electric boogaloo

I live in a suburb of Atlanta. Life is easy here in a way that things have never been easy for middle-class people before in the history of the world. We live the life of Egyptian kings, all of us, except the food is better and we have air conditioning and less pressure to be immortal and whatnot. We don’t have slaves like they did back then. Who does all our work for us? Machines I guess, and people in poorer countries. And high school students.

Life here is also packed full of entertainment, and it’s extraordinarily safe. Our food and water supply, the homes we live in, the things our kids play with are all things we can trust on some level to not kill us or give us serious lead poisoning or tetanus or salmonella unless we really work at it.

Yeah, there are trade offs to living in modern America. We feel stressed out a lot, there’s all these hassles and obligations and schedules and little pressures eating at us. We drive in traffic and our kids worry us, and other moms judge us for making slightly different parenting choices. We worry that we aren’t adequate, we worry that we’re gaining weight. But really? Big damned deal. Chances are our kids will grow up fine, and it’s not like gaining weight and going up a size means having to grow the cotton and weave a new pair of pants. We just stop at Old Navy on the way home.

We take these things all so for granted that even the phrase “take it for granted” doesn’t say enough. We take it for permanent. We take it for fundamental right. When we talk about our way of life being threatened by terrorist attacks or gas shortages or economy crashes, what are we talking about if not our ability to drive to Target and buy a new garlic press whenever we want?

Tiffany goes to Libertarianism
It was this kind of easy lifestyle that first led me to learn more about libertarianism. I still had a full-time job, but was moonlighting and daydreaming about a time when I’d be running my own business. It was the exciting dot-com days and things seemed pretty great for myself and everyone I knew — even my poorest friends had cable TV and cell phones — and it seemed like the good things were all thanks to capitalism. Capitalism gave me a good car to drive at an affordable $200 per month. It gave me ten different restaurants to choose from at lunch time, some chains, some quaint local places. I also worked in marketing which is all about compelling people to consume, giving them choices.

With this perspective, it’s easy to see why I’d start to think that the government should leave companies alone. It looked pretty straightforward: The government sucks butt at things. Private companies are good at things. The government is cumbersome and bureaucratic and corrupt. It’s slow to react, and inefficient and expensive. The problem, I argued, with centralized legislation is that some dude in Washington or NYC or Chicago might make a law that is impossible for a Georgia farmer to follow if he wants to stay in business. The free market, I said, can work things out. Ooooh trust the free market. Ooooh it’s such a beautiful idea.

I wasn’t a Republican, because on social issues I’ve always been a liberal-butted hippie. People everywhere just wanna be free. They want to do drugs and make mistakes with their money and have the anal sex. GO FOR IT, I say. Just don’t hurt anyone else who isn’t, you know, into that. But in terms of government regulation of businesses, taxes, income, property, etc – I found myself on the far conservative side of things. The Libertarian philosophy worked well for me: laws should be pared down to almost nothing. You shouldn’t need lawyers to interpret them, anyone should be able to understand what’s expected of them in this society.

In my mind this was a perfect, simple, beautiful thesis to test every political issue against. For six years my liberal friends would beat their heads against their computer screen and try to understand how I could agree with them on 16 out of 20 issues but still be so infuriatingly determined to see the Democratic party fall on its ass. The question I kept coming back to was this:

As a group, people who are on the left tend to be very (rightfully) suspicious of the man, of large organizations, of institutions, and of the government. So why would it make sense to give more power to the US government, arguably the biggest lamest corporation in the world?>

This contradiction bugged the shit out of me. And I couldn’t ever get an answer that made sense.

So now, here we are several years later and I have an answer:
I had it backwards. The basic tenet that we should entrust our government with great power requires that we remain vigilant. We must never trust our government completely, not despite the contradictory fact that we ask them to take over areas of our lives such as health insurance or education but BECAUSE of that fact. The suspicion is built in, the same way that red tape is built in to prevent anything from happening too quickly.

And for added points you could have turned the question back around on me:
If the federal government is just like a giant corporation, and is so terribly suspect, why do you trust the free market to do the right thing?

In fact, now that I think about it, someone did ask me that. “Oh!” I think I said, “Easy! Because the free market is better incented to respond to what people want. It may not happen instantly, but it does happen.” Here is the problem with that. And yes I do know that I’m now arguing with myself from four years ago, and it’s really fucking boring, but there are really three reasons that logic no longer works for me.

1. The government is designed to encourage suspicion and vigilance – the market isn’t.
   Politicians try to calm the population, and it works some of the time, sort of. But there’s always a good percentage of people going WAIT. WTF? Because that is part of the system. The market on the other hand is designed to assuage fears… shhh… there, there, don’t worry… don’t think too hard about what you’re buying. JUST DO IT, in all caps if necessary.

2. A truly pure free market is not possible unless consumers can make informed decisions.
   The idea that consumers will push companies to build safer cars and put less poison into baby formula assumes that consumers know what’s going into those products. The idea that we don’t need environmental regulations because the free market will encourage educated consumers to only buy from companies that use ecologically practices assumes that consumers know how products are built and what that means for the environment.

   With all of the inner workings hidden behind a big curtain, a lot of industries are impervious to market pressure. Others are dangerously slow to react even when the market is all Seriously. Stop putting poison into baby formula. We think it’s just that wacky China and their morally inferior business practices, but all they have is the kind of unregulated market that we had just a few decades ago. It’s totally what we would have now if consumers hadn’t gone to the federal government and demanded oversight and creation of The National Department of Not Putting Poison Into Stuff For Babies. Now we’re so used to our safe life with no poison in stuff that we find the news that companies would DO such a thing totally shocking. But they would totally do such a thing here, if they could get away with it.

   So the truth is that for all their talk, companies do not want a free market. A true free market would not mean that companies are free to do whatever they want without the pesky burden of stupid government intervention. The free in free market means — or at least is SHOULD mean — that people are free to spend their money where they choose. Under this definition, a free market would mean that companies would have to give consumers 100% of the information they need to make a decision, right down to the name and email addresses of the individuals who assembled this infant car seat or box of cereal. I want to know exactly what ingredients went into this thing I’m buying, and how exactly you made it, and what impact that has on the area’s water and air quality. I want to know exactly how you tested it for safety and what you’ll do if it proves unsafe. I want to be able to email the assembly worker and make sure that she’s working in decent, humane conditions for a living wage.

   Different consumers will have different priorities when making a purchase. Some people won’t buy from you if you make cuts in order to compete on price. Some people will. Hey, that’s the free market. In exchange for this kind of total transparency, companies would pay no taxes and be subjected to zero government regulations. Deal?

   But then my brain goes: But wait. What about intellectual property, patent rights, trade secrets? How would companies stop competitors from stealing their great ideas if they have to be totally transparent about how they do things? You’d want to put something in place to help protect and — shit. If you put federal laws protecting trade secrets, that’s not a pure free market anymore.

   Then I loop back around a few more times and come to the conclusion that the libertarian ideal of a pure free market is perfect except for being impossible.

3. There are certain things that aren’t sensitive enough to market pressure to be handled privately, but are critical to maintaining our way of life.
   Things like national security and healthcare and oh, I don’t know, saving people who are trapped in a major city that is under water.

   As a libertarian I didn’t understand what all the healthcare fuss was about. I became a full-time freelancer and still could not believe people wanted health insurance in the hands of the federal government. Then 18 months later, COBRA ran out. We bought our own and learned exactly how impossible it is to buy insurance as an individual. Insurance companies aren’t sensitive enough to market pressure because consumers aren’t the real customer. But also, because if they truly gave the consumer what they want – affordable, excellent healthcare coverage even for people who are very expensive to cover – insurance companies wouldn’t make a whole lot of money. And if they operated under total transparency, pretty soon healthy people would notice that they were paying for sick people and would cancel their insurance and the whole system would go under and we’d all be fucked.

   A year after Kevin had to shut down his business to go work in a dangerous and shitty chemical plant so our family could have health insurance, there was a pretty big hurricane down in New Orleans. Right after that another big hurricane hit Texas. Lots of people died while the world watched.

   Watching these events on CNN, where news anchors cried openly as they tried to convey the situation, I felt a new kind of outrage. This – THIS – is what we have a government for. Oh I know, it was actually not Bush’s job; it was the mayor’s fault, the state’s fault, but whatever. We have a federal government to goddamned keep people from dying if something goes terribly wrong in that chain. And if that’s not the way it works because that’s not how our federal government is set up to work, then I want that changed. I WANT the federal government to work that goddamned way. We’re a civilized, first world country. This is the very best place to live, we like to think. That’s not the way the world leader in human rights ought to treat its own citizens.

So where does that leave me, politically? Well, take a libertarian. Once you subtract a total stubborn hatred of all things legislative, and you add in a strong feeling that the government should play a role in protecting its citizens, you’re left with a social liberal who is skeptical of government but wants key areas of involvement and SHIT. That’s a Democrat.

I tried to fit all of that onto an Obama bumper sticker, but it didn’t work.