i am a government addict.

hi.

my name is joe drymala, and i am a government addict. in fact, i've used government probably hundreds of times today already. i can't stop. i don't know if i'll ever stop.

it's just so much easier not to stop.

i guess you could say i was born addicted. it happened in a state hospital, funded and sustained by government, delivered by doctors and nurses each licensed and certified by the government without my knowledge or consent. government regulated and approved the medical equipment used to assist my birth and monitor my health and development even before i left my mother's womb.

i was driven home, strapped into a car seat mandated and approved by government, in an automobile built according to government specifications, in an auto factory that not only relied on government subsidies but benefitted from the destruction of foreign competitors by the U.S. army in world war two. i drove home on a government road. A. GOVERNMENT. ROAD. paid for by government, monitored by government traffic lights and stop signs and all manner of other governmental regulatory constraining my father's ability to operate his vehicle like a respectable member of a free society.

government taught me to read and write and add and subtract and reason and speak in front of a crowd and understand musical notation. i quite literally don't know who i am without it. every building i inhabit has been built according to government specification, every job i do pays me according to minimum amounts set by government and is monitored by government for safety, and if i have a grievance, government judges are there for me to complain to, in courthouses built by government. without government, i am powerless.

every bite of food i eat and drop of liquid i drink in this country, indeed, even the air i breathe, is monitored and regulated by government. the thought of it makes me sick to my government-insured stomach.

i dream of kicking the habit once and for all. it's just a dream. but i dream it anyway.

i long for a world in which i can eat food free of government inspection and regulation, a world where i can build and drive my own vehicle at whatever speed i wish fueled by whatever energy source i can burn. a world where i can conduct business without government interference, relying not on the justice system to insure fair dealings, but instead on whatever weapon i have handy.

i long for a world in which minorities of all kinds, be they racial, sexual, religious, political, or otherwise, will finally be at the mercy of the brute force of whatever majority they find themselves on the wrong end of.

i long to raise my children in a world where they never see the inside of a government school, where if they go to school at all, it will be with children not from all walks of life, but children of those who have the means to pay for it. i long to fight my own fires, police my own neighborhood, construct my own roads, conduct my own scientific research, build my own hospital, make my own medicine, deliver my own baby and purify my own air.

some would call this crazy. i call it freedom.

i am an addict. but i long to be free.

self-interest for me and not for thee

it's old hat to point out the prisoner's dilemma of capitalism: that cooperation yields much better outcomes for everyone than a hobbesian war of pure self interest, "all against all".

i've been thinking recently, though, about another paradox that dogmatic capitalists do not address: namely, that the only way to maintain a "pure" capitalist society is for the majority of people to deny their self-interest.

in theory this paradox should never take place; econ 101 says that everyone, maximizing his or her rational self-interest, will lead to the best possible economic outcome for the whole. in practice, lenin and marx were correct in their assumption that unfettered capitalism leads to monopoly and imperialism; i.e., concentration of wealth and power in the hands of just a few actors. (and i suppose this is where i'm obligated to say that they weren't correct about everything, so consider this my offical disclaimer of marxism-leninism.)

in other words, history makes it quite clear that without a strong regulatory regime, powerful entities will dominate the marketplace and squeeze out competitors through means legal and extra-legal.

however, in order to maintain this "pure" capitalist state, free of regulation, everyone else in the marketplace ("the 99%", if you will) must be persuaded not to join together to form labor unions or political parties (or wage full-scale revolutions) to redistribute wealth or enforce regulations on the 1%, even if they'd be much better off doing so.

and here we have the paradox: the 1% justify their obscene wealth and power with a philosophy of self-interest, but ask the 99% to deny their self-interest out of fealty to the Great God Capitalism.

you don't need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows, and you don't need a mathemetician to tell you that this equation is unsustainable.

it seems, though, that in the philosophy of free-market capitalism, some kinds of self-interest are acceptable and some are not. the self-interest of the Koch Brothers is capitalism, but the self-interest of the janitor who votes for a higher minimum wage is socialism.

this applies to groups also, it seems; a coalition of businesses like the Chamber of Commerce promotes capitalism, but a coalition of garbage collectors promotes socialism.

i wonder what the distinction could be.