Moses, Musk, and the Iron Law of Force

For the last week or so, Elon Musk and his teen minions have been taking a sledgehammer to the federal government. The long-term effects remain to be seen, but so far I’m surprised at how total their victory seems: even elements of the Fourth Estate, like the CIA, seem to be on the back foot. He’s accomplished this feat by gaining control of the US Treasury’s payment system, through which he will probably eventually be able to excersise complete control of the government’s money faucet, unilaterally deciding which projects will continue and which will be starved to death.

In general, I’ll admit that I’m surprised at how quickly and how extremely it seems like the “left” has capitulated. In the face of an enemy with some power and the desire to use it toward a specific end, they seem totally rudderless, incapable of doing anything to oppose it. The most they can muster is sputtering think-pieces declaring that The New Government’s Actions are Illegal! On its face this opposition is silly and meaningless, but it feels very real to them. After all, remember that We Live in a Nation of Laws™.

But what is the law, really?

Liberal incoherence is based on a fundamental (possibly willful) misunderstanding of what The Law is, and what it does. They are flustered and incoherent when their opponents break laws in furtherance of their goals, and they see this lawbreaking as a surefire indicator of their eventual victory within the legal system. Remember when The Walls were constantly Closing In on Donald Trump? It seems pretty clear that he flouted the law before his election and throughout his first term, and he hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down. They’ll get him any day now…

What they get wrong is that The Law is not a computer operating system the country runs on. The law is a set of procedures for resolving conflicts. There’s no automatic camera watching human behavior and applying the law with electric shock collars in real time. When and how we choose to follow the procedures laid out in law is just as important as the procedures themselves.

Think about it like this: USA Boxing has a rule prohibiting “low blows” (hits below the belt). When you sign up for a USA Boxing fight, does the organization implant a NeuraLink chip into your head that prevents you from punching someone in the dick? No. In the ring, AFTER you punch someone in the dick, USA Boxing outlines a set of procedures for how to handle the dick punch in the context of the fight. You get a penalty, which might affect the outcome of the match. But the other guy’s dick is still punched. Depending on how hard you punched him, he might become infertile. The boxing referee isn’t really concerned with that; his future fertility doesn’t factor into the USA Boxing rule set. The ruleset ceases to apply once you step out of the ring, but the other guy might still be infertile.

In real life, powerful people can break laws, and even be held accountable for the violations, while still “getting away with it”. Assume the law outlines a $7 million fine for dumping an industrial pollutant into the river, but handling it safely costs $10 million. A company can just start dumping shit in the river whenever they want. EVEN AFTER an Erin Brockovich-style investigation and yearslong legal battle, EVEN IF Erin Brockovich wins and the court issues an injunction eventually forcing the company to stop, the company still might come out on top financially. The regular people who drink from the river are still poisoned.

The real effect of this is that our legal system (the combination of the law and how and when it is enforced) heavily favors powerful people acting first, and asking questions later.

Robert Moses

History is chock-full of episodes that teach this lesson. The master of this principle was Robert Moses, the man who built modern New York City. For more than 40 years, from the 1920s all the way up to the ’60s, he sat at the nerve center of the Democratic Party’s political machine and used all the levers of power at his disposal to remake the city in his image. Without a direct mandate, he built the New York State Parkway system, gigantic public housing tracts, and many of the arterial highways, bridges and tunnels connecting Manhattan to the mainland.

And the best part? He did this all by autocratic fiat without ever winning an election. His projects often faced considerable opposition at all levels of society. They often demolished public spaces or existing tenement housing, displacing tens of thousands of poor New Yorkers and drawing the ire of activists, conservationists and polite society more generally. But despite this resistance Moses remains the longest-reigning champion of New York’s political boxing ring, going up against the likes of FDR, Fiorello LaGuardia, Eleanor Roosevelt and Jane Jacobs and winning time after time.

None of this supposed liberal pushback provided any real friction. Attacks from the world of ideas broke against the physical reality of Moses’s projects like waves on rock. He used bureaucratic positions, often holding many at a time, to create a vertically integrated system of planning, resource allocation and construction without oversight from anyone tied to the discourse-sphere of the times. Through control of bodies like the Bridge and Tunnel Authority, he unilaterally issued bonds to fund unapproved construction, which he would then pay crews to do without approval. Oftentimes, by the time the sclerotic court systems could hear cases opposing one of his projects, the work was nearly done, and it was more difficult to stop the work than to let him complete it. The results of his career are written in concrete in the hard substrate of New York City. You truly couldn’t build the Parkway System or Throgs Neck in today’s woke society, et cetera.

What Moses understood, and what Musk and Trump seem to understand, is that possession is nine-tenths of the law. The people who own land and employ construction crews can pretty much impose their will on people who don’t. The power to control money flows is much the same. Even if the courts SOMEHOW manage to coerce the Treasury into turning the money faucet back on, I suspect that many of the programs Musk will cut will wither and die in the intervening months and years without the required inflow of resources.

…and Us

As long as we keep electing leaders like my own Gruesome Gavin and Karen Bass, who rule more in the symbolic domain of statements and TV appearances than the cold, hard world of fire management, prescribed burns and housing construction, we will continue stepping on rakes. Nothing will get done, except maybe some subsidies from the state to Disney by way of Stronger Together spiderman ad campaigns on billboards across my fine city.

Unfortunately, the California Democratic machine is able to mobilize enough low-information straight-ticket voters that their anointed creatures will probably remain on top here. So what does this mean for us chumps? If you’re reading this you’re in my real or online social circle, which means that you’re probably a member of the Ideas tribe, someone who doesn’t own a bunch of land or have a bunch of goons. If you’re paying attention at all you realize your stock is currently crashing in America. What do we do about that? I certainly don’t want to become one of Mark Zuckerberg’s techno-serfs.

We can no longer look to Daddy in the legal system to enforce some abstract legal code on our behalf. If we want to protect our way of life, we need some power of our own. Ideas People such as ourselves have historically undercounted the importance of real power in the form of ownership of tangible resources like land in favor of purely cerebral assets like cultural capital or a nice apartment in The Big City.

This isn’t a Leave Society manifesto. Technology will always expand into the frontiers. You can run, but eventually the internet will knock on your cabin door. Tangibly, you can gain real social power in your surroundings. You can cultivate a real network of real friends who are accountable to one another. You can volunteer in your community. One of the easiest ways to do this is to dispense free food to people in your neighborhood. You can also obviously buy land, although that’s more complicated.

I’ll be honest. I don’t totally know what we do. I don’t know how coherent any of this is. But we need to start from the fact that if you want to affect the real world, physical reality and hard resources are ultimately what matters.