The Long View 2008-12-29: Happy New Year
John J. Reilly was a big proponent of public order, or what post-liberals right now term the common good. John was in favor of universal healthcare because he deemed it a public good, rather than a right. Building, and perhaps more importantly, maintaining all the vast infrastructure of manufacturing and specialized training required to make modern medicine work is something that can be facilitated by government action.
This quote of John’s from the end of 2008 is very much in line with that view, and a preview of where John wanted politics to go:
The problem with Steyn's assessment is that the results of bad choices in the course of an ordinary life "are ultimately within your power to correct." That is not true of systemic failures, even systemic failures that are the result of an accumulation of bad private choices. Individuals can no more remedy the effects on their own lives of a refusal of banks to lend short-term to one another than they can fix a water treatment plant. There can be manmade disasters that threaten public order beyond the core government functions of police protection and the administration of civil liberties. The kind of conservatism that Steyn speaks for in that article, one which denies that collective misfortunes can legitimately require collective remedies, will fall out of fashion for several decades at least.
Happy New Year
Just before Christmas, I too noted that the holiday shopping crowds were thin. Mark Steyn also made this observation, but was more interested by a piece of Muzak he heard in those semi-deserted stores, a Christmas song entitled My Grown-Up Christmas List. Much of the song, apparently, is a wish for a non-materialist Christmas holiday. Steyn could not restrain himself from observing that the poor retail season was pretty much what the song wished for. However, the song also had these two lines:
"No more lives torn apart,
That wars would never start?"
They evoked this meditation, on which we may lay both praise and blame:
Whether wars start depends on the intended target's ability to deter. As to "lives torn apart," that, too, is a matter of being on the receiving end. If you're in an African dictatorship, your life can be torn apart. If you're in a society that values individual liberty, you'll at least get a shot at tearing your own life apart – you'll make bad choices, marry a ne'er-do-well, blow your savings, lose your job – but these are ultimately within your power to correct. The passivity of the lyric – the "lives" that get "torn apart" is very revealing. A state in which lives aren't torn apart will be, by definition, totalitarian: As in "The Stepford Wives" or "The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers," we'll all be wandering around in glassy-eyed conformity. "Lives" will no longer be "torn apart" because they're no longer lives, but simply the husks of a centrally controlled tyranny.
This struck me in part because my Christmas reading is Whitley Streiber's 2012: The War for Souls, one of a series of novels incorporating his personal mythology about what UFOs really mean. (You can read about that on his website.) I had just reached the point in the book where a substantial fraction of the human race had been relieved of their souls and set to marching to collection points where they would be enslaved by the lizardly psychophagous Grays from the hell-world of Abaddon at the end of the Mayan Long Count on December 21, 2012.
Not very likely, you say, but then who saw the collapse of mortgage-backed securities coming, eh? Anyway...
The problem with Steyn's assessment is that the results of bad choices in the course of an ordinary life "are ultimately within your power to correct." That is not true of systemic failures, even systemic failures that are the result of an accumulation of bad private choices. Individuals can no more remedy the effects on their own lives of a refusal of banks to lend short-term to one another than they can fix a water treatment plant. There can be manmade disasters that threaten public order beyond the core government functions of police protection and the administration of civil liberties. The kind of conservatism that Steyn speaks for in that article, one which denies that collective misfortunes can legitimately require collective remedies, will fall out of fashion for several decades at least.
* * *
Speaking of obsolete persons, I was surfing the news channels over the week, and I found some Fox Business News commentators trying to suggest an alternative to the program of Electus Obama. They had apparently been talking for a while (drinking when the camera was off them, I don't doubt) and they had worked themselves into such a state that they were tittering about how wonderful it would be if the new Administration just declared a year-long holiday for all federal taxes. As with zero-percent interest rates on Treasury bills, we have reached a sort of metaphysical limit here. I checked online to see whether anyone had suggested such a thing in cold blood. The closest suggestion I found was this proposal from the National Retail Federation:
Washington, December 23, 2008 – The National Retail Federation today asked President-elect Barack Obama to incorporate a series of national sales tax holidays into upcoming economic stimulus legislation as an important step toward rebuilding consumer confidence, saying short-term gains from consumer spending and long -term growth from job creation are both needed to achieve economic recovery.
Confidence? When a government gives up on collecting taxes, that does not inspire confidence. It inspires the sort of feeling you get in an elevator when the cable breaks.
* * *
Actually, some people did foresee the securitization crisis. Let me give the last word for the year to Strauss & Howe, whose Fourth Turning was published 11 years ago. Here they speak of a time a little after 2005:
Distrustful of some things, individuals will feel that their survival requires them to distrust more things. This behavior could cascade into a sudden downward spiral, an implosion of societal trust.
If so, this implosion will strike financial markets - and, with that, the economy. Aggressive individualism, institutional decay, and long-term pessimism can proceed only so far before a society loses the level of dependability needed to sustain the division of labor and long-term promise on which a market economy must rest. Through the Unraveling, people have preferred (or, at least, tolerated) the exciting if bewildering trend toward social complexity. But as the Crisis mood congeals, people will [awake] to the jarring realization that they have grown helplessly dependent on a tottering edifice of anonymous transactions and paper guarantees... Americans won't know where their savings are, who their employer is, what their pension is, or how their government works. The era will have left the financial world arbitraged and tentacled: Debtors won't know who holds their notes, homeowners who owns their mortgages, and shareholder runs their equities-and vice versa.
They did not foresee a libertarian reaction. Rather:
In the initial, jerry-built stages [of recovery], people will not be entitled, but authorized to receive whatever they receive from government...Public needs will assume a new shape and urgency.
Strauss & Howe did not say anything about the Grays, however.
Copyright © 2008 by John J. Reilly
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