The Ouroboros

posted at 12:00 am on May 7, 2009 by Doctor Zero
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The ouroboros is a symbol that looks like a serpent swallowing its own tail. It symbolizes eternity, because the serpent is a self-perpetuating closed system: he devours himself, then grows so there is more of him to devour. He’s a zero-sum serpent, accomplishing nothing except his own continued existence. He just sits there and eats himself all day. The philosopher Plato described the mentality of such a self-consuming creature by saying he “had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to be heard.”

The ouroboros would be a good symbol for the undead husk of Chrysler, or maybe for the Obama Administration in general.

Today we learned that the $8 billion failout granted to Chrysler will disappear into the pockets of Chrysler’s creditors, corporate owner Fiat, and the labor unions. None of it will ever be repaid to the taxpayers. What will the unions do with their share of that eight billion dollars? Why, they’ll donate a great deal of it to Barack Obama, and his Democrat Party allies. The American taxpayer just made a huge donation to the re-election funds of their political masters, greatly enriching a swarm of union officials in the process.

Political palms have been receiving grease from business interests since the earliest days of the United States, and every other nation that came before it. The radical transformation imposed over the last few months has changed the character of the American system, however, and the full extent of the changes is only beginning to be felt. Socialism has always been a zero-sum game, extracting money from the private sector to pay benefits to preferred groups, “spreading” wealth around instead of creating it. President Obama, building on events and decisions made in the last days of the Bush Administration, has begun the construction of a self-sustaining, viral form of corporate socialism. Tax money is used for gigantic bailouts and “stimulus” programs, whose beneficiaries will reliably provide future funding for the Democrat Party, which will take control of more money from the economy to support its politically favored targets. Purchasing political influence will become an increasingly essential expense for business that want to survive and prosper in this environment. The change in the system we’re witnessing now is more than just an increase in degree, but rather an order of magnitude.

We long ago passed the point where the cost of government and public welfare was a line item on the expenses of a prosperous, free society, and now we have arrived at the point where private sector profits are starting to look like a line item on the government’s balance sheet. Someone asked me about the difference between “welfare” and “socialism” recently. I think public funding stops being “welfare” when the people paying for it no longer have the power to decide how much it will cost. It becomes socialism when the government doesn’t even pretend to be interested in their opinions on how much it should cost.

A persistent myth peddled by populist leftists is that they will create a society that has no obscenely rich people. That’s never how it works out, though. Leftist politics don’t eliminate “obscene” wealth – they just change the skill set needed to obtain it. Recent big-money corruption scandals have unfolded around powerful congressmen like Charlie Rangel, Jack Murtha, Chris Dodd, and Maxine Waters. Diane Feinstein routed billions of taxpayer dollars to her husband’s firm through the FDIC. Barney Frank and his boyfriend made millions from Fannie Mae, even as they were lighting the fuse for the financial-sector explosion that nearly crashed the entire economy. It’s the same pattern that crops up in every socialist workers’ paradise around the world, where the guys in charge of the Glorious People’s Revolution always wind up swimming in billions of dollars of the people’s glorious cash. Nationalizing industries invariably produces a great deal of revenue for the people doing the nationalizing, and their friends. It makes little difference if the man seizing control of the industries is named Chavez or Obama. The outcome is always the same.

Political corruption increases as the government becomes more involved with controlling the business sector, because the huge honey pot of money and power draws a lot of hungry flies. Unscrupulous businessmen are always eager to gain an advantage by paying politicians to distort the rules of the market in their favor. The deadly flaw in a government-controlled economy is that paying politicians to distort the market isn’t exactly “unscrupulous” any more, especially when the media shows little interest in blowing the whistle on politicians it loves. The creative energy and restless curiosity of the free market is replaced by the dismal, lifeless need to please the powerful President and congressmen who hold all the keys to success. To say that Barack Obama is woefully unqualified to micromanage a trillion-dollar economy misses the larger point that no one else is qualified to do that, either. No tiny group of political sultans can equal the combined genius of three hundred million free men and women.

The America of the previous century was a vibrant, chaotic, hyperactive nation that grew explosively, taking risks in the pursuit of reward. It generated enough wealth to defeat the Axis, rebuild Europe, double the human life expectancy, and redefine “poverty” to the point that the poorest Americans ended up battling an obesity epidemic. The America taking shape today is a government promising to provide prosperity to the industries that feed it, and subsistence to everyone else. It’s not a sustainable economic model. No serpent can survive forever by chewing on its own tail.

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