It has been said that one of the purposes of government is to protect ourselves from each other. From fellow citizens, that is, and more than just brutish criminality. There are subtleties here that stand in the shadows behind criminal and civil law. The very meaning of freedom is at stake.
Like untold millions I assumed freedom simply meant the ability to travel, speak and associate with whom I please without government interference. But that is just the dust jacket of the book. The inner chapters have a particular inflection, building upon the superficial blurbs on the dust jacket. In this sense freedom includes the unfettered ability, i.e. the bigger freedom, for individuals and companies to separate the citizenry from their wealth either in ways yet to be banned or by good old fashioned fraud and theft.
The term “unfettered ability” includes the staging by the government to clear the regulatory path for the extraction of wealth from the public. This occurs through deregulation of business practices that were meant to protect the public from unfair leverage, theft or legally grey activity. Businesses would prefer customers be lined up with credit card in hand like pigs to slaughter for efficient processing. After all, don’t spreadsheet toting MBA-in-finance views on efficiency trump our desires for a good and decent life? Isn’t economic efficiency the apex of capitalistic society? Shouldn’t we be grateful that wealth funnels to the right people? After all, they know best. Just ask them.
Another aspect of deregulation is the removal of constraints on the recovery of natural resources and any lasting, though necessary, environmental insult that may result. The word recovery is interesting because it helps to normalize the private extraction and ownership of Earth’s non-renewable resources. The word recovery sounds almost heroic or herculean in describing the grasping of someone’s missing property that has been heretofore inaccessible.
While fabulous wealth is waiting below earth’s surface for the industrious to pull out and be rewarded for their risk and efforts, the other issue is how to balance the reward to miners and drillers with the inevitable loss of wilderness and exhaustion of resources. The global economy is heavily reliant on mineral resources- BTW petroleum is a mineral- that props up the house of cards supporting our modern lives. Our economies are dependent on stacks of apex technologies built upon apex technologies. Apex technologies that required a goodly bit of finesse to achieve may have weak points built in that were unavoidable.
A weak point may be a single raw material supplier or the price of a scarce specialty material on the international market. What was previously a trade secret for a manufacturer may have been superseded by the granting of a patent to another company who was unaware of the previous secret use but with patent in hand is in no mood to forge a sweetheart agreement. The collapse of an apex technology that supports other apex technologies can bring subsequent technologies into hard times.
How is it that millions of voters can justify to themselves their pandering and submissive behavior towards Trump. Witness the slavish honoring of Trump with their apparel and rote parroting of his insane rhetorical yammering. This is not unique in history but is telling of the effectiveness of Australian Rupert Murdoch’s media empire outside his own country.
Given the submissive behavior expected in the prevalent Christian religion towards the Holy Trinity, are MAGA people predisposed to bowing in prostration before their orange crusader? There appears to be more devotional thinking than analytical thinking among the MAGA hordes. The MAGA love for Trump grossly resembles religious devotion. It’s just a theory. If it dissatisfies the reader, come up with your own.
Post Script
An interesting contradiction is with MAGA American support of Zionism. American Zionists defend the reclamation of the Levant by Jewish Zionists, but seem unwilling to validate similar action by Native Americans. Indians do not figure in Christian eschatology in the manner Israel does. If Indians were said to have a role in the second-coming of Christ, I’m sure the situation around an Indian homeland would be quite different.
