I just don’t fit in nowhere
The left is laudating about a turn back to the welfare state:
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/03/biden-administration-covid-relief-bill
I think it’s a bad idea to set up any dependencies upon a large, modern centralized nation-state.
There are some nation-states of small enough scale to retain some semblance of a communitarian ethos. That’s why life in Norway (population 5 million) is pretty good, Switzerland (8 million), etc. That’s why Cuba somewhat works despite a totalitarian governmental regime and Israel somewhat works despite a problematic racist foundation.
If you laud the social spending of the United States, sorry, you can’t separate it out from the $ trillion spent on militarism and assertions of geopolitical dominance (empire). I would prefer not to send a dime to Washington, DC, and I’d be fine with getting nothing from the empire. I really can’t understand how citizens relate to the government of gigantic-totalitarian China. Can they possibly conflate the idea of community with “we the people of” that Leviathan? They really don’t mind being cogs in that Machine? It’s far away and I just don’t understand.
I’m for minimalist centralized government. I’m not an anti-government libertarian. I’m not a conservative. I’m not coming from a place of individualist self-reliance.
Does anybody else out there relate to the idea of communitarian self-reliance? Not autarky, but a high degree of autonomy. Self-governing communities characterized by a stable group of familiar others. Population five thousand, ten, twenty. Within bioregional-scale commonwealths, population below ten million. Sure, some trade. Sure, some coordination regarding universalist policies (No Weapons of Mass Destruction!) all the way up to the global level. But mostly stay local and simple and free.
Anyway, we now seem to have gone into a period where the big governments see no downside to handing around money. Any excuse. The crash of 1987. Y2K. The housing bust of 2007. The COVID recession. MMT theory says don’t worry about deficits. Just hand around money. Most of it goes to the already-rich. But everybody likes a $1,400 check in the mail and all the welfare-state subsidies. The megamachine of “our” “economy” doesn’t produce much anymore, but it’s stellar at Keynesian consumption. Suck on the teat. Drift farther and farther away from an essential relation to what’s really real.
