history thoughts

I'm living in America, and in America, you're on your own. America's not a country. It's just a business. Now fucking pay me.
- Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt), Killing Them Softly

There's a historian named Howard Zinn who died not long ago. He's controversial, and there's more than enough room to poke holes in his scholarship (he's definitely wearing biases on his sleeve), but Zinn's A People's History of the United States is an interesting, dense read nonetheless.

I'm long overdue for rereading it, but the general idea behind A People's History is to retell the history of America from the bottom up, rather than from the top down. As such, it's largely a story about revolts, rebellions, and most crucially, labor movements. As a result, it's very sympathetic towards socialists and communists, many of whom are inextricably bound up in the history of American labor.

The general idea I got out of Zinn's work is that early America was basically a modern libertarian's paradise. The government stayed out of business unless forced to do otherwise, and most of the rights, privileges, and benefits that modern Americans take for granted had to be fought for. It wasn't a simple or bloodless process to do so; our forefathers faced violence, jail time, riot cops, hostile law enforcement, and pretty much everything else the status quo could muster up. People had to die to institute child labor laws, which you would think would be a gimme, but no; someone had to speak up to suggest that perhaps ten-year-olds should not be losing fingers and hands in industrial machinery.

It's sort of like how you might read the warning label on a product and laugh at what it specifically cautions you not to do. No, you shouldn't ride a running lawn mower around like a skateboard; yes, the reason that warning is there is because someone tried to do so. Common sense isn't; anything you can think of has been done.

As such, there aren't any "bad" regulations. There might be regulations that are badly written, poorly enforced, or used to justify abusive behavior, but a regulation is generally there because a business cannot be trusted to act responsibly if there's profit on the line. We have the government we have because our forefathers fought for it, against business owners and operators who needed to be forced to act like something adjacent to a human being.

Right now, however, we have a failure of history. We've lived in a world with solutions for so long that people would like to fight to replace them with the problems, because the problems have faded into living memory. You can see that clearly with the anti-vaccination crowd, for example, many of whom have sold themselves a fiction based upon a deliberate misunderstanding. They had the luxury of growing up in a world without certain diseases, and as such, are convinced the diseases were never that bad to begin with.

More relevantly, because we've enjoyed a relatively long stretch of time under the protection of labor laws, although they've been chipped away bit by bit over the last few decades, we now see people arguing that the labor laws are irrelevant, unnecessary, or actively harmful. They only see current abuses, and instead of fixing those loopholes, they argue in favor of pulling the entire system down.

The system's there for a reason, though. The government is made of people, and as such, will never be as perfect or efficient as we want or need it to be, but even a cursory, biased glance at history is enough to convince me that the government is also necessary. People died to make this system possible, and at best, it's disrespectful to throw it out because it's a mild inconvenience. It's a simple answer, and wholly insufficient.