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CHAPTER 4 The Supporter's Narrative Any American, no matter what their background, can rise to whatever level he or she is capable of. ... I think it's very fluid. People who were born in poverty can become multimillionaires. I know people like that, and there are plenty of examples. And I think America is almost unique in that sense. We have more opportunity in that sense. (10) In comparison to the critic's narrative, the supporter's narrative occupies more familiar American terrain. Although the stories that the supporters tell vary in significant ways, they are held together by views about economic justice that we would associate with a conservative position. This narrative's story line is markedly different from that of the critics: the heroes become villains, the villains become heroes, and the alleged victims become culpable. As with the critic's narrative, the supporter's narrative also contains four core episodes or chapters that organize the supporters' views. In many respects, the supporters sketch negative images of the portraits drafted by the critics in the chapters of their narrative. I have called the four supporter chapters "Every Man a Trump"; "Render Therefore unto Me"; "More Like Us"; and "Government as Villain."l These chapters cover roughly the same topics as those in the critic's narrative. "Every Man a Trump" describes the workings of the market economy, the history of distributional patterns, socioeconomic mobility, and the operations ofbusiness. "Render Therefore unto Me" concerns the makings ofa successful economy and the norms ofdistribution. "More Like Us" advances remedies for the problems the supporters recognized in the course of putting forward the first two chapters. "Government as Villain" describes the impact and role of government. As in the critic's narrative, the material in these chapters inevitably bleeds together, and in each chapter the reader will undoubtedly discover elements from the others. Taken as a whole, the supporters' chapters are more consistent than those of the critic's narrative, but they nonetheless contain ambivalences of their own, which I will flesh out in the following discussion. An Overview of the Narrative Supporters believe that, by and large, society is just. Their sense ofjustice is based not on the egalitarian impulse to provide for human needs, but rather on the notion of equity, of being able to keep what you make. Supporters believe 91 92 Narratives of Justice that the allocations yielded by market exchanges preserve and promote equity. They locate the immediate threat to justice not in the accumulation of wealth, privilege, and power by those oftraditionally higher status (which critics might say distorts the workings ofthe market), but rather in governmental redistributions of wealth and restrictions on the market, and the political power of the have-nots. These forces lead to unjust allocations of resources through unfair confiscations of fairly earned rewards; supporters view these allocations as fonns ofspecial, illegitimate privilege. These allocations and confiscations are in tum the sources of market disruptions; they ultimately result in inefficiency, in addition to being unjust. Like the critics, supporters reach for conditions of opportunity and equal opportunity as the indicators ofjustice, but they differ from the critics in the way in which they construct these tenns and in the degree to which they see them to exist in reality. A negative conception of liberty and freedom is prominent in their thinking. Equal opportunity is also constructed more negatively; it is thought to be more concerned with direct exclusion from economic pursuits than with assistance and empowennent in order to take part in these pursuits. Implicit in such a notion of equal opportunity is the assumption that an adequate supply of opportunity exists. And supporters do claim that economic opportunity does in fact exist, and that it is available to all persons. They believe that in most important respects, America still operates under its traditional ideals. Supporters thus share the premium on economic individualism held by most Americans and express criticisms of public assistance, government regulation, and policies to increase economic equality. Supporters resist any strong notions of socioeconomic classes and deny the existence ofan underclass.2 They instead posit a naturally occurring cooperative relationship between employers and employees, which unfortunately is often disturbed by employees. Their description ofthe distribution ofwealth is a nonnal distribution, with a center of mass located slightly toward the poorer end. They recognize that there are great distances between different income and wealth levels, but in their view the boundaries between them, to the degree that...

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