Pelosi and Marx on 'Freedom'
- From: jose el fontanero <josefsoplar@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:58:41 -0700 (PDT)
Pelosi and Marx on 'Freedom'
By Ed Kaitz
Nancy Pelosi wants to give birth to a new kind of freedom in America
-- the freedom from being "job-locked."
In an interview with Rachel Maddow Thursday evening, Pelosi asked
Americans to "think" about a bright, new, liberating kind of utopia:
Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer,
a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have
health insurance. Or that people could start a business and be
entrepreneurial and take risks, but not be job-locked because a child
has a child has asthma or diabetes or someone in the family is
bipolar. You name it, any condition is job-locking.
Maddow was so overwhelmed and smitten with Pelosi's remarks that she
posted the interview on her website under the following title:
"Finally! Pelosi frames health reform for the win. (Hint: It's about
freedom.)"
The problem with Pelosi's remarks, however, is that from hindsight,
they are not bright, new, or liberating. On the contrary, almost
identical words were penned over a hundred years ago by another
champion of economic "freedom": Karl Marx. Marx criticized the private
economy because it led to the "renunciation of life and of human
needs."
Like Pelosi, Marx was deeply troubled by an economic system that left
most people job-locked and unable to satisfy their "human need" to
become more authentic. In other words, the more you have to work, said
Marx, "the less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theater or to
balls, or to the public house, and the less you think, love, theorize,
sing, paint, fence, etc."
Marx chastised the middle class in England for being "so incurably
debased by self-interest" and thirsty for a "quick profit" that they
were incapable of recognizing the alienation from their true selves.
Communist society, then, was the cure that could liberate us from our
false selves and usher in a new kind of creativity and authenticity.
Says Marx:
[C]ommunist society ... regulates the general production and thus
makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow,
to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the
evening, criticize after dinner, as the spirit moves me ..."
This kind of sheer lunacy could have been hatched only by an
unemployed academic and journalist like Marx, who, by the way, was
supported financially in his authentically job-liberated struggle
against capitalism by his wealthy colleague Friedrich Engels. What's
most disturbing is the number of wild-eyed crusaders, both then and
now, who have fallen for Marx's creative definition of "freedom."
As for that nagging issue of just how "communist society" will
"regulate the general production" after the socialist revolution,
Engels had this to say:
The community will have to calculate what it can produce with the
means at its disposal; and in accordance with the relationship of this
productive power to the mass of consumers it will determine how far it
has to raise or lower production.
In other words, leave it to the "community" (government) to worry
about levels of production and consumption in order for the newly
liberated and formerly "job-locked" citizens to pursue their lifelong
dreams of being artists, writers, or photographers.
Friedrich Hayek wrote about this subtle shift in the word "freedom"
over sixty years ago. He argued that as socialists began coming under
fire for promoting servitude and control, they made the creative
decision to harness to their "cart the strongest of all political
motives -- the craving for freedom." For Hayek,
The subtle change in meaning to which the word ‘freedom' was subjected
in order that this argument sound plausible is important. To the
great apostles of political freedom the word had meant freedom from
coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men, release from
the ties which left the individual no choice but obedience to the
orders of a superior to whom he was attached.
For the socialists, however, "before man could be truly free, the
'despotism of physical want' had to be broken, the ‘restraints of the
economic system' relaxed." For Hayek, this new definition of freedom
was simply "another name for the old demand for an equal distribution
of wealth."
Hayek asks a fascinating question that each and every American needs
to consider before deciding whether to return any Obamacare-supporting
politician to power this fall:
Who can seriously doubt ... that the power which a multi-millionaire,
who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very
much less than that which the smallest [bureaucrat] possess who wields
the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends
whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work?
Nancy Pelosi's theory of "economic freedom," you see, requires legions
of new bureaucrats wielding the power of the state so that you can be
liberated from your inauthentic, job-locked selves. If we take freedom
in its true meaning -- as freedom from coercion -- we see instantly,
however, that indeed, I am less coerced by a neighboring millionaire
than by the tiniest government bureaucrat deciding where and when I
can see a doctor, go to school, or become job-locked.
Years ago, before he died, I asked my father what he liked most about
working in the home-building industry. After having been "job-locked"
in the housing industry for over twenty years, he told me the
following: "For me, the best thing of all is seeing a new family move
into one of our homes."
My father wasn't a writer or an artist, but he was a kind, decent,
hardworking man who loved his job and his family. Rather than struggle
against the system and neglect his children like Marx did, my father
felt it was part of his job, not the government's, to take care of his
family -- including our health care.
Sounds pretty authentic to me.
.
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