Politics for the pragmatic soul
The politics of faith and wishes
Communism, the Devil and I
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
(Karl Marx)
I could have been about 15-16 when I had a friend with a great name. Translated to English it would be Leslie Devil. (Ördögh László). True to his name, he loved to play the Devil’s advocate. We had long discussions about the quote above. We found Marx’s concept offensively simplistic.
He called the hunter-gatherer existence with its barter economy ‘primitive communism’. Then came “all the hitherto existing societies” of exploitation, but with the help of his ideas, we were supposed to look forward to the glory of the real communism to come. We tried to refine, not to refute his ideas.
What we both believed in, the point we couldn’t go beyond was the inevitability of progress. The idea that our reality represented a next step in societal evolution. A step beyond capitalism with no way back.
It took me more than a decade to get it passed. I met several people in that decade with the same foundational belief and the drive to make the world a better place.
I wanted to make the world a better place. We just had to do it within the confines of our reality.
I knew many good communists who were just trying to overcome the obstacles on the path of progress.
If you wanted to get things done, like organizing a school dance, you had to be a member of the Komsomol. It was a prerequisite to any organized social activity, even if you did not really care about the ‘grand idea’. After a while I stopped seeing them as communists. For me, the communists were the people in power, not the ones who were trying to salvage whatever was left of civil society.
As we are moving on the path of progress towards global communism, I keep meeting the types on their hopeless quest of doing good in an ever less caring world.
Public service
A few months back, I went to see a friend, and finally met his wife. I know him for a few years, but he always kept his wife separate from the conservative circle in which we met. He explained this by saying that his wife is a liberal, working in the constituency office of an actual liberal member of the Canadian parliament. He just wanted to keep his personal life apart from his political views to avoid possible friction.
I wanted to understand how did she get where she is, while my wife wanted to understand how can anybody support a corrupt, vacuous, incompetent and sleazy bullsh*tter like Trudeau.
When we met, we found a genuinely decent, good person eager to help. She said that the MP she is working for is an old friend who needed help when she was running for office, and when she won, she stayed around to help her as a full-time staffer. Her job is to help people who come from the constituency to their representative with their problems. She takes care of those problems. She does not care about the budget and the employment figures or NATO membership, politics to her means helping people with their problems. Either directly, or by directing them to the appropriate government agency.
We could ask: is THAT politics? Offering help and redress to petitioning citizens?
The book that led me to libertarianism was Charles Murray’s “Losing ground”.
My only exposure up to that point was the works of Ayn Rand.
The most important element of Murray’s book was its emphasis on civil society. I was immediately able to relate to it, to understand why, you should read my post on the Attapawiskat kulturni Dom. A few years later I read David Beito’s “From Mutual aid to the welfare state” describing the process in which the state slowly took over all the functions of civil society. Mutual aid was turned into a power relation where we all have to petition the state to give us back a little bit of the power and resources they have taken from us.
In the world that we already walked away from, the wife of our friend would be a member of a civil society organization helping those in need. She reminded me to the well-meaning decent people of my youth who did the best they could under the circumstances. Should this be called politics? The replacement of civil society by an ever-more totalitarian state?
(…and its well-meaning representatives?)
The doctor who cares
Dr Shawn Whatley already wrote two books on Canadian healthcare.
No More Lethal Waits: 10 Steps to Transform Canada's Emergency Departments &
When Politics Comes Before Patients: Why and How Canadian Medicare is Failing
I even had the privilege of looking at some early drafts, just to find out that I am a terrible editor. A good editor should help the author in clarifying and thus amplifying the message, not to argue with it. I really wanted to help and contribute, but I could not bring myself to improve on something I so fundamentally disagree with.
I reviewed the second book here: Communist boots, bread and health care
Dr Whatley is a perfect example of the communist goodwill: trying to save the irredeemable. Reform the unchangeable. Fix the hopelessly broken.
While he clearly sees the problem:
“Governments […] try to be the buyer and seller of the same item at the same time. It cannot be done.”
….. he still finishes the book with the following paragraphs:
Governments feel political pressure to do something. But fixing Medicare is like trying to be happy. We can achieve happiness only by trying to accomplish other goals. Medicare will improve only when we try to change the environment in which it exists. We need to treat Medicare more like a child and less like a puppet. We need to create the environment for care to flourish and take a shape that matches patients’ needs, instead of forcing it to grow in a political science laboratory.
Patient care should be pursued for its own sake, not to achieve some other purpose. This is obvious and true in the same way that putting politics before patient care is wrong. Medical care in Canada will never improve until governments commit to what most Canadians know already: that medicare is supposed to meet patients’ needs, and not the needs of doctors, nurses, politicians, planners, lobbyists, governments, or anyone else.
Wishful thinking is not politics. Socialized medicine cannot be saved any more than any of the other socialist dumpster fires. I could feel sorry for Dr. Whatley just as I did for the other good communists I encountered in my life; but the idea he is so desperately trying to protect – the idea that governments should have some role in healthcare - is killing me, figuratively speaking, but my wife, literally. We escaped communism, just to find ourselves its victims, again.
The GENEtics of politics
Like the Good doctor Whatley, my libertarian friend and fellow Substacker
is trying to be the saviour of another God that failed: democracy. He loves clever concepts and acronyms and truly believes that we can figure out a system to manage our shared affairs. He has various theories of technology enabled direct democracy. He is a bona fide libertarian, but with a technocratic drive to create solutions to pragmatic problems. I have seen some of his ideas; very clever but completely unworkable.Tinkering with democracy isn’t any better than tinkering with socialism or healthcare.
Yes, goulash communism is better than hardcore Stalinism, but the problem is the foundation which is far more than just ideology. It also built on faith, wishful thinking, emotions like fear and envy, zero sum selfishness and misguided good intentions.
I am told way too often that I shouldn’t just call everybody a communist; although I am just following in the footsteps of Mises. I also don’t like to be critical without offering positive suggestions.
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More from here
This post is part three of an (unplanned) series. Here are the first two: