In a recent interview on Fox News, Senator Rand Paul said:
“I never argued against any technology being used when you have an imminent threat, an active crime going on. If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and $50 in cash, I don’t care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him, but it is different if they want to come fly over your hot tub or your yard just because they want to do surveillance on everyone, and they want to watch your activity.”
Yes, it is different… it’s just not very different. In his statement, Senator Paul is making two mistakes. The first is an old one: The ends justify the means. The second is a modern one: Technology is neutral.
While he has attempted the usual political backpedaling since, what Senator Paul clearly intended to say was, to put it crudely, how you kill the bad guy doesn’t matter. In fact, it does. A policeman with a badge and a nametag is a legitimate, accountable agent of the state. He is subject to the law himself, and acts in full view of the public. He is not there to kill, but to arrest if possible, and ultimately to protect the innocent. He gives the honest citizen a sense of security. A weaponized drone does just the opposite. It protects no one, and it arrests no one. It is an anonymous killer. Its operator sits in a room at an undisclosed location. No one will ever know exactly who that operator is, or even what governmental entity the drone belongs to. It can be used with near impunity. It is, therefore, a weapon of state terror by its very nature. If it is just fine to fly weaponized drones over public areas – so long as they pretend not to spy on private property – then it will also soon be fine to fly a weaponized drone over a troublesome crowd of protesters to intimidate and scatter them. Twenty years ago this would have sounded paranoid and far-fetched, but now the only thing that keeps such a scenario from happening is the will to carry it out.
Our government now makes a regular habit of assassinating foreigners from the sky. They find this a convenient process, because it kills or terrifies a few of America’s enemies without risking the embarrassment of having American pilots shown captured and blindfolded on TV. I am no longer confident that the people who now order such things will not, in some eventual emergency, turn those weapons loose on honest citizens who merely disagree with them. I am no longer confident that a farmer in Alabama means any more to our rulers than a villager in Pakistan or Yemen. To the people who hold the reins of power, the Pakistani villager and the Alabama farmer are about equally alien, and about equally unimportant. And, to the media that is supposed to hold the government in check by exposing it to our scrutiny, the villager and the farmer are about equally un-newsworthy too.
We have already gotten accustomed to nameless law enforcement agents wearing masks, dressed from head to toe in black military-style uniforms, equipped with military rifles and concussion grenades. A weaponized drone is merely an extension of this trend. I believe the cop on the beat, with his badge, his pistol, and his duty to serve and protect – keeps us free. I believe an anonymous stormtrooper or a drone does just the opposite. I have no idea, anymore, what Senator Paul believes.
April 29, 2013
April 24, 2013
The fantasy society of western liberalism
A couple of decades ago there was a popular TV series entitled Star Trek: The Next Generation. Superficially, it was a spin-off of the original Star Trek series of the mid-1960’s. I found it moderately entertaining at the time. There were good episodes and bad episodes. What I did not notice, perhaps because I was more left-leaning then, was that it was not merely a TV show, but rather a long set of parables about how western liberalism imagines society not only will be – but should be.
I will skip the silly exercise of quoting characters and episodes. If your life is so empty of content that you care, you can, I’m sure, watch the whole seven seasons on demand. Since I’m merely using Star Trek: The Next Generation as an illustration of an ideology, I’ll just highlight the salient points from memory.
The series centered on the adventures of a nominally military vessel, whose modus operandi was to seek out hostile aliens and avoid fighting them at all costs. The ship was a kind of “community” vessel, with children and teenagers in evidence, and probably a Montessori school on board somewhere. A few specific passages have stuck in memory. In one, I recall the captain noting, with obvious astonished contempt, how in earlier times the people of Earth had been willing to go to war with one another “even over economic systems.” In other words – Communism is just a different way of doing things! Get over it!
In various episodes it was revealed that, in the brave new world of the 23rd century, work had become an entirely optional thing. You could have a job if you wanted one, but those who didn’t were free to just aspire to whatever higher calling they happened to be interested in. Somehow, in this society, although there were bad apples here and there to advance the storyline, no one simply degenerated into an idle, whiney, de-socialized couch potato. Given the opportunity to aspire to liberal avocations, almost everybody did.
The Federation – the centralized, federal government depicted in Star Trek: The Next Generation, could only be characterized as a humane, consensual, collectivist state. Not only weren’t there any couch potatoes, there weren’t really many misfits or dissenters either. Everybody agreed that the faux-multicultural monoculture of the Federation was the best thing for everybody, and that freedom meant that everybody could wear their own unique ethnic clothing, have their own tastes in food, and sleep with whoever or whatever they wanted to. Here and there an alien race might depart this perfect way of thinking, but that was OK too. To be a citizen of the Federation was to exercise practically unlimited tolerance toward outsiders – one is tempted to say, to bumpy-headed aliens of color. In later seasons, this extended to accepting a parasitic race that sucked the consciousness out of a succession of human hosts and used their bodies merely as vehicles. Well, one mustn’t be judgmental about other, uh… people and their cultures.
There was at least one episode dedicated to advancing the gay and lesbian cause (by thinly disguised alien proxies). There were other episodes, generally less disguised, dedicated to portraying the conservative faction of some planet’s population as paranoid, dishonest, or dangerous. In all respects, the western liberal worldview – complete with its self-righteous monologues, its dewy emotionalism, and its impossible contradictions.
It was only a TV show. Still, let’s not pretend that the messages that people absorb from the popular media don’t mold them in part, particularly during their youth, and more particularly in a culture in which parenting is often a sort of afterthought, and in which established authority has largely discredited itself. I have to wonder if we don’t have mid-level diplomats right now who were Star Trek NG fans as kids. “Kim Jong Un just doesn’t seem to understand our patient, infinitely tolerant response. Maybe we should apologize again, or lay down our weapons or something. WTF!?” Maybe the love that the rest of the world has long had for American TV hasn’t been about their love for us, but about every human’s prurient curiosity regarding the behavior of idiots. Perhaps we aren’t the role model we like to think we are – but just another of history’s traveling freak shows.
The larger liberal narrative, the one of which outdated science fiction programs are only the smallest and most petty examples, is indeed quite like a freak show – and not completely unlike the fantasy regime of Kim Jong Un’s North Korea. We don’t have all the totalitarian trappings yet, but our internal surveillance technology is already far better than his. We – or they, as I can no longer even recognize, let alone identify with, my own government – are certainly obsessed, like North Korea, with defining and redefining reality to meet political need. Our government is now a tiny circle of ideologues in a shrinking ideological bubble. Or perhaps even to call it a bubble is overly optimistic. Bubbles, at least, are transparent. It is, I think, more like a citadel. A fortress that sees the outside world only through the lens of what its occupants already know – and know a priori. A truth which is ultimately measured against the liberal narrative itself – in which every opponent is a racist; every non-Caucasian is a liberal; every corporation is deliberately evil; every expansion of government is good; and everyone one outside the citadel is ultimately too stupid to be allowed any decisions beyond the color of his or her cell phone case. It is a movement desperately re-enacting its own history – the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement – in the absence of any real opposition to those causes. What could be more freakish? What could be more tragically entertaining?
I will skip the silly exercise of quoting characters and episodes. If your life is so empty of content that you care, you can, I’m sure, watch the whole seven seasons on demand. Since I’m merely using Star Trek: The Next Generation as an illustration of an ideology, I’ll just highlight the salient points from memory.
The series centered on the adventures of a nominally military vessel, whose modus operandi was to seek out hostile aliens and avoid fighting them at all costs. The ship was a kind of “community” vessel, with children and teenagers in evidence, and probably a Montessori school on board somewhere. A few specific passages have stuck in memory. In one, I recall the captain noting, with obvious astonished contempt, how in earlier times the people of Earth had been willing to go to war with one another “even over economic systems.” In other words – Communism is just a different way of doing things! Get over it!
In various episodes it was revealed that, in the brave new world of the 23rd century, work had become an entirely optional thing. You could have a job if you wanted one, but those who didn’t were free to just aspire to whatever higher calling they happened to be interested in. Somehow, in this society, although there were bad apples here and there to advance the storyline, no one simply degenerated into an idle, whiney, de-socialized couch potato. Given the opportunity to aspire to liberal avocations, almost everybody did.
The Federation – the centralized, federal government depicted in Star Trek: The Next Generation, could only be characterized as a humane, consensual, collectivist state. Not only weren’t there any couch potatoes, there weren’t really many misfits or dissenters either. Everybody agreed that the faux-multicultural monoculture of the Federation was the best thing for everybody, and that freedom meant that everybody could wear their own unique ethnic clothing, have their own tastes in food, and sleep with whoever or whatever they wanted to. Here and there an alien race might depart this perfect way of thinking, but that was OK too. To be a citizen of the Federation was to exercise practically unlimited tolerance toward outsiders – one is tempted to say, to bumpy-headed aliens of color. In later seasons, this extended to accepting a parasitic race that sucked the consciousness out of a succession of human hosts and used their bodies merely as vehicles. Well, one mustn’t be judgmental about other, uh… people and their cultures.
There was at least one episode dedicated to advancing the gay and lesbian cause (by thinly disguised alien proxies). There were other episodes, generally less disguised, dedicated to portraying the conservative faction of some planet’s population as paranoid, dishonest, or dangerous. In all respects, the western liberal worldview – complete with its self-righteous monologues, its dewy emotionalism, and its impossible contradictions.
It was only a TV show. Still, let’s not pretend that the messages that people absorb from the popular media don’t mold them in part, particularly during their youth, and more particularly in a culture in which parenting is often a sort of afterthought, and in which established authority has largely discredited itself. I have to wonder if we don’t have mid-level diplomats right now who were Star Trek NG fans as kids. “Kim Jong Un just doesn’t seem to understand our patient, infinitely tolerant response. Maybe we should apologize again, or lay down our weapons or something. WTF!?” Maybe the love that the rest of the world has long had for American TV hasn’t been about their love for us, but about every human’s prurient curiosity regarding the behavior of idiots. Perhaps we aren’t the role model we like to think we are – but just another of history’s traveling freak shows.
The larger liberal narrative, the one of which outdated science fiction programs are only the smallest and most petty examples, is indeed quite like a freak show – and not completely unlike the fantasy regime of Kim Jong Un’s North Korea. We don’t have all the totalitarian trappings yet, but our internal surveillance technology is already far better than his. We – or they, as I can no longer even recognize, let alone identify with, my own government – are certainly obsessed, like North Korea, with defining and redefining reality to meet political need. Our government is now a tiny circle of ideologues in a shrinking ideological bubble. Or perhaps even to call it a bubble is overly optimistic. Bubbles, at least, are transparent. It is, I think, more like a citadel. A fortress that sees the outside world only through the lens of what its occupants already know – and know a priori. A truth which is ultimately measured against the liberal narrative itself – in which every opponent is a racist; every non-Caucasian is a liberal; every corporation is deliberately evil; every expansion of government is good; and everyone one outside the citadel is ultimately too stupid to be allowed any decisions beyond the color of his or her cell phone case. It is a movement desperately re-enacting its own history – the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement – in the absence of any real opposition to those causes. What could be more freakish? What could be more tragically entertaining?
April 19, 2013
The saddest possible form of dignity
Watching the coverage of the Boston marathon bombing a few days ago, I began to think about the question of who was responsible. There are people who would obviously love the bombers to have been rightwing extremists -- there are even leftwing journalists who have said so. Most Americans believe the perpetrators were the usual Islamic suspects, perhaps foreign-born or perhaps domestic. The Federal authorities will eventually arrest somebody, probably the guilty parties, and it will all get incorporated into everybody’s respective narratives, with the usual finger-pointing, hand wringing, TV commentary, and a book or two in a couple of months. This is the way we digest tragedy at this point in our history, for better or for worse. Everybody in the media will tell us how we should feel about the incident – as though we were mere inanimate objects, waiting for the godlike voices of others to fill our empty minds with feelings. As though we were not qualified to fill in even those for ourselves.
Of one thing, I am fairly certain. Anyone who plants a bomb in a crowd, or shoots up a school, or even flies an airplane into a building, shares in a very common, very unhappy byproduct of progress. They all know, in their hearts if not in their minds, that the world has no need for them. People who believe that they are needed, that they have some meaningful connections to their societies, are not generally willing to engage in random murder to get attention. To do that, you have to know beyond a doubt that you are nothing.
I don’t think the ideologies that crop up in these things are really very important. To be sure, radical Islam is a nasty set of ideas, but it does not make people want to kill so much as it promises relevance to people who have little reason to live. People who love their lives have better things to do than throw them away. A person who would lay a bomb in a crowd is someone with nothing better to do.
A kid shoots up a theater or a school, and we say that he is mentally ill – as though that diagnosis somehow meant something. For the most part, it is nonsense. All that this sort of labeling really accomplishes is to draw a psychological line between us and the people that we fear. It is really not much better than saying that the killer was “bewitched,” or “possessed by the devil.” It makes us feel better about ourselves. It gives us comfort in whatever sociological niche we happen to identify as our sanity.
Let me be clear – I am not defending the killers as yet another class of victim. We already have far too many victims. Most of contemporary life seems to be one long competition for the attainment of the most attractive form of victim status. Setting out to butcher people for whom the world is working a little better than it is for you can never become an acceptable defense for murder. If it does (and it has sometimes come perilously close to doing so) the glue that binds society together will dissolve. When everyone’s sins are forgiven in advance there is no incentive not to commit them.
What I am saying is that perhaps we have so many mass murderers because we have so many people whose lives are essentially irrelevant. This is not a matter of mere income inequality. Even in an extremely stratified society, the lowest classes can do vitally important things and take some pride in their mundane contributions to the public as a whole. The problem of our times is that one could erase enormous numbers of people from most societies without any economic consequences whatsoever. Technology has made us so productive that most people are unnecessary. Large populations are not a strength now, but a burden. In America, at least, this is something rather new.
People die if they do not have food. If they do not have purpose, they rot. Most rot quietly in front of a TV screen or some equivalent venue, but a handful, especially among the young, rot actively in the pursuit of the saddest possible form of dignity. They feel, even if they can seldom quite articulate the fact, that it is better to be the world’s enemy than the world’s discarded trash.
This is where we are right now, as the population rises and the market value of human life declines.
Of one thing, I am fairly certain. Anyone who plants a bomb in a crowd, or shoots up a school, or even flies an airplane into a building, shares in a very common, very unhappy byproduct of progress. They all know, in their hearts if not in their minds, that the world has no need for them. People who believe that they are needed, that they have some meaningful connections to their societies, are not generally willing to engage in random murder to get attention. To do that, you have to know beyond a doubt that you are nothing.
I don’t think the ideologies that crop up in these things are really very important. To be sure, radical Islam is a nasty set of ideas, but it does not make people want to kill so much as it promises relevance to people who have little reason to live. People who love their lives have better things to do than throw them away. A person who would lay a bomb in a crowd is someone with nothing better to do.
A kid shoots up a theater or a school, and we say that he is mentally ill – as though that diagnosis somehow meant something. For the most part, it is nonsense. All that this sort of labeling really accomplishes is to draw a psychological line between us and the people that we fear. It is really not much better than saying that the killer was “bewitched,” or “possessed by the devil.” It makes us feel better about ourselves. It gives us comfort in whatever sociological niche we happen to identify as our sanity.
Let me be clear – I am not defending the killers as yet another class of victim. We already have far too many victims. Most of contemporary life seems to be one long competition for the attainment of the most attractive form of victim status. Setting out to butcher people for whom the world is working a little better than it is for you can never become an acceptable defense for murder. If it does (and it has sometimes come perilously close to doing so) the glue that binds society together will dissolve. When everyone’s sins are forgiven in advance there is no incentive not to commit them.
What I am saying is that perhaps we have so many mass murderers because we have so many people whose lives are essentially irrelevant. This is not a matter of mere income inequality. Even in an extremely stratified society, the lowest classes can do vitally important things and take some pride in their mundane contributions to the public as a whole. The problem of our times is that one could erase enormous numbers of people from most societies without any economic consequences whatsoever. Technology has made us so productive that most people are unnecessary. Large populations are not a strength now, but a burden. In America, at least, this is something rather new.
People die if they do not have food. If they do not have purpose, they rot. Most rot quietly in front of a TV screen or some equivalent venue, but a handful, especially among the young, rot actively in the pursuit of the saddest possible form of dignity. They feel, even if they can seldom quite articulate the fact, that it is better to be the world’s enemy than the world’s discarded trash.
This is where we are right now, as the population rises and the market value of human life declines.
March 15, 2013
The Birth Control Mandate
The recent government mandate for employers to cover the expense of employees’ contraceptives in their insurance plans is significant in two respects. Most of the media attention has centered on the religious freedom issue, but the mandate raises a second, equally important issue that has gone almost unnoticed. Quietly, over a series of laws of which the mandate is only the most recent, we are becoming acclimated to the idea that businesses can be made into public welfare institutions, subordinated to the authority of the Federal government. This is a significant transformation of the relationship between the individual, business, and the government.
Consider the model of government intervention in business that predominated through most of the last century. Institutions like the FDA, OSHA, and the EPA were all, in principle, dedicated to a single concern – that of safety. The FDA’s initial purpose was to make sure that the food and medications that reached the public were safe. OSHA’s purpose was to make sure that the workplace was safe. The EPA had the task of controlling pollution, making sure the environment was safe. None of these concerns are within the power of ordinary individuals to address themselves. Environmental issues are often even beyond the control of individual powerful corporations. While these regulatory institutions necessarily took an adversarial position toward business they were, unquestionably, formed for good purposes and did good things. They mitigated dangers against which individuals were truly powerless.
The mandate for unemployment compensation was, perhaps, the beginning of the deviation from government intervention on the basis of safety alone. Making an employer pay into an unemployment insurance fund is, essentially, making employers protect their employees from the vicissitudes of the economy for a specified term. That is only a safety issue if you interpret the term “safety” very broadly indeed. Unemployment is a problem which, in theory at least, individuals can defend themselves against through savings. While there is little doubt that unemployment benefits reduce hardship, the mandate did constitute an expansion of the scope of government’s intervention in the economy. Unemployment insurance may be a good thing in itself, but it set a precedent for other kinds of interventions that have not been as benign.
The provision in Obamacare which prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage of preexisting conditions (set to take full effect in 2014) abrogates the very mechanism by which insurance companies operate. An insurance policy, at its core, is just a very well researched wager. The policy holder bets on getting sick enough to need more money than he or she will end up paying to maintain the policy. The insurance company bets the policy holder will be relatively healthy, and has compiled enough predictive data to win most of the bets. When the system works correctly, the insurance company makes a profit and the policy holder minimizes the severity of the worst possible outcome. All the participants in the system win. Not everyone gets covered, so the model is flawed from the perspective of making paid medical treatment universal – but that is not what private insurance is designed to do. Forcing an insurance company to cover people who are already sick is like making a gambler place a bet on a horse that isn’t even in the race. It is mandated charity, or, to look at it another way, it is a narrowly targeted and irregular tax.1
While health insurance was, at least, a problem everybody recognized, affordable contraception was a bolt from the blue. It was not a problem anyone was wrangling with because, frankly, it is not a real problem. Contraceptives have long been available at no cost to the user from Planned Parenthood and similar organizations. They are not particularly expensive in any case. Anyone who wants them can get them. The only vague inkling that contraception was being scrutinized as a public policy issue came in a question put to Mitt Romney by George Stephanopoulos during a Republican presidential debate in late 2011. “Governor Romney, do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?” Every candidate on the stage was stunned by this absolute non sequitur. It was shrugged off by Romney and the others as a ridiculous question and quickly forgotten. The question was probably intended to produce a useful gaff, and to that extent it failed. Nevertheless, a few months later the mandate was unveiled, Sandra Fluke appeared before congress with her carefully crafted testimony, and the “Republican war on women” was born. The correct people were offended and the resulting narrative contributed to the president’s re-election victory. That such political theater was foisted on the public is contemptible. That a significant number of people found it credible is a tragedy.
Buried in the noise of this Machiavellian maneuver were, as I’ve said, two significant policy agendas. The attack on the Catholic Church was the more obvious of the two, and garnered most of both the media and public interest.
While I personally do not believe any form of theism is epistemically tenable, I am nonetheless a defender of religious liberty and religious tolerance. Our republic was founded on these principles and has, in the main, benefitted by our adherence to them. When government intrudes so deeply into the life of the individual that it begins to require a particular worldview, regardless of what that worldview happens to be, it has overstepped its constitutional limitations. Conflicts with religious liberty have certainly occurred in our history, but they have tended to focus on obvious life-or-death issues. For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses vehemently oppose receiving blood or blood products on scriptural grounds. While we accept the right of adult Jehovah’s Witnesses to do this, we do not accept their right to deny blood products to their children in life-or-death situations. While this is an infringement of religious liberty, it is an ethically justifiable one. The birth control mandate is not an issue of that character. No one is denying anyone the right to use birth control. Churches might discourage the practice openly, and it’s conceivable that a business might somehow discourage the practice tacitly, but no adult in the United States is going to actually be denied access to birth control by their church or their employer. Buying contraceptives is the prerogative of any adult citizen. Forcing one citizen to buy them for another is unjustified, and, I believe, deliberately malicious. To use the case above as an analogy, it would be like forcing a Jehovah’s Witness mother to administer blood to her child personally. It is simply an abuse of power, not to save life, but to force adherence to a particular ideology.
I, myself, believe that widespread contraception is a good thing. While I respect other views, I think that slowing and reversing world population growth is a laudable goal. The world has almost certainly exceeded its sustainable carrying capacity. There are too many of us. Most of the world’s problems stem from this simple fact. If we do not decrease the population ourselves, nature will eventually do it for us. Malthus has never been refuted. That being said, I do not believe the ends justify the means. While we may, perhaps, only understand society in terms of aggregates, when we treat individual human beings as mere parts of a collective we lose touch with our own humanity. In the end, only the individual can really matter. Groups have neither feelings nor aspirations – except for those embodied in individual, flesh-and-blood human beings. Unnecessarily diminishing the freedom of the religious is not an attack on the religious alone, but is also an attack on the principle of individualism itself.
The second agenda, that of rendering business subservient to the state, goes hand-in-hand with the first. Free enterprise, in all its strengths and weaknesses, is an expression of the individual capacity to strive and prosper. If money is power, functioning free markets are the diffusion of that power into a comparatively large number of hands. If this is not conducive to perfect equality, it is at least more conducive to equality than the centralization of economic and social authority in the hands of the state. I may opt to neither work for nor to buy from an objectionable business, but I may not decline to pay my taxes nor ignore objectionable laws. In the last hundred years, government has gone from being a relatively benign regulator of business to being its ultimate overlord. Or, in cases like the banks of the Federal Reserve System, government and private enterprise have already become one and the same. All of our resources, from the poorest of us to the richest, can now be bent to the will of quite a small group of planners – ideologically driven people who view the nation and everything in it as theirs to redirect or redistribute. Odd that we, as a people, should give up so much freedom with so little complaint – and call it progress.
_______________________
1 The same thing has been happening with hospitals for many years, insofar as they are required to provide a considerable level of care whether the patient has any means of paying or not. This is obviously a related issue, but it is complicated by the fact that hospitals, prior to the last half century or so, were largely run as charities. It is an open question whether or not the charity model of healthcare is or isn’t better for society, but at the point at which healthcare isn’t organized that way, forcing it back into the charity role is a little peculiar. While I’m dubious about the ethics of running hospitals as profit centers, I can’t imagine many other businesses being forced to give their products or services away for the sake of the public good. Restaurants are not required by law to feed the hungry, nor are clothing stores required to clothe the threadbare.
Consider the model of government intervention in business that predominated through most of the last century. Institutions like the FDA, OSHA, and the EPA were all, in principle, dedicated to a single concern – that of safety. The FDA’s initial purpose was to make sure that the food and medications that reached the public were safe. OSHA’s purpose was to make sure that the workplace was safe. The EPA had the task of controlling pollution, making sure the environment was safe. None of these concerns are within the power of ordinary individuals to address themselves. Environmental issues are often even beyond the control of individual powerful corporations. While these regulatory institutions necessarily took an adversarial position toward business they were, unquestionably, formed for good purposes and did good things. They mitigated dangers against which individuals were truly powerless.
The mandate for unemployment compensation was, perhaps, the beginning of the deviation from government intervention on the basis of safety alone. Making an employer pay into an unemployment insurance fund is, essentially, making employers protect their employees from the vicissitudes of the economy for a specified term. That is only a safety issue if you interpret the term “safety” very broadly indeed. Unemployment is a problem which, in theory at least, individuals can defend themselves against through savings. While there is little doubt that unemployment benefits reduce hardship, the mandate did constitute an expansion of the scope of government’s intervention in the economy. Unemployment insurance may be a good thing in itself, but it set a precedent for other kinds of interventions that have not been as benign.
The provision in Obamacare which prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage of preexisting conditions (set to take full effect in 2014) abrogates the very mechanism by which insurance companies operate. An insurance policy, at its core, is just a very well researched wager. The policy holder bets on getting sick enough to need more money than he or she will end up paying to maintain the policy. The insurance company bets the policy holder will be relatively healthy, and has compiled enough predictive data to win most of the bets. When the system works correctly, the insurance company makes a profit and the policy holder minimizes the severity of the worst possible outcome. All the participants in the system win. Not everyone gets covered, so the model is flawed from the perspective of making paid medical treatment universal – but that is not what private insurance is designed to do. Forcing an insurance company to cover people who are already sick is like making a gambler place a bet on a horse that isn’t even in the race. It is mandated charity, or, to look at it another way, it is a narrowly targeted and irregular tax.1
While health insurance was, at least, a problem everybody recognized, affordable contraception was a bolt from the blue. It was not a problem anyone was wrangling with because, frankly, it is not a real problem. Contraceptives have long been available at no cost to the user from Planned Parenthood and similar organizations. They are not particularly expensive in any case. Anyone who wants them can get them. The only vague inkling that contraception was being scrutinized as a public policy issue came in a question put to Mitt Romney by George Stephanopoulos during a Republican presidential debate in late 2011. “Governor Romney, do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?” Every candidate on the stage was stunned by this absolute non sequitur. It was shrugged off by Romney and the others as a ridiculous question and quickly forgotten. The question was probably intended to produce a useful gaff, and to that extent it failed. Nevertheless, a few months later the mandate was unveiled, Sandra Fluke appeared before congress with her carefully crafted testimony, and the “Republican war on women” was born. The correct people were offended and the resulting narrative contributed to the president’s re-election victory. That such political theater was foisted on the public is contemptible. That a significant number of people found it credible is a tragedy.
Buried in the noise of this Machiavellian maneuver were, as I’ve said, two significant policy agendas. The attack on the Catholic Church was the more obvious of the two, and garnered most of both the media and public interest.
While I personally do not believe any form of theism is epistemically tenable, I am nonetheless a defender of religious liberty and religious tolerance. Our republic was founded on these principles and has, in the main, benefitted by our adherence to them. When government intrudes so deeply into the life of the individual that it begins to require a particular worldview, regardless of what that worldview happens to be, it has overstepped its constitutional limitations. Conflicts with religious liberty have certainly occurred in our history, but they have tended to focus on obvious life-or-death issues. For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses vehemently oppose receiving blood or blood products on scriptural grounds. While we accept the right of adult Jehovah’s Witnesses to do this, we do not accept their right to deny blood products to their children in life-or-death situations. While this is an infringement of religious liberty, it is an ethically justifiable one. The birth control mandate is not an issue of that character. No one is denying anyone the right to use birth control. Churches might discourage the practice openly, and it’s conceivable that a business might somehow discourage the practice tacitly, but no adult in the United States is going to actually be denied access to birth control by their church or their employer. Buying contraceptives is the prerogative of any adult citizen. Forcing one citizen to buy them for another is unjustified, and, I believe, deliberately malicious. To use the case above as an analogy, it would be like forcing a Jehovah’s Witness mother to administer blood to her child personally. It is simply an abuse of power, not to save life, but to force adherence to a particular ideology.
I, myself, believe that widespread contraception is a good thing. While I respect other views, I think that slowing and reversing world population growth is a laudable goal. The world has almost certainly exceeded its sustainable carrying capacity. There are too many of us. Most of the world’s problems stem from this simple fact. If we do not decrease the population ourselves, nature will eventually do it for us. Malthus has never been refuted. That being said, I do not believe the ends justify the means. While we may, perhaps, only understand society in terms of aggregates, when we treat individual human beings as mere parts of a collective we lose touch with our own humanity. In the end, only the individual can really matter. Groups have neither feelings nor aspirations – except for those embodied in individual, flesh-and-blood human beings. Unnecessarily diminishing the freedom of the religious is not an attack on the religious alone, but is also an attack on the principle of individualism itself.
The second agenda, that of rendering business subservient to the state, goes hand-in-hand with the first. Free enterprise, in all its strengths and weaknesses, is an expression of the individual capacity to strive and prosper. If money is power, functioning free markets are the diffusion of that power into a comparatively large number of hands. If this is not conducive to perfect equality, it is at least more conducive to equality than the centralization of economic and social authority in the hands of the state. I may opt to neither work for nor to buy from an objectionable business, but I may not decline to pay my taxes nor ignore objectionable laws. In the last hundred years, government has gone from being a relatively benign regulator of business to being its ultimate overlord. Or, in cases like the banks of the Federal Reserve System, government and private enterprise have already become one and the same. All of our resources, from the poorest of us to the richest, can now be bent to the will of quite a small group of planners – ideologically driven people who view the nation and everything in it as theirs to redirect or redistribute. Odd that we, as a people, should give up so much freedom with so little complaint – and call it progress.
_______________________
1 The same thing has been happening with hospitals for many years, insofar as they are required to provide a considerable level of care whether the patient has any means of paying or not. This is obviously a related issue, but it is complicated by the fact that hospitals, prior to the last half century or so, were largely run as charities. It is an open question whether or not the charity model of healthcare is or isn’t better for society, but at the point at which healthcare isn’t organized that way, forcing it back into the charity role is a little peculiar. While I’m dubious about the ethics of running hospitals as profit centers, I can’t imagine many other businesses being forced to give their products or services away for the sake of the public good. Restaurants are not required by law to feed the hungry, nor are clothing stores required to clothe the threadbare.
February 26, 2013
Decline
A couple of decades ago, when I was living Dayton Ohio, I began to notice a strange phenomenon. Every now and then I would see a car stopped in traffic, blocking a lane and apparently disabled, the driver sitting behind the wheel doing nothing. These were always young people, no older than their twenties, apparently with no idea what to do. This was before the era when cell phones were universal, when you could not ask Siri or hastily Google “car stopped in traffic.” I was always astonished to see this, and, I suppose tellingly, never kind enough to stop and help. I always imagined the sentence being played inside the driver’s head was: “If I sit here long enough, someone will come to fix the problem.” I suppose someone always did come along, a police officer if no one else.
We all have cell phones now, so many peoples’ lives are one continuous conversation, interrupted now and then by sleep. They now do have Siri and Google, as well as an unbreakable umbilical cord to mom and dad. When mom and dad are dead, I suppose the new adults of this brave new world will still have Siri and Google, and the gentle hand of government to tuck them in at night. The world will be “idiot proofed,” in theory at least, or at least unburdened by any expectation that one should ever need to completely grow up. I find this both infuriating and heartbreaking. I am pretty sure that most people neither mind nor notice. It is normal to them. The time in which I was born, in which a higher degree of competence and self-reliance was expected, must seem like a dark age to most young people.
Fairly often now, I see grown-ups out in public in pajamas. When I was a child, such behavior would have gotten you a mandatory psychiatric evaluation. Now, no one notices. What difference does it make? People waddle into Walmart from the parking lot and plop themselves onto the nearest available scooter. I believe these were originally provided for the genuinely handicapped, but now they are the accepted convenience of the fat and apathetic – people who don’t really fear the loss of their mobility through the atrophy of their legs because they are intuitively confident that there is no minimum requirement for their survival anymore. The more helpless you are, the more help you will receive. I still notice these things – they just no longer astonish me.
I know all too many instances in which children are being raised by their grandparents. Parenting is an impossible task for people who are not really responsible adults themselves, and the grandparents are there doing nothing anyway, so – why not? But what is going to happen when the last competent member of a particular family passes away? Who will raise the children then? This predicament happens already, of course, in the caring nation of America, where we are smarter and more capable than any people on the planet have ever been.
This country is ruled by a political elite, regardless of which party is in office. If you think the people rule – you just aren’t paying attention. A fair fraction of the public are unfit to dress or feed themselves, let alone participate intelligently in the democratic process. The elites treat the public with a thinly veiled contempt, lying to us in ways that aren’t even subtle any more. While this does anger me, it should not and does not surprise me. If I were in the government’s massive shoes, I doubt I’d think much better of the public than they do, frankly. A morbidly obese man, sitting on a scooter in Walmart in his pajamas, poking through a pile of discount movies, is not the sort of being which inspires much respect. He is not the sort of creature that his grandparents were, or that de Tocqueville encountered in our brave new republic, once upon a time. I used to think that, though our TV shows were popular around the world, they must have convinced the rest of the world that Americans were idiots. It was less obvious to me that TV (and its modern descendents) was actually helping to make us idiots. We do not discuss now, or explain – we tweet. What could be worth saying over 140 characters anyway? It did not occur to me until recently that TV (and its modern descendents) had convinced our own leaders that we are idiots. I often suspect that this is also a factor in our failure to produce an immigration policy. So what if Mexicans do not speak English? Quite a few Americans don’t really speak English either. For the elite, I think, all varieties of tweeting animals look alike. Who cares where a particular bird happens to come from? What difference does it make?
Fortunately, I know quite a few men and women who still have more-or-less functioning brains and bodies, and substantial and even admirable characters. There are even some young ones, here and there. One ought to love such people, and encourage them. They are the light of humanity. One must also seek them out in unexpected places. When there is so much rot, one must look hard to find the good. One must be honest about what one finds – but still maintain an open mind.
The unconscious hand of evolution will not be stayed. Nature does not make very inspiring animals when she leaves them in environments in which they cannot fail. The dodo was a stupid, slow, and ugly creature that became extinct as soon as more robust animals set foot on its island. I do not believe in anyone’s utopian ideal – not merely because I don’t believe that any group of human beings is collectively bright enough to devise such a thing, but because I believe that taking the rigor out of life diminishes us rather than enriches us. This is evident among all classes. The person who struggles to amass a great fortune is almost always a better specimen than the person who inherits one and lives idly on its fruits. The impoverished person who ekes out a living has more dignity – and more worth – than one who lives a lifetime on the dole. It is effort which makes us. A utopia of self-indulgent, incapable, overgrown children whose only competition is for the highest state of victimhood is not a utopia that any decent human being would want to live in. It is, in fact, no utopia at all.
(see: Decline II )
We all have cell phones now, so many peoples’ lives are one continuous conversation, interrupted now and then by sleep. They now do have Siri and Google, as well as an unbreakable umbilical cord to mom and dad. When mom and dad are dead, I suppose the new adults of this brave new world will still have Siri and Google, and the gentle hand of government to tuck them in at night. The world will be “idiot proofed,” in theory at least, or at least unburdened by any expectation that one should ever need to completely grow up. I find this both infuriating and heartbreaking. I am pretty sure that most people neither mind nor notice. It is normal to them. The time in which I was born, in which a higher degree of competence and self-reliance was expected, must seem like a dark age to most young people.
Fairly often now, I see grown-ups out in public in pajamas. When I was a child, such behavior would have gotten you a mandatory psychiatric evaluation. Now, no one notices. What difference does it make? People waddle into Walmart from the parking lot and plop themselves onto the nearest available scooter. I believe these were originally provided for the genuinely handicapped, but now they are the accepted convenience of the fat and apathetic – people who don’t really fear the loss of their mobility through the atrophy of their legs because they are intuitively confident that there is no minimum requirement for their survival anymore. The more helpless you are, the more help you will receive. I still notice these things – they just no longer astonish me.
I know all too many instances in which children are being raised by their grandparents. Parenting is an impossible task for people who are not really responsible adults themselves, and the grandparents are there doing nothing anyway, so – why not? But what is going to happen when the last competent member of a particular family passes away? Who will raise the children then? This predicament happens already, of course, in the caring nation of America, where we are smarter and more capable than any people on the planet have ever been.
This country is ruled by a political elite, regardless of which party is in office. If you think the people rule – you just aren’t paying attention. A fair fraction of the public are unfit to dress or feed themselves, let alone participate intelligently in the democratic process. The elites treat the public with a thinly veiled contempt, lying to us in ways that aren’t even subtle any more. While this does anger me, it should not and does not surprise me. If I were in the government’s massive shoes, I doubt I’d think much better of the public than they do, frankly. A morbidly obese man, sitting on a scooter in Walmart in his pajamas, poking through a pile of discount movies, is not the sort of being which inspires much respect. He is not the sort of creature that his grandparents were, or that de Tocqueville encountered in our brave new republic, once upon a time. I used to think that, though our TV shows were popular around the world, they must have convinced the rest of the world that Americans were idiots. It was less obvious to me that TV (and its modern descendents) was actually helping to make us idiots. We do not discuss now, or explain – we tweet. What could be worth saying over 140 characters anyway? It did not occur to me until recently that TV (and its modern descendents) had convinced our own leaders that we are idiots. I often suspect that this is also a factor in our failure to produce an immigration policy. So what if Mexicans do not speak English? Quite a few Americans don’t really speak English either. For the elite, I think, all varieties of tweeting animals look alike. Who cares where a particular bird happens to come from? What difference does it make?
Fortunately, I know quite a few men and women who still have more-or-less functioning brains and bodies, and substantial and even admirable characters. There are even some young ones, here and there. One ought to love such people, and encourage them. They are the light of humanity. One must also seek them out in unexpected places. When there is so much rot, one must look hard to find the good. One must be honest about what one finds – but still maintain an open mind.
The unconscious hand of evolution will not be stayed. Nature does not make very inspiring animals when she leaves them in environments in which they cannot fail. The dodo was a stupid, slow, and ugly creature that became extinct as soon as more robust animals set foot on its island. I do not believe in anyone’s utopian ideal – not merely because I don’t believe that any group of human beings is collectively bright enough to devise such a thing, but because I believe that taking the rigor out of life diminishes us rather than enriches us. This is evident among all classes. The person who struggles to amass a great fortune is almost always a better specimen than the person who inherits one and lives idly on its fruits. The impoverished person who ekes out a living has more dignity – and more worth – than one who lives a lifetime on the dole. It is effort which makes us. A utopia of self-indulgent, incapable, overgrown children whose only competition is for the highest state of victimhood is not a utopia that any decent human being would want to live in. It is, in fact, no utopia at all.
(see: Decline II )
February 20, 2013
February 19, 2013
On the Liberal Social Experiment
Anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty has to admit that among the many enormous problems that America faces in our era, the unavailability of unbiased information ranks among the most significant. We have a glut of news, a glut of opinion, and a glut of government statistics, but unless one is content with hearing reality spun to suit one’s own taste, picking and choosing facts out of the trash heap of partisan noise is a formidable problem. The agreeableness of a narrative is no measure of its truth. I believe, based on my observation of the rest of reality, that there is truth – that political and social matters exist in a real world, in exactly the way that ocean tides exist, and have real material causes. That we may not understand those causes as clearly or as definitely as we understand some other causes in nature does not mean that those causes do not exist. It means only that we can’t, or haven’t, discerned them.
So, what are some things we can reasonably claim to know about the social transformation of the United States over the last eighty years or so – not from ideological argument, but from brute, observable fact? That’s a big topic, I know, but let’s just pick out a few salient points.
First, I think any non-delusional person would have to admit that both the civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement accomplished their principle goals. Although there is plenty of sturm und drang about voter ID initiatives, any U.S. citizen who is legally qualified to vote can do so. He or she might have to wait in line or suffer some minor inconvenience at the polls, but, allowing for a handful of irregularities here and there (the manipulations of both of the major political parties) everybody gets to vote. Likewise, although there isn’t perfect equality in employment opportunities, virtually no perspective employer is going to flatly deny a woman or a member of a minority a job on the basis of gender or race. A few employers might still harbor such prejudices privately, but, in practice, they live in terror of the law. The vast majority of the public, liberal and conservative, north and south, have internalized these social changes even if a few people quietly don’t like them. We did elect a black president – didn’t we? No woman has attained that office yet, but I can’t imagine any significant number of people objecting to a woman president on the basis of her gender alone. Cultures change. Really – they do.
The largely liberal project of eliminating poverty has, on the other hand, been an abysmal failure. The public policy of vast and various public welfare programs has moved us no closer to the elimination of poverty, regardless of the race or ethnicity of the recipients in question. Consider urban poverty alone. Almost every city in America is divided into two discrete if unofficial zones – a zone of safety, where the middle class and wealthy live, and a danger zone, where prudent people do not go. This is a fact. No matter how liberal or how conservative you are, odds are pretty good that, if you’re middle class or above and you live in a city, there are large parts of it you have never visited and rarely think about. Most people are little more familiar with the poorer, more crime ridden halves of their own cities than they are with the interior regions of New Guinea. These defacto ghettoes have not gotten any smaller in the last eighty years, but have actually gotten larger in most places. They are by no means the sole province of black Americans – their constituent populations vary in accordance with location – but, wherever they are and whoever inhabits them, those inhabitants are the chief consumers of most forms of government relief. Such places are a standing monument to the failure of such programs to eliminate poverty.
The continued presence of urban ghettos is a fact. Explaining their continued presence is a more speculative matter. That being said, the idea that we simply need to pour more money into existing programs to overcome the problem is highly suspect. Both the major political parties, surprisingly, cling to a single false belief regarding this issue. This belief is that human beings are naturally industrious, and if they are given a Democratic floor of support on one hand, or a Republican tax holiday on the other, they will seize the opportunity to become productive citizens. This is an astonishingly naïve view. We do not assume that people who live on investments really care about being productive citizens. The state lotteries thrive on the millions of middle class and working poor Americans who would love to become instant millionaires and quit their jobs. A work ethic is a learned value, not a genetic imperative. Human beings, by nature, will rarely do more than is necessary to achieve the conditions they find tolerable. Put a solid floor of entitlements under any group of humans, regardless of their race or ethnicity, and quite a few of them will find that floor acceptable and sleep there. The first generation will feel that they have won the lottery; successive generations will be acculturated to non-productivity as the norm. Make the floor a higher standard of living than one could achieve by unskilled labor, and only a handful of the most ambitious will ever climb off. While jobs programs are a better answer in theory, in conjunction with the dole their impact is largely nullified. Further, short of direct public employment programs like Roosevelt’s WPA, they have never created any substantial number of jobs. While ideological conservatives may be dubious about tinkering with the economy, Republicans have occasionally exercised a certain pseudo-Keynesian streak in the establishment of low-tax free enterprise zones – with predictably negligible results. None of it has worked. Having produced a substantial body of people who find no shame in the dole, and who are not resigned to a more-or-less arduous life of full time legal employment that the rest of us endure, we, as a society, have created a serious problem.
Perhaps more interesting than the problem itself is the collective refusal to even recognize it. Consider it in purely geographical terms. If someone fenced off an area of several square miles of city just a few blocks from your home and told you they were conducting a social experiment inside – wouldn’t you be curious? Wouldn’t you wonder, as you glanced into the area from a highway overpass on your way to and from work, what was really going on? Wouldn’t you get tired of having to detour around such a region? I suppose the honest answer for most of us is actually “no.” That is exactly what we do. We accept it. We grow numb. We watch the local news, which convinces us, daily, not to go there. Typically, society’s decision makers don’t even live close enough to experience the spillover along the edges. For them, the problem is an entirely abstract one.
The current mantra of the left is that the real problem is one of increasing economic inequality. This is to say, it’s all the fault of the rich. This is very dubious too. While the middle class have gotten poorer, the poor have not. Frankly, there aren’t any problems I’m aware of that are the fault of the rich collectively. We do have an ongoing monetary crisis which is, in large part, the fault of a poorly regulated banking sector. Too much money has been made in an entirely non-productive way, by simply shifting complex bets around. That really is a serious problem, but it is not the fault of the rich as a class. It is the fault of a very small number of very large banks, and of a government whose complicity transcends party lines. Still, to listen to the rhetoric of the Democratic Party, one would imagine that the entire top one percent (minus the Democratic leadership and a few of their exempted friends) held a fiendish conference every now and then – specifically to plan ways to maximize the suffering of the rest of us. While it is always nice to have someone to hate, and it has been a useful rhetorical tool in recent elections, blindly laying the blame at the feet of the wealthy is a form of economic suicide. Raise a generation to hate capitalism reflexively, and you will drive whatever energy is left in the economy somewhere else. Like it or not, capitalism, for all of its faults, is the organizing principle of American society. This is a market economy. The goods and services that get produced are the ones that people want. You may hate your boss, but, difficult as it may be, you have the option of quitting and taking your labor elsewhere. Beat capitalism to death, and we leave government to manage every retail business and every factory. We may find we get only what the central planners decide we need, and work when and where they decide we ought to work. We may find that the State, surprisingly, does not need many web designers or college professors. While it is obvious that some regulation is now necessary – the banking crisis being only one indicator of this need – a full blown anti-capitalist mass movement is likely to eliminate poverty only by making it universal.
In all fairness, I have no positive solution to propose. There are, of course, draconian solutions. The draconian solution of the left, as noted above, is Communism. When all are poor then none are poor. Even in this most entropic of political states, however, there are always at least two classes: the people on the one hand – and the planners on the other. The endgame of the left is an ironically simplified example of the inequality it claims to abhor. At the right end of the spectrum, we could simply pull the rug out from under the unproductive. If you’re a child born in the wrong place to the wrong parents – hard luck. Thrive or die. Society, in this view, is a state of nature with a little glitter added. Appalled as I am at the arrogance and blindness of central planning, the hardest of the hard approaches also manifests the very disease it would attempt to cure. If the disease of unproductivity has its roots in human selfishness, then so would its elimination by starving it unfeelingly to death.
I think it is fair to say that we got into to this predicament through the unintended consequences of good intentions. That is the ongoing comedy of humankind. While I cannot suggest a method to unwind our mistakes – I believe that at least admitting they were mistakes would be a good beginning.
So, what are some things we can reasonably claim to know about the social transformation of the United States over the last eighty years or so – not from ideological argument, but from brute, observable fact? That’s a big topic, I know, but let’s just pick out a few salient points.
First, I think any non-delusional person would have to admit that both the civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement accomplished their principle goals. Although there is plenty of sturm und drang about voter ID initiatives, any U.S. citizen who is legally qualified to vote can do so. He or she might have to wait in line or suffer some minor inconvenience at the polls, but, allowing for a handful of irregularities here and there (the manipulations of both of the major political parties) everybody gets to vote. Likewise, although there isn’t perfect equality in employment opportunities, virtually no perspective employer is going to flatly deny a woman or a member of a minority a job on the basis of gender or race. A few employers might still harbor such prejudices privately, but, in practice, they live in terror of the law. The vast majority of the public, liberal and conservative, north and south, have internalized these social changes even if a few people quietly don’t like them. We did elect a black president – didn’t we? No woman has attained that office yet, but I can’t imagine any significant number of people objecting to a woman president on the basis of her gender alone. Cultures change. Really – they do.
The largely liberal project of eliminating poverty has, on the other hand, been an abysmal failure. The public policy of vast and various public welfare programs has moved us no closer to the elimination of poverty, regardless of the race or ethnicity of the recipients in question. Consider urban poverty alone. Almost every city in America is divided into two discrete if unofficial zones – a zone of safety, where the middle class and wealthy live, and a danger zone, where prudent people do not go. This is a fact. No matter how liberal or how conservative you are, odds are pretty good that, if you’re middle class or above and you live in a city, there are large parts of it you have never visited and rarely think about. Most people are little more familiar with the poorer, more crime ridden halves of their own cities than they are with the interior regions of New Guinea. These defacto ghettoes have not gotten any smaller in the last eighty years, but have actually gotten larger in most places. They are by no means the sole province of black Americans – their constituent populations vary in accordance with location – but, wherever they are and whoever inhabits them, those inhabitants are the chief consumers of most forms of government relief. Such places are a standing monument to the failure of such programs to eliminate poverty.
The continued presence of urban ghettos is a fact. Explaining their continued presence is a more speculative matter. That being said, the idea that we simply need to pour more money into existing programs to overcome the problem is highly suspect. Both the major political parties, surprisingly, cling to a single false belief regarding this issue. This belief is that human beings are naturally industrious, and if they are given a Democratic floor of support on one hand, or a Republican tax holiday on the other, they will seize the opportunity to become productive citizens. This is an astonishingly naïve view. We do not assume that people who live on investments really care about being productive citizens. The state lotteries thrive on the millions of middle class and working poor Americans who would love to become instant millionaires and quit their jobs. A work ethic is a learned value, not a genetic imperative. Human beings, by nature, will rarely do more than is necessary to achieve the conditions they find tolerable. Put a solid floor of entitlements under any group of humans, regardless of their race or ethnicity, and quite a few of them will find that floor acceptable and sleep there. The first generation will feel that they have won the lottery; successive generations will be acculturated to non-productivity as the norm. Make the floor a higher standard of living than one could achieve by unskilled labor, and only a handful of the most ambitious will ever climb off. While jobs programs are a better answer in theory, in conjunction with the dole their impact is largely nullified. Further, short of direct public employment programs like Roosevelt’s WPA, they have never created any substantial number of jobs. While ideological conservatives may be dubious about tinkering with the economy, Republicans have occasionally exercised a certain pseudo-Keynesian streak in the establishment of low-tax free enterprise zones – with predictably negligible results. None of it has worked. Having produced a substantial body of people who find no shame in the dole, and who are not resigned to a more-or-less arduous life of full time legal employment that the rest of us endure, we, as a society, have created a serious problem.
Perhaps more interesting than the problem itself is the collective refusal to even recognize it. Consider it in purely geographical terms. If someone fenced off an area of several square miles of city just a few blocks from your home and told you they were conducting a social experiment inside – wouldn’t you be curious? Wouldn’t you wonder, as you glanced into the area from a highway overpass on your way to and from work, what was really going on? Wouldn’t you get tired of having to detour around such a region? I suppose the honest answer for most of us is actually “no.” That is exactly what we do. We accept it. We grow numb. We watch the local news, which convinces us, daily, not to go there. Typically, society’s decision makers don’t even live close enough to experience the spillover along the edges. For them, the problem is an entirely abstract one.
The current mantra of the left is that the real problem is one of increasing economic inequality. This is to say, it’s all the fault of the rich. This is very dubious too. While the middle class have gotten poorer, the poor have not. Frankly, there aren’t any problems I’m aware of that are the fault of the rich collectively. We do have an ongoing monetary crisis which is, in large part, the fault of a poorly regulated banking sector. Too much money has been made in an entirely non-productive way, by simply shifting complex bets around. That really is a serious problem, but it is not the fault of the rich as a class. It is the fault of a very small number of very large banks, and of a government whose complicity transcends party lines. Still, to listen to the rhetoric of the Democratic Party, one would imagine that the entire top one percent (minus the Democratic leadership and a few of their exempted friends) held a fiendish conference every now and then – specifically to plan ways to maximize the suffering of the rest of us. While it is always nice to have someone to hate, and it has been a useful rhetorical tool in recent elections, blindly laying the blame at the feet of the wealthy is a form of economic suicide. Raise a generation to hate capitalism reflexively, and you will drive whatever energy is left in the economy somewhere else. Like it or not, capitalism, for all of its faults, is the organizing principle of American society. This is a market economy. The goods and services that get produced are the ones that people want. You may hate your boss, but, difficult as it may be, you have the option of quitting and taking your labor elsewhere. Beat capitalism to death, and we leave government to manage every retail business and every factory. We may find we get only what the central planners decide we need, and work when and where they decide we ought to work. We may find that the State, surprisingly, does not need many web designers or college professors. While it is obvious that some regulation is now necessary – the banking crisis being only one indicator of this need – a full blown anti-capitalist mass movement is likely to eliminate poverty only by making it universal.
In all fairness, I have no positive solution to propose. There are, of course, draconian solutions. The draconian solution of the left, as noted above, is Communism. When all are poor then none are poor. Even in this most entropic of political states, however, there are always at least two classes: the people on the one hand – and the planners on the other. The endgame of the left is an ironically simplified example of the inequality it claims to abhor. At the right end of the spectrum, we could simply pull the rug out from under the unproductive. If you’re a child born in the wrong place to the wrong parents – hard luck. Thrive or die. Society, in this view, is a state of nature with a little glitter added. Appalled as I am at the arrogance and blindness of central planning, the hardest of the hard approaches also manifests the very disease it would attempt to cure. If the disease of unproductivity has its roots in human selfishness, then so would its elimination by starving it unfeelingly to death.
I think it is fair to say that we got into to this predicament through the unintended consequences of good intentions. That is the ongoing comedy of humankind. While I cannot suggest a method to unwind our mistakes – I believe that at least admitting they were mistakes would be a good beginning.
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