Trains, Planes, and Automobiles: On the Left’s Ideas about Money and Freedom
There’s a whole essay or dissertation to be written—probably has been—on how liberals and leftists interested in explaining the relationship between money and freedom—namely, that without money, we cannot be free; that we lack liberty if we lack the economic means to pursue our ends—so often resort to metaphors of, or make reference to, travel and transportation.
The Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen does it in his classic essay, “Freedom and Money,” where he shows how not having money is an abridgment of freedom. Not having money does not mean simply that I lack the resources to do what I want to do. Not does it mean that I lack the capacity to do what I want to do. Without money, says Cohen, I am literally unfree to do what I am otherwise physically and emotionally capable of doing.
To explain that argument, which is an attempt to take apart Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between negative and positive liberty, Cohen deftly uses the analogy of a train ticket. If I cannot afford to buy a ticket to travel to Glasgow (Cohen was a Canadian who made his career in Britain), I am not free to travel to Glasgow. I am physically able to board the train and make the trip. But without a ticket, I’ll be physically stopped and prevented from doing so—not by the frailty of my body or infirmity of my mind, not by the weakness of my will, but by the conductor and behind her the force of the state.
This afternoon, Alex Gourevitch reminded of a quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg that I posted on Facebook a while back. It’s from an interview she gave to Elle magazine where she explains that poor women, by virtue of being poor, lack the same right to an abortion that wealthy women have. Freedom is unevenly distributed in relationship to social class and wealth. To drive the point home, she too invokes travel, less as an analogy than as an instance:
The impact of all these restrictions is on poor women, because women who have means, if their state doesn’t provide access, another state does. I think that the country will wake up and see that it can never go back to [abortions just] for women who can afford to travel to a neighboring state…
You find the same trope in the Buckley v. Valeo decision, where the Court upheld the constitutionality of limitations on campaign contributions but struck down limitations on campaign expenditures as a violation of the First Amendment. Explaining the connection between expenditure and expression, between money and speech, the Court wrote:
A restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached. This is because virtually every means of communicating ideas in today’s mass society requires the expenditure of money.
And then to, um, drive the point home, the Court added a footnote:
Being free to engage in unlimited political expression subject to a ceiling on expenditures is like being free to drive an automobile as far as and as often as one desires on a single tank of gasoline.
This being the United States, the Court naturally invoked the car and the gas tank—rather than Cohen’s train and ticket—as the appropriate metaphor.
The invocation of travel makes some sense: Going back to Hobbes, the absence of external impediments to the motions of our body has often been taken as the most basic definition of freedom. (In chapter 14 of Leviathan, as opposed to chapter 21, Hobbes is a little more elusive on the question of motion, but his emphasis on external impediments remains.) Likewise, the hallmark of the state’s power is the right to control a person’s entry and exit across its borders.
But rather than external physical impediments serving as the barrier to motion, in these examples, what is doing that work of impeding motion is money itself.