SHINY HAPPY RAINBOW PUPPY MUNCHIES
by Wesley M. Brown
Our dear cat-herder-in-chief, Roy, is disappointed with the world. Wall street bankers commit crimes, or at least acts that should be crimes, with taxpayer bailout funds, health care reform is a joke, the economy is sagging, news media have neither the time nor the inclination to fact-check, and President Obama has spent 18 months serving us nothing more than rhetoric and bullshit. All true and sad.
But, his disappointment is predicated upon some spurious progressivism that holds government and other institutions of power and influence should be responsible for bringing wealth, happiness, and liberty to the populace. For what other purpose could these institutions operate?
I answer that government and other institutions of power exist for their sake alone. They exist to perpetuate themselves, by whatever means, and only act in the people’s best interest, or perceived best interest, to the extent that outright revolution is averted. These institutions are the status quo in its most basic form, and when that changes for any reason, we will be told what to think and how to react, if necessary.
Like little Virginia O’Hanlon who wrote to the New York Sun, our editor has too been affected by the cynicism of a skeptical age. He thinks there is no problem or change that cannot be fixed by one more government agency, one more regulatory body, or one more blue ribbon committee charged with ensuring that all of have the benefits of life, liberty, and happiness which Mr. Jefferson promised us. How dreary his world would be if there were no governments or Wall Street to impose its oppressive will upon us.
Government and Wall Street not granting us the life, liberty, and happiness that Mr. Jefferson promised? How could that be?
I answer that there will always be shiny, happy rainbow puppy munchies if you look for them. The first wail of a newborn child, a schoolchild mastering the ABC’s, sharing a laugh with good friends, catching a glimpse of a hummingbird sipping the sweet nectar of honeysuckle on a summer evening. These events are the currency of the human condition, and no government or bank can either provide them or truly deny them to its citizens, for they exist truly apart from the organs and mechanisms of power.
Wes,
Interesting take on my previous post. Why you are wrong on the subject will be posted on Tuesday…must give the readers (all 7 of us) something to ponder…
Roy
Wes,
You appear to rest on the libertarian fallback position on the nature of government, which is essentially a straw man argument against progressives/liberals. That’s to say, your panties begin to bunch up when you perceive a liberal getting frustrated with government’s lack of solutions. Because you reject that premise; it is not government’s place to fix all the problems, and provide us our shiny happy rainbow puppy munchies (hereinafter “SHRPM”). The problem is that this isn’t quite the premise we (or at least I) stand on.
It’s more accurate to say that government agencies are supposed to perform specific functions designed to prevent the predictable and inevitable ills that will result from unchecked human selfishness. For example, establishing tap water purity standards (and for that matter, treating the water), without which we would almost certainly be drinking water that is 30% toxic runoff or hobo urine.
In short, your argument makes a leap from the idea that government exists to prevent certain human-caused ills from becoming systemic, to the idea that government exists to give me SHRPM. I, and most liberals, simply believe the former, which would, if properly administered (which is isn’t) result in a more equalized opportunity for the individual to go out and wrangle his own SHRPM. Sure, there are some benevolent paternalists out there who hold to the latter, but who takes them seriously?
And lastly, a question. You wrote, “catching a glimpse of a hummingbird sipping the sweet nectar of honeysuckle on a summer evening.” When did you become a giant vagina?
Yours,
Dan
Dan, you appear to be claiming “government exists to prevent certain human-caused ills from becoming systemic.” Is that your position?
Mmmmm . . . yes, more or less, though I reserve the right to refine that statement. It was made within the context of Wes’s and Roy’s tet-a-tet above. Which is just to say that it was meant mainly as a response to this statement by Wes:
Which is to say, I do NOT hold with the idea that government exists to give me shiny happy rainbow puppy munchies. And also, let me specify that my statement is not meant to apply to governments categorically. I.e., my position is that the US government was meant to serve this purpose, not that as a principle this is what people do when forming any type of government.
With those clarifications, yes, what you stated is my position.
So, stipulating that whatever other governments or peoples may be up to when they engage in government-forming behavior we can leave to the side for this discussion, preventing spurious gotchas about Aztecs and human sacrifice or, really, anything in the history of Russia and so forth. We’re talking about the US, and that’s it, and if you don’t like it, participate elsewhere, buddy!
(Note: I’m a big fan of that sort of scope control.)
So, on that background:
Dan’s claim: form 1:
The United States Government was meant to prevent certain human-caused ills from becoming systemic.
form 2:
Government agencies are supposed to perform specific functions designed to prevent the predictable and inevitable ills that will result from unchecked human selfishness.
But then you totally cop out and say: “I, and most liberals, simply believe the former, which would, if properly administered (which is isn’t) result in a more equalized opportunity for the individual to go out and wrangle his own SHRPM.”
You’re making quite specific claims. As it’s quite difficult to manage people if their job description says “perform specific functions designed to prevent the predictable and inevitable ills that will result from unchecked human selfishness” I’ve thus got some questions.
So, questions, questions, Counselor:
1. which human-caused ills are you talking about and who meant them to be prevented?
2. Which are the predictable and inevitable ills that will result from unchecked human selfishness?
3. Why are government officials supposed to be immune from these forces?
4. Are there government agencies which do not perform specific functions designed to prevent the predictable and inevitable ills that will result from unchecked human selfishness?
4. You say it’s not properly managed. Is it properly manageable, and if so, how do you know? I mean, I can express in English a sentence like “Your job is two find two two-digit integers, which, when multiplied, turn into a butterfly” and someone can even understand that, but it can’t be done and it’s pointless to consider it.
5. I think–now, I’m not sure, that Golden Retriever’n'Watermelon are my favorite flavor, but Jack Russell&Jack’n'Coke is a close second. What’s your favorite flavor of SHRPM?
Oy, this is the mess that happens when you take issue with sweeping generalizations. Consider me to have learned my lesson. Until the next time I make a sweeping generalization.
Before I answer your six questions (you have two numbers four, for a total of six), I first want to understand why you say I copped out. My statement can be summarized as this: liberals like me tend to think our government exists to prevent one person’s pursuit of happiness trampling another’s, especially by preventing institutionalization of the trampling; the ideal end result of this purpose is a more equalized playing field; and oh by the way, we flunk at this task a lot of the time. I’m not sure how that’s a cop out from my previous statements. Please clarify so I can understand the nature of my flogging.
Now to answers.
1. This is really two questions, neither of which can have a brief answer. Which are the ills, and who meant them to be prevented? 1.a – Humans interfere with other humans both intentionally and unintentionally; some interference can actually be good, but we’ll set that aside for now. If we take all the nearly infinite ways human activity can directly cause a negative effect for another human – from murder to dumping trash in my water supply to accidentally letting your dog out of your yard to crap on my lawn – that’s our starting pool. If it’s an ill, and it is ultimately caused by humans, it’s in the pool. Now, in my world view, our government should be taking some of the bigger ones out of the pool, and setting up systemic methods for curing them. E.g., human-caused ill: I have no self-determination; gov’t cure: let’s make a republic! Woot! Human-caused ill: I can’t enjoy my back yard ever since that cow-poop-burning plant went up next door; gov’t cure: zoning FTW! I don’t expect a gov’t to cure all human-caused ills, but let’s at least take care of the worst ones, like repression, murder, slavery, and people who talk in the theater. 1.b – Ah, tricky. The wishy-washy-but-still-true answer is: society. The constitutional delegates in 1787 did some work toward that end, as ratified by a majority of society. Hypothetically, every time Congress institutes some new piece of legislation to eradicate one of these ills, it does so as a reflection of society’s evolving standards. Without getting into a discussion about idealism vs. the rank offal that is our actual factual system, this is what I meant. We, society, get together in a figurative sense and decide that the harm from X to an individual’s life, liberty, and that other thing, outweighs the good of letting the perpetrator of X continue doing X.
2. Depends on the topic. Let’s take personal property for example. Without systemic checks of any sort, predictably and inevitably someone stronger will take personal property away from someone weaker. (An anarchist might even define personal property as simply that over which one has the ability to maintain possession, but I’m not trying to delve into philosophy here. Honest!) This is a very simple example, but gets the point across. Humans are selfish. Maybe not everyone would steal in the absence of any preventative systems, but many would. The ill in the example is no longer having your spiffy iPod; it’s human-caused because some douche nozzle took it from you; it’s predictable and inevitable because that’s what a very large percentage of humanity would do if not stopped. So, we make a law against stealing, we set up a police force, etc. etc. Yay for government! In the context of Wes’s and Roy’s original discussion above, pick a topic that falls into one of the categories of life, liberty, property, or pursuit of happiness, and we can probably identify a few ways that fundamental human selfishness can impinge said category.
3. Uhm, they aren’t. Yay for checks and balances in our wonderful three-branch government! Of course they’re not immune, and that’s why we should have proper systems to protect against the predictable and inevitable ills that would result from the unchecked human selfishness of selfish human government officials. One way of doing this is by placing other selfish human government officials at odds with the first batch. We actually have huge systemic resources with which to fight that sort of thing. If only we could actually stop watching Judge Judy long enough to make sure they’re in good working order. (A free press would be really powerful for that, for instance; too bad most people never noticed the transition from free press to lazy, corporate-owned, poorly educated press.)
4. I’m sure there are. I’d be happy to discuss such things, if you bring an example to the table. But before you do, don’t make the mistake of thinking that my above position was meant as the full extent of what I believe our government is supposed to do. I mean, with further thought, it may actually be the full definition, but I’m not sure. I haven’t really worked that all the way through. My statement was a response to the specific disagreement between Wes and Roy. Again, my point was mainly that liberals like me don’t think government should give us SHRPM, but that it should prevent the institutionalization of categorical advantages that some people have over others in the pursuit of SHRPM. Ben Franklin wrote that the Constitution only guarantees the right to pursue happiness. “You have to catch it yourself.” Yeah, I’m down with that.
4 (redux). Hm, I said “administered,” not “managed,” which somehow has a different connotation in my mind. I’m not sure the difference matters, but I’m preserving the error for appeal if it later seems to matter. And again, this is a compound question in two parts, so I’ll go in order. 4.a – Properly manageable? I’m not even sure anymore. At one time, yes, absolutely. It gets more difficult as (1) population grows, and (2) technology advances. When the population is around 1 million, and your tech level is muskets, horse carts, and kerosene lanterns, the problems society creates for itself are both simpler and simpler to solve. Currently, I think it may be possible. But if both population and tech continue traveling the asymptote, eventually both will make governance of the whole too unwieldy without breaking us down into smaller societies. That’s one reason I don’t believe we’ll ever have a single planetary government. I don’t know the critical mass, but at current tech levels, 7 billion is definitely above the line. Is this an argument against federalism? Hm. Probably not yet, but maybe some day. 4.b – how do you know? There are measurable indicators for a lot of human-caused ills. Water pollution: just test the water. Identity theft: count the number of victims. If you set up a gov’t agency to address one of these things, you can just look at the stats; if good indicators go up and bad indicators go down, then the agency is probably doing its job at least nominally “properly.” But don’t think of it as a binary state; more of a gradient. When I say, “if it’s properly administered,” I don’t mean to imply that either it is or it isn’t, yes/no, black/white. If those good indicators go up, then the agency (or other gov’t pseudopod) is doing its thing properly, but that doesn’t mean it’s acting without corruption or inefficiency. I guess for me the question of whether you know comes down to an analysis of whether the targeted ill has been substantially ameliorated as compared to the absence of the gov’t pseudopod that has been set on the task. By and large, this is a measurable thing.
5. Green eggs and gubment cheese, of course.
Only responding here to the copping out charge:
Not really flogging you for that yet. I haven’t even read the rest of your post, but it just seems unfair to cloak argument with a get-out-of-jail free card:
““I, and most liberals, simply believe the former, which would, if properly administered (which is isn’t) result in a more equalized opportunity for the individual to go out and wrangle his own SHRPM.”
This sets up a lovely “you can’t argue with me” scenario because one party here, Wes, I think would love to be talking about how institutions exist purely for the sake of power. You’d love to be talking about how government exists to prevent human-caused ills from becoming systemic. Wes’s scenario is also a “Y.C.A.W.M.” scenario. So Wes can point out lots of examples of ‘this is a case of power for power’s sake, so is this, so is this’ and you get to point out ‘oops! Not properly administered. And neither was that one. This too–not properly administered.’
Meantime, it seems to me like you’re utterly missing each other. Those are unrelated conversations because they occur in different ontological spaces.
Having read your piece: Nice fantasy. I withdraw from argument because (1) your position is unassailable due to vagueness and generalization of Krugmanesque heights and (2) there is a differing first principle which is that you think at one time, possibly even at this time, a central system was able to or now may be able to do a ‘proper’ job of managing and mitigating human-caused ills.
To me, #1 is obviously untouchable and a lousy game to play; #2 is demonstrably false and even crazy pants.Well, of course it turns on the definition of ‘proper’: see reason for withdrawal #1.
Just responding to the perceived cop-out. I was not clear. Improper administration, as I meant it, typically results in a failure to accomplish the intended goal. So what I was saying is that government agencies SHOULD (note: not that they necessarily ARE) be aimed at — for lack of a better phrase — leveling the playing field, or protecting us from abusive selfishness, or whatever. I can refine the phrase later. My point was to set this against Wes’s perception that liberals believe agencies should be aimed at giving us things to make us happy. So in that context, an improperly administered agency just fucks up that task. In light of that dichotomy, if Wes wanted to point out that the Department of Redundancy Department or the Department of Silly Walks, etc., exists for the perpetuation of power, it would actually have no bearing on the debate.
The debate was about what purpose liberals believe underlies government. Wes’s premise was that we think it’s there to give us SHRPM (i.e., that us bleeding heart liberals just want government to redistribute wealth and chuck hand-outs and entitlements at people like we’re shooting those t-shirt guns at concerts). My premise was that we think gov’t is there to prevent some bad things from happening and to fill pot-holes. Whether an agency as implemented is in the practice of regulating purely with the motivation of continuing its own funding and authority proves neither of these positions.
Now addressing your last post.
It wasn’t really an argument and was never meant to be. I feel like you’re still missing the point because you’re ignoring context and just taking issue with the fact that unlike you I don’t think all government agencies are bad. Therefore your withdrawal from a field of battle that never really existed confuses me.
Again, the context: Roy wrote an article because he’s upset that Obama didn’t deliver on his promises. (”I’m shocked – shocked! – to find there’s gambling going on here.” – “Your winnings, sir.” – “Oh, thank you. Now everyone out!”) His disillusionment rambled into some of our other national problems, like “criminals on Wall Street” and oil companies, and so on. Now go re-read the second paragraph of Wes’s original post above.
Everything else that I wrote was more or less in response to that.
Of course it’s a fantasy! I was talking about what I believe government in this country SHOULD be trying to do, based on the goals we’ve set for ourselves since the Constitutional Convention of 1787. I recognize that even in the best of circumstances, it would only accomplish fraction of things it tries to do. Your problem is that you took me to be saying that our current incarnations of agencies ARE trying to meet these ideals. Well, fuck no. Jesus Christ on a crutch with a swollen nut, I’m naive but I’m not THAT naive.
The point of the discussion was a political ideal. I want my government to be filling pot-holes, hosing down my house when it catches fire, keeping companies from dumping carcinogens in my water supply, and generally making sure that profit- or ideals-driven associations don’t interfere with my ability to pursue happiness in their rush to get what they crave. I do not, as Wes implied, want my government to keep me fed and bathed and warm and happy.
This is my notion of government, informed in part by the candy-coated version of our founding that they taught me as a kid, and informed in part by the actual writings of the smart guys who literally put us on the map.
The fact that my government has been failing miserably at achieving what I want of it since before I was born has no bearing on that, other than to occasionally upset me in a way similar to how Roy felt when he posted his Midsummer emotional breakdown.
Now you withdraw because you feel that either my ideals are (1) too vague to argue against, or (2) crazy pants.
To believe #1 you are either insultingly patronizing, or you just missed the point. You’ve never seemed patronizing to me, so I assume the latter. I was, in fact, fairly specific; as specific as possible in a limited space. Everything I said about preventing human-caused ills is pretty easy to discuss in specific terms, but there are so many of them to discuss that it’s hard to have an arch-topical conversation. Pick one: water quality, identity theft, predatory lending, whatever. I’ll identify for you the part of it that is the inevitable result of unchecked human selfishness, then tell you a suggestion for how I think gov’t can ameliorate the effect. It won’t be perfect; it won’t solve the problem entirely; it’ll just be a start, a workable beginning; it won’t be vague to Krugmanesque heights. My position isn’t unassailable for vagueness; it’s unassailable because it’s merely an expression of my ideals. There’s nothing to argue, no facts to dispute. The only appropriate counterpoint is to explain your vision of government, and perhaps to argue that your suggestion is better.
And as for #2, well, fine I wear the crazy pants in this relationship. But here you actually are patronizing me. You sit there with your smug libertarian cynicism calling me crazy for believing that a central system could possibly mitigate human-caused ills systemically. It’s really easy to stand outside the mud pit and criticize all approaches with a one size fits all attitude that all human governments are always flawed and useless. Can’t get too dirty that way. Basically all I can recall ever having seen from you is negation. You point out how both political parties offer us the same idiot charmers, and every action taken by any political group or gov’t limb is flawed. Good job — no sarcasm, that’s a very necessary thing. I even appreciate when you poke holes in my statements. But all you do is shoot down.
I know my idealized version of the way things should work is silly to a libertarian, but to borrow from Churchill, it’s a really awful system of government except when compared to all the others.
You and Wes are basically saying Roy and I can never expect to get our version of what gov’t should be; that as a practical reality all governments only ever exist to feed their own power. The logical extension of that view is that government should not exist. Have fun living in Thunderdome. I hold differently.
Government is a collective contract amongst all of us. Without it, everyone gets to do what they want, regardless of the effect on others’ pursuits of happiness. We all agree that murder puts a crimp in one’s ability to pursue happiness, right? So we agree to some terms, set some rules, and then to enforce these, we create a governmental body. Where you and I differ, I predict, is simply the extent to which we need these systems. You seem to think that anything beyond basic sewage, fire, and police services inevitably turns into the Emperor Palpatine sitting a throne on the Death Star, whereas I think we should have a few more agencies than that.