a different account of desert, one that lets the market decide: no one intrinsically deserves a salary; the market distributes salaries based on its own suppositions and demonstrations of value (even liberalism has a version of this: Hobbes says that the worth of a man is what one is willing to pay for his power). Such then is the fantastic deception of capitalism, it's nearly alchemical ability to make something (desert) out of nothing (its lack).