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A conservative recently wrote (though hasn’t yet published) that my statement that this blog is committed to our collective welfare is what’s wrong with this blog, this preconceived notion I am imposing on the discourse here, promoting a collectivist rather than individualist orientation. But what individualist orientation, that is even vaguely consistent with our fundamental shared values, does not privilege our collective welfare? For what is our collective welfare, other than some function of our combined individual welfares?
If someone is not advocating for our collective welfare, even if a social system that benefits some at the expense of others, or that leaves some to suffer horribly, then what are they advocating for? Consider, for instance, the argument, that I consider erroneous but that certainly is a valid argument to make, that we are all better off in an uncompromised lottery of life’s fortune, each left to his or her own fate, or to whatever non-governmental alliances they can form, all pursing only their own interests by any and all means that they can, unfettered by any collectively imposed constraints, than in any more equitable system, because at least, in such a lottery, each has some chance of winning, whereas in a more equitable order everyone loses (or so the argument goes). Even that erroneous argument is an argument about why such a lottery is in our collective interest. So who would refuse to engage in discourse about what is in our collective interest, if even the argument that a Hobbesian war of all against all is the best of all possible worlds is admissible in such discourse?
The answer: People whose ideology is inherently absurd. Those who argue against working toward having a functioning society, including a functioning government which constrains individual freedom in ways which serve our collective interests (as our Founding Fathers knew was a necessary part of the challenge, and as our Constitution set out to do), can’t frame it as an argument about what is in our collective interests, because their position is ultimately absurd if they do. And they can’t frame it in any other way, because, again, their position is absurd if they do.
If one is not arguing that their preferred policy is in our collective interest, then why should anyone care about their argument, or favor their policy? If they’re arguing for something other than our collective interest, what is it? Their own individual interests, which serve no one else’s interests? Some group’s interests, which serve no other group’s interests? No one’s interests at all? Some blind bit of dogma that privileges some other dehumanized social value over our collective interest? Why would any rational person taking an interest in social policy prefer any of these over our collective welfare?
The problem with extreme individualism is that it obfuscates this self-evident truth, and privileges a bizarrely inconsistent insistence that only extreme individualism is acceptable, not because it is in our collective interest, but because our collective interest doesn’t matter. And by that argument, if made consistently, we need no laws, no protections, nothing but the Hobbesian war of all against all that I have long considered the far right to covet, which no sane person can argue is in our collective interest. And so no sane person does.
So we have a robust ideology, a movement, in America, that argues against our collective interest, and tries by an alchemy of irrationality to convince itself that that makes sense. And this is why I think we have reached the final distillation of the great struggle of human history, the one that really counts: The struggle between reasonable people of goodwill, and irrational belligerents who argue a socially self-destructive absurdity, pursued with fanatical determination.
But why, then, should any decent human being react in any way other than disgust at this notion that we should dissolve as a society, and be only a jungle of conflict and mutual predation? And how can we be anything else without discussing the parameters of what that something else should look like, to best serve our collective interests? Why should anyone embrace an agenda seeking, stupidly, the lose-lose outcome of absolute conflict, rather than the win-win outcome of a well ordered society, perhaps one characterized by well-framed cooperative competition?
Extreme individualists are literally “enemies of society”. Well, here’s my olive branch: Let’s rid ourselves of this absurdity, and agree that we are always discussing what is in our collective interests, regardless of what you think it is. And, by recognizing this, maybe we can finally engage in some rational and constructive public discourse.
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If America ever was an enlightened country, it hasn’t been in my lifetime. Shortly before I was born, we had congressional hearings and blacklistings to destroy lives on the mere insinuation that someone believed in a particular political economic theory. During my childhood, we had the hippy movement that, while more hopeful and positive in outlook, almost immediately became just another pretext for a symbiosis of glassy-eyed and opportunistic human folly (even more so in the case of its progeny, the “New Age” movement). Then we (over-)reacted to such utopianism with the Reagan years, which put into place an astronomical bloating of the national debt (while claiming to represent fiscal conservativism), a renewed (self-delusional) sense of moral superiority vis-a-vis the rest of the world, a cynical promotion of religious fanaticism and cultural tyranny for political strategic purposes, a deregulatory frenzy that we are still paying for in numerous ways, and a set of policies that created more economic polarization in this country than existed in the 19th century “gilded age” of the “Robber Barons.” (As of 2007, 34.6% of net worth and financial wealth, 42.7 % of financial wealth alone, was concentrated into the hands of the wealthiest 1% of the American population. The bottom 80% of the American population were left to divide among them 15% of net worth and wealth combined, and just 7% of financial wealth alone. http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html).
After a brief respite under Clinton, we returned to insanity with redoubled enthusiasm. Like a reverse John the Baptist to Bush’s reverse Jesus, Newt Gingrich regaled us with his “Contract With America,” a grandstanding promise to be indifferent to the needs of our most vulnerable citizens. Then came George W. Bush himself, not merely an embarrassing dimwit, but the first president in American history to both engage in and try to advance as our national values the torture of prisoners, the pre-emptive military bombardments of other sovereign nations, the kidnapping of foreign citizens off of foreign streets on the barest wisps of evidence against them (a mere accusation from a neighbor perhaps miffed about some private dispute) and then holding them in secret compounds and torturing them, even after concluding that they’re innocent of any crime, or “rendering” them to other countries that will torture them with even less self-restraint. After eight years of that president who morally and financially bankrupted the country, squandering the economic surplus left by Clinton, catalyzing the worst economic crisis since The Great Depression, we finally, in a rare glimmer of sanity, elected Barack Obama.
But sanity never lasts long in America. Since after a year and a half he has failed to erase the mess that Bush (and his Republican predecessors) created, since though he stopped the hemorrhaging of jobs (http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/02/a_very_revealing_chart.php) he has not turned around what economists almost universally admit no one can, since he has tried to address the disgraceful fact that the richest country in the world had the most expensive and least efficient health care system in the developed world (the only one that failed to cover a significant portion of the population), since he addressed the lack of financial regulation (insisted upon and advanced by all preceding Republican executives and legislators) that led to the financial sector meltdown in the first place, he is the devil incarnate (born elsewhere, foreign in every way), and we must return to the insanity that preceded him (and is reacting to him).
Yesterday, on “This Week” (http://abcnews.go.com/thisweek), Queen Rania of Jordan very eloquently and moderately captured the corrosive role of religious extremism, both at home (in the United States) and abroad, the multiple folly of opposition to the Muslim cultural center in Manhattan (which stands in opposition to the intolerance and extremism of 9/11, and which in turn is opposed by the parallel intolerance and extremism at home), and the need not to surrender to cynicism and pessimism regarding the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Such a voice of reason! So certain to fall on deaf ears….
After all, she is speaking to the America of Florida pastor Terry Jones, who felt that responding to the hopeful building of a Muslim interfaith center in Manhattan (not at “ground zero”, in fact) by threatening to burn the Koran was the epitome of what it means to be an American (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100907/ap_on_re_us/quran_burning). While many even on the right denounced him (only because they knew it would end up costing American lives), the ironic similarity of such intolerant ethnocentric escalators of hatred to the terrorists whose acts they abhor, and the dissimilarity to those who preach tolerance rather than interethnic hatred, is lost on them.
The Republican “Pledge to America”, which even conservative economists admit will further increase the deficit (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=534), is being aggressively and successfully marketed by the right as fiscal responsibility which no rational person could oppose (though virtually all rational people oppose it). And it imposes debt on future generations only to benefit the wealthiest Americans, rather than those who need assistance, or to improve our human or material infrastructure. We should incur debt only as an investment in the future, not as a redistribution of wealth, across generations, to the uber-wealthy of today.
At South Jeffco’s Summerset Festival the weekend before last, for instance, I had numerous encounters which drove home the zeitgeist. One pleasant young woman told me she was a Republican, and responded to my suggestion that we should all agree to be reasonable people of goodwill and build on that by saying, “yes, just look at health care reform, that ruined the best health care system in the world.” Was she referring to the same health care system that, by every statistical measure, underperformed the systems of every other developed nation on Earth, and did so at far greater expense, while managing to cover a smaller percentage of the population than any other developed nation’s health care system? And another woman insisted that illegal immigrants never pay taxes and are purely a sap on our economy, though many pay taxes, often for services they can never collect on, and by all economic analyses are either an economic wash or a slight benefit nationally. Truth is the first casualty of war, and there is currently a war being waged on truth itself in America.
Examples abound. There are the Colorado ballot initiatives, 60, 61, and 101, that even fiscally conservative Republican politicians in Colorado oppose (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16158190), but that have a chance of passing, and are defended by earnest pseudo-economic arguments such as those presented by Debbie Schum in yesterdays Denver Post (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16158191). This is what happens when insanity is cultivated, in the hope of it being harnessed for political gain. Those who cultivate it eventually lose control of it, and it is the insanity unleashed that prevails.
As I’ve often said, there are legitimate debates to be had, legitimate disputes based on the differing conclusions of sound reasoning applied to reliable data in service to mutual goodwill. But we’re not having those debates. Instead, public discourse and the political process that simultaneously tracks and exploits it, have been hijacked by the need to incessantly debunk the unsound reasoning, fabricated facts, and fundamental inhumanity of what is perhaps the most powerful social movement in America today. We are too busy fighting the sheer human folly incarnate among us to get to the legitimate debates, and the hard, information-intensive work of governing ourselves wisely and effectively.
I have long noted that, in many ways, America is Ancient Rome to Europe’s Ancient Greece, the more brutish inheritor of a cultural, economic, and political fluorescence. Unlike Rome, however, which coveted Greek slaves to tutor their children, America has come to disparage rather than respect the still more civilized originators of modernity across the Atlantic. We look at countries that have almost completely eliminated poverty, have universal health care, low infant mortality, a far more successful and higher functioning public education system, greater social mobility, and higher rates of self-reported happiness, and many among us dismiss them as “socialist” countries, which we arbitrarily claim, by definition, must be failures. (As one individual quoted in yesterday’s Denver Post said, health care reform is “a communist, socialist scheme. All the other countries that have tried this, they’re billions in debt, and they admit this doesn’t work” (http://www.denverpost.com/commented/ci_16175215?source=commented-news).
The western European countries have their defects, to be sure, and America has done better than them on some dimensions, but this absolute rejection of the possibility that we have something to learn from others, who have fared better than us on numerous dimensions, is the epitome of combined arrogance and ignorance, that unholy marriage that dooms any individual or social entity to self-destructive irrelevance. We are a country very much like the one we were when Elmer Gantry was written a century ago, a country of small-minded yahoos and those that exploit them, with the marginalized voices of sincere and well-informed analysts shouting desperately across the sound-proofed barrier that has been erected against us.
But the question remains: How do we defeat this persistent, deeply embedded insanity that has come to define us as a people? In a conversation with Adam Schrager (Colorado’s pre-eminent political broadcast journalist) last week, we both voiced our disgust that politics has become far too much about the acquisition of power, and far too little about the challenge of devising intelligent public policies. But I shared with him this thought: Politics is almost inevitably hostage to an evolutionary logic. That which works (in the competition of policies and candidates) is that which is reproduced, while that which doesn’t work is abandoned. As a result, politics has devolved into a competition of marketing strategies and raising the funds necessary to their effectiveness. It isn’t enough to bemoan this fact, because any attempt to reject it, unless embracing an alternative simultaneously less cynical and more effective (which, as much as we’d like to be the case, almost never is), is doomed to failure, and thus obsolescence.
The ironic challenge we face, then, is how to use what works to create a context in which it is no longer what works, or no longer an option. For, while extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice for the public good by political leaders are both admirable and meaningful, they are not a sustainable strategy. Ralph Carr (Adam Schrager’s favorite example), the Republican governor of Colorado during WWII, who refused to comply with Japanese interment, despite such refusal being political suicide, might be a great example to follow, but if universally followed by all reasonable people of goodwill in all instances, would succeed only in ensuring that only irrational people of ill-will ever remain in office once confronted with the choice to do what’s right or do what’s politically expedient. The somewhat empty admonition that elected officials (like the rest of us) should always do what’s right rather than what’s in their own interests does not get us very far, both because of human nature (one’s own interests are going to remain a powerful incentive, whether we like it or not), and because of the evolutionary logic of politics (to paraphrase a famous quote from Henry Kissinger, in politics, always doing what’s right rather than what’s politically expedient or strategically superior merely cedes the world to the less scrupulous).
We can afford neither to be “above politics,” nor to surrender completely to its dysfunctional logic. But here is the limit of my own cynicism: We most certainly can’t afford to make ourselves morally indistinguishable from those we oppose. We must find successful strategies, in pursuit of raw political power, but by finding resonance between our own better angels and those of the electorate, rather than bringing both us and them down by resorting to the same old political cynicism as a first rather than last resort.
People criticize Obama for having tried to take the political high road rather than jamming through whatever we could any way that we could, but I do not. He is looking at a longer-term agenda, and a deeper necessity, than his critics are. There is a balance to be struck between what reality demands of us, and what our ideals demand of us, and we must always subordinate the former to the latter in the final analysis. Health care reform may have been critically important to our collective welfare, but there are deeper and more essential reforms that should not be sacrificed in every instance to the exigencies of the moment. We cannot defeat our own ignorance by surrendering to a political strategic system that exploits and cultivates it.
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Tina Griego wrote about The Dream Act’s latest rude awakening in today’s Denver Post (http://www.denverpost.com/griego). Despite her support for it, she actually exaggerated the ability of a child brought here in infancy to gain legal permanent residence (LPR) status. She said, “To get back in you must have an immediate family member who is a U.S. citizen or have a permanent legal resident as your sponsor.” Actually, only in some very rare circumstances are either of those possibilities. More often, the best you could hope for is to get at the back end of a twenty-something year waiting list for family members of various categories, and as for an LPR sponsor, not so much.
But the point is that the kids in question have no legal path to citizenship, or even legal residency. They are Americans in all but name, often with no real connection to any other country, no knowledge of the Spanish language, no more affinity for life in Mexico than a suddenly impoverished and deported Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck would have. We deprive them of opportunity, despite, in these cases, their having been model citizens, served in the military or attended college, stayed out of trouble, in short, been good Americans.
Some Americans thrive on turning the world into in-groups and out-groups, and managing to just not give a damn about those in the out-groups. And then they are eager to cut off our own national nose to spite our own national face. If we provide a path to LPR status for these people who are on the path to being productive citizens, we end up with productive citizens, contributing to our shared wealth, not contributing to crime rates and other social problems. If we don’t, we continue to breed a festering social illness within our borders, a group of undocumented people with little opportunity to succeed, a group that, despite the mythologies of the right-wing demagogues, can’t be removed to any significant degree at a price even those demagogues would be willing to pay, and will, in many instances, end up with little choice but to become predators rather than the productive members of society that they had worked hard to become.
The truth is, the Dream Act isn’t just good for those kids who some would rather throw under the bus; it’s good for all of us.
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The Denver Post reported today on the revamped Mile High Marketplace in Commerce City (formerly the Mile High Flea Market) (http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_16169374). It’s not just a flea market anymore (though it still includes one), nor is it a modern mall or strip mall, or traditional commercial area. It is, it seems, an agora, a vibrant, diverse, entertaining place of convergence, where people can find exotic (as well as mundane) wares, fresh produce, roving entertainers, chance encounters, and other attractions.
As a world traveler and avid student of ancient history, I find such agoras particularly attractive artifacts of the human spirit. The famous Covered Bazaar in Istanbul (and it’s uncovered sprawl of shops and stalls that surround it) is a marvel to behold. The vendors lining the narrow, corridor-like lanes of the Old City of Jerusalem and other ancient towns and cities, hawking their wares, bargaining with customers, is a wonderful slice of life that has been tragically scrubbed from our modern existence.
The agora in ancient Greece, as in many lands, was more than a marketplace for vendors’ wares; it was also a social meeting place and a marketplace of ideas, where people came to discuss the issues of their day. In our own aesthetically sterilized culture, few things are more welcome than some remnant of those less dehumanized times and locales finding its way back into our lives. Let’s stop by and listen to a roving minstrel, or admire an artisan’s painstakingly crafted offerings, while we enjoy a delicacy made for such occasions.
Let’s all meet at the agora again, where we can exchange the products of our labor and of our minds, and create greater shared wealth by doing so.
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The none-too-liberal Denver Post reported today that “even conservative-leaning budget and policy analysts said the Republican blueprint, as drafted, would lead to bigger, not smaller, deficits and that it did not contain the concrete, politically difficult steps needed to alter the nation’s fiscal trajectory.” (http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_16159864). You know you’re in trouble when your pseudo-economic mantra to shrink government, lower taxes, and reduce regulation is rejected even by that minority of professional economists who are ideologically inclined in your favor.
Alan Greenspan, no mamsy pamsy nanny statist by any stretch, had already publicly said that the continuation of the Bush tax cuts to the super-wealthy is counterproductive and economically indefensible at this juncture. Not even Republican shills (at least those with an iota of integrity) can support the economically irresponsible, politically pandering and cynical attempt by the Republicans to wrest political power from those who, you know, are actually trying to govern the country.
Even by the narrow measure of short-and-medium-term economic efficiency and robustness, the Republican policy fails. Add in its complete indifference to long-term economic sustainability (by, for instance, mitigating global warming), distributional justice (by, for instance, ever-more insistently advocating policies which continue to concentrate ever-more wealth in ever fewer hands), and human welfare in general (by, for instance…, well, everything they stand for), and you have failure on an epic proportion, failure that will reduce our children and their children to suffering victims of a dumb ideology successfully imposed on a complacent and complicit society.
As I’ve said before on this blog (The Economic Debate We’re Not Having: http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=247), there are legitimate and necessary debates to be had over how much and what kind of public spending, under what conditions, serves our long-term interests, and how much and what kinds harm our long-term interests, all things considered. And certainly, one of the principal things to consider is the effect it has on the robustness of the economy. I’ve linked to an op-ed piece by a Harvard economist and public policy expert who argued, in a remarkably balanced and level-headed analysis, that there’s little or nothing government can do to stimulate job creation (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=325); to an academic paper by another professor of economics at our own University of Colorado who argued that those public investments in public goods that are supplementary to private goods have the largest (non-keynesian) multiplier (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=247&cpage=1#comment-14); and to an op-ed piece by the 2008 Nobel Prize winner in economics, who railed against Republican Mitch McConnell for resorting to political extortion to hold much-needed middle-class tax relief hostage to clearly fiscally irrational tax breaks for the super-wealthy (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=415).
I’ve argued myself that few argue that The Great Depression wasn’t definitively ended by the most robust, public debt-creating public spending project in human history: America’s participation in World War II, as the arsenal of the free world. I’ve yet to hear anyone explain how public spending can be so inefficacious, when it was so resoundingly effective in that case.
Be that as it may, that’s the kind of debate responsible leadership should be having, rather than this economically, socially, and politically destructive sloganeering, spreading false certainties like a plague through the land, such that sweet old grannies are now spewing them today just as some sweet old grannies spewed racist epithets in generations past.
Even the free-market advocate Economist magazine noted in this weeks issue that the Tea Party “constitutional idolatry” which is paraded out as the political philosophical justification for this mantra, is “infantile” (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=525). When the most highly respected market oriented magazine in the world calls the ideological underpinnings of a movement that claims to be the defenders of liberty “infantile,” in a chorus accompanied by conservative economic and policy analysts stating that the GOP plain actually increases rather than reduces our deficit, you know that reason is in decreasing supply at that end of the ideological spectrum.
It’s time to grow-up, folks; or move aside, and let the grown-ups do the serious business of governing ourselves wisely.
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(This is the first in a series of four posts which discuss Tea Party “Political Fundamentalism”, comprised of the unholy trinity of “Constitutional Idolatry”, Liberty Idolatry, and Small Government Idolatry.)
Every now and then, you encounter an argument you’ve been making for years, made far better than you’ve ever made it. And such was my pleasure a few moments ago, when I read this week’s “Lexington” column in The Economist (Lexington is the weekly column about America), titled “The Perils of Constitution Worship: One of the Guiding Principles of the Tea-Party Movement is Based on a Myth” (http://www.economist.com/node/17103701?story_id=17103701).
Among the many sage observations made by the author, was one I’ve repeated in at least a dozen “debates” with tea-partiers: The Constitution was not drafted to check central government and preserve state or individual rights, but rather to do the exact opposite, to create a central government with teeth. And, of course, the Constitution doesn’t actually contain all the answers to all of the challenges we face as a society, nor all of the information necessary to define the scope and range of our federal government. The notion, as the author notes, is simply infantile.
George Lakoff, in The Political Mind, notes that while both conservatives and progressives rely on a metaphorical narrative of “family” to understand government, what distinguishes them is that conservatives rely on a metaphor of the authoritarian, patriarchal family, while progressives rely on the metaphor of an empathetic and nurturing family (thus “the nanny state”). Ironically, the claim to be rooted in a commitment to individual liberty is belied by the deference to some ultimate authority that deprives us of responsibility to meet the challenges of our own day as free individuals. Like the fundamentalist religious zealots that so many of them are, thumping the Constitution with the same blindly dogmatic fanaticism that they thump the Bible, they are relieved of their responsibility to know or understand anything by the presence of an infinitely wise and infallible final authority, one in print, one that answers all questions and resolves all disputes, the final word from on-high.
Of course, the Constitution is a brilliant document, made more brilliant by what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t address the minutia of how we must govern ourselves, but rather sets out the general principles. And, as is so often the case, those principles are rarely more egregiously violated than by those who most zealously claim to be the defenders of the faith.
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The Economist this week published a cover story called “The World’s Lungs,” about the transition to a forest-preserving rather than forest converting world (http://www.economist.com/node/17093495). The article mentions REDD, but reduces it to “pay(ing) people in developing countries to leave trees standing.” That’s not inaccurate, but it misses the critical point about how the payment occurs: As part of regional and global markets for GreenHouse Gas (GHG) emission reductions. The Kyoto Protocol had begun to institute global cap-and-trade markets, with various instruments representing various kinds and locations of emissions reductions. Kyoto hadn’t yet embraced deforestation abatement, but other regional systems (such as Europe’s) began to allow such off-sets into their own markets. In the wake of the disappointing Copenhagen convention, which had been hoped to advance what Kyoto had started, it is beginning to look like the world will be progressing in the form of regional and national GHG emissions abatement markets, linking together through such things as developing country REDD off-sets.
I am one of those rare birds who is a big fan of carbon markets, not because they are in all or most cases currently the best approach, but because they offer the best long-term promise to give us one more powerful tool with which to tackle a variety of public goods and public bads, across national boundaries. As strange as it may sound now, and as technically challenging as it would be, we could conceivably, in the somewhat distant future, create violence abatement markets, and human rights violations abatement markets, and goodwill credit markets…, whatever we can imagine as public goods and bads that we want to promote or discourage (see Political Market Instruments).
Jeffco Schools won a federal grant for 32.7 million dollars (and Colorado Springs for 15.1 million dollars), over five years, to reward teachers for improving achievement, teaching in tough schools, teaching tough subjects or to tough populations, and taking on leadership roles in their buildings, as well as to fund professional development and classroom support for individuated instruction, all in schools in with a large percentage of low income students (http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_16153823?source=bb).
That’s all fine and good, and it can only help, but it’s not an approach which goes to the heart of the problem. It concerns me to see continued and increasing focus on the same old mechanistic, reductionist approach to public education that has persistently and increasingly failed for generations now. Education is a challenge which involves what goes on in the home, what goes on in the community, and what goes on in the media, as well as what goes on in the schools. And it is an endeavor that requires great attention to the unmeasurable foundations of the human imagination, in order to build strong measurable edifices upon it.
I have no objection to this approach as one tool in the toolbox, but if we’re going to start giving school districts sudden boons of millions of dollars to get it right, let’s give it to them to teach parents how to better play their part, and to involve the community in a more holistic, day-and-week-and-year-and-life long shared enterprise. Let’s use it to address the problem where it resides, in our homes and communities, in our astoundingly rampant anti-intellectualism, in the soil in which we hope these little saplings of human consciousness will grow. Because it doesn’t matter how sophisticated the growing lights you turn their way; if their planted in bone dry and depleted Earth, they’re potential is limited at its very roots.
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President Obama addressed The United Nations earlier today (Wednesday) to announce a continued, if more vigilant, U.S. commitment to provide foreign aid to developing countries ( http://www.denverpost.com/ci_16141218). Way back in the last millennium, I was a student of Development (political, economic, cultural), and the various competing theories (Modernization, Dependency, World Systems). Modernization theorists tended to see nations as autonomous units, undergoing their own history, developing or not developing according to their own endogenous variables. Dependency and World Systems theories saw the world as more tightly intertwined, the relations among them affecting the fate of each.
The descriptive value of Dependency and World Systems theories is hard to deny: Due to client state and economic dependency relations to powerful nations, the small ruling classes in less developed nations are, more often than not, in either explicit or implicit league with the larger wealthy classes in some more developed nations, benefiting together as islands of wealth and comfort in a sea of suffering. To be sure, that’s not the whole story: Nationalism and other allegiances exist as well, with the ruling classes in those less developed nations generally identifying more with their own people of their own class at home than with those of their own class abroad, and sometimes even with the poor of their own country more than the rich of others. There are cross-cutting solidarities involved.
And it is overly simplistic to argue that the poverty of much of the world is a direct artifact of the wealth of some enclaves. Much of that poverty is, in reality, due to a lack of indigenous development, and would have existed with or without the rise of other wealthy and powerful nations. It’s also important to recognize that, in some ways, “a rising tide” really does “raise all ships”, and the wealth and institutional and technological innovations of the developed world have contributed positively as well as negatively to the development of less developed countries.
It’s hard to measure exactly to what extent that’s the case, and to what extent the rise of the European world empire did indeed suppress development elsewhere. Certainly, the history of colonization, of imposing inequitable trade relations, of dismantling sometimes diverse and vibrant indigenous economies in order to turn whole countries into plantations growing low value-added tropical crops and primary natural resources for the benefit of the lords across the seas or to the north, has to at least some extent exerted a suppressive developmental force on the late-comers. There is some mixture of both truths in play.
But let’s look at the world through the Dependency lens for a moment. We can as easily see the world as one divided by separate international classes as one divided by national boundaries. And a comparison of modern history to Medieval and ancient history bears out such a view. Ruling classes within nations or continental cultures developed historically from the descendants of warriors becoming landed nobility on the estates that their ancestors stole in conquest, with the former inhabitants reduced to serfdom. And global ruling classes began developing in the early modern era when European conquistadors found new lands to conquer, new native inhabitants to reduce to serfdom or other forms of marginalization, and new expropriated wealth to enjoy as a result. Our smug (and historically conveniently amnesiatic) belief that our relative wealth has no connection to the relative poverty of others in our own and other lands is simply not borne out by an honest survey of world history.
And that’s why foreign aid, and much else about the modern world, reminds me a bit of a scene from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Madame Defarge, eager to spill the blood of any members of the hated aristocracy, was testifying at the trial of innocent aristocrat Charles Darnay during The French Revolution, recounting how Charles’ father had once carelessly run over and killed a peasant child with his carriage, and stopped to toss the distraught parent a coin. Needless to say, Charles was sentenced to be guillotined, a fate only averted by his look-alike barrister, the down-and-out Sydney Carton, who redeemed his own squandered life by taking Charles’ place, and thus doing “a far, far better thing than (he) had ever done before.”
As Charles Dickens said of that era in his opening lines of the novel:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Some things never change.
The only thing uglier than tossing the peasant parent a coin after running over her child is having your hand held back by a member of your household in the moment of doing so, admonished not to waste “our” hard earned cash on such lazy riff-raff.
I don’t know the answers to the vexing problems of our age. Development happens when and where it happens for reasons other than foreign aid, and independently of most of our theories. Some have successfully instituted export-driven growth, finding niche markets, and developing on the capital thus generated. Others have successfully leveraged the wealth derived from natural resource endowments. Occasionally, targeted protectionism for nascent industries has helped those industries acquire the breathing room necessary to become competitive in the long run. Infusions of capital from the developed world can certainly help (as it did in The Marshall Plan), and can also hurt (as it did in the Latin American debt crises of the 198o’s). But one thing’s for sure: In the long run, there is no “Us” v. “Them”; there is only an “Us”.
We may find the Madame Defarges both past and present to be hateful individuals. But those who are their enemy have always helped to create them. You run over enough peasant children in your carriage, and people start to want to send your adult children to the guillotine, or fly airplanes into your skyscrapers. You draw enough lines in the sand with opportunistic military conquests, lines above which to prosper and below which to languish, and the desperate mass of humanity you locked out will eventually come flooding through.
We live in a world increasingly acutely locked into an anachronistic global political landscape. Sovereign nations, which were on the slow path to gradually compromising their sovereignty to some form of weak global federalism throughout much of the twentieth century (during the breaks from their extraordinarily destructive demonstrations of why it was absolutely imperative that they do so), have now, under the decreasingly enlightened leadership of The United States, begun backpedaling once again into global balkanization and mutual antagonism (except in the cradle of modern civilization, Europe, which has coalesced into the most vibrant of all supranational entities, and has tried to march proactively into the future despite, once again, the absence of an American willingness to see past its own nose and do the same).
But as the United States discovered early in its history, a degree of shared fate, of shared challenges, of shared opportunities, requires a commensurate degree of effective shared governance. And as I’ve said elsewhere, it is inevitable, and pragmatically necessary, that whatever form that takes, it does not simply wish away or disregard the real distribution of political and material power in the moment preceding its creation. That distribution of power has to be leveraged, to create something better from the soil of what preceded it. America has to be a major player in the creation of a functioning world order, whether Americans or non-Americans find that an attractive prospect or not.
As President Obama rightly noted in his speech, foreign aid is an act of self-interest. But that interest is best served when those aided are perceived to be less foreign, and instead are recognized as fellow human beings in a world too small for some to hide from others behind walls and across oceans. We can’t close our eyes and plug our ears and expect to live unmolested in our enclave of relative wealth and comfort, while horrors are the norm in so much of the world. That won’t protect us from the tsunamis that will continue to hit, with increasing force, all of our shores and borders. We are a part of this world, whether we like it or not. And it’s time to take our noblesse oblige seriously.
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Amendment 63 on Colorado’s ballot this November would prohibit the state from forcing people to buy health insurance, a provision of the new federal health care law , further cluttering our state constitution with yet another amendment which violates the U.S. Constitution (in this case, the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, to be precise, which states that federal law takes precedence over state law). Many think this is a good idea. And the argument for it seems straightforward enough: Free people should not be compelled to buy any good or service from any private company that they do not wish to buy.
But most people acknowledge (albeit grudgingly) that some taxation is necessary, and so the qualifier “private company” is necessary. Taxes, after all, are the government forcing people, collectively, to buy goods and services from the government. You don’t get to choose if you want to contribute to the provision of a military, police and fire departments, schools, and other public services that we have not yet been foolish enough to eliminate (though some are trying to get us there), and most people don’t object to that. Certainly, no rational people do.
There are some who advocate for more privatization of public services, contracting more out (as the military has done, for instance), more private-public partnerships, more market dynamics and competition (in the form of school vouchers and cap-and-trade regulation, for instance). Few, again, would argue that government cannot tax citizens for any service that it contracts out in part or in whole, so, again, the prohibition we are discussing must be against government forcing people to buy any good or service directly from any private company; government forcing people to pay private companies indirectly is fair game.
What, exactly, is the moral or pragmatic distinction between government using tax revenues to pay for contracted services, and government cutting itself out as the middleman, and mandating that citizens buy certain services directly? Is the issue a concern that we mandate only taxation for the provision of public, not private, goods?
But insurance very much is a public good. It is the spreading of risk so that all pay some part of a collective burden that we all share, rather than allowing the whims of chance to dump crushing burdens on a few at a time when they are least able to bear them. Ideally, we would dispense with “insurance” altogether, and instead spread the risk universally, and seek to reduce it together through a preventative and proactive health care regime, conceptualizing health care not as an individual service that is individually consumed, but rather as a basic need that we collectively provide to all of our citizens.
In the absence of that ideal, in a compromise with our dysfunctional prior system, the next best choice is to have a highly regulated private market, one which uses private insurers as agents of a public function. To ensure that the pool of contributers is sufficient to cover the demands that will be placed on the system, mandating that people pay into it is functionally no different from mandating that people pay their taxes for services that are publicly provided.
Some argue that this is just a boon to the “evil” insurance companies, that exist to maximize profits by collecting the highest premiums possible while denying as many claims as possible. There is some truth to this, and it points to a basic defect of private insurance: When you pay now for a service whose future provision depends on a judgment by those responsible to provide it, you create the perverse incentive for those enterprises to be biased in favor of judging against providing it. As long as we rely on private insurers with some discretion to accept or deny claims, we will be facing an uphill battle, individually as consumers of that service, and collectively through our government agents, to force them to uphold their end of the bargain in good faith.
As an aside, in the case of liability insurance, it creates the added defect of commercializing the meeting of moral or ethical burdens in such a way that they will be minimally met if at possible. If a parked car is totalled by a drunk driver, that driver has a moral obligation to make the owner of the parked car “whole” again, to ensure that no loss of any kind is borne by the victim. But insurance companies have no incentive to view that moral obligation as being as compelling as it is; they will not pay for anything that the victim cannot document is owed to him or her, despite the fact that no burden should fall on the victim at all. (This observation is derived from personal experience, in which, in the above scenario, State Farm Insurance sought to pay me less than the real value to me of the car the drunk driver had totalled). In other words, when you buy liability insurance, you are paying a company to fulfil your possible future moral or ethical obligations, and that company is then motivated to do so its best to shirk that responsibility on your behalf.
Relying on private insurance is problematic in a variety of ways. The insurance companies are incentivized to refuse those most in need of insurance (those most likely to have to collect on it), to bear too little of the crushing burden of health care expenses when most needed by clients who have already paid for their insurance, and to charge exorbitant prices for the under-provision of these services. With the enormous wealth thus amassed, these financial giants can then aggressively lobby Congress to do their bidding, legally bribing and blackmailing their way to almost unstoppable heights of political influence.
But, boon to private insurers or no; a sad and frustrating tribute to a corrupt system or no; our goal is not to punish insurance companies or cut off our nose to spite our face, but rather to move incrementally toward more functional social institutional arrangements, and this often means acknowledging and accommodating existing distributions of power and influence, in order to move in a direction which makes their exercise more utility-producing. The best road we have forward, both to diminish the future political clout of insurance companies and to constrain them more narrowly to provide the service for which they’ve been contracted, is to increase government regulation, and increase public participation.
Requiring everyone to buy into health insurance pools is a necessary step toward developing a fully functioning national health care system.
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