Everyday Independence Day and other thoughts

Here we are, less than 250 years after one of human history’s most glorious moments, the supposed beneficiaries of that glory, watching our country crumble. Economic ruin and stagnation. A police state obsessed with surveillance and control. Even formerly all-holy free speech under relentless attack from glassy-eyed apparatchiks.

And even the most unaware among We the Ordinary are beginning to wonder, “How did we get here?”

Lots of us think we know. But only a tiny minority really do. The problem is not that the villainous, elitist thinking of Alexander Hamilton ultimately triumphed. The problem is not that the delegates who met to revise the Articles of Confederation pulled a coup and produced a big-government blueprint that Patrick Henry said “squints toward monarchy.” The problem is not that Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant or that Franklin Roosevelt created the modern welfare state. The problem is not Wall Street fraudsters being rewarded and encouraged by the very people who were supposed to catch and stop the fraud. The problem is not paper money or eternal debasement (though corruption of the currency is probably the least recognized force of destruction in the world).

The problem is that government — all government, everywhere — is designed seize people’s earnings by force and order people around. And it’s designed to attract the sort of opportunistic scoundrels who want to seize other people’s money by force and order other people around, preferably while exempting themselves and their kith and kin. So, generation upon generation, government feeds government and government’s friends until there’s a monster squatting upon the land.

If you just look at the root, the problem is obvious.

And of course a corollary to the innately thieving, control-seeking government is that the majority of government’s subjects — however otherwise hapless, innocent, or victimized they might be — fail to recognize government’s obvious and indisputable nature.

So they wake up, want change — and completely miss the principle that might lead to real change, in their own lives, if not immediately in the big world.

More o’ the same, more o’ the same.

—–

Independence Day came and went this year, producing some lovely writing and reminders that the heroic founding fathers of old school days were the treasonous scum of their own day. Outlaws like us.

That’s all well and good and very much worth recollecting and celebrating — particularly when it comes to the question of when a government (inevitably) becomes oppressive enough that it must be shaken off, regardless of cost.

But of course, that would all be far less necessary if we turned our eyes away from political dramas*, if we and committed ourselves to making every day our personal Independence Day.

We all know well over 101 ways to do it.

—–

It seems a cruel joke (but also a good lesson of history), that less than 250 years after the founding of one of the most deliberate nations in history, built on the soundest principles of individual liberty, we’re now thinking about having to defend ourselves with more than the first three boxes.

Partly that’s just the way of government. Partly that’s just the way of people. Flight or fight. We poor stressed-out humans appear to be made to go into one mode or another under the slightest provocation. Since we’d quite reasonably prefer flight to fight on most occasions (including mental flights from reality, as in denial, obliviousness, or misplaced trust) government gradually has its way until a fight eventually comes to us — that is if government doesn’t simply collapse under its own regulatory, warmaking, desperate-to-spy-on-the-citizens weight. But of course those good old tax-spend-and-command governments do collapse under their own weight. And under the contempt of their citizens.

When people stop believing in the myth and start seeing the underlying reality, times get interesting.

—–

I watched the movie The Big Short last week. Which moved me quickly to read the Michael Lewis book, which I did in a single evening and morning it was so engrossing. I highly recommend both, with the understanding that the film takes a few liberties (though far, far fewer than most “based on a true” stories, and to much better effect). While the film isn’t precisely a comedy, it is at times the funniest rage-driven movie you’ll ever see.

The rage is, of course, against the Wall Street gamblers who created an incalculable fraud based on and fed by the subprime housing market. And to a lesser extent rage against the government that didn’t see the catastrophe coming and not only failed to protect Americans — but actually stepped in in the aftermath to reward the fraudsters with incalculable billions, courtesy of thee, me, and millions of screwed-over Americans.

The Big Short reminded me (not that I needed reminding) why nobody respects “experts” any more. No wonder suddenly even blue collars and grandpas have turned anti-establishment (while collegians turn rigid and defensive). No wonder people are so fed up that they latch on to the first outsider who promises he’s on the little guy’s side, even though he’s demonstrably not.

But though The Big Short, both book and movie, tell of evils done and outrages committed (while focusing on a handful of investors who saw what all the “experts” missed), mostly they show how utterly stupid so many hotshots and “people in charge” were. Most people trading in subprime derivatives didn’t know or care what was inside the worthless CDOs, whether the instruments of crazy debt were rated honestly, or the conditions of the underlying real-world housing market they were based on. And all the “experts” in economics, financial regulation, and federal law enforcement were just as ill-informed, each in their own ways.

Sure, you can argue that clever little gnomes have a devious long-term goal of milking the whole country dry for their own benefit and this is just part of their masterplan. But … well, who was it who said you should never attribute to conspiracy what can be more easily explained by stupidity?

Once again the “best and brightest,” as they have done throughout history, cast the world into disaster because no matter how brilliant they are, they’re functionally stupid.

They are not even worthy of our contempt.

—–

To end here’s the epigraph that opens the book (the film uses a similar, but simpler one from Mark Twain):

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him. — Leo Tolstoy, 1897

Teach your children well …

—–

*Never mind that I know first-hand that turning eyes away from politics and such is as difficult as turning eyes away from particularly gruesome car crashes or the sex scandals of celebrities we’ve otherwise never heard of.