A Letter to the UMMC

This isn't an ordinary MC post, but I couldn't resist sharing it out of vanity.

This past April I was obliged to visit the emergency room. A month later, I received a bill for somewhat less than $700; naturally, since I haven't yet taken up hustling, I applied for financial aid. I have since received a letter in reply, and penned a reply in turn, which I haven't yet decided whether I will actually send.

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To the financial offices of the University of Maryland Medical Center:

I filled out an application for financial assistance on account of the $675.07 bill I received for my emergency room visit back in April. Today, I received a letter saying ‘Insufficient documentation—get real and try again,’ or words to that effect. While admitting that more time to either amass the sum or get it reduced is very welcome to me, since the aforesaid bill is nearly as much as I make in a month, I pray you will indulge me in a review of the process to date.

First, with respect to the billing itself. The engagingly mysterious summary of costs includes the items ‘Laboratory,’ ‘ER/EMTALA,’ ‘ER/Beyond EMTALA,’ and ‘Pharmacy.’ I gather that the first of these charges indicates the two blood tests and one urine test, all inconclusive, that were done on the night of the 24th; but, since those tests cost approximately $12 apiece (including the cost of the work itself and a profit margin of about a fifth for the hospital), I am intrigued—not to say disconcerted—that they sum up at $478.89.

Having, to a very limited extent, familiarized myself with EMTALA, ie. the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, I remain mildly uncertain about its presence on my bill. I can only assume that ‘EMTALA’ and ‘Beyond EMTALA’ are cryptic allusions to the two saline drips that I received, couched no doubt in the language of medical ritual. This, however, again results in a puzzle, since a saline drip costs something like a dollar, whereas the EMTALA-related charges come out to $1,371.39, which strikes me as rather a lavish (not to say intemperate) expense for a bag of water, even when divided in half in justice to the fact that there were two; although, if the UMMC is experiencing difficulty in acquiring water, I would be happy to donate almost any amount of it from my own home, since I receive it gratis through the taps.

Of the semi-anonymous billing under ‘Pharmacy,’ it may well be for all I know that the medicine to treat a patient for four hours costs $69.05. Given the previous items, I must confess to skepticism on that point; but perhaps I am only cynical.

How I digress. In any case, taking together the tests, the two (2) bags of water, the medicines, and the payment of the salaried professionals who in fact cared for me, I am finding it difficult to make the cost of service come out to more than about $300 at the absolute outside; and while I am perfectly happy to pay $300 to be well, I would venture to point out that the bill before the insurance contribution came out to $1,919.33—an arresting sum for most persons to consider even before choosing to be sick—and that the insurance company obligingly sent UMMC $1,244.26, thus apparently recouping your actual expenses, vis à vis materials and work, four times over with room to spare.

I understand, from the most elementary reading on the subject, that the standard practice of hospitals is to bill not so much for services actually rendered, as for whatever figure can be put to paper without provoking laughter, on the grounds that this must be the starting point for any discussion with insurance companies (who evidently do not mind provoking laughter). That of course is not my business in itself; but it does seem a little squalid and ridiculous to make it my business when the insurance company stops coughing up, given that the vast majority of these values are produced only for haggling and are, accordingly, entirely imaginary.

Nevertheless, perhaps you need $675.07 on some other grounds, and are too shy to say so; a beloved cat, doubtless, is suffering from ennui, and requires intensive aromatherapy and stress counseling. Let us, then, turn to the application you have provided for financial assistance.

My mother is far more devoted to mystery novels than I, but I dare say I derived as much pleasure from the obscurities of this document as she does from a delicious murder. Beginning at the beginning, as the custom is, the instructions say: ‘Return this application with the following required documentation: Income (including all of the following documents you currently receive): Copy of last 2 pay stubs or copy of W-2 form for most recent tax year. … If you are unable to supply any of the required documents above, please complete Form FAF 116 attached.’

Now, I hasten to admit in simple truthfulness that it was my own carelessness that destroyed my copy of my most recent W-2. Further, I do not ordinarily receive pay stubs, my paychecks being routed to my account via direct deposit. Accordingly, since the instructions directed those who lacked these documents to fill out FAF 116, I ventured to fill out FAF 116, on the grounds that I lacked those documents. Judging from the underlinings and highlightings of the letter that I received in reply to my application, this was the wrong thing to do. I trust you will not take a piece of stylistic advice amiss? If your intention was to require these documents from anyone who is employed, it would be as well to say so. The literal-minded like myself are apt to assume that, if they do not possess some document X, and are told to fill out form Y in consequence, they will not then be met with a reply that they failed to send document X—since their intimate knowledge of this fact was the reason for their earlier decision to fill out and mail form Y. But if applications for financial aid (when made by the employed) will certainly be refused when made without document X, it would again be as well to say so, and thus to save much paper, ink, and aspirin.

Turning to the aforesaid Form FAF 116, how wonderful is life! But that aside: FAF 116 requests only the patient’s signature; the letter I received in reply to my application requests ‘a letter of explanation of your housing situation, stating the amount paid each month, to whom, and have all parties sign as verification.’ Here again, the inveterate habit of the student of the Classics prompts a teacherly thought in me: surely it would be as well to require this at the beginning of the process, rather than while it is underway? It would admittedly be curious (even a kind of solecism) not to request such information and attestation at all, but I can testify from experience that life displays many curious tendencies, and as a rather scrupulous person I usually do not hand out personal information (my own or others’) when it has not been asked for.

Nevertheless, in response to that query which has now been made plain, this: I make somewhat more than $14k per year. I live in a house attached to my parish church, along with a few other impoverished parishioners. In an act of great generosity, my parish charges me very little in rent (while I provide board on my own initiative). My monthly rent consists in $100 cash, plus five hours of manual labor, principally janitorial, per week; ergo, about twenty hours or so per month (reaching an estimated $200 in labor); hence my estimate of $300 per month. Fr Albert Scharbach as head of the parish is my de facto landlord, while Michael Byrd, the church’s sexton and general factotum, usually receives and deposits the payment. You may find their signatures below as requested.

The letter’s final highlighted portion, seeking a proof of additional income, was in its way a welcome moment of levity. I do have one: namely, sponsorship on my blog, which comes out to a little more than $5o extra per month. Thus, even if you should elect to ruin me financially in pursuit of your ostensible $675.07, representing $1,619.26 of fees that remain sacrally veiled from the debtor, you need not trouble your consciences, since I will be able to sustain myself with a bag of water every day of the month and, two days out of three, a nutritious nut bar.

Wishing you a pleasant summer, I beg to remain

Your obedient servant,

Gabriel Ian Matthew Blanchard

Why I Am Not a Capitalist

This post wasn't planned. Actually it started out as a Facebook comment, replying to a reply to a reply to a Chesterton quote I'd retweeted: It cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the Family in the modern world was Capitalism. As I was writing, and citing absurdly long, and still lengthening, passages from Chesterton's essays on Distributivism, I realized that trying to summarize this in a Facebook comment was a useless endeavor, so I decided to turn it into a Google doc. Then I realized that, since this is one of my major and animating political concerns, the blog seemed like the right place to put it. And, well, the rest is history.

I take Capitalism (at its purest) to mean the view that: first, the only persons who are or can be concerned with any transaction are the parties transacting (i.e., no others can justly have any say in the matter, even if it affects them in some immediately practical way); second, that the only quality that makes a transaction fair is the mutual willingness of the parties to engage in it (e.g., a just price means nothing more nor less nor other than a price that a purchaser consents to pay the seller, and a just wage means simply and solely the wage an employee consents to take from an employer—regardless of the thing sold, the work done, or any constraining factors on the choice). While I don’t think this view irrational, I do think it fundamentally incompatible with Catholicism in certain important ways: the Church teaches that the goods of creation were made for mankind as a whole, the universal destination of goods (cf. the Catechism of the Catholic Church §§2402ff.), hence also her persistent teaching that we have a duty to give to the poor, as a matter of justice and not only of charity (cf. Quadragesimo Anno, especially §§3-5). Accordingly, she has also taught that the good of people in general, and not only of the parties of a transaction, must be considered by the parties to any transaction, and that there is such a thing as an unjust price, notably (but not only) in the context of monopolies whether legal or effectual, and an unjust wage.

The best material of Chesterton’s that I'm acquainted with on the subject can be found in What's Wrong With the World and The Well and the Shallows. Obviously I can't quote entire essays here, but some salient passages:

Now Marx had no more philosophy than Macaulay. The Marxians have therefore no more philosophy than the Manchester School [a group of economists drawing on Adam Smith, and favoring laissez-faire and government non-intervention in trade]. ... A Philosophy begins with Being; with the end and value of a living thing; and it is manifest that a materialism that only considers economic ethics, cannot cover the question at all. If the problem of happiness were so solved by economic comfort, the classes who are now comfortable would be happy, which is absurd. —Well, pp. 97-98

This hints at my own discomfort with Capitalism, at least with all the versions of it I've encountered and been able to understand (including the Austrian ones): they in all cases seem, and in some cases explicitly profess, to divorce economics from ethics and both from the purpose and dignity of man—or at most to locate man's dignity in his capacity for economic choice, which I utterly reject no matter how broadly economic choice is defined. For in that case, those who are powerless to choose, like the unborn, the mentally ill or handicapped, and the vegetative, are accordingly robbed of their humanity, as we have seen with a horribly compelling historical logic here in the West where Capitalism has enjoyed most of its explicit triumphs. (The fact that certain prominent Capitalist theorists, including Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand—pace Deirdre McCloskey—have expressed the view that Capitalism and Christianity are essentially incompatible is, for me, a mere footnote beside that.) Any economic system that does not begin with the dignity and happiness of man as such, questions in my view inseparable from his purpose, are inherently suspect; and that accordingly requires situating economics firmly within the discipline of ethics.

I believe the divorce of economics from ethics that (as far as I can tell) Capitalism has effected as a historical fact, whether it’s intrinsic to Capitalism or not, is responsible for our incredible wastefulness in the modern era. Yes, an increased population plays a part in pollution, but pollution isn’t the only effect of wastefulness—I think our respect for good craftsmanship has plummeted as well, because, while craftsmanship makes some money, advertising makes far more. When the idea of real, objective worth is banished from things, and profit substituted for it, the decay eventually begins to show in the things themselves; for when an evil spirit hears its name, it comes.

Perhaps the shortest statement of it is in the fable of the man who sold razors, and afterwards explained to an indignant customer, with simple dignity, that he had never said the razors would shave. When asked if they were not made to shave, he replied that they were made to sell. That is A Short History of Trade and Industry During the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. … It is not true that a man whose apple-tree is loaded with apples will suffer from a want of apples; though he may indulge in a waste of apples. But if he never looks upon apples as things to eat, but only as things to sell … if he produces as many apples as he imagines the whole world wants, with the hope of capturing the trade of the whole world—then he will be either successful or unsuccessful in competing with the man next door, who also wants the whole world’s trade to himself. Between them, they will produce so many apples that apples in the market will be about as valuable as pebbles on the beach. Thus each of them will find he has very little money in his pocket, with which to go and buy fresh pears … At the root of all apple-trees and apple-growing, it is really as simple as that.

Of course I do not mean that the practice is at present simple; for no practical problem is simple … But the principle is simple; and the only way to proceed through a complex situation is to start with the right first principle. … When God looked on created things and saw that they were good, it meant that they were good in themselves and as they stood; but by the modern mercantile idea, God would only have looked at them and seen that they were The Goods. … Nobody in his five wits proposes that there should be no trade and no traders. Nevertheless, it is important to remember, as a matter of mere logic, that there might conceivably be great wealth, even if there were no trade and no traders. —Ibid., pp. 165-168

(not saying old things are always better, just that they usually are)

Turning from this back to the original context of the quote about Capitalism destroying the family, Chesterton proceeds to say:

No doubt it might have been Communism, if Communism had ever had a chance, outside that semi-Mongolian wilderness where it actually flourishes. But so far as we are concerned, what has broken up households, and encourages divorces, and has treated the old domestic virtues with more and more open contempt, is the epoch and power of Capitalism. It is Capitalism that has forced a moral feud and a commercial competition between the sexes; that has destroyed the influence of the parent in favor of the influence of the employer; that has driven men from their homes to look for jobs; that has forced them to live near their factories or their firms instead of near their families; and, above all, that has encouraged, for commercial reasons, a parade of publicity and garish novelty, which is in its nature the death of all that was called dignity and modesty by our mothers and fathers. It is not the Bolshevist but the Boss, the publicity man, the salesman and the commercial advertiser who have, like a rush and riot of barbarians, thrown down and trampled underfoot the ancient Roman statue of Verecundia [goddess of modesty]. … It is done, for instance, by perpetually guying the old Victorian virtues or limitations which, as they are no longer there, are not likely to retaliate. It is done more by pictures than by printed words … Then they balance these things by photographs of the Modern Girl at various stages of the nudist movement; and trust that anything so obviously vulgar is bound to be popular. For the rest, the Modern Girl is floated on a sea of sentimental sloppiness; a continuous gush about her frankness and freshness, the perfect naturalness of her painted face or the unprecedented courage of her having no children. … When I see the Family sinking in these swamps of amorphous amorous futility, I feel inclined to say, ‘Give me the Communists.’ Better Bolshevist battles and the Brave New World than the ancient house of man rotted away silently by such worms of secret sensuality and individual appetite. —Ibid., pp. 112-113

Here of course he is speaking of the social alterations which, in this country, we associate more with the Sexual Revolution of the 60s than with the Roaring 20s (rightly or not). But the fact remains that promiscuity is naturally antithetical to the family, and also extremely profitable, both because sex sells products (whether they have anything to do with sex or not) and because industries like abortion and the contraceptive trade depend primarily, though not solely, on fornication and adultery to exist. And all this is without touching the matter of divorce lawyers profiting from the destruction of the family, which according to our Lord is also making money from adultery.

But there is another side to this, another way in which Chesterton considered Capitalism inimical to the family—not in the sense that all families would be destroyed by it, but that it allowed the family to mount no defense of itself against the crushing power of money.

Evicted inhabitants of a London slum, ca. 1900

I have said that the strong centers of modern English property must swiftly or slowly be broken up … There are two ways in which it could be done, a cold administration by quite detached officials, which is called Collectivism, or a personal distribution, so as to produce what is called Peasant Proprietorship. I think the latter solution finer and more fully human … I will end with one plain parable, which is none the worse for being also a fact.

A little while ago certain doctors and other persons permitted by modern law to dictate to their shabbier fellow-citizens, sent out an order that all little girls should have their hair cut short. I mean, of course, all little girls whose parents were poor. … Now, the case for this particular interference was this, that the poor are pressed down from above into such stinking and suffocating underworlds of squalor, that poor people must not be allowed to have hair, because in their case it must mean lice in the hair. Therefore, the doctors propose to abolish the hair. It never seems to have occurred to them to abolish the lice.

… It is obvious to any Christian man (that is, to any man with a free soul) that any coercion applied to a cabman’s daughter ought, if possible, to be applied to a Cabinet Minister’s daughter. I will not ask why the doctors do not, as a matter of fact, apply their rule to a Cabinet Minister’s daughter. I will not ask, because I know. They do not because they dare not. … Their argument would be that the disease is more likely to be in the hair of poor people than of rich. And why? Because the poor children are forced (against all the instincts of the highly domestic working classes) to crowd together in close rooms under a wildly inefficient system of public instruction; and because in one out of the forty children there may be offense. And why? Because the poor man is so ground down by the great rents of the great ground landlords that his wife often has to work as well as he. Therefore she has no time to look after the children; therefore one in forty of them is dirty. Because the workingman has these two persons on top of him, the landlord sitting (literally) on his stomach, and the schoolmaster sitting (literally) on his head, the workingman must allow his little girl’s hair, first to be neglected from poverty, next to be poisoned by promiscuity, and finally to be abolished by hygiene. He, perhaps, was proud of his little girl’s hair. But he does not count. … It never seems to strike these people that the lesson of lice in the slums is the wrongness of slums, not the wrongness of hair. —What’s Wrong, pp. 191-193

I think that Capitalism perpetuates this kind of problem by its nature. Now, we may not have exactly the same problem, in this country and at this time; for one thing, our hours are shorter and our wages higher—by legal mandate, mandates obtained by political pressure and conscientious outcry, not by businessmen looking to profit. That isn’t to say that shortening hours and raising wages should or could be done indefinitely, which would be ridiculous. But consider: if the landlord can maximize his profit by renting to the poor who can afford nothing better than a slum, what is to prevent his doing so, if economics is divorced from human dignity and made to concern only human choice? if how he treats his tenants is immaterial, so long as (in both senses) they suffer such treatment? If the employer can maximize his profit by paying the poor so little that they can neither save anything up nor afford to miss their inadequate paychecks, and by working them such barbarous hours that they are too exhausted either to look for a more human employer at the same level nor acquire the skills or education to seek work at a different level, what’s to stop the employer? And what, in an economic theory where consent is the only rule and constraint barely exists (since, after all, you are technically free to abandon everything and become homeless rather than consent), is to stop any number of employers, or all of them, from maintaining a stranglehold on the disadvantaged? And what, pray tell, is all that going to do to the family?

Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man, Salvador Dali, 1943

I cannot forbear to conclude with Chesterton’s own conclusion of What’s Wrong, for its sheer rhetorical beauty.

I begin with a little girl’s hair. That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. … If other things are against it, other things must go down. If landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and sciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home; because she should have a clean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution. That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict’s; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. —Ibid., pp. 193-194

Five Quick Takes

I.

My longsuffering editor/publisher/factotum Ben Y. Faroe is finishing up my next book, a collection of poems titled Wells of Night. And on that subject, I have a new book about to come out! It’s called Wells of Night, and it’s a collection of poetry. (I don’t have a definite release date, because those are for commies.)

To whet your appetites, and since it’s seasonally appropriate, here is one of the poems from that collection, Crown Celestial.

The world was in its winter; in the lands

Burnt by sunrise, east of the inner sea,

The angel-haunted Holy City lay

Upon its starlit, olive-woven peaks.

There an unlikely forted palace housed

The heir of Solomon’s regalia:

Though of uncertain birth to bear the crown,

He came in golden clouds of frankincense;

He ruled his people with an iron rod,

And crafted a new Temple to the Lord,

For which he was reviled by Israel.

Weeping for loss, he cried, ‘I am your king,

I and no other’; but they did not heed,

Though many shed their blood on his account,

Purpling the streets of Zion, Bethlehem,

Yea, all Judæa and the lands about,

Massy with lilies dropping nectared tears

That coldly shone in the crescented night.

This royal shape, heir of the ancient glory,

Remembered yearly these two thousand years

By holy Church, was named Herod the Great.

There also, in a cave beneath the earth,

Warmed by cows’ breath and rested in their trough,

Straw puncturing his foster-father’s hands

As his young Mother, white against the soil,

Lay back to catch her breath and loose her breast,

Lay God: the God who, by his pure command,

Brought forth those skies, burning with infant stars;

He who brought Jewry from Egyptian might

To this glade ‘twixt the River and the Sea;

Yea, he who roared from his myrrhed Temple’s seat.

For from this point, creation drew its breath:

He entered it, and, by his entering, made

The door-posts and the lintel, wet with blood,

The feast within, the broad desert without,

The cave, the cows, the donkeys, ewes, and lambs,

The kindly earth, the wild, singing heavens,

And all the ranks of minds invisible

That bear them all upon their glassy wings.

Here past and future flowed, from this bright point,

Being created by the birth of Meaning;

Now space threw forth fold after generous fold,

Given a center after centuries

Of aching void.

And God opened his eyes

And murmured to his Mother as he drank

Of that sweet milk. The heavens clustered close,

Transfigured into earthly charities,

And earth shone back, bright with divinity.

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II.

I recently watched the film Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party. It was uncanny. I suspect anybody raised among evangelicals of the ‘90s and ‘00s would, on seeing the first twenty minutes or so, start having uncontrollable flashbacks of DC Talk albums and weird attempts at evangelizing secular friends and uncomfortably attractive youth pastors. I won’t say it was flawless—there’s a very oddly chosen song (sorry, but the Protestants who have that pool party don’t play Gregorian chant at it), one conversation where the protagonist’s mother’s lines feel unnecessarily preachy, and the handful of secular characters seem just a little too always-right—but it’s a magnificent film. (Warning: there is a pretty graphic scene of cutting, and a couple of briefer and more discreet sex scenes.) I want to watch it again, but it may be a little while before I do; it’s intense.

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III.

Apparently NSA has a twitter. I have to assume that that’s some kind of brilliant reverse psychology maneuver.

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IV.

The need for rest, for Sabbath, has been much on my mind lately. We’re not good at it as a culture. We push ourselves, and each other, to keep up—as though life will get away from us if we aren’t quick enough; and by our thinking we make it so. If the need for rest were acknowledged, and taking steps to meet it were accepted, we’d have a very different society, and probably a different economy, too. When you can’t take off work on account of illness because you’ll get reprimanded if you do, that’s a deeply sick system. And even pagan societies had more guaranteed holidays than we do (if you work for an hourly wage, the idea of federal holidays is pretty much a bad joke).

I’m not totally sure what to do about this; but I do think it’s part of the clash between capitalism and Christianity. Any society in which work is valued primarily for the money it gets us, instead of the goods it produces, has put the cart before the horse about as emphatically as possible—it’s literally putting means above ends. The Sabbath, which refocuses both work and leisure toward the well-being of man as an image of God, radically contradicts the capitalist approach. And the orthodox Marxist approach, too, since Marxism simply takes over the economic reductionism of the capitalist and tries to restore equality by economic force.

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V.

This coming Christmas may be the quietest I can remember. The putative war on Christmas has barely been talked about (I think everybody’s still tired from the election, which frankly I am fine with); shopping’s mostly been easy on me this year, and I actually got it all done sooner than usual; my parish will have one Solemn High Mass for Christmas Eve, and one Low Mass on Christmas morning, and then be done, and since Christmas is on a Sunday it’ll be a still simpler week; and I’ve studiously avoided most Christmas events. The bustle and harassment of so many Christmases seems to have been skipped this year, and the relaxation seems far better. I dig.

I’ll admit, it would’ve been nice to have a white Christmas. But, living in Baltimore, the hysteria over any and every kind of weather makes me content to accept even a grey Christmas instead.

A Plague on Both Our Houses

MERCUTIO  I am hurt.

A plague o’ both your houses! I am sped.

Is he gone and hath nothing?

BENVOLIO             What, art thou hurt?

MERCUTIO  Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch. Marry, ‘tis enough.

Where is my page?—Go, villain, fetch a surgeon.

—William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, III.1.lv-ilx

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Nate Silver tells us there’s an eighty-odd percent chance that Mrs Clinton will be our next President, not that many of us really want her to be. What we don’t want even harder is for Mr Trump to be our next President. But at least nearly everyone is likely to be equally unhappy on 20th January 2017: Trump’s partisans will be unhappy because Clinton is being inaugurated, and those who voted for Clinton will be unhappy for the same reason.

I’ve said as much as I have to say about voting in this election before. This post is about why we’re fucked in a general way no matter who wins—although probably way more fucked if Trump were to take office, just because of his gross incompetence. Hillary may be a crook but she isn’t an idiot.

The problem is, The Issues on which this election, and most elections, officially take place have next to nothing to do with our actual power to function as a nation.1 What we’re threatened with are certain problems, many of which no one at all is talking about, and most of which aren’t treated as national problems even when they are. These include:

1. Eliminating surveillance of citizens.

This is what Snowden was protesting. It’s a fundamental breach of the Fourth Amendment, which addresses the right to privacy; ‘no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.’2 It could be argued—and probably is, by the Department of Homeland Security—that this doesn’t address surveillance per se, but searching things manually was surveillance at that time. And in any case, the whole point is, quite obviously, that any intrusion on someone’s privacy must be justified by probable, not possible, cause (one backed up by a legally binding oath), and that such intrusions must have a defined object. So, for instance, searching for ‘a bomb’ or ‘an illegal handgun,’ not ‘weapons.’

Neither party is really interested in solving this problem—nor the problems with due process that our nation has entangled itself in over the course of the so-called War on Terror.3 Democrats like to pretend they are, because the Patriot Act was introduced under a Republican administration; but Obama signed the NDAA and nobody raised a stink,4 which shows that they’re just as cynically pragmatic as their opposite numbers in the GOP.

One of the necessary corollaries to this is that whistleblower protections have to be increased. (Snowden actually did attempt to go through official channels with his protest, and was shut down; and of course, since then, he has had his passport canceled while in Russia, rather a dickish move on the part of the government.) A society that punishes those who expose its faults can never be a free society. The mechanisms that sustain its freedom have already been destroyed.

2. Eliminating gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering—a.k.a., the practice of drawing congressional districts in totally asinine shapes so that whatever party is in charge during the time of drawing the districts can stay that way—is, in itself, totally hostile to any idea of real democracy. Either you have representative government, or you don’t, and gerrymandering interferes with representation, rendering it a don’t. Even the electoral college, as weird a system as it is, sort of tries to follow the actual population of the states. Neither party wants to confront this, because both of them want the option of using it to their advantage. (And sure, some of them likely feel there are more important things to do with their time, but honestly, I think they’re probably wrong—not because nothing’s more important than getting rid of gerrymandering, but because I find it highly unlikely that politicians care about those more important things, either.) Understand, I’m not saying that gerrymandering makes room for corruption; gerrymandering is corruption.

3. Deal with police corruption.

Corruption, excessive power, and lack of oversight plague our police force. These problems have been displayed most forcibly by the Black Lives Matter movement,5 but they’ve been exposed even in much smaller and stupider matters, like cyclists. I don’t know whether anything can be done on a federal level to confront police corruption, since police forces (if I’m rightly informed) are basically under the control of the fifty states. Nevertheless the scale of the problem is national—Florida, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Maryland, Louisiana, and Minnesota have all seen high-profile cases, and high-profile cases are always a small selection of reality. If we accept the authority of a national government at all, it is that government which is responsible to deal with this problem—as it will certainly be this government’s own problem if and when its failure to deal with it erupts into revolt and bloodshed.

My own opinion is that the British model of ‘policing by consent’ is the preferable alternative to … well, policing by guns, which honestly is kinda what American police seem to do. I think it should be implemented as swiftly and smoothly as possible, especially in cities, where the lack of a local, personal connection to police officers is so much likelier to impede their work.

4. Criminalize the practice of passing legislation without reading it.

It’s embarrassing that a rule like this would have to be stated in so many words, but you shouldn’t pass a law if you don’t even know what it fucking says. The irresponsibility is astonishing and disgusting.6 The law that springs to mind is the Affordable Care Act: not that I disapprove of health care being available to everyone—I’m strongly in favor of health care being universal, because come on, people shouldn’t have to cook meth or run a Kickstarter so they can not die—but that those fuckers passed that bill without reading it. I can barely words, in my attempt to describe how not okay that is. If our legislators can’t even be assed to read the damn things, why should we be required to obey them? If you want to jail us for disobeying a law, but you can’t even tell us what the law is, maybe that consequence should be turned around on you.

It could be argued, and with some justice, that no one on earth could face reading the Newspeak monstrosity that is [any bill here]. However, this seems to me to be better grounds for instituting a ‘Cut the crap and write comprehensible bills’ rule than for instituting laws that neither the populace nor their lawmakers understand. It isn’t often one gets to use the word Kafkaesque accurately, but here we are.

5. For fuck’s sake. Balance the budget.

The national debt of the US currently stands at about $19.4 trillion,7 or, to desanitize it just a little, 19,400,000,000,000 of dollars. In other words, if everyone in the country worked eight hours a day at a minimum wage job, for which their entire paycheck went to paying off the national debt, and taking no sick days, weekends, or holidays whatsoever—it’d still take twenty-two years to get the country out of debt.

This isn’t just an economic obscenity, though it is certainly that. It’s a warning. Countries that get in this kind of mess are at risk of becoming dictatorships, because a dictator, somebody with untrammeled and unaccountable power, is almost the only person who can actually put things in order once they get bad enough. A statesman who has to worry about reëlection, or even about being examined and perhaps disciplined by the rest of the government, has to please the electorate or the cabinet as much or more as he has to solve the actual problems he’s presented with. An unbalanced budget is, therefore, a great long-term plan for turning a democracy into a dictatorship—especially because the mechanism for putting a charismatic person in power and keeping him there is so readily available.8

If we, as a nation and as an electorate, don’t make a point of electing politicians who will do what it takes to balance the budget—and don’t accept what it will take—then we’re condemning ourselves to the consequences: a weak currency, an uncertain future for ourselves and our children, and the increased likelihood that the only person who’ll be able to restore order to a fractured society is a bona fide tyrant.

There are steps that could be taken: for example, reïntroducing the backing of currency (whether with gold or some other concrete thing), to help curb inflation and keep an actual relationship between the goods that are available and the money that ostensibly measures their worth. No such steps are likely under Mrs Clinton, and I think we can predict with total confidence that they will not happen under Mr Trump. But a clear grasp of the real problems facing us is the first necessity.

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1Ordinarily I’d make an exception here with regard to abortion: I don’t believe any nation can survive for long with any semblance of order and peace, as long as it dismisses certain human lives as beneath its consideration. The reason I don’t think abortion makes any difference in this specific election is that neither candidate is pro-life. Trump claims that he will appoint pro-life justices to the Supreme Court, but frankly, I wouldn’t trust him not to piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. I mean, this is the man who said during the second debate, word for word, ‘I mean, I know about Russia, but I know nothing about Russia.’ To say nothing of the blatant lies he has been repeatedly caught in, not infrequently on video, about every subject under the sun.

2From the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, emphasis mine.

3I say so-called because, even if we argue that every act that’s taken place under the ægis of the War on Terror was both just and necessary, it isn’t exactly a war; there’s no defined enemy and, therefore, no declaration of war—thus neatly circumventing both the provisions made concerning war in the Constitution, and also the guidelines carefully laid down by centuries of Just War Theory.

4If you have an innate impatience with reading linked articles (as I do), the short version of the NDAA is that any person suspected of involvement with, or substantial support for, Al Qaeda and Friends can be imprisoned indefinitely without so much as access to a lawyer. Yes, that includes American citizens, even on American soil; you’ll noticed they killed Anwar al-Awlaki (a citizen) with a drone strike, not in battle—still less did they arrest and try him. (Granted, al-Awlaki was apparently a monster, but the Bill of Rights contains no addendum reading ‘Unless they’re complete turdburglars, in which case you can just murder their asses.’)

5I don’t agree with everything the BLM movement’s proponents say. No one could, since many of them say different and incompatible things. But they have, in fact, spoken to the institutionalized racism that still influences much of our police force across the country, and for that, we owe them thanks.

6I would go as far as to say that passing (or repealing) a bill without reading it invalidates the law, ipso facto, because doing that violates literally the entire point of having laws: to govern the behavior of a community. If you don’t even know what behavior you’re prescribing or penalizing, then your pronouncements on the subject are worthless, and other people shouldn’t be bound by them.

7You’ll probably see lower estimates than this. These come from the (partly smoke-and-mirrors) technique of splitting up governmental debt into that which is officially held by the public, i.e. owed to non-government creditors (such as private individuals), and that which is intragovernmental, i.e. owed by one government department to another. Budget surpluses and deficits, meanwhile, have just about no reference to the national debt, only to the amount of money budgeted by Congress for the operations of government, which may or may not have anything to do with resolving our debt. Believe me when I say things only get stupider from here.

8Ironically, term limits may make this worse. The professed purpose of term limits was to keep anyone from tyrannically hanging on to power. The problem is, the shorter a term limit is, the less the person elected has any vested interest in actually doing the work they were elected to do, because they’re so beholden to popularity—a force that does little to preserve the healthy functioning of any state—that they can scarcely afford, politically, to think about anything else. A longer term limit allows the elected official breathing room in which they can (relatively) disregard the popularity of their policies; but of course, if they’re novices, that may not matter—especially when it comes to affairs as subtle as the budget—while if they’re experienced, limits on the number of terms they can have pose the same problem; and if limits on the number of terms an official can serve are abolished, then, for all practical purposes, so are term limits—as we’ve noticed in the case of congressional incumbents.