Though tall and well built, my friend Arthur has developed a paunch and moves rather slowly. His profession however (Stocks and Options, Futures and Forex), moves at high-speed. An independent, iconoclastic scholar, a super hetero nerd, Arthur has traded his whole life.
Funny thing is, in addition to being a supreme capitalist, he’s also a libertarian. From excruciating personal experience, he trusts big government only to impede, subvert and punish… He’s also an anarchist, in fact was a serious hippie back in the day; lived for a few years in a communal house with no doors on the bathrooms. But that’s behind him. Now he’s a peripatetic professor, proselytizing the faith and sprinkling wisdom around the world about a field that many claim to understand, and few do. He has devotees all over the place. He’s a 5 star hotel rat.
He also speed reads seven world news sources a day and bases his trades in part on that and in part on his proprietary formulae of ‘technical trading’. He has a very strong grasp of global reality. In fact he’s a bit of a know-it-all. I can debate almost anything with him but he’ll usually win, at least on the idealogical, macro view. On the micro/subjective plane, we are fairly in line with each other, especially on human rights. He may actually be more of a Pollyanna about the future than I am. My Pollyanna sometimes gets hacked up by Lizzie Borden. She’s the one that makes me want to drive to DC and lop off some heads.
Take for instance the environment; here I am a raging liberal and he’s free market and libertarian. Anti-big government on principle. I get his argument. As we can see any old day in the news, government is riddled with corruption, self-aggrandizement, and myopia. And right now it’s running off the rails. Frankly I think we ought to pull out the old vaudeville hook and yank all the hams and pols right off the stage. That being said, however, I find it hard to align with the libertarian belief that less regulation of those gangly, hoary, insatiable, and totally misconceived entities known as corporations is going to lead to paradise on earth. How happy they would be if we would all just agree that coal is really not dirty, nor is their laundry. (Although I will note that even an arch-conservative town in Texas is shifting entirely to renewable energy sources – it just makes economic sense.)
No a student of political theory, I therefore won’t venture much further into this debate. Essentially I believe that what’s in order is some brand new thinking. We’ve gotten absolutely nowhere with ye old two party system. It’s thoroughly impacted, stultified, stymied and entropic to boot. Sort of like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – the same old indigestible bits and pieces of political thought swirling in an ever-expanding mass.
So because of this, and because I want to be open minded, I listen to Arthur. Elements of his point of view are appealing. Fewer taxes paid to the state for bungling nearly everything it touches, makes sense. Other parts don’t – like the reason we all need the right to bear arms is that without it, the only one able to bear them is the state. I agree that is a chilling thought, yet how do we need guns any longer when the weapons of choice these days are biological, chemical, financial and technological? If guns were only used for self-defense and to uphold liberty, his argument might hold water. But the evidence shows that an armed populace is a murdering populace.
My gut feeling is this: if you can’t trust big government, how can you trust big business? Arthur says because if they don’t please the people, they go out of business. This formula presupposes that 1) we know (or care?) what corporations are actually doing to ‘please us’ and that 2) they are not too big to fail.
Does the fact that I trust neither big govt. or big biz account for my dire questioning of the concept of hope? (See my book Her Argument.) And one has to factor into the mix how often the ‘deep state’ actually aids and abets corporations that offer donations and other perks. Which then beckons the specter of fascism – the collusion of government and corporate power. Perhaps the only thing I have a flicker of optimism for is that humanity will get its ass in gear and tear down the whole shabby stage upon which the corporate state and its bad actors so shamelessly parade and then start all over with a brand new form of theatre! Bring on some better clowns!
