Simplifying Capitalism - Part/Chapter Two

        From my two previous posts on capitalism, my readers might logically and reasonably assume that capitalists think that, indeed, all government is evil and must be destroyed. After all, Friedman says that government, specifically American government, has done a lot of things wrong. He says government should not interfere with buying and selling, he says that government should not use coercion to manage the people's economic activities, and he says that government interferes in American society in many areas where it should not be present. Thus we can conclude that capitalism proposes government should be done away with.
So to Washington D.C., conservative Americans! We must wave our banners and proclaim that the White House should be burned and the office of President abolished! ... Right, Friedman??
         Unfortunately, no. In the second chapter of "Capitalism and Freedom," titled "The Role of Government in a Free Society," we find that this is not Friedman's conclusion at all. On the contrary, our government has an extremely important role to play in the workings of this nation. After all, where would we be without leaders, without authority, without referees? And this is, in fact, government's primary job - that of referee. As a rule, the people should be left to their freedoms of speech, religion, thought, and open marketing. But this does not mean there shouldn't be laws, and this does not mean there shouldn't be individuals to enforce these laws. Therefore, our government's job is double-sided; it must know where to step in and where to stay out.
        Firstly, there are many important ways it must step in. In this chapter Friedman has defined eight specific areas of government intervention...
1.) Maintain order and uphold the laws,
2.) Define and uphold property rights,
3.) Arbitrate disputes,
4.) Enforce contracts,
5.) Promote competition,
6.) Counter technical monopolies, (monopolies on lighting, transportation, electricity, etc.)
7.) Counter neighborhood effects, (by-products of private agreements that harm a third, uninvolved party,) and
8.) Support private charities and support families to govern the irresponsible (children and lunatics.)
        These are extremely important functions, ones that, if adequately performed, would have an enormous impact on our society's law and order. We can trust humans to be able to manage their own affairs, but we need higher authority when these affairs threaten to harm other human beings. This also goes along with the Founding Fathers' idea of three separate branches of government - one branch, the legislative, makes the laws. The next branch, the administrative, puts the laws into action. The third branch, the judicial, tries and punishes those accused of breaking the laws. Without government we would be a lost and immoral country indeed. A few important lines from one of my favorite plays, "A Man for All Seasons" by Robert Bolt, serve to express this concept; 

Will Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? Will: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast... And if you cut them down, (and you're just the man to do it,) do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

           In other words, so many people's lives would be threatened and ruined if there were no standards by which to judge their actions. America devoid of laws and authority is a frightening thought. 
           Government's role however, is not only very vital to the preservation of law and justice in our country, but is, (or should be,) a very defined role. There are many areas of society in which it can and should, in fact, be an active participant; there are also areas where it should mind its own business. This is where some of the lines become fuzzy. Many recent presidents, beginning, I believe, with Teddy Roosevelt and the "Progressive" Age, have taken it upon themselves to broaden, expand, and re-define government's parameters in society so much so, that these parameters hardly exist anymore. That is to say, fewer and fewer boundaries restrict government from intruding upon every area of our lives. This is also a frightening thought, one that has given rise to much concern from conservative Americans like Friedman. In this chapter he also lists 12 roles government has taken it upon itself that should instead be played by the American citizen...
1.) Sets agriculture prices,
2.) Sets tariffs on imports and exports,
3.) Controls output,
4.) Uses rent, price, and wage controls,
5.) Regulates many industries,
6.) Regulates and censors free speech,
7.) Forces people to use social security programs,
8.) Public housing,
9.) Conscription into military service, (employed several times throughout our history, such as during the later stages of the Vietnam War,)
10.) National parks,
11.) Government post offices, and
12.) Government toll booths.
         And these are not its only spheres of influence - think of public high schools, public colleges, income taxes, public service projects, licenses on occupations, the alphabet soup of wasteful government programs, its interference in health care. You are probably familiar with and accustomed to the government being a part of all these things in your life. I, for one, have become very used to giving my Social Security number to anyone in the public sector who asks for it, though I don't really or fully understand Social Security's purpose. All I know is that I had to have that 10-digit number memorized by the time I was 16 and can only do certain things if I write it down on certain forms. There are three very important things that define American individuals - our health, our education, and our jobs; Washington has stuck its finger, its entire hand rather, deeply into all three.
      I could continue in this line of argument for many pages, using 1984 or Animal Farm by George Orwell, or excerpts from works of Hayek, Reagan, and De Tocqueville as support. However an anti-government theme is not my focus. I merely wish to point out, as Friedman did, that government should and does have certain duties, and one of those duties is leaving the market alone. The more recent presidents have found this difficult to do - they have found it impossible to do. And te consequences for our economy have been disastrous. More importantly, the consequences for our much-cherished liberty have been disastrous. 
     This is a summation of Friedman's "The Role of Government In a Free Society," along with my own commentary and thoughts on the subject. There is much, much more I want to say, but I'll stick with this expression of the main points for now. Any comments or questions below would be much appreciated. 

The Internet Is Creating A More Intelligent Society

         Though I may be dating myself by this anecdote, I feel compelled to share it anyway in order to demonstrate how far our society has progressed along the road of the Information Age in the past decade. Whenever I was assigned an essay in 5th grade, I was forced to take a trip to the bookshelves in the basement, locate the shelf creaking under the weight of the enormous Encyclopedia series, run my finger along the alphabetized titles until I found the desired word category, summon all my strength to pull out the gigantic volume, heave it onto the floor, flip through the pages and then proceed to laboriously copy out the encyclopedic entry using paper and a pencil. I would then use this information in my essay to make it more credible and informative. That is how it was done when I was ten years old, and for this reason I loathed writing essays.

       Now, obviously, things are different. As I stated in my last post on this subject, all I need to do now to supply my essays with authoritative sources and facts is to open up my MacBook Pro, get onto Google, type a few words, and there, I have sources and facts in abundance, usually more than I ever want or need. We possess a wealth of information literally at our fingertips, and this is truly amazing to one who has grown up watching the progress of this Information Age unfold. 

      The internet has undeniably altered the way that our society learns, thinks, understands, and researches. Some argue that this change has been for the worse - that because of the internet, now we have shorter attention spans, weaker memorization skills, and shallow minds incapable of deep thought. However true these claims may be, we also can learn much more quickly, we can access a multitude of data in a matter of seconds, we can multi-task easily, we can understand the complex mathematical and physical science that is computer programming, we are able to connect with more people and different cultures around the world, and save so much time and effort through the use of Google, Bing, and Wikipedia. Perhaps we retain less information, but why do we need to? The information is at our fingertips at all times. The internet is not making us less smart, it is "simply challenging us to become smarter in new ways." ("Is the Internet Making Us Smarter or Dumber? Yes.", by Matthew Ingram, June 6th, 2010, Gigaom.com)

      First of all, simply take a moment to stop and contemplate the overwhelming and exhaustive amount of data that exists on cyberspace purely for our cognitive benefit. Contemplating Google alone is enough to blow one's mind. You can literally ask anything, ("Does God exist?", "How do I freeze strawberries?", "Why should I get married?", and "Where can I find Tom's shoes?" are just a few search suggestions that I've seen, meaning that someone out there has actually asked Google these ridiculous questions,) and receive a million answers in a few seconds. Frequently at the dinner table when my little brother asks my dad some random question about why the toilet bubbles when it flushes or what year King Peter the Great died, all my dad has to do it pull out his iphone and find the answer. Our essays and articles are more thoroughly researched and the quality and quantity of our daily information intake is much improved. If the internet is not making us smarter, it is certainly making us much more well-informed. 

      Along those lines I propose my second support of the thesis that that internet is not making us stupider; the internet has proved to be a valuable asset to education. Not only are vast amounts of historical and scientific data available for easy access to the student, but helpful learning websites, educational software, and school gadgets exist in abundance. Throughout high school I benefited enormously through website programs such as Sparknotes' study guides, Collegeboard's SAT and CLEP prep, StudyBlue's easy and efficient online flashcards, and Rosetta Stone's online language games. Reading and writing have become more central to our culture with the use of email, blogs, twitter, facebook, online newspaper sites, and yes, even texting. We can say what we want to say more quickly and efficiently. 

     Thus teens like me, though accused of being shallow-minded zombies addicted to the internet, have benefited perhaps more than any other social group from its use, because we've had myriads of sources to aid our learning. We've learned quickly how to best utilize those sources; we've been able to connect more widely with people all over the world through social networking sites; we've been able to virtually travel to places we never dreamed of; and we've been able to freely share our ideas, express our opinions, and publish our thoughts via the internet. For these purely selfish reasons I'm thankful to have had the internet as an additional teacher during high school.

      What about the accusation that before the internet people were smarter, more learned, more educated, and less distracted? Well to this I can only retort that even during the Middle Ages shallow distractions existed in abundance as well: they always will exist where shallow minds can be found to desire them. This is pure human nature. The internet has given knowledge to those with the wisdom to desire it, just as Gutenberg's printing press gave the Bible to religious and devout individuals. But Gutenberg's printing press also eventually gave issue to cheap sensation newspapers, vulgar fiction and erotic novels, just as the internet is also the source of much pornographic material, misleading advertisements, and shallow distractions. (Angry Birds, anyone??) Something as multi-faceted as the internet cannot be blamed for lowering the IQ level of an entire society. If you are unfocused, scatterbrained, or have weak memorization skills, don't blame the internet - blame yourself. There is a lot of knowledge and learning to be found on the internet if you have the discipline and focus to search for and find it. 

          My final conclusion then, is the same as the title of an online article by Matthew Ingram; "Is the Internet Making Us Smarter or Dumber? Yes." There are numerous good things and numerous bad things about the internet, so its goodness or badness really depends upon how you, as an individual, choose to utilize it. In fact the internet is so double-sided that I discovered I am not the only one to write a debate on the subject - the Wall Street Journal also recently published two articles arguing opposing views about whether the internet is making us smarter or more ignorant. As Ingram concluded his article; "To the extent that we want to use them to become more intelligent, they are doing so; but the very same tools can just as easily be used to become dumber and less informed, just as television can, or the telephone or any other technology, including books." But the advantages, I believe, certainly outweigh the disadvantages. We don't outlaw all books because some of the books contain superficial or inappropriate material, and with the same logic, we can make the best use of all the wonderful things that the internet has to offer.

The Internet Is Creating a More Ignorant Society

Sunday, March 11, 2012

 The other day I was struggling to remember a funny quote from a movie I had just seen the previous night. Did I have to engage in this mental battle with my faculties for long? Of course not. All I had to do was pull out my handy laptop, click on a little google button, and type in my question. Immediately dozens of answers were available at my disposal. Finding this answer required no more than a superficial browsing of my memory and very little physical effort other than moving my fingers over a keyboard.

        In rhetoric class, I felt more than a little guilty learning about the fourth canon of classical rhetoric Memoria, and the ability of the Greeks and Romans to train their minds to remember whole series of poetry, to chant the entirety of the Iliad or the Odyssey from memory, (in Greek, nonetheless!!) and to retain extensive stocks of definitions and progymnasmata, commonplaces to be used in argument. No doubt about it, those dudes had astounding memories, made even more retentive and accurate by constant training, both everyday and formal.

       Contrast it to our culture today... Do we even memorize our friends' phone numbers or emails anymore? No, we just "edit contact" and there: the computer has done the memorization for us. Do we quote poetry or readily offer answers to questions about historical data? Sometimes, but more often it is more convenient to google it, is it not? Google has eliminated the need to remember things, whether it be historical dates, friends' emails, that funny quote you heard on "Psych", or the name of that one character in that one book that I just read that one night... what was his name again? Hold on, let me look it up really quick... But lest we digress.

      The internet has not only decreased our need to retain information, it has also greatly reduced our ability to retain information. Perhaps this is less obvious, but it becomes apparent. After all, our memory is a muscle - if it is not used, it becomes weak and ineffective. It may become sore when you suddenly make use of it after it has spend a long period lying in inactivity. Author Nicholas Carr expresses a common effect of this disuse in his famous article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"; "I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle." Our unused memories are suffering and so are our attention spans, which are becoming shorter and shorter as our need to concentrate is being reduced by short articles, quick links, and fast-paced images of the internet.

      Has it ever bothered you when you go to type a search into google and it comes up with a million suggestions before you finish the sentence, or even the word? It irritates me that a soulless yet complex machine is haughtily predicting what I, a reasoning human being, want to find. What irritates me even more is that it's usually right; my query is almost always one of the suggestions, so I am able to gratefully cease the strenuous activity of actually typing it out and simply click...The internet therefore is making our society's memories weaker, our attention spans shorter, and individuals themselves lazier. All of this contributes to a stupider society. (Wow, I didn't even know "stupider" was a word until no squiggly red lines appeared underneath it!) We certainly "click too much, read too little, and remember even less."

      Yet another feature of the internet fostering ignorance is that it has reduced creative thought, which is related to the laziness factor. Take me, for example. Not all of the ideas and objections in this post are my own. Obviously that quote from the article above was not stored word for word in my human memory. It was the product of the process 1.) google, 2.) click, 3.) read, 4.) copy, 5.) paste, 6.) and add quotation marks. Instead of talking to people who share my ideas and who could contribute to the arguments in this post, all I need to do is search for similar articles online. Instead of having mental progymnasmata ready to use as did the ancient Greeks and Romans, it's extremely more convenient to utilize the pre-packaged arguments formulated by others. I do it myself often because it saves time and energy, (i.e., because I am lazy and uncreative, having few of my own ideas to offer.) But wait, this is the internet's fault. Or is it?

     This post isn't an environmental sermon attempting to convince readers to "unplug" and spend more time taking walks in the woods and looking up info in encyclopedias instead of online. I have just been thinking about the pros and cons of technology and decided to explore the arguments an anti-internet proponent would use to convince us that google is detrimental to our cognitive processes. In my next post I plan to play the advocatus diaboli and argue that the internet is, in fact, creating a more intelligent society - because this is not an issue I have made up my mind upon, and perhaps never will.

    Well, now I need to go chat with my friend, bookmark some interesting articles to aid me on my next post, look up that funny quote I couldn't remember off the top of my head, post a few tweets, research Emerson on RWE.com for my lit. class, edit a few contacts and answer a few emails. It's also a beautiful day so perhaps I'll turn on my ipod, put in my headphones, and listen to my favorite pop tunes while I look out the window.