Trickle-down
Officially, my brother’s death was an accident: he got careless with his new charcoal grill and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Unofficially, it looks a lot more like suicide, for a variety of reasons. I think the official ruling is meant as a kindness for friends and family. In the absence of legal challenges or evidence of foul play, maybe officials just let cases like this go on the books as an accident because it spares friends and family knowledge the departed died in despair.
If so, it probably helps people cope. My family is a little more hard-nosed, but I can understand the appeal.
Chief among the reasons we suspect suicide: we discovered he was in debt—not much in debt, maybe a couple thousand in overdue bills, apart from his mortgage. And the job prospects he told us were materializing…weren’t. Dan got caught in the housing market bubble, buying his house at the wrong time, and getting caught with a property worth less than the debt on it when the bottom dropped out. On top of that, he lost his job around the same time, because he worked for an architectural firm that cut the payroll when the market began to slide.
I bring this up because it’s given me a more intense appreciation of the evils of a generation of business deregulation. Ever since the ascension of the beloved Saint Ronnie to the White House in 1980, federal policy has taken deregulation of business as universally good: deregulated, business will behave itself, driven by the invisible hand of the market, and make us all rich. That’s obviously pretty silly. Deregulated business seeks its short-term gain at the expense of whoever and whatever gets in its way, including the environment, countries on the Persian Gulf, and the middle class. The current banking crisis and collapsing mortgages are just two heads of the hydra which is irresponsible deregulation. I complained about it before, but largely in the abstract, an argument about justice and legality and the way free markets need more, not less, regulation to preserve them. But suddenly, I find the argument has become much more personal. Dan, in some sense, is a victim of the way our government has steadily sold our interests away to big business since way back in the “me” decade of the 1980s.
That is not to say that gol-durned gummint killed my brother. It’s not true. He killed himself. As an independent citizen, he was responsible for examining his own business deals and making his own decisions. When caught in negative equity, he could have chosen to default, or declare bankruptcy, or possibly pursue other options. The housing bubble was merely a contributing factor in his death, a necessary but insufficient cause. Nonetheless, it was a contributing factor. Suddenly, maintaining a dispassionate view of national fiscal policy has become much more difficult.
In some ways, that’s bad. Objectivity is essential to setting good policy, and even to voting responsibly. As Terry Pratchett says, personal isn’t the same thing as important. But in another way, my personal reaction can be made valuable, if I can harness it properly.
Humans aren’t built to think in terms of the big picture. We empathize with our circle of acquaintances, or with individual cases. The little girl trapped in the well triggers a national effort; 30,000 handgun deaths per year is business as usual. “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” When we do think in terms of the big picture, we can, if we aren’t careful, lose sight of the principle that virtues are virtues only because of how they affect individual people. Truth, the rule of law, civil liberties, justice, national security, religious freedom, education—these and others are only valuable to the extent that they make individual lives better. High principles like these are held so valuable because they affect a lot of people, all at once, often dramatically.
Dan’s death hasn’t changed my mind about anything, merely reinforced certain beliefs—and those only mildly. But it has served as a reminder that bad government doesn’t just flaunt ethical principles; it hurts actual people. Now I share that reminder with you, vicariously, in the hopes you won’t suffer one directly.