The No Borders Movement:
A big piece of the fallout from Globalization 3.0 that we’re getting here in the desert is a lot of illegal Mexican immigrants. The story behind it is pretty simple…
As I’ve said before, the Founding Fathers of the United States were all Christians, and they wrote the Constitution before the Theory of Evolution or the Laws of Thermodynamics were discovered. That’s causing a number of problems now.
Due to their shared cultural background they all took certain things for granted about human behavior and how the world worked. They assumed these things were true because no individual in the group had a perspective on the world that was different enough from everyone else’s for anyone to realize that any other perspective was possible. They realized that they couldn’t anticipate everything, but they didn’t realize how much they couldn’t anticipate. So they wrongly assumed that certain things were true about the world, and then they wrote the Constitution based on that assumption. But as a result of these fundamental errors they made in writing the Constitution, human behavior has strayed from what the Constitution was prepared to deal with. The Founding Fathers included a provision that the Constitution could be amended to meet the changing times, but they didn’t include any provision for what to do if it was discovered that the Constitution was fundamentally flawed. Amending a Constitution that’s fundamentally flawed would only cure symptoms of the real problem. To solve the fundamental flaws in the U.S. Constitution, the Constitution needs to be rewritten. And considering how hard it is to amend the Constitution anymore, rewriting it would be politically impossible.
One specific way the Founding Fathers erred in their understanding of human behavior was that they all believed in a general Christian origin of human behavior. They all assumed that people are inherently good but are tempted by evil. There’s nothing in there about the preservation of anyone’s DNA. And there’s nothing in there about what to do if people don’t turn out to be inherently good.
What the Founding Fathers wrote was a Constitution that works perfectly (let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, anyway) if everyone in America was raised according to their religious values and cultural background. But everyone in America isn’t raised that way. Lacking the cultural values the Founding Fathers took for granted, they left gaping loopholes in the Constitution that let people follow the letter of the law, claim that what they’re doing is perfectly legal, and act completely differently from what the Founding Fathers expected.
That brings us to Capitalism. Capitalism, as it worked in the late 18th century, was “an economic system that was different from monarchy”. In the late 18th century, the material resources available in America seemed to be infinite. So a Capitalist economy, as far as anyone in America in the late 18th century could tell, was an economy that let anyone work in whatever way suited them best, and that rewarded hard work. It didn’t attempt to be an egalitarian economic system, because the Founding Fathers took a hierarchy of the universe for granted. That meant they did it subconsciously. Think about it. The Americans had just fought a war to drive the British lords out of America, but they still served The Lord. They were no longer serving the king of England, but they were still serving the King of Kings. And nobody saw the contradiction there. If they won their independence from an Earthly king, but they still served an imaginary king, how much differently were they really going to act now?
Even if they were consciously aware that they believed in a hierarchy of the universe, they had internalized the idea so much that they wouldn’t’ve realized how much they acted upon that belief subconsciously. That is, they could imagine a society that was more egalitarian than what they had, but they couldn’t imagine how egalitarian it was possible for a society to be. And even if they had enough vision to imagine a more egalitarian society, the majority of Americans couldn’t—which meant that if they tried to force egalitarianism upon everyone with the Constitution, nobody would accept egalitarianism, or the Constitution for that matter. That was why George Washington wanted to free the slaves but he realized that before that could happen, he had to convince all the slave owners to join a government that would be capable of freeing the slaves.
So now Americans had built a political and economic system where everyone was allowed to work in whatever way suited them best and would be rewarded for their hard work, but they still believed in an invisible kingdom that created a hierarchy to the universe that was beyond their control. The Founding Fathers and everyone else in the late 18th century continued to act in a hierarchal manner, assumed that’s what they were supposed to do, didn’t write anything into the Constitution to change that, and called the perpetuation of their hierarchal cultural tradition freedom. So some White men were supposed to lead, and others were supposed to follow. And if you came from Africa or North America and you made all your tools out of stone and you had skin the color of dirt, where else were you supposed to belong in the hierarchy but at the very bottom?
Now skip ahead 200 years. We have a Constitution written on the faulty belief that people are inherently good and that we’re supposed to have the hierarchy that the Founding Fathers had. That means that if some inherently good people exploit other people, that’s still inherently good, because they’re fulfilling their roles in the imaginary hierarchy of the universe.
Now the infinite supply of material resources the Founding Fathers thought we had is gone, but the hierarchy they believed in remains. Now that we’re running out of material resources to extract from the environment, the only way to get material resources through hard work is to take them from other people. And under the imaginary hierarchy of the Founding Fathers, that’s justified.
In a world where our supply of natural resources is limited, Capitalism is inherently anti-democratic. Once you label an object your “own”, you control how that object can and can’t be used. And you prevent anyone else from deciding how it can and can’t be used.
Here we arrive at the fundamental conflict between Capitalism and the Use-Value economic system. Under a Use-Value economic system, rightful ownership is not defined by physical possession of an object. Defining rightful ownership by the physical possession of an object depends on people’s belief that the ability to acquire material possessions is an adequate measure of human value—which it isn’t. Possession of an object doesn’t prove willingness and ability to work for it; it proves a combination of willingness and ability to work for it and opportunity to get it. If willingness and ability to work for an object were the only factors involved, you could say that inherent human value could be measured through possession of material objects. That would mean that a Capitalist economic system was an equitable economic system, because the only differences in economic status would be caused by the people themselves.
That opportunity factor is what destroys the possibility of Capitalism resulting in an equitable economic system. However, the Founding Fathers believed, on some level or another, that opportunities were created by their imaginary hierarchy of the universe, and that it was by each person taking advantage of the opportunities that presented themselves that the rightful hierarchy of the universe could be realized. I can say that the Founding Fathers must’ve believed this, even if only subconsciously, because there is no other way to reconcile the possibility that ability, willingness to work, and opportunity could create an economic, and consequently, political, system in which all men were created equal. For them to build a hierarchal economic and political system and call that “equality” depends on their belief that a divine power is intervening in their political system. (Well, the other possibility was that they believed that all people were created equal, people were equal for reasons no one of the 18th century could precisely define, but that if they established that idea as the founding principle of a country, they would at least set events into motion and eventually someone would figure out a secular way to define human equality—which is exactly what I’m doing.)
Under a Capitalist economic system, if your parents were millionaires and someone else’s parents earned minimum wage, the fact that when you grew up you made enough money to buy a mansion and the other person only made enough money to live in a tenement apartment, proves that’s what each of you deserve. That perpetuates the invisible hierarchy of the world that the Founding Fathers believed in. But as evolutionarily equal humans, all inherent human value is equal. There is no other way to measure human value scientifically. That means that regardless of the imaginary hierarchy of the universe the Founding Fathers believed in, under the secular government they set up, all human value is equal. They even said that themselves, that “All men are created equal”, even though they didn’t possess the science at the time to fathom the full meaning of that statement.
A Use-Value economic system is not perfectly equitable, but unlike Capitalism, it is a conscious attempt at equitability. As I showed you in my example of Crusoe Island, rightful ownership is determined according to a combination of who needs something the most, who was willing to work for it, who was lucky enough to get it, and how important the thing really is. If you find some medical supplies they belong to the doctor automatically. If you find some medicine, it belongs to whoever is sick, automatically. If you find a field full of strawberries, they belong to everyone. If you find a few strawberries, they belong to you and whoever was with you when you found them, or else to you and whoever you want to give them to.
Under a Capitalist economy it’s a lot easier to keep track of rightful ownership, because that only depends on simple arithmetic. If you have a hundred million dollars and get a hundred million more dollars, now you have two hundred million dollars. Determining rightful ownership under a Use-Value economic system would depend on a gigantic calculus equation using a lot of theoretical numbers, which no one has ever figured out how to write.
However, the fact remains that in a world with limited material resources, a Use-Value economic system is the only one that can result in everyone getting what they need. The Founding Fathers thought we had an infinite supply of resources, and everyone at the time agreed with them, but they were all wrong. At the time they could get away with acting as if we did have an infinite supply of material resources, and everyone acting upon what they all believed to be true was the easiest—and probably only—way to create economic and political stability. But now that we can see that the beliefs they based their economy on were not true, we can see that we’d better build our economy on what we know to be true about the world now. That necessarily will mean that we’ll end up with a different economy. And an economic system built on equal human value, in which economic success is defined by everyone getting what they need, is the definition of a Use-Value economic system.
A Use-Value economic system functions differently from Capitalism, but that’s unavoidable. Capitalist competition drives innovation, and that leads to people finding ever more efficient and productive ways of doing things. A Use-Value economic system isn’t competitive, and therefore it doesn’t drive innovation. But building ever more machines that do things ever more efficiently and productively necessarily depends on extracting ever more material resources from the environment. But we don’t have any more material resources to spare. So once again, you can see that Capitalism isn’t an economic system that’s going to do us any good.
A Use-Value economic system depends on everyone learning to be content with what they have. That is, after the resources get redistributed so everyone gets what they need. Everyone learning to be content with what they have doesn’t result in a competitive economy, and therefore, doesn’t measure economic success by people’s ability to continue extracting resources from the environment.
But the Constitution says we have a Capitalist economy. That means that replacing our Capitalist economy with a Use-Value economy would not depend on our amending the Constitution but on rewriting it. At any time, we could say, “Hey, this Constitution is bullsh*t, because it doesn’t work anymore. Let’s write a new version now.” But we don’t. We’ve all been taught to believe that the Constitution is right, and that anyone who suggests we should get rid of it and write a new Constitution better be thrown in prison. So we go on participating in this suicidal economic system for the sake of maintaining short-term political stability. But a suicidal economic system can only lead to economic instability, and that means political instability. So we’re sacrificing long-term political stability for the sake of short-term political stability.
That brings us to the North American Free Trade Agreement. We wrote the North American Free Trade Agreement based on our faulty assumption that everything the Constitution claimed to be true about the world—either explicitly or implicitly—really was true. That meant that the success of the NAFTA, like the rest of our Capitalist economy, depended on people being inherently good, the world’s material resources being infinite, and divine powers creating a hierarchal, but somehow equitable, political system.
So what happened? What the f*ck did you think was going to happen? The inherently self-interested Homo sapiens who occupied the highest tiers of their economic and political systems willingly used their abilities and worked hard to claim all the material resources they could as their rightful property, as efficiently and productively as they could. But for some reason, they couldn’t find any resources that nobody else was using, so they had to claim for their own resources that people were already using.
So the Mexican aristocrats started buying American agricultural produce that had been subsidized by the U.S. government and importing it to Mexico, where they could sell it more cheaply than Mexican farmers could sell their own produce. So the farmers lost their land and had to move into the cities to look for work, just like the farmers in Haiti did when people started importing rice to Haiti more cheaply than their own farmers could grow it. Conveniently, all those aristocrats who imported the agricultural produce had also built a lot of new factories to take advantage of the NAFTA. And now they had a whole bunch of unemployed farmers looking for work. Think that was a coincidence?
But there’s a catch. Right next door to Mexico is the United States, where there’s even more money to be made. So here comes a flood of immigrants. Some of them get through the border legally, and the rest… don’t.
A lot of people have been working on this problem from a lot of different directions. I once met up with a Presbyterian minister who had been involved in the No More Deaths movement since the beginning, who told me the history of the border since the NAFTA went into effect.
20 years ago, people came and went across the border all the time. The town where I grew up in Maine is about 5 hours from Quebec City. Before the NAFTA, life on the Mexican border was pretty much the same as life on the Canadian border. People from Mexico worked in U.S. border towns and commuted from one country to the other all the time, people from both sides would cross the border to go shopping for whatever they couldn’t get in their own country easily, people had families living on both sides of the border, whatever. Security was a little tighter here than on the Canadian border, because there was a lot more incentive for Mexicans to immigrate illegally than there was for Canadians.
Then Mexican farmers started losing their land. They could move into the cities and get jobs in the factories. Or, since they had to relocate anyway, they could just move to America and make even more money. So here came the flood of immigrants.
American politicians and law enforcement agents tried a lot of different things to stop them, and none of them worked. Then, in some border city, someone got the idea to build what basically amounted to the Berlin Wall. It worked. So they built another one in another city. Then another, then another. Within a few years, every border city had one.
Then someone said, “This is great, but the border is 1,800 miles long. How are we supposed to wall off the entire border?”
To that, someone replied, “We don’t need to. All we have to do is to wall off the cities. The desert will do the rest.”
By that he meant—and he may even have said it, but I’m remembering this conversation from 3 months ago—that once people couldn’t cross the border in the cities anymore, they would try to cross it in the desert. But a lot of people would die out there, and eventually, enough people would hear about it that they’d give up.
It hasn’t worked.
To date, about 4,000 Mexicans have died in the desert. And they keep on coming.
For this Presbyterian minister I was talking to, that conversation was a turning point in his life. Because that meant that this plan for securing our borders depended on killing innocent people. And for this Presbyterian minister, that violated a set of rules that were way the hell more important than anything these mortal politicians had in mind.
So now our border politics have turned into a complete clusterf*ck. We had the border agents, and we keep hiring more and more of them and giving them more and more equipment. Then we had the Minute Men, who consider themselves a patriotic militia who volunteer to help the border agents defend our country against the invasion of Mexican peasants. And now we’ve called out the National Guard.
On another side we have a lot of groups who are out to provide humanitarian relief for the Mexicans. They set up stations out in the desert where people can find water, food, and emergency medical supplies. At first the border patrol agents, Minute Men, and National Guard wanted to guard the water stations and use them for bait. But the two sides argued it out, and eventually the three factions of the border guard agreed not to stake out the water stations. But now, to make the water stations work, the people who set them have to go down to Mexico and spread word there that the border guard has agreed not to stake them out, because if the Mexicans thought they were guarded, they still wouldn’t use them. But now that some people have found them, what do you suppose the odds are that they spread word back to Mexico and now the unguarded water stations are being used as planned way-stations in a new Underground Railroad?
On another side, we have the Mexican drug lords, corrupt politicians and law enforcement, and the human trafficking blackmarket. People who are taking their chances on crossing the desert are easy prey for a lot of people. Corrupt politicians and law enforcement take bribes or extortions from migrants. At one point someone even sent some of the Mexican army to the border to conduct training exercises, to try to scare people away. Drug lords pay immigrants to carry drugs across the border for them. And the human trafficking blackmarketeers take payments from Mexicans to smuggle them across the border.
Now the border guard are installing infrared cameras at all their border checkpoints, so they can see heat patterns coming off of people’s bodies no matter where they’re hiding in a vehicle. A lot of Mexicans have died from heat and suffocation riding in cargo compartments. A couple summers ago, someone stopped a trailer truck on the border. And when they opened up the box trailer, they found 19 people dead. When I first moved to Arizona, I was driving around down by the border in my van, checking out the desert, and I got questioned by police three times in one night. Part of their reason for stopping me was to see if I was smuggling anyone. The other part was to warn me to be careful of people trying to steal my van.
And on another side there are the six Native American nations who had the U.S.-Mexico border drawn right through the middle of their land. And just like the Haudenosaunee and so many other Native Americans on the Canadian border, now they’re all people of the same nation, but some of them are citizens of one colonial country, and some are citizens of the other. Now they all have to go through other people’s checkpoints just to travel from one end of their land to the other.
Now U.S. politicians are talking about temporary work visas and immigration reform and amnesty and tougher laws. Now every single law that affects U.S. citizens has its own interpretation for illegal immigrants. You are allowed to send your kids to school, you are allowed to go to the emergency room, you aren’t allowed to get a driver’s license, and you do have to pay your income tax, but the IRS won’t report your illegal citizenship to anyone else. Or whatever all those laws have been changed to by now.
We have so many illegal immigrants here that if they were all caught and thrown in prison, the first 10% would make all of our prisons overflow. So instead they’re transported back to Mexico. And by now, a number of immigrants have been recorded laughing in the immigration officials’ faces and saying, “Fine, take me back to Mexico. I’ll be back here next week.”
A lot of Mexicans have lived here for two generations. The parents came illegally and have been living here illegally for years. Then they had kids here. Their kids are legal residents but the parents aren’t. So when the immigration officials come to the door, the parents have to leave but the kids can stay. Or maybe they just deport one of the parents and break up the family.
Now every May 1st we get tens of thousands of Mexicans marching and protesting through the streets of L.A., Phoenix, and every major city near the border. They keep repeating the fundamental truth that the economy of the southwest depends on illegal workers. They take the jobs no White people want. To get White people to want to do those jobs, people would have to pay so much money that they couldn’t afford to hire anyone. So this is yet another example of what happens when people want an economic system that their political system isn’t capable of supporting—somebody figures out a way to cheat.
That brings me to the No Borders movement part of Globalization 4.0.
So far, all these people have been asking, “What are we going to do about all these illegal immigrants sneaking across the border?” The members of the No Borders movement asked a fundamentally different question. They backed up to the very beginning and asked:
What is a border?
So here we go with another version of the history of the world. But you’ve already heard all the parts of this story before…
Once upon a time there were a bunch of monkeys in the world. They lived in tribal groups for their mutual protection, meaning for basic cooperation toward their mutual interests.
Then they evolved into humans and kept living in tribal groups so they could cooperate toward their mutual interests.
The tribal group is an economic and political unit. Within the group, people combine their energy to serve their mutual interests—the definition of cooperation. That group of people acts to serve their mutual interests. That concentration of energy is the foundation of an economic system, and the group of people acting in a certain way is the foundation of a political system.
In order to define who is in your group, you have to distinguish them from the people who are not in your group. People also need land to live on and to provide their food and other material resources. People also need a stable supply of food, so they plan ahead and know where their food is going to come from. The obvious solution to all of these needs is to divide up the land and say that the people in your group live on this land and the people in the other group live on that land.
So a border is an agreement between groups of people about which land belongs to which group.
Now here’s the catch…
You know how all those Capitalists are globalizing their corporations? And you know what I said about those international interests, alliances, networks, and sympathies dissolving the power of national governments? What the f*ck do you think illegal immigration is besides globalized labor?
A Capitalist economy is competitive. That competition drives innovation, which causes people to find ever more efficient and productive means of doing things.
Or…
A Capitalist economy is competitive. The goal of competition is to win and to eliminate your competition.
So which do you think it is? If Capitalists were competing for the sake of driving innovation, then the more competition there was, the more successful their Capitalist economy would be. If driving innovation was the goal of Capitalism, then the Capitalists would welcome as much competition as they could possibly get.
On the other hand, you know what I’ve said about how the most effective way to compete is to compete against people you know you can beat? And who are the easiest people to beat? The materially poorest people. And who are the materially poorest people here but the displaced Mexican farmers?
If Capitalists truly believed that competition benefited a globalized Capitalist economy, why wouldn’t they want to dissolve national power even more and erase all their borders? We’re globalizing Capital, so that Capital can be moved from any country to any other country. So why do they have such a problem with workers trying to move from any country to any other country? Do we have a competitive economy or don’t we?
Of course we do. The Capitalists are competing against Labor and eliminating them as competition right from the start.
So what is a border? It’s more than just a line drawn on a map. It’s a line drawn on a map plus all the emotional and political significance people attach to the idea of the line drawn on the map. The border doesn’t just exist on the map; it also exists in people’s minds.
The name says it all: Illegal immigrant. An immigrant is a person who was born on one side of the line and now lives on the other. He’s called illegal because when he crossed the line he broke the law. Doing things that are illegal is bad. Or at least, everyone is taught to feel that doing things that are illegal is bad. And in this case that bad word is being applied not to a thing the immigrant did, but to the word immigrant itself. So what else does the name “illegal immigrant” translate to besides, “bad person”?
Now politicians and the people who control the media spread the news to people everywhere that their country is being invaded by waves of “bad people.” What do you suppose people are going to do about it besides hire more police, pass more laws, and build more prisons to keep them safe, elect politicians who promise to do something about the problem, and live in fear of what all those “bad people” are going to do? It sure would be hard to get much of a reaction out of anyone if you referred to these Mexicans as “people who are desperate for jobs”, wouldn’t it?
Unrestricted immigration would result in an imbalance in our environmental economy. The United States already has the most environmentally destructive economy in the world. Every person we add to our economy makes our economy bigger and increases our environmental impact.
If a flood people all came moving up here at the same time, what would they all do? Where would they all live? How would they support themselves? How would they convert energy and material resources from things that aren’t useful to people to things that are useful to people? Where would they get all those material resources? Each individual couldn’t possibly predict the effects his presence would have on our local environment. Nobody could predict the effect that everyone’s collective presence would have on our local environment. Practically overnight our cities would end up looking like they had been swept over by a swarm of locusts. That would mean economic instability, and that would mean political instability, as Americans started acting in whatever new way they had to act to try to keep themselves safe from the Mexicans.
So here we are, supposedly fighting this War on Terror, with a government that’s manufacturing foreign threats to our country, and a media that’s making sure that everybody hears about the threat. And what do you think happens next? A lot of American workers living in fear of Mexican workers and fighting back, and vice versa. If they weren’t fighting each other, the American workers could ask them, “Hey, why do you want to leave your homes and your families so badly and come take our jobs?” To which a lot of Mexicans would say, “Because I lost my farm and I need some work.” Now the two groups are communicating, and communication opens the door for cooperation. And workers working together for their mutual interests means Labor competing against Capital. Competition is supposed to be good for our economy.
What do we have instead? Divide and conquer.
The No Borders movement is still new, and its members are still figuring out their strategies, but this is the problem they’re working on. It’s a new project, but it’s no great departure from what any of them have been working on before.
Unrestricted immigration wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem of people overstretching the environment. But it is the only way that Globalization 3.0 can be considered fair. If Capitalists are allowed to move their capital across borders freely, why shouldn’t people who sell their labor be allowed to move across borders freely? Is the goal of globalization to make us a global community, or isn’t it? If the goal of globalization is only to make more money for some people, we aren’t a global community, because the goal of our so-called community is not the mutual benefit of all of its members.
This seems to conflict with what Mr. Friedman said, about globalization benefiting everyone. There are just two things wrong with his prediction: The Theory of Evolution, and the Laws of Thermodynamics.
(See what happens when you try to develop political and economic strategies without taking the time beforehand to learn how the world actually works?)
First, the Theory of Evolution. All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her. I’m sure you’re getting sick of hearing me say that by now. While it is true that Globalization 3.0 is leveling the field between the materially wealthy and the materially poor, it is also true that the materially wealthy are making the choices they’re making for a reason. Materially wealthy people got materially wealthy by investing their material wealth in ways that would make them more materially wealthy. So if they’re investing in anything now, what other reason could they have for it but to make themselves ever more materially wealthy? And if the rules of Globalization 3.0 are written to let the Capitalists make themselves ever more materially wealthy but prevent Labor from making themselves more materially wealthy, that’s obviously not an equitable economic strategy, which means it can only lead to ever more economic inequality.
Mr. Friedman’s strategy for how Labor should make themselves more materially wealthy is to cooperate with the Capitalists. But if the Capitalists get to write the rules, they’re going to write them in their own favor. That’s what Capitalists always do. Why should Labor expect them to do otherwise? And how is inequality in decision-making ability supposed to lead to economic equality?
The unrestricted immigration plague-of-locusts economic strategy wouldn’t benefit anyone but the Mexicans in the short run. But under the current economic strategy, they’re losing their farms and dying in the desert, and the Capitalists are making a profit on that. So if the current economic strategy is that inequitable now, why should Labor expect it to get any better?
So the plague-of-locusts economy isn’t a valid economic strategy, but it is, at least, a direct opposition to the equally invalid death-in-the-desert economic strategy. Competition is the only thing Capitalists can understand, and competition is exactly what they’re getting. The plague-of-locusts economy puts a balance of power in the hands of the people who are currently caught at the losing end of the death-in-the-desert economy. So until anyone comes up with a better solution to the problem, at least this way everyone involved has a choice. And if you’re trying to use the death-in-the-desert economy and some people don’t feel like cooperating with you, you’ve got no one to blame for that but yourself. So innovate, motherf*cker, innovate!
The Globalization 4.0 movement already has a better solution to the problem. It’s called localized organic agriculture. And as it so happens, that’s exactly what the displaced farmers were already practicing. But then the Capitalists drove them off their lands. Well if it’s fair for the Capitalists to do that, then it’s only fair to let the displaced farmers try to make the best of their situation. And if you don’t like the choices they make now, too goddamned bad. You should’ve thought of that ahead of time. That’s what happens when you initiate economic strategies without consulting the people they’re going to affect.
If the plague-of-locusts economy did succeed, in the end America would go bankrupt—or something close to it. First American Labor would lose their jobs to cheap Mexican Labor. Everyone’s wages would be driven down, so no one would be able to pay their taxes or make much of an economy happen here at all. If Labor couldn’t pay any taxes anymore, the Capitalists would have to pay all the taxes, and then they’d lose a lot of the money they thought they’d made by setting up their international corporations to let them move their capital back and forth across national borders freely. Somewhere along the way, we’d run out of money to pay the farm subsidies that let the Mexican Capitalists import American produce and sell it cheaper than the Mexican farmers could sell it, which is how they drove them off their land in the first place.
I call it the plague-of-locusts economy, but I really should call it the chickens-coming-home-to-roost economy. And if you don’t like it, innovate, innovate, innovate! A lot of people didn’t like the death-in-the-desert economy, so innovating is exactly what they did. And now if you don’t want people to use the plague-of-locusts economy, think of something else.
As for the Laws of Thermodynamics, trickle-down economics is a myth. Jeremy Rifkin published Entropy in the early years of the Reagan administration, and for those of you who are too young to remember, trickle-down economics was President Reagan’s solution for everything. In the Thermodynamics chapter I told you how energy is always radiated out in space every time anything happens in the world. I talked about food chains, where energy is always lost between one level and the next, because a lot of chemical reactions happen in between. If a deer eats some leaves and then a bear eats the deer, a lot of the sunlight energy that was contained in the molecular bonds of the leaves never reaches the bear, because the deer used it for the energy he needed to live. The deer used some of that energy and some of the atoms he got from his food to build new molecules for his body, and that energy was stored in the molecular bonds of his body. That’s the energy the bear got. If you then came along and ate the bear, again, a lot of the energy the bear ate would never reach you. That’s why the only large animals anyone ever domesticated were herbivores. If you wanted meat, you could domesticate cows, then feed them to domesticated bears, and then eat the bears. But if you just ate the cows, you’d get a hell of a lot more meat out of the deal. Or you could not raise cows at all use their former pastureland to grow beans instead. Now you’re eating the sunlight even more directly, by cutting another tier out of the food chain.
You could call a food chain trickle-up economics. So guess how trickle-down economics works. The exact same way, only in the other direction.
According to Ronald Reagan’s idea of trickle-down economics, if we give tax breaks to the materially wealthy, everyone will make money out of the deal. If someone makes a bunch of money and then uses some of that money to pay you to do a job, you make money as a result of their making money. But here’s where the Laws of Thermodynamics crash the party. You earned the money as a result of doing something. Energy radiated off the Earth in the process and was lost from our environmental economy forever. Sure, the money reached you, but by the time it did, there was less energy in our environmental economy for you to trade your money for. That means inflation. That means that your money isn’t worth as much as it would’ve been if we’d cut a tier out of the Reaganomics food chain and given you the tax break directly. I know it doesn’t sound like you getting paid to do a job should devalue your money, but that’s just a product of the Laws of Thermodynamics being counterintuitive to us. If you were the only person involved in the Ronald Reagan economy, you’d be right. But at the time we were talking about a national economy made up of 250 million people. Today we’re talking about a global economy made up of 6.5 billion people, all of whom are using an industrialized technological level—although some more than others, and some a lot more than others.
Everyone in the Globalization 4.0 movement has already figured this part out too.
I suppose now would be a good time to point out that the global Anarchist movement has been working on Globalization 4.0 for about 150 years. The Capitalists have been working on Globalization 3.0 for about 15 years. The goal of Anarchism is to level the playing field among everyone, to empower individuals, to dissolve hierarchal social systems, and to replace them with a horizontal social structure. In other words, the goal of Anarchism and Globalization 4.0 is to do everything Mr. Friedman said is happening in Globalization 3.0. The two things the Anarchists have lacked to this point are an effective communications network and a unifying ideology. In other words, the Capitalists are building the infrastructure the global Anarchist movement needs to be able to succeed.
And the universal ideology?
Heh, heh, heh…
So I have to wonder: Are the Anarchists who are protesting Capitalist globalization really just a bunch of immature children kicking and screaming about the world not being fair, as Mr. Friedman accuses them? Or do they have such a highly developed ideology that Mr. Friedman can’t even understand what the f*ck they’re talking about? The Capitalists aren’t having any trouble turning their ideology into practice, but they’ve hardly had any time to develop an ideology compatible with Globalization 3.0. The Anarchists have developed an ideology that’s so compatible with Globalization 3.0 that they can call it Globalization 4.0. They haven’t yet figured out how to put their ideology into practice effectively, but at least they have an ideology that’s compatible with the economy we have now, which is more than the Capitalists can say for themselves. The Capitalists have been stumbling through this economy and making up an ideology to go along with it the whole time. The Anarchists started at the beginning and identified an ideology first, and then started looking for how to put it to use.
In the end, the goal of the Capitalists is to compete. In a world with a growing population and diminishing resources, that competition necessarily will make the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can’t keep everyone alive. The goal of the Anarchists is to make the chemical reaction of the world work in a way that can keep everyone alive, because to do otherwise would be authoritarian. It would depend on people deciding that they possessed greater human value than other people, and therefore that they deserved to live while the other people deserved to die. And given the choice between a globalization strategy that depends on people dying to make it succeed, or one that doesn’t require people dying to make it succeed, guess which one I picked…
“When they came for the homosexuals, I did not speak up because I was not a homosexual. When they came for the Socialists, I did not speak up because I was not a Socialist. When they came for the Jews I did not speak up because I was not a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak up.”