Freedom or just Free Stuff?

The politics of economics is a very ironic realm indeed.  Nothing’s ever quite as it seems and noble causes are sometimes exposed as pure greed dressed up in nobility.

This is especially true in the Arab Middle East.  On the surface people want freedom, but dig a little deeper, and you sometimes find that they just want free stuff.

Last week we cited the Saudi King who was trying to placate the marauding masses by handing out free stuff.  Time will tell whether this strategy works…ok, it won’t work, but what I meant to say was time will tell for how long this strategy works.

One of the problems in the libertarian tradition is the outright belief that people are good and the state is bad.  The state is bad, but people can also be lazy and exploitative.  Human nature is weak, frail, prone to ignorance, and looking to exploit systems.  In some sense though we can also blame this on the rise of the state.  It was the state after all that has fostered the belief that simply being born confers upon one a whole host of false ‘rights’.  The right to everything under the sun at the state’s expense.

Saudi Arabia has a particularly unhealthy polity.  Put rather crudely, the Saudi royals soak themselves in oil money and then pay off the Islamic radicals, who have a huge support base, to stay out of politics.  The oil provides the lubricant for this festering pustule that is called Saudi ’stability’, the kind of stability the US government is always so intent on preserving.

The royals buy themselves gold-plated luxury cars and live in palaces, but if they didn’t funnel oil dollars to the Islamic madrassas they’d probably undergo an Iranian style revolution tomorrow.  But this, as you can clearly see, has its limitations.  For one there is only so long a proud people will be someone’s bitch for oil money.  There’s a loss of dignity in that and anyone who knows the Arab-Muslim world knows that honour and dignity are strong psychological forces there.

But more than that, an economy built on consuming oil money is not really an economy’s backside.  You create a weaned class who know no other way other than leaching off their oil masters.  The religious clerics too live in a funding bubble.  It is very easy to pontificate about the finer points of the Quran or how to establish the Islamic Caliphate when the oil dollars are flowing in.

But strip these societies of this black gold veneer and you’re left with deeply unproductive societies, quite frankly strange and unhealthy male-female relations, a religious bubble, and a whole host of people living on freebies but not actually finding the fulfilment of experiencing what it means to work at risk, produce value, and understand the workings of a free and unhampered market.

The democratic idealists are watching the Arab world and licking their lips at the prospect of a democratising ‘Arabia’.  But maybe we should ask: If it was really democracy they’re after, wouldn’t they have got it by now?  Maybe rather than freedom they just want more free stuff, and, when economic hardship hits, maybe it’s not political change they’re after, just economic salvation from big brother?

The people of Saudi should reject the disgusting offers of free stuff from their rulers.  These gestures are patronising, belittling, and sickening to the core and should offend the very essence of their dignity.  But if the desire for the material is so strong as to outweigh the desire for genuine freedom won the hard way, then the Saudi people get what they deserve.

Buying people’s souls with oil dollars is bad, but in a market of willing-buyer-willing-seller, ultimately the seller too has a choice.