TANSTAAFM

"Fe vældur frænda rogi"

Wardruna - Fehu

______________________________

"Caveat emptor is the motto we stand behind! I'd have to charge more if we followed health and environmental regulations."

Bill Watterson - Calvin and Hobbes (1993/04/04)
______________________________


I'm a science fiction fan. Once you get past the monster flicks and primitive pulp ScieFie swashbuckling heroes IN SPAAAACE! (i.e. Star Wars) the genre has attracted a disproportionate number of gifted minds capable of looking past the human condition to true creativity. I especially like Robert Heinlein. I love the cowboy swagger his protagonists so frequently adopt, juxtaposed with their punctiliously civilized ethics and actions. Heinlein more than any other of SF's greats explored the role of the individual in the face of change and the unknown, of individual rights and responsibilities when reality shifts under one's feet.

He proclaimed himself such an individualist as to make Ayn Rand look like a communist in comparison, and much like Rand I've frequently seen Heinlein's books co-opted by those who worship profiteering and taking advantage of others' misfortunes. Except that, in direct contrast to Rand who seems to have mostly believed her own bullshit, Heinlein was a thinker first and an idealogue far down the list. Independence did not give his heroes license to abuse their fellows. Moreover, his stories carry an incisive self-awareness, an implicit admission that he is suspending disbelief.

He introduced us all to the acronym TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) yet the work in which he did so, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, hangs its entire plot on a free lunch. The lunar colony could never have achieved its independence without the aid of Mike the sentient supercomputer, a service the loonies had not purchased and whose value they could not begin to repay. The lunar revolution may as well have been subsidized.

The health industry has been in the news again in the United States. Whatever the current pretext for trying to undo the Obama's administration's minor improvements to America's shameful predation on physical illness, the real reasons are much less complicated. Most of those who hate the idea of government-managed healthcare know nothing about it. Their opposition is an ideological one, a fanatical one unburdened by perspective. They're true believers. They believe in free market capitalism. They believe in the right of the rich to abuse the poor. They are easily taken in by the propaganda of corporate governments claiming to be oppressed by the national government.

This is hardly a debate limited to health care. Three years ago I commented on the upcoming presidential election by likening it to the then-recent release of The Force Awakens, the most expensive movie in history with an advertisement budget larger than the production itself. No unique occurrence. Big businesses routinely invest more in destroying their competition than in producing good products. Any human hierarchy is a government which will freely wage war against other nearby governments when given a chance to do so and it is always the goal of every for-profit enterprise to eliminate individual choice, the ensure that each and every consumer can only choose their own product, at prices as inflated as possible. It doesn't matter how free your choices are when there's only one choice on the shelf, when the service you need is turned into a noose or a set of manacles. A "free" market is a market enslaved by its wealthiest robber barons. When the system finally collapses, the fatcats cut and run seeking another group of willing victims whose labor they can exploit. Our only defense against their depredations is regulation by an elected government answerable to its constituents. Our defense against spontaneously-occuring human thuggery and despotism is to entrust the public good to a public thing, a res publica, an overarching system of arbitration to keep our myriad tribes from exploiting each other. To keep every individual in society from unfairly exploiting every other individual in society.

So at times like these I can't help but think how tenuous a hold American-brand "libertarianism" (read: parasitic profiteering) keeps on Henlein's name. In Stranger In a Strange Land, Heinlein explicitly noted that Mike's nest brothers could pursue their personal growth only as their personal needs were assured by his nigh-infinite wealth. In Tunnel in the Sky the youths survive their hostile environment only by cobbling together a system of governance to impose fairness. In I Will Fear No Evil the brilliant painter is supported by an influx of cash which might uncharitably be called charity. In Job: A Comedy of Justice the hero demonstrates his self-reliance but is ultimately supported in his quest by the "hospitality" of a cosmic force. In Double Star politics is described as a dirty game but the only game. The cacophonous, boisterous town hall meetings of Red Planet, re-iterated less obviously throughout his works, display a presumption of government not as a matter of history or national identity, but as a universal human tendency and need, to be entered into consciously and purposefully and not left to chance.

Individualism, as worthy a goal as it is, paradoxically cannot stand on its own. For all his heroes' pioneering bluster, Heinlein seems to have known all too well that the good guys don't win without help. If only his fans would catch on.

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Market