Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [119]
Yertle the Turtle King is king of all that he can see, but he wants to see more so that he can rule more. To that end, he enlists the aid of his fellow turtles in the Sala-ma-Sond pond to build his throne higher so that he can see farther. They throw themselves into the task by stacking their own bodies higher and higher so that Yertle may sit higher and higher. King Yertle gets a wonderful view. All the turtles’ labor winds up generating quite a bit of property for him. But a plain little turtle speaks up from the very bottom of the massive turtle stack:
“I know, up on top you are seeing great sights,
But down at the bottom, we, too, should have rights.
We turtles can’t stand it. Our shells will all crack!
Besides, we need food. We are starving!” groaned Mack. (Yertle)
Eventually, if the proletariat is not seeing the results of its hard work to the point of not even having their basic needs met while management and the owners reap all of the rewards for doing very little, then the labor force will revolt, or will at least have the moral authority to do so.
Communist revolutions indeed broke out in many parts of the world during the past century, creating societies based in theory (if not in practice) on the idea that instead of property being distributed through a free market based on the value of one’s own labor, property should be distributed “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”18 However, the end of the Cold War and the opening of capitalist markets to many of these former communist regimes, including the former Soviet Union and China, suggest that Smith’s invisible hand is a more successful, if not always just, method of distributing goods in a society.
But such revolutions, regardless of their ultimate success, suggest that property rights may require redistribution at some point, for a couple of reasons. First, for practical purposes, in order to make sure such revolutions do not happen, some method of making sure that the labor force is not overexploited may be needed. So even a devout free-market capitalist like McBean should at least recognize that taking care of the basic needs and rights of the labor force is imperative to avoid a violent revolution, and thus rich capitalists should be willing to redistribute some of their wealth to those less fortunate. But it’s not just about prudence and practicality. While a laissez-faire free-market economy may be an efficient way to promote society’s best interest overall, it’s not always just. There are compelling moral reasons besides enlightened self-interest to make sure that basic needs are met and basic rights are respected. Simple ownership rights may, in some cases, be overridden by higher moral values, such as the rights of everyone to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If the labor force is starving and is forced to work under oppressive conditions, then it seems that rights to both life and liberty are being ignored. So we need a framework of distributive justice that can acknowledge and allocate property rights while at the same time recognizing that some property might need to be reallocated to fulfill other moral imperatives. Property is not an absolute right—there are limits, and sometimes redistribution is morally demanded. One prominent theory of distributive justice is that of John Rawls (1921–2002), who invokes a principle of “justice as fairness.”19
Rawls argues that to decide a fair method of distribution, we must put ourselves in what he calls the “original position”:
This original position . . . is understood as a purely hypothetical situation characterized