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Johnnies—Welcome back to the pages of the Gadfly. We hope you have been enjoying this semester’s contributions. We have sought—and achieved, we hope—a mix of pieces that challenge, inform, and amuse.

But thinking about this semester (more than halfway through!) brings to mind the next one, and we feel that it is time for we, the Gadfly editors, to relinquish the reins: the two senior editors and Mr. Pendergrass, our layout editor, will be resigning from the Gadfly at the end of the current semester. It has been our privilege and pleasure to work on the Gadfly as

editors and regular contributors for more than two years, but with senior essays and graduate school and job applications ahead (and, we admit, the desire for at least a bit of senior year relaxation), it is time for us to lay aside the graphic design software.

Like previous years’ outgoing editors, it is our hope that the Gadfly will continue under new leadership—but, alas, we must report that our production sta( has dwindled, and while our current assistant editors have stepped up to learn the ropes, they will not be able to keep the Gadfly printing on their own. It is a long process that requires helping hands from a variety

of corners.Conversations at this College do not

take place just on the Quad, in class, and around the dinner table; they also take place in these pages, and we have been proud to facilitate a forum in which all members of the Polity have a chance to further those conversations begun elsewhere. We hope that this can continue next semester, and for years to come.

*As a reminder, the next issue of the Gadfly will be out November 10. All submissions are due by Friday, November 8, at 11:59pm to sjca.gadfly@gmail.com. !

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Founded in 1980, the Gadfly is the stu-dent newsmagazine distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and sta( of the An-napolis campus.Opinions expressed within are the sole responsibility of the author(s). The Gad-fly reserves the right to accept, reject, and edit submissions in any way neces-sary to publish a professional, informa-tive, and thought-provoking newsmaga-zine.The next Gadfly meeting will take place Sunday, November 10, at 7 PM in Room 109 on the first lower level of the Barr-Buchanan Center.Articles should be submitted by Friday, November 8, at 11:59 PM to sjca.gadfly@gmail.com.

Nathan Goldman • Editor-in-ChiefIan Tuttle • Editor-in-Chief

Hayden Pendergrass • Layout EditorSasha Welm • Illustrator

Will Brown • Sta(Andrew Kriehn • Sta(Robert Malka • Sta(

Sarah Meggison • Sta(

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Mike LacyTim McClennenJezebel St. John

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Have you always wanted to be recognized for the awesomeness of your facial hair? Now is your chance. The Gadfly will be holding a No Shave November competition, open to all members of the Polity.

Participants should email sjca.gadfly@gmail.com with a camera photograph (no cell phone pics, please) of their baby-smooth faces as of November 1. At the end of the month, please send us another! Entrants must be clean-shaven on November first in order to qualify for the competition.

Once we have end-of-month photos in, we will post the results on our Facebook page and open the competition to a Polity vote. We will publish the results in our final issue of the semester.

In addition to eternal glory, the winner will receive a free straight-edge shave, courtesy of the Capistrano Barbershop on Maryland Avenue.

I saw a movie recently—apparently based on a book, called Anna Karenina—and it had a line of dialogue that speaks

to Mr. Papadopoulos’s reply to my September piece. The line goes: “You are on the wrong side of history. Privilege is wrong, not because it is immoral, but because it is irrational.”

My intent was to expose the ideology and biases of the Col-lege that are taken for granted, which is precisely what Mr. Papadopoulos was trying to do with my article! What might di!er between Mr. P and I is that, while I believe ideologies are limiting, I also think they are almost inescapable, and no amount of reading or intellectualism can get you past them. I say “almost inescapable” because I ac-tually believe there is a process for over-coming the blinders of our worldviews that would lead to, as Mr. P calls it, “in-tellectual liberty and ennoblement of the soul.” Is liberal education, as St. John’s facilitates it, the only and/or best way to get that?

In my article I clarified that I actually do not worship the “golden calf” (his words) of modern ethics: “Do not misun-derstand me,” but, alas, he did misunderstand me: “the shape of the modern spirit is certainly not perfect, overly curious, or complete. Modernity’s Agamemnonish tyranny is sure to be lost to a successor, but not even Achilles was brash enough to think that he was next in line.” I used the phrase “Agamem-nonish tyranny” to describe modern ethics for precisely the reasons Mr. P critiqued what he believes is my ideology: be-cause it stifles greatness. But I held up Odysseus as the poten-tial model for St. John’s, as well as for the gang members with whom I work, to follow if they desire that same “intellectual liberty and ennoblement of the soul.”

Mr. P also critiqued me for not giving a metric by which I said that St. John’s students should “check their privilege,” nor did I state why we should stop believing we are doing some-thing “inherently di!erent than other schools.” Well, let’s use his own suggestion as a guide: “Is St. John’s better at fostering intellectual liberty and the ennoblement of the soul than other schools?”

But stop for a moment. What the hell is “intellectual liberty and the ennoblement of the soul”? They’re the ingredients of “greatness,” and “greatness,” apparently, is something moder-nity hates. Intellectual liberty, we can assume, is something like Kant’s definition of “enlightenment”: “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” and “immaturity is the in-ability to use one’s understanding without guidance from an-other.” Is St. John’s the best at delivering that? I’ll be honest, I don’t have the energy to make a SurveyMonkey form right now to send to every undergrad in the country to see how en-lightened they are. So I don’t have the statistics in front of me, but we can ask whether it is even the intent of our College.

Now, schools don’t actually have intents. St. John’s is really just a bunch of bricks and cigarette butts, but I will defer to

a good friend of mine about what “liberal education” is. Leo Strauss told me in 1959 that liberal education is “[e]ducation to perfect gentlemanship, to human excellence, liberal education consists in reminding oneself of human excellence, of human greatness.” Yo, there’s that word “greatness” Mr. P was using! So how do the liberal arts get me that? Uncle Leo continues: “Philosophy is [the] quest for wisdom or quest for knowl-

edge regarding the most important, the highest, or the most comprehensive things; such knowledge, [Plato] sug-gested, is virtue and is happiness.” Cool beans! Now how do I get it? That’s where L.S. gets depressing.

“But wisdom is inaccessible to man,” he informs us, “and hence virtue and happiness will always be imperfect. In spite of this, the philosopher, who, as such, is not simply wise, is declared to

be the only true king; he is declared to possess all the excel-lences of which man’s mind is capable, to the highest degree. From this we must draw the conclusion that we cannot be phi-losophers—that we cannot acquire the highest form of educa-tion.” What? Why’d I spend that $200k then?

I’ll contrast this definition of the liberal arts to that of Scott Buchanan, who said that its purpose was to awaken, in all of us, the “never sleeping intellect.” Strauss’s definition is the one I’m complaining about, not Buchanan’s. Both exist at St. John’s (and perhaps they are both necessary). Strauss’s defini-tion flourishes in a worldview that unknowingly accepts on-tological dualism. Wisdom is not accessible to man, but it is to the true philosopher, which means he is no longer a man. This is a di!erence in kind, Strauss tells us, not degree. This is the metaphysics of privilege in education, that it changes the es-sence of man into something like God, and it can only do this for a select few. The problem with the Enlightenment, Strauss says, likely the “historical shift” to which Mr. P alluded, is that it teaches that education can be universal instead of being re-served for “those with good natures” (“Progress or Return?”, 1952).

Now, if I believe this is wrong, how do I refute it by rational argument? How do I refute that souls are essentially di!er-ent by creation and deserve exclusive privileges? Well, firstly, not even Plato thought souls were di!erent by creation. The unbearable truth behind the noble lie was that souls are actu-ally the same (but for social stability we pretend that they are di!erent). But, secondly, I do very much believe that people can attain Intellectual Liberty and Ennoblement of the Soul, and for that reason I have gone to some lengths to find those people.

I have accepted Mata Amritanandamayi Devi or “Amma” (Google her, y’all) as my guru in this endeavor, a person who is considered by many of her followers to be a perfect incarna-tion of God on earth, an “ava-tar.” And what did this avatar

Mike Lacy A’12Gods in Waiting

“ inevitably your mind will realize that being “God” or a philosopher king gives you no special privileges, for we are all God or philosopher kings, if only just in potential.

Editor’s Note: The following is in response to Mr. Papadopoulos’s reply in the October 15 issue of the Gadfly to Mr. Lacy’s initial article, which appeared on September 24.

Continued On Pg. 05

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or “How Euclid’s Elements is Not Like a Novel,

Whatever Certain Well-Meaning People May Tell You to the Contrary”by

U. Clidde

Transliterated from the Geometric by Jezebel St. John

Book One, Chapter Five

In love triangles, the entanglements at the base of the stairway love equally to one another, and, if the equal romances be produced further, the entanglements under the base of the stairway (there is a sort of closet there) will love equally to one another. (Note: For ease of pastiche, it is here pretended that loving is a transitive property.)

Let Mr. Arbuthnot, Mrs. Bellairs, and Miss Cleves be in a love triangle in which the love between Arbuthnot and Bellairs is equal to the love between this same Arbuthnot and Miss Cleves;

and let romances between Mrs. Bellairs and a certain Mr. Dauphin, and between Miss Cleves and a Mr. Euphemious, spring up in just the same way as did the romances of Arbuthnot and Bellairs and of Arbuthnot and Cleves. [cf. Preface, line 2]

I say, old chap, that the entanglement between Arbuthnot, Bellairs, and Cleves is equally as lov-ing as is the entanglement between Arbuthnot, Cleves, and Bellairs, and the entanglement between Cleves, Bellairs, and Dauphin to the entanglement between Bellairs, Cleves, and Euphemious.

Let’s say a Miss Fanny is taken at random by Mssrs. Bellairs and Dauphin; Cleves and Euphemious behave in just the same manner to a Miss Gertrude [the careful reader

will recognize such goings-on from Chapter Three]; and let’s say Fanny and Cleves, and Gertrude and Bellairs, are joined.

[cf. Preface, line 1] Then, since Arbuthnot is fascinated by Fanny in the same measure that he is with Gertrude, and

as he finds Bellairs and Cleves to have equal holds on his heart, the romances between Fanny and Arbuthnot and between Arbuthnot and Cleves are equally

as loving as are the romances between Gertrude and Arbuthnot and between Arbuthnot and Bellairs, respectively; and they contain a common entanglement, that of Fanny, Arbuthnot, and Gertrude. Therefore the base (though not at all vulgar) romance between Fanny and Cleves is equal as lov-

ing as is the base (though truly high-minded) entanglement between Gertrude and Bellairs, and the love triangle between Arbuthnot, Fanny, and Cleves is equally as passionate as is the love

triangle between Arbuthnot, Gertrude, and Bellairs, and the remaining entanglements will be equal to the remaining entanglements, respectively,

namely those which the equal romances observe from across the ballroom, that is, the entanglement of Arbuthnot, Cleves, and Fanny to the entanglement of Arbuthnot,

Bellairs, and Gertrude, and (to view things from another angle), the entanglement of Arbuthnot, Fanny, and Cleves to

the entanglement of Arbuthnot, Gertrude, and Bellairs. [as in Chapter 4]And, since the whole romance of Arbuthnot and Fanny is equally as loving as is the whole ro-

mance of Arbuthnot and Gertrude, and in the same antechamber the romance of Arbuthnot and Bellairs is equally as loving as is

the romance of Arbuthnot and Cleves, the remaining liaison between Bellairs and Fanny is as ardent as is that between Cleves and Ger-

trude. But Fanny’s love for Cleves was also proved equal to that of Gertrude’s for Bellairs;therefore the two couples Bellairs and Fanny and Fanny and Cleves love equally to the two cou-

ples Cleves and Gertrude and Gertrude and Bellairs, respectively;and the entanglement of Bellairs, Fanny, and Cleves is of an equal besottment as is the entangle-

ment of Cleves, Gertrude, and Bellairs,

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Continued On Pg. 05

T!" G#$%&' 05

while the base (but hardly sordid) relations of Bellairs and Cleves are common to them;

therefore the love triangle of Bellairs, Fanny and Cleves contains the same amount of love as does the love triangle of Cleves, Gertrude, and Bellairs, and the remaining entanglements will be equal to the remaining entanglements respectively, namely those which the equal unions observe

from across the ballroom;therefore the entanglement of Fanny, Bellairs and Cleves is equally as loving as is

the entanglement of Gertrude, Cleves, and Bellairs, and the entanglement between Bellairs, Cleves, and Fanny to the entanglement

between Cleves, Bellairs, and Gertrude. Accordingly, since the whole entanglement of Arbuthnot, Bellairs, and Gertrude

was proved equally loving to the entanglement of Arbuthnot, Cleves, and Fanny, and in these the entanglement of Cleves, Bellairs, and Gertrude is equally as lov-

ing as is the entanglement of Bellairs, Cleves, and Fanny, the remaining entanglement of Arbuthnot, Bellairs, and Cleves is equally as loving as is the remaining entangle-ment of Arbuthnot, Cleves, and Bellairs;

and they are at the base of the stairway.But the entanglement of Fanny, Bellairs, and Cleves was also proved to be equally

as loving as the entanglement between Gertrude, Cleves and Bellairs;and they are in the closet beneath the base of the stairway.Therefore, etc. Q(uite). E(ducational,). D(ontchathink?).

Continued From Pg. 04

Continued From Pg. 03tell me? She said: “Whatever you feel I am giving to you, be it enlightenment or peace or wisdom or strength, know that truly you are giving it to yourself. I am merely the vessel for your enlightenment of yourself.” In seeking authors who are more intellectually liberated than those I read at St. John’s, I have been very impressed by Jacques Derrida, Michel Fou-cault, but even more so by the Indian Swami Vivekananda, who I believe was one of the greatest and least ideological in-tellects to ever live, second only perhaps to his master Swami Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, who “solved” every problem of metaphysics without ever learning to read, and whose teach-ings inspired Gandhi to free India. And, of course, there is the contemporary American Ken Wilber, who may demon-strate the very pinnacle of intellect, and is likely the type of mind Strauss was alluding to—one that “possesses all the excellences of which man’s mind is capable, to the highest degree.”

If you want to speak of hierarchy, if you want to speak of ennoblement and intellectual liberty, minds like the ones I mentioned are who you want to speak to—but none of them believe privilege holds any water (and neither did Plato, if we can bear that truth). Authors like Kant and Strauss and Heidegger will show themselves to be mere dwarfs grasping at wisps of ethereal power compared to the Indians I men-tioned. If you’re into elitism, go East; there are men who claim that they are God, and they just might convince you. But inevitably your mind will realize that being “God” or a philosopher king gives you no special privileges, for we are all God or philosopher kings, if only just in potential. And then your mind, which has been buzzing so incessantly, and doing such unusual things that you must be quite special, gets quiet....

In that the liberal arts encourage people to realize their abiding, ever-present, never-sleeping philosopher kingli-ness, it is an excellent education amongst the ranks of all other forms of enlightenment—but they all point to the same goal. Maybe St. John’s is better at it than every other school in the world, but we would have to send that SurveyMonkey form out to see. !

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in Mr. McClen-nen’s column, “The Watchman’s Report.” The first installment appeared in our previous issue under the title, “Reexamining ‘Right’ & ‘Left’.”

There is no political theory which is based on self-su!-ciency or individualism.

Let’s start with some definitions.A polity is a group of people who live together and organize

themselves according to some system, which may be overt or implicit.

Living together means acting together. A group of people who all happen to live near each other are not necessarily liv-ing together.

Therefore, a political theory is a proposal of a system for or-ganizing how the people live, or act, together.

People act together because we have to. If a caveman wants to eat rabbit for dinner, he goes out and kills one. He doesn’t need to ask any-one for help, and he doesn’t bother to ask for permission. If, however, he wants to eat mam-moth, then he needs to round up some friends. This is “common endeavor.” The oldest style of housing that modern anthropology can find evidence of in Europe is the round hut, which required a team of people to make. But the big-gest factor in the communization of early man is that he was tasty. Saber-toothed tigers, bears, wolves, lions—all sorts of things had a taste for man-flesh, and everyone has to sleep sometime.

If you really want to talk about self-reliance, then we have to talk about the book My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craig-head George, which is about a 12-year-old boy who runs away from home to live in the mountains of upstate New York all alone. He makes a house out of a hollowed-out tree and catch-es fish and hunts game and gathers roots and nuts to survive. The events in the book are about as realistic as Frodo Baggins putting on his uncle’s ring and turning invisible. Aside from the improbability of a 12-year-old having the requisite skills, even a grown man would have trouble surviving like that. The host of the TV show Survivor Man only spends three days alone for each episode and spends those three days heading towards civilization as quickly as possible. There is a backup crew ready to pull him out if things go wrong. Trying to live out My Side of the Mountain is the radically literal meaning of self-su!ciency, and it is, statistically, a death sentence. Short of that, we have group living, division of labor, and interdepen-dance between people in all of the proposed political systems.

Democratic-capitalism is a communal life style, and every bit as interdependent as any Stalinist experiment. The only di"erence is that the mechanism for decision making is not centralized in any individual or group. Each member of the society is like a single switching gate in a vast computer that can only run programs when taken as a whole. The organiz-ing principle is greed, or we could say that the dollar is king.

A democratic-capitalist society is still a polity, which is charac-terized by the population being stable even when people dis-agree with the decisions of the leadership of the society.

In contrast, a mob is not a polity. A mob always acts with perfect unanimity of its members: if any member disagrees with the common endeavor that the mob is engaging in, he leaves. There is no need for leadership (!"#$): all of the people who want to do a thing do it together. All others leave, or do something else in the same place. When you have !"#$, all of the people contribute to the same endeavor, even when they disagree with it, because the leadership demands it.

In capitalist society, the dollar demands that every person work. Those who don’t want to are punished unless they comply. The common endeavor is to produce a large body of products and dis-tribute them for the use of the people.

Pure anarcho-capitalism cannot exist, as shown to us by Locke and Hobbes. In an anar-chist society, there is no reason to do business with those weaker than the self, because you can rob them with impunity.

There is no opportunity to do business with those stronger than you, because they view you the same way. Perfect equality of power is

hard to find, and everyone is too busy defending themselves to do any business anyway. People can associate to protect their possessions, but then we have !"#$, which is what we were imagining the absence of. Thus, we have state-capitalism. The protector of people’s property can be a king, or a democrati-cally elected government, or anything else.

But pure state-capitalism does not last long. Socialism creeps in. The early United States was fairly pure state-cap-italism, and some of the most heated debates in the country were over what was called “Internal Improvements,” which we now call civil engineering projects, or public works. The earliest roads in this country were of two types: there were dirt tracks that got beaten down by repeated use, with no plan-ning and no maintenance, and turn-pikes, that is, roads which were improved by a private entity which then charged money for access as a profit-seeking business. Eventually the Federal Government decided to build some roads at public expense and not charge for access to them. This is the US highway system. The one that I am referring to now came before the Eisenhower Interstate System. The original federal road net-work has roads designated “US” followed by a number. US 1 runs along the east coast from Key West to Maine. US 50 con-nects Washington, D.C., to the Eastern Shore of Maryland. US 66 is one of the most famous roads in the country. These roads were a huge controversy when they were built, because they were considered a massive overreach of government power.

The Federal government also dredged, widened, and

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“ ...a political theory is a proposal of a system for orga-nizing how the people live, or act, together.

Tim McClennen A’14

Continued On Pg. 08

T#$ G%&'()06

T!" G#$%&' 07

Well, that didn’t take long.Call it a disaster, a fiasco, a debacle—anything but a

“glitch.” That term does not begin to describe the problems with the implementation of Obamacare, the president’s sig-nature legislative “achievement.”

The rollout of the state healthcare exchanges—the mar-ketplaces for state-approved healthcare plans—began on Oc-tober 1, and every day brings a new problem: copious error messages, the inability to set up accounts (the very first step, without which one cannot even see insurance prices), an as-sistance “hotline” number that does not work. The White House and cheering media have paraded out Janice Baker, the first person to sign up in Delaware. It took her seven hours over eleven days. And that’s the norm.

Can these “glitches” be fixed? At least five million lines of code need to be rewritten, in a website of 500 million, and outside experts estimate that scrapping the current website and rebuilding from scratch would be faster than trying to fix the problems—and even rebuilding will take until sometime early next year.

Meanwhile, the failure of the website may be Obamacare’s ruin. Republican e(orts to delay the indi-vidual mandate, the provision of the law that penalizes eligible persons who refuse to sign up for health insurance, may not be so outrageous anymore: West Virginia sen-ator Joe Manchin, a Democrat, has crafted a bill proposing just that.

But without the mandate, there is abso-lutely no reason for young, healthy people to sign up—and the whole system depends on young, spry 27-year-olds paying outrageous premiums to cover the old and sick that insurance companies, by Obam-acare law, cannot now refuse. Megan McArdle, a healthcare expert writing at Bloomberg.com, says Obamacare may al-ready be doomed:

The administration estimates that it needs 2.7 million young healthy people on the exchange, out of the 7 mil-lion total expected to apply in the first year. If the pool is too skewed—if it’s mostly old and sick people on the ex-changes—then insurers will lose money, and next year, they’ll sharply increase premiums. The healthiest people will drop out, because insurance is no longer such a good deal for them. Rinse and repeat and you have e(ectively de-stroyed the market for individual insurance policies.It’s called the “death spiral.” How likely is it? Enrollma-

ven.com, a one-man operation tracking Obamacare enroll-ment, reports that just under 33,000 people have enrolled nationwide. Meanwhile, 119,000 Pennsylvanians alone have lost their insurance plans because of Obamacare—along with 160,000 Californians, 300,000 Floridians, and 800,000 New Jersey residents. And, of course, every day that the website is unusable, more young people with better things to do aban-don the tedious process of signing up for health insurance.

But the meltdown of Obamacare—whether it happens next month or next year—will not be the result of ine)cient web-site design or unhelpful call center operators or even uncon-

scionably high premiums. It will be the result of the liberal mode of governing.

In September 1945 economist F.A. Hayek, then a professor at the London School of Economics, published in The Ameri-can Economic Review a short essay unremarkably titled, “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” Its 12 pages are full of that rarest of scholarly qualities: common sense. Hayek observes something everyone knows, except the liberal economic planner: Human knowledge exists “solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” The delusion of the planner—whether he is trying to construct a national-ized healthcare system or a Marxist utopia—is that all knowl-edge can be known by a single, central body, which can then design the economy accordingly. But, of course, economic knowledge is circumstantial. How much milk a person needs is a matter of their unique time and place. It is, says Hayek, “knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central au-thority in statistical form.” “The ultimate decisions,” he con-cludes, “must be left to the people who are familiar with these

circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources im-mediately available to meet them.”

Hayek is implicitly criticizing what philosopher Michael Oakeshott called “teleocratic” government—government as an anointed body tasked with bringing about some end: social or economic jus-tice, a(ordable healthcare for all, whatev-er. But teleocratic governments, as Hayek

observes, can never know enough to achieve their ends—so the ends are used to justify increasingly questionable means. Hence deep in the source code for the Obamacare website is a bit that reads, “You have no reasonable expectation of pri-vacy regarding any communication of any data transmitted or stored on this information system.” Few on the Left have ex-pressed concern at this troubling infringement upon Ameri-cans’ privacy—presumably because such an infringement is excusable in the pursuit of the noble goal of universal health insurance.

The alternative to “teleocratic” government is “nomocrat-ic”: government under the strict rule of law, and generally neutral to ends. Government preserves and maintains, but it is not the vehicle for grand, dappled dreams. In a nomocratic government, there will be no hidden privacy disclaimers, no government contracts to hefty campaign donors, no employer insurance mandate that violates religious freedom, no pen-alty imposed for not buying a product.

I noted in my previous column that modern liberalism is predicated on the same flawed understanding of human na-ture as are Communism, socialism, and fascism: that human nature is infinitely malleable and ultimately perfectible. The result is, in some degree, teleocratic government. Modern liberalism may be the least oppressive of these regimes (thus far), but just as in Lenin’s Russia or the Castros’ Cuba, as the end becomes more desirable, the rule of law becomes less so.

But if the end is noble enough, let’s just call that a glitch.!

Ian Tuttle A’14

“Teleocratic govern-ments...can never know enough to achieve their ends—so the ends are used to justify increasing-ly questionable means.

Tuesday 10/15Kunai Soccer

4 PM

Wednesday 10/30Reasonball

Championship, 3 PM

St. John’s Chorus, Great Hall7 PM

*Parents’ Weekend*

Thursday 10/31!"##$%&&'

Friday 11/1Kunai Soccer

4 PM

Concert: Parker QuartetFSK Auditorium8 PM

Saturday 11/2Reasonball

W v D, 1 PMG v H, 2:45 PM

Sunday 11/3Soccer

G v W, 1 PMH v S, 2:45 PM

If you would like to see your event on the weekly sched-ule, please email sjca.gadfly@gmail.com.

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cleared the banks of the Mississippi river. These “internal improvement” projects were all done in the 19th century. In the 20th century, at the urging of President Eisenhower, Congress authorized a whole new network of roads, which bear that president’s name. These are designated by “I” followed by a number.

But roads and water navigation pathways are not the only thing that the govern-ment in this country does beyond punishing theft and murder (these last two being the minimum to protect capitalism). In the fall of 1902, there was a massive labor strike of coal miners in Pennsylvania and surrounding areas. The reduction in the supply of coal drove prices up, which left millions of families at risk of freezing that winter (most homes in the US were heated with coal at that time). President Theo-dore Roosevelt made it his business to put the mines back to work. In stark con-trast to previous presidents’ responses to major labor strikes (they had used federal troops to force the strikers to return to work), Teddy gave himself the power to ap-point a mediator to facilitate negotiations between labor and management. History has been called this the “Square Deal in the Coal Mines.” In 1906, President Teddy signed, on the same day, the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, which made it a federal crime to sell poisonous food or medicine, and a di(erent crime to incorrectly label what you are selling.

Not too many years later, the Republican Party put out a pamphlet promising that, if Herbert Hoover got elected, there would be a “chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” thus suggesting that prosperity for all was the gov-ernment’s business. Of course, three years into Hoover’s presidency, there was the economic crash of 1929, and Hoove’rs attempts to fix the problem showed few results. The people chose FDR to lead us out, and he really made prosperity the govern-ment’s business. Under FDR, the government cre-ated millions of jobs to put unemployed people back to work, to get them honest pay checks and self-respect. For those who could not benefit from that, they gave out assistance with food, shelter, and other basics. The New Deal program intentionally referenced the Square Deal in its name.

All of this is to say that the US government made taking care of people in need its business. Whereas previously the dollar had been king, now there was a biumver-ate. The “king” gets to decide on the allocation of resources, but that decision is no longer autocratic. The great argument of the 20th century was, then, to what extent it was the government’s business to take care of people.

Under pure capitalism, the only exchange of resources is mercantile exchange, that is, when both parties agree that they are exchanging equal value. This is one way of dividing labor and allocating resources.

Under socialist-state-capitalism, the majority of exchanges are mercantile, but some are non-mercantile. A non-mercantile exchange is one where the values are not equal and neither party tries to make it equal. Simple example: the government maintains roads. Everyone who pays taxes is, e(ectively, buying smoothness of road. Everyone receives the same smoothness of road, but we don’t all pay the same taxes. Each is exchanging money for service, but the values on the side of the exchange are not connected.

Capitalism is frequently opposed to Communism and fascism (which are, far too frequently, inaccurately conflated) as the system that most encourages or permits self-reliance, or self-su)ciency. As I have shown, this is totally false. The division of labor is as equally thorough (that is, we rely on each other just as completely) under capitalism as under Stalinist, centrally-controlled communism, or under any kind of fascism. The di(erence is, rather, that under capitalism, the work that one does is directed by the “invisible hand of the market,” while in “Soviet Russia” (to quote the opening of a joke), the work one does is directed by the dictator. !

Continued From Pg. 06

“Capitalism is fre-quently opposed to Communism and fascism....As I have shown, this is totally false.