Shuffle to the Right

Professedly, the republicans do not want more government, indeed they are vociferously, if not actually, opposed to expansions of federal power. That goes especially for the realm in which, traditional, left-leaning socialists have wanted power – the economic sphere. Again, it is a question of values, and the pre-eminent value is freedom – economic freedom as the precursor to all other freedom. If economic control is “the control of the means for all our ends,” and I do believe it is, then it is reasonably clear that my sympathies lie with Hayek and the laissez faire republicans in this regard. It isn’t terribly difficult to ennumerate the failure of almost all attempts to build the great sociiety through planned, programmatic redistribution of wealth. Government entitlements, if they are distributed blindly, are often allocated to those who are, by most measures of personal worth other than economic wealth, the least entitled. The deserving may get their share – which is, perhaps, better than nothing – but more often than not, the undeserving get their “share” as well. It violates precepts so deeply embedded in our psyche as to be genetic – a fairness gene. People should get what they deserve, and one doesn’t need to read Weber to understand the equally deep connection between perceived effort and perceived worth. While we might look on in envious fascination at those who come by their wealth arbitrarily – winners of the genetic lottery, the Paris Hilton’s of the world – we do not admire them, and we do not think them successful. Indeed, if we are envious, we are sanctimoniously so, our envy tinged with a sense of moral and ethical superiority likewise so deep as to be genetic -- an Horatio Alger gene.

All would be well if the republicans really believed in laissez faire economics as a prerequisite to the full development of human, if not individual, potential – if this really were, in some substantive way, the land of equal opportunity where the best person wins. It’s not, of course, and I think privately most republicans would assent to John Jay’s sentiment that “the people who own the country ought to govern it.” There is some sense in this, and it reflects nothing more than a thorough-going paternalism – the time honored assertion that, “so long as you’re under my roof, you’ll obey my rules.” The question, of course, is who own’s the country, and in this repect, I think Chomsky is right when he asserts that “the question was answered by the rise of the private corporations and the structures devised to protect and support them.” I will return to this is more detail in later posts, but I don’t know how there could be much doubt that, as more and more wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, so too is power. In an interesting set of side notes, the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Mark V. Hurd, ousted for ethics violations and sexual impropriety, was given a severance package of $12.2 million, and it didn’t take him long to find employment elsewhere, landing a lucrative new position with Oracle. As the Times also reports, that the board of Gleacher & Company, a New York investment bank, expanded its board last year to include not only Marshall A. Cohen, who served as a director of American International Group until its near collapse in 2008, but also Henry S. Bienen, who served as a director of Bear Stearns from 2004 until its resuce by JP Morgan Chase in March 2008. Such appointments, “highlight how the directors of the companies at the center of the financial crises – AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman itself – still play an active role in the governance of corporate America.”

In short, those who presided over the decimation of my retirement fund, have simply played a game of musical chairs, as it should be, of course, if those who own the country should govern the country – this based on the likely presumption that the perpetrators of the collapse are also among the 2% of Americans earning more than $250 thousand, among those who command the lion’s share of American wealth. As McChesney points out in his introduction to Chomsky’s Profit over People, the republican agenda “works best when there is formal electoral democracy, but when the population is diverted from the information, access, and public forums necessary for meaning participation in decision-making” – the sorts of economic decision making that makes a significant difference in the lives of people. The republican agenda works best when political debate is limed to “minor issues.” One could consider any number of “issues,” ranging from “abortion” through “immigration” to “gay marriage” to get a feel for how distracting it all is. If the republican party is to have any popular (or populist) appeal, it must attach itself to “issues” that have great emotional, but little economic impact. I do not doubt, not for an instant, the sincerity of those who align with the republican party because it is anti-abortion, anti-illegal alien, pro-death penalty, and anti-gay marriage, but no matter how resolved, such “issues” are unlikely to have much impact on the daily lives of most people. For those republicans not among the 2% who control the majority of the nation’s wealth and who are, apparently, too big to fail, appealling to the visceral antipathy to those who are sexually promiscuous, those who are not-like-us, those who do not profess the fundamental Christian values on which this country were founded, and et cetera,is powerful rhetoric, but poor reason. It distracts the heartland folks, the Wal-Mart Hippies, from the almost painfully obvious fact that the republican agenda lies elsewhere and has few of their economic interests at heart.