We Need First Principles to Avoid Becoming a Nation of Beggars

Lincoln opined that useful debate required an agreement on first principles. He must have observed that without common goals people talk past one another as if they were speaking in different tongues. People cannot agree on means without first agreeing on ends. The failure of democratic institutions in America evolved largely out of a failure to even discuss first principles, without which problem solving dissolves into power struggles and the erosion of trust. Freedom of speech has little meaning when people only speak to gain a result. Deception becomes the norm. Opinion and self-interest trump facts.
Religion offered a location for first principles and many still cling to faith to fill the void left without these principles. But belief in an omnipotent creator does not satisfy the need for first principles. Authority, as the dispenser of reality, does not recognize any truths other than its own. The people who benefit most from a lack of first principles are authority figures, the wealthy and the powerful, or what I call “The Money Tribe.” The power they possess permits them to make policy uninhibited by a standard for judging that policy. Hence, the money-controlled media discourages any debate on first principles. Money, as the first principle, is divisive. The competition for it creates a war of all against all and another form of tribalism—the Money Tribe versus everyone else in the great zero-sum game.
How do first principles function? The mind generates a great many thoughts, some of which will come into conflict with one another. Without prioritization, confusion will trouble our thoughts. First principles are the ideas given the highest priority. They become the absolutes to which everything else relates. As such, they become the basis for making decisions as well as the basis of fundamental political conflict. Does good government protect the poor from the rich or must it protect the rich from the poor?
Some hold that government protects the poor from the rich by enforcing civil rights and protects the rich from the poor by protecting private property. Civil rights have little to do with the economy but private property has everything to do with the economy. The propagandists of greed have managed to suppress any real discussion of class. Creating today’s primary value in America, the ability of the ambitious to make it really big, justifies the silence. According to that paradigm, God rewards the righteous with financial success as well as spiritual fulfillment. Government regulations are therefore unnecessary, if not evil. The market knows best. The foregoing beliefs are seldom disclosed, certainly not in the press, because they provide only a thinly disguised apology for stealing other people’s labor.
The consequences of government’s withdrawal from regulation, particularly of the means of production, and a lack of prioritization of human needs has permitted a successful war on labor that threatens to turn America into a land of beggars. Marx presciently observed that the means of production determines the fabric of society. In the years of America ’s vibrant economy, wages supported discretionary spending. People could buy things they did not need. A real economy, the production of necessary goods and services, provided the foundation. Thanks to the Marshall Plan, Europe enjoyed a similar experience, which supported international trade.
And then came the technologies, digital production and huge transports, that permitted manufacture of almost anything almost anywhere. Labor found itself bargaining for lower wages to compete with third-world labor costs. Discretionary income shrank and America no longer, outside of agriculture, produced many necessities. People went into debt to continue buying what they did not need. Government went into debt bailing-out the failures, making the rich richer, and supporting a military-industrial-complex that has become a significant portion of the economy. Unemployment insurance and permanent warfare compete for tax dollars. Now that labor has been successfully cannibalized, the middle class is next. The price of schools, health care, insurance, and government will destroy their savings and reduce the number of high-paying jobs.
No one, including the far left, will discuss the systemic problems facing the economy: exporting the real economy, exhausting resources, automated means of production, and allowing growth, growth, growth to evolve into the supremacy of oligarchies. How do we avoid the evolution of corporate feudalism where a handful prospers and the rest endure poverty? This will occur if the present downward spiral continues. Depressed buying power, higher costs, and less employment create schemes for getting money from people without giving value. Someone wins and someone loses when nothing of value is produced. Only money changes hands in zero-sum games.
There is a reason for the dramatic transfer of wealth in progress. For 200 years, industrial economies have employed the algorithm I call the “Ethic of the Machine:” Take as much wealth from the earth as possible with as little labor as possible. Technology has successfully applied that algorithm to the point where most people produce nothing while the side effects of the machines do much harm to the environment. The enemy may not be the politics of the people next door. Modernity’s curse is its success. Machines produce more with less labor but the remaining labor does not share in the increased productivity. The owners of the machines have to recover their costs and expect more profit as their reward for the investment.
Automated means of production create other problems. Millions of years of evolution taught us, among other things, how to use our hands. Work that satisfies marries craft and intellect. Mass production and games played for money produce little satisfaction. Worse yet under the dominance of the machine, labor lost its bargaining power as well as satisfying work. The right of financiers and owners to most of the profits has replaced the moral right that Lincoln saw as the right of one to the profits earned by the sweat of their brow. Metaphorically, the machines provide the sweat. Therein lies the seed of industrial feudalism. Labor subsidizes the true cost of machines.
The new feudalism is made possible by ignoring in economics what the Constitution recognizes in government: No branch of government is allowed overriding power. Yet, individuals (and corporations) are permitted overwhelming economic power, enough to buy small governments and materially influence big ones. Only taxes and regulations can prevent such distortions of power. Capitalism does not work without massive redistribution of wealth and the suppression of oligarchies. The economy functioned at its best in the 1950s when progressive taxes were the norm. At that time, no one could own more than a handful of radio or television stations. Campaign spending was much smaller. Power was not as centralized. Significant taxes and regulations provide part of the fabric of a democracy in a market economy. Government should protect people from the excesses of wealth and poverty.
Instead, we have a Supreme Court which holds that money talks and that political spending must go unregulated. The media has fallen into a few hands. “No taxes, no government” comprises virtually the sole agenda of conservative politics. The new feudalism has arrived. Americans are so misinformed by the media that they live in a fantasy world sown by the propaganda that money is wealth and God’s reward, government and taxes are evil, and making it big is the purpose of life. Nothing may interfere with that purpose in a free society. These are not the first principles of a free people. They provide the constructs justifying a few getting rich at the expense of the many. Social and economic justice requires first principles based on equality and the well being of as many people as possible.
Mr. Stroud is the author of the book, Natural Selection’s Paradox: The Outlaw Gene, the Religions of Money, and the Origin of Evil. His essays written after publication are found in the blog: naturalselectionsparadox.blogspot.com.