breakfast at mussolini's

I was having breakfast my last weekend in Korea at an American style place called the Lazy Diner.  It was better than perfect.  Everything you could hope for and beer too.  The conversation was only tangentially about politics and I was a little proud of myself for that.  But in one of those sparse moments when talk did turn to the machinations of the state, one of my friends said, "you know, one thing you can say for fascism, the trains ran on time".  To my credit or my shame (I'm really not sure) I left it alone and let the talk flow away from it.  I get that it was a bit tongue in cheek.  He certainly doesn't want to usher in a new fascist state, and there's no point in mounting my high horse to accuse him of it.  He wouldn't support the elimination of civil liberties, the militarization of the police, or the rounding up of political dissidents.  He doesn't want to see waves of jackboots goosestepping on the faces of starving proles.  He's a decent guy who wants everybody to live as peacefully and prosperously as possible.

But,

That comment really does reveal his basic belief that there is some amount of aggressive violence that is acceptable for the economic benefit it supposedly produces.  I don't know that he would be opposed to the cartelization of industry that characterizes a fascist state.  In fact, he already supports the medical cartel known as the national health service:  A system that drives costs up and quality of service down and banishes people to months or years long waiting lists that inevitably spawns special privilege fast tracks for the politically connected.  Never mind that it's all paid for through the implied threat of murder for anybody who sufficiently resists the sticky fingers of civil "servants".  So when he starts suggesting that there may be silver linings to even the most egregious violations of human rights, it gives me pause.  Nobody needs to hear me explain yet again why it's not OK to threaten to murder people, no matter how many people vote for it, or how punctual the public transportation might become, so let me take a different track.

I don't know if fascist trains were more reliable than their more liberal contemporaries.  But even if we just assume that they were, it begs the question, "at what cost?".  How much did they spend to achieve it, and what else could they have spent that money on?  Would it have been better to sacrifice a little punctuality for more cancer research, or better policing strategies, or better water treatment facilities?  Nobody knows.  It's easy to see the good that governments seem to do when they spend other people's money, but it's hard to see the damage they cause by robbing society of what it would have had if they had left it alone.  And it's very easy to forget that government had to steal that money from other people.  Governments can't know how best to spend the money they confiscate, because they don't have the profit and loss signals that communicate the collective preferences of an entire society:  Only the free market can do that.  So they always create dead weight loss.

So,

If you have no conscience,  If you're the kind of state worshiping violence apologist willing to sacrifice any of your neighbors rights for the "greater good", just understand that every time you shove a gun in your neighbors face to demand he pay his "fair share", you always end up shooting yourself in the foot.