Brain-Dead Utopian Seekers

David Mamet (screenplay of The Untouchables, director of The Spanish Prisoner and The Heist) has a great piece from a couple months ago about his 'conversion' from leftist-socialism to free-market libertarianism, or (in Mamet's words) why he is "no longer a brain-dead liberal."

While the whole article is reflective of Mamet's writing style, one part of it particularly stood out:

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life....

And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

In other words, the whole notion that 'capitalistic America' is basically evil while the people who benefit from and take part in 'capitalistic America' remain basically good is glaringly inconsistent. Such views are nothing more than dreams of a utopia that simply does not (and never will!) exist.

Through recent years, it's become increasingly clear that one of the fundamental flaws that both 'Christian America' (to the right) and 'Socialist America' (to the left) ironically share is their search and quest for civil utopia. Their goals, presuppositions, and agendas are massively different....and yet they both need a certain amount of intrusive government to pull off their visions.

This explains (in part) why libertarian political and economic philosophy seems so foreign to the average American today. Why? Because we've become so accustomed to trusting the government to provide and produce utopia for us, whether it be in matters of economics or faith/religion. Just listen to the candidate speeches going on during this current election year -- are not most of them filled with 'promises' about what the government is going to do for you? Candidates that run a platform of 'less government' (e.g. Ron Paul) are deemed 'nutty' and 'radical'.

Mamet continues:

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

Economist Walter Williams argued a very similar point earlier this month by pointing out that "[m]ost of the great problems we face are caused by politicians creating solutions to problems they created in the first place." Bigger government is not going to solve our problems, whether moral/religious or social/economic!

Mamet's article highlights an interesting irony -- far from allowing individuals, governments, or corporations a blank-check to do whatever they deem right in their own eyes, Libertarian 'freedom' has a remarkably realistic way of approaching the topic of total depravity as a 'given' this side of heavenly perfection. I suspect this is one reason why I find libertarian economic theory to be quite compatible with my Calvinistic-amillennial eschatology, given that neither hold out empty pre-consummational, utopian promises. There is certainly a legitimate place for Christian involvement in civil affairs, but this should not be confused with the only true 'Christian utopia' to be found in the eternal age to come, an age that we partake of even now in an anticipatory form. Failure to make this distinction between the present age (which recognizes the need for the State to bear the sword per Romans 13) and the age to come (which recognizes there will be no need for sword-bearing since the final judgment is now past-tense) continues to be a prime source of error among Christians thinking about politics at present in the US.

Now go watch the Untouchables (again)!

Last Minute Christmas Shopping?

Stephen Dubner (of Freakonomics fame) provides a rather compelling reason why consumers might not want to be so quick in buying gift cards for that hard-to-shop-for person:

[F]or the merchant...the gift card is a godsend. Just think of it: In the weeks leading up to Christmas, millions of people visit your store or Web site and hand you billions of dollars in exchange for nothing more than a plastic I.O.U. that may never even be redeemed. Best Buy, for instance, earned $16 million last year in gift-card “breakage,” which is the industry’s term for card value that was bought but never redeemed. Then there’s what retailers call “upspending”: most customers who do use their gift cards spend some of their own money to buy merchandise that is more expensive than the value of the card.

For the giver, meanwhile, a gift card could hardly be easier. But most economists would argue that if a gift card is so transparently good for the giver, it is necessarily bad for the recipient: the fact that it can be bought so easily signals to the recipient that the giver didn’t put much effort into the gift.

In the end, the value of any gift is overwhelmingly dependent on the nature of the relationship between giver and recipient. The economist Alex Tabarrok, writing recently on the Marginal Revolution blog, put an even finer point on this fact, noting that each of us has many “selves,” including a “wild self,” and that “we want the wild self in someone else to be wild about us.” His advice? “If you want to please the economist in me, send me cash. If you want to please my wild self (you know who you are!), use your imagination.”

So next year, if you need a gift for a strict rationalist, consider cash. If you want to appeal to someone’s wild self, you’ll have to use your imagination. And if you’re hoping to send a little something extra to the shareholders of Best Buy or the Gap or Tiffany, consider a gift card.

This makes sense to me on a number of levels, but I'll pick just one.

Vicky and I registered this past spring at Crate & Barrel and Bed Bath & Beyond primarily because that's just what engaged couples do...and not so much because we really needed the things we registered for. If we had strictly operated on the later premise, our registry would have actually been quite small. The kinds of things (truth be told) that we were really interested in were things like a modest couch/recliner set....and who is going to give that for a wedding gift!

Had we been moving into a 3 bedroom, 1600 sq. feet home, together then there likely would have been all sorts of things we would have needed to 'fill in' the place. But we were going in the opposite direction -- from my studio and her one bedroom apartment to just her apartment!! Needless to say, we quickly realized that wasn't going to work....so we moved into a more spacious 2 bedroom place a few blocks away. Still, in typical California fashion, it's hardly booming with space.

So what happened? We ended up with a lot of nice gifts that we simply didn't have room for! What do you do then? Well, one option would be to store it all in the mother-in-law's house 25 miles away. I actually know someone who married fairly recently -- I won't say who -- who privately confessed to doing this very thing. But, being the 'cruel' people that we are, Vicky and I decided to take the insensitive route -- "Let just return the stuff we don't really need...and exchange it for cold hard cash!"

Which brings us back to the point being made by Dubner. I've admittedly fallen into the 'gift card' myth many times in the past, but the evidence doesn't lie. There's a reason Best Buy parades gift cards before you on virtually every isle -- they know many of those $50 gifts are really just gifts to Best Buy, not the consumer who receives to card.

The next time you think about giving a 'gift card' for a wedding or Christmas gift, why not just give them cold hard cash instead? It's certainly not less-thoughtful, and it actually provides more immediate-yet-flexible liquidity. I doubt too many Koreans have read Freakonomics, and I'm not sure I fully understand the complexity of motives behind Asian-wedding gift giving....but they clearly understand that most of us low and middle income people will always benefit (and enjoy!) the most from monetary gifts.

So Bah humbug to gift cards, I say!

[And if you are reading this blog and you were one of the people who gave us a non-monetary gift for our wedding, we truly appreciate your decision to give whatever you gave! Rather, this commentary really has to do with my own public 'repenting' of all the gift cards I've given people as gifts in the past!]

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Postscript: Dubner has a great piece released yesterday on charity giving. His blurb about tithing didn't strike me as particularly revolutionary, but it did occur to me how manditory tithing cuts against the whole theonomic rationale (i.e. law) behind tithing. Anyone interested in a soft-pedaled form of 'Christianized Socialism'? Of course, I learned from a good friend a couple years ago that there are actually Reformed church sessions that think the entire congregation should give all of their goods/possessions to the session, only to have the sessions distribute it as needed. What a grand idea: Reformed charity in the form of Christian communism! Seriously....who can make this stuff up?