Technofideism

An intriguing passage from the fascinating (and deeply troubling) book Merchants of Doubt, about which much more soon to come:

"Cornucopians hold to a blind faith in technology that isn't borne out by the historical evidence.  We call it 'technofideism.'

Why do they hold this belief when history shows it to be untrue? Again we turn to Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, where he claimed that “the great advances of civilization, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.” To historians of technology, this would be laughable had it not been written (five years after Sputnik) by one of the most influential economists of the second half of the twentieth century. 

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Leviathan or Puppet?

One of the favorite rhetorical weapons of the Right is to point to the sheer page count of federal legislation, particularly the Federal Tax Code.  They are especially fond of pointing out that the tax code is longer than the Bible, though there seems to be considerable haziness on the precise margin.  This is often presented as damning evidence of the overgrown power of the federal government, a sprawling, all-consuming monster that has its tentacles in everything.  Of course, no one would deny that there is a lot of truth to this picture.

But reading Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens, it occurred to me that another interpretation is possible.  Perhaps the sheer length of US tax regulations is more a sign of impotence than omnipotence.  Think about it.  

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Taxation and Christian Ethics, Pt. 2: Paying Up

From the passages discussed in Part 1, we can glean several principles about our responsibility to pay our taxes, and about the extent to which it is legitimate to try to minimize our tax-paying through legal loopholes, etc.  Here's a first attempt to think through those principles, and how they might apply concretely.  

1. We shouldn’t care

For himself, the Christian shouldn’t be bothered about paying taxes.  This is chiefly because the Christian shouldn’t be bothered about money in general.  “Do not store up for yourself treasures on earth” (Mt. 6:19-34; Lk. 12:13-34); “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”  We are certainly not to seek after wealth as a good in itself--that much is obvious enough.  But nor are we to seek after it unduly as a means to meet our needs, for we are to have faith that God will provide--interestingly, it is what we might call legitimate prudence, rather than miserly greed, that is primarily being targeted in both the Matthew 6 and Luke 12 passages.  This does not mean, of course, that we are to indulge in sloth and apathy; it means we are to work diligently in faith, without fear, and it means that if we have enough for our needs, we will be content.  If someone demands money from us, then we will have no reason to make a fuss about it, because we don’t need it.  Of course, this raises the objection, “What if we do *need* it?  What if the government is in fact levying very oppressive taxes on very poor people?”  Well, actually, it kinda was in the Palestine of Jesus’s day; and Jesus still calls on us to trust and pay.  I imagine that there could very well be exceptions, however; but as our own tax systems are far less oppressive, considering our disposable income, it hardly seems like a relevant objection in modern America.

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Love the Government, Hate the Government

I have for several months now been vexed by the irresolvable contradictions of the American political mindset.  For the first two decades of my life, I was brought up to believe that the problem with our society was that we had way too much faith in the government--the State was our Saviour, an idol to which we sacrificed all and for which we looked for every solution.  And this critique resonated deeply with me.  

For the past year, though, I have begun to wonder.  Having traveled overseas, what has struck me most about America is not how much faith we put in our government, but how little.  The rise of the Tea Party movement and the fall of Congressional approval ratings to historic lows has underscored this long-growing tendency of American politics.  We don't trust our government to do anything; we consider it not our government, but simply the government, an alien entity that forces us to obey it and pay it tribute, like an invading force.  And perhaps this should be a greater matter of concern than the State-as-idol concern.  After all, our current situation bears all the marks of the decline and fall of a great civilizations, as summarized by Carroll Quigley in his 1963 The Evolution of Civilizations (thanks to my Dad for this quote): 

"[There is] acute economic depression, declining standards of living, civil wars between the various vested interests, and growing illiteracy.  The society grows weaker and weaker.  Vain efforts are made to stop the wastage by legislation.  But the decline continues. The religious, intellectual, social, and political levels of the society begin to lose the allegiance of the masses of the people on a large scale.  New religious movements begin to sweep over the society.  There is a growing reluctance to fight for the society or even to support it by paying taxes."

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The Problem in a Nutshell

The contents of this post are probably nothing new if you've this blog for awhile, but as people back home sometimes get baffled and think I'm a left-wing loony, I've been thinking of a way to encapsulate where I'm coming from politico-economically in a nice, neat (though none too eloquent) nutshell.  So here's a try:

I'm for a free market, or more importantly, a free society, which includes a free market.  Freedom requires the removal of oppressive constraints.  But oppressive constraints are precisely what are put in place by large and powerful entities determined to retain and advance their power.  We live in a world full of massive, extremely wealthy and powerful entities.  Our government is one, to be sure.  But when there's ten bullies on the block jockeying for position, you don't get freedom just by taking out the current top bully--rather, by doing this you invite the nine others to come in and take his place, and woe to you if they turn out to be less benign than the first.  If we're going to live in an age of massive, centralized multinational corporations, then unfortunately we're going to need massive, centralized governments to keep them in line (though unfortunately, these will often collude with the corporations, rather than restraining them).  You focus just on removing the governments and you don't get freedom, you just get regime change--indeed, from a constitutional regime to an unrestricted one.  Conservatives talk as if freedom will be attained simply by removing one bully from the equation--the government--and leaving all the others untouched.  But if they get their wish, they may find that the government was, for all its foibles, the only thing maintaining some semblance of freedom from all the other bullies on the block.  So if we're going to talk about freedom, let's start talking about how to shrink all the bullies down to size, something that will require laws and constraints--things which, believe it or not, can be aids to freedom, rather than chains.

Now, I realize now that that's really only half of what needs to be said, so I suppose I'll try to work up a Pt. 2: The Solution in a Nutshell.  Heh, that should be fun...