Proposals for a Nation gone off--Conclusion

 The Individual

From the foreign let us finish with a return to the individual and a reminder that the house swept clean does not constitute genuine reform.  All true reform is a circumcision of the heart.  None of the attractive proposals that came before will be made real without a thorough change in the individual write large, in the national individual.  None of what may be wicked or worthless in what came before (if any such) will be avoided without free and self-directed individuals.

There is no better time to remind ourselves of the “Parable of the Owl” preserved for us in that book of ‘Abd-ar-Rahmân Abû Zayd ibn Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldûn, the most beautiful soul in Mohammeddom:   The world is a garden the fence of which is the dynasty.  The dynasty is an authority through which life is given to proper behavior.  Proper behavior is a policy directed by the ruler.  The ruler is an institution supported by the soldiers.  The soldiers are helpers who are maintained by money.  Money is sustenance brought together by the subjects.  The subjects are servants protected by justice.  Justice is something familiar and through it the world persists.  The world is a garden . . . 

The fulcrum of any contemporary rendition of this circle would have the world start and end and find its persistence and meaning through the individual, his effort and his ends.  That is where the garden lies today.

An honest politics, however, would prompt us to note that our reformed house is no paradise or even common-garden.  Rather we seek a politics of such subtlety, surpassing mildness and calm that the very day after this program be enacted not one person will be able to discern a single difference from the day before or any other day in recent memory -- and this despite the fact that we call these days, our days, bad, tawdry, servile and worthless.  Shallow and doomed.  From one day to the next our politics would change nothing.  Yet, despite its start in the exact same, in the workings of its slow repercussions the relation of government to individual will be radically transformed.  Our proposals therefore are not what the world should be, they are what the world is, the reality of prices, the reality of conflict, the reality of a government difficult to dislodge without injuring its dependents.  We have merely proposed a set of gambits which allow the individual to interact with that world more honestly and more and more so over time.  Prosperity is prospective. 

To resign ourselves to a fifty year reversal from the last fifty years should not dispirit us.  Finding ourselves at odds with our present should not dispirit us.  Take the long view of our troubles and move “like the sun through the ecliptic.” 

To lay the improvements over the generations should not blind us either to the reality of work.  Life is often painful and to travel to a great good is often to suffer without the benefits of fantasy.  Work is the only God who will never abandon you.  Finding ourselves in the present condition, there is much work to do.  Every improvement in our condition will be a slow improvement and well earned.  Unlike the previous generations, we will have built well and earned the gratitude of a world freer and happier than this one.

Work is the only God who will never abandon us.  There is work everywhere and in all things.  There is work waiting in ourselves.  While we have spoken lavishly in praise of liberty, in coming home to the individual, the seat of liberty, let us acknowledge that the daily reality of life is formed mostly through necessity.  We don’t live in good times and honesty requires the grim honesty of laboring for the better and expecting the worse.

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There is a story well told to children that could profit us all -- that in this universe, one can travel -- at the speed of light, mind you -- for millions of years and never come across another sentient being, one who can think and feel and play and laugh as a human can.  For all intents and purposes, human beings might as well be considered unique -- there is no reasonable approximation to us within voyaging distance.  To be a human being therefore is to be of infinite worth.  Yet, that said, what is the most beautiful thing about economics?  That that's not good enough!  It’s not good enough to be a member of a rare and beautiful species.  It’s not good enough to be rarer that a star. It’s not good enough to be a cosmically unique species because here on Earth there's another one just like you not four feet away.  Your obligation in the context of other rare beings of infinite worth is to be an individual, as much as humans are unique you have a similar opportunity to become wholly your own, to differentiate yourself from every other human, to be as separate and dignified as one star from another.  If the economy is cruel, it is the cruelty of not letting us rest satisfied with being creatures of infinite worth.  And where would we be without that prompting?

As a matter of serviceable rhetoric it should be kept in mind that belief in free markets is an expression of self confidence as much as anything regarding the market itself.  People who hold other views are signaling their concern -- fear of being “left behind,” of being humiliated, exploited etc.  Since modern liberals claim to prize the virtues of hearing the other side only to about face and “seize the moral high-ground” (useful for kicking their opponents in the face and precluding other views), let us be the true liberal and listen to what people are saying in their own language.  Let the "sweet rose of persuasion" guide our public discourse.

Understanding also that it is difficult to respectfully address those who are depriving you of your liberty, let us find some polite argumentation to address directly those who require a federal subsidy to maintain their self regard, those who crave the amniotic graces of the welfare state and those who given the infinite possibilities open to the individual opt instead for the wretched personal power of the ballot box to found and perpetuate their happiness, drowned in a sea of 300 million.  Consider then this experiment: if we established a two-tier citizenship, with some opting for the obligation of paying for the army and enforcing the public safety, and others opting for a full service government as well as paying, themselves, for all the bells and whistles a bureaucrat can dream up -- what do you think would happen?  It’s very likely that the full service government would be in and out of bankruptcy court, that the sorrowful dupes who purchased its bond offerings would get back pennies on the dollar and shortly afterwards this full service government, paid for only by those who received those services, mind you, would quickly dissolve.

The limited government on the other hand would persist.  This thought experiment is not so far distant from the state we have today except that because the full service government relies on the payments of those who do not opt for the welfare state or benefit from it,* it will persist slightly longer than if it were funded exclusively by those who want and use those services.  The welfare state guarantees that 49.9 percent of the population will be alienated from their government because in an electoral system that figure is the point where it no longer pays to provide.  For safety’s sake, its own, it will always try to hold a better balance than 50.1 to 49.9 but there are well known economic realities that will keep it from maintaining a conveniently minimal, demonized and exploited class to pay for a large majority of beneficiaries.

Yes, humanity is only a few generation up from slavery, serfdom and peasant sureties, and it is no coincidence that the welfare state grew in the wake of those happy demises.  Yet, are we to rest content with an unfree world today only one step removed from the unfree world of yesterday?  No, let us be free, to face the world and ourselves as is.  Socialism, as it has revealed itself in its various forms, can only perpetuate itself through the degradation of humanity.  Its root calculus has ever been the welfare of the government and its permanent classes.  It is doomed.  Social security is doomed.  Socialized medicine is doomed.  All of the poisoned programs the federal government has foisted upon the populace are doomed.  We don’t have to be doomed.  Let us think of a future without them.

Work will be the only God to never abandon us even for a moment.  Life can rise to the tolerable, to as good as can be expected, to the “OK.”  Let us cultivate our virtue and fear nothing.  We’ll do OK.