Law and Ordering

“First They Came” | ”Als sie kamen”
by Martin Niemöller

There's been a lot of erosion of US democracy lately. The latest is the case of Kilmar Abrego García's deportation. It should matter to everyone because of the specific precedent it sets.

But it's part of a general trend for how many precedents are being set. The order in which things are happening is not accidental.

In many ways, what I'm going to say here is just a restatement of the famous Niemöller poem. Great poetry often captures an idea crisply, and certainly that poem does. But some things are important enough to say a lot of different ways, and this is certainly one.

So, at the risk of redundancy, let me just say that there's a very specific ordering in which laws and norms are being stretched and broken. It goes from “most acceptable” to “least acceptable” in our society for whose rights we'll tolerate violating. We as a society have grown used to some of our members being abused. They know this ugly truth, and they're exploiting it.

As I explained in my essay Political Terraforming last fall, the goal is plainly just to eliminate all rights. But they can't do it all at once. There's a clear order in which this has to be done.

In effect, there is an aspect of this which is its incremental and creeping nature. We see that as a kind of icky feeling as we wake each morning to look at the Internet, but it's not just that. It's tactical. The Overton window can only stretch at a certain rate. It's apparently fast, but not infinitely fast.

The US right now is a herd of animals where the weakest are at the outside, being picked off one by one by his wolves. We've arranged ourselves with the weakest, least overall-acceptable people at the outside, and too many of us comfort ourselves that we're safe because we're not on the outside (yet).

There's some part of this that's shock and awe, trying to go as fast as possible before anyone can react at all. But there's a slowness component to it, too.

With the system—and our own sensibilities—overwhelmed, citizens are forced to prioritize which indignity to be responding to at any given time. This Gish gallop of disgusting acts is so vast that one cannot respond to everything. So the Project 2025 goal is to lay a foundation of precedents, breaking prior norms, moving the Overton window while most people aren't yet noticing or caring because they're busy with other indignities.

So, amid the flurry of things that every day assault us citizens, they're going slowly enough that the part involving precedent setting passes unnoticed. In this way, by the time it matters for mainstream America, the aspiring dictator will be poised to say “This is just how it's done. You've lost your chance.”

We must not let these things pass unnoticed. It matters to catch them and object to them before legal precedents are set. And, for those of us who think we are not immediately threatened, it matters to see that really we are. It's coming for all of us, and soon. The damage will be done by the time it gets to many of us. So none of us can afford to postpone our outrage and involvement.

E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

We The People must not let them divide us. We must stand as one.

 

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Author's Notes:

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This post began as a comment on reddit. It's been tidied up and expanded, and the formatting has been adjusted to be suitable for a web venue. The reddit post is best seen as a first draft.

The graphic was downloaded downloaded from Wikimedia (which says it is in the public domain), and then cropped and scaled using Gimp.

Retirement Savings

I often hear people say that Social Security should be eliminated, that we'd do better with our own 401K's.

There are a lot of problems with that argument.

The argument is that people could invest their money better. Maybe. But they can also invest their money worse. So it's a very uneven policy. And that is ultimately cruel. It makes gamblers of us all, and experience shows that gamblers are often a lot more confident than is warranted.

Moral Failing

The sociopaths among us often say, “Too bad. Individuals should take responsibility for their lack of saving. It's not my fault that some people don't plan.” Is that so? I doubt it.

You see, those same people are telling us that we should eliminate the minimum wage, asking “if the market doesn't want to pay someone enough to even live, why should it have to?” So exactly where is the savings supposed to come from?

On the one side, people work hard for hardly any money. On the other side, they're told their failure to save is a moral failing. But where is the discussion of moral failing in having more money than God and yet still being unwilling to help raise people out of poverty? That seems the biggest moral failing.

Dynastic Wealth & Connection

Moreover, a lot of what makes the difference in who succeeds or fails is one's parents. Dynastic fortunes. Better schools. Better connections. Race. Sometimes even just better health or better clothing. The narrative is spun that the rich worked hard for their money, but, in my personal experience, poor people work much harder for the scraps they are thrown than rich people ever do, and the notion of “meritocracy” is nonsense because the people who get ahead are just those who get to start ahead of the others.

Social Security as Moral Agent

While on the topic of morality, let's also look at the structure of Social Security itself. People like to compare it to a 401K, but it's not like that. It's not a bank account. It's a very different beast.

As an example, if you become suddenly unable to work, it kicks in right away, even if you haven't paid a lot up front. That's very different than a bank account. Also, if you live for only a short while or for a long time, it continues to pay you through your life.

There might be issues with getting necessary cost of living adjustments, but the only reason we don't do those more often is that the aforementioned rich sociopaths insist it's more important to give tax breaks to the wealthy.

They'll tell you that Social Security is intended only to supplement your retirement, not to be the full amount, and yet they'll happily attach penalties for those using Social Security if they try to draw money out of it while also getting other income. That's not really how supplements work, and it's a disincentive to additional work.

A Social Contract

But my point is that the contract is not for a specific quantity of money. It is a social contract. You pay into it while you're able and you are paid when you're not able. We could do better in the “helping people to get paid” part, but the point is for it to keep a great many people from falling into poverty—to add dignity.

It's worth noting that Social Security did not arise in a vacuum. While people could invest their money, a lot of people didn't, or else were losers in that gambling. Before Social Security, in the 1930s, the elderly poverty rate in the depression was something like 70%. So there is an objective way to understand what this did for the public. Some have called it the most successful anti-poverty program in the history of the US.

Implementation Details

If we were sincerely worried that investing in the market were a better bet, we could arrange for the Social Security trust fund to do that. That's just an implementation detail and has nothing to do with the overall social promise. If DOGE wanted to do something helpful, instead of aggressively dismantling all of the US government's ability to provide value to the public, they could analyze whether there are better ways to manage the funds.

But, ultimately, government is not a business and Social Security is not a profit & loss center, even if it's popular for some who don't like it to portray it that way. It mostly pays for itself, but from a moral point of view, its real purpose is to say that we as a society need to have a commitment to our sick and elderly, to assure they are taken care of, before we declare a profit.

If we as a nation are able to give tax breaks to rich citizens only by cutting social programs, then the rich are preying on the poor. The health and welfare of all citizens is our first priority as a nation. We should not be preferencing the already-preferenced before we have attended to that.

The Present Day

This topic is very apropos in the current market. We may be about to enter another recession, perhaps a depression. 401K's are down. So the claim that we could do better investing on our own is uncertain, but is again certainly going to test a lot of ordinary citizens, postponing their ability to retire.

And I emphasize that the choice of when to retire is not just a whim. Even ignoring age discrimination, age wears on a person, and some people do physical jobs—actual hard work, as opposed to the metaphorically hard work done by rich executives—that leaves them depleted. So, delayed retirement is not just an inconvenience, it is in some cases cruel torture, and in some cases impossible.

But even as we are potentially entering a depression, the billionaires are salivating. They are looking forward to “buying low”. They're treating this roller coaster as a buying opportunity! They plan to get rich on this depression. Even as others suffer and probably many die. As homes and farms are foreclosed upon. They are gleeful.

Betting on Regular Citizens

This is the time when Social Security should be doubling down and assuring people it will increase benefits to cover rising costs—although it wouldn't be terrible if we also just impeached the President who's artificially causing those rising costs by imposing tariffs that really no sane business people think are a good idea. Social Security is a social contract with the population about what our priority is, even in tough times. Especially then. So, if we need more money, we should be bumping the tax on those gleeful about what a great buying opportunity this is. That would properly reflect our societal morality.

They, the rich, would probably whine that such a tax singles them out. They'd speak of their pain, and claim that others were just jealous of their wealth and cleverness. No one should stand for such rhetoric. The rich folks making noise did not get their power by dealing honorably with us citizens. This is not jealousy speaking. It is a desire for justice. Be glad I'm not suggesting—as some have and still do—that we just “eat the rich” and be done with it. Proper taxation of accumulated wealth (not just income) works for me.

No one needs that much money anyway. It's clear from their observed behavior that one can only buy so many gold toilet seats before one starts to wonder what the point of excess riches is, and really it seems the only thing that one can find to spend such wealth on is buying governments. And then, apparently, running them badly and cruelly. The Peter Principle in its most high stakes form. No, I'm not going to feel sorry about suggesting taxation.

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

An early version of this post lost some text from the original that was restored a few hours after posting.

This post originated as a rant by me on Mastodon. Small amounts of content have been aded, it has been lightly copy-edited, and its typography has been adjusted to fit this forum. Also, some of the tariffs were paused today as this revised version of the essay goes online, along with claims that this was all strategic. But that only underscores my point about gambling. There is no certainty in the 401K approach like there would be in a societal commitment to care for its weaker members.

The graphic was produced using abacus.ai using RouteLLM and FLUX 1.1 [pro] Ultra, then post-processing in Gimp.

Government is not a Business

Be wary of the statement “Government needs to be run like a business.” It should not. It's meant to sound unobjectionable, but is a radical shift away from anything familiar.

Centralized Control

The Constitution is designed around the notion of decentralizing control. It's inefficient, as people often notice, but that's by design. Inefficiency is protection from tyrants. It makes things happen slowly, allowing time for deliberation. Every time you make something efficient, you enable change to happen faster than government can respond, as is happening now with DOGE.

Tyrants want central control. Be wary of the statement “The President is the CEO of the US.” They want you to think a President is a King, a central voice to tell us everything. That neglects the checks & balances of three co-equal branches of government, intended to distribute control, to have the various branches fighting with one another, to make sure there's lots of consensus before anything happens.

Checks on Power

When a Congressperson salutes POTUS and says “yes, sir, you're in charge,” they breach their oath of office. The whole point of distributed power is distributed thought, which isn't happening.

It's pointless and dangerous, to have all the thought be centralized in one person and then to have everyone just say “yes” because then you just have a zillion photocopies of one person's thought. If that person is even thinking. Democracy at all levels intends many people thinking in different ways and making sure many paths of thought lead to convergent policy. That's how consensus is built.

In Service of All

But even beyond that, government differs from business in another very important way. Business is founded centrally on the notion of profit made by determining who not to serve. It's rarely profitable to serve everyone, so the assumption is that it's fine to leave some unserved. Maybe someone else will serve them. Maybe not.

Business figures out its profitable customer base and just focuses on them. That's not what democratic government promises. Democracy, even beyond all the voting stuff, is about believing each person matters just because they exist, that dignity arises not from wealth but from being alive, that we are all equals. Government must serve each of us in a way that does not prioritize rich over poor.

Oh, You Poor Unheard Rich People!

Money already speaks. It needs no representation in government. There are people, usually rich people, who sometimes say that Big Business needs special attention in government. It does not. Business is not going to be forgotten, no matter what government does, so stop feeling sorry for it. Big Business has the shameless means to be regularly petulant, but in spite of its many pity parties, it is not suffering.

Undo the Citizens United ruling. Corporations are not people. Profit-making entities don't need to be voting. Their stakeholders can already vote in public elections. Businesses need no additional, redundant, amplified freedom of speech, no megaphone.

Business isn't going to suddenly stop happening if we change laws in some way that is unfavorable to particular rich folk. If the people who are in business now don't like it, they can drop out. Others will happily take their place.

Fairly Represented

What needs representation in government are regular people. Government sets the rules that all businesses must follow.

Adam Smith, called the father of economics and/or capitalism, expressed concern about morality in business. He very clearly understood that the optimization engine that is the marketplace will not find morality on its own, that business will tend toward tyranny if not forced to do otherwise. He suggested that if you want morality in business, it must be encoded in law.

It's government's job to make good rules that hold tyranny at bay. Some people and businesses will tell you they'd profit better if there were no rules. In my view, where there are no rules, bullies rule. That's no world to be seeking.

What Privatization Dodges

Nor should government be privatized. An important thing that government offers is accountability and auditability by the public, and redress of injustice. Many pushes for privatization are attempts to get around such scrutiny and accountability.

Business is a dictatorship in structure, where the US government distributes control to avoid dictatorial control. We're lulled by business success to thinking such dictatorships nonthreatening, but you can go home from them at the end of the day, they cannot keep you from leaving, and they can't threaten your family or property, as government dictatorships might.

Employees have a duty to business leaders, who have a fiduciary duty to shareholders, whereas our elected representatives have a duty to the public, those who elected them. Elected leaders must be working for The People, not vice versa.

DOGE Debunked

Business profits by efficiency, where democracy finds strength in inefficiency because it distributes power. Too-concentrated power is historically understood to be a great danger. A DOGE-like effort to focus on efficiency might be defensible in some businesses, where efficiency is the central concern, In government, however, DOGE undermines both the safeguards underlying and the stated goals of the US government.

Government must not be run like a business. Elimination of inefficiency is not an automatic positive. Privatization loses control of and accountability for things that affect citizens' lives. Such suggestions are active dangers to democracy to be discussed with great wariness.

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This post was cobbled together from other writings of mine, so if you feel like you've read some or all of this before, you're probably right. But I wanted to put it all in one place.

The graphic was produced using abacus.ai using Claude-Sonnet 3.7 and FLUX 1.1 [pro] Ultra, then post-processing in Gimp.