Issue 13 - October 1996
The children are hungry and mommy is crying
By Dan LaFavers
Arrenkyle Press Copyright 1996 ©
In My Humble Opinion
When there is oppression and despair, the answer is to remove the oppression, not to spread it.
The image: a poor, unmarried mother, struggling to make ends meet, feels the weight of the world as she tries to make it through a cold, heartless, selfish world. Look at her, sitting in a second hand suit, hem sewn sloppily with mismatched thread, name tag over her left breast, hair in day-end disarray, crying silently, wondering if she'll have enough money to pay this month's bills, waiting for a miracle to make the world stop just long enough to get a little foot hold. Look at her children: good kids, hopeful, tired of pot-pies and macaroni, trying to grow up with too much noise, clutter, and evil lurking all around them.
We know them well, because all modern political arguments lead to their small kitchen and heavy hopes.
What do we do with that woman and families like hers? Why would we ever consider social policies that would make it harder for them to make ends meet, or to have the same opportunities as everyone else, or to be taken care of when they're sick? How can this wealthy, generous nation, let one child go hungry if there's money somewhere that could put food in his mouth or clothes on his small, shivering body? When you see starving families over here and such corporate wealth over there - well, it's not fair. It's just not fair. If you don't see that, you must be some heartless, selfish fiend, and if you would so readily turn your back on them, it's only right that you be made to help them.
This is the image that in one way or another fuels the politics of today. Sentiments like those above seem so laudable and kind, but they do more to help the elite, national power brokers than the struggling families portrayed on the surface. It's a scam, a hoax, and I'm not buying it.
I reject this image, not because I don't care about families at or below the fringe, working hard, trying to do the right thing, but because I believe that there are better, more effective solutions. Families don't need pity or someone else telling them how to get by. They need a chance to build their own lives as they see fit, to the best of their abilities, with appropriate and effective help offered.
The issue of how to deal with the poor, the working class, is not only a modern question; it is part of a path that humanity began over three hundred years ago. Step back for a moment with me for a brief review of our modern history.
The 17th century was an era of great exploration and expansion. The world had been pretty well explored and traveled for some two hundred years. This is the time of the Mayflower Compact, where new Americans banded together to form their "civil body politic". Empires were branching out: Peter The Great was conquering and modernizing Europe. Advancements in science were ramping up: Kepler and Galilelo started the century and Newton finished it with his Principia Mathematica. The first steam engine was built, and Leibniz, L'Hôpital, and Newton started thinking up Calculus.
In the 18th century, things really began to heat up. This is the time called The Age Of Reason. Rousseau's Social Contract advocated that government should obey the "general will" rather than the whim of a single man. Immanuel Kant began examining the reasoning mind, and people started thinking and reasoning that they ought to be allowed to do what they want as free men. In America we were establishing our colonies and exploring the new world. Inventions like Watt's steam engine would soon usher in a new era of industrial expansion.
On July 14, 1789, the French stormed the Bastille prison and began a revolution for "liberty, equality, and fraternity." They cut off Marie Antoinette's royal head, and then Napoleon Bonaparte went about invading The Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy and then declared himself emperor. The people threw away one monarch only to have the void filled by another. This is a trend that would continue around the world.
On July 4, 1776, representatives of the American Colonies declared that they were free independent states. After six years, from Lexington to Yorktown, we proved it.
The 19th century brought us what Toffler would call the Second Wave: big industry. This gave us the dirty, congested cities of London of Dicken's time. In America, railroads networked the nation and by 1869 had joined the East and West coasts. This era brought great wealth and great hardship, depending on whether you owned or worked in the coal mines or steel mills. It was this disparity that led Karl Marx and Fredrick Engles to question whether or not this Capitalism idea was really such a good thing. Marx suggested that the worth of some commodity was measured not by what someone would pay for it, but by the effort put into its construction. Thus, he argued, the worker and not the owner should gain the most.
Meanwhile in America, we had a little trouble of our own. After just a single generation, some of our free independent states were feeling less free and independent, and the South said to Lincoln what we had all said to King George. We held it together, after a terrible three and a half years, and in the end, the individualism of the Confederate States was denied. This began a trend toward nationalism that was firmly established in the 1930's and 1940's.
In the 20th century, it was Russia's turn for revolution. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin put a modern twist on Marx and he and the Bolsheviks tossed out their monarchy. Like America, they had to prove it and, after Trotsky defeated the final counterrevolutionaries, the Soviet Union was established, a land run by the emancipated Proletarians, freed from the oppressive hand of the Czar and the Bourgeois to stand in line for two hours for some potatoes and dried vegetables.
The philosophy of this century revolves around two primary forces, the modern version of Marx and the philosophy of Ayn Rand. The interplay of these two positions: the virtues of the collective state versus the virtues of the individual, is what defines the modern political landscape.
If we had remained primarily an agrarian world, the ideas of Thomas Jefferson and John Locke may have settled in as they were intended. But the world did not sit still. Industrialism brought a new form of elite classes. Once power was taken from the monarchs, it was granted to this new elite in no small part because of the Industrial Revolution.
In the Soviet Union, the elite was the Communist Party, ostensibly of, by, and for the Proletariat, but actually standing above and in control of them. In America, the nationalism established in the era of Big Wars brought us things like the National Recovery Act and the New Deal, and the power again bypassed the people and ended up in an elite group, this time the federal government in Washington D.C. Today we are reliving the same issues that our forefathers faced. Instead of the King of England, we have an aggressive federal government. The issues are also not new: taxation, states rights, freedom of expression, liberty.
We often discuss political alternatives in terms of liberal versus conservative, or Democratic versus Republican, but a more important delineation is national versus local. This demarcation shows better the modern political environment in its historical role.
The national position has within it some unspoken, but very core, assumptions.
There are also assumptions in the local side.
The first set of assumptions favors clustering power at the federal level, and from this comes such things as the president worrying about local police funding, whether or not to pray and wear uniforms in school, education programs like goals 2000, the welfare system, social security, and the other entitlements.
The second set of assumptions favors spreading power at the local level, and from this comes such ideas as block grants, school vouchers, privatization, and medical savings accounts.
Who's right, the philosophers of the 1700's who promoted individual freedom, personal responsibility, and decentralization of power, or is it the philosophers of the 1800's who promoted homogeneous societies, national leadership, and centralization of power?
I think that's the wrong question. The better is: which is right TODAY?
The events of the 1700's were appropriate to transition away from monarchy rule. The activities of the 1800's and early 1900's were understandable considering the injustices endured by textile mill and coal mine workers of the industrial age. The 21st century, simply by virtue of the culture, will grant more power, information, and control to every individual. It is natural that there will be a parallel trend to migrate political power away from any central agency or elite group..
It the 1980's we began to question the big government taxation and spending. The Reagan Years induced one of this centuries greatest economic booms just by lowering taxes and reducing regulation. The problem with the Reagan presidency wasn't that he tried to move us toward a local focus. The problem was that it was done without also giving up the national focus. We were running with two opposing systems at the same time, and the result was an unimaginable explosion of the national debt.
Imagine the boom of opportunity that a complete turn to local focus politics would bring. There would be no personal income tax, no business tax, no capitol gains tax, no inheritance tax, no gas, cigarette, or alcohol, tax. Money spent on complying with EEOC, ADA, FDA, IRS, EPA, FHA, FTC, NTSB, ATF, FCC, FDIC, NLRB, OSHA, and NAFTA regulations would be freed for more productive use.
This brings us back to the question: what do we do with the Crying Mother? How do you help the less fortunate if everyone is going to spend their money on themselves and not on helping others.
Step one is understanding that this question serves the national powers more than it helps poor families. Using altruism as a pretense for the accumulation of power over others also lets them brand any opposition as mean spirited and uncaring. It's a game the Democratic Party has been playing very well for the past fifty years. But we must ask: how helpful has this national focus been? As a mechanism for increasing the national power elite it has worked very well. As a means to help poor families, it has been terrible.
We all want the hungry to be fed, the drugs to be off of the street, children to be educated. None of us wants sick people to go untreated, old people to be ignored, or families to be trapped with no work. Advocates of national focus suggest that only by the grace of a few elite politicians may these problems be solved, or that any other attempt would be somehow less effective or kind.
Again I ask, who is helped most by the policies of nationalism? The people, or the politicians?
Although the nationalists will tell you that freedom means the freedom to be selfish, the freedom to do mean-spirited, evil things, the freedom to hurt people, and therefore it must be curtailed, in truth, it very simply means freedom. It's why everyone comes to this country, that and free welfare.
There are better ways to take care of the complex issues of the modern world.
It is possible to address the social issues without turning them over to the federal government.
The fact that many children are raised in single parent families depends on the decisions made by the parents of the children, not some invisible force of society. If there is such an invisible force, it is the result of nationalist social policies. What would help her most would be more job opportunities and fewer regulations dictating how she bring up her children. For example, day care is so expensive because of the regulations they must support and because of the insurance they must carry. Her job pays less because of the health care benefits the employer must provide. The cost of government regulations are mostly hidden, but the pick away at the profits, forcing companies to pay millions in making sure they comply with tax, equal opportunity, safety, and the many other regulations. The nationalist government cripples companies with a clog of regulation, and then condemns them for not paying enough payroll. Then comes a new minimum wage and family leave mandates, making things even tighter, forcing more corners to be cut, and exposing companies to even more scrutiny. If the cycle would just stop, the company could grow, and it could afford to pay much more than it is now.
But what's to keep companies from being greedy, laying people off, and padding the pockets of their stock holders? First off, padding the pockets of the stock holders is why the company exists in the first place, but this does not by definition mean exploitation of everyone else. One reason that companies prefer overseas factories is the cost of the regulations that must be endured here at home. We have many people in America that could use those jobs here, but because of nationalist, collectivist pressure, from unions, and the federal government, they would have to pay close to ten dollars per hour, plus benefits, plus medical, plus deal with OSHA, EPA, ADA, EEOC, and on and on. So we end up with many Americans having absolutely nothing instead. The nationalists then rush in to add more regulation, more social control, and more taxes, all under the guise of helping someone who, without all their meddling, would very likely be going to work every day.
Again there is such a general acceptance that only a nationalist government can protect the environment. It makes more sense to me to use a local perspective. Let Florida worry about what's best for the Everglades. Let's let Arizona determine what's best for the Grand Canyon. Do the handful of national politicians have a monopoly on caring about the natural world. I find it rather insulting to be told that because I'm not one of two hundred Senators, or one of some five hundred district Representatives, that I don't care.
This is another area that has been spinning on the great nationalist merry-go-round for too long. Government regulation both feeds problems and hampers solutions in this area, much as it does when it tries to control businesses. First, it demands that everyone be served, and then ties the hands of doctors and hospitals so tightly that we seem to need yet more national reform. Operating under local, rather than national laws, hospitals could evolve to support a variety of needs, from applying alternative therapy, now blocked by the FDA, to offering their own insurance and medical loans.
The arrogance and abuse of power of the monarchies three hundred years ago was blatant and complete. Today it is wrapped inside a veneer of altruism. Nationalists tell us at every turn that we need them, and then they pass laws to tie us down, break our legs and force us to take their crutch. The bottom line is that they don't help as much as they say. Unions empower the union over the employees. Welfare empowers the government over the poor. All the laws that pretend to help us do so only at the cost of our giving up our freedoms and liberties to live lives controlled by the master plan of the power elite.
Most people have compassion for the sick, the poor, for the environment and those struggling to get by, but if you really want to help, let's work together to find real solutions that work, and which don't simply feed the fire of nationalist control over all our lives.
One thing history has shown us is that people want to be free. We want 1776 and not 1984, and we're going to have it. There will be a revolution, but today, unlike before when kings ruled by force and fear, today's revolution must be one of ideas. Whereas monarchs of days past broke our spirit and our bodies under their oppressive thumb, the power elite of today breaks our will and our options by convincing us to ask that they wrap their noose around our neck.
Their great deception is all that holds them over us today. Once we all realize what has been going on, that we can and should take care of our own communities and our own lives, their hold over us will evaporate into just another step on our historical journey toward freedom and liberty.