Technology and Culture

Note: An older piece I came across recently, which I thought might be shared with the wider community. (Hence the references to Advent, when here we are in Holy Week, and to my three children, when since we've been blessed with a fourth.) Given that Luddism is an accusation constantly hurled at distributism, I hope this will spark some discussion about distributism and technology.

The abuse of technology is rapidly killing culture.

I'm not just talking about creepy technology, though that exists, as well. We've all seen creepy technology. You know, the kind that's just obviously creepy, like this and this. This sort of technology isn't particularly alarming; I don't foresee a whole lot of danger coming from it. It's just really weird.

In this post, though, I'm referring to really creep technology; scary things, like so-called "earbuds." I find these horrible little devices considerably creepier than either of the above examples. It came to mind yesterday, while I was out with my family shopping for some odds and ends for the Advent season. There I was, pushing my cart with my three energetic and excited (they're always excited; the oldest is four, and the younger ones follow his lead) children through the store, and another gentleman approached. He, too, was pushing a cart, and there was no one with him. But he was chattering, on and on. Just talking. When I first caught his voice, I thought he was talking to me, and I studied his face, trying to remember from where I might have known him. But he blew by me without a glance; I might as well not have even been staring at him, which I probably was. He passed not ten feet in front of me.

Odd, I thought. The poor man is talking to himself. Only as he went by did I notice that omnipresent little monstrosity hanging in his ear.

The earbud. The final solution to that obnoxious, unpardonable peace and quiet that man has sought for so many generations. Where our forefathers spoke with one another, sang, drank, and enjoyed one another's fellowship, we are more connected with men at distant places than with those who are right beside us. This is sad. This is the sort of person who goes to a bar so he can sit in silence and drink his beer and watch a football game. He might even cheer or boo the game, and he may, conceivably, do it with someone else (if his earbud is silent, that is). But one thing that he will not, under any circumstances, do is turn away from the game and relate with the people around him. No; it's much more fulfilling to relate to people he doesn't know, playing a game he doesn't play, in a city he's never been to, through a screen that's posted on the wall.

Thus does technology kill culture. This sort of technology, the kind that makes blogs and emails possible, is one thing. It's really just an accelerated postal service and publishing industry, when you think about it. And there's certainly nothing wrong with football games, or even telephones; I'm no Luddite. But it's downright creepy when technology and the obsession with it reaches the point that one's more inclined to talk on the phone than to tip one's hat and greet the passers-by. When men are more aware of what's going on hundreds of miles away than of what's going on right next to them, something's gone horribly wrong.

And yet that's the situation, and nobody remarks about it. The President of the United States, as lofty and remote a figure as one could hope for, is daily in our living rooms via the almighty TV god; yet most Americans couldn't even name their neighbors, much less their local government officials. Who knows their city manager's name? Their county supervisor's? A small handful of people involved in local politics; the average American doesn't know, and what's worse, doesn't care. What does it matter, after all? The really important things aren't local things. Why, those people hardly ever get on TV!

We don't sing; we don't dance; we don't talk; we don't argue; all we do is immerse ourselves in the numbing influence of mass entertainment. When was the last time that, wanting music, you got out an instrument and started playing? Or gathered your children and began to sing? When was the last time that, your children wanting entertainment, you took them outside and gathered up some neighbors for a ball game? Once, when we wanted baseball, we gathered up some friends and played baseball. Now, we turn on the Yankees.

Isaac Asimov (no technophobe by far) once wrote a story, "It's Such a Beautiful Day" (it can be found in Nightfall and Other Stories) in which mankind had developed "Doors" which take them from building to building without ever having to step outside. Men developed a strong phobia of going outdoors, terrified of the dirt and the germs and the weather and all those horrifically frightening things that exist in nature unrestrained by man's benevolent, technological touch. A child who once, through necessity (his Door was broken), went outside in order to get to school, developed a real love for it. He experienced what was real---and was nearly diagnosed with a psychosis. That's exactly what is happening to us today; we're so involved in what's passed down through the media, with things that are happening hundreds of miles away to people we've never met, that we barely even notice what's happening right next to us to the people who live across the street.

Technology has killed our culture and erected in its place a monstrous substitute which gives us neither joy nor fellowship. We no longer create our own culture with the songs that we sing, the stories that we tell, the books that we read, and the topics we discuss. Instead, our culture is fed to us, donated from on high by the corporate interests which dominate mass entertainment. Instead of telling great tales of soldiers for Christ in the Crusades, or of the great Catholic kings of old, or the heroics of our ancestors in fields and in war, we talk about Batman and the X-Men. And we wonder why Catholic culture is dying? It's because Catholic culture is not allowed to live.

Remember always the principle of subsidiarity. Does it make sense that culture---the songs that we all know, the stories that we all recognize---should be made by disconnected producers in Hollywood, or in the streets of our cities and the hearths of our homes? Which can do it better? Which has been doing it since man first awoke in the Garden? Do you want to decide what your children think about? Do you want to decide what they consider important and what they consider worth repeating time and again? Or are you happy with corporate warlords doing it for you?

But we can only make our own culture if we limit the influence that the media culture-masters have over us. Can we watch television? Certainly. Can we watch movies? Of course. But make it conscious. Choose them carefully. And most importantly, don't do it too much. We must never allow what we're taking in in this way to override and drown out what we've received, recreated, and want to pass down to our children.

So take out the earbud; turn off the TV. Gather some friends, open a bottle of wine or some beers, and argue about local politics with one another. Get your wife and your children together and sing some songs, such wholesome songs as you can remember from your childhood. Look up new songs and learn to sing them. Perhaps even devise some songs of your own. Practice playing that musical instrument you haven't touched since you graduated from high school and, horror of horrors, make some music of your own. The RIAA won't like it, but you will. A lot. I promise you.

Praise be to Christ the King!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Read more...

Some Videos of Note

Part I of The history of Argentina's economic collapse and what may come.




The late Jacques Ellul authored over 50 books, some of which famously explored the limits of technology and the dangers it poses to modern society.

Read more...

The Illiberal Legacy of Liberalism

Phillip Blond at Villanova University: Well worth the 90 minutes.

http://www.youtube.com/user/villanovauniversity#p/a/u/1/S2LWc5DIQrc

Mr. Blond notes that we are witnessing the simultaneous collapse of the Left and Right because, at base, they are the same thing. One proposes a libertarianism of sexual morality: all "liberty" is about choice, and all choices are equal. Those who try to impose any restrictions interfere with liberty.

The other proposes an economic libertarianism, where isolated individuals make autonomous choices guided by the invisible hand. Behind both of these is a bankrupt account of liberty. We end with a society founded on "rights," rather than goods. In our radical individualism, we abandon all shared notions of good. Each person's good is incommunicable, therefore there can be no community of goods, only radically isolated individuals bound together only by thin, contractual relations, and the state can have no other legitimate function than to enforce contracts. Hence, it is small wonder that we have abandoned the old and don't care for the young.

Liberalism (of the Left or Right) cannot deliver what it promises: Liberty. Instead, the polity of self-interested individuals becomes the war of all against all as each isolated individual seeks to maximize his private good at the expense of all others. And the state, instead of shrinking to the mere guarantor of contracts, becomes the only force capable of policing the incessant warfare, becomes the supreme arbiter if all relations. Indeed, since the notion of objective good is discarded, the good itself becomes an arbitrary quantity, and each seeks as much of this as he/she can get. The state becomes the means to achieve the "greatest good for the greatest number," but has itself no mechanism to determine what the good is. "Push-pin is as good as poetry," as Jeremy Bentham noted, and the community has no interest in encouraging the Bard more than the game, and no right to do so. Only the market, whether political (one man, one vote) or economic (one dollar, one vote) can distinguish the relative worth of each. The only "good" in these markets is equality of men with men (and women).

In response, Mr. Blond proposes "The Civic State." This state is based on three principles: re-moralizing the markets, re-localizing the economy, and recapitalizing the poor. It is a state of shared values and objective truths. It is not a static society, since man's knowledge of this truth is always approximate; we are always in the mode of discovery, and hence we are always journeying through history. Still, there is sufficient confidence in what we have learned to state "this is good" and "that is bad" and "this is worth more" and "that is worth less." It is a state that admits not only of private goods, but of the common good as well.

This poor summary does not do the subject justice (and what makes no sense should be blamed on me rather than Mr. Blond). (There is a somewhat longer summary here.) But I think it would be a good thing if we, as distributists, began a conversation on Phillip Blond's work. So if any of our esteemed contributors would like to comment, I encourage them to do so. And if any of our readers would like to submit an article that is too big for them combox, please send it directly to me.

Read more...

The Closing of the Conservative Mind?

No fan of Frum am I, but this is disturbing:

http://capitalgainsandgames.com/blog/bruce-bartlett/1601/groupthink-right-would-make-stalin-proud

Read more...

Steelworkers with Mondragon

Keynote speech by Rob Witherell

Western Mass. Jobs with Justice Conference

March 6, 2010



· An official unemployment rate of 10%

· A real rate of unemployment and underemployment of 17%

· Millions of good paying jobs lost, including 2 million manufacturing jobs in the past year alone

· Stagnating wages

· Frozen pensions and inadequate 401(k) plans

· Sky rocketing health insurance costs

· Millions of people without health insurance

· Millions of people falling into poverty

· Millions of people receiving food stamps to feed their families

· Millions of people homeless and millions more struggling to stay in the homes they have

In the middle of the worst recession we’ve seen in the past 70 years, conservative politicians in Washington, DC are defiantly putting the purity of their ideals before the reality of the painful consequences. Congress is not a high school debate club. People need help, not talking points.

Wall Street executives, who were part of creating this crisis, were the first ones with their hands out, asking for help from Main Street taxpayers. We gave them billions and billions of dollars. As panic began to recede, they gave some of those billions back rather than have to live with the few strings attached. These fat cat executives are trying to avoid accountability and transparency, regardless of the cost. The millions of dollars in bonuses being paid again to executives, while insulting to the rest of us, are less harmful to our economy and our communities than the fact that little has changed in how Wall Street works. Years of increasing deregulation have left us with a Wild West of finance where anything goes.


Corporate executives have not done much better. In response to this crisis, corporations cut pay, laid off workers, and closed operations – too often as the first option rather than the last. Year after year, shedding jobs and shuttering plants has become an all too familiar pattern in what remains of our manufacturing sector, as production, investment, and jobs are shifted to other countries with the fewest amount of labor and environmental protections possible.


The result of years and years of neglect have left us an economy that is rotting from the inside out. Our manufacturing sector has been hollowed out and our standard of living has at best stagnated, or worse, declined. Under the added weight of the financial crisis, our economy nearly collapsed.


Due to decades of decay, we no longer have an economy capable of a quick recovery. The “good” news announced yesterday was that we “only” lost 36,000 jobs last month. If last year’s stimulus bill has been effective as economic triage, and most likely it has been, then there is still a long, uncertain road to rehabilitation and recovery.

So what are we to do?

Maybe we need to rebuild from the ground up. But how? What should our blue print look like? What historical examples might we look to?

Let’s imagine the situation in the Basque region in 1943. Still devastated from the Spanish Civil War, most notoriously the bombing of Guernica in 1937, the Basque region continued to be punished by Franco’s regime, which forbid use of the Basque language and repressed Basque culture. Thousands were murdered for supporting the Republican forces, including the priest that Father Arizmendi replaced two years earlier, and nearly Father Arizmendi himself.

High unemployment. No social safety net. No pensions. Little access to capital and investments.

It is in this context that Father José María Arizmendiarrieta started up a small polytechnic school that was the seed for the phenomenon we know today as the Mondragon cooperatives. In 1956, five graduates of that school, with the assistance of Father Arizmendi, started the first Mondragon cooperative, Ulgor. A little over 50 years later, the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation employs over 100,000 people, with nearly all of them worker owners, and over $20 billion dollars in annual revenue.

Maybe there’s hope for us after all.

So, what can we learn from them?

To start with, let’s always remember that these cooperatives were started and supported not out of some utopian ideal, but rather a very pragmatic means of helping people put a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs and food on their tables. The goal was, and remains, to create jobs that can support their families and their communities.

The success of the Mondragon cooperatives comes from putting people first. Prioritizing people before profits – imagine that. We have become so conditioned to think that companies must prioritize profits above all else, usually for the sake of some group of unnamed, unknown shareholders, that’s is hard for us to imagine any alternative.

Now keep in mind that this is no utopia, this is a highly competitive, for-profit business – just organized differently than most . As the saying goes at Mondragon: “This is not heaven and we are not angels.”

At its best though, Mondragon could be a better way to run a business. A business that is sustainable, supports jobs, supports families, and supports communities.

So how has Mondragon been able to put people first and still be competitive, growing, and profitable?

The first thing we might want to consider are the ten Basic Principles of the Mondragon cooperatives:



· Education

· Sovereignty of labor

· Instrumental and subordinate nature of capital

· Democratic organization

· Open admission

· Participation in management

· Wage solidarity

· Inter-cooperation

· Social transformation

· Universal nature



How many corporate mission statements are out there where you can find ideals like “sovereignty of labor” and the “instrumental and subordinate nature of capital”? Not many, I’m sure. Yet these principles are why job creation and sustained employment are top priorities. Even during economic downturns, when unemployment is high, as it is now, the amount of layoffs within MCC are few and limited in duration. As noted by Judy Schwartz in a recent article, “During the 1980s, when Spain's unemployment hit 27 percent, Mondragon’s hovered below 1 percent.”

As a worker owned cooperative, ultimately all profits are kept by the workers. Although some portion of profits are pooled with other coops and used for finance, education and R&D, a significant piece of the pie is distributed directly to workers in the form of profit sharing or put into the workers’ individual capital accounts. Shared risks become shared rewards.

Another key differentiation for Mondragon is the principal of democratic organization with “one person, one vote”. Every worker-owner owns an equal share and has an equal vote through “one class” ownership. All worker-owners can participate in the General Assembly to elect its Board of Directors, which is comprised of fellow worker-owners in the cooperative. The Board appoints management within the cooperative for a limited term. Workers also directly elect a representative, internal Social Council to advise the Board and management on a range of employment issues, including wages and benefits.

Mondragon cooperatives also subscribe to a principle of wage solidarity. In most cases, the highest paid worker in the cooperative makes no more than 5 times the lowest paid worker in the cooperative. In contrast, CEO’s at many multinational corporations take over 400 times the pay of the lowest paid worker. Wage solidarity means there is less disparity among workers and the communities in which they live, reinforcing the equality, and quality, of ownership.

Finally, the principle of social transformation means that a key part of the coops’ mission is to support and invest in their communities by creating jobs, funding development projects, supporting education, and providing opportunity. Their communities, in turn, support the coops.

There is no doubt in my mind that there is plenty we can learn from Mondragon. If we are going to dig ourselves out of this recession, we need every good example we can find. A business model that makes employment a priority and solidarity a principle would certainly reflect some of the key values of our Union.

I had the opportunity to visit Mondragon in September 2008. I was in nearby Bilbao for a different meeting when a good friend, who also happens to be Mondragon’s North American Delegate, suggested I go meet with the President of Mondragon Internacional at that time, Jesus Herrasti. In a good conversation, we found our organizations shared many key principles and ideas.

Over the year that followed, more conversations involving more people began to turn to specific ideas on how we might work together on projects in the U.S. and Canada.

In the context of the severe recession, we ultimately thought this was an idea and a partnership that shouldn’t be kept under wraps until we figured out all the intricacies of launching a specific union co-op project.

The USW and Mondragon announced our alliance on October 27, 2009, with little more than a common set of principles and a general framework of how our alliance would work. Risky? Absolutely. Success is by no means guaranteed.

How do we define success though? Is success only the physical manifestation of a USW/Mondragon affiliated coop?

Despite still being in the preliminary stages of this alliance, I would argue that it has already been a success. Since our October announcement, we’ve gotten interest from people in all corners of the U.S. and Canada, plus the UK, France, Australia, and of course, Spain.

Maybe success is shining a spotlight on a really interesting idea, at a time when it is desperately needed.

But can it work here?

I’ve heard a number of people wonder openly about whether such an idea could really take root in an American culture steeped in individualism. I would reframe such questions in a slightly different way though. In the midst of economic devastation and oppression, the people who originally formed and supported the Mondragon cooperatives did so out of necessity to feed and provide for their families. They started their own schools, created their own jobs, provided their own health care and met their own banking and financing needs. Theirs is a story about self-reliance and pragmatism, not just idealism. Shared values such as self-reliance and ownership have deep roots in our culture and history. In the middle of this economic crisis, people are desperate for answers. Since our announcement, I’ve gotten email and phone calls almost every day from people asking, pleading, for help.

We have a real opportunity to rebuild our economy from the ground up, in a way that is sustainable and creates good jobs. We cannot afford to wait for someone else to do it for us.

So, what is the Union’s role in this?

There are natural and historical alliances between the cooperative and labor union movements. Where those have diverged, we believe now is an important opportunity to bring them back together.

With Mondragon’s assistance, we will seek to closely implement their worker-owner model in combination with our collective bargaining model in a way that makes the workplace more participatory and more accountable to the workers, but also protects the interests of the workers and establishes guidelines to ensure that all workers are treated fairly.

We must ensure that ownership means more than just the value of a share.

A core part of this hybrid will be to transform the role of the Social Council into a Union Bargaining Committee. To sustain this model, we must also ensure a dynamic labor-management relationship rooted in partnership, understanding the needs of both the business and the workers, and respect for the advocacy roles each must take on.

Now some of you may be wondering why the USW is spending this much time and effort trying to develop coops. Well, we are indeed probably working outside of our comfort zone, but to me, that’s one of the aspects of my Union that I’m most proud of.

Leadership means taking risks.

My Union is undertaking this effort, like so many other things we do, because we know we cannot afford to rest on our heels. We cannot afford to insulate ourselves in the ongoing work of negotiating contracts and processing grievances. We must do more. For our members and for all workers.

We fight to protect the jobs we already have and the industries in which we work, but we also believe that our Union can play an important role in creating new jobs, developing better business models, and growing new industries.

We are in this alliance with Mondragon because we believe there’s got to be a better way to run a business that is sustainable and accountable to its workers and its communities.

We know change is hard.

While we must understand and learn from the past, we must not be beholden to it. We cannot simply tell ourselves “that’s just the way it is” or “that’s the way it’s always been”. We must set our own course for the future. Our children, our grandchildren, and everyone else that comes after us depend on it.

I have a small poster hanging above my desk with this quote from Margaret Mead:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Father Arizmendi and five of his former students started a small co-op in the Basque region in 1956.

Imagine what we can do.

We have the power to change the world. The people right here, in this room, have the power to change the world, in ways both big and small.

What are we going to do with it?

We cannot afford to sit on our hands, we must act. We have the power and the responsibility to act. We can create good jobs. We can create jobs with justice.

Now let’s go do it!

Read more...

Plutonomics, Citibank, and the Doom Cycle

Regular readers of this column (and there might be some) know by now that I am given to rants against the banks, accusing them of being plutocrats and oligarchs, and sometimes descending into even stronger language. But I did not expect to receive confirmation of this thesis from the nation’s biggest bank. Citibank uses a term to describe our economy which has never occurred to me, “plutonomy,” an economy run for the benefit of the rich. This is the term we find in a Citibank investment advisory letter from March, 2006. The memo (which Donald Goodman mentioned in his last post) is rather remarkable. It sounds like a satire written by some mad Distributist (like me, for example). But no, they are in deadly earnest, and unlike the mad Distributist, they are quite happy about the situation.

On Citibank’s analysis, in the U.S., the UK, Canada and Australia, “the rich take an increasing share of income and wealth over the last 20 years, to the extent that the rich now dominate income, wealth, and spending in these countries.” They speak but the truth; the top 10% of households accounted for 43% of income when the memo was written. “In total, the top 20% accounted for 68% of total income; the bottom 40%, for just 9%.” And the situation is worse when we look at wealth. The top 10% account for 57% of household net worth; the bottom 40% share only 9%.

The writers of this letter point out that in other places, such as Japan and much of Western Europe, the rich were confined to pretty much the much the same share they had in the 80’s, but in the plutonomies, such as the US, the “capitalists benefit disproportionately from globalization and the productivity boom, at the expense of labor.” In other words, the imbalance is not necessary, but a creation of particular forces within the plutonomies.

Citibank does note that the rich face some problems. For example, the CLEW Index has rising much faster than the Consumer Price Index. And what is the CLEW, you may ask? It is the Cost of Living Extremely Well, which measures such essential items as the price rise in Beluga caviar or a suite at the Four Seasons. Pity the poor rich. As the authors note, “In 2005, the CLEW Index rose 4%, while US CPI rose at 3.6%.” Well, no wonder the rich have to claim such a large share of the income “at the expense of labor.” What laboring man really needs Beluga caviar in his lunch box?

The Citibank analysts note that plutonomy explains many of the conundrums in the economy. For example, they note that the rising price of oil did not dampen demand, for the simple reason that the price means nothing to the rich. They can fill their Hummers and Porsches with what amounts to spare change, in effect outbidding everybody else, who must economize in hard times. The economy of the many should drive down usage, and therefore the price, but that simple market wisdom does not work in the face of great imbalances.

Another conundrum explained by this imbalance is the low savings rate. It is received wisdom that Americans are profligate, especially the poor and middle classes. They don’t save, which is precisely why they are poor, and because of their bad habits the nation has a net negative savings rate. The truth is otherwise, as the authors point out. The bottom 2 quintiles were actually saving at a respectable 7% rate in 2000. Meanwhile, the top 20% were actually dissaving (their word, not mine) at a rate of 2% of their considerable incomes. But since they so dominate income, their dis-savings consumed everybody else’s savings, leaving no net national savings.

The authors do note one threat to the hegemony of the rich:

[T]he rising wealth gap between the rich and poor will probably at some point lead to a political backlash. Whilst the rich are getting a greater share of the wealth, and the poor a lesser share, political enfranchisement remains as was – one person, one vote (in the plutonomies). At some point it is likely that labor will fight back against the rising profit share of the rich and there will be a political backlash against the rising wealth of the rich. This could be felt through higher taxation (on the rich or indirectly though higher corporate taxes/regulation) or through trying to protect indigenous laborers, in a push-back on globalization – either anti-immigration, or protectionism.

In other words, Joe the Plumber might get a brain and actually start voting against the policies which keep these people in power. But I doubt it. Most people subscribe to the “John Gault” myth that the rich are rich because they have earned their incomes by contributing to the productive powers of the economy. And some have. But by and large, the increasing share that the rich get is not due to productive power, but to political and economic power, and particularly the power to free themselves from any public obligations,through lower taxes, for example, or any public control, through de-regulation, especially of the finance industry. And here we get into arcane matters to which Joe the Plumber does not give much thought. At least, not now. And probably not until the situation becomes so bad that it can no longer be ignored. I think that day is now in sight.

Why? Because this situation has been building for 30 years, and has involved repeated crises, all of which have been covered by an increasing scale of government intervention in behalf of the rich. The authors of the memo venture no explanation of why the rich have been able to claim a larger share. For that, we need to turn to the analysis of Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF. And Johnson finds a “doom cycle” built into the very structure of the financial system, ever since the Reagan Revolution. Johnson summarizes his analysis in this short film.

He finds that since Reagan, the banks and other financial institutions have an in-built incentive to take ever-greater risks, and to grow as large as possible. This is because the risk rewards are asymmetric. The bankers can make massive amounts of money by taking massive risks. But when the bets fail, they can get bailed out. Thus, there are great rewards for success, and no penalties for failure. The profits are privatized, the losses are socialized. How far are they socialized? The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the portion of the public debt attributable to bailouts amounts to 40% of GDP. And then there are the 8 million jobs lost. That’s a lot of socialization.

What deregulation has set up is a doom cycle. An increased incentive to take risks, resulting, initially, in out-sized profits, then in massive failures, creating a need for bailouts, which leave the same people in charge, and the game begins again. Already, the profits of the banks are rebounding to pre-crash levels, but not on the strength of their lending to productive businesses (which by and large they aren’t doing) but by the same risky ventures that got us here in the first place. We are already repeating the cycle.

The rewards from the finance sector far outstrip the profits from manufacturing and other non-financial sectors of the economy. But in a sane economy—in an economy that is not actually a plutonomy—this cannot happen. The purpose of finance is to assist productive activities, and the rewards cannot logical exceed those of the things they finance. Yet that is precisely what has happened.

Further, the grip of the financial sector over the economy continues to grow. In the 1990’s, the Big 6 financial institutions controlled assets equal to 20% of GDP; today their assets are 60% of GDP. “Too big to fail,” and getting bigger by the moment. This is in an industry which, as Simon notes, “involves massive abuse of consumers, where they speak openly about ‘ripping the face off their customers.’”

But plutonomies are not stable, and doom cycles end in doom for everybody involved. The task of Front Porch Republicans, I believe, is to save what can be saved, and build what must be built. Up to this moment, that task has been theoretical; soon it will be actual.

Read more...

Down with the Plutocracy!

It's ever-increasingly clear that the Republicans and the Democrats are really just two opposing factions within a single plutocratic party. Their official platforms vary considerably, of course, and their favorite dead horses to beat are different dead horses. But in the long run, they both hold the same basic principles.

Both parties hold that American spending on the military is appropriate, and attempts to cut that spending in any significant degree are met with extreme opposition.

Both parties agree that unqualified support for the Israeli state is a vital part of American foreign policy.

Both parties agree that the "Global War on Terror" is an essential piece of American foreign policy, and that the American military should not be withdrawn from either of our current wars or from any significant number of our countless foreign bases.

Both parties agree that the president, without a declaration of war from Congress, is free to send the American military on adventures that he sees fit, and that defunding such adventures when, very belatedly, they meet with one or the other faction's disapproval is not an appropriate remedy.

Both parties support the decriminalization of sodomy and other perversions.

Both parties believe that abortion should not be criminalized. I'm aware that this assertion is controversial, but look at the facts. Look at the major candidates presented by the Republican party, for example, in the last presidential election: John McCain; Mitt Romney; Rudy Giuliani. Look at the ostracism that was displayed for the pro-life candidates, who despite temporary success made no headway: Mike Huckabee; Ron Paul. Is there any meaningful difference in the opinions of these major candidates from those of the opposing faction? Yes, Sarah Palin is pro-life (though ludicrously bizarre in many of her other views), but that doesn't count, because as Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first vice president, John Nance Garner, correctly observed, the vice-presidency is "not worth a warm bucket of piss." A lower half of a ticket thrown as a sop to pro-life constituencies does not a significant difference make.

Most significantly, both parties depend upon large quantities of money to gain and maintain office, and both derive the vast bulk of that money from the same corporate sponsors.

It's the last bit that I'm concerned with. Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy; it is often used interchangeably with plutarchy, a combination of plutocracy and oligarchy, which is the rule of the few. What we have in America today is not a democracy; it is not a republic, though it has some of the remnants of the old Republic; it's a plutarchy. But for convenience's sake, and also because "plutocrat" sounds better than "plutarch," I'll be referring to it as a plutocracy.

As the aforelinked Wikipedia article correctly notes,

In a plutocracy, the degree of economic inequality is high while the level of social mobility is low. This can apply to a multitude of government systems, as the key elements of plutocracy transcend and often occur concurrently with the features of those systems.

That fits modern American society exactly. The degree of economic inequality in America is high. It's middling-high according to the commonly used metric, the Gini coefficient (though even then it's higher than Canada and Europe, particularly Scandinavia, as well as India and Indonesia, and it's in the same category as such political and economic utopias as China and Malaysia), but to illustrate the enormous factual inequality only a few numbers will suffice.

The average CEO in America in 2007 made 364 times the salary of the average worker, and the average hedge fund manager makes 16,000 times that average worker's salary. This is truly enormous, even compared to the recent past; only twenty years ago, the average CEO made only 71 times that of the average worker. This indicates that the income gap has been expanding extremely rapidly; and that is, in fact, the case.

Some very disturbing numbers from the University of California at Santa Cruz indicate an alarmingly widening wealth gap in America. From 1983 until 2007, the total net worth of the bottom 80% of the population went from 18.7% of the nation's wealth to 15%; in the same period, the total net worth of the top 20%, minus the top 1%, went from 47.5% to 50.5%. The astute reader will notice that that's an increase of only 3% to balance a decrease of 3.7%; that's because a full 0.7% of that increase accrued only to the top 1% of the population. And this over less than a quarter century.

The bottom line is that the top 1% of the population controls a full 34.7% of the wealth in this country, and the top 20% controls a full 85.1% of that wealth, leaving only 14.9% of the wealth for 80% of the population. That's less than one sixth of the wealth being owned by a full four-fifths of our population. Surely this is an enormous inequality of wealth by any reckoning.

The other characteristic of plutocracy is low social mobility. Arguably, we don't have that in America. Anybody can become fantastically rich without starting that way, the tale goes, and that's at least facially true. There are no institutional barriers to the child of a homeless migrant laborer becoming president of the United States, or CEO of the country's largest corporation. We don't have a caste system, in other words, in which citizens are formally prohibited from being mobile outside of their particular classes. However, the story really isn't that simple.

The absence of formal, institutions prohibitions on social mobility does not make a society highly mobile; it merely indicates the absence of one means of preventing that social mobility. There are others, of course, some of which are mostly invisible. Tom Hertz of American University has published a lengthy report detailing the state of social mobility in America, and his results may be surprising to those wedded to the standard story we've heard so long that in America, all you need to succeed is hard work. You need, as it turns out, a bit more than that.

• Low-income children have only a 1% chance of becoming one of the wealthiest 5% of society.


• Middle-class children (by which I mean here "children born in the middle quintile of parental family income") have only 1.8% chance of becoming one of the wealthiest 5% of society.
  
• "By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States."


• The middle classes are less secure in their income, and getting less secure in it over time, as opposed to the upper classes, who are more secure in their incomes, and are getting more secure in it over time.

In other words, the United States is not particularly socially mobile, at least not as much as we think we are.

Is high social mobility even a good thing? Arguably not; however, its presence in a society in conjunction with a high inequality of wealth is a strong indicator that we're living in a plutocracy.

So we live in a plutocracy; what does this mean? It means that the people who make the decisions are, to an overwhelming extent, the people who have money. Lots of money. We can see clear evidence of this in the sorts of laws that they end of passing. The financial bailouts are the most obvious example; twenty-three trillion dollars to ensure that the wealthy bankers and speculators are kept safe, because they're "too big to fail," a cost which must be born by the public even while their own private interests get the benefit. If there were any doubt that the bailouts were largely motivated by the private interests of the plutocrats, all such doubt should be gone by now.

These, of course, are merely legislators; what about the so-called regulators, who hold much of the real power in the nation? The situation there is, if possible, even more dire. The regulators of our industries are literally in the pockets of those industries, a phenomenon that is well-known in political circles and called "industry capture." Of course, despite it being well-known nothing is ever done about it because the situation is extremely helpful to the plutocracy. Two great examples will suffice to demonstrate this condition of our regulators, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Treasury.

The Department of Agriculture is put in place to regulate, as the name implies, agriculture throughout our nation. As such, it's supposed to regulate all of agriculture, from the largest of factory farms to the smallest family one. However, family farms have only a little money, while factory farms have a lot of it, and as such the Department of Agriculture ends up regulating family farms right out of business and factory farms into ever-increasing piles of new wealth.

Monsanto, a ridiculously huge agribusiness corporation, is a producer of many farming chemicals, most particularly the fantastically deadly herbicide Round-Up, along with seeds which are genetically engineered to be resistant to Round-Up, which it calls "Round-Up Ready" seeds. Of course, it alone can sell Round-Up Ready seeds, because it has a patent on them. It is illegal, therefore, for a farmer to save Round-Up Ready seeds from his own plants. This is a fairly standard market capture technique here, very similar to that practiced by Microsoft in the computer field, and as such isn't particularly surprising, nor even particularly plutocratic. But things get even better from here.

Monsanto has totally dominated the Department of Agriculture, to such an extent that one reviewer has noted that "Monsanto employees and government regulatory agencies employees are the same people. Examples of this sort of thing abound. It doesn't help, of course, that Monsanto spent nearly nine million dollars lobbying in 2008 alone, or that another Monsanto alumnus was appointed to the FDA in 2009. And yet, when the Department of Agriculture, the FDA, and similar farming-related agencies constantly propose and support laws that will make small farming more difficult or impossible, no one in authority ever asks any questions. Because these, remember, are their fellow plutocrats.

The situation is much the same with the Federal Reserve, as well as the Department of the Treasury and similar federal agencies. Goldman Sachs is the name of the game here. Henry Paulson, George Bush's Secretary of the Treasury, was a Goldman Sachs CEO; Timothy Geithner, our current secretary, is a Goldman Sachs alum prior to serving the Federal Reserve in New York. These officials literally speak out of both sides of their mouth, saying that they want to reduce lobbyist influence while appointing lobbyists---Goldman lobbyists, of course---to their staffs. Neel Kashkari, in charge of overseeing TARP distributions, was moved to that position by Goldman Sachs alumnus Hank Paulson from---guess where?---Goldman Sachs. Joshua Bolton, John Corzine, Stephen Friedman---the list goes on and on and on. And SEC chief operating officer? Meet Adam Storch, Goldman Sachs alumnus, hired at the ripe old age of 29. Yet these are the same men who are supposed to regulate the industry that formed them.

So vote, we are told; if you don't like the situation, throw the bums out! Vote for somebody new! The only response to this can be, for whom else shall we vote? We're presented in nearly every election with someone from one or the other faction of the same plutocratic party. We can throw one bum out, but only by throwing another bum back in. How else can we explain the fact that Congress consistently gets less than 50% approval ratings while maintaining a higher than 85% reelection rate?

The situation is so blatantly plutocratic that the plutocrats are starting to be very open about it. Citigroup, a large investment firm which only continues to exist thanks to the plutocracy (bailouts), is the best example. Utilizing the neologism "plutonomy," Citigroup praises the situation of "income and wealth inequality," praising the fact that "[t]he rich are in great shape, financially." They further note that those great religious causes of the plutocracy, globalization and the constant advance of technology, "contribute to the plutonomy," and do so "at the expense of labor." In other words, they benefit the rich and harm the poor. All of this, according to Citigroup, an unquestioned and honored member of the plutocracy, is a good thing.

Welcome to the plutocracy, ladies and gentlemen. You've been here for a while already.

So what can we, as distributists, do about this situation? The sad answer is that we can do very little, in the short run. The very nature of the plutocracy is that it's tight-knit, hard to break into; unless you're very rich, or at least can become very rich, you're just not in it, which means that you're more or less excluded from the echelons of power. But that doesn't mean that we can do nothing.

The most important thing to do is take control of our own lives. We are men, not automatons, nor slaves of the machine on which the plutocrats are still, even now, just putting the finishing touches. Most of us may have the knowledge of infants, but we still have the souls of men. Let's exercise them, train them, and make ourselves what we ought to be: free citizens. A society made up of free citizens itself cannot help but become free itself.

Becoming a free citizen involves some of the same things we've been hearing about since our teachers forced us to memorize the Bill of Rights in elementary school. (I know they don't do that anymore; but they ought to.) We must speak our minds; speak out against the plutocracy, against capitalism, against greed, and in favor of free government, distributism, and moderation. Refuse to be a part of the plutocratic machine. Refuse to confine ourselves to the rival factions; vote for the candidate whose policies are best, not whose are least worst. It may even be feasible to seek political office ourselves, particularly on the local level.

But it also involves things that we didn't have to memorize in elementary school. Distributism is about freedom, of course, but it's about economic freedom in particular. There are many things we can do to fight the plutocracy that capitalism has wrought, and that fight can itself further the distributist cause. They are legion, and each distributist will undoubtedly be able to come up with many of his own. A few that immediately present themselves are as follows:

• Begin to produce. Don't rely on the machine to produce everything for you. Even if you don't have a lick of soil to your name, grow something in pots. Keep small livestock, like rabbits or chickens. If you are fortunate enough to have any land, no matter how little, you can grow more than you think. Study the matter. Hamilton's Organic Gardening is the stuff of legend. Most of Logsdon's works are also excellent, particularly Small-Scale Grain Raising, either the first or second editions; it's persuaded me quite thoroughly that grains, particularly corn, are feasible even for a small gardener on an urban lot. Storey's many guides, like the Guide to Raising Rabbits or Guide to Raising Chickens will probably be all the small producer needs to know. And "grazing" or foraging is available to anyone, opening up a world of food products for which we need not depend on the vagaries of an industrial and plutocratic capitalism. Few more distributist tasks can be imagined.


• Walk somewhere. Really, put the keys of the car away and just walk somewhere. We should consider locating ourselves close enough to our places of work to walk there. We must not fall into the modern trap of considering anything longer than a hundred yards too far, either; I might be a young man, but I've got a bad knee on one leg and a bad ankle on the other, yet I manage to walk two miles to work nearly every day (I do carpool home pretty frequently), a walk of only about half an hour. If such relocation is not possible, let us walk to the store; walk to church; or just walk for walking's sake. See people and say hello. Look into shop windows on a main street somewhere. Walk down the street and hear the tweeting of the birds, the barking of the dogs, the cries of the children at their play. Feel the weather. The universe is not seventy-two degrees at all times, and neither should our skin be. Accustom ourselves to the real, physical world. Distributism, despite protestations from capitalists to the contrary, is fundamentally about the real; let us remember what the real is by being part of it again.


• Buy. No, that's not a typo, but it's not consumerism, either. Buy selectively. We should refuse to be engulfed in the "save a buck at all costs" mentality that our plutocratic society tries to thrust on us. Try to pay attention to slave-made goods, and avoid them whenever possible. Try to buy local in preference to remote. And support those businesses which respect distributist principles while declining to support those which don't.


• Relate. Above all, don't just buy local, be local. Relate to the people around us. Get involved in our local parishes, perhaps trying to spread distributist principles and practices through them. Get to know our neighbors; think how many of us probably can't even name our neighbors? Next time we have a barbecue, invite a few of them over. Let's talk to them when we see them outside; share our produce with them; listen to them tell us about their children, their hedges, the annoying person who lives on the other side of their house. These are the people we live with; it's only decent to get to know them.

The plutocracy hates all of these things, because none of them are profitable for it. Seeking money and power before all else, these practices deprive them of both. These are the actions of a free people taking charge of their own destinies and their own communities. These are really the only ways we can effectively fight the plutocracy. Let's embrace them, and fight to our last breath.

Praise be to Christ the King!


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Read more...

The Red Tories in Washington

And Philadelphia. Previously, I had written about Phillip Blond and the Red Tories. Thanks to the efforts of the folks at the Front Porch Republic and others, Phillip Blond will be speaking at Georgetown University on March 18, and Villanova on March 22. And he will have an all-star cast to comment on his work: Andrew Abela, John Milbank, Ross Douthat, Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, and Daniel McCarthy. These should be first rate events. I wish I could go myself, but I hope some readers of this review will go and give us all a report. More details on the event click here.
Phillip runs an excellent "think tank" ResPublica, which has it own blog, The Disraeli Room.

Read more...

Our Disastrous Debt Economy

I'm pretty old-fashioned economically, really. I put a relatively new name on my economic opinions (I call them "distributism," a term derived from "distributive justice" and only in existence for less than a hundred years), but it's really a set of pretty conservative principles, some of which even Republicans and libertarians will agree with. A few of my fundamental principles:

• An economy, like all parts of society, exists to help its members proceed away from vice and toward virtue. The provision of sufficient quantities of material goods, however it may be done, is a necessary part of this.


• Because economics deals with the distribution of material goods in a society, distributive justice is its fundamental principle. This distinguishes it from, say, criminal law, in which retributive justice is the fundamental principle.


• The bedrock of any economy is production of useful goods for human consumption. We cannot consume what has not first been made. Putting consumption before production is putting the cart before the horse.


• At least considered in the abstract, local is better than remote. The perfection of a society comes in part from possessing the greatest possible degree of self-sufficiency. Thus, encouraging reliance on remote, or even foreign, sources of goods when such goods can be produced locally is a Bad Idea.


• Debt is a burden on an economy; too much debt will cripple or kill it. My grandmother once told me, "If you can't afford it until tomorrow, wait until tomorrow to buy it." But she is a child of a different age, with saner principles in her mind.

That last is my topic today. We're awash in debt. The primary issue most businesses have had during our current "economic crisis" is the inability to acquire more debt quickly enough. Our federal government, even, is in the hole nearly twelve trillion dollars, and that crushing debt is increasing at a record pace while our government lives out to its fullest Dick Cheney's idiotic principle that "deficits don't matter".

The average American's credit card debt is $8,329. That's just credit card debt alone; that doesn't include pesky little things like mortgages, car payments, student loans, hospital bills, and the million other things that people need to take out credit for. Indeed, in 2007 14.7 percent of U.S. families had debt exceeding 40 percent of their income. And then they still had to pay their mortgages, pediatricians, and so on.

Can anyone seriously look at this situation and claim it represents a healthy government and a healthy economy? At first, of course, it seems great; that's why the Fed "stimulates" the economy by lowering interest rates to encourage people to borrow more. People are flush with cash with which they buy lots of stuff that they otherwise couldn't afford; this makes car dealers and television salesmen very, very happy, which makes stocks go up, which means people borrow even more because they feel that things are only getting better, and so on. But this is a very limited boost to the economy.

Because, of course, it can only last so long. Eventually, the people lending this money out do actually want it back. With interest. And people begin struggling to make their payments. Many of them default; many of those who do not are forced to forego many purchases which they would otherwise make in order to pay off those bills. Businesses which might have hired one more person with real money, rather than three with debt, have to fire their three debt employees and hire nobody instead while they pay it back. It's clearly a loss from the individual perspective; but for a while, the economy manages to cancel out those negatives and continue apace, building itself on ever-increasing piles of debt.

Too bad it's bad debt. Eventually, those individual financial disasters begin to accumulate. They start as a trickle, increase into a flow, and finally crest as a tidal wave. And here we are, at the beginning of the tidal wave, right now, while our years and years of living beyond our means by borrowing for things that we couldn't afford finally, at long last, catch up to us.

Who's responsible for this situation? Facially, of course, it's citizens and businesses who engaged in very risky credit behavior. Namely, it's almost everybody in the country. But most of these people were relying on advice and on policies from higher up, coming from everywhere from the banks to the Fed itself. I myself, when buying my house, had to deal with constant encouragement from mortgage lenders to spend more than I had, despite my repeated insistence, and provision of a specific maximum figure, that I would spend only this much and no more. Those with less control or knowledge over their financial situation are surely much more likely to succumb.

The banks are really responsible, taking their cue from the Federal Reserve, who encouraged their reckless lending behavior with obscenely low interest rates. (Rates which remain obscenely low even as we speak.) And so, naturally, the banks ended up holding the biggest and heaviest bag when the debt hit the fan. But the banks also had the most money, even if it was funny money. They asked their friends at the Fed and the Treasury to help. And those friends moved heaven and earth to ensure that these banks would never, under any circumstances, face the consequences of their own actions, even as the poor in this great country literally lose house and home for following the advice that the Fed and these banks gave them.

So the banks are the truest of capitalists. Profit is privatized, as they made billions of dollars thanks to the government's easy-lending policies. But costs are publicized, as the taxpayers of this generation and of countless generations to come pay the price when those policies finally run up against the inevitable wall. This is wrongdoing in the extreme. We have become a country run not by the people, nor even by a despot. We are an oligarchy, in which our very richest get whatever they want, taking the profits of the public largesse while forcing the hoi polloi to stomach the losses.

MSNBC, of all places, put up an interesting monologue which prompted me to return to this topic:


What is said in this video is true. The "Troubled Asset Relief Program," which sprayed seven hundred billion dollars in free money all over the big banks like a fire hose, is just a drop in the bucket. TARP, combined with other federal programs bailing out the already rich and powerful, comes to 23.7 trillion dollars. This figure comes from our government itself, surely not given to inflating its estimates of its own reckless expenditures.[1] For comparison, the combined GDP of the entire world is only about sixty trillion dollars. And while some might rightly object that that figure is only an estimate, the same report makes it clear that the Federal Government is already irrevocably on the hook for a full three trillion dollars, still an order of magnitude more than the TARP represents and nearly a full fifth of our gross domestic product. And, more importantly, over three hundred billion dollars more than our yearly tax revenue.[2]

I mentioned earlier my grandmother's statement, which I'll go ahead and call Nana's Principle: if you can't afford it until tomorrow, don't buy it until tomorrow. Reactionary advice, indeed. This seemed perfectly natural common sense to her generation; bred in the roaring twenties, matured in the Depression, steeled in the furnace of the Second World War. She and my grandfather, a combat veteran of that war and a sometime coal-miner, were much alike in that way; they grew up growing their own potatoes and shooting a lot of their own meat, and even in their adulthoods didn't buy what they couldn't afford. My own mother spent her infancy sleeping in an opened dresser drawer because they couldn't afford a cradle.

It appears, though, that the apparatus of our government, much of which is only a decade or so younger than that heroic woman from whom I'm honored to be descended, is incapable of digesting even in its maturity the lessons that she understood by the time she was ten years old. Nana's Principle, so simple as to seem obvious, is completely beyond it. Its dependency on rich and powerful interests is so pervasive and so complete that it simply cannot contemplate not giving those interests everything they desire, up to and including indebting their country in the amount of over a third of the global gross domestic product to make sure that those interests remain ever rich and ever powerful, and leaving the poor, the workers, and the middle class to foot the enormous bill.

As I mentioned earlier, my economic opinions are pretty old-fashioned, though they go by a fancy name. That name is derived from an ancient concept, one hallowed in the annals of philosophy and politics for thousands of years: distributive justice, the giving to each what is his due. That is what distributism is, at its core: the implementation of distributive justice within an economic system. But this bailout system is the exact opposite of distributive justice. It gives profit to recklessness and costs to frugality; it gives benefit to fiscal incompetence, and even to fiscal malice, while thrusting its costs onto the complicit but largely innocent, and certainly less responsible, public. It's an injustice, pure and simple, a violation of the principles which should guide all economic activity.

We must all pray that our nation recovers from and remedies this idiocy soon.

Praise be to Christ the King!

1. July 2009 Quarterly Report to Congress 137-38 appears to be its first acknowledgment in governmental literature. It appeared in some subsequent quarterly reports, as well; in the January 2010 report, however, it and the entire section it represented appears to be completely missing, without any explanation for the omission that I have uncovered.
2. Based on our 2007 tax revenue of $2,674,007,818,000, according to Federal Tax Revenue by State.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Read more...

Hudge and Gudge Watch: Big Business squashes your rights

It is common thinking among conservatives that the government getting too big is the only problem, and once that is dealt with our freedom will be secure.
However, this view forgets that big business can be just as bureaucratic and invasive as big government.
Recently this year, a hospital decided that it will no longer hire anyone who smokes. You thought the government was the only one running the anti-smoking campaign? Think again. It was neither the first nor will it be the last.

According to the hospital's new policy, anyone who tests positive for nicotine in their drug screening will now be considered in the same group as illegal drug users. From the article:

As part of the pre-employment drug screen, they will be looking for nicotine. If a prospective employee tests positive for nicotine, the offer of employment will be rescinded. Even nicotine gum or the patch would make a potential employee ineligible.

Officials with Memorial say the new policy isn’t designed to save money on health care costs, but because a hospital should set a healthy example to the community.

“I understand the concerns people have, but we are here for the health of our community,” Brad Pope, vice president of human resources said. “Like it or not, what’s proven is that tobacco is the most preventable cause of death and disability in the United States. I think the Chattanooga and surrounding communities should expect this from Memorial.”

Thus, based on an unprovable statement with no evidence to back it up (as the majority of people who smoke do not even die from it) Gudge is now going to tell his slaves what they can do when they sit at home in their living room in a manner that concerns him in no way whatsoever. Now what concerns me here is not that a majority of us here at the Review smoke (even though such contributes to our sober and balanced atmosphere), nor the fact that I smoke and I love smoking and would no sooner part with my pipe than I would with food, I might very will have a distaste for smoking and be alarmed by this event.

Mr. Pope has decided that he is the Pope of the holy office of discipline in his company, and he is going to regulate not just what the employees of his temple of Asklepios do while they're there, or with company things (which he is within his right to do), but what they do with their own things at home (which he is not). Imagine Dr. Smith at home in his living room. He decides that he should like a small cigar to go with his coffee while he reads his a very thrilling novel. No, my Pope (that is of the HR department) will fire me. Or again Dr. Smith is invited out for a round of drinks with some friends, but wait, they smoke. Not only might nicotine get in his blood stream from second hand smoke, but he will get it on people at work through third hand smoke. So Dr. Smith is now forced to contract his social circle.

Moreover, as Mr. Pope has pontificated, the hospital is not treating smokers in the same class as those who use illegal drugs because they think it will save them money on insurance, but because they are positively opposed to the thing in itself, irrespective of whether or not the research behind it is correct. The hospital is not saying "do not smoke in the building around the patients" etc. which is reasonable on various levels. They say do not do it at home. What else might a Mr. Pope decree with the dubious infallibility of statistics and studies? What about obesity? We saw the spectacle of a woman nominated for Obama's Surgeon General who was slightly pudgy, shapely might be the correct description, rejected on the basis that she was fat and this would send a bad message. What if Chatanooga's Pope should decide that the hospital needs to set the standard and fire anyone who is fat (or perceived to be fat, since our society has a strange and unhealthy obsession with being skinny, the goal should be to acquire fitness)? Dr. Smith, even though you are an award winning pediatrician who has worked with children for 20 years, you don't set the example of what a healthy person should look like because you are fat. You have been excommunicated.

Then it comes down "If anyone should on his own time eat at McDonalds, anathama sit." If that sounds far fetched and ridiculous, think again. It follows exactly from big business getting the power to determine what you can and can't do. The Nazis embarked on a massive anti-smoking campaign, and the reason was if people could accept the government's right to regulate their personal behavior, they could accept the principle that the government can regulate other behavior, and they selected that which was becoming scientifically unpopular and thus could have the weight of doctors, scientists and the gestapo behind it. Soon any behavior seen as unpatriotic, much like "counter-revolutionary" in the Soviet Union, became criminalized. How has big business gotten this power might you ask? Gas prices. Not from the gas prices, but rather the gas prices show us how they have gotten a strangle hold on us. We can't afford to lose our jobs, particularly in a volatile economy, and we can't afford to not work. This is why when gas prices went over $4 people continued to buy, although other sectors of the economy weakened, not because people are addicted to oil, but because without it we can't get to work, and end up living in the street.

In truth, big business is little different than big government. They think that they own you, the former because they pay you, the latter because they take from you. Next it becomes, I don't like the Pope (because Mr. Pope correctly observes that there can only be one at one time) so anyone whose religious affiliation is Catholic must be sacked. This has already been done for any appointment in congress who might be Catholic and faithful to the Church. Then perhaps you drink coffee. Coffee is found to cause heart problems based on these studies, so drink tea instead. Testing positive for coffee in your system will lead to rescinding of job offers or firing. Then, it will become more ridiculous, not to mention stressful without that cup of kona in the morning. On the other hand, in Michael Novak's estimation that might be a boon to capitalists in the medical field.

One may not like smoking, I for example detest cigarettes, but proudly smoke a pipe and cigar, but none of that really matters. What matters is neither big business nor big government (hudge and gudge) believe in the family. They both believe the man who works for them is but a cog in their machine, and that his is their cog in their machine. The big business doesn't believe in the family because it is inconvenient for him, the government because it believes it is the Pater Familias. Since the two become more and more alike, the two begin acquiring the other's traits, like a married couple who begin to behave like each other. The family becomes inconvenient to the state, because the state brings about a new concept of the family that clashes with tradition, so it forces compulsory education where its policies are right and mom and dad are wrong, or children can be taken away because parents taught the wrong values. The big business begins thinking it is the head of the family, and begins to control it. Yet that is the future because big business and big government are the same thing.

Now the libertarian, or some other fool who doesn't believe in the effects of original sin but sees man only in a vacuum of reality, might remark, well, work somewhere else. The market will not allow them to continue for long if that is what people want. In a vacuum that might even work, but in reality it is senseless.

In the first place, one may not be able to get another job. Let's even say he can, to get away from a tyrannical HR Pope, he must contend with other businesses which will eventually adopt the same thing. The libertarian fails to take into account what is fashionable, except in the metric of selling garbage, which capitalism does very well. It takes good products, like a bit of virginia cut tobacco leaf rolled up into a natural tobacco paper, into a disgusting capitalist product half tobacco and half chemical filled saw dust and bleached paper, not to mention fiberglass filters. It is good at selling crap, but we must not forget that when the wealthy put their wealth to something, it creates an effect irrespective of what people want. The wealthy want women to be dressed up like prostitutes even at age 4, so they flood stores with clothing of this style and mark it $4. A sweet dress such as girls about 4 should be wearing, $20. There is no market force involved, but the forces of the wealthy and social destruction. Nevertheless, let us say again that Dr. Smith has several children, and as costs go up providing for his family has gone up. So maybe he can't leave, but wishes to escape the bull of his HR Pope, yet is stuck there. So he must change certain virtues he engages in at home to suit his employer, which are but the beginning of the first. Most men will fall into this category, especially when real unemployment numbers factor in pretty high.

It is much like the gas prices. The market can bear it not because that is what people want to pay, but what they must pay to avoid being fired and living with their family on the street. It is why people worked 15 hour days before government correctly began regulating big business, not because they wanted to, but because they had to. The big business is betting that if you don't like it you will step in line, because (especially in this economy) you must or else risk joblessness and homelessness.

Nevertheless, let us suppose that Dr. Smith does move. He moves to a new city where he knows no one, that he doesn't care for because that is where he could get a job without a Pope of the home as well as the workplace.

Why should a man leave off of hearth and home and go to a new place? There are all kinds of legitimate reasons, war, or personal tragedy, or some other calamity, but not because he is required to give up smoking at his former job! Its ludicrous. Hearth and home are no longer the sacred domains of the family, but subject to the whims of the bureaucratic befuddlements of Hudge and Gudge. The Caesars rose to many heights, they also descended to many lows, but they never descended so low as to try and be worshiped as the gods of the hearth and home. Big business has done Caesar one better.

Read more...