(11:42 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Solidarity

I just heard President Bush on TV, addressing the power outage issue by saying that those with electricity should be careful how they use it, because if they practice conservation, their neighbors may be able to get power sooner. To repeat: President George W. Bush was just on TV advocating conservation. In the face of a national crisis, he was advocating that people should sacrifice in order to give assistance to their neighbors. Does it remind you of anything?

Before I saw that snippet, I intended to write about public health initiatives and the huge blind spot therein. For instance, it is undoubtedly a great social good if fewer people smoke, particularly if they don't start at a young age. As lame as the propaganda campaign often is, it feels as though it has good motivations. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of the marijuana propaganda campaign. The most honest commercial is the one in which they show a pot-smoking loser still living in his parents' basement -- that, more than the absurd idea that you're going to get pregnant or run over a little kid, is what the campaign against marijuana is really about. People believe, rightly or wrongly, that marijuana use leads to idleness, and no one wants to be considered a lazy burden on society, right? Just like no one wants to be reminiscent of "kissing an ashtray" or to get lung cancer. (Side issue: do people who don't smoke ever get lung cancer? From the propaganda, I have to say that my impression is that they do not. Could that possibly be true?)

The problem is that the appeal to self-interest, coming from the government, ultimately rings hollow. If everything is reduced to the level of the individual, then there are a million possible goals. If all that matters is being the best that I can be, then why not say I'm at my best when I'm relaxed after smoking pot? So what if I don't "achieve" as much -- I can individually decide that the levels of responsibility and stress associated with "success" are just not worth it for me. As for the smoking thing, what if I sincerely prefer to smoke? One could argue that it places stress on our nation's health infrastructure, but last time I checked, our "health system" was not really "our nation's" -- it is largely offered by private enterprises that require me, or my insurance company, to pay my way. If I'm willing to make that kind of trade-off, especially when the risks are printed clearly on every pack of cigarettes, and if I'm supposed to pay for my own health care anyway, then who is the government to tell me I shouldn't smoke?

I think that in America, the government's function is finally to ensure that the market runs smoothly, and the market (as the aggregate of individual desires) makes all the real decisions. Thus it might make financial sense to discourage people from smoking, while still allowing tobacco companies and farmers to stay in business. The more glaring public health problem, the rampant use of automobiles, cannot be addressed, because such large-scale decisions are beyond the competence of the government. So all we get is the government as one voice among many, attempting to regulate public health through commercials. The president's response to 9-11 reveals the truth of the United States government: all he could tell us was to go shopping, and hopefully the market would fix this problem, too, in some mysterious way.

Luckily for us, most people do manage to "get by" in the present system: although malnourishment and infectious disease are problems, mass starvation and epidemics that kill entire generations are not. This is, however, not because of the inherent wisdom of the capitalist system; it's because we are fortunate enough to live in a prosperous country, the country that first amassed the huge means of production necessary for the capitalist system. We can afford our vast national waste because we've been saving up for the last 150 years or so. It's not at all clear that this can go on forever. In fact, it's pretty clear that it can't. But our government, which has given up almost all powers except the considerable power of disciplining and punishing its citizens, is powerless to make the kind of changes that would be necessary to create a more just and stable social order -- powerless by choice.

We have forgotten that human beings really do have choices about the way their lives will be structured, if they work together. Perhaps the problem of today's generation is how to make us all remember.

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