Collective Responsibility: The Forgotten Oxymoron

Up to this point, my rants have been largely focused on general theory or very specific issues, even those blatantly critical of certain trends or policies have abstained from making general claims about any political or economic system. Today, for the first time, Neurotoxin becomes abrasive, and I will give a harsh, discrediting critique of one particular socioeconomic school of thought that has virtually no redemption in scientific terms. The target of the day: State Involvement in the Economy, and its extreme form - Socialism.

First of all, it is important to remember, as I mentioned in the "Understanding the Modern US" post, that only the most extreme State involvement in the economy scientifically qualifies to be defined as Socialism (you can look at the definition in that rant for more information). However, the fact that government policies regulating the economy don't qualify for that definition in no way redeems them as efficient or beneficial, I simply point that out to remind people of the need for more concrete criticism than just dismissing it as "bad" by attaching that label, which to many Americans is a dirty word that they don't understand.

However, that being said, it is impossible to look at state involvement in the economy in its modern form without examining the history of Socialism, where modern policies find most of their roots. The ideological story begins in Medieval Europe. In the centuries immediately following the fall of the Roman Empire, even in places where it never reached like modern Russia or Norway, the political order in Europe largely resembled that of the Barbaric Tribes contemporary to the Roman Empire itself. Immediate authority in most of Europe was held by local territorial figures, who had mostly come to power through accumulation of wealth and control of force, and then hoisted upon themselves various aristocratic titles like "Duke," "Baron," "Count" and so forth to legitimize their authority. Terms like "King," "Dauphin," or "Czar" did not come into use until hundreds of years later in the majority of Europe. Overbearing authority then, very roughly resembling a federal or supernational government today, was held by networks of religious leaders, just as it had been in the Barbaric Tribes. This is why territorial rulers had their authority legitimized in religious terms - often through ceremony as well as revisions to the Christian Faith taught to their constituents aimed to make them believe these leaders were God's favored, although Christian scripture clearly says the opposite. This is also why the majority of wars in this time period were not state vs state or territory vs territory, but large conglomerate vs large conglomerate, as they were fought predominantly over larger territorial power schisms within the Church, the split of Eastern Orthodoxy from Roman Catholicism and the birth of Protestantism with its 30 Years War being the most prominent examples. Territorial leaders accepted the Church as an overbearing authority, common sense would dictate, because it commanded these large conglomerates of force and could bring the power of several dozen other territorial rulers down onto the head of one who tried to declare his independence. The Church's own claim to legitimacy, besides faith-based supernatural beliefs, was that it brings about a synchronized doctrine of collective responsibility. While the presentation of this responsibility - a need to enforce fundamental Christian laws to avoid various Hell on Earth scenarios - is laughable even to most Christians today, it is nevertheless rooted in an ideology aimed at solving a variety of very real contemporary social issues (discussed in the Premise posts), and was corrupted into an autocracy of superstition that lost sight of these goals through centuries of political implementation. It will soon become evident why this discussion is so relevant to modern day Statism.

The formation of the infant modern states was largely a trend of territorial rulers acquiring enough hegemonic authority to usurp and undermine the overbearing power of the Church. Phillip II of Spain, while proclaimed by historians as "Mr. Catholic", took over the city of Rome and held the Pope prisoner for a number of years, allowing him to operate his Church with, essentially, the blade of Phillip's sword held to his throat. Henry VIII, in what is oversimplified by modern history as a conflict over seeking a divorce, militarily expelled the Catholic representatives from England and coined the Anglican Church, which was almost exactly the same but named the King, not the Pope or his Cardinal, as its final Earthly authority. Ivan IV of Russia, its first hegemonic monarch, spent most of his life in territorial wars against members of his OWN FAMILY that were territorial rulers who did not agree to a united monarchic state, and in the process executed the majority of the elite of the Russian Orthodox Church - paradoxically declaring them heretics for opposing him while teaching that Earthly force-based authority is to be succumbed to. Those who remained were largely his proponents and the Church took a secondary role to the Czar in Russia once his claim to the throne was unchallenged.

This ousting of Church autocracy is often credited as a large factor in ushering in the Renaissance, but whether or not it actually caused it, the Renaissance did not bode well for the monarchs for reasons most people today are not aware of. Namely, reading scriptures on their own and having the liberty to interpret them for themselves rather than listening to a "spiritual advisor" who commanded tremendous amounts of force, scholars and elites began to see that these writings said absolutely nothing about the legitimacy of monarchic authority, and could pretty easily be interpreted as calling these people tyrants and despots for hoarding wealth while forcing the common people to live in poverty under the duress of force. Every late-Renaissance political philosophy that is alluded to by underlying theories of modern government, from the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and JJ Rousseau to the early Socialist writings and Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, largely draws upon ideological Christian values for support. The states later formed based upon the writings of these philosophers largely divorced themselves from theocracy, but it is important to remember that the philosophers themselves lay their moral roots in Christianity. What they found in the scriptures - originals rather than Church-authored revisions - were the same ideals alluded to earlier meant to preserve human rights and dignity and deal with destructive social issues. The 18th and 19th century revolutions were, in an ideological sense, nothing more than an enema of force-wielding authorities (Church and Feudal Aristocracy) who had lost sight of the ideologies that supposedly legitimized them - it was a return to ideological roots rather than a change in them.

The relevance of this for modern state policy is gargantuan. Namely, every political philosophy in question, or at the very least every state formed on their basis, continued to commit the fallacy of giving the state the unchallenged authority of ensuring these social issues were addressed, giving very strong credibility to the folk wisdom that humanity really does learn nothing from history. Personally, I don't agree that any modern government has at any point adequately lived up to this responsibility. The pre-Civil War United States was fairly adamant on the limitation of federal authority and the separation of Church and State - the erosion of the former being the real cause of the Civil War conflict, NOT slavery. But, this country was still not the libertarian utopia many modern anti-governmentalists believe it was 145 years later. It was riddled with lawfully-protected ethnocentrism and downright racism, and while in modern times it is easy to dismiss these as prejudiced excuses for the economic hegemony of the ruling elite, the exclusion of ethnic minorities (immigrants, slaves, Native Americans, etc) from the political process was largely accepted then under the same rhetoric used to justify the state's excessive role in the economy today. Namely, these people were said to be insignificantly educated, savage, and unfamiliar with modern customs of civility and hence would eradicate the freedom and prosperity enjoyed by everyone if enfranchised in politics. Moreover, their disenfranchisement was sold to the masses by psuedo-scientific sources as doing them a FAVOR in many cases; the people with the power to make policy had to take the minorities' moral incapacity into consideration, and protect themselves and everyone else in society from the irresponsible decisions they would make if given the power to do so!

It is no surprise, then, that modern western socialism, as a policy rather than ideology, had its birthplace right here in the United States. Following the abolition of slavery and the industrial revolution - which gave birth to another minority very inconvenient for the ruling elite - the workers - a large school of thought then considered scientific infused in the masses a sort of hysteria about the corruption of society's moral fabric due to the participation of these minorities. Namely, formerly-enslaved blacks, immigrants which were now heavily allowed to naturalize and become citizens, industrial workers, and certain Native American groups, were now all formally allowed to participate in policy making. Despite Jim Crow laws and corporate-controlled election-fraud, their political influence was nevertheless heavily felt. The school of thought mentioned above, with its roots in the "Know-Nothing" movement of 3 decades prior, and Psychiatrist Henry Goddard and education guru Horace Mann at its forefront in the 1880-90s, advocated that the state was now bearing the economic and social weight of these groups' participation, and to protect everyone, it had the responsibility to ensure they were in line with modern customs. In policy, this approach was the justification of a number of "charming" state-ordained practices:

- The application of extremely culturally biased IQ Tests (designed in homogeneous France for the purpose of educational placement of children and blatantly co-opted for this) to incoming immigrants, as well as blacks in the South and Native Americans in the West to determine their "mental capacity" to vote or even be admitted to the country in the case of immigrants.
- The coining of the term "Moron" by Dr. Goddard to describe what could now loosely be translated into a classification of individuals bordering on mental retardation, determined by the same tests. These individuals were then LEGALLY MANDATED into psychiatric detention camps with the admitted objective of preventing them from reproducing (sometimes also sterilized), as Goddard largely believed that intelligence was genetic.
(These tests largely tested math, English in its New England form, and social IQ in terms of New England customs. Of course, no immigrant or minority who had never been formally educated and grew up in a different culture could do well on them, and modern IQ tests account for the grand majority of these biases.)
- The formation of the first government-run primary and secondary schools, which mandated attendance, and again had the openly admitted objective of instilling in youth who could not afford private education the moral and cultural knowledge necessary for the capacity to participate in politics. This education system is also credited with the coining the civillian "salute," in which it was mandatory for children to hold their hands to their hearts while reciting the pledge of allegiance.

Here's the kicker: Predominantly, the proponents of this movement and those who supported it openly referred to themselves as, you guessed it: SOCIALISTS.

Fast forward 50 years.

Let's start with Hitler's Germany. First of all, the term "Nazi" was coined in 1941 by the Western enemies of Hitler (France, UK, US); it is very rare to hear this term in reference to Hitler in Eastern Europe to this day, and in Germany itself it was virtually unheard of until after the defeat of Hitler in 1945. It is no secret that Hitler and his followers referred to themselves as National Socialists, and this is more or less how the rest of the world referred to them until 1941. This is important because, until Hitler's unexpected backstabbing of the Soviet Union in June of 1941, these regimes were allied and lumped together by both supporters and detractors in the category of "Socialists." As the Soviet Union joined the ranks of the Allied Powers, however, it became very inconvenient for Western governments, whose constituencies saw the USSR in the same light as Hitler's Germany and for good reason, to refer to these countries by the same label. Hence, the term "Nazi" was quickly co-opted to emphasize the nationalistic eugenic human-rights abuses that characterized Hitler's socialism, while Stalin's socialism which slaughtered millions of its own citizenry with little heed to their ethnicity was suddenly less abusive of human rights. (Remember how "General" Musharaf who usurped power in Pakistan suddenly became "President" Musharaf after the 9/11 attacks and the need for his compliance against the Taliban?) Interestingly, the USSR and many of its modern successor states refer to Hitler's Germany as "Fascist Germany," a term coined by Stalin to represent Hitler as the enemy because Fascism was seen as an extreme totalitarian form of the imperialism that socialism ideologically sought to eradicate. Finally, Hitler's allies through the end of the war - Japan, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria - continued to refer to him as a Socialist until their own defeat.

The importance of Socialism being the underlying rhetoric in Hitler's Germany is colossal, even if in practice the economic system did not fully qualify for the label, at least not to the extent of the USSR's. Today, it is a popular fallacy to paint Hitler as the epitome of extreme right wing, but without defending the extreme right wing (they are more comparable to the Spanish Inquisition for those seeking diminutive comparisons), Hitler was the POLAR opposite - an extreme LEFT winger. The justifications for every one of his own charming practices openly and admittedly drew upon the ideals and policies coined by US Socialists 50 years prior, they just took them to a greater extreme. Hitler's death camps which housed Jews, Blacks, Gypsies, Homosexuals, the Disabled and Mentally Ill, and later political detractors like Catholics and Communists, were a direct derivative of Goddard's detention camps for "Morons" with the exact same justification - these people were not only unfit but dangerous to the rest of society if allowed to participate or even mingle with it, much less to reproduce seeing as these were genetic qualities that set them apart from the Greater Race. Early National Socialist rhetoric targeted people afflicted with birth defects and mental illness for costing the economy large amounts of state-collected resources without being able to produce their fair share. It is a known fact that Hitler idolized Henry Goddard, despite the fact that the latter admitted in the 1910s that his theory of hereditary intelligence was deeply flawed from a scientific standpoint. Furthermore, anecdotal evidence points to Hitler's "salute" being an adaptation of the mandatory gesture in the first American public schools, and that his choice of the Swastika (two intertwined S's) and the importance of the letter 'S' as a symbol in general were a tribute to the word "Socialism". I am not making the argument that Hitler's Germany wasn't EXTREME, but I am making the claim that collectivized responsibility, even in less overtly oppressive forms, has an inherent necessity for the denial of equal access in order to function; the only differences are the severity and the specific groups it chooses to oppress.

The essence of collectivized responsibility in every form, whether Hitler's eugenics-based Socialism, the class-baiting "re-education" socialism of Stalin, Mao, or Kim Il Sung, or the various social welfare policies of Western European and North American democracies today, is that every individual in a society is responsible for its progress as a whole, and hence bears the collective costs of the irresponsible behavior of any one member. This isn't a normative theory - this is the practice which laws in all 3 examples above FORCE on their constituents. Hitler justified the extermination of the disabled because it was already accepted as a given that it is the state's financial responsibility to support them. In the USSR, it was illegal and punishable by imprisonment to not have a state-recognized job (meaning freelancing of any kind or unemployment by choice) under the justification that the system could not exclude the citizen from the fruits of everyone else's labor in the form of state services, and he was hence committing a crime by voluntarily not contributing. Western democracies don't enact the same extremes, but ridiculous laws such as being required to wear a seatbelt in a car or a helmet while riding a motorcycle or bicycle, blanket drug prohibition, and proposals such as Obama's mandate on US citizens to buy health care insurance, at the end of the day draw on the same rhetoric when faced with the unbeatable "Fuck you, its MY life" argument. It is accepted as normal for the state to pick up the tab when someone needs an "essential" service that they haven't arranged for, even if by choice, and hence the state gets to mandate precautions to reduce the costs of these irresponsibles to the masses.

I won't get into normative or moral arguments that are so popular in criticizing this model, because frankly, as I've stated over and over again, normative morality is arbitrary and science is not concerned with it. My criticism of it has far more irrefutable backing in the sphere of countless examples of rampant economic and civil inefficiency associated with it. For starters, even without committing the all too common slippery slope fallacy that equates the policies above to herding undesirables into detention camps, this model nevertheless gives the government a very dangerous economic decision power under the extremely flawed presumption of its neutrality. In the fervently debated topic of health care, for example, both conservative and liberal politicians almost unanimously agree that its runaway costs are the results of excessive regulation - although somehow their solutions then propose more regulations to counter this. Health care professionals - doctors, nurses, laboratories, residential facilities, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, etc. - are placed on a mythical pedestal of need for regulation to ensure safety of service. They are required to jump through a maze of hoops to obtain and keep their practicing licenses, and these are given only to those who follow a scientific model of health care accepted as correct by.... who? Ah, yes, government bureaucracies like the FDA and the AMA heavily controlled by large business interests who practice this very same model, ranging from procedures to pharmaceuticals. Their scientific school of thought is credible and useful, I am not advocating that all traditional western medicine is quackery; but to make it a CRIME to practice medicine from any other, equally credible and scientific school of thought, is nothing short of policy intended to ensure profits by eliminating the competition, thinly masqueraded as protecting the health of the masses. And practicing unrecognized medicine is just about a crime - it can result in the loss of licensure, steep fines, and the obsession with government ordainment opens the door to frivolous malpractice lawsuits against anyone who gives treatment or advice slightly deviating from the norm (malpractice lawsuits are commonly known as the #1 cause of runaway health care costs in the US). Of course, alternative practitioners can spend obscene amounts of money on lawyers to put together advisory disclaimers that protect them from becoming the victim of the policies described above, but this drives up their own costs of operation AND gives health insurance providers - an unrepentant government-ordained cartel that is legally prevented from disbanding and has strong government-infused disincentives from broadening their scope of coverage - an excuse not to COVER alternative treatments. If this CLUSTERFUCK, pardon my language, and the runaway costs of health care that it results in are in any way definable as the "failure of the free market," then I'm not sure what economic glossary the politicians are reading, but its not one any economist or political scientist has ever laid eyes on. Health care is a prominent example in modern times, but countless other examples exist of the government taking on a responsibility for delivering a type of service and then driving it into the ground in terms of efficiency as a result of the compound effect of special-interest-originated policies over time.

The other purely scientific problem with collectivized responsibility is its inherent empowerment of the irresponsible. I'm not praising Hitler and Stalin, but their social totalitarianism was aimed at curbing non-contribution and free-loading, even if the ends of a socialist society do not justify such means. In western social welfare states, the problem of free-loading is a gaping, ever-expanding void with no solution in sight, and anyone who dares to suggest it is a problem is quickly labeled a racist, an oppressor, and so forth. Well, the Michael Moores of the world can call me whatever they want, but from a purely efficiency-oriented perspective, with no mention of ethnicity, religion, national origin, social class, gender, sexual orientation, etc., social welfare has the inherent quality of destroying the incentives of those who benefit from it from contributing their fair share. This isn't limited to the archetypal 23-y-o welfare mother with 3 children who gets a far larger check than she would if she were to find a job, especially factoring in the costs of daycare, although said people ARE an example. What about working-class families who DON'T receive welfare, but in which the adults hold jobs that do not provide group health coverage, and they are FORCED to rely on state-funded health care systems at least for their children? Anyone who has ever been a recipient of state-funded health care services knows how nightmarish they are, but the alternative for these people is lack of health care for their children altogether and they are reasonable in not wanting THAT. What about college students from lower middle class families who can only afford higher education by attending a tax-funded university and even THAT with government loans? When 75% of their education costs are not paid by them or their families, where is the incentive for them NOT to choose a major like Philosophy or Critical Gender Studies with which they are extremely unlikely to make a fraction of the money post-graduation that their education cost? What about large businesses that gladly support laws like minimum wage hikes or others that drive up their operation costs, knowing that in return they will receive government funds to expand their operation that essentially allow them to pass said costs onto the taxpayer? Free-loading, as in all these examples, in the western social welfare state is not only tolerated, it is the only viable method of competition for the majority of actors in the economy, and it makes sense that they domesticate political actors to represent them in government and ensure they have a way to benefit from it, as the alternative is to end up the sucker that pays the price but gets no reward. The deeply flawed defense for this system is that we are "dependent" on it and that without it, children will be without food and health care, no one will be able to afford an education, workers will be underpaid and businesses will not be able to extend their services, and so forth. This defense ignores the fundamental problem with this system, which is not that its "unfair," but its inherent INEFFICIENCY. Every one of those examples, when multiplied by the millions of cases in the US and Western Europe, EXPONENTIATES the costs of whatever service the government is providing. The curbing of welfare and health care programs for the needy would strip private providers who these services pay of a very significant chunk of their income, forcing them to lower their prices and explore more efficient methods of operation with the money they save from taxes paid to support these same programs to attract those same customers; as discussed in my public education rant, educational institutions would have to significantly reduce their costs if the government no longer picked up the tab, and the market shortage of educated people would result in a response of more efficient forms of funding, such as private corporations paying for someone's education in exchange for say, a 5-10 year commitment of working for them (this would also exponentially reduce the number of students with economically useless majors, for which I remind you your taxes currently pay); large corporations stripped of government welfare would have to eat up the costs of competing with their small-business rivals, and would have no incentive to support labor laws that put said rivals out of business, as discussed in a previous rant. The welfare state does not only tolerate inefficiency, it rampantly promotes and rewards it at a cost to anyone attempting to be efficient, creating an ever-expanding dependency on itself in the fashion of an illicit drug that most people see no alternative to. I am not advocating for the complete and instant eradication of each of these policies as these would have abysmal immediate consequences, but efficiency-based policy would dictate their gradual, harm-minimized rollback that allows the time for free-market alternatives to adequately provide the same services, NOT propose the continued expansion of the welfare state when it already consumes a gargantuan portion of our resources with diminishing returns.

There is always some involuntary brunt of responsibility for members who choose to be irresponsible that every member of society carries, and this brunt does have a tendency to disproportionately affect the poorer or the politically disenfranchised. However, trusting the state to set standards of responsibility and then attempt to protect everyone from everyone else's (or their own) irresponsible choices makes, for lack of a more scientific term, a piss-poor solution to this problem. History and the modern system are both littered with examples of special interests quickly co-opting the supposedly neutral government to set the standards in a way that benefit them economically and disenfranchise everyone else, and seeing as the government is very difficult to effectively compete against, the only viable means of opposition is for competing special interests to infiltrate this system with their own agents and fight over who the standards will benefit. This results in, at best, a race down a bottomless pit of ineffiency; and at worst, millions of people herded into concentration camps under the excuse of having a nature contrary to progress. The public sector's tendency toward this is irreconcilable regardless of what accountability measures well-intentioned proponents of Statism may suggest - history does not offer a SINGLE example of economically efficient government. For the most part, people somewhat versed in politics and economics recognize this condition, but make the flawed argument that the free-market alternative would be worse and has already proven to fail. As I've illustrated over and over and over again in this post, however, it is very difficult to blame any of these economic failures on the free market considering none of the failures cited that the welfare state aims to fix occurred in anything even RESEMBLING a free market system to begin with. The ONLY alternative, as the title of my blog advocates, is to FIRE YOUR GOVERNMENT when it comes to being charged with minimizing collective risk and maximizing collective efficiency, because not ONE example exists of it being given this duty and accomplishing anything short of the EXACT OPPOSITE.