by Tom Baugh
Lease land from the farmer? If you think it is a nightmare for him to hire you to fix a fence, imagine the terror of wading through a lease. It will cost him hundreds of dollars, minimum, to even get started with having a lawyer look it over. Add to that his legal risks should you hurt yourself or your chickens get loose and flap a driver into a tree. Now that scrub land isn't looking so bad as it is.
Add to all of these your own issues such as dealing with the health department after that backyard fiasco. Then mix in the tax laws which regulate barter and exchange transactions. Now that welfare check isn't looking like so much of a disgrace.
Hire another peasant to help you clean the scrub land? Congratulations, you just became boss and farmer rolled into one. Get ready for the hassles of both. Workplace safety, environmental regulations, food and drug compliance issues, taxes, insurance, liability and the entire mountain of modern employment just fell upon your starving peasant shoulders. Now stop dreaming and get back to your miserable life from which there is no lawful escape.
Wow. Now let's try some other topics from Smith's book. In Smith's world, the reason to squirrel away some extra coin is that you then have the chance to become your own boss. As your own boss, you might then manage your own day to the best of your abilities. Our first hypothetical peasant might deal with the farmer to provide mutual benefit, and then perhaps hire another peasant to assist with the requisite labor. Similarly, that second peasant might go into the scrub-clearing business himself. However, in our modern world the hurdle to even start your own business means that most will never try. And the few that do face such a regulatory uphill battle that most fail very quickly.
The only purpose for the state, in Smith's classical model, is to prevent fraud or theft. If peasant number three steals chickens from your leased lot, the magistrate handles that. And the barrister takes care of things should you fail to clear the scrub as you promised. You pay taxes to support the first, and fees to support the second, with the sheriff, also supported by taxes, standing by to enforce the judgements.
But in our modern world, and to a greater degree, the state becomes an instrument of coercion to allow the transfer of ill-gotten gains. Including those ill-gotten gains such as the settlement of a frivolous lawsuit. Or, through the blunt-handed intrusion of paperwork and regulations, the state prevents the free exchange of labor, services and material itself.
Smith writes from the perspective of a subject of the British monarchy. As such, the feudal system had just been overthrown, but much of that system still lingered in his time in the form of land ownership and rents. So, Smith's farmer doesn't necessarily own his land, but instead rents it for long periods, essentially for life, from a lord or the king. This, by the way is the origin of the term "landlord", or lord of the land which you are renting to till. If you are a lord in that day, you can choose to rent to whomever you wish, as long as they are willing to pay. You can also decide not to rent to someone for whatever reason you choose, but you would be foolish to turn down good money.
As far as the farmer is concerned, he may be induced to give up his current lease to another farmer through a suitable cash payment. After this transaction is completed, the second farmer is then free to use the land, but now he must pay rent to the lord or king or be booted off. Note that it is absolutely irrelevant how much the second farmer paid to the first farmer for the right to take up the lease.
In modern terms, imagine if the second farmer paid the first farmer four hundred thousand dollars for the right to lease from the lord for four thousand dollars a year. But, the second farmer's failure to pay the lord the relatively small sum per year invalidates the entire lease. Viewed this way, you don't own your house, you only own the right to pay the lease, which we call property tax, to the county lord. When you sell a house, you are really just selling that lease to another. If you rent, not even your landlord owns the house. He just, in turn, pays his own version of protection money to the king.
That last one should have hit you in the stomach. If it didn't, you're not paying attention and the rest of this book will be of little value to you. You own nothing. The king, meaning in our case the state, and thus the people, do. Your right to property is a fiction. Yet right to property is a cornerstone of a free people. You are not free if you cannot own and build from what you have. You are merely a servant in a collectivist state. Governments, and collectivists, love property taxes as you must slave away to pay them even if your efforts put not one scrap of food on your own table.
You may start to see why no one teaches from Adam Smith's book anymore. Radical stuff. Particularly if you want to convince someone to go off to war and fight for a set of freedoms. Freedoms which include your right to property, or right to sell your time and services to others for whatever terms you can agree upon. Freedoms which don't really exist and haven't for a very long time.
Beyond that, though, the economic principles involved are just as valid today as before. You just have to substitute "machine" for "worker" and then Smith's work applies word for word. We'll see how in more detail as we progress.
Once you have absorbed Adam Smith's seminal work, you will then be ready for some philosophy. So go off and read an even larger book:
Reading Assignment
Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand Ayn Rand was a brilliant lady. She was also a refugee from socialism. About a half-century ago she wrote that book to highlight the dangers of socialism which she saw following her to this country. At the time she wrote that classic work of economic fiction her ideas seemed a little paranoid.
Now her ideas seem prophetic.
Ask a hundred people who have heard of that book, and very few will have been able to finish it. That's a good screening tool right there, by the way. Most who start reading it have to eventually put it aside as it makes them feel kind of bad. Those who finish it tend to like it.
Like it a lot, in fact.
Some of the economic nonsense which we suffer through today was predicted by Ayn in that book. The names of various policies are different, but the policies themselves are eerily similar.
She was wrong about a couple of things, though. First, the book completely ignores children, except for a couple of helpful waifs. Those who might want to take her ideas to heart, and to implement them directly, might run into a problem when they take the needs of their children to heart. Unfortunately, to some degree or another one's children in the modern world are held hostage to your compliance with popular reason. For example, very few cubicle slaves would choose their lifestyle if they didn't have kids to take care of.
After you read this book, though, you might find a solution to this dilemma. It turns out that you can apply Ayn's ideas, even if you have children. And they will probably benefit from the experience.
She was also wrong about her understanding of the nature of collectives. In her eyes, the collective responds to the heroes of the story in an almost childishly gentle way. In reality, however, the collective is far more aggressive about stamping out dissent from individuals. With brutality, if necessary.
Ayn was also a bit naive about the character of the man on the street. Later portions of this book will highlight where my thoughts diverge from hers.
Once those two books are under your belt, you need to read the essential explanation of evolutionary principles:
Reading Assignment
The Selfish Gene
by Richard Dawkins Warning: Theologians hate that book and its author with a hell-fire burning passion. I have actually been dis-invited from speaking at theological seminaries after recommending that book as part of the preparatory material for the attendees.
Dawkins wrote that book in 1976, and then released an update in 1989. He then released a 30th anniversary edition in 2006. Get the anniversary edition if you can, it has some pretty interesting notes and changes in it.
The central theme of the book is how organisms and ideas evolve over time. Organisms evolve through the use of
genes, while ideas, in Dawkin's terminology, evolve through the use of memes. Meme is a word which means memory, or idea, genes.
Dawkins also explains that Darwin didn't really explain evolution, he just expounded a theory which could explain some characteristics of animals. Like it or not, evolution is a fact of life. Does that mean that men evolved from monkeys or that God didn't create life? Of course not. Evolution is no better equipped to explain the origin of life than creationism, or even the best of science. No one, to my knowledge, has yet to explain how to create a cellulose molecule from water and carbon using mechanisms which are built of cellulose and self-replicating. Or even how to build up a cellulose molecule from glucose molecules. Much less how to use that cellulose molecule, along with lots of other stuff, to make that mechanism which we call a cell.
And while we're putting requirements on scientists, let's add in the nifty detail of making this hypothetical mechanism run on solar energy. And eat carbon dioxide and water for raw materials. And spit out pure oxygen as a waste product. And look pretty. And smell good. And make more of itself.
Wow. We can't even figure out a really good way of breaking cellulose down into its constituent glucose molecules. At least without using special bacteria, another living thing which we can't make, to help us. If we could crack that nut, we would have an unlimited amount of food and liquid fuel at our disposal.
Yet a cow does exactly this all day long. Using those same bacteria, which evolution equipped it with. And which we found using brains which evolution provided us with. But neither evolution nor creationism explains how that bacteria works, or how the cow came to have some of them along with special organs to host them. Other than, "because."
In my opinion, evolution works because that's what God designed it to do. Evolution explains lots of things, like why stupid results in bad stuff. Or at least why it should. Evolutionary forces are at work around us, and the best examples of evolution involve those memes. Bad ideas should die out. When we promote bad ideas over good ideas, bad things start to happen. Continuing to do this constitutes a worse idea.
Eventually, the bad things will get bad enough that the brains which promote the worse ideas will run out of stuff like food. And then die. Along with a lot of other brains which didn't having anything at all to do with the worse ideas. Other than not getting rid of those other brains first. And that tolerance is just another kind of worse idea all by itself, isn't it?
See how cool evolution is? If you take away that concept from Dawkin's book, you will see how to direct the natural forces which surround you in ways that benefit you, instead of fighting those forces and losing.
You will also be able to spot those bad ideas and the worse ideas. And understand why bad and worse ideas seem to take over for a while. And why the brains which promote those ideas can't last for very long.
The other key take-away from "The Selfish Gene" is the idea of suckers, cheaters and grudgers. To take the time to explain this concept would take another book, but fortunately Dawkins has already written it all down in his. In a nutshell, lots of human behavior can be boiled down into those three, or suitable variations thereof. There have been philosophical arguments over the most valid ways in which those behaviors can interact with each other to form civilizations.
One day, as Dawkins tells it, some guy named Axelrod did some computer simulations about these ideas. He simplified some aspects of the problem, and made other aspects more complicated, and even opened up some of the simulation to other experts. This is so interesting that my son and I spent a couple of months reproducing these results during our homeschool philosophy and computer science courses. By the way, my son was thirteen at the time we studied this. If he had been in public school, the only philosophy he would have experienced is a meaningful discussion of why plants cry.
Axelrod's results were surprising, as are Dawkin's interpretation of these results. But on reflection, you can see how they make sense by looking around at people you know. And once their behavior makes sense to you, you will realize that a lot of people suck.
Here is a very simplified version of these results. Imagine a world of suckers. Because they are all suckers, no one cheats anybody out of anything. Everyone lives happily ever after.
Now insert one cheater. This cheater can cheat suckers all day long. And prosper like crazy. And then reproduce like crazy. At some point, though, the cheaters start bumping up against each other. And then they stop prospering so much. They still prosper way more than suckers, mind you, but not as much as they did before.
And then, the cheaters start maintaining herds of suckers. Why? Because it is much easier to sucker a captive herd than it is to go out and find a new sucker. Especially if you might run across a fellow cheater. It will take time to figure out you are dealing with another cheater, and like the guy says on TV, "I can't do this all day." The cheater also doesn't want to suck his suckers dry, as it would cut down on his goodies. He also doesn't want some other cheater horning in on his suckers.
The suckers and the cheater will reach a kind of equilibrium, and again, everyone lives happily ever after, except the suckers have a lower quality of life than they would without the cheater. But, since they are suckers, they don't mind.
Now introduce the grudger. A grudger acts like a sucker once. But as soon he encounters a cheater, he puts the cheater on his list. And then our grudger beats the hell out of the cheater every time he sees him again.
Suckers are no problem for the grudger, because he never cheats them, and they never cheat him. Absent a cheater, the suckers would also get along fine with a grudger, or any number of them.
But the cheaters mind the grudger quite a bit, as you might imagine. As much as it sucks to waste time with a fellow cheater, running into a grudger can ruin his whole day. All those hell-beatings get in the way of his cheating, after all.
The cheater's response? Turn his herd of suckers against the grudger. The cheater's herd is composed of suckers, after all, and easily fooled into thinking the grudger is a problem. The cheaters will also learn to team up with the other cheaters and get all their suckers to turn on the grudger, too. "That bastard has to be stamped out, and hard, before he ruins it for all of us," the cheaters agree among themselves. The suckers are happy to oblige with this universal action. Because, after all, say it together, "they are suckers."
So, in a society of suckers and cheaters, a lone grudger has to act like a sucker and just suck it up when he runs across a cheater. Or, he has to get on the cheating train and start running around cheating. Either choice is anathema to his grudger nature, and causes him a great deal of personal anxiety. But, absent a way to wipe all the cheaters out, it is pretty much the only choice which allows him to avoid, say, a stoning.
By the way, a society filled with grudgers would get along fine. As would a mix of grudgers and suckers. It's the cheaters who are the problem, but the suckers are too sucky to figure that out.
With all the grudgers fading into the background acting like suckers or cheaters and getting ulcers from the stress, it is hard for one grudger to recognize another. Just having the conversation might set off all the alarms the cheaters have installed. Even the suckers will sound the alarm for the cheaters, as they have been instructed to do. But if grudgers could team up, in sufficient numbers, they might have a chance to pick off all the cheaters.
Every last one of them.
You will get more of the flavor for the sucker/cheater/grudger concepts from reading Dawkin's book, but you should have the gist of it by now. After you finish reading my book, the one you are reading now, you might want to revisit the dilemma which the hypothetical grudger faces.
And consider a possible solution to his problem.
Dawkins has another book out, "The God Delusion," which is purportedly a scholarly refutation of the existence of God. I don't know for sure, because I haven't read it yet. So, I really can't say anything good or bad about it. I do know that it has theologians in a tizzy.
They are so enraged or offended by the latter book that they then, apparently, transfer that rage onto the first.
I've seen this happen for myself. I can have a great conversation with someone about "The Selfish Gene" until I mention the author's name. If they have been briefed in about "The God Delusion" they then shut down, or at least try to quickly change the topic. His stuff is that powerful. One day I'm going to have to read the latter book and see what all the hub-bub is about. In the meantime, I don't think my faith is in any jeopardy from anyone's point of view. I have no doubt that God created the universe. I just question some of the religious notions which people embrace about the details.
It doesn't matter to me whether the universe is five thousand years old or five billion years or whatever. I know enough about science to know that not even the brightest of us can explain most of it. And we are a long, long way from being able to replicate even a slightest fraction of His Creation. Or for that matter, even harness it for our use. Or to say with confidence that my use of some of it is bad and your use of some of it is good.
The most beautiful description of creation I have ever seen is found in Ben Stein's documentary about the debate surrounding the origin of life:
Video Assignment
EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed To me, Ben's description of how a cell works, and how we know so little about it, is one of the most touching parts of the entire film. We know so little about so many things that it is foolish to allow anyone to do our thinking for us. God gave us individual minds for a reason. This film also explores the depths to which a collective will sink to crush opposing points of view. It shows many examples in which the liberal collective crushes any discussion of creation, or even of intelligent design versus evolution. And yet, the creation folks can get just as snippy. In their collectives, they also tend to cast out any demons who think differently from them.
I think both extremes of behavior are bad, because both camps want to shut down individual thought and replace it with conformance. Some pundits, even the very successful ones, claim that refusing to adopt an extreme point of view makes one a moderate, and then defines moderation as evil.