Bum Rush: Corporatism In Plain English

Something stinks to high heaven.

Remember the highly successful, bi-partisan de-regulations of the trucking, airline and banking industries during the 1970s?  Have you ever wondered what about the fundamentals of economics has changed so profoundly since that time?  Why have both Democrats and Republicans frantically, strenuously, almost comically tap danced around the prospect of deregulating health care—an obvious and proven approach to improving efficiency and lowering prices?

Is it just me, or did you ever notice that the largely exaggerated health care cost crisis was seemingly never defined by politicians in terms of high prices?  Instead, there was this obsessive focus on the number of people who are uninsured.  Being uninsured was presented as some great social justice issue, even after researchers showed that the uninsured were mostly wealthy (able to pay out of pocket) or probably had other, voluntary means to obtain health services.

There is one thing I am completely sure of:  A GOOD INSURANCE SALESMAN NEVER LET’S ON THAT THERE ARE GOOD ALTERNATIVES TO HIS PRODUCT.

So what happens when you elect lying insurance salesmen into federal office?  You get Congress, two presidential Salesman-in-Chief candidates, and millions of instant “customers.”

Get it?

Bin-Laden Sums Up Well the Bush "War on Terror" Policy

"It is easy for us to provoke and bait this administration.
All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin
[jihadists] to the furthest point east to
raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-
Qaida, in order to make the generals race there
to cause America to suffer human, economic,
and political losses without their achieving for
it anything of note other than some benefits
for their private companies . . . So we are continuing
this policy in bleeding America to the
point of bankruptcy. . . . That being said . . .
when one scrutinises the results, one cannot
say that al-Qaida is the sole factor in achieving
those spectacular gains. Rather, the policy of
the White House that demands the opening
of war fronts to keep busy their various corporations—
whether they be working in the field
of arms or oil or reconstruction—has helped
al-Qaida to achieve these enormous results.
And so it has appeared to some analysts
and diplomats that the White House and us
are playing as one team towards the economic
goals of the United States, even if the intentions
differ. . . . for example, al-Qaida spent
$500,000 on the event [the 9/11 attacks], while
America, in the incident and its aftermath,
lost—according to the lowest estimate—more
than $500 billion. Meaning that every dollar
of al-Qaida defeated a million dollars by the
permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge
number of jobs."

The above is quoted in Lustick, Ian S. "Our Own Strength Against Us: The War On Terror as a Self-Inflicted Disaster." Independent Policy Report. The Independent Institute. April, 2008. (Available at: http://www.independent.org/pdf/policy_reports/2008-04-04-lustick.pdf)

This speech was broadcast on Al-Jazeera television on November 1, 2004. I haven't found a current online video version of it yet.

What is Government?

What, exactly, is government? Frankly, it sounds like a silly question. Yet, a little thoughtful, factual, reflection demonstrates that the question is not as easy as one might think. The “silliest” questions of all are very often the most challenging precisely because such questions are little thought of or are taken for granted.

If one were to ask a random New Yorker standing on a street corner what a government is, the response might likely be something like “they’re the ones that make the laws, right?” This is an understandable reaction—to refer to the familiar notion of legislative activity we see covered on the nightly news. The phrase “ones who make the laws” in U.S. political culture is invariably a reference to the apparatus of the nation-state. In this essay, I propose to challenge this response on several levels.

Mankind is naturally social. From time immemorial mankind has demonstrated a propensity for social organization, or society. We expect mankind to form societies, anything from the family to the U.N., and social behavior requires coordination. These societies and their coordination facilitate everything from the most basic, personal human needs to the highest attainments. Societies coordinated by rules are said to be “governed” by rules, and government is that part of human behavior having to do with the making and enforcement of rules that facilitate being a part of society or societies.

Starting with the society associated with the most basic needs, we begin with the quintessential and primordial example of coordinated society, the family. Familial social ties, of the genetic and/or emotional sense, provide nourishment and affection during the most formative and vulnerable stages of life, and are often found to be so emotionally rewarding as to support their continued existence well after childhood and child rearing. In families we see the first, most stark example of the inter-dependency of the human condition, especially in the helpless human infant—among the most helpless of living things on earth at birth. These needs are met by coordinating familial society through
rules.

Perhaps it is a truism to describe the family as the “basic unit of society,” since it is the individual’s very first introduction to social organization and social rules. However, it may also be basic to our understanding of governments. How could this be?

A clarification is in order before I proceed. Laws and rules are the same thing, although in general use, “law” tends to refer to the rules by which a much larger society than a family functions. Laws are simply societal rules, although, in smaller societies like families, using the word “law” in reference to family rules is confusing. Appealing to the etymology of the word “law” serves to disarm its confusing cultural connotations to larger societies like nation-states: “Law” comes from the old Germanic lag, meaning, quite simply, “order.”

To return to our last query more specifically, how can the idea of families be used to critique our New Yorker’s intuition that governments are “the ones who make the laws”? The surprising answer is that family suggests that, in certain circumstances, there may be no real answer to who it is that makes the rules, at least in some explicit sense. In comparing nation-states to families, we can say they are both forms of social organization that are coordinated through rules or laws. However, in the case of families, we quickly see that rules may arise spontaneously, without any particular person or persons to make the rules. As just one example, families in subsistence farming economies tend to have a sexually discriminatory division of labor based on comparative advantage, such as the fact that men tend to have greater upper body strength than women. This rule about division of labor was certainly not imposed from without or even explicitly stated. Like language, such rules spontaneously arise out of the immediate environment of the individual acting with other individuals.

Thus we see that the mere fact that there is order, or law, to be found in societies does not necessitate anyone issuing laws at all. Therefore, to the extent that our New Yorker assumed that social order inherently necessitates a nation-state imposing law (rules) upon a society, he is quite mistaken.

This surprising example, among others, of spontaneous law is especially impressive when social order or law is achieved precisely in this way on a massive and complex scale, underscoring the ingenious ways societies free from top-down rule-making, such as legislation or diktat, can achieve remarkable results.

Moving outside the society of the family, what explains the strong tendency in trade for self-interested parties to practice honesty? For one thing, the continued existence of need and scarce resources by both parties drastically reduces the desire of both parties to engage in extortion or violence, thereby cutting oneself off from a source of economic betterment through mutually-beneficial trade. An expanding division of labor strengthens the desire for honest dealings and peaceful exchange, as the variety of goods and services available for the betterment of all is increased through the efficiencies of trade and specialization.

The mutual self-interest created in the division of labor and the development of trade has produced some of the most wide-ranging and complex examples of spontaneous law and government.

A marvelous historical example of trade and economic self-interest being a spontaneous source of law is the “law merchant,” a system of international trade law developed during medieval times. The system was made up of part-time law experts or judges (themselves merchants) who, through competitive trial and error, developed a common law tradition of rules providing resolution to conflicts between contracting parties. Because of the strong level of interdependence built up among the network of trading parties, there was strong incentive to settle conflicts in a mutually agreeable manner. Also, the use of force was seldom needed, since failure to abide by the law merchant system could easily mean the loss of a fortune. This was because the prestige the system had gained for fairness was so powerful that it was very easy for merchants to conclude that a dissenting merchant, refusing to utilize the law merchant for conflict resolution, was not willing to trade fairly with them. The law merchant stands as an incredible example of a system of law and government that arose spontaneously, without the imposition of force by a state or group of states.

The notion of “natural law” (natural order), implies that, in some prior sense, societies develop starting with the most basic and central human needs being met, and certainly family organization is one such society. Natural order comes into being because of natural needs. In as strict a use of the word lag (law) as might possibly be used, the society of family is the beginning of natural-law-based societal law. The individuals in families make up the most immediate webs of inter-dependence and most often represent the most fulfilling personal relationships individuals have. In this sense, we can easily see that the most compelling locus of personal (self-) interest and initiative is the family, with other forms of social organization (i.e., larger social orders) being secondary, tertiary, and so on.

Because of this, the most fundamental social rules (as distinguished from mere fashion or manners) provide order in society by protecting persons and property. In more ancient times this connection between the individual social sphere of family, persons, and property, were underscored with the close relationship between economic survival and family organization itself. In more ancient, subsistence-based economies, the place where people, property, means of production, and the most compelling, emotional reason for that production were all most closely, psychologically associated was in the family home. Thus, to attack person and property was to largely attack much of the meaning of individual life itself. Human beings are so social that individual life is largely made meaningful only by others.

The genius of the Western tradition that puts emphasis on individual rights and natural law is that it properly sees law as arising from naturally-occurring mutual self-interest between individuals, most basically centering in families and the immediate environs of the individual. Natural-rights-based order, where found, avoids conflict by recognizing the highly divergent needs, desires, and destinies of the individual (i.e., ensuring personal liberty).

The proper role, therefore, of government in the classical liberal sense, is limited to the protection of “negative rights”—the class of rights that prevent the inflicting of harm on persons and property. Where policies have arisen in western nation-states that favor some individuals over others through the creation of special, exclusive rights, governments sow the seeds of social destruction and, over time, only manage to entrench a much more pernicious and arbitrary social hierarchy, despite the purported goals of equality that often accompany these policies.

Socialized government, in its quest for utopia, not only pretends to have some collectivized, often “correct,” system of values on behalf of every individual, regardless of the knowledge or beliefs of those individuals, but, in bursts of hollow but impressive rhetoric, socialist politicians use metaphors like “village” and “family” in presuming to bestow upon individuals the kind of similar omniscience that would press individuals past the limits of human cognition to care about millions of other people by threat of violence! Thus, in a very practical sense, and in vast contrast to such socialist notions, natural-rights-protecting governments approach mankind’s nature with respectful deference, going a long way to providing stable social order.

Even in democratic nation-states, the democratic process itself has been severely abused by socialist notions, under constitutional law regimes that only purport to protect individual, natural rights. By appealing to utopian rhetorical flourishes or perfectionist social engineering projects, politicians have created a sort of “tyranny of good intentions.”[1] Forgetting the locus of natural rights, democratic governments, by force of majorities and honey-lipped persuasion, have universally engaged in legal plunder, the fiction of wealth equalization schemes, as well as a variety of other projects purporting to have the good of “the people” in mind.

The failure of democracies to protect property rights attacks and emasculates the familial locus of self-interest. This is dangerous for a variety of reasons relating to disrespect for individuals, but also disrespect for the relationship between individuals and their closest associates. Where families and local communities once freely widened their locus of self-interest by engaging in civil associations to provide all sorts of social services, thus encouraging a sense of authentic moral social conscience, governments have replaced such voluntary moral action with an amoral, faceless, socially meaningless, bureaucratic machine.

To summarize, the most fundamental rules of society, referred to by Michael Van Notten in his book The Law of the Somalis as “customary law,” are those rules that more or less approximate natural law.[2] The discussion of the definition of government is often confused by nation-states having taken the word “law,” with its desirable connotation of “order,” and applying in its place statutes or legislated commands. These are very different sorts of rules that do not necessarily arise out of mutual self-interest and need, and often only replace order with disorder, conflict, inefficiency and arbitrariness. The arrogance of the legislator in proposing to impose order by his/her superior wisdom in as inflexible and destructive an instrument as legislation destroys the individual initiative, creative genius, flexibility, and personal empowerment that recognition of spontaneous, non-legislated, contractual order tends to protect.

Thus, government, in its ideal sense, is not to be confused with the ruling organization of nation-states. It simply has to do with the spontaneous rules by which people successfully conduct their lives with one another. Even Jefferson recognized law, (order) as arising through consensual means when he said “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.”

*The first draft of this was completed in September 2007. It is largely unchanged.

[1] I am indebted to a book by the same name—The Tyranny of Good Intentions by Roberts and Stratton—for this witty term.

[2] Van Notten, Michael. The Law of the Somalis: A Stable Foundation for Economic and Social Development in the Horn of Africa (Red Sea Press, 2005).