In a complex
world such as exists today, a "political system built around self-made,
self-reliant and value-creating agents whose connections to other humans are
purely voluntary or contractual," is not only impossible, but also undesirable. If we are to function
in our complex world at anything other than a disadvantage, we must learn how
to interact with a wide variety of individuals and groups, including those we
might believe we prefer not to deal with. The questions we must ask ourselves
are: why we do not desire to interact with a particular individual or group; is
this desire based on our experience or the untested prejudices of ourselves or
others; and is what we are losing from not interacting with a particular
individual or group worth it?
Thomas Paine admits to the desirability of society; the evil that exists is in the necessity of government. James Madison says that government, for good or for ill, is the greatest reflection of human nature; if men were "angels," no government would be needed. Any government would work equally well, with or without any internal or external checks or balances to its powers.
Theodore Roosevelt reinforces Madison's viewpoint: We are the government, you and I. If government is operating in a manner contrary to our needs and desires, we have a duty to change it, because government is the political expression of ourselves. This is what Thomas Jefferson was stating in the Declaration of Independence when he wrote, "That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." (See my 27 July 2007 OpEdNews article, " Rights, Powers, Privileges, and Responsibilities ," for my in-depth analysis of the Declaration of Independence as a moral document, and its application as a legal declaration of rights both collectively and individually for all humanity.)
Robert Nozick and those libertarians who follow his creed, do not believe in either the desirability or necessity of government, other than to protect themselves and their property. The second is evil by my definition of the term, because it places things--Mr. Nozick and his friends' property--ahead of human beings. (See my 15 June 2007 OpEdNews article " Choosing the Hardest Thing ," for more on this subject.)
The libertarians
like Nozick--and for that matter, the Objectivist followers of Ayn Rand--in my
opinion want a type of unlimited, irresponsible individual freedom that is a
boon only for a small minority of the nation's population: those who will abuse
this freedom to attain their own selfish, avaricious, antisocial ends.
For libertarians,
this response is due in part to the more unreasonable laws and regulations that
certain members of our society have inflicted upon us. Some of these laws and
regulations concern what are generally victimless crimes--e.g., prostitution,
gambling, and drug use--to force the moral precepts of their religion or other
belief system on the rest of us. In my opinion, the libertarians seem to desire
to throw out the "baby" (laws preventing abuse of the public by business,
especially the largest corporations) with the "bath water" (laws against the
aforementioned victimless "crimes"). Libertarians generally cannot see the
difference between the laws that regulate safety and environmental hazards for
a corporation like BP, drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, or those laws
that protect the consumer from a company who sells shoddy or dangerous
merchandise; from a woman who makes her living as a professional sex provider,
or a man who sells marijuana to consenting adults.
(No, I do not
consider the coercion of individuals into sex work to be a victimless crime,
anymore than I consider addiction to gambling, heroin, cocaine, alcohol,
methamphetamine or any of their relatives to be something positive for society
in general, or the affected individual in particular. However, most
professional sex providers are not victims, in spite of the prohibitionists
claims to the contrary. See Norma Jean Almodovar's website " Police, Prostitution, and Politics ," for more on this subject.)
There is strong
evidence out of Portugal that when drug addictions are treated as medical
problems rather than crimes, the rate of addiction declines. If you have hope,
you have less need to get high, or try to drink or gamble your problems
away. People who feel as if they have a
positive personal and financial future to look forward to, rather than some
mind-numbing existence as a nameless worker drone in some gigantic, uncaring
multinational corporation don't need distractions from their plight.
One-hundred-and-seventy years ago, Karl Marx warned of these inherent dangers
in an unfettered capitalist system, in his book, The Poverty of Philosophy :
"Finally, there came a time when everything that men had considered as inalienable became an object of exchange, of traffic and could be alienated. This is the time when the very things which till then had been communicated, but never exchanged; given, but never sold; acquired, but never bought--virtue, love, conviction, knowledge, conscience, etc.--when everything, in short, passed into commerce. It is the time of general corruption, of universal venality, or, to speak in terms of political economy [economics, RJG], the time when everything, moral or physical, having become a marketable value, is brought to the market to be assessed at its truest [monetary, RJG] value." -- Karl Marx , The Poverty of Philosophy , p. 16. [Terms in brackets are amplifications or clarifications.]
Marx further expanded on this theme in Das Kapital :
"...Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour-process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital." -- Karl Marx , Das Kapital, Volume I ; Part VII, The Accumulation of Capital; Section 4: Different Forms of Relative Surplus Population, The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation; page 401.
Marx is
right: the dehumanization of the workers by the corporation is beyond any doubt
the single worst aspect of the modern corporate state.
Richard Eskow, in his 29 August, 2012 AlterNet.org
article, " Goodbye, Liberty! 10 Ways Americans
Are No Longer Free ," gave us a list of ten
things which we used to take for granted as rights we had that we have lost in
the last forty years, to this dehumanizing process:
1.
Our American liberties end at the workplace door.
2. We're losing our "right to life" in many different ways--from birth through old age.
3. We've lost autonomy over our own bodies.
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