Bad policy drives out good: updating Gresham’s Law

The G-7 conference of world leaders that took place here in Quebec last week inspired me to apply Gresham’s Law in economics (“bad money drives out good”) to the way that most countries are being run these days. However, my idea that bad policy drives out good policy is not at all a reference to the abundant tears that various people in the Canadian media have been shedding, to the effect that six of those G-7 countries (Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Japan) were so badly bullied by the barbarian president of the great American empire to the south. In the first place, it is not obvious that every one of those six unfortunate countries are as opposed to Donald Trump’s protectionist and anti-immigrant ideas as Canada purports to be. For example, Italy’s delegate, representing that country’s newly-elected coalition of populist parties (one of which is decidedly neofascist), had to be talked out of agreeing with Trump that several mistreated countries in the West, especially his own, have recently been accepting way too many non-European immigrants. The latest information coming out of that country being Italy’s intention to also refuse to ratify the new Canada/European Union free trade deal.

More to the point, however, is the observation that each one of the professional politicians present at that meeting are constantly having to deal with their own, homegrown billionaires, many of whom are every bit as reactionary and disgusting as Donald Trump. For the moment, the USA is the only country in that group to have elected a billionaire as president, thereby “cutting out the middleman”, by letting one of the private investors who dominate the anything-but-free market economy also run the political side of the elitist equation. So it is quite amusing, as well as genuinely frightening, to see several well-known leaders of the political class trying their damnedest to convince one of their worst nightmares to support the official set of policies that was designed to hide the completely unequal nature of power, even among some of the world’s most important, officially democratic countries. Having guys like Trump running international politics as well as the world economy, at the same time, makes it increasingly difficult to convince some of the more intelligent “ordinary people” that there really is a place for popular influence anywhere near the centres of power.

Not to mention the fact that the Charlevoix region of Quebec, where the conference was held, was turned into an armed camp, with thousands of police officers, soldiers, armoured vehicles and helicopters vastly outnumbering the only medium-size horde of journalists and the very small number of protesters who were eventually allowed within a few kilometres of the official site. A situation that also neatly underlines how obvious it has now become that the entire world is entirely run by private money (private capitalism) and/or state power (state capitalism). The Canadian organizers of that (at least) 600 million dollar conference tried their best to make everyone believe that all that security was absolutely necessary to ward off the potential threat (that never materialized) of hundreds of anarchist, “Black block” revolutionaries wanting to disrupt the conference with their own ultra-violent, neofascist methods of protesting against everything in the world not specifically organized by them. Given the way that they do things, it looks as if at least some of those anarchist organizations may have actually been set up as what British general Frank Kitson used to call “counter gangs”, which is to say police-controlled protest movements. Just like some of the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) cells were apparently controlled fifty years ago.

All this brings to mind Bertrand Russell’s comment to the effect that in a democracy, people only have their rights until they really need them. Every time officially democratic countries go through some type of crisis, such as the Great Depression, the Second World War, or even the much smaller October (1970) crisis in Quebec, all the rights that everyone previously thought were guaranteed suddenly disappear. In this day and age, for example, people have the right to say almost whatever they want to say on the Internet, unless of course someone rich and powerful decides to feel hurt by whatever it was that was said about them. As everyone now knows, however, the Internet is also being used to promote totalitarianism by algorithm, such as during the 2016 presidential election in the USA and the Brexit vote in the UK. With the result that nowadays no ordinary person ever has the faintest idea what may or may not happen in the future to his or her own life and/or personal interests.

Recent scandals all over the world, such as the thousands of hurricane victims that were deliberately kept out of the official statistics in Puerto Rico, show exactly what has happened to the democratic pretensions that some countries tried to project in the decades following the Second World War. The fact that the treasonous Donald Trump prefers “strong, authoritarian” leaders like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-Un to “weak, ineffectual” leaders like Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau, is not so much a cause of the recent trend toward ultra-right-wing domination as it is a symptom of the increasingly popular regression of most countries toward more openly barbarian methods of rule.

Neoliberalism and neofascism, which are jointly practised to some degree in practically every country in the world nowadays, have joined hands to promote the race to the bottom, each country trying to be more “competitive” than the other one by lowering taxes on rich people much more than on the poor, or on whatever is left of the middle class. In that context, the protectionism adopted in countries like the USA has nothing whatever to do with the “infant-industry” argument of times past. It is also completely incapable of reversing history in order to bring back the “good old days” of US industrial domination over the whole world during the 1950s. Any more than anything that the oligarch-ridden Russian Federation does nowadays will ever be capable of bringing back the levels of industrial development achieved by the former Soviet Union. For the obvious reason that in both cases it is entirely useless to close the barn door after the horse has already fled. Tax “reform” of this kind only makes the overall situation in the whole world a thousand times worse than it was before.

As for Gresham’s Law as such, it was initially proposed back in 1858 by British economist Henry Dinning Macleod and attributed to Elizabethan court financier Thomas Gresham. In economics, this idea simply means that any currency that is not backed up by any real value, but is still allowed to circulate anyway, always drive out any other currency that does represent real value. As an economic concept, that same kind of observation also seems to apply quite well to what took place when good and bad receivables were fraudulently mixed together during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, in the USA as well as in many other countries.

According to Wikipedia, former US vice-president Spiro Agnew reworded Gresham’s Law, which became “bad news drives out good news”, to describe (from his jaundiced point of view) the somewhat similar race to the bottom among American news media during the Nixon era. And British anthropologist Gregory Bateson also used that same general concept to describe cultural evolution, saying that “the oversimplified ideas will always displace the sophisticated and the vulgar and hateful will always displace the beautiful.” Both of those observations concerning the race to the bottom certainly seem to apply again today, both to news media and to cultural evolution, in most parts of today’s world. So my idea of using the basic concept underlining Gresham’s Law, to describe the decline and fall of modern democracy as an ideology, certainly seems appropriate as well.

But we still have to figure out what is it that makes the positive evolution of human societies, toward greater cooperation between different countries and cultures, so difficult to achieve, as opposed to negative evolution (or devolution) toward greater division (commercial and geopolitical warfare). The answer would seem to lie in the tendency possessed by the vast majority of human beings, even among some of the world’s most progressive people, to let their own personal demons (excessive narcissism, or egotistical mania) bring them down. To the extent that, over time, they let bad policy drive out good policy, even when they themselves were largely responsible for the adoption of good policy in the first place.

A fascinating example of this sort of thing was quite nicely described in a seven-part series, “Montreal’s longest-running real estate fiasco”, that journalist Linda Gyulai wrote for the Montreal Gazette earlier this month, about completely disastrous municipal attempts since the 1960s to develop the originally pristine Rivière-des-Prairies suburb on the eastern tip of the island of Montreal. Each successive city administration, from the Drapeau era (1960-1986) right up to the present day, was (believe it or not) initially elected as a reformist movement in order to clean up the disgusting corruption left behind by each and every previous administration, not only in that particular suburb but also in most of the other parts of the city. Each one of those several succeeding “reform movements”, however, after having quite correctly denounced while in opposition all the horrible machinations of their corrupt opponents in power, turned into corrupt politicians themselves a short time after they managed to come to power. Thereby once again upholding British historian Lord Acton’s famous nineteenth-century maxim according to which, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

So far as I can tell, the same kind of thing seems to have happened over and over again, all over the world, in thousands of other similar cases, from the beginnings of urban-based government 6000 years ago right up to our own time. Well-intended, progressive-minded reform movements have constantly turned into their opposites whenever they were eventually confronted for more than a few months with the reality of political power. In most of the more recent cases, those governing movements were corrupted by the much more realistic folks from what is euphemistically known as “free enterprise”. In other words, guys (as well as more than a few gals) like Donald Trump for whom no particular ideals are ever allowed to get in the way of recognizing, in the immortal words of W. C. Fields, that one should “never give a sucker an even break”. This observation also applies with even greater effect to revolutionary leaders, every more or less bourgeois (England, France, the USA), proletarian (the USSR, China) or anti-colonial revolution (Mexico, Myanmar, South Africa) in the world, over the past several centuries, having always been betrayed almost at the outset.

This is why it soon becomes obvious to anyone who wants to really think about it at all, that gun lobbyists in the USA who pretend that the only decent way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to send in a good guy with a gun, are so completely off the mark. The way that violent interventions function most of the time in the real world, is that the good guy with a gun soon becomes thoroughly corrupted by the superior power of his own weapon, and we are left at the end with two bad guys carrying guns. Who will then be tempted to shoot it out in order to figure out which one has the bigger weapon (or nuclear button).

Once the “superior” people at the top of every society become thoroughly corrupt, the somewhat “less superior” people at every level of the pecking order will then transmit that same characteristic all the way down to those at the very bottom of every class-based society. Leading shareholders will pass on what they have learned about the real world to upper management, who will pass it on to middle management, then lower management (“outhouse bosses”), then workers (also divided between “superior” and “inferior” races, religions and genders), then stay-at-home spouses (or the occasional male housekeeper), then the children, and on down to the family dog. Each level of society successively mistreating the next lowest level. Except that these days, the worst-off people, those in extremely poor countries with no sewage or garbage disposal systems, will also imitate their “superiors” by treating the natural environment as being even lower than the family dog, sending every discarded object into the river and on downstream into the world’s increasingly polluted oceans.

While all this is going on, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “deplorable people” from every social class and every culture will seize every available opportunity to differentiate between themselves and other even “less worthy” groups of people. In the same way that the “poor white trash” in the southern USA have always insisted on the “obvious inferiority” of black people so that they would not end up being considered “the lowest of the low” in their own particular region. This kind of projected discrimination also, unfortunately, has often been adopted by all sorts of groups previously mistreated by everyone else, whose attempts at climbing out of their designated roles often induce them to adopt what is now being called “reverse racism” (or even “reverse sexism” or “reverse elitism”).

One such example that I came across recently was in the Spring 2018 issue of the left-wing Canadian Dimension magazine, published in Winnipeg. Several of the photos published by that magazine show people in Canada protesting in favour of indigenous rights, carrying signs that sometimes read “White people scare me”. The racism of that message is obvious, even though it is directed against the dominant “race” in Canadian society, rather than against any of the dominated “races”. Assuming that all white people are necessarily reactionary is every bit as racist as assuming that all indigenous people, or “visible minorities” in general, are necessarily inferior. Fortunately, the same issue of the magazine also published an article (“Does ‘anti-racism’ contribute to racism?”) by Samir Gandesha, that clearly establishes that the misuse of certain slogans, and messages, can indeed contribute to racism even when the presumed intent of the message was mistakenly believed to be anti-racist.

This leads to the kind of systematic error that often crops up these days in the messages being propagated by all sorts of theoretically liberal and progressive-minded governments and organizations. Anyone who sets out to defend only women (or transgender people) from alpha male domination, without any attempt to also discover how most (non-alpha) men might also be victims of the same domination, is making that kind of error. As are those who defend only the rights of “obviously” handicapped people, without showing that people not displaying any obvious, mental or physical handicap might also be suffering in some way from that same type of discrimination. As are those who refuse to have anything whatever to do with the problems of white working-class people, or white immigrants, because of their “obvious whiteness”.

In reality, “racial” and cultural discrimination, as well as gender discrimination, are only “special” cases of elitist discrimination. All forms of discrimination among human beings, as well as inhuman treatment of animals, are basically elitist, “elitism” being a general category that subsumes class-based oppression as well as gender-based oppression, species-based oppression and cultural-based oppression (which is often transcribed as “race”-based, even though races are not scientifically-founded categories).

Which means that anyone supporting self-determination for indigenous peoples should also be supporting self-determination for Québec, as well as for Scotland, Catalonia, Corsica and so on. Anyone supporting Israel’s right to exist as a functioning society also has to support Palestine’s right to exist as a functioning society. Or Tibet’s right to exist as a self-determined, functioning society, as well as any of the other minority peoples within China, or Russia, or any other imperial nation. (Most nations in the world are imperial nations, in the sense that almost every country possesses at least a few oppressed peoples within its self-imposed borders.)

No one should have to choose between national entities like Israel and Palestine, all such nations should all have equal rights, just like all the genders and all the social classes. Why do the vast majority of countries give way more advantages to employer associations than they do to trade unions? Why do we put up with today’s enormous, thirty-million-dollars-a-day versus one-dollar-a-day, income gap between the world’s richest people and the world’s poorest people? Why does practically every country in the world condone the kinds of legal and illegal tax evasion that support that ultra-discriminatory system of income distribution?

The same sort of rational humanist logic should also apply to the resolution of any other kind of human problem, even those not seemingly related to a known form of elitism. For example, what should we be doing about problems like excessive drug use or gaming addictions? In the case of drug abuse, why do we have to exclusively choose between “the war on drugs”, which does not seem to have resulted in any decline in the abuse of illegal drugs but only in sending millions of people to jail, and total legalization of every obviously harmful substance known to humanity? Why do so many different companies and governments end up profiting from some people’s addictions to drugs (alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, opioids), or profiting from some other people’s addictions to gambling? Why not try to find a solution that includes neither of those extremes?

Otherwise, the continued application of Gresham’s Law to official policy all over the world will guarantee that our only choices for the future will be even more of the same corruption as before, or the total eradication of multicellular life on this planet altogether. Is it too late, or is a much more positive “third way” still possible?