Atlas Chugged

Someone put U2’s “Better than the real thing” on the jukebox. She wore a low-cut vest and a denim miniskirt; a most welcome encounter to end an otherwise dreadful workweek. As she operated the tap to pour my second pint of Magic Hat, she said that she loved classical music. She was no common tavern wench of the college-town variety.

Ach, mein wunderfrau! Mi bailllerina bella!

I was about to go into my spiel about Bach, when this unemployed punk-ass next to me started whining about federal drug prohibition policy and the need to legalize marijuana and privatize all functions of government under an Anarcho-Capitalist pogrom, so that he could find a job.

Bitch-ass punk, I came in here to ESCAPE the world of rationality and Faustian abstraction, not dive into it. Take your brain turd and dump it on the Internet, where people care about flame-bait. Dick Cheney is paying dudes $80,000 to drive a truck in Iraq! And why would an Anarcho-Capitalist need a job? I thought you were all globe-trotting entrepreneurs with private jets and Tag Heuer Chronographs.

But my brain box was ignited and a disparate phantasmagoria of think-tank papers assembled itself in my consciousness to unleash an analytical fugue:

My problem with capitalism is that the market has no mechanism to mitigate the demographic externalities that lead up to cascading failures at the macro-economic level.

“WHAT THE FOOK?!?!?!,” you ask?

For example, you could say that there are PLENTY of jobs in America, even in this economy, BUT to land a job, young unskilled worker, you must be willing to be paid equal or less that the $8.00/hour going rate for the services an undocumented Mexican day-laborer. And you must line up and down 18th Avenue at the crack of dawn every day for a chance to get on the van to God-knows-where. For the college-educated American, that prospect is met with: FUCK THAT SHIT! Well, bub, that’s the MARKET RATE of unskilled labor determined by market forces. Any lower and the Mexican won’t get into the van. Any higher and the extra expense gets transferred into the project’s final cost, which means the developer is going to hire another construction company.

Such is the way of labor arbitrage on this side of the border. The externalities are:
1. Decreased tax revenue from workers, whether they file income tax returns or not.
2. Over-development of an unsustainable housing market because of an artificially low cost of labor.
3. The underdevelopment of a viable middle-class that would in turn support the higher-skill economy of professional services and boutique-niche industries.
4. The inter-generational sense of community is replaced by a constant stream of transients and alien cultures. (Is it any wonder that gated communites and home owners associations are skyrocketing across this country?)

Well who can we vote for to turn around that trend?
By voting for Republicans, its corporatist-wing continues to have access to cheap labor, while its Evangelical-wing dispenses with any real-world solutions because Jesus is going to solve everything in 2012.
By voting for Democrats, its ethno-relativist-wing continues to soak the middle-class with newly arrived useless eaters, while its hipster-wing sublimates any outrage at the cultural dilution of our neighborhoods.

The Paleo-Con Pat Buchanan has made a social defense of industrial protectionism, that the communities that thrived around our manufacturing hubs are the backbone of traditional blue-collar American culture. Global finance and manufacturers are not exposed to the external costs of labor arbitrage when the factories are moved overseas: Deteriorating neighborhoods, drug addiction, violent crime, collapsing tax base, white flight, etc. Low-wage workers, undocumented or not, still use the same public services as everyone else, but without paying for it except through sales taxes. The tax burden then falls on those who do play by the book and file their tax returns. The tax burden becomes so great that moving to another state becomes a viable option. And one wonders why a steady flow of New Yorkers, Bostonians and Los Angelenos have been moving to Florida, Texas and Arizona recently.

As the middle class dwindles, cities fall apart. The “native” English and Germans could’ve made the same argument against the Irish in 1850 (and with the Protestant vs. Catholic spin too) but the public services and welfare system was nowhere near as extensive in the 19th century as it is now: Public schools, Medicare, Social Security, fire, police, garbage collection, etc. That is the ultimate “externality.” The economic eschatology of Marx predicted that capitalists will arbitrage the world into the ground in a race to the bottom to undercut each other. Henry Ford once doubled the pay of his autoworkers because he conceded that he wanted them to be able to afford the cars they built. The multi-national has no such concerns.

This is a new century with new technologies that require a learning curve gets steeper with each passing year (lending credence to Singularity Theory, IMHO). Contrary to the CATO Institute's optimism, Puritan Middle America cannot be retrained to turn Norman Rockwellesque small towns into ultra-tech Silicon Valleys or hyper-literate DUMBOs or Seattle-Vancouver-plexes. The Creative Class is the future and will cluster together, abandoning places like Pittsburgh and Detroit. The cities are increasingly unable to sustain the market for the services of the suburban/exurban professionals. The Dust Bowl displaced countless Okies into California. Hurricane Katrina displaced half of New Orleans into Arkansas and Texas. How will the Great Unraveling displace Americans? The best and brightest into the Singapore-style Digital City-State Fortresses and the rest into the welcoming arms of the Soldiers of God?

Let's be honest. A crackdown on illegals and a moratorium on legal immigration is a means to this end: Artificially buoying the hourly wage of the American worker. And it is a very legitimate end because I am a cultural determinist. Immigration, unless tempered by assimilation programs, will and is already leading to the Balkinization of this great country. The US federal government slashed and burned its way through Dixie in 1861-65 because white workers had the political will to deny new states the comparative advantage of slave labor. The same political will led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The same political will bans non-Shanghainese from entering Shanghai without a work permit (Yes, China has INTERNAL immigration restrictions) Perhaps in the Great Collapse, an economic nationalist wing will emerge from each of the major parties and synthesize a new protectionist party. (I won't even go into the pros and cons of unionization here).

But protectionism too, leads to macro-economic implications: Let's say a Buchananist party wins the Presidency and Congress and restricts immigration and imports. Capital is electronic and can flow freely. Multi-nationals will simply divest and move overseas completely. There is ALWAYS another market. The factories that moved to Mexico post-NAFTA went to China's coastal cities. Now inflation has made coastal industry less profitable, and so Chinese firms are moving inland to the backwoods. Some are even moving to Vietnam and Nigeria. Every place that the arbitragers touch may seize on a global trend of protectionism. Such a scenario would spell the end of the globalist project. The end of Wal-Mart. The return of 70s-era crappy cars.

An aging population will drive away younger workers who don't want to bust their asses to pay taxes to support Social Security. And so Germans will have to hire Turks. And the French will have to hire Moroccans. And the English will have to hire Pakistanis. And Italians will have to hire Albanians. And Japanese will have to hire Filipinos. And Americans will have to hire Mexicans.

Back to this young, aspiring Ragnar Danneskjold sitting next to me in the bar. Legalize drugs? Sure. I can understand the Libertarian arguments. But there are implications for such a society that the legalizers fail or refuse to appreciate because they are too psyched-up after reading Reason magazine or Ayn Rand or something, an elated feeling that someone, somewhere has an easy dogmatic answer to contemporary human dilemmas.

Legalization of drugs has the same social costs that we already bear for legalized alcohol: Motor vehicle fatalities, domestic violence, a subculture of addiction, a generation of college grads lost to binge drinking. My problem is not with those who drink or smoke responsibly. My problem is with the cost of foster care and battered women’s shelters. And the cost of city morgues that will fill up with crackheads shot by card-carrying NRA members like myself. Such a society had better have a mechanism to handle the damage that legalization will inflict upon the taxpayer.

Such a society concedes that a large segment of its population is beyond redemption and cannot be trusted to function in society, much less respect another's rights or civic culture; a permanent prison/institutional population. We are way past the point where a voluntary sterilization project could have prevented their births in the first place, a la Margaret Sanger's proto-eugenics ideas. Are proponents of drug legalization prepared for streets littered with homeless addicts? We can't even deal with the homeless alcoholics we have now (my shout out to the pieces of shit buzzing the Bay Ridge Ave and 95th Street R train stations).

So punk-ass, even if we legalized drugs and went to a totally free-economy out of a Robert Heinlen novel, who would want to hire a dope-sucking anarchist who bitches about shit all day? How about some Darwinian reality? How about those who abstain from drugs have undiminished mental capacity are fit for economic survival and those to don't prove themselves unfit for survival? If Libertarians fully understand and accept that consequence, well shit, point me the fuck to the sign-up table! But those Libertarians that have the balls to think that won't dare say it, fearing public outrage that would further condemn them to Third Party status.

By the time this neer-do-well finished his rambling, I turned to see her on the far side of the bar, stacking glasses. The conversation on high Western culture, now a faded echo….