Less Government, more Fascism!

Do you remember the Good Olde Days? When government kept its fucking mouth shut and let the market do whatever the fuck it wanted to? They're kind of hard to remember now - the only people still alive from that Golden Age are currently hooked up to machines in Elderly Deathcare Centers, dripping their lives away while their great-grandchildren work hard at trying to remember a time when these decrepit carcasses were ambulatory.

That's right - it was a long time ago, but history repeats itself frequently, and bringing back a semblance of the Good Old Days is what our friends in the Libertarian Party are hoping to do. It goes without saying that Government is a collection of lying fuckers whereas the Market is where American Do-Gooders strive to sculpt our Rugged Values into something that we can pass on to our children and our grand-children. Never has anything been more clear: if we could reduce the size of our government and free up the market to find its natural, Gawd-Given Equilibrium, the common man would walk taller, save more money and not need to masturbate so much. Frustration is not a pretty thing: guvmint stands in the way of my happiness. There's the marketplace right over there waiting to make all my freedoms come true if those lazy, elitist sodomites in the guvmint would get the fuck out of the way of progress.

I hear these people all the time - not on the regular Conservative Media: ABC, CNN, the Big Papers - but on the Lunatic Fringe Conservative Media: Fox and the various Talk Show Clever Bastards. Their mantra: if government were to fade into obscurity like chastity belts and ox-plows and quill pens, then the market would bring us into balance. If it's said on Talk Radio, it will soon blather out of the mouths of the Common Man - the same people who shop at Wal-Mart, eat at buffets on Sunday nights, and believe that there's a significant difference between Chevron gasoline (with "Techron") and BP gasoline (without so much Techron, but plenty of baby seabirds). These are the folk who are too busy watching "Jersey Shore" to pay attention to the news and investigate the issues - they listen to Talk Radio and say, "Think for me, Sean Hannity! I'm too busy - tell me what to think!" And it's a service Hannity is happy to provide - all his life he's wanted to control what people think, and how they think, and suddenly we have a society where the Common Man requires his services, his prejudices and his subjective opinions.

Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and their ilk have in common a belief that the Market can do no wrong - indeed, that the Market philosophy as all the answers, whether we're talking about family, education or government. New Gingrich proposed, in 1994, that the Government solve the Big Issues of the day by asking the CEO's of the biggest Multi-National Corporations what they would do. This was the logical conclusion of a reality that had been in the Secret Social Laboratories since the end of WWII: the Bidness Man was the Common Man who stood against the brutal repression and prejudices of the Liberal Elite. Gingrich and the New Wave of Conservative Thinkers posited a "Marketplace Democracy" where the masses were Democracy Consumers who could "invent their own futures" in a way that Old World Europe never could, because "inventions often remained the province of the wealthy and aristocratic".

According to the Libertarian Party - the True Party of the Marketplace - we can solve nearly all our woes by reducing the boogerman of Big Guvmint with all its smartass elites who loathe Freedom; the Marketplace of Democracy will then surge forward and God will smile upon this great nation as He once did.

When did He? Well, if we're following the logic of the Libertarians and the Reduce Satan's Government Philosophers, I guess we can go back to really the only model we have of a relatively unregulated marketplace and a government that kept its nose in its own business, which was making business happier - The Gilded Age, which was anything but Gilded for the vast majority of suffering masses.While there were some beautiful mansions built in Asheville and Newport, Rhode Island for the big shots, the workers and laborers often times were kept as virtual sharecroppers, if not indentured slaves, to the Corporations that employed them. This was the age of Child Labor and Sweat Shops and Strike Breakers. This was a time when Upton Sinclair and various "Muckrakers" exposed Standard Oil, and the obscenity that was the meat markets in The Jungle.

This was an age when: 

The industrialist George Pullman built a model community devoted to constructing his luxurious passenger rail cars south of the city. Pullman provided his workers with churches and cultural facilities, but denied them the opportunity to own their own homes or govern themselves. Pullman also made his town run at a distinct profit. All Pullman workers were obliged to live in the town and pay rents some 25% higher than those in Chicago. 

When the depression of 1893 undermined Pullman's business, he cut workers' pay by up to 25%, but did not reduce their rents. Despite other businessmen's advice, he refused to negotiate with his hard-pressed workers. The Pullman employees went out on strike. 

He also sold city water and gas to his population - at a 10% markup. There was no Big Government to step in and regulate the situation. The workers themselves had no money to move out of the villages because they were purposefully kept impoverished. They had no recourse to the Famous Market philosophy of  Mistreated Workers Will Vote with Their Feet, finding a new job. They couldn't - they were so in debt to Pullman - like the sharecroppers in the the rural South - that their salaries were gone before they were paid, put up against the massive debt they had accrued simply by working for this company.

Plutocrats are NOT democrats (little "d" - not the party but the political philsophy) - they never have been. Gilded Age plutocrats like William Vanderbilt damned the public and saw democracy as a threat to his wealth; John D. Rockefeller claimed "God gave me my money" which meant that guilt was tantamount to sin; mining big shot, George Baer, used these immortal words to address a 1902 coal strike: The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for - not by the labor agitators, but by the Cirstian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of this country.

Inhuman working conditions, child slave labor, starvation and the threat of death and dismemberment within the maw of industrial machines. Those people who benefited - a tiny minority - built massive homes. We call them "Robber Barons" for good reason. Another good name for them is Plutocrats. Everyone else involved became so increasingly marginalized that eventually government had to step in. Laws were drafted after things got so bad, even the President had to step in. Teddy Roosevelt led the fight to reign in Corporate excesses and slave-labor and child-labor and monopolies and the entire panapoly of Grotesquery that resulted from unregulated Big Business. There was so much outcry that something had to be done. An entire network of regulation was created to prevent Big Business from perpetrating these sorts of abuses ever again. In 1929 when the markets crashed, it was because Big Business hadn't been regulated enough.

There are a lot of differences between government and business but perhaps the most obvious one is that business operates under a singular philosophy: make money. It is money driven. We know instinctively that "money is the root of all evil"; we know deep in our bones that the pursuit of money, for money's sake, brings pain and suffering and unhappiness virtually always. We know this - therefore it strikes me as being incredibly - well, insane - to believe that a system that is built on greed and selfishness and cut-throat competition can give us a model for how we're supposed to comport ourselves in everything: education, family, society. 

Thomas Frank puts it this way: "A system that takes the pursuit of self-interest and profit as its guiding light does not necessarily satisfy the yearning in the human soul for belief and some higher meaning beyond materialism."

Look: the business model basically works this way - you want to maximize profits while at the same time cutting costs. Businesses may pay lip-service to providing benefits to their employees but that's all it ever is. The sensibility of the Marketplace is, if you don't like your job find another one. Some other smart guy will snap you up because he realizes that benefits will make employees happy and that revelation will push him to the front. People will want to work for him instead of the competitor. That's the dynamics of competition! But not really because there's no place to go and no one has any money in the bank and the competition to get those jobs means that people are forced to put up with a lot of shit, just to hold them. They sacrifice their dignity and their humanity and their hope.

If the market is unregulated.

When the market is unregulated the money flows in one direction - into the coffers of an increasingly exclusive plutocracy. It's happening that way right now. Currently the gap between the uber-wealthy and the poor is larger than it has ever been since the Gilded Age. That's why recent studies have found that there's much less class mobility present in the current US than in Europe. In a land where we're supposed to be able to make our own destiny - which put us as a radically new idea vis-a-vis old corrupt Europe, we're actually less able to do so.

The unregulated market allows a Wal-Mart reality to exist without boundaries - Wal-Mart is scary enough as it is. Massive companies move into small towns and, with their huge coffers, are able to temporarily underprice their competitors and drive them out of business. The bigger the company, the more they are able to crush the opposition. Soon you have four or five huge businesses that control everything - if you need an example, look at the Oil Industry. How many small guy operators are there, undercutting BP and Exxon and providing healthy competition? You only have to look back to about 2005 when Hurricane Katrina caused the fear of an oil shortage. The oil industry reacted in a singular way: the four or five major oil companies colluded to raise their prices despite the abundance of real oil reserves, including oil from America's newest economic colony, Iraq. A monopoly can exist when you have a few companies who work in conjunction to artificially set prices and conditions. By the end of 2005 when oil prices were higher for the working man than ever in history, oil companies recorded record profits while simultaneously poor-mouthing through Talk Radio Assholes. 

Big Oil is a perfect example of unregulated industry. Money and power become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Small operators disappear so that eventually, because the market is unregulated, the marketplace and all its supposed values is replaced by a hegemony. Competition disappears.

The unregulated market does not work for you, humble American worker guy. In today's global economy, companies can maximize their profits more easily by exploiting weak labor laws in Third World Countries - China and Pakistan. Your workers are agitating for insurance? Fuck them - save some money and relocate to Pakistan. Or Mexico. Those niggers will be happy for a fucking job paying twelve cents an hour. Increasingly, jobs are going overseas - it makes good business sense. And somehow, we're supposed to benefit from that - the same way we were supposed to benefit from Reaganomics Trickle Down theory: if the rich get richer, they will bestow largesse upon us. Their monies will become our monies. Their wealth and ease and comfort will somehow bless us in some amorphous way. I'm not sure how that will happen but it will because Rush told us so.