Liberty And Service

The soap opera that is CBS news brought us its latest round of entertainment, with 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley going scorched-earth on his network, and getting fired for his efforts. Since Bari Weiss took over the division, the ivory tower Better-Than-Thous who purport to be journalists at The Tiffany Network have been clutching their pearls and waggling their wigs over the death of their highbrow form of...

I won’t call it journalism, because it’s rather obvious that they forgot, long ago, what journalism is supposed to be.

Journalists are supposed to serve the public. By reporting news, by unearthing secrets that people in positions of power would rather prefer remain secret, by exposing criminal activity and violations of public trust, and by standing in opposition to government excess no matter who is in power, they perform a vital service (a word I deliberately repeat).

The same goes for politicians and bureaucrats, who are public servants. Who, like Steve Miller’s Texas detective Billy Mack, make their livin’ off of the people’s taxes.

When journalists and politicians forget that their jobs are service jobs, things go poorly. When they decide that their calling is to shape society rather than support the People who, by their votes and their daily decisions and their behaviors and their interactions, determine and define society, they take other people’s freedoms away. They undermine the premise of equality that’s fundamental to a free society, and install themselves as dictatorial overlords.

Sure, I may still have the power to vote, but if my vote is “managed” by someone feeding me curated information - or lies or half-truths or incomplete stories or Dowdified quotes or unvetted “facts” or opinions presented as facts or other forms of propagandizing, my voice is being muted. I am nothing more than part of the pretense of a free society. It’s different only in degree from the elections held in totalitarian nations, where the dictator gets 99.97% of the vote.

In pondering the notion of service jobs, it occurred to me that in a liberty-based society with a capitalistic, free-enterprise economic system, all jobs are service jobs. Any compensation I receive relies on someone wanting what I offer, on me serving the wants and needs of the person with whom I’m interacting.

Compare this to socialism, where coercion replaces free exchange. Socialists will be quick to reject the “coercion” characterization, but socialism requires someone be coerced. If capitalism is about voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services in a legal framework that protects individual and property rights and enforces contracts, not-capitalism necessarily is about some form of coercion. Typically, that’s the confiscation of the fruit of someone’s labor for the benefit of someone else. It doesn’t matter if the majority approves of that confiscation, it’s still coercion.

Their current bleat is that capitalism puts all the power in the hands of the wealthy, but I ask, who has the monopoly on force? Who controls the laws and the police and the courts and the prisons? Look at socialist nations and ask, what happens to a millionaire who doesn’t toe the party line?

The irony is that, rather than fighting the part of the mixed economy that empowers the wealthy (i.e the rent-seeking, the cronyism, the corporatism, the lobbying, K Street, political action committees, etc.), they fixate only on the use of that power for ends they dislike. Some millionaire/billionaire uses his wealth to move things in their preferred direction? Nary a peep, of course. So, rather than fight to make government so weak that there’s no influence worth buying, they want government power to grow, as long as they are the ones who get to wield it.

But, I digress.

The core problem with the “elites,” as Thomas Sowell calls them, is that they do not accept that their work is service. To them, the problems of humanity are a call to action, a demand for the application of their wisdom. They “serve” by being our masters, by organizing society as they think best, no matter if we disagree. We are not their equals in their eyes, because they are smarter than we are, and so it’s not only OK but proper for them to run our lives. Once you realize that’s how they think, much becomes clear.

Every time I hear a socialist complain about the coercive power of wealthy people in capitalistic societies, I lament the brainwashing that has planted that utterly backward idea in their heads. I then recall Thomas Sowell’s admonition about learning history

All these “new” ideas about “democratic” socialism are merely recycled garbage, freshened up for young minds left ignorant by an education system that has failed them. This belief that it’s a cooperative system, where “the people” will decide things and businesses will be run by “the workers” is childish fantasy, believed because their critical thinking skills are those of children. Again, this is the product of a failed education system.

As for Scott Pelley? I can honestly say I didn’t recognize his name when I read it. I haven’t watched TV news, other than by accident (i.e. it was on in some public space, or someone else put it on in my presence), and especially 60 Minutes, in forever. What I know, I know second and third-hand, but I have no reason to doubt the reports, and by every measure he demonstrated that he thought he was bigger than the job, his bosses, and the company that paid him millions of dollars. Charlie Cooke’s summation feels accurate, and I figure another self-important blowhard got his just deserts Maybe somebody who puts the job ahead of his agenda will take his place, and give me reason to tune in.