Keep It Simple, Silly

(I saw this expression the other day and realized that was another thing I hated about Clinton and his toadie Mr. Carville: By corrupting it into "Keep It Simple, Stupid," you change a teasing reminder into an "I'm better than you are" putdown - You're so dumb I have to remind you to keep it simple. I embrace silliness; I try to avoid stupidity, especially in myself - so routinely calling me Stupid is a frustrating insult. But then, unreformed statists do seem to think they know better than the rest of us, and it's important to them that we stay in our place.)

A friend of mine points the way to a four-year-old Bob Wallace essay called "Love Your Neighbor As Yourself." He begins by suggesting that the study of economics makes people's eyes glaze over because it is not presented playfully enough, or simply enough.

One of the few things I remember from jr. high about Jesse Stuart's book about his teaching days - The Thread That Runs So True - is when he finally hit on the only way he was able to motivate his students. He made the learning play. The only time he saw his students motivated and interested is when they were playing games in the yard. So he made school play, and he had almost no problems thereafter getting his students to learn.

Bob's goal was to find a way to explain economics in a truly free society that is as simple to understand as Marxism: "I think one of the reasons Marxism, no matter how destructive, was able to make such inroads into societies is that it's easy to understand. 'I'm good; you're bad. I'm right; you're wrong. You're guilty; I'm innocent. Capitalists bad, workers good.' So simple, and so completely wrong. It takes an hour to teach it and a hundred years to get rid of it."

As he searches for a fun and simple explanation, Bob finds himself turning to Richard Marbury, who "distilled all laws down to to two basic ones: 'Do all that you have agreed to do' and 'Do not encroach on other persons or their property.'"

Noticing that those two principles are extrapolations of the Ten Commandments, Bob takes the religion angle a bit further and notes that almost all religions at some point boil down to a variation of "Love your neighbor as yourself" or "Do to others as you would do to them." This, he argues, is the essential point of libertarian law and economics:

"You can just 'love your neighbor.' The Neighbor Wins, you Lose. You can just 'love yourself.' You Win, your neighbor Loses. But if you love your neighbor as yourself, both you and your neighbor Win."

This is an overly simplistic summary; Bob says it better than I can. (It's such a solid piece that I was reminded I've been meaning to add a section of essential articles to the sidebar, which I did this morning with five charter members of "Other Folks' Greatest Hits.")

But what great ways to kick off an explanation of how the free market works, or an explanation of the bottom line of liberty: It's all about loving your neighbor as yourself. The price of securing your own individual freedom is you must embrace your neighbor's freedom - and if you treat each other in a way you would like to be treated yourself, you have a free and open society based on trust.

The state thrives when it can drive a wedge into that trust and make us afraid of each other. If it is effective enough at the fear-mongering game, eventually we become afraid of freedom itself. I am a broken record on this point: The bottom line to protect your freedom is to REFUSE TO BE AFRAID.