The Public Interest – Carl Peter Klapper
The Popular Capitalist View
Recent actions and initiatives, particularly on the federal level, have brought up the issue of how far the public interest extends and what the scope and nature of the public function ought to be in serving that interest. Popular Capitalism addresses this question by applying its core populist philosophy of advancing the cause of the individual against privately or publicly owned collectives, as well as against the predations and intimidations of more powerful individuals.
It does this primarily by assuring that government pay the cost of sovereignty for the political economy by directly paying to each independent citizen their cost of survival and to each household, the cost of survival of minor or infirm dependents under their care. This is what I refer to as “the provision of the necessities”. In addition, it requires that government provides to each new or prospective citizen the elementary civics education necessary to acquaint them with their legal rights and responsibilities. Such education must include instruction in the language of the law of the land.
After this assurance of minimal individual power, it curtails collective power that would be gained through the apparatus of the political economy by reserving functions requiring judgment and objectivity to governmental agencies under the control of laws and by reserving functions which would otherwise come under natural monopolistic control or which are necessary for the prevention of and protection from calamity to governmental agencies under the most immediate and local electoral control. Note that so-called “privatization”, whereby public functions are farmed out to private interests and thus establishes state mandated monopolies and oligoplies with little to no electoral control, is directly contrary to what is proposed here. For this reason, Popular Capitalism is firmly opposed to governments contracting out work, regardless of the bidding scheme employed.
While dealing with the threat of collective power and thus that of its functionaries, Popular Capitalism does not reject well-established public functions to deal with other types of threats. It firmly supports limits on the power of an individual against their fellow citizens. And besides these public functions for threats from within, Popular Capitalism assigns to the highest federal level the public functions for eliminating, limiting or protecting from threats to the body politic from without.
Lastly, Popular Capitalism recognizes that these public functions have operational requirements, though these should be met without compromising the main objective of power to the people, individually and without exception. Thus, Popular Capitalism would provide for a skilled government work force by establishing the certification process for the various skills demanded of government workers at an intermediate level of government that balances electoral control and adherence to reasonable minimal standards. This allows people to gain those skills independently from the certification. Only in those cases where on-the-job training is required for a job that is not or should not be privately performed, e.g. being a soldier, should government training be required in addition to the certification.
With this abstract setting, we can present some typically radical popular capitalist views on recent issues:
1. National Health Insurance. This is a bad idea on several levels. First, insurance should never have been involved in health care in the first place. It is neither care nor caring. To save a few bucks, it demands that doctors prescribe the wrong drugs. It increases the amount that doctors and hospitals can charge while maintaining the same out-of-pocket expense for the patient. The list goes on, but this is enough to show that insurance should be firmly booted out of our health care system and not further institutionalized in a federal system. Secondly, the scope is too broad to serve the people. The same remoteness and unwillingness to consider the specific needs of specific patients that have beleagured other national health care systems will plague a national health insurance system. Thirdly, municipal health care staffed by state medical workers provides an alternative that eliminates the insurance middleman, responds to individual needs, limits medical expenses through a set government pay scale and provides an avenue for innovation at the local level.
2. Same-Sex Marriage. That is up to the participants and their faith. Marriage is a deeply personal matter as well as being a religious institution, so intrusion is this area is an assault on personal freedoms and in violation of the “establishment of religion” clause of First Amendment. Government should have no involvement with this or any kind of marriage. There should be no registration of marriage and no laws with respect to such registration. Similarly, there should be no laws with respect to divorce. Arguments for governmental involvement in this area based on employment benefits are mooted by the provision of the necessities and municipal health care.
3. Government-Owned Corporations. Popular capitalism opposes these. If there are necessary public functions which these corporations perform, then those functions should be performed by government agencies staffed entirely by government workers on a government pay scale and adhering to civil service regulations. That way, the the work is kept to the public purpose. Arguments to take over companies based on preservation of jobs are mooted by the provision of necessities. While we are on the subject…
4. Preservation of Jobs or Job Growth as a Justification for Anything. This nonsense is based entirely on the false assumption that employers should be responsible for the cost of survival of their employees. The core argument of Popular Capitalism is that that responsibility belongs to government. Passing it on to employers increases their labor costs and decreases the size of their optimal work force. Preservation of jobs or increasing jobs beyond what would have occurred through market forces in this setting is simply a roundabout way of trying to undue the bad effects of bad policies without eliminating the bad policies themselves. The popular capitalist prescription with respect to jobs is to provide for the necessities and let the market determine the number of jobs and their compensation.
5. Gun Control. This is where we catch flack from the “libertarians” in asserting the right of municipal governments to restrict or prohibit the private ownership of firearms. Jefferson, brilliant though he was, was only one of the “Founding Fathers” and, even with his prominent role, his opinions are not as important as the words of the Constitution. It is the Constitution that was ratified, not the collected sayings of Thomas Jefferson. In that Constitution, the primary basis of the ratification is the Preamble in that it gives the intent and overriding purpose for which everything else is just the detail to achieve that purpose. The key purposes for this question are “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense”. Private gun ownership is often an impediment to establishing justice, indeed in establishing injustice if not committing outright crimes. The same applies to domestic tranquility. These two purposes strike at the very heart of the essential reason for establishing a body politic: replacing the expense, stress and barbarism of individual defense with a common defense. Thus, private gun ownership, by refusing to relinguish the individual defense, also works against the purpose of providing a common defense. The Second Amendment addresses this issue head on by qualifying the “right of the people to keep and bear arms” only for the task of creating a “well regulated militia” in fulfilling the purpose of the “security of a free state”, i.e. the common defense. The regulations would be established by each State, but the militia units could be established by each municipality or community within the State. The degree of private gun ownership allowed, if any, under the regulations for miltias is thus the province of the States. Within this Constitutional context, and with the purpose of reducing the cost of survival for each individual while also protecting them from others who own guns or have access to them, the popular capitalist view would be in favor of the abolition of private gun ownership, the storage of guns in armories for the use of the militias under strict regulations, militia border control by the state and the disarming of the police force.
I know I have covered a lot of ground here, but I can provide a simple summation. The public interest is in preserving the public, by serving all of the people and maintaining the civility amongst them which makes them a public.
CPK
I think this was your best article to date. I have long felt that one of the biggest threats to progress in America is the overwhelming civic and economic power of public and private collectives. In my opinion, these large interests are what hold us back from important policies such as education reform and rekindling the production economy that helped build this great country. Banks, Energy Companies, and Credit Card Companies have so much power that they can essentially break the laws of common decency in order to turn a profit, and because they control our addiction to fuel and liquid assets, there’s nothing we can really do.
In ancient Rome it was forbiden to carry swords, but the people still dound ways to effectivly kill one another. If you ban guns, pipe bombs become more attractive. If your restrict acess to those materials, another weapon will be developed. There are estimates that suggest that more weapons exists in this country, than citizens. Data also sugests that most guns are not obtained legaly, so I would argue that you are essentaly advocating those same laws that have been so sucessful in alcohol and other illicit substances.
Should we outlaw cars becaue they can be used as a weapon? Should hammers be controled by the ATF? I have not known a single tyrany that has not sought to disarm its citizendry. Charles I tried to disarm protestants and other disadents. The British did the same to our founding fathers.
How is it unjust to allow a man to keep and bear arms? There is a risk that a lunatic will hurt people or some idiot will get drunk and fire a wayward shot. I am not convinced that a risk of harm out weighs the right to truck, barter, and exchange honestly.
My argument is that the decision to control weaponry or not should be left to the local level. The ATF has no reason for existence under my policy; for firearms at the federal level in this thread and for alcohol, tobacco and other substances under the general rule that it is not the province of government at any level.
Though I am personally in favor of banning cars, that would be a matter for the local voters to decide, perhaps circumscribed by some general rule about use as a weapon being the primary or most common use of a device within the considered context. Nonsense such as compasses and safety pins being considered weapons would not pass muster if put up for a local vote and, even if it did, could be overturned by a court with reference to a general rule. A car driven in a pedestrian area, up on a sidewalk as they like to do in the movies, has no other purpose than as a weapon in that context. In typical sprawl, confined to the roads, its purpose is transportation, not as a weapon.
As for history, need I remind you that every tyrant came to power by force of arms, by private armies or public armies converted to private use. Often this took the form of protection rackets, not unlike those of the Mafia, where citizens terrorized by gangs of armed thugs gave authority to a warlord to gain some measure of civility. The people in that case, the unarmed citizenry, thought the tyrant better than the armed citizenry.
It is quite depressing to read the statistics about there being more guns than citizens — I am assuming that safety pins are not included in the weapon count — but it is indicative of the general breakdown in civility. The provision of necessities would, by addressing the survival issues, eliminate the need for some people to employ force in order to eat or feed their families and thus restore civility. Then more people would be, as I am, gun-less.
Your words sound far to much like an advocation of democracy. Given the stigmata that comes from being enthusastic about guns, it is likely that the majoity could vote against the minority of gun owners who do no harm to others, but offend the majoitarian sentiment that guns are in some way impropper. Unless I am completly off the mark, you seem to find the ability off local comunites to deny the property I find chewing gum offensive. I suspect that televison does harm to the community, but I cannot comprehend forbiding its existance. The risks of accedental gun deaths is far lower than the media would sugest. The Vriginia Tech shootings could just have easily been bombings or gassings. Are you sugesting that tools and results are equivalent?
The difference is between being distasteful and being threatening. The first is the inevitable result of people being in community. The second is incompatible with community, not because there is some vague communal danger but because individual people are intimidated.
Common law does not look kindly upon intimidation. If you feel the necessity of carrying a device whose sole purpose is to kill and you are in a city or other environs where game is nowhere in sight, where there are only people and harmless pets, then you are threatening to kill people. You have, in that case, already committed assault against everyone whose path you have crossed. Innocence has already been lost. Further actions merely make the charges more serious. Shooting is battery. Killing is, depending on intent, anything from manslaughter to first degree murder. The line, however, has already been crossed by carrying a gun. And obviously the same would apply to something that could be readily recognizable as a weapon. Of course, most bombs or poisonous gas containers are not easily identifiable as such. On the other hand, the squeegee guys brandishing baseball bats above car windows are committing assault, while somebody carrying a baseball bat on the subway would be assumed to be on their way to or from a game and not trying to intimidate anyone.
By the way, this is why I am not in favor of the police having guns. Peaceable citizens should not be intimidated on a daily basis.
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