#95: The Scorpion

April 19, 2011

There is a wonderfully instructive parable, whose origin I can’t remember. I’ll just call it “The Parable of the Turtle and the Scorpion.”

A traveling scorpion who cannot swim comes to river that bars his progress. He sees a turtle lounging by the river bank and addresses him thus: “Turtle, I cannot swim but need to cross this river to be on my way. Will you give me a ride across on your back?” The turtle responds affably, “Why scorpion, I would be happy to give you ride across under other circumstances, but, as you are a scorpion, I will not. After all, once you were on my back, you would sting me and we would both drown.” To which the scorpion replied: “But turtle, listen to yourself. You just said we would BOTH drown, which is quite correct. Would I do something that would bring about my own death?That would be irrational.” The turtle considered this and conceding the scorpion’s point, invited him onto his back for a ride across the water. Halfway across the river, the scorpion stung the turtle and they both proceeded to drown. As he was sinking, the turtle gasped to the scorpion, “Why did you do this? Now you will drown as well as I. It’s not rational.” To which the scorpion replied with his last breath: “I couldn’t help it. It’s my NATURE.”

Yes, Nature trumps Reason. The societal impulse towards Socialism within a democracy is very much like the scorpion’s impulse to sting. Just like the scorpion, Democracy can’t help it, it is its NATURE.

Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate, one of my professors assigned us a text entitled “Politics: Who Gets What, When, and How.” The text was by one Harold Lasswell, and the title deservedly came to capture in simple terms the meaning of “politics.” In short, politics is about the distribution of wealth. Capitalism is one kind of political system, Socialism is another. The former, in its most extreme and unregulated form, allows for the “invisible hand” of competition to determine in whose hands the wealth accumulates; the latter determines where the wealth goes by forcibly re-distributing the wealth already in existence. Another, perhaps more accurate, expression for “re-distribution” is “confiscation.” We might also call this the “Capone” political system, in honor of Al Capone, who was known for his generosity among the people of the neighborhoods who were grateful for his largesse.

The most primitive political system is that of the “strongman” or tyrant. Even this system, however, is not without its internal complications. No strongman beyond perhaps the chief of a small tribe is strong enough all by himself to just take everything he wants by his own force of arms. A strongman needs power in order to acquire and retain wealth. An army is a strongman’s instrument for the gaining and maintaining of power. Even Achilles needed his army in the storming of Troy. But gaining and keeping an army already requires either wealth or at least a promise of wealth. And, once wealth is acquired, the question immediately arises as to the best way for the tyrant to distribute that wealth, not only among his army, but also among his unhappy wealth producers, the peasants or slaves. In other words, the instrument of power must be kept happy.

Once people leave tyranny behind, the question of distribution becomes more complicated, but the basic one still remains: how is the instrument of power to be kept happy?

Within democracies, the instrument of power is the vote of the enfranchised population. The various candidates for power vie with one another for the approval of the electorate. Regardless of the original design of the democracy, the candidates will inevitable attempt to bribe the electorate. Unlike the tyrant, the democratic candidates for power have an automatic wealth resource, namely the government’s ability to tax the very population being bribed. Thus, the candidates inevitably promise more and more of the public purse to the population. Some people have argued that the stupidity of an electorate falling for this lies in its not seeing that it is being bribed with its own money, but this is not where the stupidity lies. The portion of the population being bribed is NOT the same as the portion earning the money being taxed – we must distinguish the parasite from the host. No, the stupidity lies in not seeing that this strategy inevitably kills the host, in which case no one does well, not even the parasite.

It is because of the mechanical spending impulse that democracies inevitably and inexorably tend in the direction of socialism. Marx was right, capitalism does carry within itself the seeds of its own destruction, but he was not right in why this should be the case. Socialism is not inherent in the economics of capitalism, it is inherent in the machinery of democracy. The mechanism that moves every democracy towards socialism is called, in the U.S.A., by the piquant term “pork.” The term “pork” derives from the phrase “pork barrel politics,” which was apparently derived from an ante-bellum practice of giving slaves a barrel of salted pork as a reward, leaving it to them to divide it among themselves.

Pork is government money that is allocated by congress to specific constituencies for local benefits. When, for example, a particular congressman brings federal money home for the construction of, say, a new airport, that’s pork. “Pork” has generally been distinguished from what are called “entitlements,” but the only differences between the two are these: pork is usually a limited grant for a specific purpose and pork is usually aimed at a congressman’s particular geographic constituency; entitlements are usually unlimited and are aimed at specific demographic populations. Thus, Medicare is an ongoing cost and is aimed at the poor and the elderly. I exclude Social Security from these two categories because, arguably, it has rather the character of an insurance plan, since the beneficiaries paid into it all their working lives. I will therefore include only the unpaid entitlements under the generic term “pork” (e.g. welfare, the department of education, the E.P.A., medicare, etc.).

There’s been a lot of discussion in recent years about the evils of pork, but it hasn’t been identified yet as the single most important evil lurking in the clockworks. But that is what it is.

The problem with pork doesn’t lie in the idea of federal money being used for local projects and it doesn’t even lie in the idea of the federal funding of unpaid-for benefits to various groups. The real problem with pork is that the barrel it comes in is elastic.

If there were a finite amount of pork to be distributed among the people, as there was a finite amount of salted pork in the barrel given to the slaves, then there would be no current fiscal crisis. The crisis is the result of the barrel having been increased in size during each of the preceding 60 years. How does one increase the size of a pork barrel? Simply by borrowing the extra pork to be distributed, the barrel adjusts accordingly.

The U.S. now has a fiscal crisis brought on by regular increases in pork, in entitlements, in foreign aid, and in military ventures. Everyone, however, admits that the most devastating costs in this pie are the combined ones of pork and entitlements. These costs, however, must be seen as inevitable if two factors converge: 1) one man-one vote democracy, on the one hand, and 2) no automatic mechanical spending governor in place. Without the latter, the former is an inexorable spending force that works without a consciousness or plan guiding it, like the eating of a shark. Without a mechanism that stops spending at a pre-defined point, politicians will spend the nation to death.

Before the nation actually declares bankruptcy, however, there is a prior stage.

Since the current political climate in the U.S. includes both a Left and a Right, this implies that at least one half of congress does not view the consequences of overspending to be a bad thing. Why is this? It is because the objective of the Left, of Socialism, is precisely the re-distribution of citizen wealth from those who have it to those who do not. As Rahm Emanuel has famously said of the first fiscal crisis over two years ago, it was too good a crisis to waste.

A good fiscal crisis has its uses when one is a Socialist. It is in the moment of crisis that envy and class hatred can be mobilized so as to confiscate the wealth of the better off in the society. In the most extreme cases, we find actions like that of Hugo Chavez, who has nationalized industries and confiscated private companies and land. Similarly, Putin’s Russia allowed for the confiscation of its largest oil company and jailing of its owner. In the U.S.A., Obama’s effort is to gain popular support for increasingly squeezing America’s rich, who already pay over 40% of government revenue.

Obama’s rationale for this confiscation of private wealth is the threat posed by the gigantic national debt, of which he has been one of the most significant architects. First he created the debt, and now he uses the debt as the pretext for squeezing the rich. But would he actually use the additional income he squeezes from the rich to reduce the debt? Arguably he wouldn’t even try, he’d just pass it on to the union bosses who help to fund his campaigns. But, in fact, he couldn’t, since even if he confiscated the entire holdings of the wealthy of the country, that would not even scratch the surface of the debt. Thus, the objective can’t be fixing the debt. In fact, Obama will do all he can to perpetuate the fiscal crisis for as long as he can, while all the time blaming the wealthy.

His actual objective is simply to re-distribute wealth. And for this he has more than just an ideological motive, for by redistributing the wealth, he thereby increases the number of stake-holders in his re-distribution scheme. Increasing the number on welfare, increasing the number working for the government, increasing the number on Medicare and Medicaid is not only ideologically sound, but it increases the voting power-base of the Democratic (read “Socialist”) party in the U.S.A. Thus, Obama, like Tom Lehrer’s “Old Dope Peddler,” seeks to “do well by doing good.”

Democracy, even in the form of a republic, thus contains a self-destructive mechanism. The mechanism is simply that of being internally driven to over-spend the system’s productive capacity. We know that this is the case now by observing, first, the failed communist experiment of the U.S.S.R., and second the failing socialist experiments in Europe, beginning with Greece. It is sad to note that even the most idealistic socialist experiments, the kibbutzim of Israel have given way one by one to more successful capitalistic organizations.

I was in Eastern Europe back in the 1960s before the fall of the U.S.S.R. while Yugoslavia still existed and Czechoslovakia and Hungary were still under Soviet control. I was in East Berlin before the wall fell. These places could have told anyone that Communism does not bring happiness. They were without exception gray, gray, and more gray. There were no good on the shelves of stores, the people looked gray-skinned and unhealthy, and no one smiled.

And if we want to look at the face of Social Democracy as practiced in, for example, France, just watch the newsreels of French “youth” exercising its democratic rights on store windows and parked cars, watch them “expressing their views” via burning tires and roaming mobs. Things haven’t changed much since July 14, 1789 and the Terror that followed.

Tyranny is awful, yes, but it is equally so when it is the tyranny of the strongman, the tyranny of a few, and the tyranny of the mob.

So when a scorpion comes up to you at the river’s edge asking for ride across … just say No.