Ian Welsh argues that in the real world we really don't always have to do the wrong thing (for all those wrong reasons)

by Ken

From our friend Ian Welsh comes a remarkable piece today called "The right thing to do," in which he argues the proposition:

What makes me saddest of all things in the world is this: the vast majority of the time the right thing to do morally is the right thing to do in terms of broad self-interest, and yet we don’t believe that and we do the wrong thing, thinking we must, thinking that we’re making the “hard decisions”.

"This spans the spectrum of issues," Ian writes. Foreign affairs ("the money used on Iraq and Afghanistan could have rebuilt America and made it more prosperous"), health care ("everyone knew that the right thing to do was single payer or some other form of comprehensive healthcare, which would have reduced bankruptcies massively, saved 6% of GDP and massive numbers of lives"), the financial crisis ("where criminally prosecuting those who engaged in fraud (the entire executive class of virtually ever major financial firm) and nationalizing the major banks, wiping out the shareholders and making the bondholders eat their losses was the right thing to do, and didn’t happen"), and on to drug policy, food policy, and environmental pollutants (read the full post!) -- "and on, and on, and on."

Now the fact is that there is no free lunch. When you spend money on war, you can’t spend it on education or health or crumbling infrasture or civilian technology. When you allow oligopolies to control the marketplace and buy up politicians, the cost of that is a decreased standard of living. When you refuse to deal effective with externalized health pollution, whether from soda pop or carcinogens, you pay for that with the death of people you care for from heart disease, cancer and other illnesses.

The response is “we have to do this to protect ourselves/to make a profit”.

No, you don’t. America would be more prosperous and just as safe if you didn’t waste trillions on wars and a bloated military whose purpose isn’t to protect you but to beat on foreigners (who is going to invade the US? No one. Next.) You would be happier if you did not allow health pollution because you and your loved ones would be healthier and it’s damn hard to be happy when you or your loved ones get cancer, or diabetes, or asthma and so on. Cheap consumer goods do not make up for it and the costs are so high that it’s questionable that the consumer goods ARE cheap—you’re just paying for them in illness and health care bills.

"All of these things are moral wrongs," Ian write, but "one of the great ironies of human society is that we create it ourselves, but as individuals and even groups we feel powerless to control what we created."

But the first step to freeing ourselves from our chains is to stop telling ourselves that the moral thing to do isn’t the right thing to do in practical terms. . . . Doing the wrong thing, the immoral thing, is almost never the practical thing if you care about the well-being of yourself, your children, your friends and your family. It always blows back. If you’re lucky, you may die before the cost comes to bear, but that’s only if you’re lucky, and in the American context, if you aren’t dead yet, you probably aren’t going to get lucky.

So do the right thing. Not just because it is the right thing morally, but because it’s the right thing to do for you and your loved ones in a very practical way.

Commenter nihil obstet objects that Ian is assuming incorrectly "that 'we' decide what to do, based on thinking about our lives as part of a wider society," but "In fact, decisions are made by an oligarchy for their own psychic and material profit," and offers a series of quotes from leaders showing how clearly they understood the nature of the manipulation involved. Of course the point remains that we let them do it, whether it's in a dictatorship (even dictators have to find ways of preventing their subjects from standing up for their self-interest) or nominal democracies (where we vote for people who are supposed to be answerable to us).

We routinely let our leaders get away with telling us that of course they have to compromise what you know the be the right choices in the interest of being "realistic" or "practical." What was the health care "debate" about? Or the now-abandoned energy "debate." What is the Obama administration apologists' constant screech against us of the "professional left"?

I do like nihil's formulation of the oligarchy's technique, though:

“Hard choices” has become the phrase of choice to describe the oligarchy’s abuse of the citizenry. It’s an attempt to redirect the emotion of “hard” away from the citizen’s sufferings to feelings of bravery and achievement. It’s also a psychological projection -- a legislator would find it hard to choose what’s good for the citizens rather than what’s good for the crowd of lucre-bearing lobbyists who people the bubble of his/her world.

Absolutely, nihil. It's not that there's no such things as "hard choices," but when we hear the phrase out of our politicians, it's a good idea to check to see that our wallets are still in place.

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