To Market, to Market

The moment that finally pushed me off my lazy butt to write this was Donald's Trump escalation of his trade war with China.  There are so many short-sighted notions floating around in American politics these days that I have been thinking about it for a while, even if I don't expect my sharing a viewpoint will cure the human urge for ideologies. Be warned: this little essay is a celebration of market capitalism, of freedom, of laissez faire, of open borders and of the open minds that come with them. It is an assertion that human progress, i.e., greater wealth and health and freedom for folks, has been the result of trade and economic growth and not of governmental programs. Do not expect to find here an embrace of the Green New Deal as a solution for global warming, especially since I am convinced that FDR's New Deal prolonged the great depression.

If you have not been totally triggered by my spoilers to stop reading, I want to consider the recent history of China as an example of the liberating effects of the market, and to consider how Donald Trump's trade war on China is in fact a war on the Chinese people and  support for the Chinese Communist Party.

The Chinese Communist Party is an interesting development, being much more Chinese, I would suggest, than communist.  The long political history of China is a series of totalitarian despotic regimes being replaced by other totalitarian despotic regimes. With regime change, property was usually redistributed to the followers of the new leaders. Mongol, Ming, or Mao, the pattern was the same. When Mao proclaimed the People's Republic of China in 1949, the ideological justification for state despotism may have been new, but he became as much a Son of Heaven as any Sung emperor. The property of the opponents of the new regime were claimed in the name of the people, but the Mercedes 600's were owned by Mao and his party officials. When the golden age of Communism did not seem to have arrived, the blame was not taken by the party with their series of plans and purges. Rather there needed to be a Cultural Revolution to root out all remnants of traditional or capitalist ideas in China. There was a ten year reign of terror which continued even after the Revolution was officially over.

In 1976, Chairman Mao died. In 1978, at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee--why do revolutionaries always have such grandiose names for their little gangs?--Deng Xiaoping called for something which might well be followed by all politicians: to seek truth from facts and abandon ideological dogma. In the midst of the failure of Chinese Communism as envisioned in Mao's Little Red Book came the visit of Richard Nixon, making a Chinese role in the world market a real possibilities. I was living in Chicago when the main import from China--Taiwan, officially--was fire crackers. Soon one could buy bamboo steamers. Not very long after that in the measure of Chinese history one could buy iPhones.

With the coming of a market economy to China, there have finally been real advances in the standard of living for ordinary Chinese citizens. Intellectuals are no longer sent to slave gangs.  Girl babies are no longer abandoned. Please understand, I am not claiming that China is some kind of Adam Smithian Utopia. The Communist Party is still in charge, and its leader, Xi Jinping,is still by most standards a despot, even if he does often seem more enlightened than the US president who wishes to be a despot, Huawei may be owned by its employees' labor union, but it certainly operates within strict government limits. But, and this is I think the most important 'but', operation in the world market is the most important factor allowing China to become less despotic. Indeed, compared to most political parties, The Chinese Communists have been amazingly self-critical and self-correcting since the death of Mao, (Perhaps a bit of traditional Confucianism continues despite the Cultural Revolution.)

Donald Trump's trade policies, a policy of tariffs and wars, unfortunately will almost certainly push China back to a more isolated position, but also into a more aggressive position. The One Belt, Road Program will become more important than ever.  Trump's regressive Fortress America does little to encourage anyone choosing to trade with the United States.

Indeed, not only is Trump's trade war a war on the Chinese people, pushing them back into the arms of the Party, it is a war on the American people, increasing their cost of living and narrowing their choices. Unfortunately, the democrats seem to have no vision of the benefits of free trade, either.  I don't think any of them support my right to spend my money on whatever I can afford wherever it was made, which is what I would suggest is the essence of globilization. We are far too often motivated by fear and envy. We put up signs saying 'Buy Local' on stores that depend on a world-wide market system for their operation. We think that if someone else is doing well, it must be because he has cheated me, even though by any reasonable standard I am living like a king.

I remain an optimist, because of truth from facts not from ideology. Over the long course of human history, our technological advances and larger and larger communities have made possible better standards of living for more and more of us. But I think it is foolish to fight against advantages, and trade with China is a great advantage to the US and to China. Of course China tries to spin it in their interest. But if you own Apple stock or own a modern television, it should be obvious that it is in your interest, too. It's Adam Smith's much-maligned but no less active 'invisible hand'. Besides, think how Chinese companies can benefit while they have no reason to respect the intellectual property of the enemy.

Why I Stay in an Abusive Relationship with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook

I did not so much enlist for Facebook as i was drafted. I knew about it for a while but ignored it. A lot of my friends had been on MySpace, and I had opened an account, but I found it all too ugly. Folks said that I could customize it anyway I wanted, but I just wasn't into having myself as a brand. My MySpace is probably out there on some 4-bit server, linked to a Hotmail account that I have long closed. Folks said I might like Facebook, and it did seem less hideous, but not anything  I wanted. Then a friend, who has himself left Facebook, made me an administrator of a group that organized neighborhood cookouts, so I felt obliged.

That was in the old days when one's status was a fill-in-the-blank. 'Dale "woke up to find a winter wonderland"' or such. I still drove a Nokia flip phone with no support of course for MMS, and I had a Dell Inspiron running Windows 57, the smallest I could find with a video drive. I was in the middle of a period of my life when mostly I was on vacation, paddling oceans and rivers and creeks and lakes. But when I found myself once more growing content with collecting books as well as having waves smack me in the face, I found Facebook growing  in content as well, adding paragraphs and photographs. Out on my bike or in my boat--my username in those days was paeddler--the usual thing to do when I met new people was to become 'friends' on Facebook. Most often that meant little more than receiving a reminder that someone was having a birthday and I could look at their profile and remember having had a beer with him once in Mount Vernon. But it also meant receiving friend invitations from people with whom I had had very important connections but with whom I had lost contact: college friends, high school friends; my first grade girl friend who now is married to someone named Tom with whom she raises horses in Texas; my freshman philosophy professor whom I had suspected to have been a CIA agent and who, when I asked him on Facebook Messenger whether that were true, neither affirmed nor denied it. 

Already some of my friends were criticizing Facebook.  Either some small changes had ruined it or the information about themselves which they had put on the internet, information now being called 'personal data', was available to be found on the internet, and that allowed them to receive advertisements related to things they had posted about themselves. None of that bothered me. I always took the position that if one were too unhappy about the appearance of Facebook, one could leave. I had read the small print and realized that there has been no privacy since women started gossiping over their clothes lines.  Facebook was basically a huge clothes line, but one that had huge electric bills that needed to be paid somehow.

There was also a thing I really liked about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg:  the concept of one identity. A lot of people were upset when aliasing became more difficult on Facebook. But I think the more honest we are about ourselves, the better it is for everyone. I semi-jokingly called this the Luke 12:3 effect.  So I try not to present a false depiction of myself on Facebook, although of course I probably don't really know myself well enough to present a completely truthful depiction.

However, as Dieter Boen, executive editor of The Verge, a part of Vox Media, a blatantly left-leaning bunch, says, 'here's the thing': Facebook is not one identity. Just last week Mark Zuckerberg stood center stage at D8 and talked about Facebook being a privacy company that was going to increase its support of groups of 'real friends'. Except for the privacy bit, which drew uncomfortable laughs from an audience who mainly drew their pay checks from Facebook, it sounded like the sort of neighborhood cook-out encourager that had drawn me in. And just last week Facebook banned some people from the community forever.

Whenever cracks had appeared in Facebook's one identity, I had tried to apologize for them. To use Bohn's phrase again (and in my own effort to have one identity I should admit that probably the main reason I keep The Verge at the top of my News Feed is that I think Dieter is seriously hot), 'here's the thing:' there has never been anything quite like Facebook before and there isn't an operating manual for such a thing. People complain about Facebook, but they still use it because it allows them to publish their thoughts in a way never before possible. With a $100 smartphone one can tell the world to stop, one wants to get off, or whatever else is one's status this fifteen minutes. And, Facebook has seemed most often to be the most open 'social medium', the one least quick to remove content because it 'violates community standards'. The photograph of Robert Lentz's icon,  'Lord of the Dance', was removed by Google+ as being pornographic, but it stayed on Facebook. It's hard to know what the standards are of a community of 2.23 billion people.

Unless, of course, those standards are required to be the standards of Marky Z & Company. As is  becoming increasingly clear, those standards are pretty vanilla shit-posting progressive. Now don't get me wrong. I have many vanilla shit-posting progressive friends, and they are nice people.  I just don't want them to be the arbiters of what may be said across the global clothes line, any more than I want the Donald to control what can be said. I would not even find it outside the rights of Facebook to censor people who seem to be to the right of their position if they admitted that they were a progressive social adjustment platform. Vox never claim to be unbiased. But Facebook do. They claim to be wanting to connect the whole world. Except for those they don't want to connect, those who belong, I suppose, in Mrs. Clinton's  basket of contemptibles.

The 2016 presidential election was an interesting event in the relatively young life of Facebook.  People used the platform to call each other all sorts of things. I was called all sorts of things because I not only did not find either party's candidate worthy of my vote nor did I think that the things said about them were necessarily true. Because I didn't think Mrs. Clinton actually ate sausage made of unborn children for breakfast, it was assumed that I was a socialist or in cahoots with Wall Street. (Actually, I abhor socialism and admire Wall Street, but that has nothing to do with my opinion of Mrs. Clinton.) Because I voted for Gary Johnson, it was assumed that I must have secretly supported Mr. Trump.

The real position of Facebook was revealed in an internal memo circulated just after the election, stating that they had failed in their mission, a memo issued just after Oculus founder Palmer Luckey had been sent to Purgatory for funding a billboard suggesting that Mrs. Clinton might be a bit greedy.

And now, Facebook has a black list of people whom they consider 'too dangerous' to be allowed to speak to the 2.23 billion folks on Facebook  Why do I think that Marky Z should change his grey t-shirt for a pink suit now that he's making the place nice?

And yet, despite my revulsion, I have not yet left Facebook. I am exploring other platforms, ones less likely to ban me forever if I make a slip in correctness. I am lucky it didn't happen already, because once I shared a comment Alex Jones had made about public education. At the time I had no idea who Alex Jones was, but I then and now found what he had said accurate. I am not one to indulge in ad hominem arguments.  I stay on Facebook because I think that in the long run, having 2.23 billion people in conversation is good thing, even if that conversation does become heated and insulting and silly,  and that the 2.23 billion people in the conversation are more important than Mark Zuckerberg.  I stay on Facebook because I think that both Mark Zuckerberg and Alex Jones are sincere in their positions, at least much of the time and insofar as they understand themselves, even if I think they are often acting from fear. But, here's the thing (two things, actually): first,what one fears one often comes to hate, and removing the face of what one fears from the book, one invites more hate; second, the one identity of a community of 2.23 billion people is very complex, and Facebook reminds me of that complexity every time I click on that blue icon, punching through my bubble.

One more thing, a confession of sorts from one who claims to value one identity, a concession to how complex and contradictory life in the Zuckerberg Galaxy can be: a friend on PornHub asked me if I were on Facebook, and I didn't tell him my real name. I remain on Facebook because so I am not ready to throw the first stone.