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

Existentia

When you hear the rustling of the Reaper's cloak do not lie down and tremble; run and sing and marvel at the crimson light of evening sun.

The University

In a better world, the universities would be places where young people would learn how to think. Unfortunately today the university is a place where young people do not learn how to think but rather they are taught what to think.

Greed

In contemporary social thought, still significantly defined by romantic era social constructs, greed is perceived as an especially loathsome human tendency. Other Deadly Sins, by contrast, appear to have lost much their deadliness. Gluttony and sloth, for example, have become commonplace to a degree previously unknown in human history; they are everywhere perceived in the flabby contours of our pale and adipose nation. Normative and culture-bound, they have lost their potential to dismay. Lust has evolved away its significance, like human body hair, as we tend to think of sexual desire as a good thing in all but a very few circumstances. For the record I'm relatively cool with that; puritanism is, after all, the force that propels licentiousness.

But greed maintains a hold on our psychological need to find fault in others. Every age has to have some characteristic, some fault, that the majority of people can hold high in the scornful appraisal of others. Liberals love greed for the same reason that conservatives love homosexuality: it permits them to sit in self-righteous judgment of people afflicted with faults from which they perceive themselves to be exempt. How savory it is for the deaf to judge the blind! For the tall to judge the short!

An archetype woven by the spinnerets of the 21st Century American mind is that of the greedy entrepreneur. In our heads is this template of a talkative, wheeling-dealing businessman who tirelessly accumulates wealth and prestige. He lives in a spacious home, he drives a luxury car, he has a beautiful trophy wife and tow-headed children who smell only of fabric softener. His media avatar in popular culture gets what he deserves: His wife has an affair with a blue collar worker (one of us!) and his children get addicted to methamphetamine. Eventually he goes to jail for accumulating bad karma because it is impossible to get wealthy, say the poets, without the exploitation of others.

Because this idea has its roots in the 19th Century, it applies only to the upwardly mobile middle class. The poor are nobler for ill-defined reasons and therefore not subject to this kind of moral weakness. Those who are born wealthy perceive themselves to be bound by their exalted nature to right the injustice of The Creator. They strive to alleviate the middle class of their unperceived guilt, extracting their wealth and redistributing it to the lowly. Noblesse, after all, oblige.

Much to the irritation of my friends, I view mankind as basically good, and the poor neither morally superior nor inferior to the rich. Nobleness is a guilt offering of the rich to the poor, a surrogate for the wealth that the poor would rather have. "I'm keeping my money," say the elite, "but trust me, you're better than me." If we are all really of one substance, it does not make sense to say that one class of people is exempt from certain kinds of faults and another is disproportionately afflicted. Despite our generally good nature, we all have a similar tendency toward the Deadly Sins, no matter what our demographic.

To the binary American mind the poor are incapable of greed because shucks, they don't have anything! The rich, on the other hand, have to be greedy because they have so much. But to me, greed has little to do with how much you have or how much you lack, it is much simpler than that, for one's means are affected by innumerable factors. The Deadly Sins, on the other hand, are engraved on the reverse side of human nature. Greed is not about how much you have, but how you get what you have.

If a person gives something of value to get something of value, who is the victim? If a singer has a beautiful voice and she charges us fifteen dollars for a CD, we readily pay it, for her songs give us pleasure. If she gets very wealthy by selling millions of CDs, what has she done wrong? If a physician studies hard in medical school, works endless hours in residency and fellowship, pulls himself out of bed in the middle of the night to see emergency cases in the hospital, why is it evil for him to live in a big beautiful home and have a beautiful wife and impossibly cute children? To whom do the lives of the singer and physician belong? They have invested years of their lives in the cultivation of talent, knowledge and skill and they deserve to get a fair price for the products of their life's work.

If, on the other hand, a manufacturer knowingly sells an inferior product and quickly grows wealthy, that is greedy. In the orthodox doctrine of the Left, this sort of thing happens all the time. In reality it is rare, because it does not take long for consumers to realize a product is of poor quality, or of a quality less than the price would justify, and then to stop buying it. Liberals, like Conservatives, give themselves over so completely to their doctrines that no amount of evidence to the contrary will dissuade them.

And yes the poor, being fully human, are also quite capable of greed. If a man is paid a salary to do a job and he avoids his duties, he is greedy, for he is not giving something of value (work) to get something of value (money). If a poor man feigns an illness to acquire a disability pension, he is greedy, even though the pension may be barely enough to live on. If a man gets laid off and he does not seek work until the unemployment benefits are about to run out, he is demonstrating a manifestation of greed. The only definition of Greed that stands up to the cool fluorescent light of reason is the desire to obtain something while intentionally giving something of lesser value in return.

Is it not greedy to have great wealth and not share it? No, I believe that is called being stingy or miserly or avaricious. But when the wealthy acquire political power from the poor in exchange for plundering the wealth of the middle class, that appears to conform to an accurate definition of greed. After all, the rich do not help the poor so much with their own money but with that of people of less means. Rather than give something of value to get something of equal value, the politician gets something of value (power) in exchange for something that has no value to him: someone else's wealth. Let us conduct a thought experiment: Has there ever been a wealthy political person so concerned for the poor that the individual gave away most of his or her possessions and then had to move into a modest apartment and eat ordinary foods? There must be such a case, but I do not know of it. It is not rare for a very wealthy individual to write a check for a million dollars here and a million dollars there, but when you are worth 40 million it doesn't seem like much of a sacrifice; you still live in opulence. If you make a hundred thousand dollars a year, though, and the government takes a third of it, your lifestyle is dramatically affected.

So in review, we find that:
1. Some poor people seek to give something of little value to them, political power, for the wealth of the middle class; therefore those people may well be greedy. The value of a living wage is forty hours a week of work, not standing in line for thirty minutes to vote.
2. Many wealthy people give other people's money for power; they are also greedy. They are stingy as well because they are unwilling the part with their own wealth.
3. Many middle class people may be stingy because they do not want to part with their wealth, but the rich use the power of the state bartered to them by the poor to take it anyway. It is hard to feel sorry for the middle class though because they usually vote for the same people who use force to deprive them of their money.

Whether the object of desire is wealth or power, we define greed as using force or deception to give something of lesser value for something of higher value. So again, greediness refers to the manner in which someone gets what he or she has, not how much or how little a person has.

Copyright 2011 Robert Albanese

Wealth

It is not possible to condense wealth out of legislation, no matter how many people believe it. Government sublimates wealth by converting effort into lassitude.

Copyright 2011 Robert Albanese

Caveat Canem Part 2: Apparently They Can't Help Themselves

This Letter to the Editor Appeared in today's (4/13/2011) Idaho Statesman. She appears to be upset because the angry man had this weird interpretation of the Leash Law; he apparently felt it was meant to be adhered to. Too bad the policemen didn't offer her a citation.


Free speech? What a copout

This fall I was on the Garden City Greenbelt west of the library. As I leashed my dog after she played in the river, a man accosted me. He proceeded to provide me with his interpretation of the leash law and used foul language to describe my gender.

A few minutes later, I told two Garden City police officers what had happened and how upset I was. They informed me that the use of indecent and foul language towards women is the constitutional right of “free speech.” Neither officer offered assistance, empathy or consideration.

In a complaint letter to the Garden City Police Department I noted that the First Amendment grants U.S. citizens the right to free speech to “petition the government for redress of grievances,” not insult women. I also cited Title 52 of the Idaho Statutes indicating it is illegal to use language that is “indecent or offensive to the senses.”

The response I received said that the officers followed “appropriate policies and procedures.” So, just a word of caution, ladies, don’t expect protection, politeness or professionalism from Garden City police officers on the Greenbelt. And don’t expect to see me there again either.

JAIME MOSS, Boise



Read more: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2011/04/13/1603489/letters-to-the-editor.html#ixzz1JSw7ruy7

Liberty and Justice

A nation that puts Liberty before Justice will have both in some measure; a nation that puts Justice before Liberty will have neither.