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Thursday, February 11, 2010

Dispatches from Libertopia: Who Is Paul Ryan? Edition

via TPM (follow the link for the full text):
Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) determination to privatize Social Security and dismantle Medicare -- what he calls a "collectivist system" -- comes, at least in part, from his longstanding devotion to the works of Ayn Rand… Ryan, the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, reportedly requires staffers and interns to read her opus, Atlas Shrugged, and gives out copies as gifts…

Fearing political suicide, Republican leaders have tried to distance themselves from Ryan's "roadmap" budget proposal, which calls for privatizing Social Security. But Ryan is upfront about it….

"If we actually accomplish this goal of personalizing Social Security, think of what we will accomplish. Every worker, every laborer in America will not only be a laborer but a capitalist. They will be an owner of society…"

Needless to say, under so-called "market orders" -- that is to say, in social orders the regulatory authorities of which justify their decisions and outcomes in terms connected to free market fundamentalist articles of faith none of which are consistently implemented or even implementable in fact -- everybody has already been reduced precisely to being always only a capitalist. This is so, because everybody is treated as a being invested in the indispensable infrastructure in the futurological fantasy of the ongoing implementation of the market utopia: That is to say, everybody has already been reduced to a commodity, everybody has been reduced to a person who is not living their life so much as having it. Their life is nothing but a commodity available for sale as labor at a price.

Under such an arrangement, the overabundant majority of people in the overabundant portion of their lives are not "owners of society" in the least, contra Ryan and his ilk, but "owned" by that minority of incumbents/elites who are authorized to dictate most of the terms on the basis of which human lifeways, environmental phenomena, and modes of production are constructed and maintained. That these incumbent/elite minorities dictate these terms always only so as to yield whatever distribution of cost, risk, and benefit from which they happen to expect most to benefit themselves should go without saying.
In interviews, [Ryan] has said Republicans should frame the choice between "collectivism" and capitalism as a moral choice. "We have an opportunity to make a choice clearly once and for all in the next two elections, and we owe it to the American people to give them a clear choice: Do you want a collectivist welfare state or do you want to get back to being a free market? We need to make a moral, not just practical or statistical, case…"

This is handy, since free marketeers are unable to make either a practical or a statistical case that general welfare is improved by the choices they prefer. The pace at which "market mechanisms" compensate for disruptive events and bad information is too different from the pace at which life is actually lived by human beings for these mechanisms to sustain those lives, while at once the assumption of infinite growth without which "market orders" could not be mobilized in the first place is too threatening to the actually-existing limits of ecosystems to sustain the planetary biosphere on which we all ultimately depend for our survival let alone flourishing. Let us be clear about this: the "free market" is a literally incoherent and unintelligible fantasy the belief in which and devotion to which directly inspires profoundly irrational decisions and injurious organizations.

Of course, by turning from making a case involving statistics and practical outcomes to what he calls a "moral case" Ryan really means that Republicans and other free market fundamentalists (and, to be fair, one must recall that corporate-militarists of the neoliberal/neoconservative kind throng both the Republican and Democratic parties, and that "market libertarian" and "spontaneist" ideologues throng the extra-partisan extremes at either end of the partisan political spectrum, from Randroids and libertopians to California ideologists and futurological Greens) sell the dismantling of equitable law and democratizing order by relentless appeals to the fears of defensive incumbent/elite minorities as well as to the short-sighted greed of stupid or misinformed rubes who can be counted on to buy the usual fraud that they can get something for nothing, that they can have civilization and eat it, too.
In last year's CPAC address, [Ryan] claimed the White House had blamed the free market for the financial crisis, then used the crisis as an "excuse to impose a more intrusive state."

There is no such thing as "the free market." "The free market" has no existence, it has no substance, it has no historical, actual, or even logically-possible reference, utterances on its behalf have no more coherence than do utterances on behalf of "God" -- with the fundamentalist discourses of which market discourses have in fact an enormous amount in common to comparably disastrous effect. Self-described market orders are constituted and maintained through laws and treaties and protocols and sanctioned customs, all in the context of a legal and infrastructural order that owes an indispensable debt to direct and ever ongoing state subsidization. There is no empty, open, spontaneous "market place" into which the state can "intrude," the state suffuses and articulates and invigorates that space in which what are taken to be "market transactions" make their play in the world.

Paul Ryan is a dangerously deluded man, as are all "market" ideologues. He is and they are all cynically selling a line of bullshit to fleece the American people, almost all of whom they take to be suckers who deserve what they get as they are fooled into participating in the dismantling of any public organization that facilitates the equity in diversity of actually consensual associations, peer to peer, all so as to install public organizations that facilitate instead the rule of the incumbent/elite minorities with which they happen to identify, whereupon they will celebrate as "consensual," of course, whatever outcomes they denominate "market outcomes" by fiat, however duressed they may be in fact by inequity, misinformation, and the proximate threat of death by starvation.

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