The Strange Death of American Freedom?

There seems to be a popular meme floating around, both right and left, in the mainstream of political discourse. Something to the effect of: America has fallen from it's lofty perch. America's founding was a great and noble, but the government has fallen into corruption since then. The wisdom of the Founding Father's has left us. Our freedoms are being taken away.

And yet, any objective look at history shows that America is exponentially more free now then when it was founded. The Founding Father's spoke of self determination and freedom. And founded a country with a massive slave based feudalism. They talked of "taxation without representation", and yet the only people who were represented were wealthy white landowners. And while striking a blow against Imperialism, they wiped out the Native Americans. The slaves are free, the franchise is universal and domestic populations are no longer being ethnically cleansed. America is more free than it ever has been. Which isn't to give any credit to the government, nor to deny they are trying to take our freedoms away.

The supposed act that represented America's long fall into slavery is debated, some say the creation of the Federal Reserve, some the New Deal. And yet the hidden assumption seems to be that the freedom of blacks, the poor, women or Indians doesn't matter. The only freedom to be concerned with is Middle class white America.

We need to recognize that the Founding Father's weren't saints, that America's founding wasn't special, and that society is slowly improving. We just need to find out how to help it along, and stop the occasional reactionary back slides.

P.S. to Thoughts on Healthcare

In addition to the below information, I think it is also likely that Americans would be more overall healthy without the continuous government interference in the market. One of the largest ongoing welfare programs is the Farm Subsidy program, where the government pays huge sums of money for people (and multi-million dollar international companies) to grow enormous quantities of inedible corn. This corn is either used as animal feed, leading to corn fed beef, which has a higher fat content than grass fed beef, and highly processed food pumped full of High Fructose Corn Syrup. Both of these are cheaper than they would otherwise be due to their reliance on a subsidized crop. It's damn near impossible to not eat High Fructose Corn Syrup and it's prevalence coincides with a drop in price, and thus rise in consumption, of highly processed pseudo-food.

Without all of this, it's safe to assume that people would be healthier and require less health care overall.

Musings on Health Care

The Pharmaceutical industry is often a target of populist scorn, but rarely is it mentioned in mainstream conversation that one of their main sources of power is a government created monopoly: a patent. With the elimination of the patent system the cost of all patented products would decrease dramatically as competition exploded. Medicine would become cheaper, health care costs would go down.

It sounds absurd (to some) to say it aloud, but our government has taken direct action, through regulation, to increase doctor's pay by creating an artificial shortage of providers. Largely done at the behest of the AMA, these regulations, if removed, would allow qualified professionals from other countries to practice in the US, as well as more people being able to become doctors. The number of providers would go up, the cost of health care would go down.

Under the current tax code, under an apparent attempt to stave off socialism (boo! hiss!), employers are given tax incentives to offer health care to the employees. This ties people to their employer for health insurance. Health insurance is then a commodity where the person who actually uses it is not involved in the choosing of the finer details. An agreement is reached between the employer and a health insurance carrier, and the employee is given some options, A B or C, for example. Removal of these incentives would give more consumer choice for health insurance, and the decreased cost of health care would decrease entry cost into health insurance, leading to more companies. All of this together would lead to a more de-centralized health care industry, as well as a more equitable one.

It goes without saying this is a very complex topic, and these are simply some brief thoughts on the matter.

Legacy

John Ostrander, the writer who brought us the best work ever done on the Spectre, is currently offering an ongoing series in the Star Wars universe, set over a hundred years after the film and thus taking place long after all other stories. What an intriguing concept. Upon reading, one must struggle mightily to keep down the disappointment, as the plot is mostly rehashes of previous stories.

A Sith Lord takes over the Galaxy and is hunthing down the Jedi! Wow, what an original plot twist. An alliance of Rebel fighters, striking from secret bases, fights against the new Imperial power. Hmmm....that seems familiar, too. There are strong points, a frontlines view of an Imperial civil war, the story of the new Sith Lord and the fate of the Yuuzhan Vong among others...but overall it seems like such a waste. This could have been an oppurtinity to create something entirely original and so far Ostrander doesn't seem to have even tried.

The Empire Strikes Back

Recent, within the last decades, advances in the way Americans relate to the past and the world around them has long provoked a reactionary backlash. A better example could not be found than a history book released fairly recently. The book attempts to be a response to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, which committed the heinous sin, in some people's mind, of presenting a historical perspective focusing on 99% of the population, instead of the 1% that makes up the generals/leaders/wealthy. (I'm paraphrasing Zinn there.)

Hence we now have a massive tome entitled A Patriot's History of the United States: from Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror. The title tells us everything we need to know about this book, presumably the author's intent. What are we to make of this, and how worried should we be that some people want to go back to a 1950's worldview: the Indians were savages, America is the greatest country that has ever existed and we should believe whatever our leaders tell us?

The real kicker is that subtitle, though. What exactly did Columbus discover and what was so great about it? We know now that Columbus wasn't the first European to make his way to North America, viking explorers can claim that title. Which ignores the the larger question: how can someone discover something millions of people already knew since the day they were born? It's like saying I discovered blogs when I first started one. In which the discovery is personal only, and of no historical value, obviously not the intent. The only way we can keep Columbus' discovery great is by denying that the original inhabitants of America were even people. Hence, Columbus discovered an un-inhabitated wilderness. In which case, the title of the book is inherently racist and ethnocentric. As for the greatness of this supposed "discovery", it doesn't seem to have been so great for the Indians, who would spend the next 500+ years being slaughtered by colonial powers and their proxies.

Sadly, I don't see the "Columbus' Great Discovery" meme going anywhere. Until, we all just need to preserve and spread the truth about history: the heroes weren't always the winners and the winners weren't always the heroes.

Gift economy

There was a pot luck (sp?) at work last Friday, and it got me thinking about a gift economy. (an economy with no exchange) The pot luck being a perfect example: entry into the system requires you bring one thing, it doesn't a certain type, shape or minimum value. Once in the system, you can take as much as you want from everything that was brought.

The equivalent would be some kind of community store, and bringing in an item would give you access to the store. If the communal store were to have enough item's to satisfy people's needs, we would need many more people contributing than a simple pot luck. And what stops a handful of bad apples from abusing the system? Once you start trying to figure out this nugget things get hairy fast. Employees would be needed to monitor the community store and to make sure people weren't just bringing in garbage. Who would the employees be? Anyone in the community could volunteer, perhaps, and maybe working a shift would count as a contribution to the store. How often would a person need to contribute? Once a week? Once a month? Once in their lifetime?

Perhaps there could be a share/use ratio, like p2p sites. And anyone who's ratio is within certain bounds is trusted to use the system to it's full extent. Anyone who hasn't contributed much in a while needs to contribute x number of goods to get back in good standing. Again more regulation, more problems arise. Maybe people are good enough that no such rules would be needed at all? It's hard to say.

Judging a comic by it's cover

After having read the first two issues of the new Vigilante series, I can say that many times you can judge a comic by it's cover. Case in point: is there a non descript character spraying seven pounds of shell-casings out of his weapons, as if carrying some kind of ammunition fountain? If yes, peruse inside: is there large amounts of sanitized violence and %$#@ed words? If so, you are holding an extremely pointless comic striving to capture some kind of dangerous bad-ass mystique. And for some reason I bought the second issue before learning my lesson.