ein volk, ein fuhrer, ayn rand?: white whine vs. the Borg Collective vs. everyone else May 10 '03 (Updated Sep 25 '09)    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Books Mildred D. Taylor - Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: A Literature Unit From $8 Olivier Dunrea - Ollie From $7 The Bottom Line Will low taxation make you free? Complete the behavior self-check inside and find out what you think! 1. Libertarians: an enemy I'm not actually trying to make. This piece is inspired by three things -- two of them very minor -- that displease me. First was reading, in an otherwise innocuous talk-about-yourself Epinions writeoff, the following statement: "I absolutely can't stand anyone who believes we should sacrifice our own belongings, money or property for 'the greater good'." Second is the pattern this fits: the frequency of aggressive Libertarian argument in what are supposed to be Epinions Comment sections. For one example, when I told someone nicely that I'd liked their Epinion about a Waco-standoff documentary, my comment was dragged into the mire of a lengthy libertarian-dominated Comment debate that had long lost any reference to the essay itself. Third, though, and by far the most important, is that the minor, offhand 16-questions-writeoff quote about "the greater good" is the policy of the Bush Administration, which treats the dismantling of the Greater Good as its central goal on all fronts. The Bush Administration, though, is why I do _not_ wish my following critique of Libertarianism to be seen as hostile. Libertarians are the natural enemies of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, which would criminalize many unspecified acts of anti-Administration political speech and render natural-born Americans prone to losing their citizenship; of the Patriot Act, which has already given the government great surveillance powers; of disagreeable restrictions on gene research, birth control, and sexuality; of government terrorism a la Waco and Ruby Ridge; of a military budget that is racing towards $500 billion per year in the absence of any remotely comparable enemy. Libertarians could help save the country, on those issues. I simply want to explain why collective sacrifice is a good thing, why everyone reading this already depends on collective sacrifice a hundred times over, and why it is possible to vote Democrat or even Green without being an enemy of The Individual. Hating taxes doesn't make you Satan, but I'm not the Borg Collective. I want you to change your mind, sure; but I don't deny for a moment that your mind is already at work. 2. Libertarians and self-awareness. To anyone who agrees that it's wrong to "sacrifice our own belongings, money or property for 'the greater good'", I offer the following checklist. Do you practice what you preach? If you can truthfully answer "yes" to all the following questions, I admire the heck out of you (even while disagreeing with your views). If not, it's never too late to start: - Do you refuse to drive on government-maintained roads, including the Interstate Highway System? - Do you refuse to use government-built airports? - Do you refuse to buy or use products that have been transmitted to stores or to you using roads or airports, and insist on paying extra for transportation across gravel roads via horse? - Do you use old actuarial tables from the 1920's and roll dice, every year, to determine whether this is the year your luck would have run out and you would have gotten polio or smallpox, two of several diseases abolished by government co-ordination? If you roll yourself the disease, do you inject yourself with it and let the disease run its pre-vaccine course? - If your parents or grandparents got to college using the G.I. Bill or another federal grant program, and from there earned a professional career, have you refused all financial or "networking" aid from them on the grounds that their ticket to success was stolen from hardworking taxpayers? - If you live in California, Arizona, New Mexico, or Nevada, do you refuse to drink, bathe with, or otherwise use water or other liquid products, all funneled to your state at massive taxpayer subsidy? - Do you unhook your toilets from the common sewer system and redirect your sludge onto your own property? - Do you inject your lungs with little bits of poison every day, to stand against the Clean Air Act and its cousins? If so, which brand of poison? The cartoon camel is kinda cute. - If you're in a car crash, and the seatbelt and/or safety glass (both government-mandated over heavy auto industry lobbying) save you from crashing through your window, do you run headfirst through a pane of glass later to make up the missed experience? - Do you refuse to watch TV in protest against the space program and its satellites? - Do you refuse to attend theatres, operas, symphonies, and New Zealand rock bands because they receive government grants to cover their expenses? - Do you refuse to use the computer -- the invention of which was an expensive government research project which compiled huge losses for over 25 years with no commercial end in sight -- and the Internet, which also was invented by the government at taxpayer subsidy with no commercial end? If so, how did you come to be reading this? Let me know your trick, since the computers at work don't get me here. Please note that this is a very middle-of-the-road defense of taxing and spending. It is a defense Dwight Eisenhower would endorse, let alone Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy. If you're using their programs (i.e., if you say "no" to any of the checklist items), and if you're not about to stop today, then please have the decency to be thankful for their beliefs. Which are, unfortunately, far to the left of the Democratic Party these days. 3. Libertarians and efficiency. It is the assertion of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and the entire George Bush retinue that a free, unregulated market is the most efficient way to give people what they want. Now, I have a B.A. in Economics from the University of Iowa, earning a 3.8 GPA in my major; I can argue demand curves and comparative advantage with the best of you. For now, however, I won't. I will simply point out this: that from the panic of 1893 on, every major economic recession has been caused by overproduction: workers putting in long hours to produce more goods and services than anyone wants to buy. And from the recovery of 1895 on, the solution has been advertising: vast expense to tell people that they want (by happy surprise!) the very things that, as workers, they are overproducing. _All_ of the theories, graphs, and monographs of free-market economics depend on the assumption that people have unlimited desires for goods. _All_ actual businesses, meanwhile, face the fact that people's desires for goods run out; all actual businesses tell people how unsatisfied they are, in the hopes that they'll buy the product and satisfy themselves. In other words, "efficiency" is a crock, and everyone with a P.R. budget knows it. It is efficient to leave a satisfied person alone; it is inefficient to tell them to want material things, make them work for the money, and sell them the satisfaction they started with. 4. Libertarians and "collectivism". I have said little, until this essay, about my politics aside from the war on Iraq. My profile endorses public libraries, free health-care, and free day-care, so obviously I'm not allergic to taxes, but it doesn't debate my motives. Yet I've been name-called here, personally, a "knee-jerk believer that Big Brother government should give everyone a hug" (approx.; my paraphrase is cleverer). The Epinions essay I've quoted already had another more general quote, "I abhor welfare and ANY form of forced taxation to support lazy free-loading people", which sums up another very common assumption about who's on the political left. And Ayn Rand, much admired here, celebrates the free market as the triumph of the Individual over the Collective. So here, listen close. Even if I can't convince you of my logic, here's a secret about motive: I believe in government regulation and services as a means to _support_ individualism. Like most fellow readers of the American Prospect or even the more dogmatic the Nation, I want people to be liberated, creative, subversive. I live that way myself, and in general creative/ subversive people tilt far to the political left (check the best directors, comedians, songwriters etc). How does that work into my belief system? - I believe that people make freer choices when they're not afraid of expenses. As college grants have been replaced by college loans, and students graduate deeper in debt, there is a strong correlation between how much debt a student has, and whether s/he takes the kind of job she wanted. This doesn't mean public-interest law or environmental law is better than corporate law; this doesn't mean a general practitioner in a rural area is more useful than a nose-job specialist in Orange County; this doesn't mean off-Broadway choreography is better than insurance loss adjustment (though admittedly, I believe all those value judgments). What it _does_ mean is that many students want to be the former in each pair instead of the latter; the ones who do what they want are, statistically, the ones without debt. The ones who got education for free. That forced, tax-funded gift to them: it let them choose the work they valued. Another example: millions of men or (occasionally) women in the United States are forced to work two jobs to pay for pprivate daycare for their children, or for health insurance. If your highest value is Work, this is fine. But if your highest value is The Individual, this is spiritual suicide. Workplaces, for most people, are the opposite of a free environment, subject to intense regulation about dress, talking, food, and (of course) the often unpleasant and generic nature of the work itself. In most of Europe, daycare and health care are free. The overall tax rates often approach 50%, but people nonetheless are free to work only one job, and to average 35-hour workweeks to America's 47 hours. The extra time is theirs to be Individual. Such is my value, and that of many "collective-good" liberals. - I believe that regulation and taxation can encourage people to choose behaviors that make them happier. Estate taxes, or the "death tax" as Republicans have dubbed it in their haste to pretend that more than 1% of the population ever pays it, are widely acknowledged to be the leading motivation for charitable foundations. Restrictions on drugs, such as the increasingly frequent bans on smoking in public places, free many people from beginning expensive addictions (a purchased addiction, individual money going to a faceless corporation to prevent painful induced cravings, is Collectivism indeed). Mandatory nutritional labels on foods let people choose to eat well. Mandatory work-safety rules allow workers to not bleed and not die. The now-abolished Fairness Doctrine of radio and TV-station debate once mandated free response time for both sides of any controversial issue. It let listeners make up their Individual minds. A nice start. But beyond that, - I believe that free thinking must be taught. None of my 10th-grade students, even the many who are naturally bright, came into my student-teaching internship knowing how to closely read a serious magazine article. None had ever imagined that Chapter 9 on the Industrial Revolution might relate to Chapter 13 on World War I. Only a few ever discuss ideas or the world around them in their free time, and almost none had ever independently hit on the idea that History, studied, could help them think about current events. In practice, I don't know if anything I've taught them in twelve weeks will stay with them... but many have proven that, if asked, if showed, they _can_ learn to do all these things, to ask good questions and learn to answer them. Maybe they will again, especially if teachers ask them to. Especially if, with government funding, they go to college. But they didn't do this on their own. Their parents are generally poor and could not afford good schooling, even as good as the Brighton public schools, in a free market. A free market would let even the best of them sidle through minimal mental stimulation on their way to competing for crapola retail jobs. Then it would blame their lack of "merit". If the market bottomed out, or their skin color held them back, and they didn't get a job? "Lazy welfare bums", all of them. Whereas my wife's boss -- who earns $150,000 for a publicly-traded company, who missed a third of last year on a "disability" leave that took him to Daytona Beach and the Bahamas and Mardi Gras New Orleans, whose team is more efficient in those absences than in his presence, who hires his fishing buddies for $90/hr to complain about how hard computer-chip design is these days -- is, like his buddy contractors, a paragon of virtue who should never, ever be taxed. Which is damning, but off my point. Some people are irredeemably lazy and hope for cheap welfare. Some people are irredeemably lazy and luck into cushy jobs. But many, many people look lazy because the free market won't take the time to train them into good habits when they're young, and because even the public schools don't get the funding to attract more and better teachers. I spend every weekday with quite a lot of useless layabouts, and I don't deny it for a second. But I spend those weekdays with just as many other 10th-graders who care. They could become thoughtful, imaginative, well-read individuals who've pondered their life choices. Maybe they will. Maybe, in twelve weeks, I've slightly helped; it's hard to know. Yet too many Americans are too lazy, or too protective of their money, to even try to help. It's not as if, when the wealthy keep their money from the government, that makes them richer. Supply and demand: the more money floating about in the hands of the wealthy, the more their products cost. Housing prices go up; colleges and private schools and private kindergartens get ludicrously expensive; restaurants and hotels charge hundreds of dollars a night; private jets get more luxurious; auction prices of collectible art go up; Victoria's Secret starts selling $10,000,000 bras. Beyond a certain level, individual money creates only inflation and competition, and not a lick of individual freedom. But at the level where an individual is assured of having a paying job, is assured of having a chance to go to school, is assured his kids will be okay if he leaves them in trained hands for a day? That's money as freedom. It takes a government. And not, alas, George Bush's.

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