Sunday, February 7, 2016

Conservatives With Property & Without


1.

People Helping People

- What are you doing here?
- Drinking coffee. Reading.
- What is someone like you doing here, alone at a fast food restaurant in the middle of the night?
- Drinking coffee. Reading.
- What are you reading?
- The London Review Of Books.
- I knew it!
- What did you know?
- I can help you.
- How?
- Do you need help? Are you in danger?
- Riding my bike here an Aston Martin going about a hundred ran a red light and missed me by a few feet. And there's this lapsed student who wanders around Westwood night and day who has an apartment he's afraid to stay more than a few minutes in. Last week he invited me over and served me poisoned Tequila. I saw him again tonight at Starbucks. Did I want to come to his place again, he asked, he didn't like Tequila any more, wouldn't I finish the bottle for him?
- God's trying to tell you something.
- What? That I am in danger and announcing that you would arrive to save me?
- Why not?
- How are you going to save me?
- What do you need?
- A safe place. Is that what you are offering?
- Yes.
- I accept. Let's go.
- The place is my girlfriend's friend's. It's not free at the moment.
- I see.
- You should help people like I do.
- Do you offer everyone a place to stay?
- I do what I can. Sometimes a few words, a few dollars.
- How are you going to help a drug addict with a few words or a few dollars?
- I understand them. I'm a drug addict myself.
- You're a drug addict? A drug addict is sent by god to save me at Jack in the Box? You don't look like a drug addict.
- I'm checking into rehab next week. Crashing at my girlfriend's until then. I'm going outside to smoke. Come with me.
- I'll wait for you here.
- Sure you'll wait?
- Yes, sure. Go on, smoke your cigarette.


2.

Conservatives & Other Strangers

- Something terrible has happened.
- What?
- One of my best friends has become a conservative.
- Conservative morally or politically?
- Politically. It’s so stupid.
- By conservative you mean resistant to change?
- No. I mean wanting to keep the present kind of government but reduce it to a minimum, conserving the idea of government and little else.
- That is stupid because an idea of government doesn’t govern, people do, the kind of people who have that idea of government. And what kind of people are they?
- Selfish and greedy.
- And the reason you say conservatives are stupid is that the government in idea alone they ask for ends up being against them?
- Yes. Against all of them but those who are of the same social class and wealth as their leaders.
- Conservatives want to exclude aliens, end aid to the poor, forbid subsidies to business: they don’t want the government to help strangers. Yet they elect to represent them and implement this idea strangers who convince them that they hate strangers more than all the others running for office. They don’t seem to have any doubt these strangers who hate strangers will not hate them as strangers.
- They think these politicians are their friends.
- Where do they get that idea?
- They share with them a fear and hatred of strangers. Living alike in fear they think they all are in this together.
- A kind of family. While in a family people help each other instead of treating each other as enemies, as the politicians say they want to do and the people say they want the politicians to do.
- And somehow not hate them too!
- Some things government must do if the state is to remain in existence. Government must defend against attack, protect against other countries' subsidized products coming in to ruin local trade, protect against crime. These government jobs are to be given into the hands of people who hate strangers, when the people who gave them the jobs are also strangers to them and in the normal course of things will be hated?
- They aren’t expected to act against us because, just like us, they don’t like strangers. We’re alike in not liking strangers (yet alike in nothing else).
- Political representatives have authority over people who elect them, like the government has authority over the poor and weak. Representatives who are elected to minimize concern for the poor and weak will also minimize their relation to those who elect them who are likewise poor and weak in relation to themselves who have the power of the government behind them. Have you tried explaining this to your friend?
- You know how it is. No one listens.
- We’re strangers.


3.

Conservatives With Property & Without

- Let's say conservatives don't hate strangers. They believe a limited government is the only safe government. The don't want property relations questioned, they believe that is too dangerous, they'll instead select leaders who say they will lead without questioning property and govern as little as possible. But the led, giving up their freedom into the hands of leaders, are treated by them as their property to do what they want with, and what they want is more of their property.
- Why do the leaders have to want property?
- If you don't acquire property for your life with people, you use people to acquire property.
- Why?
- Because people who you manage are your work, not your joy. You don't live with people you have power over. You live with the people you share that power with, your fellow leaders, with whom you can act creatively and be at ease. Conservatives in their trusting to leaders are like their nemesis the communists. For if like them you do question property, yet agree to having leaders, you'll find unequal property relations returning, leaders getting rich, the rest getting poor.
- Then politics don't matter, communist or capitalist? Choose to have leaders and you've chosen to redistribute property from the poor to the rich?
- Yes. Conservatives and Communists alike must expect redistribution. For leaders, it is just what they do, for the led, it is the mysterious way of the world they gave up understanding when they gave that job of understanding to their leaders. Can I tell you two stories about conservative leaders and their concern for the led?
- Ok.
- In the last days of the Clinton administration a bill proposing a new bankruptcy law was introduced into Congress and passed by both houses. The proposed law would make bankruptcy inapplicable to credit card debt. The rich could go bankrupt and not pay their debts, corporations go bankrupt and not pay their debts, but those without corporation protection and without wealth, who in fact had nothing but debt, would have to pay in full. On the same principle that only the poor have to pay their debts, student loans had already by recent law been exempted from bankruptcy forgiveness. It seemed a foregone conclusion that the President would sign the bill into law, when Senator Elizabeth Warren* received a message from President Clinton's wife asking for a crash course in bankruptcy. Senator Warren met with Hillary Clinton, schooled her, convinced her the proposed law was extremely unfair. Within days the president's wife had convinced her husband not to sign. The president left office, and Hillary in the course of time became a U.S Senator. The same bankruptcy bill came up for a vote and she voted for its passage. She was willing to make a kind gesture when her husband's office was at an end, but not when for her own political career she needed funding by the credit card industry, the largest of all donors to politicians, tens of millions a year. Just today she claimed on television, now running for president herself, that she doesn't know why Goldman Sacks paid her $650,000 to give a speech; they offered, and she accepted. No obligation. An act of generosity.
- Like her act of generosity to all the little people in America.
- Not really. Leaders when they are generous to each other strengthen each other, make their collaboration more productive in the endless endeavor of acquiring property from those they lead. Generosity to the led however is a mere gesture to make the leaders feel better about themselves, severely limited because strengthening their victims too much makes victimizing them that much harder. Here's the second story about conservative leaders and their care for the led.
- I'm listening.
- The 24 hour fast food restaurant is cold, near freezing at 2 in the morning. Those who sleep outside come in one by one, encumbered with their bags, or sometimes like this one, dragging behind him a strong scent and a filthy blanket. He studies the overhead menu, while the night manager, an immigrant from India who has held this same night job for 26 years waits, his expression not hiding his increasing impatience. Yes? Yes? Can I help you? Finally the customer makes his decision.
- Give me, uh, two tacos.
- We have no lettuce.
- I'd like two tacos.
- No lettuce.
- Uh, two tacos. I want tacos.
- I tell you. No lettuce.
- No lettuce?
- No lettuce.
- Uh, hm, two tacos.
The manager grunts, punches in the order, takes payment, gives change. He moves quickly away and takes up his station at the drive through window, ready to deliver orders to the waiting cars as they are delivered by the cook. A headset keeps him in communication with cars. The overnight shift has a skeleton crew of three: cook, and two more who between them take drive through and walk in orders, clear the tables, clean the floor, and keep an eye on the bathroom which receives a steady stream of problematic visitors arriving at regular times. This demands considerable attention, as almost every night one of the bathroom regulars will flood the place bathing or washing clothes, or in an attack of madness strew the floor with paper. The next day just ahead of that time the night shift takes the precaution of locking the bathroom door: the visitor gets the message, finds another bathroom to frequent, perhaps returning after a suitable interval expecting forgiveness and period of exclusion expired. Those are the problem visitors. There are also the favored visitors, who whether they buy anything or not are allowed to pass the cold nights inside the restaurant. These include: the "mummy" who pulls his football jersey over his head and draws his arms inside and sleeps at the table; the bike restorer who sleeps days under the freeway in a semi-permanent structure built of scavenged boards, with dozens and dozens of bikes on the sidewalk protected in his absence by the other denizens of the underpass who've all got their bikes from him; the old man who talks to himself and reads the newspaper; and the former counterfeiter of U.S. currency. He operated a press himself, aged the bills in cat litter, lined up a whole crew to make purchases with the counterfeits and get genuine money in change. Finally he was caught living too large and too getting too many people involved. That was long ago. Now he's at the 24 hour fast food every night all night writing for micro payments fake comments and reviews on the internet. Counterfeiting opinions not money, he's gone legal: who can prove payment affects the personal views he expresses?
- He's doing there what Hillary Clinton does accepting Goldman's Sacks' generosity, which you say is something significant...
- It's their work.
- Not the mere gestures she makes in the direction of the public.
- He is. More, many more, are regulars at the fast food restaurant.
- The drug addict who wants to save you.
- Which is his generous gesture, like the manager letting this assembly spend the night at his restaurant despite it being against his nature and his principles and his personal interest. Indeed, his own good nature makes him angry and bad tempered with everybody. For he is a conservative just as every person let stay in the restaurant is a conservative. He doesn't complain about the desperation he has to face every night, the customers don't complain; they accept the government isn't interested in them, that actually no one is interested in them. Poor as they are they don't for a moment challenge existing property relations.
- They're conservatives without property. Why does that sound strange?
- Because we think of people being conservative to protect their property. That's generally true. As it is true that generally the poor become communist to acquire property. But in both cases the consequence of accepting leaders deprives them of property at the same time it makes them accept, in their voluntary relinquishing of responsibility and understanding, being deprived of their property.

Further Reading:
Against Leaders
Killer Metaphysics
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* Elizabeth Warren interview with Bill Moyers, 2004