Freedom of Association

Everyone has a membership organization. There's the American Egg Board. There's the United States Polka Association. There's the California Artichoke Advisory Board, and there's the United States Croquet Association. Some of the less esoteric causes have better known associations behind them. The National Rifle Association and the American Association for Retired Persons are household names.

With such a tradition of private advocacy built into our society's framework, something basic is curiously missing from the list. Where is the association for the American worker? Why isn't there an association for the working guy, making sure their workplace is safe from occupational hazards, fighting for paid time off for new moms, vocational education programs, or job placement? If the National Rifle Association is so powerful despite some rather extreme positions, an American Worker's Association should be about as controversial as an American Teddy Bear Association, or a National Council for the Advancement of Puppies and Kittens.

An American Worker's Association would not be a union. Membership wouldn't guarantee solidarity in an international brotherhood. There wouldn't be any shop stewards, and no collective bargaining. It is just an association that fights for rights and benefits for all workers. If retired people can fight tooth-and-nail for Medicare, why can't everyone else fight for their own decent health plan? Why can't we push for policies that help with job security and a little paid time off, like every other industrialized country seems to have? Who's looking out for the working guy?

None of this is radical. Nobody here is talking about workers of the world uniting to seize control over capital. It's simple advocacy for a constituent group. Americans have always been an atomized people, but the moment there is a threat to something we collectively value, we donate to the cause, call our congressmen, hire lobbyists, write legislation, develop position papers, and protect our rights.

Why is it that government programs are hard to cut? Associations. Why is it that we can't even begin to offer reasonable controls on health care costs, or know who owns what guns? Associations. Why are there artichokes in most grocery stores, even thousands of miles from California? Associations.

As workers, every day, we see our benefits eroding through underhanded human resources policies, like offering flexible paid time off that's indifferent to whether it's sick leave or vacation, even as the total number of days is fewer than under the old policy. We see people who don't dare take any leave for fear of being deemed a drag on productivity. We see mothers putting their infant children into day care so they can make rent. We see flat wages even as management takes home massive bonuses.

Nobody likes any of this, and yet nobody does anything about it. To even talk about it is to run a risk of being called extreme. When it comes to worker's rights, there is a subtle repression in the social order, a tacit understanding that our place is to take what we're given and be grateful. But rights aren't usually given to people. You have to take them. Profit and productivity can be found in places aside from our paychecks and free time. If workers should have a little paid time off and know that it's OK if they get sick, we have to demand that it be so. If the culture of management is to include any form of social responsibility to match its power and privilege, it must be made so. Laws can change, and so can attitudes.

America needs an association for all of us, the working guys. How do we do this?

Rock the Health Insurance Mandate

(...thanks, guys)

Rush lyrics offer some wisdom in relation to our own struggles over the so-called individual mandate that each US resident have health insurance, or be penalized. I'm thinking of the line, "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

This premise (emerging without intended irony from a libertarian rock band that hails from the land of single payer health insurance) serves as the crux of a powerful argument in favor of the mandate issued yesterday by a federal district judge. I don't think she quoted from the above, but still...

Many opponents of the health insurance mandate hold that the government is not in a position to mandate individual inactivity, namely, the choice not to buy an insurance plan. Of course, those same people pushed the individual mandate up until the moment the Democrats actually introduced a bill that contained it. The position is that those who prefer to wander naked into the wilderness of American health care should do so free of civil penalty. But how different is inactivity from activity? Is it not just one more form of activity in itself? What if being inactive has a cost on the rest of us?

Consider the penalties for inactivity in daily life. I could wake up tomorrow choose to do nothing. I could stop paying my rent, and the mortgage on a house I unfortunately still own. Let's say I stop going to work and stop paying my bills. I could opt to sit on the couch all day and eat Doritos. Sure, it's possible to take a permanent vacation. But consider the damage to those around me.

But I can't do nothing. My doing nothing has consequences. The state has a clear, compelling interest to make sure I don't do this. Why? Well...

My house would be foreclosed on, likely with broken windows, missing its copper pipes and a/c unit, leaving my neighbors with even lower property values than they already face. The bank would become a little stingier with the next guy who wants a mortgage. The city might be on the hook for securing and patrolling the property. Now that I quit my job, if I wanted to have some kind of life, I'd start taking unemployment, subsidized by the state. I'd go on Medicaid or go to the ER if I got sick from all the doritos I've been eating, courtesy of everyone else who pays their way.

Unless I go off and live in the woods somewhere, I'd go from being a net asset; that is, a taxpaying, upstanding contributor to the economy; to a net burden on my fellow citizens, just when public resources are at their scarcest. What right do I have to do this?

If I choose to be uninsured, that is, if I have the money and don't go get a plan, I put my neighbors and my community in the same position. With a law that guarantees coverage and subsidizes the premiums for people who need it, what excuse do I have? What excuse should I have?

First, let's not forget the moral obligation to help the sick. Few but the most reptilian among us would deny this belief. But even the snakes and lizards should recognize that this choice is the choice of a person to move from social asset to liability. This choice is the choice to take advantage of moral obligation while driving the costs of compliance for the rest of us sky-high. What is liberating about forcing others to clean up after your irresponsibility?

Unless society's answer is to throw the unwilling or unable to the wolves, doing nothing in this instance is not only immoral-- it's stupid.

Left alone, people will make good and bad choices. When a choice affects others, some bad choices should be limited by the state. Some choices are active, and some are passive. Doing nothing is sometimes called depraved indifference, as when we do nothing to head off mortal danger for our neighbor when it is clearly in our power to do so, or when doing nothing means that others will face far greater expenses as a result of your passivity. Our actions (and our inactions) can have serious impacts on others. That's why we accept some government authority to penalize inaction. It protects the many from the selfishness or indifference of the few.

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice... a choice that we all pay for. That's why you'll have to be covered in 2014 or face a penalty.

Egypt is not Iran is not Libya is not Tunisia is not...

The sometimes-controversial social thinker, Samuel Huntington observed that democracies come about in waves. First there were the American and French revolutions, then there were a number of countries that went democratic after World War I. Then it was many places across Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa during the 80s and 90s. Now some people are declaring the so-called Arab Revolution a Fourth Wave of global democratization. I think so too, but not without about a dozen caveats.

Let's recall a few things about the first three waves. In Round 1, France didn't achieve true republic status until they dropped their emperors and conquests in the 1870s-- 80 years after their revolution. America went along fine for about 8 decades, only to succumb to bloody civil war. In Round 2, Germany and Italy were countries that joined the Democracy Club. It wasn't twenty years before the Wiemar republic was overrun by Nazis and Italy went along with Mussolini. In Round 3, places like the Czech Republic and Brazil came away pretty well-- Belorus and Zimbabwe, not so much.

At the beginning of Round 4, we have to assume that in the short term and in the longer term, at least some of the new political orders that emerge will be positive. It's just going to be generations before the final tally is in. But I'll make my own predictions. If I get half of these right, I figure that's not bad. But who's counting? For better or worse, here they are:

Some places will become rulebound representative democracies that ensure a decent chance for people to work towards their potential. Due to their secularity, levels of education, income, their history of pragmatic autocrats, not theocrats or warlords, I'd say that Egypt and Tunisia have good chances of making it through some pretty tumultuous times and coming out better in the end. Syria might end up in this category over the longer term.

Some places will make changes incrementally and without a whole lot of fuss. I'd put Jordan and Morocco with their personality-driven monarchies into this category, though Jordan's king has some problems of legitimacy since two-thirds of Jordanians are in fact Palestinian. But turkey did this a long time ago, thanks to the leadership of Ataturk and the collapse of the Ottomans. They were plenty diverse then as now. Autocratic Syria is a tough call. While not a monarchy, it acts a lot like one, with the son succeeding the father, etc. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States might take some time to do it, but they'll probably get there too.

Some places will make a lot of progress only to be overrun by fanatics, reverting to a hostile, dormant state for decades before emerging as more-or-less dynamic democratic states. Iran looks like it may be near the end of thirty years of pugnacious theocracy, and may be emerging now into something more pluralistic. Iraq unfortunately looks like it may be right at the beginning of its own dormant decades. And possibly Pakistan too.

Some places are a long way from achieving anything resembling an open, forward-thinking state that represents the wills and interests of most people. Yemen fits squarely in this category, as does Sudan and Afghanistan.

Algeria and Libya are wildcards in my view. For reasons of regional affinity, I'd say that Libya depends in large part on what happens in Egypt, and Algeria on what happens in Tunisia.

The point is not to expect the results of these developments to be either universally good over the short term, or uniform in their outcomes over the long term. Looking at Eastern Europe's upheaval now at age twenty is enough to convince me of this. Different people in different settings will generate different social outcomes, even if they all began changing things for similar reasons. We always have, and so long as we remain different from one another, we always will.