Rights without Responsibilities

It seems that every day we hear more and more about ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’ from the right wing in this country. We’re subjected to a constant litany of complaints about the supposed infringement on these precious commodities. We hear about 2^nd Amendment rights, rights to low taxes, freedom from regulation, freedom from obligations to take responsibility for…wait a moment. What were those two words? Back up. ‘Obligations’? ‘Responsibility’? These two words seem to be outside the vocabulary of these complainers. How can one go on and on about one’s patriotism and love of country and rights and freedoms without every mentioning these two words? How can you love a country to which you feel you owe absolutely nothing but from which you enjoy all the fruits of its liberties?

You can’t just chant ‘USA! USA!’ and ‘Support the troops’ in one breath, and in the next breath begrudge the funds (aka taxes) needed to actually, literally support the troops. You certainly can’t use that old chestnut ‘Freedom isn’t free’ when you want your freedom to be literally free of charge.

You can’t bemoan attempts to place sane boundaries around your 2^nd Amendment rights when that right begins to cut into the more fundamental right of six-year-old children to live, to not have their bodies riddled with bullets from high-capacity, semi-automatic assault rifles. What about your obligations to them?  

You can’t talk about ‘freedom of choice’ in the context of our healthcare system when real choice and the highest-quality care are restricted to the wealthiest people. Yes, we have the most advanced healthcare available in the world, but the vast majority of us aren’t ‘free’ to choose that level of care. If having the most advanced care available were synonymous with having the best healthcare system, then our outcomes would be higher and we wouldn’t be ranked behind most other developed countries in life expectancy. Without the obligation to extend healthcare to all Americans, having the freedom for some select people to choose the best healthcare is meaningless.

Folks on the right wing in this country claim to be the patriots, the lovers of freedoms. But if you want freedom without responsibility, you’re not a patriot. You’re a freeloading leech sucking away resources without wanting to give anything back. That’s not my definition of patriotism. 

B.E.S.T.

Since the collapse of the colonialist/mercantilist era, all the great economic -isms have been centered on how national economies can increase, maintain, and internally distribute their fortunes. The hows were always predicated on the whys: we created and maintained wealth in a capitalist economy through free-market mechanisms because we believed that the wealth of the individual was an extension of the freedom of the individual; or we created and maintained a command-and-control economy through centralized planning because we believed that the wealth of the society was an extension of the responsibilities of the individual towards the society.

Spoiler alert! Looks like capitalism is more or less in the lead. We are still arguing about degrees, but there is now no major debate, even in 'communist' countries*, about the suitability of the free-market capitalist model. So for the sake of argument, let's call it settled.

So the -isms of the 21st century must turn on very different questions. It is no longer a question of how we gain our wealth, but how we spend it and how we build the legacies we endow with our wealth. And make no mistake: it is a huge amount of wealth, despite the setbacks of recent years. Compared to any other time in history, people in developed countries are better off than ever before. Your average lower-middle class American enjoys better food, shelter, and technology than any medieval emperor could even imagine.

If you are a pure free-market capitalist, the answer to how to spend this wealth is very simple: have few to no taxes and let people spend their money freely, with little to no obligation towards society. If you are of that mindset, you might as well stop reading right now. You won't like a single word of what I have to say.

Now that the pure free-marketeers have exited stage right and in a huff, let's discuss some alternative models. The very idea that there are alternative models seems to scare many people. As soon as one says, "I have an alternative to free-market capitalism", our 20th-century minds automatically react negatively, working on the assumption that one must mean some variant of socialism. But remember that we have moved past that conversation entirely. Again, this isn't about how we accumulate wealth. This is an entirely new conversation not about how we get it, but how we spend it.

At this point, most people might say that how we spend it is in fact a function of how we got it: if free-market capitalism worked for getting the wealth, must we not simply spend it on the same principle, as free-wheeling consumers? My answer is simple: spending it how ever we like isn't making us happy as a society and is perpetuating a culture of debt and emptiness, and an overall sense that we have no collective (and often even individual) purposes as a community. The easy part about positing this belief is that I do not need to provide proof of it: I think that any Western citizen reading this will instantly connect with and feel exactly what I mean here, which is itself all the proof I require. If I am wrong, please write and tell me how our society provides a sense of community and direction, of purpose and legacy, of pride of place in history, of patrimony we happily pass along to the next generation. I look forward to hearing it! I do not expect my inbox to overflow.

So what can we do to provide a fulfilling outlet that will make all the hard work and hard-won wealth seem worth the effort? My proposal is summed up with a simple acronym: BEST. Building, Exploration, Science and Teaching. BESTism - for what is a belief worth if it is not instantly converted to an -ism? - is a reaction and alternative to the simple consumerism that we all thought was the only possible product of capitalism. It's my attempt to say that we don't have to reject capitalism in order to reject many of its ills, because those ills are not necessary outcomes of the system, but are instead unnecessary outcomes of what we do with the wealth created by that system.

I'd like to explore the details of BEST in future postings, but for now will close with a counter-point to the single most obvious objection to the idea. The clever free-marketeer will say, "But without that reviled consumerism, there would be no wealth or capitalism upon which to base these fine pursuits." I reject that argument for the very simple reason that it is factually inaccurate: contrary to popular opinion in the US, money spent on public works, education and exploration, does not simply disappear into thin air; quite the contrary: that money fuels growth and jobs in ways that often surpass those of the private sector, not least of all because such efforts strongly engage the private sector.


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Footnotes:

*How ironic that one of the few remaining communist countries, China, is in fact the most capitalist of all.

Egypt, Ends and Means

Congratulations to the Egyptian people on a wonderful, courageous revolution. I hope it spreads!

In light of recent events, I'd like to revisit a theme I have addressed many times: ends and means, and why Realpolitik isn't just immoral, but fundamentally irrational and counter-productive.

In 2005, I wrote, "[Successfully redefining our foreign policy] also means being honest with ourselves about the nature of the regimes in our so-called allied countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan and Egypt, regimes that are little better than that of Saddam [Hussein's former regime in Iraq] and, for our own interests, perhaps even worse."

And in 2003, "At least since the moment the morally depraved philosophy of foreign policy espoused by Henry Kissinger became our guidebook for dealing with the world, we have marched from one blunder to another. Why is it so hard for us to learn our lessons? We supported the repressive South Vietnamese regime simply because they weren't the communist North Vietnamese. We put the brutal dictator Pinochet into power just because he wasn't the socialist Allende. We supported the right-wing forces of dos Santos just because they weren't the left-leaning UNITA. We helped create the monster Saddam because he wasn't the Ayatollah. We supported the fundamentalist Mujahideen, the precursors of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, simply because they were fighting our communist enemies. And on and on and on, right down to our current tolerance of brutal Afghan warlords. This is the legacy of Kissinger's...[American brand of] Realpolitik: we consistently abandon moral principles in favor of short-term expediency."

In short, I suppose I could live with Henry Kissinger and his ilk, with their smug, self-satisfied contempt for decency in foreign policy and their ends-justify-the-means philosophy, if their policies EVER actually worked EVEN ONE SINGLE SOLITARY TIME. But these guys just never seem to get tired of being wrong. And for reasons I will never understand, every foreign policy 'expert' in every American administration (and from both parties) seems to agree with them, despite no one EVER seeing evidence to suggest they are justified in their confidence. This month, with the collapse of the Mubarak regime in Egypt, they have been proven wrong (and hypocritical) yet again, and Obama was left standing red-faced next to (but supportive of!) a dictator one moment, asking him to leave the next! So just how many more examples do we need to burn through before we accept that there is nothing realistic or practical about Realpolitik? It turns out that letting decency and morality guide your foreign policy is also actually the logical, rational, reasonable thing to do. Why is that so hard to accept? Is it because people are afraid of being thought naive, gullible or foolish? But if the old way of doing things fails repeatedly and consistently, isn't sticking to Realpolitik the naive, gullible and foolish thing to do?

So here's a wild idea. Let's adopt a foreign policy that is consistent with the best ideals of democracy and decency. Let's stop propping up the bad guys, even when it's convenient for us in the short term. Let's stop selling weapons to thugs and sadists. Let's stop funding one terrorist to fight another. I'm not saying we ride in and play hero: as we saw in Egypt, revolutions work best when the heroes are homegrown. But if we behave in a manner consistent with our own values, at least we won't look so hypocritical when we try to stand next to those heroes once they've beaten beaten the villains; and at least those defeated villains won't have been our friends.