You can’t evaluate the Coronavirus bailout unless you understand the government’s role in our nation. If you try to evaluate the bailout without this understanding, your judgment will be grounded in arbitrary and capricious feelings because you won’t know what the bailout is supposed to do. Your judgement will be emancipated from a reasoned understanding of how and why governments secure freedom. This gut-based sensibility will make you ripe to be exploited by fear or flattery or otherwise manipulated by someone who knows exactly what the government’s bailout ought to do for them.
How this works:
Under the rule of law, governments secure rights. What are rights? They are externalizations of a person’s freedom. What’s a person’s freedom? A person’s freedom is her respected capacity to make and enact plans for her life, as long as these plans are carried off in way that enables everyone else to make and enact like plans for their lives. By the way, that’s what separates rights from privileges. Rights can be universalized for everyone; privileges are exclusively restricted to a few. The government, through it’s control of guns, money, and culture, confers to all citizens objective certainty in their exercise of their rights. To appreciate what this certainty means, consider the following:
If I want to take your car, I can, indeed, take your car. I can formulate a plan and take your car as you are getting out of your car. You would be very sad. You can even show me your registration and title as I steal your car. And then you’d have to ask yourself, “Well, if Irami can just take my car whenever he wants, did I really ever own it?” Sure, you could have had plans for your weekend trip or to drive to work, but your plans were always liable to whether I felt like respecting your claim to your car. In this way, the answer to whether you owned that car would be, “kind of, but not really.” Since it wasn’t objectively certified by the governing body that can effectively enforce your ownership, there is a way in which your car ownership is all in your head, without any objective certainty. I could wake up in the morning and decide to steal your car in the afternoon because absent government, it was only ever quasi-yours to begin with.
However, one reason that I am not free to take your car is because my capacity to take your car is not respected by the governing body. In fact, your capacity to plan on retaining ownership of your car, even when it’s not in your immediate possession, is respected as a right. In this way, you have a right to your car, and you are free to leave your car in the parking lot with a kind of certainty that nobody will take it, and if someone does take your car, the government will use its full might and all of its guns to retrieve your car. That’s what makes it objectively your car.
The government confers certainty to your rights, and not just property rights. A good government will secure your plentitude of rights, including your employment rights. You can make plans for what to do with your next paycheck, and if your employer refuses to pay you, in a well-ordered world, the government would be triggered to step in and extract and deliver your wages. But this certainty isn’t always secured by government guns. You are allowed to be certain that the food you buy from Kroger won’t kill you, not because of market pressure from competitors like Publix, but because the FDA and regulatory agencies.
The government secures your capacity to make and enact plans for your life, and since you get your identity as a self-determining creature through the plans you make and enact, the government is also securing your identity, allowing you to be certainty of who you are. This is also what government confers in marriage. I wrote a bit about that here:
Do you really own the car if nobody is going to step in and secure your property rights against a would-be thief? I don’t think so, and you can’t be certain. Are you really free in a failed state, where none of your rights are secured? What can you build? I’ve argued elsewhere that this is the life of The Purge.
At the next level, the answer to the question of when the government should use its guns to step in and certify someone’s rights claim is not obvious. That’s why we have courts to contest these rights claims. The question is, “Are you really free if you don’t have access to lawyers?” Here, Peter Thiel, the billionaire who founded Paypal, is admitting that single digit millionaires do not have access to the legal system. Which means that anyone worth less than ten million dollars cannot really contest and press their rights, and if they cannot contest and press their rights through the recognized channels, do they really even have rights? I do not believe so, and that’s why I’m convinced that the next step in the march towards freedom is securing single-payer legal care on the model of single payer healthcare.
How does this concern the bailout? More than convenience or relief, the government confers certainty, and the question you should ask yourself, working people, is whether you think the bailout enables you to make certain plans for your life, or do you still think you are subject to political forces that are not under your control determining which plans you can make and enact?
When Trump says that he is going to make sure that cruise ships and hotels get bailed out, he was letting it be known that executives for those industries would not have to worry about the plans they’ve made and enacted for their lives. He was securing their freedom and giving their plans as aspirations certainty.
When you look at the provisions of the bailout, ask yourself, does this convey to me and anyone who may mean me harm, that the US government certifies the validity of my plans and my ability enact them?
The question you should ask yourself is whether the government is committed to secure your plans as much as it is organized to secure the plans of the head of your bank.
The second question you should ask yourself is whether the government is committed to secure your bank head’s plans, when the head’s plans are to run over you.
Rather than a one time 1,200 dollar check, I’d much rather see a Federal Job Guarantee at $20 an hour with 100% replacement pay as we remain in quarantine until we get called up. With a Job Guarantee, no matter whether I lose my job, I know that the government is providing another, secure and compensated role in civil society. I’d also like to see federal payroll infusions to private companies so that “essential workers” in high contact spaces are earning a minimum of 30 dollars an hour.
All of this in addition to universal testing.
Those provisions convey to me a sense of certainty and knowledge that the government is objectively certifying my ability to make plans and enact them. Every citizen should have the certainty Trump has granted to the hotel executives because make no mistake, asymmetrical governmental security will be weaponized by the most secure against the most vulnerable.