Question Authority - and oppose it

   
Who are the Agents of Authoritarianism?
The Law of Unintended (or concealed) Consequences

A phenomenon of great importance

Few people seem to recognize this "category", but it is part of the ethical "dark matter" which seems to permeate our positive moral universe.  We can see it everywhere, from drug prohibition (actually designed to maximize both criminal activity and the state police authority which supposedly "opposes" it) to our health care system, which is surely a disease and revenue producing system (actually designed to cause and perpetuate illnesses and unhealthy lifestyles), since doctors and other providers are now paid on the basis of how many "treatments" they provide, and thus have little or no incentive to actually make people healthier.  Indeed, that becomes a threat to their economic survival, which is compensated for by decreasing supply and increasing the monopoly power of the providers, thus leaving half or more of the population untreated or underserved. 

The very principle of "insurance" is  based on this.  Essentially, we are betting that bad things will happen.  And it is very difficult to prove causality when they actually do.  Thus, insurance is way more expensive for the prudent and safety-conscious than they would otherwise pay in a pool made up entirely of people like themselves. 

It used to be hard to get insurance if you are a "high risk" person with lots of claims.  The idea of compulsory insurance actually negates the very idea of insurance and risk-pooling, on a voluntary and market-regulated basis.  Instead, it becomes a government diktat which costs everyone two or three times more than an optimal distribution of the same resources and services would provide.  And so it goes with almost everything these days.

Public education is the most significant manifestation of this phenomenon.  I'm not talking about real public, community-based education.  I'm talking about our present system of vicious, coercive state monopolies utterly controlling a unified content of obedience, ignorance, and subservience, with some sort of lip service to "human rights" and "job training."  Our public education is so bad that many of us, when it was only 20% as bad as it is, today, despaired of ever fixing it, although we certainly had dozens of excellent plans and policies which could have transformed it into something approaching the "real public community-based" system. 

Site-based management (each school being autonomous and run by those on site, not a central bureaucracy), parent-teacher co-ops, neighborhood open schools where learning is available for everyone of all ages - these are just a few of the cogent and workable solutions which various groups and scholars have supported consistently for as long as there has been "public education."

The fact is, American public education is based on an earlier Prussian model, which derives from  the post-Napoleonic paranoia to create superstates with super armies to either be like Napoleon's Empire, or to be able to effectively counter and oppose it.  The educational arms race was on.  And it has never been more focussed than it is, today, with the competition between China and the US for global hegemony. 

The role of economists

Economists exist to sort these things out, and make the proper, scientific and rational determinations of  what our economy should and must provide, and how best to go about it.  Economists agree among themselves much more than the general public might suspect.  And we are not "socialists" or "free-marketeers" or even "pro-business."  We are SCIENTISTS - observers, researchers, predicters, truth-seekers, not dictators or "sycophants of the bourgeoisie," as Marx, himself a philosopher and economist, put it.  But of course we are.  Someone has to pay us, and it is, by definition, the bourgeoisie who control the money, jobs, and the rest of the economy. 

Another way to look at it is that economists are "engineers of the economy."  We're supposed to understand the nuts and bolts of how the economy works, so we can maintain it, and protect it from the many assaults, both foreign and domestic, which are launched against individual firms, sectors, or the economy as a whole. 

Perhaps we should pause a bit and consider the idea of "whole" and "parts".  Most people have heard of something being "more than the sum of its parts."  Yet, all the parts together must equal the whole.  That's a definition.  So, if more comes out of the "whole" than might have been predicted merely by looking at the parts, that is called "synergy" - created energy and power (wealth, influence, healthfulness - whatever we are dealing with).  It is something that entrepreneurs as well as social engineers accomplish regularly. 

The genius of the market (which hardly any leftists understand at all) is that it's all voluntary, and it coordinates all the disparate supplies and demands for goods and services.  YOU, the individual, decide what you want to do, what kind of education you want, what sort of transportation, food supply, health care system, retirement plan, etc.  And you get a fixed quantity of resources (called the "social product") - the earth itself, the free energy all around us, etc, plus the legacy of knowledge and techniques which is our common inheritance. 

When an oil or coal company moves in and strips out a billion dollars worth of oil or  coal, and maybe leaves the local community with a few hundred (now redundant) jobs and a mess of pollution, they have looted the "social product."  They have claimed our common heritage for their own.  And we agree with them - even "liberal Democrats", who trade off such pillage for a stay of execution for Social Security and Medicare. 

We need to rethink everything about "property", incomes policy, and what the rightful functions of a just and free state might be (if any).  Anarchists have long contended that it is the state, itself, which is the problem.  We don't need any "government" bigger than a rural county or urban neighborhood.  Anything else is likely to represent "capital" instead of people; war instead of peace, control instead of community.