Why I love big government

Or something like it

Dear M,

The New York Times reports that another whistleblower is testifying against Boeing — which is amazing, since two whistleblowers have already dropped dead and nobody seems to be doing anything about it. What this means is simple: Boeing is so bad at making planes that its own employees are willing to risk death to tell everybody how much they suck.

How did it get this way? According to Lisa Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, it goes all the way back to 1997, when Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas — their biggest American rival. This allowed them to become the only commercial airplane giant in the US, which allowed them to do whatever they wanted.

This included such desirable things as hiring a shitty diversity staff on purpose, and giving up things like quality control*, and viewing essential employees as expendable — which meant lowering standards further as a corollary of cutting payroll. According to the Times, the second they became “too big to fail” they even became a target of foreign governments, who were looking to influence US policy, and didn’t want to directly address the US government.

Not that addressing the US government would have done better anyway, because Boeing wears the pants in this country. The FTC failed to prevent the merger in the first place, showing that in America, big money is more important than law and order. And after Boeing planes killed almost 350 passengers in 2018 and 2019, the Federal Aviation Administration says it failed to regulate them “strongly enough.” Not to be outdone, three weeks ago the Justice Department was “weighing” whether to prosecute Boeing — not because two whistleblowers died “mysteriously,” but because Boeing violated a settlement related to the crashes. “Weighing” as in, “maybe we will, maybe we won’t.” A question that doubled as a statement.

This is a picture of small government — not that our government isn’t bloated and corrupt, and taxes aren’t too high, and they’re not meddling in things they shouldn’t, but that they’re too puny to deal with big business. And business has responded accordingly — by letting itself go, and then indirectly killing hundreds of parents and children and best friends and lovers, who went down crying and screaming because somebody didn’t want to double check for loose parts. And when somebody wanted to stand up for our loved ones who died (and the ones who still might), those whistleblowers died “mysteriously” too.

(To put this in perspective, the Manson Family, who we’ve been hearing about since the 60s, was only convicted of nine murders — a minnow in comparison with Boeing’s whale).

What we’re witnessing is the philosophy of libertarianism in action: that you can earn however much you want, that you can do almost whatever you want with it, and that everything, from justice to chastity to the integrity of airplanes, is effectively for sale**. And we’ve found that the more money rules things, the cheaper our lives get.

But second (and perhaps more importantly) we’re witnessing nature: that struggle is the only thing that makes us any good, and that Boeing collapsing on itself isn’t the fault of losing, but of our unbridled belief in winning. In other words we’ve forgotten what we’re made of — and the result is our being unmade.

Yours,

-J

P.S. We like to make fun of the rich for doing things like this, and we should. We should actually do more than that and hang them. But I would argue they're doing on a large scale what we already do on a small one, and that if they’ve got a plank in their eye, we’ve still got a speck in ours.

How, you ask? I list here the obvious fact that every single one of us is a biological machine. This means our existence is predicated on being cost-effective, and in the long run, every single one of us has to take in more energy than we put out. It's that or death. And since we’re almost never at a complete balance, the tendency is to try and take in as much as we can while doing as little.

When you maximize output and reduce cost, it’s called efficiency. Every innovation in technology is a guy trying to get somebody or something to do the work for him, and faster. But when you fail at it, you’re either bad at what you do, or a skeezy, corner-cutting good-for-nothing — at which point others have to put their energy into you***. Thus asking whether we ought to cut corners isn’t an anomaly — it’s a normal, healthy thing to ask. Our problem isn’t that we ask it: it’s that businessmen aren’t afraid when they ask it about the wrong things.

*I listed “hiring a shitty diversity staff” and “getting rid of quality control” as two separate steps of falling apart. In fact they’re the same step. You can’t do the first without the second.

**Although I think some trust-busting has to happen for this country to survive, Ayn Rand, in her book Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal, has a pretty strong counterpoint:

If I were asked to choose the date which marks the turning point on the road to the ultimate destruction of American industry, and the most infamous piece of legislation in American history, I would choose the year 1890 and the Sherman Act—which began that grotesque, irrational, malignant growth of unenforceable, uncompliable, unjudicable contradictions known as the antitrust laws.

Under the antitrust laws, a man becomes a criminal from the moment he goes into business, no matter what he does. If he complies with one of these laws, he faces criminal prosecution under several others. For instance, if he charges prices which some bureaucrats judge as too high, he can be prosecuted for monopoly, or, rather, for a successful “intent to monopolize”; if he charges prices lower than those of his competitors, he can be prosecuted for “unfair competition” or “restraint of trade”; and if he charges the same prices as his competitors, he can be prosecuted for “collusion” or “conspiracy.” […]

This means that a businessman has no way of knowing in advance whether the action he takes is legal or illegal, whether he is guilty or innocent. It means that a businessman has to live under the threat of a sudden, unpredictable disaster, taking the risk of losing everything he owns or being sentenced to jail, with his career, his reputation, his property, his fortune, the achievement of his whole lifetime left at the mercy of any ambitious young bureaucrat who, for any reason, public or private, may choose to start proceedings against him.

Retroactive (or ex post facto) law—i.e., a law that punishes a man for an action which was not legally defined as a crime at the time he committed it—is rejected by and contrary to the entire tradition of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. It is a form of persecution practiced only in dictatorships and forbidden by every civilized code of law. It is specifically forbidden by the United States Constitution. It is not supposed to exist in the United States and it is not applied to anyone—except to businessmen. A case in which a man cannot know until he is convicted whether the action he took in the past was legal or illegal is certainly a case of retroactive law.

What metric could be used, then, to make sure we don’t end up with a bunch of Boeings — or Stalins? I cite myself here, in a little-read essay titled When I’m Your Emperor:

No more ownership of a hundred news channels by one company. No more Comcast investing in pornography. No more buying another company with your company and still calling it another company. The American public needs to know who owns what and where the money is going.

Not a full solution, but a good start — if a little vague. The first step is public awareness. The severity of the second step will be determined by the level of public shock.

***Moses (or God) was so in tune with our tendency to make a fast buck that he not only banned credit cards and slave-making in-house, but he (or He) said, you will not muzzle an ox while it's treading out the grain. An overt statement that even cheating an animal out of its due should earn you a beating.

Endnote: this essay was mostly written two weeks ago, but couldn’t be published due to me being myself. Since then two developments have come to my attention: 1) Boeing is getting a plea deal that the lawyers for the grieving families hate, and 2) Newsweek reports that over a hundred whistleblowers have now come forward. Two things that don’t invalidate my essay, but add significantly to the story.