A Liberal Rant

I wrote a book, Natural Selection’s Paradox, wherein I examined some crucial aspects of natural selection that Darwin’s epic discovery does not address. I do not fault Darwin for that. Finding acceptance for natural selection was difficult enough—still is— without discussing what that algorithm does not accomplish. Having done as much research, reflection, and writing as objectively as I could, I now vent my frustration with some of the more disturbing aspects of the current effort to dethrone reason.
Rant number one: that there can ever be such a thing as no government.
Indeed, we can dispense with civil government overnight, as many have done. Somalia comes to mind. The conservative rant against civil government, particularly an elected government, causes the blood to boil. Is Somalia the model we want to follow? The rule of the gun has always provided the alternative to civil government. Warlords sell their services to the highest bidder. Money rules the gun and the gun is not the only means of exploiting other people. Money itself provides an effective means.
Much of what I witness coming out of Washington appears to foster just that: the supremacy of money. Civil government becomes an instrument of repression when ruled by money. For the Supreme Court to give corporations the status of citizens and lobbyist a First Amendment right to buy government favors an elite more effectively than the gun. Under these circumstances, we do not live in a liberal democracy.
Hence, liberals find themselves impotent because they must pretend that they live in a liberal democracy, ignoring the post Civil War sub-rosa fight to maintain white, male, Christian, heterosexual supremacy. That counter-revolution against all things liberal, starting with the Constitution itself through the Civil Rights Acts, cannot be defeated by compromise or bipartisanship. Revolutions take no prisoners.
Rant number two: Managing money can solve all problems.
The mantra of conservative economics since Milton Friedman has been deregulation, privatization, and cutting taxes—the road to no government, in which all money ends up in the hands of an elite. Under that plan, money trickles up. The economy becomes a giant monopoly game.
The fallacy of neo-liberal economics follows from the fantasy that money is wealth, not just a credit mechanism. If wasting resources makes money, guess what will happen to resources. Instead of managing resources for survival, money manages resources for its own purposes. The elite that wants no government, outside the protection of private property and guarantees for their profits, reaps the benefits.
Rant number three: no taxes.
I would prefer the system in Venezuela where the government owns everything below ground and makes its money selling oil and minerals and collects no taxes. That way one pays according to how much they consume rather than how well they play the game. But that is not where we live.
We live in a capitalist economy. Capitalism is the business of turning real wealth into paper wealth as fast as possible. The new capital accumulates in the direction of bigness. Money makes more money. At the same time, technology is employed to reduce costs, mostly labor costs. The result is a giant monopoly game that eventually ends with so many chips in so few hands that the economy stalls.
Capitalism fails absent a serious redistribution of wealth—trickle-down in a big way. The monopoly game does not do that. If machines put people out of work, the machines must pay a tax (through the owners) to support the unemployed and to provide infrastructure for new work. Only taxes can provide timely, sufficient funds for that purpose. That brings me to the next rant.
Rant number four: hope lies in the service economy, buying new gadgets, and creating bubbles.
The service economy is supposed to take up the slack in employment created by exporting manufacturing overseas. More lawyers, real estate agents, administrators, nail polishers, stockbrokers, bankers, and a host of other services provide the answer. Beyond a certain point, that yields a lot of middlemen and other inflationary skimming off the top. Service employment creates inflation when it does not serve people who actually produce necessities. No assets, like lumber, are produced to justify printing more money.
And then there is the famous entrepreneur. Just give the inventive, new idea people their head and they will invent something everyone will want to buy and we will all be saved. Forget that most of those things will use up huge amounts of energy and materials and add nothing but ways to kill time, increase credit card debt, and force women out of the home for jobs to pay for it.
Rather than free up our time, technology has us working ever-longer hours to create more capital (money). Budgets increase while it gets harder to keep up with what you have, let alone the new things you must have. Few have any time for their children. Everyone has to have a job, regardless of how useless it is. Pooling resources to produce maximum efficiency and sharing the results would allow for more time to educate, exercise, and enjoy life. Instead, we have a victim economy where people’s misfortunes or errors become cannon fodder for a “service” economy.
Creating more service jobs and selling nonessential gadgets goes hand-in-hand with bubble economies. The ever more powerful computer, the ever increasing in value house, the ever larger automobile, and keeping up with the Joneses supports growth—the answer to all economic problems. Never ending growth posits a world without gravity.
We will never evade entropy but we can minimize it with synergetic designs. Divisions of labor based on merit and on what individuals do best, where all share in the result, provide an environment where efficient use of resources may flourish. We are what we adapt to. Competition for money brings out the ruthless, wasteful side of our nature.
Rant number five: the trashing of the welfare state.
As in communism and socialism, the welfare state provides the devil responsible for all evils. Communism never existed outside of theory—was co-opted by despots—and socialism never existed in a pure form. Those theories are used as foils for scaring people away from a collective solution. The American pathology consists of the belief that making it possible for people to make it really big—the second hundred million dollars—fosters excellence and prosperity. Instead, the ruthless and greedy prosper. Adequate regulations for stopping that result are suspect. We are what we adapt to.
The followers of Ayn Rand loathe the idea that survival requires collective endeavors. A society that provides the infrastructure, education, and health care needed for all to survive frees people to improve themselves. The ethic of everyone for himself or herself creates a war of all against all, wasting peoples’ potential and lives. If not for the welfare of all, what good is a state, other than to serve an elite? Who is the richer: the one who can depend on their neighbors, or the one who must, to feel safe, carve out a fortune by any means?
Rant number six: We are the chosen of God.
Nothing excuses the war of all against all like the belief that one belongs to a group chosen by God, my tribe over all others.
The thesis of my book addresses a critical fact that Darwin did not address: natural selection does not distinguish short-term adaptations from long-term adaptations in the short term. That algorithm picks no favorites. If the short-term adaptation uses up the resources required for the long-term adaptation before people discover their error, extinction follows. Only survival of the species, not the tribe, provides a time frame adequate for deciding the efficacy of an adaptation.
Final rant: Capitalism is a miserable failure.
This heresy flies in the face of current opinion that capitalism has bettered all contenders, provides the basis of freedom, and is responsible for prosperity. None can draw these conclusions as anything but transient if they adopt survival of the species as the foundation of ethics and survival; the signs of failure are everywhere.
Sophisticated and complex divisions of labor that accompanied the Industrial Revolution required a means of exchange—money. Barter no longer served as it did in agrarian societies. Money provides the means of preserving ones labor, a means of barter for whatever one needs. Those who control physical wealth use it for the same purpose. Sell your oil for money and you have something you can barter for almost anything else.
“Capitalism” trades resources for money and then treats the money as something equivalent to resources. The means of that conversion can be very subtle. The use of public transportation by most people would save huge amounts of resources and energy. The use of millions of cars creates more money and big cars command bigger profit margins than little ones. Strategies for creating virtual capital increase entropy.
All economies in the industrial world, whether called capitalist or not, employ the turning of wealth into money paradigm. People were forced to adapt to making money and became capitalists involuntarily. Capitalism did not prove itself the better adaptation for the future. It physically co-opted everyone by elevating money to the status of real wealth, not just a medium of exchange. Money played some very dirty tricks in its rise. Liberalism did not fail. It was sabotaged. In America, politicians measure everything in terms of dollars, not survival of the species. One’s prosperity often turns on whom that government subsidizes in its calculations for distributing wealth. One person’s freedom to make money can be another person’s burden.
The virtual economy cannibalizes the future (as well as people’s misery) by turning everything into virtual wealth that has no intrinsic value. Treating money as capital, equal if not superior to labor and resources, fuels an expansionism that cannot be sustained. Survival depends on equilibrium, not on the prominence of artificial wealth.
The ultimate rant: People suffer fools by fooling themselves.
If the meek shall inherit the earth, they have been waiting a long time. Instead of demanding fairness, many in our country meekly accept more work for less pay and higher costs for fewer services while an elite becomes exponentially richer. One fears the specter of a population so demoralized by the primacy of money that society has accepted lords, ladies, and serfs as the natural order of things, just as our recent ancestors accepted hereditary kings as the natural order of things. Crowns are no longer made of gold. Crowns are made of paper that burns those who resist its hegemony.
The new natural order has put the American Revolution in reverse. No longer being a nation of farmers, a “tea party” protests the very taxes we need to survive, in the process serving a private elite that taxes us with impunity through exorbitant credit card interest rates and other means. Wall Street is allowed to gamble with other people’s money, which only the government can stop but government is on the chopping block. Fools suffer from their own delusions. Good government does not come cheap. People have to pay for it and, more to the point, fight for it.