The Opiate of the People

There was once a great jazz musician named Chet Baker. He was one of the leaders of the West Coast Cool Jazz movement back in the 1950s and 1960s. He was handsome and he had a voice like a warm breeze, and he played the horn with a soulfulness lost to contemporary culture. He starred as a romantic lead in movies and he traveled and played music all over the world; his life should have been a long, easy, beautiful drive, like I-84 between Boise and Portland. Instead his life deteriorated into almost constant trouble because of his heroin addiction, he was in and out of jail, he lost his front teeth and he aged way too fast. Then at age 58 in Holland, his brain soaked in heroin and cocaine, he dove or fell out a hotel window onto the concrete sidewalk and smashed his skull. It was a sorrowful end to a novella that should have been an epic saga with a triumphant conclusion.

He was fully aware that because of his drugs use, he was like a freight train without brakes. But like most addicts, he did not care. As long as he could find a pharmacologic state of artificial well-being at the sharp end of a syringe, it did not matter to him how false or how annihilating was his joy.

Also there once was a great nation called the United States. This country that I was born into in 1957 was invincible. She had an economy that was the envy of the world, her people were armed and free and full of practical knowledge and skills. We did not ask what our country could do for us; we asked what we could do for our country. We did not want guarantees or handouts, we just wanted an opportunity to achieve what we could in the time we were given. Americans were Good Guys and we knew it, communists were Bad Guys and we know that, too.

My grandparents were carved from the stony material that made America what it once was. They immigrated here from Italy unable to speak English and without education. When they arrived there was no Medicare, no Medicaid, no Welfare, no Foodstamps, no Social Security, no Unemployment Benefits. There was only opportunity. And they traveled thousands of miles for that, and that alone. Had they been given a choice between death and public assistance, I would not be here today. They had pride in themselves and they did not believe in taking unearned money.

The decline of America resembles the decline of Chet Baker. It seems to me that an addiction has turned a robust and lively people into a terminally anxious nation with an economy wrecked by debt. A nation that once could not be defeated now seems incapable of resolve, watching helplessly as nations like China, whose citizens do not expect to be parented by the state, dismember her and use her body parts for fuel for economic growth. The addiction that has caused America's teeth to rot out is the opium dream of unearned wealth, the powerful narcotic of Socialism. The logarithmic increase in psychological and monetary dependence on government has all of the elements of clinical addiction. This is clearly visible in the DSM IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) diagnostic criteria. Let us do a thought experiment and compare clinical addiction to the phenomena we observe in the world around us.

1. A need for markedly increased amounts of the substance to achieve the desired effect. The more the government spends, the further we are from spending how much is needed. The public sector has exploded in the last few decades, and even though a third of the nation's wealth disappears into the void of government programs, it is so far from sufficient that the nation is 100 trillion in debt (that's the real number, not 14 trillion).



2. Withdrawal. When a physician threatens to discontinue a narcotic prescription for a patient who has developed addiction to that medication, the patient typically becomes agitated and hysterical, potentially dangerous. When nations make the difficult decision to rein in spending, protesters take to the streets, smashing windows, setting fires, destroying property and injuring people.



3. The substance is often taken in larger amounts, or for longer periods than was intended. In VA for example, when the Integrated Networks were established and staff were hired, the goal was to have no more than ten employees in each of the twenty-plus network offices. Now each network hires hundreds of people, and that is nowhere near enough!



4. There is a persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control substance use. Every year politicians say they are going to control government spending. Real reductions in spending, as opposed to limiting the rate of growth of programs which is often euphemistically called "cutting," have not occurred in my life time.



5. A great deal of time is spent in activities necessary to obtain the substance. The US Tax Code has 7500 pages.

6. Important social, occupational, or recreational activities are given up or reduced because of substance use. Politicians barter wealth for power. Voters barter power for wealth. If a politician perceives that directing resources toward a certain group of people will create a loyal voting bloc, that's where the funds will go, even though they may be more desperately needed elsewhere. For example, the government has now made middle class Americans eligible for health care resources, while homeless schizophrenics die of exposure on park benches (see "AP Exclusive: Medicaid for the Middle Class? by Ricardo Alonso-Zalvidar 6/21/2011).


AP Photo
FILE - In a June 13, 2011 file photo, President Barack Obama speaks to a group of supporters at a Miami fundraiser, where he launched his bid for reelection in Florida. President Obama's health care law would let several million middle-class people get nearly free insurance meant for the poor, a twist government number crunchers say they discovered only after the complex bill was signed.

7. The substance use is continued despite knowledge of having a persistent or recurrent physical or psychological problem that is likely to have been caused or exacerbated by the substance. On the microeconomic scale, individuals take to the streets if they believe their benefits will be reduced, even though they know that a failure to reduce spending will cause economic hardship for everyone later on. The teachers in Wisconsin, for example, are relatively affluent and they aggressively defend their salary and benefits even though it may come at the expense of poor people. On the macroeconomic scale, the Federal Government seeks to raise the debt ceiling even though officials are aware of the pending calamity caused by overspending.



It is ironic that Karl Marx, the father of Socialism, described religion as "the opiate of the people" when the effects of his own philosophy mimic narcotics addiction much more closely than any pattern of belief and worship. It is even more ironic that our America, indestructible by bullets, has been in a state of collapse from within. Our soul has rusted from the warm, salty air of redistributionist economic policies, and sometimes it seems like the only people in America willing to work hard are the illegals. Our nation should have been a force for freedom and prosperity for centuries to come; the question is whether or not we, too will have an early end like Chet Baker, forgotten by generations of the future. Optimism does not come easily in cases like this one; a bureaucracy can no more dismantle itself than a snake can devour itself completely and leave nothing behind.



Copyright 2011 Robert Albanese