Ice Cream Social

Recently the bored and sated West has directed its gnat-like attention to two truly stomach-churning stories: 1) the intestinal assault of the grotesque but well-meaning cyclosporiasis parasite, and 2) increasingly bold public utterances of the soul-vaporizing S-word, if you can imagine. Two quick comments: neither the flaw-expunging rigors of long-game Darwinism nor the prospect of Intelligent Design can explain to any reasonable person what benefit “explosive diarrhea” is to either the natural order or the Grandeur of Humankind. 

At the same time, we must remember that in the vastness of Creation (an enormous frozen vacuum sparsely decorated with rocks and gas and thought leaders), any animate form possessed of the inexplicable Spark of Life is an absolute wonder, statistically and possibly otherwise. If the wonder of cyclosporiasis should manifest explosively and traumatically, know that it signals a greater glory. Your youth group leader may be wielding his “emotive eyebrows” while delicately plucking the second verse of “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” when suddenly he is hollering through a spontaneous caboose geyser. Neither the gut-burrowing cyclosporiasis nor the self-perpetuating natural mechanism itself can be thought capricious or cruel in the episode. For all we know, nature thinks “ostracize” is just another size. 

Pinkos

As for the S word third-rail; the terrors of “socialism” have, for 100 years or more, been liltingly kneaded and baked into the American narrative by an army of singing Donna Reeds in gingham aprons. The current plena voce street corner discussions of “socialism” by voters is a gasping canary to which informed capitalist defenders are utterly failing to respond. This is a watershed moment from whose elementary lessons a new capitalist model may be built – one that makes itself pointedly distinct from transparent grift, full-frontal corruption, Stalinist silencing of dissension, and the program of filial enrichment that self-respecting (and respectable) conservative capitalists would once have declaimed from the rooftops. 

Instead of constructive capitalist self-reflection at this arguable nadir of the docile Grand Old Party, we get fulminations on the gulag archipelago that comes bundled with “socialism,” on the stripping away of Liberty by socialism’s lively spirit of oppression. We are told that anyone with the temerity to cursorily investigate “socialism” is an a-historical, ignorant child – that working people weary of struggling to feed the family three squares a day are the new Khmer Rouge. You have to be a deeply incurious and doctrinaire capitalist to not even ask the question, “…why all this sudden interest in socialism?!” Must be for the Free Stuff.

G*d of the Gaps 

Is Liberty a byte or a sliding scale? Private enterprise and free markets are meant as moral instruments, where the morality of human “freedom” is inherent in the unfettered navigability of the economic landscape by all. “Prosperity” – that lofty, indeterminate cornucopia – is a baseline measure of aspirational mortal worth here; a notion that dates to our national charter and its keynote – the primacy of the individual. When the Founders angrily raised a finger to King George and started their own country, the inviolability of the individual and her pursuit of actionable desires (or “happiness”) were top of mind and written down with fancy quills. Happiness is not guaranteed, but its pursuit is. 

We Americans have been taught that “many hands make light work,” but are allergic to groupthink (at least in the abstract). But the best aspects of Republicanism see playgrounds built by the communities that surround them – Kid’s World in Santa Barbara is a terrific example of this. In the U.S., public education, roads, Social Security, Medicare, fire protection, national defense have been ceded to larger structural care and are not private concerns. We apparently accept that some necessities are better secured collectively than individually. Why and which ones? Is it ruinously commodifying to suggest that everyone has a right to shelter, or to health care? “They have a right to acquire shelter and health care by their own means.” What if they haven’t the means? Why are we here?

Boontown

Research by global inequality economists like Branko Milanović shows that the poorest 5% of the United States population still enjoys a higher real income than roughly 60% to 68% of the world’s population. Think about that. This is inarguable evidence that capitalism works on the global economic stage. Our poor are wealthier than some ~ 65% of the rest of the world’s population. It also means, among other things, that you may be in the global 68^th percentile for wealth and standing in line at your neighborhood American food bank for nourishment. 

Capitalism and a rising standard of living have seen global life expectancy rise from 52.5 years in 1960 to over 71 years by 2015. Innovative machines and electricity have liberated millions of people from difficult daily work that breaks the body down. Our globally wealthy American Poor still need food stamps to eat. Discuss.

And Liberty? Our national founding cornerstone? Money is power, and the present moment’s liquidity asymmetry hands power’s levers to the well-off. The Top 1% are now taking home more total financial benefits than the bottom 80% of Americans combined. Even if your math skills are crummy your Spidey sense should be throwing colored red squiggles. This mistribution of power means more than the comparative thread count of dime store linens. Thanks to human weakness in its presence, wealth presents as a strange kind of magic. Whole mountains can be moved if we can just get to the Mountain Keepers, and meetings with Mountain Keepers are anymore regulated by turnstile token. The baker on the corner will not be taking a meeting with the Mountain Keepers, despite her being in the world’s top 68% percentile for wealth. When all the world’s poor have dishwashers will they have more or less Liberty than they do at this moment? 

So the governance of the U.S. is nudged by those who hold the wealth and are willing to legally proffer it for legislative results that suit and codify their holdings. Believe me, the poor would do the same thing if they could. But they can’t. 

Reflexive disdain for the fabulously liquid is as hopelessly blinkered a position as equating “democratic socialism” with Siberian cold and the trials of Ivan Denisovich. This is, though, an old story and an old question: do extreme concentrations of private wealth give some citizens disproportionate influence over political life and legislation? Does concentrated wealth undermine the democratic equality capitalism is supposed to serve? Let’s hope not, because that would mean an asymmetry of “power” in a country whose magisterial animating impulse at creation was a kick-ass egalitarianism (see Thomas Jefferson quote above).

Dumb, Lazy Naifs

If people are struggling so much that they turn to radioactive “socialism” as a system worth investigating for some relief, are they dumb, lazy naifs who simply want “free stuff”? A democratic form of socialism argues that healthcare, housing, education, and economic security should not align with or be dependent on purchasing power. 

The top 1% of Americans hold roughly 31.6% of total U.S. wealth. The bottom 50% hold just 2.5%. This means the richest 1% control over twelve times the wealth of the entire lower half of the population. Twelve times?

Meanwhile, the lowest-income families are projected to lose an average of $1,200 annually, primarily because billions of dollars were cut from public assistance programs like Medicaid and SNAP (food stamps) to help offset the price tag of the tax cuts. What an easy vote that must’ve been. Only one of the economic classes in the U.S. can steer its own destiny, inaugural guarantees aside. Money money money, as they say. 

250 years ago a British colony tore sloppily away from its retrograde old-world master, then pioneered, codified and branded the towering Primacy of the Individual: The American. Today American Liberty is a continuum, a precious gift accessible by degrees along a tawdry and mercantile graduated scale. We forgot. Markets are useful servants, but they make lousy masters.