On Protest Movements & Conspiracy Theories, in 2-part Harmony. Common Time. Part II

What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side…
            (Allegro)

Our original reflection was concerning how a Paranoid Author would conspire, were he so inclined, to develop and implement a plan to subvert a nation like America. Richard Rubenstein suggested a model for such a conspiracy in The Cunning of History, and defends his philosophical mooring, and by extension my futuristic fantasy, with the following points.

1)   Scientific Theory. In the scientific way of speaking about nature there is the principle that biological life is imperialistic, which is to say that living things, in their populations, will naturally expand into available space in order to dominate that space and to ensure their own survival.

2)   Rubenstein’s Conclusion (100). If this is an accurate description of nature, then it is useless to speak of the ethical life of the individual, because "In all biological populations there are innate devices to adjust population growth to the carrying capacity of the environment. Undoubtedly, some such device exists in man."

Rubenstein (8-11) also enumerates and then illustrates what he thinks are at least two of those plausibly “innate devices” or “control mechanisms” that, even perhaps without our “conscious knowledge,” regulate human population and ensure its suitable expansion.

1)   War as a mechanism of population control. At the Battle of Verdun (begins February 1916) the German general’s strategy, says Rubenstein, was entirely biological in nature. “For the first time in memory a European nation had attempted to alter the biological rather than the military and political balance of power with an adversary." In this 9-month long battle, approximately one million men died. At the Battle of the Somme (begins July 1916), the British lost approximately 60,000 men the first day.  By December 1916 approximately 1,100,000 British, German, and French were dead in order for the British lines to move forward just 6 miles.

            On Rubenstein’s calculation, in WW I there were on average 6,000 state-made dead per day for 1,500 days, which means that each and every one of the countries involved in this conflict (i.e., Albania, Arabia, Austria-Hungary, Belgium and colonies, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Finland, France and Empire, Great Britain and Empire, Germany and Empire, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Italy and colonies, Japan, Latvia, Liberia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Nicaragua, Panama, Persia, Philippines, Poland, Portugal and colonies, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Siam, Turkey, Transcaucasia, and the Unites States of America) were in tacit agreement that some 10 million state-made dead represented a satisfactory, acceptable, and indeed desirable, political, economic, and moral loss.

2)   Bureaucracy as a mechanism of population control. It also seems pretty self-evident that in order for States to function as the gatekeepers for the regulation of human population and expansion, there needs to be some sort of fundamental organization or bureaucracy. One of the tools for this in the Nazi period was denationalization, the use of the status of statelessness for certain selected populations inside the greater population. Rubenstein (33): “Men without political rights are superfluous men. They have lost all right to life and human dignity. Political rights are neither God-given, autonomous nor self-validating. The Germans understood that no person has any rights unless they are guaranteed by an organized community with the power to defend such rights. They were perfectly consistent in demanding that the deportees be made stateless before being transported to the camps. They also understood that by exterminating stateless men and women, they violated no law because such people were covered by no law.”

What we need to retain for our Fantastic Reflection, then, is that there are two natural “control mechanisms” that regulate human population and ensure its suitable expansion:  War and Bureaucracy.

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid…

            (Obbligato - Allegro)

So, as the paranoid oracle-author of a potential American future, what philosophical ingredients would I need to assemble in order to transmogrify the E Pluribus Unum into the Nazi State of Rubenstein’s vision? Straight-forward wars and official state-made dead are integral to our plottings, of course, but there are also other, less noticeable steps that can be taken to dehumanize or destroy humanity beyond the destruction of individual bodies. The State can dehumanize or disappear the philosophical idea of the Individual.

            Now a promising recipe, which the Paranoid Author could follow in order to prepare the ground for the philosophical death of the Individual, would be the following: I) find ways to neutralize the idea of the cogito-Individual, as did the philosopher Martin Heidegger for his Nazi State; II) create an economic setting in which there was a strong and independent economic culture that The People believed in or valued or needed, and that The People could not control or dominate; and III) design a type of general cultural or State environment,

·      where All and Sundry were somehow being controlled,

·      where there is an appearance of Freedom reigning,

·      but where no one actually has the practical freedom or leisure to act against the agendas represented or furthered by Moneyed Interests.

Plot-lines in the Fantasy.

I. Neutralize the idea of the cogito-Individual. In order to make a philosophical reconstruction of America along the lines of Rubenstein’s vision, the Paranoid Author would need to start a process of dismantling the philosophical idea of the cogito-Individual. One part of this neutralization or dismantlement is the creation of a pervasive atmosphere of Fear, because it is necessary to convert the listener into an Emotional Person, a strongly feeling (believing) person who will naturally follow, rather than the calm path of rational consideration and analysis, the impulsive inclination of irrational emotions. In such a widespread environment of fear, the People would learn to respond with fear in the following general areas:

a)    Fear relevant to Religion – Fear of displeasing God, end of the world, destruction of the planet, fear of hell, damnation, eternal punishment, loss of heavenly crowns, etc.

b)   Fear relevant to Economics – Fear of job loss & unemployment, banking issues, crashes, downturns, big business, financial mismanagement, Ponzi schemes, mortgage defaults, debt ceilings, bankruptcies and liquidations, financial instability, debt in general, money shortage, rising cost of education, economic ratings, etc.

c)    Fear relevant to Politics – Fear of immigration, health care reform, civil liberties, political difference, defense spending, socialism, Social Security, Welfare, Medicare, wars and more wars, Iran and the bomb, Arab Spring, Islamic fundamentalism, War on Terror, War on Drugs, War on Poverty, War on Christmas, War on Women, etc.

d)   and Fear relevant to Social Issues – Fear of abortion (because it displeases God, see above), gay and lesbian rights (because it displeases God, see above), diversity, sexual predation, smoking pot, race issues, global warming, pornography, contraception, the environment, stem cell research, et al – see also Politics, Economics, and Displeasing God.

Ia. Neutralize the idea of the cogito-Individual. (Ostinato). Additionally, the Paranoid Author could create a society that neither values nor rewards learning, that systematically vilifies teachers, that places the bar low enough for pupils and students so that measurable standards of learning progressively decline over the long-term. It is a reasonable prediction, all factors considered, that low and under-achieving youth will develop into low and under-achieving adults, thereby reducing the competition pool for labor at the upper levels; so the State that deliberately adopts a social principle of undereducating its young people will have an undereducated, and more easily swayable, adult population in the following generation. Cheap labor will attend on every corner; fears and emotions and conspiracy theories will abound.

Ib. Neutralize the idea of the cogito-Individual. (Ostinato). Finally, to neutralize the idea of the cogito-Individual in America, the Paranoid Author would polarize the population at large on general issues. Individuals would be encouraged to identify emotionally with a major political party, or group, or platform; the increase in group identification would psychologically diffuse the “individual-ness” of the individual, would encourage the growth of Unreasoning Emotionalism in the general society, and would contribute to the overall culture of generalized Fear. To polarize people in this way would also serve to breed into We the People a fundamental social dysfunction based on an emotional dissonance –

ü  together with our own feelings of patriotism or love of country, we also believe that most other Americans are profoundly confused or misguided or simply wrong in their feelings of patriotism;

ü  although we all learned in school that we are individual elements of We the People, we still have the strong feeling, indeed the conviction, that we are nationally yoked together with people who are not our religious, economic, political, intellectual, and/or social equals.

Within a very few generations of orchestrating into existence a generalized culture of Fear, the Paranoid Author of America’s Potential Future would have generated a population that identified itself through collectivizing values, such as patriotism, which are grounded in the individual emotionally rather than intellectually; this would effectively allow a partial transfer of practical democratic power to emotionally inspired groups instead of to thinking individuals.

                                                             

II. People, Belief, and Economic Culture. In order to construct an America that would look like the German State of the Nazi era, the Paranoid Author would also need to grow a strong and independent Economic Culture that The People valued, then believed in, and then needed for their economic survival, but which The People could not control or dominate. Such a value could be created along the lines of a Corporate Culture, which would encourage the existence and growth of a massive conglomeration of companies driven by profit, whose profits could be guaranteed that much more because these companies would be exempted from a tax commitment to the U.S. due to their international legal status. An additional “touch” would be to make it so that this C-Culture has legal standing, so that it can influence in turn the direction of political elections in the U.S., and especially those at the highest levels. This would naturally encourage the C-Culture to make financial contributions to politicians who favor the economic agenda and philosophical vision of the C-Culture, thus furthering the acceptance of that economic cultural agenda as an “American” value.

            A possible example of the type of Corporate Culture that our Paranoid Author might create, would be reflected in the American political setting that enabled the United States Supreme Court 2010 ruling on Citizens United v. FEC.

III. The Appearance of Freedom. For the purposes of plot, however, it would not be sufficient simply to create a dependent relationship between The People and an Economic Culture whose mission is assessed in terms of Compulsory Profit. The Paranoid Author would also have to create a general cultural environment where, as we said above, everyone thinks they are free, but where no one actually has the freedom to act in opposition to the agendas of the Moneyed Interests.

            So once we had generated an adequate Corporate Culture, and had brought The People around to valuing, believing in, and then needing that C-Culture, the active icing on the passive (cup-)cake would be to restrict and obstruct the power of the individual worker-laborer to stand against that C-Culture. So the Paranoid Author would then invent a labor pool that is powerless to oppose the interests of the massive corporate entities, either to control wages, or to determine working conditions, health benefits, retirement, etc. In a hauntingly parallel, union-breaking plot line from American current events, Wisconsin and its governor Scott Walker, have furnished interesting and relevant food for my fantasy-laden thought over the past year:

Ø  Wisconsin Governor Threatens To Replace Union Workers With National Guard

Ø  Wisconsin Union Law To Take Effect

Ø  Scott Walker's Collective Bargaining Law Keeping Wisconsin Unions From Seeking Recertification

Ø  Wisconsin Collective Bargaining Law Struck Down By County Judge

Ø  Wisconsin Union Law Challenge Heads To Federal Appeals Court

Ø  On Governor Walker in general and teachers in particular

IIIa. The Appearance of Freedom. (Ostinato). I can also imagine that if, for purposes of plot development, a Paranoid Author needed to restrict the power of both the State and the individual to stand against the Corporate Culture, he might introduce into his narrative the device of giving almost unlimited credit to almost everyone. The idea of debt, both individual and national, is a great and very effective means of enslavement, because Individual Debt actually functions just like State Debt in compelling the debtor to yield up Power (i.e., transfer Loyalties) to the creditor. The idea of Individual Debt allows the individual to hamstring himself all by himself – to buy houses, cars, appliances, furniture, televisions, stereo systems, clothes, jet skis, jet ski trailers, vacations, food, gas, etc.; and the evil bit of beauty in this narrative device is that even when the consumerable object itself is long gone on its journey to built-in obsolescence, the financial debt for the purchase of the object remains. Business wins; or as Hercule Poirot might have said: Cherchez l’argent.

            Likewise, the idea of State Debt allows The State to hamstring itself through collective liability – to pay for wars, infrastructures, schools, hospitals, social services, etc. It was due to support from Business, after all, that Napoleon Bonaparte succeeded in his coup d’état following the French Revolution. His financial indebtedness to those same Business Interests (primarily a coalition of slavers and exiled plantation owners) who funded his rise to power, also obligated Napoleon to reciprocate the favors, £ for £, by introducing legislation that would reverse the course of revolutionary France, and cause its return to an extremely aggressive and repressive form of Business Slavery in the French colonies – all in the interests of the Sugar Trade. Cherchez l’argent.

           

IIIb. The Appearance of Freedom. (Ostinato). Even more icing on the proverbial cupcake of debt could be provided by health care—not the having of it, but the individual and societal indebtedness caused by the lack of it. Medical expenses were the top cause of bankruptcies in America in 2011 – a total of 1.6 million people, a stunning number that surpasses the population of 82 of the world’s 230 countries.

Stop, now, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down…

            (Resolution - Repeat and fade)

So is there something happening here, or am I just paranoid? How realistic is such a Fantasy Future for America? Well, it certainly would not be the first time America had been caught out on such a turning in the road; fortunately, though, Germany lost that war for all of us, which corrected that particular potential wrong-turn in America’s history.

            Nations-going-wrong is not new in this telling. But what do we do as individuals when we suspect that our Nation is going down a Wrong Path in the Woods, and there is no handy GPS to right Us? Well, the Americans have a long tradition of protesting, in a bluesy kind of way, by singing their anger and grief. This is a kind of populist public airing of dirty laundry, which is certainly idiosyncratic, and also, at least anecdotally, effective. According to the Internet God: “In the 20th century, the Union Movement, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, and the War in Vietnam all inspired protest songs.” Concerns for the environment in America are already evident from an 1837 song, Woodman, Spare That Tree, although, fortunately, the song never caught on.

            From 1900 to 1920 there were Protest Songs inspired by the Labor Movement, and what Americans would tend to call Class Struggle (which in the U.S. took the form of conflict between labor and management, rich and poor), and also The Great War. Popular songs from this period were, The Preacher and the Slave and Bread and Roses.

            The 1920s and 1930s echoed with songs of protest against The Great Depression (see Class Struggle above) and Racial Discrimination, which will have a good long run in America. A popular song from this period is Ragged Hungry Blues.

            In the 40s and 50s there will be protest songs in favor of the labor movement and against McCarthyism, as there will be Anti-Nuclear protest songs. From this generation comes the Pete Seeger tune, Which side are you on?

            In the 60s, of course, there were protests for every taste and every budget. One could sing and protest about the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and Peace and Revolution. These songs and protests would wend their way into the 70s, as did the war, and would join their dithyrambic countrified beats to the newer cadences of soul music.

            The 80s would hear Anti-Reagan protest songs, and would oversee the birth of rap music; and the 90s would hear the advent of Hard-Rock Protest Bands, songs of Women's Rights, and Protest Parodies.

So I suppose that a traditional response to the America of my paranoid fantasy would be, when and if, for The People to sing out its disapproval very publically.

            There are also very concrete steps The People can take, though, when it seems to them that the Nation is going down a wrong national road. In the case of the Supreme Court decision on Citizens United, for example, what happens when The People do not support a Supreme Court ruling? Is there any recourse for The People, or is the National Monolith gone awry? Yes, there is recourse and remedy. State initiatives, motivated by Concerned Citizens, could push Congress to create a constitutional amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would allow the legislature to overturn decisions arising from a judicial branch of government gone on philosophical walkabout.

Let The People write songs in protest and sing them; sign petitions; be concerned; have a big loud voice and make it heard; READ. In the end, though, it would seem that all these Big Thoughts take us right back ‘round to the cogito-Individual, to a Socrates, who, in the name of Justice, stood his ground in the face of undeniable State corruption… till death did them part.

Is America Going Socialist?

 My wife’s Facebook universe is being utterly consumed by the post-election conspiracy wormhole of whether or not “still-free” America is going down the path of socialism, and whether this (or not) is going to provoke the Second Coming of Christ and/or the imminent dissolution of the E Pluribus Unum; so she naturally looked to her pagan philosopher of a husband (which would be me) to think some Big Thoughts on this topic. And so of course here They are. As any man can testify, marital bliss works a whole lot better when we do what our wives tell us.

The Basis of Democracy. One danger for republican democracy, but the only assured promise of its eventual success, resides in the individual; and not just in the individual as meat on the hoof, as sheer numbers in a mass; but rather the individual as conceived of by Aristotle, Descartes, Jefferson, and Kant – as the thinking thing. And if the American individual should ever commit to the path of thinking purposefully, as a student of bruta facta as opposed to an inert depository that accepts or believes the contents of every idiot fwd and email rumor monger that lands in our PC inboxes, or that takes things only at their face value, then our modern democracy will finally begin to mark its entry into the true matrix of unpredictability and opportunity, which is the predictable philosophical endgame of every democracy.

            A Thinking Individual is dangerous; but the T-I is also the only true potential for the philosophy of democracy, and it makes us uneasy. Rightly so; for as the American philosopher John Dewey wrote: “If we once start thinking no one can guarantee what will be the outcome, except that many objects, ends and institutions will be surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.”

Recognition of a Problem. In some pockets of post-election America there has been, of late, a significant amount of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over the impressive shellacking taken by Governor Romney. The hue and cry, of course, has been wrapped around the familiar old McCarthy-era chestnut – that America is on the road to European Socialism, which, as we all know if we know anything at all, is only a hop, skip, and a jump away from pinko Communism; and the road is short, steep and slippery as hell! It is a “come-to-Jesus” moment in America; because it is just possible that this last American election, when seen for what some Americans think it is… as a people’s turning away from the God of democracy and toward Godless socialism, will be the straw that broke the camel’s back, which, when good and broken, will either induce the labor of the Christian Rapture and the Tribulation, or embolden Texans into finally getting around to seceding from the “maggot ridden” Union, whichever comes first. Yee-haw!

            One of my wife’s Facebook “friends” even got her knickers in a philosophical twist by resolutely affirming pre-election that her God would not allow a socialist Obama to be reelected. The philosophical conundrum is now obvious, or at the very least, the illogical cat has certainly scampered out of the proverbial bag – because this “friend’s” religious “argument” dictates that either Obama did not get reelected on November 6, 2012, or that her God, like Homer’s Zeus (e.g., Iliad I:428-487), was out to an exotic dinner party somewhere else and not paying much attention to America’s elections; either way, the philosophical outlook for such a religious point of view is not pretty.

            So, it would seem that a certain segment of the American people, the above segment that got roundly whammed in these elections, is pretty certain that the other segment, which won the election in a whamming kind of way, has an absolutely wrong-headed philosophical vision of America. Group One, the losers, thinks that Group Two, the winners, have a totally flawed conception of democracy in American as an ATM. On this reading, G-2ers voted democratic because “they wanted stuff” from the government, and not because they wanted to be the noble creators of State, like G-1ers would have been had they won. Of course, one is instantly flooded by all-too-recent memories of the halcyon days of the Bush-Cheney era, which brought us wars and rumors of wars, an economic meltdown to rival that of the Great Depression, a transference of wealth away from the middle and lower classes that probably gave many an overindulged economic forecaster indigestion, and which left so many, many Americans remarkably poorer by having known it and lived through it.

Government & Management Theory.  Irrespective the party or the administration, there is inherent to the Big Idea of people-participation in government a practical, if not to say obviously organizational problem, which will always be at the very heart of the function we call State. How does one go about organizing a big community? There is always going to be some “few” who will have to sort out, in a management sort of way, the “many”; in the community there are always going to be some who have more (stuff, money, land, brains, beauty, family connections, ambition, talent, you name it…), and some who have less.

            There is by necessity an ingrained division of labor in any form of organization or community governance; where labor has been divided, it is not brain-science to suggest that there will no longer be an Absolute Equity, because the labor of State is supposedly divided, in the best of all possible worlds, along the lines of disposition, and competence, and willingness, rather than equality. Therefore the American philosophes were wise to see the equity of men, not in their individuality (i.e., personal disposition, competence, and willingness), but through the eyes of the Universal Law that protects each one of the We the People. This reveals itself to be a wisdom indeed because, looking back, most attempts to engineer artificially into the social space other types of equity (affirmative action comes to mind), inevitably result in injustices. Inequality (i.e., difference) does not automatically equate to injustice.

            In the above-linked ATM article, Lewis Lapham states the inescapable and axiomatic principle for this type of management distinction in government, which would be more abstract and philosophical if it were not so simple and confoundedly practical:

From Aristotle the founders borrowed the theorem that all government, no matter what its name or form, incorporates the means by which the privileged few arrange the distribution of law and property for the less-fortunate many. Recognizing in themselves the sort of people to whom James Madison assigned “the most wisdom to discern, and the most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society,” they undertook to draft a constitution that employed an aristocratic means to achieve a democratic end.

Statement of the Problem. What I would really like to know at this point, then, is something about the G-2 voters who dared to shock and awe the G-1 voters by winning these last elections. What is all the “stuff” they actually want from government, stuff that G-1 voters (the losers) would not take from government for love or money? In what ways is our post-election America now following a socialist agenda or moving toward a socialism, which will then tip over into a communism, which will then provoke either the Second Coming of Christ or the secession of Texas, along with potentially 30 other states, from the American Union?

Thinking Through the Problem. For almost two years my wife and I have been teaching and living in a country, the Netherlands, where the social contract is clearly defined in terms of a socialist philosophy, and frankly, I have only just recently seen a noticeable difference between this socialist county where we live and the “still-free” America that we left behind. As far as I can tell from living here, and can remember from my pay-stubs in America, in both social contract countries the State has the legal right, and indeed obligation, to use my tax-dollars 1) to staff and maintain the schools and universities and hospitals, 2) to keep up the roads and parks and public spaces, 3) to bring clean water and gas and electricity to my house, to take away sewage, and to maintain these infrastructures, 4) to empty the trash, and 5) to provide defense to the people (which might also include financing a foreign war or two, plus wars of a home-grown political sort: on Terror, on Drugs, on Poverty, on Karl Rove, as well as on miscellaneous other war-worthy causes, at least in the case of the US).

            On a side note for item 5): there has been something troubling me about this last warrior fact… The military budget for the Netherlands is expected to reach $10.77 billion by 2016, while the military budget for the U.S. is currently at $964.8 billion, which is expected to decline to $901.8 billion by 2016. Given this information, I still cannot quite figure out why I feel safer in the Netherlands—they are obviously not spending nearly enough money on my personal safety, and I am still awaiting, eagerly if not overly persuaded, their adoption of the equivalent of the American Patriot Act (whatever the budget!), so I can feel even safer yet! (This may be read with irony, if so desired…)

            So, schools and hospitals, trash, sewage, roads & other infrastructure, clean water, electricity, and wars—tax-wise, when all is said and done, it would seem that in both countries approximately the same amount of real money is gone from my paycheck every month, and that in both countries my tax dollars go to creating and enabling the practical possibilities of my life and well-being. Have I missed something? Did I miss the fact that the social philosophy of the Americans is comparable in its practical outworking to that of any other socialist State in Europe? Did I miss the fact that this is what pragmatic socialism looks like? Already long before this present generation America’s Socialism started with people-oriented, republican (i.e., non-monarchical) policies from the likes of Abraham Lincoln (Republican), Teddy Roosevelt (Republican), Franklin Roosevelt (Democrat), and Dwight Eisenhower (Republican). So for the question as to whether America has gotten to socialism yet… the answer is clearly: away and beyond. In fact, it would seem that America has been functioning on the principle of pragmatic socialism at least since the days of Honest Abe Lincoln.

More Thinking + Information. So, you might well ask, in addition to the pragmatic socialism inherent organizationally to republican democracy, what else does American socialism look like? Well, in the U.S. I have a tax rate of 28-32% for federal taxes, to which is added property taxes + sales and/or other state & local taxes, + (FICA, social security + Medicare), which is another 7.65%. So when the dust settles at the end of my American month, real money out of my pay going to tax-type liabilities, is between 40-50%. The Internet-God confirms this approximate figure: “Federal tax rates vary from 10% to 35% of taxable income. State and local tax rates vary widely by jurisdiction, from 0% to 12.696%.” 
            However, my liability is still not quite finished in the U.S. I also had to make monthly contributions to my health insurance, which changed according to my university’s contract negotiations: I went from about $100.00 a month for a single man in 1997, to about $650.00 a month for a single man in the early 2000s, then back to around $125.00 for a family of 4 (marital blended bliss set in…) around the end of that decade.

            In the Netherlands, on the other hand, and I say this in the interests of transparency, I qualify for diminished taxes (exonerated from the first 30% of my income) because I am a foreign employee. This is a cost-of-living type of compensation or adjustment, agreed upon contractually between the U.S. and the Netherlands, to encourage working exchanges between the two countries—workers from less expensive cost-of-living economies, like in the U.S., can actually afford to travel to, work and live in more expensive economies, like the Netherlands. Again according to the Internet-God, in the Netherlands: “Income tax is charged on a progressive basis on Box 1 income, at rates ranging from 2.5% to 52% (2007), at a rate of 22% on Box 2 income up to €250,000 and 25% on the excess (2007), and at a flat rate of 30% on Box 3 income.” Now, this gobbledygook (at least for those of us who are more philosophically inclined) does not mean much to me, but the “street” version is that the tax rate is roughly going to be around 52% for all and sundry, most likely under that threshold for many, but never over for anyone.

            So it would seem that in this socialist country, with my foreign worker status, I am actually paying less in the way of taxes than I would in the U.S.; and without the special foreign worker status, I would be paying approximately the same as I was paying at my former teaching position—from 40-50%. Health insurance costs are additional in NL, like they were for me in the U.S.; but the cost of the health plan seems to be stable countrywide—at about €99 per person per month for the basic plan.

Conclusions? What do I deduce from this short but tedious comparison of my tax-life in the U.S. and my tax-life in the Netherlands? That 1) my tax liability, and what I get for my tax dollars/euros, is approximately the same in both the U.S. and in the Netherlands; and that 2) either America and the Netherlands are both and have been for a very long time socialist states, or that neither are socialisms in any way that should be bothersome to anyone living in American. It certainly does not seem to bother the Dutch very much. Perhaps I should also add a third obvious deduction: 3) that I am excluding from my equation that category of American that thinks the government should have no right to take money out of our wallets for taxation purposes.

Perhaps it would be informative at this point, to reflect on the ways the U.S. and the Netherlands differ in their social philosophies. I suggested earlier in this Reflection that I only just recently learned about a noticeable difference between this socialist county where my wife and I live and the “still-free” (=supposedly non-socialist) American nation that we left behind.

            Big Difference #One is that in the Netherlands EVERYONE has access to the justice system, and one pays according to income. For instance, my blended daughter is a graduate student here, and she is having “issues” with Dutch Immigration (IND) right now. She is in the process of legally appealing a rather pompous bureaucratic decision not to allow her to immigrate to Holland as a family member—apparently in the Netherlands you cease being a family member at the age of 18 and if you have ever had an independent income. Anyway, based on her funds/revenue, her appeal will cost her a whopping €76. The courts will hire the attorneys, make the case, etc., and… we will see what we will see.

            In America on the other hand, and I say this in shame, the citizen has very limited access to individual justice. According to the World Justice Project’s “Rule of Law Index,” in fact, the U.S. placed 20th out of 35 nations in terms of access to legal counsel. How charming. And it should be noted for the record that “limited access” does not mean that the doorways to lawyers’ offices are just too narrow to accommodate the throngs of all of America’s tired, poor, and “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” (per our Statue of Liberty); no, the entry into the hallowed Halls of Justice by the “wretched refuse” on America’s “teeming shore” is limited by the exorbitant price of justice in America—justice, a top-shelf item with a hefty price tag, costs real money in America, real $ dollars and not credit cards. Sell your house and you might be able to afford Justice in the land of the free and home of the brave.

            So, as we remember back to my blended child’s legal contortions with Dutch immigration, if you have ever had dealings of any sort with the U.S. Immigration Service, “things” are really quite Short and Sweet: you leave on your own initiative or you are deported—fairly traditional American black & white. There is not enough money in the universe to pay for attorney’s fees and wait the years on end for justice to happen in terms of American immigration.

Big Difference #One, then, is that Justice is accessible to all and sundry, or to anyone who can scrape together the €76, in the NL; and We the People do not pay a single euro extra for this clearly socialist benefit. ‘Nuf said though about the costs of justice behind America’s “golden door.”

A second difference in how the social State is expressed and practiced in the Netherlands as compared to the U.S., is access to health care. In the Netherlands there is no need for a social safety net, because every single person living in the Netherlands, Dutch and other, is socially safe. Everyone pays, even those on unemployment pay for health insurance out of their unemployment benefit; and those who need to use the various services less, actually help defray the costs for those who use the services more. I do not suppose this is actually brain-science economics.

            In the U.S., on the other hand, there is the need of a social safety net, such as hospital emergency rooms and “free” clinics, all of which is paid for out of taxpayer dollars. It would probably be cheaper, dollar-wise, to have a more well organized health care program in the U.S., where all the citizens would have to pay, because the taxpayer pays anyway whether he wants to or not. As it stands at this point in the U.S., it is true that Obama-care is improving people’s access to healthcare, and that the number of Americans without health care declined in 2011; so now there are only about 48.6 million Americans without coverage.  An improvement in fact, compared to the numbers in pre-Obama America!

            So what does 48.6 million people without health care, let alone Americans without health care, look like? Well, this number looks a whole lot like a number that equals or surpasses the total individual populations of the following countries:  South Africa, Ukraine, Colombia, Spain, Argentina, Poland, Tanzania, Sudan, Kenya, Algeria, Canada, Morocco, Afghanistan, Uganda, Iraq, Peru, Nepal, Venezuela, Uzbekistan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Republic of China (Taiwan), North Korea, Ghana, Romania, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Australia, ad nauseam… In fact, there are only 25 countries in the entire world that have total populations larger than the U.S. population of uninsured citizens (i.e., 48.6 million), which means that the uninsured American population beats the total individual populations of 171 countries, hands down. I suppose this could be considered a record of some sort.

Big Difference #Two, then, is that health care is accessible, indeed mandatory, to all and sundry in the NL; and We the People do not pay a single euro extra for this clearly socialist benefit. ‘Nuf said though about the costs of health care behind America’s “golden door.”

            As a side note: this type of social benefit, or pragmatic socialism, is a recognition that it is not only the citizen who has an obligation to the State in the social contract, but that the State has obligations vis-à-vis the citizen as well; because for work, and therefore production and productivity to continue to maintain the viability of the State in the world, a thriving and healthy class that works must exist. This, also, is not brain-science economics; but it is a benefit of socialism in the NL that is only now beginning to come to America, thanks to her current socialist president.

Big Difference #Three: university tuition costs about € 1,700 per annum for students in any university in the Netherlands; but tuition fees vary according to individual countries in the European social community.

            In the U.S. the average costs of tuition have gone up around 15%, with top universities logging in at between $36,000 - $43,000 per annum. ‘Nuf said.

With respect to Big Difference #Three the U.S. enters a Plea of Nolo Contendere.

America does not like to lose, and does not lose often; but when she loses, she loses Big Time.