Death by Purity

Neocons and neoliberals are basically just re-attempting laissez-faire (no-boundaries) capitalism, to the same miserable result. We must disregard the "true believers" and do better for our societies.

This is a long essay, but it needs to be written because purity culture is going to get us all killed.

Let me explain.

I’m talking about economic systems here. You see, the neocons and neoliberals are basically just re-attempting laissez-faire (no-boundaries) capitalism, to the same miserable result we’d seen in the past. But here’s the deal: there’s also a concept of laissez-faire socialism that is just as dangerous as laissez-faire capitalism (laissez-faire roughly translates to “hands-off.” If we knee-jerk from one to the other, we’re no better off.

Wow, that’s dense.

Let me expand it a bit and explain.

I’ve made three claims here. The first is that we use government regulation to keep unfettered capitalism from killing us all, the second is that the safety-net of government regulation has been chipped away by neocons and neoliberals alike, and the third is that unadulterated socialism, the antithesis of no-holds-barred capitalism, is just as dangerous. These together lead to my conclusion that no single approach can work in isolation to provide for a society, and that a mix of approaches is necessary.

My first claim is pretty obvious if you know your history, but also, we’re seeing it play out right now. Historically, there used to be this problem: the ozone layer was being rapidly depleted by chemicals that corporations were using in their aerosol products. I’ve been researching this as my latest novel, tentatively titled Everything, starts in the 1970s. The hole in the ozone layer was detected nearly two decades prior, but it took that long to start taking it seriously. Scientists determined the culprit (chlorofluorocarbons) relatively early on, but it required governments to rein in the corporations to basically tell them to stop using chlorofluorocarbons in their products. This government intervention led to the reversal of the deterioration of the ozone layer, and is why we’re still alive today. We were projected to have no ozone layer by the end of 2050 or so. Now, thankfully, that’s one problem we won’t have. The important note here is that corporations didn’t just decide one day not to use those chemicals. If they had, government action wouldn’t have been necessary. It took governments worldwide to force corporations to stop. As a counterexample, let’s look at climate change. Corporations have become so powerful that, at least in the United States, we’re struggling to make inroads to slow and stop climate change, even though we all know what needs to be done. Interestingly, those behemoths of capitalism, the actual capitalists, i.e., the owners of corporations, have so far failed to decide to be good stewards of the Earth.

Worse than that, they’ve actively prevented, through lobbying, government interventions to address the issue of climate change, going so far as to lie about climate change to the American people. It turns out that American companies knew about man-made climate change from about the same time as they knew about the ozone hole, so this is a very interesting comparison. Why wasn’t action taken at the same time about human-influenced climate change? Because the bastions of capitalism wouldn’t allow it. Through mis and disinformation, they muddied the water so much that it was impossible to get a consensus on the problem until nearly fifty years later, and even now they have their thumbs on the scales of society, presenting the false choice between furthering innovation and dealing with the problem of climate change. Look at our failure to stop the development of data centers, the veritable frat-boy on the nozzle of the keg of fossil fuels.

For my second claim, I think I need to define neoliberal and neoconservative so you understand the difference…and the overlap. Neoliberalism is the belief, furthered by such thinkers as Friedrich Hayek, in books such as The Road to Serfdom, which points out that capitalism has helped shatter some boundaries of tyrannical rule in the past. This cause was furthered in the United States by Milton Friedman, who advocated for free market capitalism to such an extent that even the allocation of land in city parks should be market-driven, as well as public education. This can, in my humble opinion, be mostly traced back to a quote from The Wealth of Nations, where Adam Smith discusses an “invisible hand,” which is the emergent behavior that Hayek believed, and that Friedman discusses, as providing for the improvement of society. Neoliberals are true believers in the concept that the way to keep societies free is to deregulate and privatize wherever possible, despite what we’ve learned from watching the process play out in places like Russia, for example, where the privatization of government organizations led to the rise of oligarchs, who control the society there. Neoconservatives, however, believe that “moral anarchy” is the result of liberalism. I haven’t read his work, but I know people who tout neoconservative ideology, and from what I understand, neoconservatism is a belief that moral values can only be upheld by traditional values and the use of a strong military. Where do these overlap, then? Neoconservatives also believe in a free market, but tempered by a secondary structure, typically religious in nature, that stands in contrast to the free market to safeguard morality. If you’ll notice, the free market is a big pillar in both platforms, and hence is why it’s often difficult to tell the difference between neoliberals and neoconservatives. If you think folks on the left and right often end up saying and doing the same things…well, you’re not wrong.

Given these, you might think my third claim is contradictory. I’m literally calling out neo-whatevers for free-market capitalism. Surely, that means I’m a dyed-in-the-wool socialist? No, absolutely not. I would argue, though, that I could be, if socialism meant something other than what it’s interpreted as meaning today. Let me clarify. When we say socialism, folks think of the Soviet Union or China, and the government owning everything, distributing what’s needed. This isn’t socialism. It’s not even communism. But it is the mental box that most Americans put socialism into. The only real tenet in socialism is that the workers own the means of production, and that’s not the same thing as saying the government owns everything. We just have limited imaginations.

When I say that unfettered socialism is every bit as problematic as free-market capitalism, this is the type of socialism I’m talking about: state-controlled socialism. And that brings obvious problems that we’ve seen in many of these countries. Consolidation of power yields corruption, which then leads to more consolidation of power, which leads to more corruption, in a non-virtuous cycle that ultimately leads to the state controlling everything and entrenched dictators. We’ve seen this play out again and again. One can make the argument—I certainly have—that socialist economies that have emerged have often centralized power in an effort to stave off capitalist intervention, but it doesn’t change the practical on-the-ground facts: we’ve yet to successfully do a successful socialist economy that didn’t devolve into tyranny.

What we’re learning today is that free-market capitalism is capable of creating tyrants, too. We already knew that, so really, we’re re-learning that fact. It happens that any human system has the capacity to cater to the worst of humanity’s impulses of avarice and hierarchical thinking. But that’s another story and discussion. What we really need to think about is that if free-market capitalism and hands-off socialism don’t work, then how do we come up with a system that works?

This is where the waning of the fear of socialism is a good thing. The truth is, we need both. The battle between pure socialism and pure capitalism is something that should, honestly, be relegated to the white halls of the educational elite. What we down-to-earthers need is something that just works, and it’s not going to be found in an ivory tower while ignoring the facts on the ground. This means acknowledging that capitalism, even unfettered in some cases, is a good tool for some things, like greeting cards, whereas other things, like health care, demand socialist approaches.

Please note that I’ve presented capitalism and socialism here as varying degrees of government intervention for the sole reason that that’s how we Americans typically understand these things. Mine was a practical decision to make an argument that’s clear, based on the mental models we each already hold. So please don’t spend your energy trying to convince me that this is not the case: I know it’s not the case. There are very concise Latin phrases that are more accurate, which I could use that few others would understand, so, as is consistent with my theme, I made the very practical decision to avoid the weeds and econo-babble to communicate effectively.