Of Demagogues and Big Problems

One of the common tricks of demagogues, as cheap as it is common, is to denounce in high dander something for being “Big,”—“bad” because it is “Big.” Some of the recent targets have been Big Banks, Big Pharma (the drug companies), Big Oil, Big Insurance, and Big Business in general.  The target is apparently chosen for its relation to the prescription that the demagogue already has in mind.  Invariably the prescription involves granting more power to the demagogue, sometimes ceded from the freedoms of the targeted Big, but not infrequently taken from the liberty of the people who are somehow harmed by the Big, who are to be somehow made better by being less free.

Obamacare is one example, Big Insurance, Big Pharma, and Big Medicine all denounced to some degree in the effort to generate popular support to pass the legislation.  In the end, as more and more people are recognizing, it is individual choice that has been lost, personal freedoms to choose doctors, medical plans, and available treatments (along with substantial sums of money) that have been taken, passed on to big bureaucracies identified by the demagogues.

Demagogues on left and right and even in the middle resort to this device of denouncing Big Bad, because it resonates with many people who do not consider themselves “Big” anything.  We all can feel intimidated by something in our lives and experiences bigger than ourselves, making us all potentially susceptible to the demagogue’s pandering.  It is also a favorite device of demagogues, because it does not require much thought or creativity to make the anti-Big speech.  It seems almost required that the demagogue at some point refer to the Big Target as “Goliath” and modestly identify himself or herself with “David.”  That tired jape is now getting to be about 3,000 years old, but demagogues think that their audiences just cannot get enough of it.

To be sure, there are some cases where being big is a good thing and some things that can be too big to be good.  It all has to do with why they are big and perhaps how they got that way.  Big savings are usually good.  The Grand Canyon is big and magnificent, and I would say that the Empire State Building is, too, at least as I behold it.  On the other hand, big debts are to be avoided, big pits can be dangerous, and the L Tower in Toronto is an eyesore in my estimation (though I will acknowledge that others could be fond of it). 

Government can be too big or too small, depending on what it does with our rights and freedoms.  There are governments too small to promote and protect freedom, while there are many—most—that are too big, and ever increasing at the expense of individual rights, freedoms, and opportunities.  That includes governments that are big enough to help their cronies become bigger by robbing the competition and the public.  Businesses that are big because of government favor would be better for everyone if they lost the government favor and let competition, efficiency, and customer choices determine how big they should be. 

Some are just big because they grew that way.  Is Microsoft or Apple too big?  I do not know, and neither do you.  Exposed to the full discipline of the free market they will be the right size, and so will their competitors.  What is the right size for banks in the United States?  I do not know, and again neither do you nor does anyone else.  The more that they are exposed to market forces, the sooner we will get the best answer, which I expect will be along the lines of “many sizes and shapes” in order to match the many sizes and shapes and needs of businesses, families, and individuals who rely on banks for financial services.  Free competition in open markets has the power to right size commercial enterprises.    

A word of caution.  Part of the success of the war on Big consists in making the listeners feel small and helpless—unless rescued and led by the fearless demagogue.  Besides belittling most people, the demagogue’s device diverts attention from the fact that just about everyone is part of something Big, a Big that may eventually be the demagogue’s next target.  Maybe your church will one day be considered too “Big.”  Or maybe the industry in which you happen to work will become a “Big” target, the town or region where you live, your race or your ethnic group, your savings and investments, the cars or trucks that you drive, your appetite, your use of water, the size of the lot of your house, the wealth of your nation.  All of these, and many others, have already been used by demagogues in their Big harangues.  The demagogue’s insatiable appetite for power never has enough targets.  He or she is always looking for more.

Sometimes there is a kernel of something genuinely amiss in the demagogue’s Big complaint.  Often, when you boil down the genuine substance of any of the complaints to the hard facts, it is hard to discover what is the Big Deal—at least in the problem.  The Big Deal is to be found in the solution, which is what the demagogue is really after.  Were the Popes in Rome really controlling the lives and governments of England in the time of Henry VIII?  No, but the solution of confiscating Catholic Church properties and awarding them to the King’s cronies was a very Big Deal.  The Nazi demagogues in Germany played the same game with their own people, the German Jews, and with their property and possessions. 

The demagogue’s solutions, resting upon emotion and panic, seldom solve anything and often lead to more problems.  The Climate Wars—one year the coming ice age, the next year global warming, today just climate “change”—is an example we have all seen unfold, inflicting untold billions of dollars of costs while enriching favored cronies, but which in even the most enthusiastic promises of the demagogues will do little to affect the climate in reality in our lifetimes.

The next time you hear a public figure fume about something being Big, carefully inquire into and focus upon what he or she is after.  You may be a target just Big enough.

Of American Exceptionalism and Our Chief Executive

Two colleagues and I recently had an Internet conversation.  The first brought up the question of American exceptionalism, wondering what it really was, in what it consisted.  Two of us responded with some ideas.  You may find the brief discussion interesting, as I did. 

I would note that this is a real discussion on a public forum.  While I have edited the segments down a bit, I have not inserted new material or changed any of the thoughts expressed.  I give only the first names of my two colleagues.  While this took place on a public forum, I did not ask them to repeat their comments here.

Neal:  American exceptionalism is demonstrated as American values and beliefs projected to the world with Washington, D.C. policies.  Therefore, American exceptionalism is arrogance. This is what I would believe if I allowed myself to accept conventional wisdom.  But I’m settled on understanding exceptionalism to mean that ordinary individuals doing extraordinary things, even beyond their own expectations.  And the reason why it is called “American exceptionalism” is because the country was founded on principles of liberty, freedom, and structures that were intended to defeat tyranny.  This was unique in the world and history at the time of the nation’s founding.

So I conclude that American exceptionalism is something that is not collective and is something that cannot be demonstrated by any policy that comes out of Washington, D.C.  American exceptionalism is something that can only be demonstrated by an individual.

I have trouble believing American exceptionalism was the deliberate intention of the Founders, because I see slavery in the Constitution.  How is it possible to reconcile the concept of American Exceptionalism with the tyranny of slavery?

Wayne Abernathy:  Neal, perceptive questions.  I think that when considering American Exceptionalism—and it is very real—you have to take modern Washington and collectivism out of the equation.  Our current collectivism, which is at the heart of much of what Washington does, is a throwback to what people came to America to escape. The basic idea of American Exceptionalism—which even preceded our independence and our constitution—was that this new land was a place where the worth of the individual, protected by the rule of law, prevailed.  While there were elements of those ideas in much of Europe, they struggled there against monarchy, class systems, and other means of imposing collective will on individuals.  The European ruling classes failed in their efforts to impose collectivist and class rules in North America, but they tried very hard.

I would dispute your point about slavery.  The U.S. Constitution did not create slavery.  It took the thirteen states and brought them as they were into a new foundational rule of law based upon individual liberty.  While slave states entered into that constitutional system and brought their slavery with them, they entered into a system that would not long tolerate slavery.  Before four score and seven years had elapsed most of the slave states recognized that if they stayed under the U.S. Constitution they would lose slavery through the operations of that Constitution, and they would lose it through peaceful means.  That is why they chose to try to leave the Union and defend slavery by force of arms.  The Constitution triumphed—or the people within that constitutional government did—and defeated both secession and the defense of slavery by force of arms.

All of those were elements of American exceptionalism. We risk American exceptionalism to the degree that we embrace the age old practices and policies of group rights, class structure, collectivism, and other policies that undermine individual liberty and the rule of law.

Honza:  As an immigrant, I always took American Exceptionalism to be what our first political generations meant it to be—the idea that we are not a collection of tribes or a particular trading depot that elbowed its way into nationhood so much as people united by a very specific set of ideas:  life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (including but not limited to property).

Contrast us to Saudi Arabia or any nation with an established faith, or even, arguably national countries like India or Germany, where group membership matters more than who one is.  That’s our genius, it’s why we perform, decade in and decade out, remarkably well compared to other places and why we’re always anxious, as we are now (thanks Wayne), that we’re becoming a nation where who one knows matters more than what one knows.

Neal:  Thank you guys for offering corrective perspectives on this wildly misunderstood idea of American Exceptionalism.  I first got interested when listening to Rush. I thought he was going to define it in a quick sentence, but there was a bunch of table setting.  But Rush gave us more establishment of context.  I was still not certain I had correctly grasped what he defined.  

A whole bunch of people use the phrase “American Exceptionalism” in a very wrong way, and I think it must require an individual effort to get yourself beyond the conventional wisdom meaning. We need somebody more eloquent than Obama to explain it to the American people.

Wayne Abernathy:  I don’t think that Obama believes in it.  He offers a lot of rhetoric—and policies—rooted in the idea that America is just like everywhere else, or where it isn’t it should be.  The United States was founded on the belief and vision that this was a place that could and should be different, that could break the patterns of oppression that had prevailed throughout history and all over the Old World.  By and large, the Founders succeeded, though it is a work in progress and is constantly challenged at home and abroad.

I think that it is that difference, that respect for the individual and for the rule of law, that makes us the target of ideologies of slavery, like the Islamists and the socialist tyrannies.  I am not sure that Obama recognizes that.

Neal:  Comparison to Saudi Arabia brings to mind a question I toyed with:  would the mundane act of a woman driving a car without fear of punishment be considered an example of American Exceptionalism?

Honza:  Neal, I think Wayne is correct. The Canadian rock band Rush (at first I thought you were talking about them rather than the radio host) is less likely to blame others’ poverty and repression on America’s prosperity and freedom than Obama is.  Obama hasn’t really thought about the idea of American exceptionalism, isn’t interested in it and just knows he’s against it without understanding it.

Of Guns and American Democracy

One recent morning the commentator on a Washington-D.C. area Spanish-language radio station was declaiming at unusual length against private gun ownership.  What caught my attention that morning while driving to work was his expression of wonder at the deep and widespread interest of people in the United States in owning firearms.  He could not understand or explain it.  He was lost.  The interest in private gun ownership was a foreign cultural phenomenon to him. 

No doubt it was, but he was correct to identify the passion for gun ownership as an element of the cultural life of the United States that is not only deep, but deep-rooted.  Those roots go back to the very founding of North America by the first colonists, reinforced by subsequent waves of immigrants.  The very first North American colonists had guns, as essential to survival as seeds and shovels.  As Germans joined the English, the Scots, and the Dutch in the new land, followed by Irish, Swedes, Italians and others, guns traveled with the pioneers west.

Western European society invented common firearms and spread them among the commoners.  By means of firearms the commoners won their new land.  With their firearms those commoners also won their freedom from the lords and ladies who could no longer control the armed rabble, particularly in the English colonies, and particularly in the colonies that became the United States.  Guns in the United States have been instruments of survival, physical and political.

What the kings and nobles of Europe could not know was that there is something powerfully democratizing in gun possession.  Firearms ended the reign of the mounted knight and made it hard for kings and emperors to keep their thrones.  No aristocrat in any palace was invulnerable to the meanest peasant armed with musket and ball.  Guns have been an historically powerful equalizer and defense against tyranny and pillagers. 

That democratizing process worked further and faster in America, where courage and a gun could tame a wilderness and provide freedom for the family.  Far from the reach of government,  and unanswerable for the pretended protection of the manor house, the typical American could take immediate responsibility for himself and his own security and that of his wife and children, backed up by the very real ability to assert that security.  No one seems to know the origin of the proverb, “God created men, but Sam Colt made them equal,” but the armed nation builders of the American West understood and believed it.

That is to say that, in the United States at least, people have not needed government, and especially government protection, all that much.  Gun ownership has always been at the core of American independence and democracy, essential from the founding up into modern times.  It is a symbol of American freedom, but more than that, ownership of firearms is a tangible expression of the independence and self-reliance that are at the core of American citizenship, a culture of freedom new and sometimes foreign to people hailing from other parts of the world.  It is not accidental that not only the right to keep firearms but the active right to bear them is recognized in our Constitution as fundamental, alongside freedom of expression, the protection of private property, trial by jury, and other cornerstones of our liberty.

As the dangerous frontiers of violence encroach again on families beyond the timely protection of law enforcement, that innate American self-reliance is reenergized, and well it should be.  The examples of people saved by their guns from robbery, murder, and worse, are legion if little noted by the establishment media reporting from their armed security zones. 

In the face of increased violent criminal activity—whether from terrorists or thugs—why does it make sense to weaken the defenses of law abiding citizens?  Why would the government of a free people impose regulations to expose those who live peacefully to the barbarous cruelty of those who consider a regulation no barrier to preying upon the disarmed?  I do not understand it.  As an American, I do not understand it at all. 

Of Financial Crisis and Hopes for Better

Sitting by the hearth on a Sunday afternoon, comfortable and cozy, while the winter winds blow, it is easy to ponder how the changing of the year has come to be a time for leaving behind the failings of the past and embracing hopes for better in the future.  I reflect upon the general healthy recognition at this time that happiness in the new year is to some important degree connected with our own personal performance.  Success is not so much the luck of what happens to us as the result of what we do, hence our natural determinations to resolve to do better in some way or another.

Within a few weeks—or even a few days—many of us overcome such thoughts, abandon our resolutions to do better, and settle back into familiar patterns, including the narcotic belief that what happens to us is largely a matter of fate and fortune and little related to our efforts and actions.  Successful people are seen as more “fortunate” than others, who somehow owe something to the “less fortunate,” especially if we consider ourselves among the “less fortunate.”  How else could rational people conjure up the palpably false claim that it is fair to demand and take the property of more successful people and give it to those who have done little or nothing to earn it, who in fact have in many ways squandered their wealth and opportunities for success?

Had we as a nation embraced the principle that what a man or woman earns is his or hers to use or keep or share as he or she wishes, we would have avoided the weeks-long political soap opera called “the fiscal cliff.”  The misleading story proffered by the institutional media is that our nation is on the edge of economic calamity because Congress—meaning by implication the Republicans in the Congress—is unwilling to do its job.  In fact, there are important fundamental principles at the heart of the disagreement between congressional Republicans and President Obama, namely whether cutting government spending—mostly government give away programs—should be postponed by raising taxes on the “wealthy” and independent businesses, and moreover whether raising any taxes on a weak economy makes economic sense.  There is a growing gap in views over these principles.  But for the national cult of coveting there would not be one, but there is, and sooner or later it will be too wide to bridge.

Without this disagreement, we would address excessive government spending the same way that families do.  Families that spend more than they earn will either borrow (within their means to support debt), reduce spending, or earn more, or some combination of these.  Our government has almost exclusively relied upon borrowing (beyond our ability to support it without foreign help), has increased its spending, and has “earned” less. 

On this last point, keep in mind that governments do not earn anything; people do.  Governments take what people earn.  Government policies over the years have reduced economic growth below the growth of government, inhibiting the ability of people to earn, which in turn undermines what our government can afford.  This trend has not been getting any better and has brought us to economic crisis.  A refocus on economic growth, not government growth, is what is needed, but there lies the disagreement in Washington.

In that context, I take advantage of the year-end season of better rationality—however brief—to propose that the bells we sound for the new year ring out the old and destructive coveting for the fruits of others’ labors and ring in the determination to improve our own condition by our own labors.  I propose that for you and for me and for our society as a whole we commit to rely more upon ourselves and to unleash our creative powers for growth and prosperity.  In the same way we will increase our ability and willingness to help others, but we will do so as a healthy exercise of our free will.  Government cannot be generous, for there is no generosity in distributing other people’s money.  But the individual people who make up society can and will open their hands to those around them, as Americans have more than any other people for more than two centuries.  More productive ourselves, we will have more means to share and better judgment about how to share it—ennobling to ourselves and to those we choose to aid.

Of Vice Presidents and Manners

One of the most moving scenes in the entire Harry Potter series of books by J.K. Rowling is the death of beloved headmaster, Albus Dumbledore.  A standard element of much good fiction writing is the presence of a character representing a deliverer, sometimes referred to by scholars of fiction as being a “Christ figure.”  Such a character in the novel serves as a touchstone of good, who is rarely the main character but is a steady and constant central person to guide and often deliver the main character from danger and evil.  Gandalf serves that role in the Lord of the Rings trilogy of J.R.R. Tolkien.  Albus Dumbledore fulfills that role for Harry Potter and his friends.

In the scene to which I refer, Dumbledore is on a balcony of a high tower, cornered, disarmed, and surrounded by merciless enemies impatient for his murder.  I quote just a few lines for my purpose:

            “Good evening, Amycus,” said Dumbledore calmly, as though welcoming the man to a tea party.  “And you’ve brought Alecto too. . . . Charming. . .”

            The woman gave an angry little titter.  “Think your little jokes’ll help you on your deathbed then?” she jeered.

            “Jokes?  No, no, these are manners,” replied Dumbledore.

            (J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, p.593)

Manners.  Perhaps they seem extravagant for a man facing sure death, but why not, why not retain high humanity in the last moments of mortality?  Outside of novels and in the real life where we live, what I find distressing is the absence of manners in places where they should be found.

A prominent example is the recent debate between the 2012 candidates for vice president of the United States, the second highest executive office in the land.  This is a lofty and important office, one of only two to which a man or woman ascends by the vote and permission of the entire nation.  Many vice presidents have gone on to become president.  A debate among these candidates is an important opportunity to help voters discern who would make the better government leader, deserving of their support. 

Respect for the electorate as well as each other would seem to call for courtesy and a display of good manners.  And yet the current, sitting vice president displayed very poor manners, frequently interrupting his opponent and openly laughing at serious arguments about serious subjects.  The assertion and presentation of views in public debate can be sharp and indeed critical of the views of the other, but courtesy to the electorate would allow them to hear each argument made fully and without interruption, and respect for the views of one another would create an atmosphere that fosters a thoughtful consideration of the issues.  Such manners were largely absent in the public conduct of the current vice president of the United States in this nationally televised debate.  I might add that the debate moderator, who should have encouraged better conduct, herself showed poor conduct, frequently interrupting each of the candidates to insert herself as a third participant in the debate.

Society exists only by respect that people have for one another.  We extend our courtesies that allow all of us with our own personalities and interests and characters to live in close proximity to one another and even to be ready to cooperate from time to time.  It tears the social fabric to undermine that civility.

About a year ago I visited Tokyo, one of the most densely populated places on the globe.  I was astonished at how relatively quiet the city was.  I do not think I ever heard a car horn sounded, though I witnessed driving practices that would have quickly provoked anxious beeping in the United States.  I asked my hosts about that.  All of the cars were equipped with horns, but I was informed that it would be considered discourteous in Japan to sound them other than for emergency purposes.  I am sure that Japanese drivers get on each other’s nerves as frequently as American drivers do, but the incidence of driver’s rage is significantly reduced by observance of this courtesy.

And then there was my recent visit to Johannesburg, South Africa.   There is a lot of hope that South Africa can play a major leadership role in the economic and social development of much of the rest of the continent, the poorest of all the seven continents.  The nation has a good head start on its neighbors, with a functioning representative government with free and competitive elections, laws supported by an independent judiciary, a diversifying economy, including much local industry, and a strong banking system. 

What surprised and depressed me was what I saw of South African homes.  Traveling throughout the city I did not see a single family home that was not enclosed in a concrete or fenced stockade, topped in barbwire, concertina wire, or even electrically-charged wiring.  During the day people seemed pleasant enough, but come nighttime, families retreated into their fortified compounds, however small.  Every nation has crime, but not every nation lacks the minimum of civility needed to allow people to sleep at night without dread of violent assault on their property and person.

I do not doubt that we can find similar zones in parts of American cities, but I have never seen anything so pervasive as what I observed in Johannesburg.  I am told that it was not racially based, given the history of difficult race relations in South Africa, but rather economically based.  Not only was there little respect for property among many in the population, but too little respect for each other.  I hope and trust that things are getting better there or will get better.

I fear what the erosion of respect for property and person might produce in the United States.  Kind words and practices of courtesy reinforce through our conduct our recognition of each other’s humanity.  What we witnessed in the vice presidential debate was a courser, callous style of human interaction.  We encounter similar scenes too often.  I pray that in places where respect and courtesy are lacking I have not seen the future for our society, or for the erosion of our society.  It is not a happy way to live.

Of American Prosperity and Failing Villages

The Internet has been a boon for small businesses.  No longer is the market of the small business limited to the local community.  The Internet—together with an efficient system for making payments— allows customers to find the business and do business from near and far.
 
I am thinking at the moment of the used and rare book trade, although I have frequented other lines of small businesses via the Internet, including finding hard-to-get plumbing parts.  I love to walk into a book store, especially a used book store, and more often than not I leave with a new acquisition or two in hand.  I recall not very long ago buying a set of the debates surrounding the ratification of the Constitution.  As the bookseller rang up my purchase he asked whether I had found what I was looking for.  I told him no, that I had found what I was not looking for.  That is the way it usually is for me and a book store, the surprise and wonder of it, the discovery of things of which I had not before been aware or did not know were available to me.

It is a problem that there are not that many small bookshops around, maybe at most one in a town, two or three in a city.  I understand that it is a tough business.  You have to be willing to let musty old volumes sit around on your shelves for a long time, and those books are costing money while they sit there.

The Internet helps solve that.  You can search for a title or an author and find perhaps several sources of the book, long out of print, in bookshops scattered around the country, in towns and villages where you may have never been and would be unlikely to visit.

I have remarked how much I loved a couple of readers we used in grade school.  I could not even remember the names of the books or their authors, but I cherished them for the enthusiasm that they taught me for economic growth and development in America.  I learned a lot more than reading from those books.  I learned that America was a growing and developing country, always becoming more, richer, grander, harnessing the optimism of its people who came from many places but found in America a place where there was joy in the hard work of the present because you owned the results of what you did and what you did was build a more prosperous future that you passed on to your children and their children, who built on it in their turn.

Through the Internet I discovered that the books were written by Mabel O’Donnell, entitled Singing Wheels and Engine Whistles.  They told of the fictitious town of Hastings Mills built in the early nineteenth century on an Illinois prairie, a town that grew to become the prosperous city of Hastings by the early twentieth century.

The town and characters were a literary fiction, but they captured the real spirit and efforts of what happened all over America at that time.  Elsewhere I have quoted a passage from the first book, Singing Wheels, in which the founder of the town, then numbering but a few dozen cabins occupied by hardworking people with dreams, shared with his son the dream of how the town would grow, transforming the surrounding prairie into prosperous farms and the town into the prosperous center that would serve them all.

In the second book, Engine Whistles, the grandson of that founder is chatting with a train engineer about what made the town into a thriving city of 12,000 inhabitants, and growing.  The engineer proudly tells the boy, Tom, that it was the railroad that put Hastings on the map, and the vision of the men—including his grandfather— who brought the railroad to Hastings.  At first Tom agrees, but on second thought Tom argues that there was more to it than that.

“A railroad doesn’t make a town,” he said with a thoughtful look in his blue eyes.  “The railroad didn’t make Hastings.  My grandfather did.”

“Come, now, lad,” boomed engineer Bill, a note of amused disagreement in his voice.

“Yes, he did, too!” insisted Tom, hurrying on and allowing no time for argument.  “He came west in a covered wagon when there wasn’t even one cabin in the valley of the Big Turtle.  He knew it was a good place for a town, and so he built a lumber mill.  Then he cut down trees and sawed lumber so that other people could build homes, too.  He’s the one who made the town!” (Mabel O’Donnell, Engine Whistles, p.37, 38)

As a child growing up in south Florida, I saw that story playing out around me, as each year new homes, businesses, churches, highways and much else were built.  Economic development was the way of life.  When I was a teenager my family moved to western New York, to a much older village, much like Hastings, built in the early nineteenth century by men of vision, a village that thrived into a bustling business, industrial and even cultural center of some 10,000 people. 

But I arrived in the village’s twilight.  It still numbered 10,000 people and still retained something of its old spirit, with several manufacturing and business establishments and even a college.  By the time I and my schoolmates left—and it seemed that most of us did leave—the college had folded up, as had all but one of the manufacturing firms and many of the businesses.  I understand that the biggest employer now is the local hospital system, a close second being the ugly sum of the various state and local government agencies.  People were very happy to get a new state prison built nearby.  The heavy taxation and regulations emanating from Albany made business too expensive and leached away the village’s future.  Just recently, driven by tax burden, the remaining inhabitants of the village voted to give up their village charter.

A different story, that one, but one that has its echoes in too many places.  I wonder whether that was the America that the Dutch, Germans, Italians, Irish and others who built the village had in mind for their descendants. 

I am very glad that I found Mabel O’Donnell’s books through the Internet and was able to buy them and read them again.  You will have to get your own copies, though, as I am passing mine on down to my grandchildren.

Of Occupy Zarahemla and Sharing Your Wealth with You

Only a couple dozen years before the visit of Jesus Christ, the resurrected Savior, to ancient America one of the leading civilizations of the time was in danger of a very different visitation, of impending destruction.  The society was already on the verge of cracking from years of organized crime in the cities and terrorist attacks from refuges in the nearby mountains.  Enforcement and counterattacks had either been unsuccessful or brought only temporary respite.  Too many of the people were either sympathetic to the criminals or not well organized enough to eradicate their threats.

Recent successes emboldened the main man of the terrorist network to issue an ultimatum to the chief judge of the struggling government, whose capital city was called Zarahemla:  give up or we will destroy you.  As forward as was the substance of the demand, it was surpassed by the pitch.  Until recent years I had not come across anything like it in my own experience for twisted assertions and sheer hypocrisy.  One of the great values of The Book of Mormon is how again and again the experiences of its people and societies foretell parallel developments in our time.  This was one more example.

Consider this pitch from the robber leader, Giddianhi.  It starts out merely audacious, saying surrender before we kill the lot of you, in language you might hear from any pirate:  

Therefore I write unto you, desiring that ye would yield up unto this my people, your cities, your lands, and your possessions, rather than that they should visit you with the sword and that destruction should come upon you.  (3 Nephi 3:6)

Apparently constant raiding was becoming too tiring.  They wanted it all, pronto.  What follows, though, is a rather astounding justification, but one that sounds all of a sudden very familiar to 21^st century Americans:

Or in other words, yield yourselves up unto us, and unite with us and become acquainted with our secret works, and become our brethren that ye may be like unto us—not our slaves, but our brethren and partners of all our substance.  (3 Nephi 3:7)

In short, the demand was, give us everything you have, join with us, embrace our philosophy of want-and-take, and we will share with you all of our stuff (which was once your stuff, but no need to fuss about that).  Then we will all be one big happy society, no more conflict, “partners of all our substance”, a socialist utopia.  The takers were inviting the makers to join the society of takers.  Certainly you see the flaw in the proposition.  When all are takers—including the makers—whom will the takers take from?

It feels like Giddianhi would be quite at home in the recent “Occupy” movement.  He demanded to occupy Zarahemla, and all would then be fine.  Modern occupiers’ demands for pricy downtown real estate to squat on, money to pay for food, shelter, bedding, clothing, health care, legal bills, publicity, and other wants and needs, are to be met by the prosperous whose prosperity makes all this possible.  And the occupiers will continue to occupy wherever they are until the government ends all inequities by raising taxes on the people who are already paying 70% of all taxes.  The prosperous must be still holding back from the rest.   

The occupiers claim to represent everyone (well, 99% of everyone) already, if people would just recognize that and admit that they are one with the occupiers. Y’all come. And together we will tax everyone to death and take their stuff, and share it with one another, and then all will be great, no more problems. 

Fortunately for the people of Zarahemla, they refused to buy it.  They built a wall around their land and kept all of the takers out, until the takers were faced with famine.  What if America’s makers ultimately insisted that they would not support the takers anymore?  What if the takers were forced to get jobs and work for what they ate?  They would howl, at least as long as they thought someone was listening.  Now that is utopia we can believe in.