Why Can’t We Solve Problems?
In this world, you’re on your own.
NOTE: Within this text, wherever gender is not key to the explanation, I am using the Elverson ey/em construction of the Spivak Pronouns.
Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and many other modern public figures have sought to popularize the notion that society is not a community but instead a loose amalgam of individuals each seeking only their personal fulfillment. The claim is that societies are merely lone individuals who, if of high enough moral character, will claw, cry and litigate to wrest what they want from the enemy of the bold which is the community. Government is not “we the people” but instead the villain. It is not to be corrected but subverted — “shrunk,” as a famous neocon has said, until it can be “drowned in a bathtub.”
The problem with this claim, of course, is that throughout human history, humans have sought the company of other humans so that through cooperation and mutual support, a better life could be had by all. The philosopher Hume analyzed the state of the individual, isolated from community and concluded that such life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” That is well-stated and memorable; but, of course, it is a description of a fantasy.
Were we to go back to Hume’s time we would find no example of a persistent loose grouping of humans living out their brutish lives eschewing the annoying gifts of community. As far back as 8500 BCE humans were gathering together to domesticate and share among themselves such delicacies as peas, wheat, olives, sheep and goats. Those domesticated varieties were in common use at that time only because of the creative power stoked by human cooperation. Those people had undertaken communal projects to share knowledge and experience in order to breed plants and creatures that would serve their needs. Those experimental farmers were free to focus on the selective breeding of wheat only because others in the community supplied them with alternative food, clothing and companionship. Tribal elders encouraged them after a failed crop and the family group kept hearth and shelter for the welcome rest at day’s end.
There was no Randian hero who brought forth modern wheat and bestowed it god-like upon a grateful people. Generations of human families shared newly-developed skills in order to produce the bounty of materials and foodstuffs available to us today. From families of a half-dozen to bands of dozens to tribes to towns to cities to states, humans have always lived in communities. They have experimented with various economic and political forms in order to organize those communities effectively and they have prospered only because of those complex relationships. Nasty, brutish and short? Of course — had that ever been the case.
The Problem of Greed
Our species evolved from a developmental branch common to the Chimpanzee, Orangutan and Gorilla. Humans differentiated themselves from other hominins around 300,000 years ago and their ancestors were using stone tools and hunting wild animals in organized groups a million years prior to that. There is no evidence at all of large numbers of isolated human or pre-human foragers succeeding entirely on their own. It is only in community with others that we have ever prospered.
Since, in community, humans are formidable, it is in the best interests of the modern elite to assure that community does not infringe upon their privileges. Commoners must work one-by-one in the belief that if they pull themselves up by their own bootstraps without any help from the hated others, they too will be rich and powerful just like their admired masters.
The wealthy and powerful gather the world’s bounty with little effort and lounge by the pool waiting for their deservings, comforted by the fact that these wealth-craving, other-shunning, bootstrap-heaving peasants will remain depleted in safe, angry, pointless exertion. It is for this reason that the primary goal of the Republican Organization is to keep the nation furious, agitated and libertarian because in that mode they are no threat to the status quo.
This world faces a multitude of large problems including the combustion of fossil fuels, the persistence of chronic disease, the burden of excess population, the destruction of ecosystems and species, inadequate power distribution and a paucity of rational discussion. In each of those cases, self-serving individuals are building their personal wealth on the sturdy structure of that problem.
There is little money in curing disease because once cured, the afflicted is no longer a customer. Therefore, businesses profit from turning the fatal disease into the chronic disease as with diabetes, obesity and many forms of cancer. I assure you, no private company is working to cure any of those diseases. Since Reagan greatly restricted patent rights for researchers in the public employ, no public colleges are working on them either.
That, of course, is only one example. Without fossil fuel consumption, dozens of fantastically wealthy people would become merely rich. A reliable power infrastructure would significantly reduce profits and a culture of calm rational discussion would drain ad revenue from Fox News, Google and Facebook. Surely no one wants the wealthy to suffer loss and so these problems must remain. Greed makes them insurmountable.
Monetary Provisioning
In order to get into a problem-solving mode we must cast off the delusions with which we have been besieged. As Nancy Pelosi tells us, the federal government must tax the average person in order to raise enough money to solve problems. So where did those average people get the money that they are providing to the government?
There was a time when I believed as does Ms. Pelosi; but then, I noticed that the government was spending trillions of dollars on endless war. The government was doing exactly the thing that traditional economists said would lead to rampant inflation. It was buying things that blew up, crashed and became embedded in corpses. It was almost literally burning money. It was paying soldiers to mill around for months waiting for the attack that might kill them or might thankfully leave them alive to mill around for several months more. This was money yielding no value and yet inflation remained reasonably stable. What the …
This revelation put the lie to the idea that people had to donate money to an impoverished government so that it could do the people’s business. Instead the government was clearly printing and then spending money in order to line the pockets of wealthy defense suppliers and mercenaries and there were absolutely no undesired consequences (except, of course, for dead people who, not being rich, do not contribute to inflation).
And so we become aware that all U.S. dollars come from the federal government. It does not need your tribute except for the purpose of confirming that one dollar of value will reliably pay one dollar of tax. I recommend L. Randall Wray’s Explanation for the general idea and a visit to your local library or bookstore for the details in Stephanie Kelton’s book The Deficit Myth.
In order to solve our actual problems, we will have to accept that money is merely the method of exchange provided by the federal government and confirmed at its specified value through loans and taxation by that same government. By withholding dollars from the private sector, the government restricts productivity not inflation. With a restricted supply of dollars, every dollar Jeff Bezos makes is a dollar that a poor family cannot have simply because not enough dollars have been made available. It is this artificial restriction that Nancy Pelosi advocates with her policy of PAYGO demonstrating how far Republican memes have penetrated the Democratic Party. For further illumination regarding monetary theory see Is Communism Inevitable.
In short, the siege-trope of austerity is designed to remind all of these isolated individuals that no problem can actually be solved. With the beleaguered whine of “Can you afford to pay for this?” you understand that, alone and isolated as God intended, you cannot. How can the government pay for this when it gets all of its money from you? Problem not solved!
This, of course, is balderdash, planted in people’s heads to assure that all of these profitable problems will remain available for exploitation by capital. The next section requires that you understand this and reject the siege-trope of austerity. Any government that issues a fiat currency must move money into the private economy until that economy nears the limits of its productive capacity. Public debt is not debt. It has nothing to do with debt. It is merely a measure of the amount of monetary freedom the public sector is providing for use in the private sector. Government debt is actually monetary provisioning.
Only in Community
So what if we were to join together in order to resolve common problems? What if the whining, privileged demands of the uber-rich could be set aside for a while and we could return to our roots as communal creatures? In order to do that we must embrace the formalized embodiment of our community so that we may work together and not as impotent rogue actors. That means we must embrace and competently manage government.
The American view that the federal government is pitiful, incompetent and impoverished was initiated most clearly by Ronald Reagan who repeatedly disparaged and dismantled the very government that was successfully and effectively administering the Social Security system, Medicare, the U.S. Postal Service, and routinely boosting satellites and humans into space. This became accepted doctrine and citizens began electing representatives intent upon making Reagan’s misrepresentations factual by repeatedly starving and debilitating essential branches of the people’s government. The U.S. Postal Service has been successfully carrying out its charter while under continuous attack by anti-community representatives for decades. It was not until Louis Dejoy actually began shutting down the physical machinery of the Postal Service that performance began to degrade.
The civil servants of our U.S. government have demonstrated resilience and competence at nearly every task to which they have been assigned and if we, as a community, begin electing officials who are willing to applaud, amplify and adequately fund that competence, we the people can actually begin solving problems. Let us consider just a few examples.
Identity Theft
With the introduction of credit cards, identity theft became a billion dollar industry. Half-baked and clumsy schemes to protect against identity theft became another billion dollar industry. At this point all of the profit points to promoting as much identity theft as possible. How can the individual protect emself from identity theft? How can the individual defeat a massive cartel of thieves and grifters except by employing the services of a corporation offering a restricted service that may be able to help recover what has been lost after the theft has occurred? What other option is available to the isolated libertarian and eir frayed bootstraps?
Well, as discussed above, the federal government has a well established pedigree in the use of technology to address complex problems. The U.S. government issues to U.S. citizens, upon demand, a passport the purpose of which is to identify the bearer as a valid and fully qualified U.S. citizen. What if every U.S. citizen were to be issued a passport and within that passport would be a six digit number updated every 15 seconds that would identify the bearer unambiguously for any legal or commercial transaction? The six digit number would associate that citizen with an absolutely unique cryptographic sequence at a specific time shared by no other. Legislation could require that this unambiguous citizen identity be provided for all appropriate financial and legal transactions. No one is asking for “your papers” but if you want to prove you are not an impostor during a financial transaction, it is now easily done.
Purchase a product from eBay, provide your credit card and also your cryptographic key. No one can know that but you. Your identity is absolutely secured by the Citizen Identity Service maintained by the federal government. A few very rich people who sold identity theft protection may have to find real jobs; but, identity theft itself is exposed as just another capitalist grift.
Intermittent Power
America’s power infrastructure has been largely surrendered to various private companies regulated by various state agencies. It is divided into three isolated networks: East Coast, West Coast and Texas, the efficacy of which has been soundly impeached. By leaving these power distribution architectures to the states and counties, we as a nation have forfeited efficiencies that could be realized with a continent-wide grid. Power generated by solar farms in California while the Sun was still visible could be shunted to moonlit New York. Wind farms with halted turbines due to lack of demand on the East Coast could be provided for a sudden demand in Nevada.
A national project could build energy storage systems across the country using Li-ion and flow batteries as well as new technologies such as Energy Vaults and even newer more efficient schemes such as peak power taps into private storage in electric vehicles and home batteries (permitted through voluntary owner contracts, of course).
We hear that the problem with solar is that it is intermittent and that storage of some kind would be required for dark periods. This ignores the fact that storage is required now for nuclear, hydro and fossil fuel generation as well. The plant produces power during average consumption periods but then must provide additional power for peak periods. It does that using fairly inefficient energy storage schemes like pumping water up into a reservoir during light periods and generating additional energy by running that water through generators during peak periods (about 60% efficient).
We require energy sequestration and exploitation now, we just don’t do it very efficiently. Solar and wind do not introduce new problems. They drive us, as a community, to amplify and improve our existing solutions to our existing problems.
The stockholders in massive, inefficient and easily hacked existing power plants may lose some dividends, but a centrally administered power infrastructure capable of fully exploiting the modern distributed power generation capacity of the entire continent, will greatly reduce power outages and make a permanent place for green energy for all.
Spotty Access to Communication
Across the U.S. there are still areas that lack access to the cell network and to the Internet because there is no profit in providing remote citizens with these services. The world currently supports an Internet, a wired telephone network and a cell phone network that feeds into that wired telephone network. They are each, in their own way, answering the same question, “How do I exchange information with other people?” Only one communication network is needed but we have three because different rich people make money on each of them.
Imagine a world with one network. The telephone, the wifi network and the Internet all feed into one common network with a handful of common access methods. We the people, through our federal government, establish this one network. It may be a regulated monopoly like AT&T was back in the day or it could be a network supported directly by the federal government with its large array of public universities, institutes and other cooperating server facilities.
In the U.S., the Internet would become the common shared network. Cell phones would communicate directly to the Internet via VoIP and the federal network would convert that to telephone protocols for transmission to countries that still use the antiquated telephone system. A network of geosynchronous satellites would provide access to this common network for remote towns and for mobile hot spots such as aircraft and buses.
With the U.S. Internet provided as a common wealth for all citizens, it would be possible to institute common rules of decorum for all those who use the Internet. For instance a modernized fairness doctrine could be imposed on purported “news programs” and for those programs, like Fox News, that claim to be only entertainment, they could be required to post a chevron indicating that the programing, while appearing to be news, does not conform to actual journalistic norms.
NPR, PBS and CSPAN could be funded from non-political and non-corporate sources through a specific allocation of government funds controlled by a commission of public media workers and an annually selected random group of senators and representatives. Some years would be good and some would be bad but overall, the public media workers would hold sway and introduce essential innovation due to the natural human desire to discover and expose.
Conclusion
Many of our common problems are manufactured. We suffer them because wealthy sociopaths are profiting from them. “Sociopaths?” the regressive might ask. Yes, sociopaths. “But, Mr. Taylor, you aren’t a licensed psychologist!” To this I must reply with a response that should be obvious. If you cannot distinguish a sociopath when you encounter one then you are destined to be an exploited dupe for the rest of your life.
Yes, a psychologist can provide scholarly nuance regarding sociopathy that I cannot; but, every successful human being has prospered largely because ey has succeeded in recognizing the sociopath and resisting eir attempts at exploitation. I do not have to be licensed to recognize a sociopath. Nor do you.
The sociopath is alone. The sociopath does not recognize community because all others are merely objects to be manipulated. The vast majority of Republican operatives and a fair number of Democratic operatives are sociopaths. The system selects for sociopaths and until we fix the system, we need to accept that.
One way to begin that repair is by recognizing our community bonds. We must gather together and protest injustice. We must talk to friends and opponents about the problems that we can only solve when we solve them as a community. We must renew our ancient devotion to the power of community. Together and only together can we resolve our common problems by demanding that we the people be an advocate for the people and not for the wealthy elite.
Julian S. Taylor is the author of Famine in the Bullpen a book about bringing innovation back to software engineering.
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