They want their MTV…

No, I didn’t see President Bush’s speech on TV. Yes, I’m sure he did a fine job. But here’s the real story: it is utterly pathetic to contemplate a president trying to talk people into wanting to keep more of the money they earn.

Which drives us right into the heart of premise that economists have gotten wrong. They assume that most people would rather keep their wealth than have it taken away. That’s only a rational assumption if the rationality it presupposes on behalf of the mob really exists. Well, it doesn’t.

If you travel far and wide enough you can’t help but escape this fundamental human truth: Most people have a basic need for authority–and the more authority, the better. Like lab rats who will choose intoxicants over food, people, and societies, won’t sate their urge for authority until it literally starves them.

The modern epoch’s three most brutally dictatorial systems–the Soviet Union, Communist China, and Nazi Germany–were built by the willing, not the un-willing. People fought, killed, and died in their lust for authoritarian states. Sure, these are extreme cases, but they betray an element of the human psyche that economists have seemingly never taken into account. The pale practitioners of the Dismal Science never venture into humanity’s distant gutters and diseased backwaters in order to field test their shiny, plastic theories.

But I have.

If you were to go to the average economic backwater and cooly present a sound scheme for them to improve their economic lot, they would throw you out at best, and, most likely, slit your throat right there. The clean workings of the free market threaten too many entrenched interests in most places, and the tangled and abstract theories of wealth creation can’t hold a candle to the easy answers provided by the authoritarian aegis, be it political, ethnic, tribal, religious, or whatever.

America’s founding fathers were notable exceptions to this sad situation, but even their diligent efforts at national construction could not escape mob realities in perpetuity. They understood that if policy making was thrown to the lowest common denominator, a tyranny of the majority would result. And that’s what’s on the way.

And so we wind up with the insane prospect of President Bush trying to arm twist the average American into wanting to provide for their own families, instead of providing for more authority. The argument goes against the grain of the modern American psyche. Americans are group oriented people, organization men and women, who need to be told what to do, when to do it, who to obey, who to boss around.

Self-sufficiency and independence are anachronisms in the Prozac nation, and economic policy can’t defy this fact. Perhaps Mr. Bush should announce a national policy to give everyone a free big screen TV. It would prove far more popular than any attempts to resurrect a free market ethic that has long ago been defiled by the headless mob.

Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. “Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com”