Rights and Equality and Pigs and Shell Money

politics is messy

My pal the Zman has responded to Michael Anton and his “natural rights” diatribe. Anton knows that natural rights are objectively true. But the Zman is a neo-Darwinian.

What drives the whole of the universe is fitness and fitness beats truth.

I would rather say that what works works. And it might work for the wrong reasons.

For instance, it may be that the success of the United States is that it was founded by men that believed in the ideas of natural rights. But its success over a couple of centuries may very well be due to something else about which we have no idea.

That is probably true of economics too. We have this notion of the market and prices and we have built a whole mound of ideas upon it. (Keynesians, of course, have built a mound upon the idea of the beneficence of government spending). But I dare say that in another century men will look back on the economics of today rather as we post-relativity, post-quantum mechanics people look back upon the science of Newton.

And imagine what they will say about the political system of what our Democratic friends call “our democracy.”

I am having an interesting time reading a lefty history of everything, The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Its conceit is that it is seeing behind the curtain of the standard narrative of hunter-gatherers followed by agricultural and feudal age followed by industrial and democratic age. Graeber and Wengrow like to look at Native American tribes and see them as more advanced and less hierarchical that the Europe of the time. They like to look at some tribe and see an ideal egalitarian society. They like to discover societies in which women had the same rights as men.

They look at the “mega-sites” of pre-agriculture in Ukraine and notice that these cities had no triumphal monarchical or temple architecture and that they seemed to have an egalitarian politics. They look at early mid-East societies and see no imperial hierarchy.

But then they notice the emergence of a warrior culture in the hills north of the plains of Mesopotamia and the sudden emergence of weapons in those communities.

Hmm. You think that might be the emergence of “marcher lords” protecting the fruitful plains from the raiding of the jolly old chaps living in perfect equality on the Asian steppe?

Suppose the great kings and empires of Mesopotamia emerged because when you have heaps of grain lying around you find that you need to defend it from robbers, foreign and domestic.

What is emerging for me from the writing of Graeber and Wengrow is that they are searching for the Great White Whale of Equality, rather in the same way that Rousseau and others created a Grand Narrative that began in a propertyless Eden.

But their religious fervor makes me think that the pursuit of equality results in the opposite. The whole point of Marxism and socialism is that we can make humans equal, and bring heaven on Earth thereby.

But I would say that the record of the last century is that pursuit of equality leads to the establishment of monstrous inequality: as in the Soviet Union and Maoist China. Maybe that was an accident. Or maybe we discovered a universal rule.

I go further. I think that making economic guarantees to people living in today’s democracies is probably a mistake. I don’t think that anyone should believe that they can force someone else to provide them with income. And if you live in some protected corporate or government lifetime job, you are utterly unprepared for a downturn.

My experience of this was working at the same company for 28 years. Towards the end I was consumed by the fact that I had no idea what I would be worth if I lost my job and had to look for another one.

In the end, I got laid off and got another job; but I had to take a pay cut. For me, it was a relief to know what my skills were worth. But many people feel betrayed if they lose their job and can’t get another job with the same or better pay. And it’s when a company is struggling in a downturn that its workers strike for justice and against pay cuts.

The way of politics is that you vote for the guy that offers you benefits and payoffs, just as in the olden time you wanted a Big Man that distributed pigs and shell money.

But how does the politician come by that money, and how does the Big Man come by those pigs? However he does it, we all agree that if he fails to deliver he is outta here.