ECONOMIC
SLAVERY
In the search for the energy required to
survive, two strategies compete for dominance. One strategy employs cooperation
by divisions of labor based on merit (who can do the job best) where all share
in the labor and the distribution of the results. Historically, this has been
the most efficient means of production and of achieving a democratic social
order. Social justice is difficult to achieve (or even agree upon) and easily
corrupted.
The other strategy employs the appropriation
of other people’s labor by force (slavery), deception, or class systems that
define who has the right to steal other people’s labor (sanctioned extortion). The
contest between cooperation (and sharing) and extortion has driven the struggle
for social justice for centuries. Does natural selection determine which strategy
dominates or are there other factors?
I ask that question because the argument
between social justice advocates and free market advocates effectively renders
people helpless to act on anything. Many consider the free market an
independent force that government or anything else cannot and should not
restrain. The fallacy of a free market as an independent force (like gravity)
that governs economic realities has long been exploded.* In fact, markets do
not define forces. They are defined by forces instituted by governments and
those with the resources that private property and contracts create.
Clearly, markets do not define intrinsic
values, the very thing needed to keep markets free of abusive practices that
power can easily exploit. As the founding fathers expressed it, without a moral
code of ethics, democracy would fail again.
The argument that government must be kept
at a minimum offers no solutions because the market does not define any intrinsic
values—only money. Profit provides the measure of all values. Making money is
sanctioned regardless of how it is done. As a result, the folklore, the stories
we tell ourselves to justify a culture of greed, acquire the authority of a
religion—disclose God’s plan.
One must prove themselves worthy of God in
a merciless competition for money. God loves the winners and spurns the losers.
Like natural selection, such contests may improve the specie’s short-term
adaptations. The losers provide the sacrifice necessary to maintain inequality.
Comparisons with natural selection miss the point. Natural selection has no
favorite value. It has rules, like diversity, that determine survival in any
given environment. Short-term algorithms that use up long-term resources result
in extinction.
Life is the only value that may serve as
a means of identifying intrinsic values. The culture now in command blasphemes.
It sacrifices life for power. Despair follows because the Faith requires a belief
that we can survive as individuals without making others pay the price of our
survival. Most religions treat despair as the cardinal sin. Without the Faith,
there is no hope of social justice.
Natural selection provides an explanation
for these unfortunate propensities. Define God as whatever we believe we must
adapt to in order to survive and the result explains despair by way of the
religion of money. Until recently, people were forced to adapt to the real world of finding food
and fuel. Now that virtual reality and other technologies has us adapting to
the business of finding money for everything we need (a games economy), money
is the thing we must adapt to. Nothing serves that purpose better than the free
market theory. We are what we adapt to. We know the price of everything and the
value of nothing.
I will not repeat the well-established
facts demonstrating just how prevalent sanctioned extortion has become in
America.* I marvel at the fact that stand-up comedians do not joke about turning
the government over to the mafia as a way of improving efficiency and a better
distribution of wealth. Legal extortion far outstrips illegal extortion; hence
the general ill-feeling in America. Something is wrong and we feel it. Big
money gets supported and the poor pay.
As with comedians, what happened to the
hue and cry we observed in the civil rights movement? The explanation lies in
the culture described at the beginning of this essay. Culture has the power to
shape thought, even to the point where people will abandon logic and
self-interest—like ending social security and universal health care. If God
tells us that something is bad for us it overrules the mere laws and
understandings of humans—a perfect environment for despots to invade.
People seldom recognize the motivation
behind such inconsistencies. For many, they merely provide apologies for greed.
Conservative think-tanks spend millions on propaganda to convince people that
the poor deserve their fate and that government aid weakens the race. The
result has been a serious erosion of the empathy supporting the Faith, social
justice. and participation in public affairs. Most people do not even vote.
Herein lies the explanation for the power
a small group of conservatives have gained in the last 60 years. They have
taken over school boards, local governments, publishing and civic organizations
to make grass root appeals more effective. Teachers are not allowed to teach
anything not agreed upon by everyone. Logic and science are pre-empted.
Children are bored to death and everyone is afraid because these conservatives
take no prisoners.
Every election cycle the Republican party
provides, for your amusement, candidates less convincing than the last group that
they know anything at all. But they know their catechism well. The God of money
prevails and not a word is spoken of
social justice or the survival of the species under the ravages of technology.
The basis for judging social justice
flows from our experiences with other people and the consequences of our and
their actions. Given that we do not inherit the same genes or families,
statistics do not produce a clear means of comparing the well-being of
individuals. Many people do not need a second car.
We all develop a sense of fair play that
governs our view of what is right and who behaves accordingly. To gain our
acceptance, laws and other protocols must not violate the standards we set for
justice that our experience has determined is fair. Many relationships today
break that rule. In particular, I refer the reader to the religion of money
described here. It makes the new relative slavery ethic that I discuss here
acceptable in spite of its failure to treat everyone as an equal under God.
Equality lies at the center of social
justice. Counting possessions does not measure equality. Social justice
requires equal treatment under the law, a right to the fruits of our labor, and
the right to express our beliefs. A marketplace permits simplistic answers to
the kind of questions equality raises. Markets have little to say about ethics
or morality. There is a market for stealing other people’s labor which
generates a good deal of conflicts and great loss, not the least of which is
the ability to trust the people you rely upon.
Equality means little where some people
possess the right to appropriate other people’s labor, which often occurs when
someone takes an unreasonable share of the profits of someone else’s labor. Slavery
is obvious. Relative slavery is hidden in the games elites may play for money.
People or enterprises that must accept insufficient
compensation to maintain the laborers or their children suffer a slave
relationship. The recipients of the undervalued results of that labor simply
argue that the market for labor dictated the result, even where the profits for
the recipients were enormous. The forces of greed manipulate that market to
justify the extortion ethic. Capitalism is moving in that direction for the
sake of a handful of people able to accumulate wealth.
Labor, like other means of production,
requires some level of capital to function. In the case of labor—food, cloths,
heat, and education. Slaves work for less. Their masters make huge sums of
money by gaming finance produce nothing at all except more money games.
I cannot help asking the question why
anybody needs the second hundred million dollars for any other reason than ego
and power—power to manipulate finance and labor. CEOs, among others, do not
make corporations successful any more often than they make them fail for their
own profit. The masters of the game have given us an extortion-based economy
that now depends on bubbles to keep the money flowing. Yet a huge military
budget is still needed to keep the money
flowing.
Wall Street’s need for cash has fathered
high risk instruments of credit supported by huge conflicts of interest and
tax-payer bail-outs when the schemes fail. Regulators retire from government
and become lobbyists for the industry they were regulating—not a good
environment for social justice.
Those games have developed so quickly and
the power that they impose on finance and politics is so great that it casts doubt
on the ability to reverse the trend. The resulting disparity of wealth that damaged
the greatest economy ever was accomplished by reductions in taxes and increases
in subsidies for the rich. The disparity in wealth is so great that only
increases in taxes and reductions in subsidies can restore the general welfare
now in danger.
Politically this is no longer possible. Big
money can buy too much. What is missing, that which restrained such use of
power in the past, is a moral compass and intellectual honesty. Intellectual
honesty must overcome the lies that increase the chances of winning the game.
Intellectual honesty is not infallible. A moral compass must resolve the
critical issues. What should the moral compass define?
We are what we adapt to. I cannot say it
too often. We change when it is necessary to adapt. Failure to adapt may
produce harsh consequences. Adaptions for on-the-ground problems and adaptions
based on philosophy and ideology may conflict with one another—the pragmatic
versus some view of purity. Necessarily, the first commandment must be that no
adaptation may harm people or the environment that sustains them. Science has
made it possible in both the physical and mental world to identify what is
harmful. Politics is working very hard to silence a good deal of that
information to avoid limitations on extortion and exploitation of the
environment. We need regulations that require scientific vetting of all
industrial processes and agriculture. Technological fixes can do more damage
than the problem they were intended to cure. The choice of fixes often turns on
which one is cheaper or who controls it—seldom the best test.
The next commandment must spread power
broadly. At the time that the American Constitution was being drafted many thought
that power would soon corrupt the separations of power that the founding
fathers designed. Madison observed that there were so many divergent interests
and wide-spread distribution of property
as to discourage monopolies and other accumulations of wealth. Indeed, the
prominence of many interest sectors fostered a kind of intellectual honesty and
moral compass that served to spread power which lasted to the end of WWII. The
spread of power provided the glue that bound the nation together. Everyone
relied on help from their neighbors and their government. The war of all
against all followed the decline of independent businesses and the rise of
financial institutions and huge corporations.
Human nature has not changed. People will
still take power any way they can. To allow anyone access to the kind of power
that creates despots eventually leads to the government of despots. Instead of
people working to solve community problems, the war of all against all looks at
inequality for advantage. Too many people have a vested interest in other
people’s misery. We are what we adapt to.
Individual accumulations of wealth should
not exceed people’s needs and what comforts the community can support. People
fear big government and ignore the impacts of big money which can do as much
damage as any government. There will always be a government. The issue now is
whether it will be the government of money or the general welfare.
Congress was once a great deliberative body.
Real problems were solved by looking at the facts and the conflicts to make a
coherent policy. Campaign costs have risen to the point where legislators spend
more time and money on running for office than on listening to the needs of the
people. The great incentive to govern now turns on who will have rights to
appropriate other people’s labor and how. That also follows from the religion
of money. Congress now spends more time on lobbyists to determine how the pie
will be divided. Lobbyists now write the laws and ignore the facts.
The incentive to create an elite who gain
power by rigging the market so that some profit from their labor while others
receive far less for their labor requires a limit on anyone’s accumulation of
wealth. It matters little if the amount is one million or two million annually.
It will limit the ability to accumulate wealth that overpowers the majority by
removing the incentive to accumulate excess wealth. The same is true of private
property. Excessive accumulation of property creates another elite.
Some ancient cultures hold that no one person
can own the earth and its treasures. They belong to everyone. Private property
is not the problem. The problem with real property lies in the failure to
properly value its uses. The tree next door gives you shade. You do not pay for
it.
Water, the most important resource, is
plentiful some places and scarce in other places. If people are allowed to own
it, they can make other people pay large sums for what is rightfully a community asset, thus stealing other
peoples labor. People who own property must pay the community the community
value of that property. Hoarding or wasting water would soon become too
expensive. Such forms of taxation would finance schools, medical care, and most
government functions. Ignoring the value of property to the community creates
another elite.
Stealing other people’s labor has many
applications, some very subtle. Monsanto sells seeds for farmers to plant.
Monsanto was permitted to patent seeds that do not reproduce themself. Farmers
cannot use seed from their own crops. Part of their work has been appropriated
by a supplier whom they cannot ignore. Monsanto is huge and aggressive. Such
abuses of technology run rampant. Contracts and laws deny people access to the
courts. Big business will not deal with you if you do not agree to waive the
right to the protections the judicial branch of government provides. The free
market is anything but free.
What about the self-made man or woman? Should
they be allowed to keep what they have created? The self-made person is one of the
myths greed created. The things needed to be self-made are endless and mostly
communal—from streets to schools to everything else the community pays in one
way or another.
American government was founded on separation
of powers—legislative, administrative, and judicial. The separation means
nothing if all three branches of government apply a single value. Absent a
moral compass and intellectual honesty, money as the measure of all things
follows, which dissolves any difference in values between the branches of
government. I witnessed the process over the 30 years I practiced law. In the
beginning, judges would admonish lawyers to stop posturing and get to the
merits. As the years went by, courts became less and less interested in the
merits on the law and facts and more and more on who had the money. Off the
record I had a judge tell me that the law was “bullshit anyway.”
Another consequence of modernity yielded
similar results. For the better part of humanity’s time on earth people did
their best to keep up with nature. Their inventions, physical and intellectual,
made the keeping up easier, at which point people starting spending most of
their time keeping up with their own inventions. These inventions also were not
regulated by intellectual honesty or a moral compass. Their value again had
more to do with what they could create in dollars and cents, usually at the
expense of nature.
The true costs of technology remain
incalculable. How much of our intellectual honesty and moral compass come from
our experiences with nature? What is the impact of spending most of your day
staring at a screen that knows nothing but algorithms? What do we learn from
imitating machines that tolerate no errors, reduce everything to a formula,
cannot nurture any life, and has no interest in it. What is the difference
between a ninja turtle and a real turtle? You have to feed a turtle. The chase
for money serves no purpose without a moral compass.
Unlimited financial power has corrupted
government with the injunction that the “free market” will make everything
right. One supreme value puts everything in the same frame thus dissolving
separation of powers and abandoning intellectual honesty and a moral compass. Everything
must serve the religion of money. The result is a struggle to accumulate wealth
in a financial form. Virtual wealth controls real wealth. Such struggles
support class distinctions and more corruption.
No one can be trusted with unlimited
wealth and the advantage it bestows. The market does not purify financial
manipulation, which must be regulated for the common good.
* See ”Saving Capitalism” by Robert B
Reich, ”One Market Under God” by Thomas Frank, and “Natural Selection’s
Paradox” by Carter Stroud—the author of this essay.
