Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, June 26, 2011

The Ignorance of the Republican and Libertopian Free Marketeers Is Easily Equal to Their Cruelty

Republicans and so-called market "Libertarians" often get in a lather when they are told to their faces the obvious truth that they are not only wrongheaded but also profoundly mean and cruel for advocating policies that disproportionately advantage the already rich and already privileged (often all the while indulging in wish fulfillment fantasies that one day they will be the rich ones benefiting from such policies, once their Genius is finally recognized or once they finally get their Big Break or once their willingness to climb a gory mountain of bloody skulls with more brutality than others finally achieves the Summit or whatever creepy convictions or compulsions or convulsions drive these awful people) rather than addressing palpable problems in our shared world of structural poverty, resource depletion and catastrophic climate change, systemic violence and humiliation, treatable neglected disease and malnutrition, and facilitating through public investment and collective action a scene of equitable, informed, actually non-duressed consent (and the diversity that arises from such a scene).

Typically, these Republicans and market "Libertarians" declare themselves to be speaking from the vantage of particular political philosophy or economic ideas when they defend their selfishness and cruelty.

But it cannot be more clear, nor can one ever stress often enough, that theirs is an outlook that has not yet achieved a grasp of the basic constituents of political understanding: that every right is first of all a rite; that no-one is an island and no one consents to their investment in consent; that public goods -- among them civitas, equitable law and consensual order as such -- are incapable of private provision; that the ineradicable diversity of ends of the stakeholders who share the world are only contingently and hence interminably reconciled over time and that this reconciliation is permanently susceptible to violence; that the legitimate, non-violent adjudication of disputes is a practical, institutional, and also discursive project which will always include the renegotiation of what counts as non-violence; that violence can inhere in inequity but also in the circumscription of diversity and that there is no ideal or logical resolution of these competing but equally indispensable values; that democracy is simply the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them and since there are endlessly many ways of providing what might qualify as such a "say" democracy is not an ideal we approach but a practice in which we engage and experiment in an ongoing way, and so on.

Given their neglect of so many of the fundamental assumptions that give rise to political understanding and deliberation, properly so-called, Movement Republican and market "Libertarians" really cannot be regarded as propouding political views at all as far as I can see, but are better understood as proselytizing altogether pre-political outlooks, or even indulging in outright parochial moralizing mistaken for or peddled as politics.

Similarly, the "economic ideas" to which Republicans and market "Libertarians" appear to be devoted are typically either macroeconomically illiterate variations on the "laissez-faire" platitudes debunked and superceded by Keynes (with a few saltwater refinements) or ecologically illiterate variations on the "productivist" platitudes debunked by Polanyi and Galbraith (for instance, in The Great Transformation and The Affluent Society, respectively) and superceded by sustainability and environmental justice policy-making.

Although Milton Friedman has, since Naomi Klein's excellent polemic The Shock Doctrine, been treated as the arch villain in the story of the suffusion of economics departments and global institutions by market fundamentalist and neoliberal developmentalist brutality, it is interesting to note that Friedman's monetarism at least genuflects in the direction of Keynesian insights, while contemporary market fundamentalists and neoliberals have regressed to pre-Keynesian illiterates via Hayek, Mises, and rank popularizers like Hazlitt (some of this story is quite accessibly told in David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism, a fine companion to Klein).

Further, the moralizing project of providing via "academic economics" a facile and falsifying intellectual framework for organizing in the service of incumbent elites is the latest chapter in a longer American story which includes the initial creation of University Economics departments in the Gilded Age to provide rationalizations for plutocratic abuses and respond to the popularity of Henry George (and to a lesser extent, figures like Marx in the post-Civil War and early Republican labor agitating period).

As for the suffusion of economic thought with "productivist" assumptions that mistake a vulnerable world for an infinitely resourceful one instead and mistake vulnerable human beings who care and share with their fellows as infinitely greedy defensive sociopaths instead, I fear all too many of these pathological prejudices are to be found in Marx and Keynes (Marx's praise for the emancipating powers of technoscientific capitalism is second only to that of capitalism's actual champions, as is well known, and for Keynes see, for instance, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren") as well as in the usual suspects of reactionary economic thought.

Defenders of Marx and Keynes will have many photogenic counterexamples at hand to resist any blanket equivalence thesis with reactionary "Free Marketeers" here, and I concede their point at the outset, but productivism as social panacea and as denial of ecological limits remains a real problem in both. But only those rare -- thankfully less rare all the time -- tracts in which economic and ecologic thought are woven together is this default economistic-developmentalist productivism sometimes overcome, as in the current work of some environmental justice policy-makers, sustainability theorists, eco-socialists, among others.

To return to the basics, however, there are simply some services, some investments, some goods from which all benefit incomparably more from having them at hand than not whatever their relative contribution to their creation and maintenance and their own immediate and palpable benefits from these, and such public services, public investments, public goods are the accomplishment of collective (or even socialized, if you roll that way) action in the service of general welfare.

For some services, private profitability demands the exclusion of some especially costly beneficiaries from the service (universal basic healthcare is such a service). But when one of the indispensable benefits arising from the provision of the service is precisely that all are included in it (because one wants to live in a society where all are as well as may be, the better to contribute who knows what measure of value to that shared society when not bedeviled by treatable illness, or to eliminate an unnecessary spectacle of suffering or neglect in which we all in that shared society are humiliated), this simply means that the service will necessarily fall to the collective agency of the state rather than to for-profit enterprise for its proper provision.

Likewise, for some investments (transportation, information, education, communication, energy and resource provision infrastructures), private profitability demands that certain conspicuous social or environmental costs be externalized, paid in fact by members of society more generally or later on who must take on the costs of incapacitating injuries, illnesses, undue stresses, or of environmental depletion, pollution, waste, and so private profitability must be foregone so that these costs may be internalized and equitably borne by all those who inevitably pay them in exchange for their general benefits (or if these costs remain too high to be borne in general or in the longer-term, they must be rejected altogether as bad investments whatever their short-term or parochial benefits to some).

When people with whom we share the world suffer from violence, duress, treatable illness, severe want or neglect, exploitation, unfairness, unequal access to opportunity, undue ignorance, misinformation, harassment, or fraud in ways susceptible to collective address only or best or legitimately through the agencies of the state either because their private, charitable, or for-profit address cannot ensure adequate, equitable, or universal provision, or provides only exclusive benefits to parochial ends while imposing general and generational burdens, then it is not only mistaken to ignore this suffering or propose its inadequate address (though it is mistaken, too), but profoundly mean and cruel to do so.

Just because one might declare a person mean and cruel and insensitive to refuse charity or generosity on an occasion when such charity and generosity would do great good at little cost to the one refusing it, this does not mean that everything mean and cruel and insensitive is a matter of a failure to be charitable best addressed through greater compensatory generosity on the part of those who see things differently than some selfish oaf.

Again, some shared problems demand legitimate, collective, public, socialized address funded by taxes and comparable revenue, and while those who are indifferent to the solution of such shared problems may have an uncharitable disposition (along with their short-sightedness, parochialism, and selfish greed), this is far from proposing that charity would provide an adequate address to these shared problems.

And, again, those who propose that competitive for-profit enterprise can solve all such problems are plainly and palpable wrong, and to say otherwise is to neglect so many fundamental political assumptions and warranted economic assertions that it is not really appropriate to declare such proposals to be "political philosophies" at all rather than simply facile uncritical parochial and pre-political impressions of the world, nor to declare them forms of "economic thought" rather than simply incoherent bits of pre-Keynesian nonsense or, worse, as straightforward opportunistic propaganda and fraud in the service of incumbent elites gussied up as intellectual disciplines.

The so-called "Free Marketeers," when they declare those who seek to address shared problems by the actual public means equal to them to be hypocrites imposing their pet charitable causes on the unwilling, indeed reveal themselves to be breathtakingly mean and cruel in their indifference to the unnecessary suffering caused by these shared problems. But do not let us forget that together with their meanness and cruelty, and often enabling it, they are usually also almost flabbergastingly foolish and ignorant people as well who should be exposed as such.

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