Messy v Clean

Where no oxen are, the trough is clean; but much increase comes by the strength of an ox.  

--Proverbs 14.4 

So the Fidel Castro mini-me (Raul) decided to “permit” a small amount of entrepreneurialism in Cuba but quickly jumped in to “restore order” because the guys were branching out and producing in ways and places they weren’t supposed to.  Statists just hate the messiness of free markets where people think that they know best regarding how to get what they want with what they’ve got. And it galls them, when it comes to the marketplace, that freedom loving people see the State pretty much as a cop walking a beat to keep force and fraud out of the neighborhood. Silly people.

The Statist’s idea of how the marketplace should operate is where everyone proceeds along at the proper pace, earning a proper wage, making the proper purchase from the proper vendor at the proper price. The problem with all of this properness, however, is that throughout history it inevitably has led to empty troughs.

The “Ox” of freedom produces a lot of caca. Whether it’s in markets, the Public Square, or relationships, freedom is always messy. The freedom to succeed brings with it the freedom to make a mess of things, to err in judgment, and to fail. The alternative to the messiness of a free market is State control … and empty troughs.

Freedom also weighs a ton. All the responsibility for filling your trough is on you. There is no unalienable right to success and happiness: only the right to pursue them, as you deem best.  With the weight of responsibility firmly in place, the individual quickly learns that filling his trough will require self-motivation and self-government. Some people, however, don’t like mixing it up in the messy marketplace, and definitely do not want a ton of responsibility placed on their shoulders, so find that their troughs remain fairly empty. Rather than allowing this to motivate and educate these people, the State is called in to do-something-about-this: which it gladly does, of course.

“I’ll clean up the mess and will slaughter other people’s oxen and feed you.”

What it is actually doing, however, is taking away much of our freedom and replacing the weight of self-responsibility with the restrictive burdens of State control. Now the only people with full troughs are those in the upper echelons of the State and those corporations that make unethical side deals with it: deals unavailable to the self-employed and to small businesses. The result: an ever-increasing amount of empty troughs.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2014