Because You Never Asked

 

(2/11)

     One of the great fads of American socio-economic thinking is currently living its salad days in the name of “libertarianism”. I say “fad” because it is a philosophical concept inapplicable to the complex world we live in and cannot go beyond the rhetoric stage if a huge, technologically advanced, intricate society is to function. When it comes to libertarians, it is almost as if the expression “be careful for what you wish for” was coined with them in mind.

     Let’s start with the game of basketball. Perhaps none of our modern sports less resembles its origins than the contemporary game of basketball. If the sport’s founder, Dr. Naismith, could have foreseen the pogo stick quality of today’s players, he’d have hung his peach basket 5 feet higher. What was once a more controlled game played in closer harmony with gravity has now become a stampeding frenzy of gazelle-like acrobatics that has rendered my father’s deadly two hand set shot to the scrap heap of history.

     I can’t speak for the game’s most remote beginnings, but for almost the whole history of basketball the 2 man officiating crew was the norm. Then, about 20 years ago, the realization that the speed and tempo of the game had evolved to a point where 2 generally middle aged officials were having a hard time riding herd over the trampolining athleticism of the young impalas, became evident. Rather than waste the experience and know how of these battle tested officials, it was decided to add one more body to their crew, making 3 the norm.

     I include this brief synopsis of basketball history in order to emphasize the absurdity of the libertarian point of view in an ever more crowded, fast moving, technologically connected, complex world. If we were to apply the libertarian idea to the sport of basketball, they’d have taken away one official. In fact! (cue Howard Cosell) let’s tell it like it is: they’d probably want to get rid of all the officials and let the players referee themselves.

     How do you think that would work in Madison Square Garden?

     These principles would apply to how a libertarian sees government. “Government” is another way to say how our whole socio-economic system is administered, or, if you may, refereed. The libertarian wants less and less refereeing, in spite of the fact that the game has changed exponentially since The Founders invented the country. Libertarians want to live by principles more applicable to colonial America than contemporary America .

     Libertarians seem to ignore that almost all laws (all?) are a response to a heretofore unforeseen condition that has become problematic. If anyone out there can show me a law that anticipated a problem still to come, you know where to find me. Laws are responsive, not anticipatory. When automobiles were invented, their numbers were so minimal any rules pertaining to their use were inexistent. When they became more prevalent, it was evident this free for all had to end. Every time you stop at a red light or stop sign, you are giving up some freedom. When America was a sprawling, basically uninhabited place, you could homestead a piece of land, build a house and do whatever you damn well pleased with it. But guess what? Other people started to show up, housing tracts and residential neighborhoods began to form, and how would you like it if the guy next door opened a nightclub or body shop? Voila! Zoning laws. And then the industrial might of the nation went through puberty and grew into a strong, powerful being. This increased industrial capacity needed a place to dump its waste and the river we used to swim in began to take on diarrhea-like qualities. An important watershed was threatened. Holy crap! Environmental laws.

     In each and every case, a law limiting our behavior became necessary. If the common good the law seeks to protect has more weight than the slither of freedom we relinquish to it, then it should be instituted. This does not mean all laws are good. Some are administered poorly, some are antiquated, some are not worth what they cost, and some are just plain bad ideas. But that is a function of good or bad government, which is a function of who the citizenry elects to govern them. It is not a function of whether we should or should not have laws. This is almost an issue that is mathematical in nature: the more complex a society is, the more administration it will need.

     The current financial crisis the country is deeply mired in is a perfect example of this. Our most imposing private financial institutions were allowed to act in a reckless, even criminal manner (will somebody go see if William Holder, Esq., Attorney General of the United States , is still on vacation). Starting from the days of St. Ronald of Hollywood, the biggest fraud ever deified by American folklore, the referees for this game were being systematically eliminated, until what was left was almost ceremonial. Who needs officials when that mirage-like concept known as the “market” can take care of it?

     We all know the results of this policy and the myopic libertarians are correct in attacking the government, but they are doing it for the wrong reasons. They should not be attacking government as the problem; they should be attacking government for not doing its job! Meanwhile, the financial shysters at the tippy top of the economic pyramid, the ones responsible for this disaster, the ones for whom the government does not want to govern, are not even a remote blip on the libertarian radar screen.

     These financial moguls must be laughing their butts off at the Bob Hope Country Clubs they hang out in.

     It is difficult to talk about libertarians and not talk about taxes. A dose of gonorrhea is more palatable to a libertarian than the thought of paying taxes. There seems to be a disconnect here. The average libertarian will hop in the car, get out on the roads, cross a bridge here and there, send his kids to school, play a little ball on the softball field in the park, etc., etc., and somehow thinks this all exists through some kind of spontaneous generation. Now is the time to say the following: the citizens of the United States of America are not being overly taxed. As I’ve listened to the debates and discourse revolving around all the socio-economic issues now relevant in the United States and the world, it seems the most oft-used measure of tax burden is to compare the revenue raised against the Gross National Product. As I write, you’d have to go all the way back to 1950 to find a moment in American history when the percentage of taxes paid was lower against GNP than it is now. Let me translate that --- we paid more taxes in 1951 than we do now, and that was before Medicare!

     You don’t have to be a libertarian to legitimately question and complain about how our taxes are used and administered. It seems relevant for anyone to vociferously complain about who pays what (though the myopic libertarians don’t seem to complain about that). But a libertarian is questioning the whole concept of taxation. In a complex, modern nation-state, that is just plain silly.

     And that gets me where I’d like to go with this essay. I ask the reader to ponder the following question: what is the greatest accomplishment of modern capitalism? (Cue the music from the game show “Jeopardy”). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

     “OK, your answer please”.

     An anguished contestant scrunches his face in thought --- “What is --- Viagra?”

     Ooonnnkk! “No, I’m sorry. The correct answer is --- the Social Contract or safety net it has been able to construct”.

     The fact that this system has created enough wealth so that a certain percentage of it can actually be set aside in a cooperative effort to provide the dignified minimal standard of life spoken about earlier in this work (see essay, “The Excrement Hits the Fan”), is a monumental accomplishment. If liberty and freedom is the Valhalla of a libertarian’s mindset, their scorn for the government (people’s) administered Social Contract is a grave error. Such things as universal health care, day care and pre-school, access to higher education through cheap loans and scholarships, old age pensions, minimum wages, housing subsidies, and other accoutrements of such an idea, create more options in life for a vast block of society that would never have such opportunity. It weakens class barriers and encourages more social mobility. On the contrary, in a modern corporate environment, the libertarian idea does more to strangle freedom than enhance it. Its every man for himself attitude always creates an ever more concentrated mass of oligargic wealth in fewer and fewer hands, a concept that is complemented by an ever increasing, generation to generation underbelly with less ability to defend its interests. In the end, the libertarian idea, in today’s modern state, puts more people in shackles.

     But I’ll go even further. In so doing, I’ll have to switch to the third person.

     Over the course of the last few years, Post Consumer Man has been quite pragmatic in discussing the issues set forth by the financial crisis beginning in 2008. His thoughts, concepts, ideas and such have been confined to the framework of contemporary corporate capitalism because this is something that is not going away soon; this is where the bat hits the ball. However, when that last tweet is twittered on the I-phone of modern history, PCM’s goal is to move us towards a new paradigm for life, one no longer based upon the idiotic, destructive incentives of the current economic system. As the years have gone by and this mass of dubious philosophical patter begins its flirtation with 1000 pages, PCM has never found a better word to describe the lunacy of our current socio-economic mindset than “consumerism”. The Rube Goldberg qualities of a system whose only focus is the sale and possession of more and more superfluous “stuff”, is creating an almost neurotic state we’ve begun to accept as normal. We’ve truly invented a monstrosity of colossal dimensions, a complex, overly complicated, tedious machine meant to accomplish the simple task of keeping us happy. The stress needed to maintain this machine is thwarting that goal.

    And this is where a libertarian should become a brother of Post Consumer Man. If we could somehow (cue Jim Morrison) “break on through to the other side” and leave this adolescent stage of human development behind; if we could undo the exaggerated complexity the current economic system demands in playing the “consumerism” game; if we could develop more mature, spiritual incentives for human fulfillment, the libertarian idea becomes a more harmonious bi-product of such. In such a world, government can become that odorless, colorless liquid a libertarian might relate to. It becomes an anonymous administer of the Earth’s resources, rather than a vehicle for ambition and greed in a hyper-material world. If libertarians want less of a role for government, they should think of themselves a “post-consumerists” rather than libertarians.

     What libertarians don’t seem to understand is that their creed cannot exist in harmony with the complex subterfuges of corporate capitalism. You cannot have one with the other. But in a “post-consumerist” world ---

     Welcome aboard.