Monday 30 March 2020

Freehold and Jennifer Government: The Ideas

Picking up from where I left off in Part 1 of this analysis, I shall expand on why I think that the societies portrayed in both Freehold and Jennifer Government are fundamentally the same. Though first, I will begin on spelling out the inherent differences.

The first, and perhaps most important thing to point out is that each is set in a different genre and telling very different stories. Freehold is a work of science fiction set far in the future telling a refugee and war story fleshing out the authors view of a realistic libertarian society with minimalist government and maximum personal freedom. Jennifer Government on the other hand is a satire set on present day Earth which instead takes rampant consumerism and corporate greed to its absurdist conclusion while also pointing out the de-fanged nature of a minimalist state and the problems that would cause.

Different genres, different aims, and very different stories.

Picture is my own

With that in mind though, I do want to explore why these societies are almost twins of one another.

“The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?” - Angela Davis

Firstly, the society of Freehold has a very simple ethos "work or starve" which to some might seem reasonable. This will only effect the parasites who leach off the system of course!

Unfortunately, any dispassionate examination of economic reality would lay this brutal all or nothing system bare for the failure it is. It is a very inhumane dog-eat-dog ideology which rests at its core on an unworkable idea. This idea is that everyone has an equal starting point when engaging in economic activity. No one has any innate advantage over another person or everyone is capable of contributing to society equally. This idea is very much in error.

Now, I just want to make clear this is not necessarily a problem with libertarian thought per-say, but a problem with both libertarian and anarcho-capitalist economic thinking. It is fundamentally obvious that not all men are created equal. Some are born poor, some rich, some stronger, taller or weaker, shorter and so on. That divides the playing field at birth.

As an example, someone born into a poor family will very much be handicapped by their lack of access to greater resources or even basic living costs on some hands. Studies have shown that it is extremely difficult for those born into poverty to advance beyond that line, leading to an endless cycle. In some cases and countries this can be overcome, but it does tend to rely on government assistance or grants and loans, whether unemployment insurance or school loans in order to attend higher education.

Someone born into a wealthier family by contrast, has many advantages. They do not need to worry about the struggle for daily needs like food and rent, they have much more access to both higher education and the social circles which allow for social advancement. Whether the option of choosing more prestigious (and better connected) private schools or the simple expedient of not having to rely on loans to even get a higher education, someone born into a wealthy family has an inordinate advantage over someone born poor or even to a middle class family.

In that vein, let me use an example from Freehold. When Kendra arrives on the Freehold, she is sent to a job agent to try and find employment:

“I realize there may not be anything in inventory or a related area,” Kendra acknowledged. “But I can do loading, stocking or whatever, until something administrative shows up.”
“The problem is,” Calan explained, “that all the light jobs get snatched up by juveniles looking for spending money, veterans get preference for technical positions and unskilled heavy jobs are rare, with the industrial base we have. If you can lift fifty kilos regularly in this climate, I can find a few, but they don’t pay well.”
“Fifty?” She repeated, shocked. “No, not for very long.”
“That is the detail. I can recommend a couple of prospects that usually aren’t hiring, but will probably make an exception for you. They both offer training. Cavalier Enterprises and Bellefontaine.”
“What would I be doing?”
“Cavalier Enterprises is one of the most respected escort services in Jefferson. They offer dancers, modeling, escorts for business or social functions, massage and exotic sex fantasies. The Bellefontaine is a club that offers erotic dancing and they specialize in dancers with rare or off-world looks.”
Kendra was silent in amazement. A chill shot down her spine and all the way to her left heel. She opened her mouth twice and finally got out, “No.”
“They are both excellent companies,” Calan stated simply. “I occasionally visit the Bellefontaine myself.”

The obvious problem here is that, outside easily lost menial labor, Kendra has no real special skills. The implication too is that if she were not attractive she would probably have no choice but to work in backbreaking menial labor which would slowly grind her down. In essence, she has no negotiating power in the system and if she had not gone over the head of her agent and asked for other options she would have been trapped, but the point stands that if she did not have other skills which were deemed useful she would have been stuck with the physical labor.

In comparison, the hapless Hack Nike has both a self-esteem problem and a negotiating problem. He always gets screwed at his quarterly wage negotiations because he won't stick up for himself. A problem with consistently negotiating your wages is that you don't really have the power to properly negotiate if you're bad at that very act or have no one to negotiate on your behalf. Hell, the problems Hack faces are that he then foolishly subcontracts away from the contract he didn't read before he signed!

Problematically we also see that corporations themselves will penalize individual employees in the world of Jennifer Government for things as mad as their replacement at a job might not be as good as them. This of course can be interpreted as satire, and arguably should be, but the process of rewarding or punishing employees based on successes isn't exactly a new idea.

Essentially you do not have freedom of choice in these societies, you have an illusion of freedom. When the alternative is starvation and death perhaps not just for yourself but for your family, then whoever has your paycheck in their hands has you at their mercy and the power imbalance would be absolutely catastrophic.

I'd next like to address the bigger problem in both worlds, lack of government intervention and corporate accountability.

“Accountability. This is the primary ingredient missing in politics, corporations and financial institutes.” ― Brandon A. Trean


In the world of Jennifer Government the government is a joke and corporate oversight is a laughable concept. The paraphrase Ayn Rand through Robert Heinlein "I would say that my position is not too far from that of Ayn Rand's; that I would like to see government reduced to no more than internal police and courts, external armed forces — with the other matters handled otherwise. I'm sick of the way government sticks its nose in everything, now." The government only exists to adjudicate disputes and prevent crime, or enforce punishment if you can afford it. Ironically in that world they don't even seem to have a monopoly on military power! The Freehold is much the same. The government exists only to adjudicate, prevent crime, and keep invaders at bay. At least they appear to have the monopoly on force though.

However, it should be noted in each case that the government in each world is, effectively, powerless. While this is part of the driving plot of Jennifer, in Freehold it is a very background case.

As an example, the government adjudicates lawsuits between individuals and presumably corporations. The biggest scandal presented in Freehold is that since there are no government standards, private corporations, three large ones specifically (several smaller are mentioned, but for all intents and purposes that is irrelevant) are ratings firms who rate various products based on their reliability and quality. It turns out one firm has had employees taking bribes to up ratings and as this news leaks consumers boycott the company and it devolves into a mass of lawsuits.

Simple enough right? The lawsuits will be taken care of and the companies guilty will be held responsible. In the real world we're quite aware this doesn't work, but on the Freehold this would be far, far worse. In an ideal world, this kind of whistle blowing would end up seeing a company held responsible for their misdeeds. However, a particular problem (especially in the US) is that the company could just begin handing out SLAPP lawsuits. In brief, a SLAPP lawsuits would be designed to censor and intimidate anyone who wants to harm either a corporation or a very powerful person. It is a pet tactic of Donald Trump and John Oliver has a very detailed piece on the matter which points out why it is so harmful since those handing them out can often afford to drown people in expensive legal action.

Boycotts rarely work in reality, and in a world where 'work or starve' is the ethos, then the consumer would have virtually no power to boycott. The journalists who leaked the stories would be SLAPPed silly, and the employees who took bribes would probably already have their asses covered by management if it weren't management in the first place colluding to get better money in exchange for hyping up products from certain companies, no matter how bad said product was.

This is by no means unrealistic. Whether it is colluding to fix the prices of ebooks, illegally manipulating interest rates for profit, fixing emissions tests to sell vehicles that let out too much poisonous gas, creating fake bank accounts without client consent, among other things, these are just a few examples of the blatantly illegal and manipulative practices carried out by both individual and colluding corporations to the clear detriment of the consumer. More notably, even in a world where we see governments coming down hard on these practices, many of these corporations still exist and can screw over their customers more.

What is worse, is that in Freehold and Jennifer Government, even the mild punishments experienced in real life are impossible. The corporation is only beholden to its bottom line, not the consumer.

In the case of the latter novel, the lack of ability to enforce such accountability is the driving theme. In the former, that lack of accountability means that Freehold would essentially be an oligarchy where the various corporations run wild and no one can do a thing about it.

The Freehold, unlike the United States and affiliate nations in Jennifer, does not even have a government capable of oversight. It doesn't even have a traditional democracy. Instead, it is 'run' by a Citizens Council. To whit:"Citizens pay for the privilege of ruling, getting a small stipend in return and the court fees paid are more generated income. The military and safety patrols charge for any assistance we render on duty and most of the large corporations donate a small percentage to the military as an insurance against our need in industrial accidents. They also use us as testing and advertising for any products we may find useful."

Now while that seems great in theory, I think you can see where this would fall apart rather horribly with where I've been going. It is explicitly stated Citizens do give up their means to wield their political power. However, there is nothing which says they cannot be given gifts to play favorites. Surely bringing out a Citizen for dinner is nothing suspicious, selling them a property at a discount, donating to their District upkeep among other means? There seem to be no restrictions on what a Citizen can receive from private residents of the Freehold, and then who would enforce those restrictions? Petty bribery is practically enshrined in the American system with dark money influencing politics and cushy jobs promised to retiring politicians in exchange for their support. In the Freehold that would be even more pronounced. And you would have no oversight body, Congress, Parliament or Supreme Court, to turn to for redress. They would almost inevitably be in the pockets of these corporations.

Much worse is that then the military has much of its funding (how much is never clear) coming from corporate donations as insurance against natural disasters and presumably social disorder. Would that extend to gifting the officers and certain men who needed to be influenced? Almost certainly. While in a throwaway line it is mentioned everyone on Freehold is armed well enough to overthrow the government if they chose, with the corporations controlling the products and the government, and the military in their pocked to back it up, well you have a recipe for corporate dominance.

Speaking of that dominance, let's discuss monopolies.


"I am not denying that monopolies are terrible things, but I am denying that it is readily easy to dissolve them through legislation of that nature." ― Alan Greenspan

A monopoly is an economic situation where a single company controls access to a specific service completely. However, an oligopoly or a cartel, is where numerous companies control access to a resource and collude on how to distribute it. This can be seen today by the domination of certain industries by a small number of corporations. Two of the most infamous examples are Microsoft, which developed the idea of EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish) in order to try and corner the tech development market. The second is Walt Disney Studious which owns a truly disturbing number of mass media assets which is still being unraveled to this day.

Then we have the problem of oligopolies, where a small number of companies can collude to set prices or at least create an illusion of competition. This is seen in the case of mass media communications, such as four companies controlling over 90% of the cellular communications market in the US. In Canada this can be seen by three companies dominating the supermarket industry, four companies dominating the cellular communications industry, and three dominating the internet providers industry.

In Jennifer Government this is exactly the problem. Two massive corporate oligopolies, US Alliance and Team Advantage, dominate the market. You can either shop with them or you shop with no one and smaller stores simply go out of business. In fact the driving desire to win that competitive game nearly starts a shooting war! But the point is that consumers have an illusion of choice. They are deciding to eat at Burger King or Macdonalds, shop at Walmart or Sears, not go to the small business up the street. It is an either or situation which is being created. It's a terrifyingly real possibility.

On the Freehold you would most likely end up with an oligopoly by default. With no oversight and no method of redress, corporate dominance would just be the way it is.

This is possible because the free market does not necessarily bring the best ideas to the top. There is no invisible hand to guide and self-regulate it. Without a firm hand to stop someone from cornering a market, and many times even in spite of it, you have to work very hard to prevent the moneyed interests from simply dominating it as they see fit.

But all these dangerous signs aside, what about personal freedom?

"To change your mind and to follow him who sets you right is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before― Marcus Aurelius 

In both worlds, we find lands of fairly astonishing personal freedom. Drive how you want, be as promiscuous as you desire and no one will shame you if its all in good fun. You can buy any weapon you want, even up to lethal missile systems and weapons of mass destruction (on Freehold at least). Drugs are easily available, you can legally go out and inebriate yourself to whatever level you desire. The worst thing you might do is violate a contract or fail to pay your debts.

But as discussed before, is this freedom?

Some would argue enthusiastically yes! Small government! Privatization is the way! But is it? Privatizing a public service not only has been found to cost the public more, but has yet to be shown to be either more efficient or safer. So arguments put forward by both protagonists (and antagonists) in each story can be very, very detached from reality.

Neither society would have any means, beyond charity, of helping people in need. Whether it is something as simple as community snow removal, or even providing healthcare to the needy, an absence of a government to step in and attempt to provide these services, you would instead find widespread suffering and poverty. The corporation doesn't care.

What happens when personal freedoms begin to get in the way of profits? Could they then coerce or attempt to regulate those freedoms away or make a profit from punishing disobedience? Punish consumers by hiking prices or denying access, or simply invoke their monopoly and put people out in the cold who attempt to pressure them? All real possibilities by non government entities.

Truthfully, Jennifer Government is a very keen expansion on what the Freehold would devolve into. There are no elections, and those who govern are going to become either impotent and irrelevant or simply cronies of a larger for profit driven machine. Dissent is either pointless or a death sentence, and over time the very idea will be foreign with the brutal reality of your society laid out for you. But if enough people, and well armed people at that, become desperate enough, would work or starve make fight or die an option?

The end of these societies might then end up being all out war between those on top, or all out war against those on top from the bottom up.

Either way, these two societies are twins of each other I think, perhaps not in the way their authors imagine. While Freehold is meant to show off a 'realistic' libertarian society, and an interesting one is created to be fair, that very liberty and lack of oversight brings to mind more images of the world of Jennifer Government. Vast corporate dominance of global affairs and no one who can reign them in. The little man on the bottom had best get out of the way.

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