Politics

bls has been concerned lately about what the purpose of blogging could be if one has no opinions. I understand the feeling. And then I thought about it and realized I have a lot of opinions but I'm not sure they matter very much.

In both the earthly and heavenly city, the city has an analogy with a human. In the case of the earthly city, we go round about with who among us is what part. In antiquity, the elite were said to be the head of the society and so consumed by the mouth and let the lower classes be the hands to work to feed them. In modern times, the same analogy holds in practice, but the hands and feet now are permitted to send nerve impulses to the brain on occasion and serious doses of neurotransmitters every six years. In the heavenly city, whose only described building is the sanctuary, the analogy is between the city and the God made man, Jesus Christ, who has resurrected the temple of his Body that the whole creation be at peace therein.

Some concern with the heavenly city has seemed appropriate lately. Recall the Collect for Proper 20:

Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things which are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

It helped to think on this this week. The Collect dates from the uneasiness during the era of the barbarian invasions of the 5th century AD. But as Will Durand reminds us, the invasions from without only have the power when we are corrupt within. The good person is neither buoyed up by joy nor brought down by misfortune saith Augustine. But I find it hard to cultivate ataxia, so how can it be for a Wall Street trader?

So given this analogy between the city and the human being, I wonder what is the point of the occasional nerve impulses to our legislators and seratonin shots to them in the voting booth. Why not simply externalize each and every listing of the state to the organs to which our constitution has externalized that function (ignoring our rights of suffrage and petition). If I feel myself as a scientist to be a communal externality of our individual curiosities, why not let the politicians be a similar communal externality of our individual deliberative functions?

The answer, of course, is that this brain is on drugs, in particular Special K (Street). And like a human being, the state has the potential to act extremely stupidly when intoxicated and panicked. Indeed, all of us acting extremely stupidly is infinitely more dangerously than one of us acting extremely stupidly.

I think I might have looked at this bailout plan a bit differently if I hadn't just read North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, a Victorian novel of Non-Conformity, mutiny, romance, early industrial capitalism, and labor agitation. It's amazing how much globalization shapes a novel written in 1855. But that's the idea. England had advantages in the early Industrial Revolution, but now it faces competition from a growing United States with better soil, cheaper food, easier access to raw materials, and more favorable conditions for immigration. In other words, the United States was the developing country capable of undercutting English textile manufacturers in the world market in a world of much more expensive transportation. Gaskell took a lot of flack from her husband's mill owner parishioners, but she portrays mid 19th century capitalists in a sympathetic light. What's interesting is how Gaskell notices how comfortable the industrial working class is relative to the rural working class. They have furniture, reasonably comfortable lodging, and generally are better fed. Many of them even have substantial savings, completely unthinkable from the rural poor, who seem dependent on the trickle down of ecclesiastical charity. But they are more prone to illness, working in dangerous and unhealthy conditions, and often live just as marginally.

The amazing thing about this novel is that it represents a middle period in the relation between the capitalist manager and the working class man and woman of production. In the early stage, industrial capitalism began in the context of the artisanal workshop emerging from the collective and conservative force of the medieval guild. In this middle stage, the worker has been demoted from a potential master but still remains in intimate contact with the manager whose capital is embodied by the factory, who lives next to the factory, and runs the operations of the factory himself. The increasing globalization of capital (as opposed to the globalization of the market, which is distinct) has eliminated these kinds of relations. If someone in some other city or country manages your factory and "funds" own the capital, the social controls that allow labor and management to have a mutual interest fall away. The capitalism seen in Gaskell is attractive because it is mutualistic. Modern capitalism is feared because of the instances in which it is parasitic.

Many would ask why is it important that capitalism be mutualistic. That's often inefficient. Well, capitalism in a democratic world is only justifiable on two grounds: one is in its aesthetic. In its purest form, capitalism is the self-sufficient and self-defensible person using his or her excess to do or make things that others find "useful" and will gladly provide their excess to obtain. Its eventual end, however, lies in the perpetual excrescence of human existence beyond sufficiency. The pure capitalist exchange requires a weighing of desire, not a weighing of need. The choice of sale or starvation makes a transactional party unfree. Most critiques of capitalism are of its impure form. But in a world of self-defensible and self-sufficient people with desires in proportion to their resource base, capitalism is a beautiful thing and fine director of human curiosity and innovation.
The other value of capitalism lies in its purity hopefully being its aim. In a world of uncertainty and scarcity, capitalism brings technology and a global marketplace, allowing a sort of half-sufficiency, in which the market hopefully compensates for the limitations of our individual economic lives.

Unfortunately, since its inception, capitalism has been perverted by force. The earliest industrial workers were those driven off by enclosure, which took land in which the peasantry had interest through the mixture of their labor with the ground and the aristocracy had interest through their defense of that ground and announced that the capital in that ground would belong to the sword alone. So all of this is to say that I understand the beauty and benefits of libertarianism, especially for Christians, in that there are certain aspects of ancient Israel that seem anarchocapitalist. Unfortunately, we are fallen people who pervert all things with force. And so I lean to the social democratic approach of supporting a variety of strategies to use the force of popular sovereignty and scientific curiosity to encourage local sufficiency and various checks on the activity of capital to ensure that property rights not easily apportioned in a flawed capitalist system become reserved to the people.

Mainly, I take the American approach pioneered by Chief Justice Roger Taney, "While the rights of private property are sacredly guarded, we must not forget that the community also have rights, and that the happiness and well-being of every citizen depends on their faithful preservation." In Taney's case, he was merely arguing that the government could modify exclusive monopolies in the public detriment. I feel free to extend this to any government interference with enterprise tending to the good of the public at large, but generally restricted to "public goods." Public health care management, public utilities, and public transit generally work for me. In World War II, the United States Government had nearly communistic control of factories. They ensured they paid well, though, and directed the excess salary into buying into the war debt. Considering the way defense contractors work now, why can't we have wartime control of those industries all the time? Well, maybe not.

The key is that the left generally likes to repeat the mistake of Marx, which insists that capitalism and private property are so deeply flawed as to be worthy of destruction. Yet private property at least is rather basic to humankind. We are social and political animals but do much better than ants on our own. Adam and Eve chose their downfalls on an individual basis after all.
I think it's much better to think of capitalism as something beautiful and flawed, like a lover with a substance abuse problem. If our love is true, we neither enable them, nor cast them away. We try to get them help when they fall down, but we do let them hit bottom. Both the right and the left like drag us toward class warfare. Bernie Sanders of Vermont wants to tax $500,000 income individuals and $1,000,000 income couples with a special surtax for ten years to help pay for the bailout. California has a similar surtax. I find these kinds of measures punitive, because it only measures economic activity in terms of income, and it equally punishes and rewards the best and the worst of a capitalist economy. Unfortunately, it would be nearly impossible to implement my perfect tax system (based on ecological economics). Instead, I favor progressive tax rates similar to the 1960s and spending and debt reservice in fixed proportions of GDP, possibly delineated in broad categories. I wish I could do things to bring back the middle phase of capitalism and the conscientious class unity possible between "master and man." But I think the energy issue will take care of that soon enough.

So in the end, I remain opposed to a bailout of the financial system at this stage. Let the toxic debt crash upon the relevant ears and let those unaffected climb to the top of the financial heap. The government seems like it can find buyers for the distressed. And if not, the government should buy them at lower prices in the coming year. I don't imagine it's going to be easy. Bond issues will slow. Credit will be tighter. 20% down payments generally may be required. But this crisis is a crisis of lust and overreaching. Easier credit and lower taxes encouraged irresponsibility of both government and people. In some, it led to desperation. As credit tightens, certain goods will return to reasonable prices. Other goods will seem necessary. From what I can tell, lending to industrial expansion continues apace. If you are willing to change your ways, a new structure of the American economy is coming. But as this economy develops, we are going need a little bit of cash to pay down government debt and create a less energy-intensive infrastructure. And some of that money should go into restructuring housing. I'd like to see the government offering benefits to mortgaged properties that are insulated, put to agricultural use, or divided into multiple family dwellings.

So I have opinions. And if you read carefully enough, you may realize that I am in favor of one drug addict letting another drug addict potentially overdose in order to allow another drug addict to go into treatment, which is often the consequence of analogies in this vale of tears.

So what about our presidential candidates? I'm at least voting for one of them, though I have to admit they're increasingly ridiculous. Just listening to them talk about Russia tonight made me want to scream. No consideration of Russia's strategic position at all. Instead, anyone who opposes people we support hates freedom. No mention of how we're going to be pointing missiles at them from Poland and want all their neighbors to join their military alliance. And I really want someone to ask why we're defending borders drawn by Joseph Stalin.