Bring Me A Shrubbery: one that's nice and not too expensive

Once again I'm apologizing in advance for a post on a subject too sprawling to reasonably tackle in this format but I can't help it. Improbable as it will seem at first this does have something to do with Thailand. Feel free to skip this one outright or abandon it whenever you feel like it because I can't guarantee this is going anywhere.

My father is a Libertarian and like all Libertarians he’s a complete ass about it. I mean that as a compliment because Libertarians are a curious lot in the United States. It would be fair to characterize their core beliefs as one branch of quintessential Americanism. They’re basically the pro-human, maximum freedom party that would be dramatically nearer and dearer to Thomas Jefferson's heart than the Republicans or Democrats. Yet somehow they're lost in the political wilderness sharing instant bean soup with the Green Party, which is as quintessentially American as Chairman Mao's Little Red Book.

To believe that the government hinders the best possible outcomes is to believe that when people are left to their own devices they will produce the best possible outcomes. Even if you don't believe that it should give you pause before you reject it because it's a beautiful, simple idea that we should all wish were true. Rejecting it is saying that humans can't be trusted. That's depressing but, unfortunately, is a position with ample supporting evidence.

I'm going to take for granted that everyone reading this can conjure up ready examples of humans being terrible to other humans, not to mention non-human animals and the planet itself. So the question is really how do we deal with the fact that humans have this harmful tendency? After giving elders, chiefs and monarchs a whirl we arrived at representative democracy as the current answer. Conceptually it feels like it makes sense, it's hard to envision an alternative, and it shouldn't be incompatible with Libertarianism and yet there they are, lost in the wilderness cursing the hand that refuses to allow them to cut off feed subsidies.

I generally agree with Libertarians that the federal government is too dang big, I’ll get into that in a few minutes, but perhaps their mystifying political rejection has fostered in them the jilted lover’s tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater and then rip the tub out, smash it into pieces and chuck that too. For instance, I’ve talked to Libertarians who blame the sub-prime mortgage crises on excessive government which is as brazen as it is mad. That's like saying drug laws MAKE people smoke marijuana. It might cast a socially transgressive light on it, which can be enticing, but it doesn't MAKE someone smoke weed. The sub-prime mortgage crisis was a result of human avarice and gullibility just like repeatedly smoking pot is about the enjoyment or need of being high.

Selling a house to someone who can't afford it had nothing to do with  government regulation or securitized bundles. People took advantage of regulations and securitization to do something they knew was wrong in the first place. That's no different than preying on someone's lack of scientific and medical knowledge to sell him snake oil. People find ways to take advantage of people with or without the government. That's a human failing and a little human failing here and there is inevitable and no big deal. Or it wouldn’t be if it weren’t for the world we constructed for ourselves.

At its peak sub-prime loans accounted for approximately 20% of home loans. That means 80% of home loans were still "traditional." I don't know where you draw the line in determining quantitative adjectives but I feel comfortable saying sub-prime loans accounted for only 20% of the market. That fraction—1/5—was the primary culprit in bringing the global economy to a standstill. Check that, technically it was worse because it knocked the "gross world product" backwards. An idiot in Minneapolis sells a fool a house he can't afford in Eden Prairie; an asshole in New York sells that mortgage to an dolt in Iceland; and a lady in Bangkok loses her job. That's the world we live in.

With our Brobdingnagian multi-national corporations and hyperconnected global economies it really only does take a relative few bad apples to crash economies. It's the nightmare 80/20 scenario where the 1/5 somehow hold the 4/5 hostage. For me that’s not a situation that cries out for more unfettered freedom, it says something closer to the opposite, and yet living in Bangkok has made me appreciate the Libertarian position in a way I didn't before.

I'm not going to attempt to describe what walking down a street of hawker stalls or through JJ Market or having a drink on Khaosan Road is like in part because I'm not sure I could do it. All I'm going to say about those places is they're playgrounds of tiny scale, unfettered laissez faire capitalism. I think there are technically laws governing these places but those are emperor's new clothes regulations because each operation is one person or one family so they're each too small a potato for the state to fuss with. I'm guessing it's either true or not too far fetched to say that if Thailand decided to crack down on hawker stalls the legal fees would bankrupt the state and cripple the courts for ages. I'm also going to say these places are AWESOME and leave it at that. What I will now belabor is bit of product development and distribution magic.

A week or maybe two before the Shutdown Bangkok protests started I noticed a T-shirt at a hawker stand in JJ Market. It was an army green T-shirt with a single large Thai character on the left breast with a few words in smaller print below it. Then I saw the shirt at another stall. Over the next few days I saw the shirt pop up in hawker stalls in our neighborhood, stalls I passed every day and had a sense of their offerings. The shirt went from nowhere to all over the place over the course of a week, maybe two. We had no idea what it was and neither did our Thai friends. Then the protests started.

That shirt was, in the early days, THE protester shirt. Turns out the big character was the number 8 and text below it said something like "I'm with the king" (the current king is Rama the Ninth... and its green means "I also support the military" but that's a different story). It beats the hell out of me how that shirt went from nowhere to everywhere over the course of a week. It's not like there was a Target/Wal-Mart central product committee that decided that shirt was going to be "in" and then had hundreds of thousands of them made and distributed at their stores conveniently dotting the city.

Each stall is it's own tiny operation making its own choices about what will and won't sell. Where the hell all this merchandize comes from is an even greater mystery. I presume that's only marginally less decentralized than the stalls themselves but I'm only wild assed guessing because the idea there's a well oiled machine silently humming away behind the scenes of Bangkok would beggar belief. So somehow thousands of people working independently with thousands more people working independently managed to create and distribute what thousands more people needed to attempt to bring a government down. They did it without any central planning or focus groups or committee meetings. As soon as the protests started that shirt was joined by scores of other Shutdown Bangkok shirts with (mostly English) messages ranging from the amusing to the philosophically challenging. There was a shirt for almost any pro-protest position you could think of. Honestly, it's a thing to behold in action, that "invisible hand" moving people and products around like that. It's almost enough to make me take the Libertarian pledge. Almost.

The reason I can't is it's hard not to wonder just who is making all that stuff on short order for dirt cheap so flocks of people can buy it for prices just above dirt cheap. What are their hours, pay, benefits, working conditions? If the government can't hope to get a full accounting of the hawker stalls, and they're plain as day on the streets, is there any chance they have a clue about where all that merchandise is being made behind closed doors? Are closed doors and a lack of transparency ever part of the recipe for maximizing human freedom and decency? Is small scale exploitation by thousands any less immoral than large scale exploitation by a handful? That last one isn't a rhetorical question. Seriously, small scale exploitation by the many feels less-bad than large scale exploitation by the few to me and I can't tell if that's madness or not.

Either way, because they're both problematic (aka "wrong"), there's this issue lurking in the shadows that people have this annoying tendency to treat other people badly, especially when no one is looking and ESPECIALLY when there's a power imbalance. Many Libertarians want the mechanism governing this problem to be something like "social equity." The idea that if something is important people will pay more for it. That idea would mean American Apparel is the biggest clothing retailer in the United States while Gap, Forever 21, and Zara teeter near the brink of failure because Americans are willing to pay more for clothing made by people making living wages rather than in sweatshops hidden away in places Americans don't know or care about. Hold on, let me check the retail stats and... YE GADS!

So who or what will step into the breach to keep things on the level and in the light? So who or what can help save us from ourselves? Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there are no higher or alien powers for us to turn to. Or rather there might be but those higher or alien powers have abysmal track records in ensuring human compliance. So as painful and awkward and seemingly stupid as it is, our only recourse in figuring out how to save us from ourselves is us.  

Here's where this post officially falls apart.

I have a confession: I’m just some dude schlepping around the planet. That might come as a shock to you, and I apologize if I’ve mislead you, so I don’t know how to address this issue.

Libertarians are surely broadly correct that what we’ve got going on in the US isn't the solution. Sorry, American Folks, but at some point along the way things got out of control. The FDA helps keep us safe, sure, but it also serves its pharmaceutical masters that have their own not-necessarily-wellness-related agendas. The DEA does something, I'm sure, but we all know who's disproportionately persecuted and who isn’t. The EPA makes our environment cleaner, yes, but it also ignores its own scientists (man, people from across the political spectrum have beef with the EPA, you can search that one for yourself). Election laws and the courts sure as hell aren't looking out for the vast majority of the people who comprise "The People."

Despite all that as far as I can tell representative democracy is our only current hope but — sweet baby Jesus — talk about hope against hope. The problem the government runs into is the same one corporations run into: it's run by people who too often when given a little taste of power want a bit more, then a bit more, then a bit more. The government is really just another staggeringly vast, multifaceted and unruly institution we've deemed "too big to fail." Compounding that problem is the government isn’t nearly far enough away from the Citigroups, the Pfizers, the ADMs. Funny enough, now that I think about it, the government and cosmic size corporations both suffer from the same root systemic failing: a lack of competition.

I bet I know what you were hoping for right about now… a left field detour!

The great metaphorical misconception many people have about evolution by natural selection is the tree. This makes sense because that's how it was presented for a long time, as a tree. That’s the depiction where the evolutionary process produces a thick trunk off which distinct branches cleanly reach for their purest, most refined expressions. A human here, a horse there, a penguin over... No, wait, the penguin doesn't fit. Neither does the fact that whales evolved from land dwelling, wolf-like creatures. Evolution doesn't produce trees, it produces shrubbery. A wild thicket of a briar patch where dogs become whales and birds fly under water. The denser the shrubbery, the greater the competition, and the more astonishing the results.

Right now the United States is in the business of producing well manicured parks with plenty of open space to admire its showcase redwoods. The government and its benefactors clear cut the shrubbery and plow under the indiginous grassess and (what they deem) weeds in order to cultivate their grand vision. The arrangement is mutually beneficial for the government and its business partners and, of course, it's not without it's charms and rewards for some Americans too. But strolling through Disneyland we lost something. Something I can neither accurately describe nor fail to miss while sitting on Khaosan Road, sipping from a tower of crappy beer, while beholding the psychedelic circus of human ingenuity on display.

There’s nothing in America that remotely touches Khaoson Road because we legislated the possibility away. No doubt some of those laws make sense but I defy you, dear American, to wander through Khaoson and not ask yourself, “Why can’t we have places like this in America?” It’s not like there’s something particularly Thai about eating, drinking, and small scale entrepreneurship. Sure Bangkok is a crossroads of people from all over the globe, but so are many American cities.

It’s not that I think we should chuck out health laws and restrictions on child labor but I do think we should revisit how they’re formulated, monitored, and enforced. Of course I have no idea how to do that. Maybe it’s “economic incubator” zones where every state comes up with its own methods and then we stand back and see which ones produce the greatest good for the least harm. If you don’t want to eat at a restaurant that’s being operated under the new less cumbersome regulations, fine, don’t. That’s your choice. If you do and get food poisoning--like Spectra and I did in Railay--fine, that’s your choice too but you can’t sue. If you go to a bar in the “incubator” zone and get into a fight at 4am, because they don’t have to close if they don’t want to, that’s your choice too. No lawsuit. If you want to be forced into going home at midnight, 1am, 2am, or whatever the law is in your state, then you’re free to do that. It’s funny how many restrictions the “land of the free” has.

The crux of the Libertarian argument is that we’ve drifted away from the “freedoms” that made America “great.” I get queasy when I hear Americans talk about “freedom” and “greatness” because I think they’re both chemerical notions that long ago became the curtain obscuring the sad little political and economic men pulling the levers. But I’m going to pinch my nose and flatly agree that the government is too big, too powerful, too unwieldy, and too indentured to corporate interests. Everything “too big to fail” is a problem, whether it’s the government or a bank. Failure is necessary because without it the flawed chokes the life out of the potentially better.

I’m not saying America should become Thailand, but I am definitely saying we can learn as much from them—and Japan and Singapore and China among others, no doubt—as they can from us. America is too enamored with itself, too sure that it’s got the answers, and way too proud. One would think a predominantly Christian nation would know what goeth before destruction, but you’d have to forgive Americans for not knowing that (at least part) of the solution to our current predicament was prescribed by that paragon of capitalism and freedom, Chairman Mao Zedong, “...letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend…”

Of course, Mao didn’t mean it but instead of chortling at China Americans should be asking themselves, “Do we?”