Why I'm a Neomercantalist (Sort of)

I have previously written about why I'm not a libertarian, why I have almost no time for libertarians in practice, and that can be summarized as: Do prisoner's dilemmas exist? Yes. Then I'm not a libertarian, and in the same vein, since prisoners dilemmas exist, I am pro-neomercantalism.

It's Friday night, date night, you and your partner have agreed to go see the new Nicholas Cage, Jean Claude Van Damme gender swapped remake of Thelma and Louise. You are waiting for your significant other to get organized. You could be playing air hockey, you could be getting drinks and snacks and be in your seats for the coming attractions.

But instead you have to wait for your partner to finish the level before he showers, or you have to wait for your partner of six years to pick an outfit and do their hair and makeup in order to sit in the dark and partake in an exercise where nobody looks anywhere but the screen*.

The minor frustration of having to sit around waiting for someone else to get organized I offer as your cognitive empathetic leaping off point for why I sort of, would describe myself as a Neomercantilist. 

I essentially believe thus: Any solution that requires everyone to do the right thing is no solution at all.

What could possibly go wrong with an honour system?

The essence of this is, it's nice to live somewhere where if I get sick I don't face financial ruin, I can drink water from the tap and walk home at night without any reasonable fear for my safety. Where if I enter a contract with someone that contract is enforceable etc. 

The thing is, I don't trust my neighbours. It's not that I don't trust all my neighbours, or even distrust most of my neighbours. I just know there's enough of my neighbours who are willing to take all the toilet paper, all the pasta, all the lentils, all the frozen meat and poultry, not just once but in successive waves of panic buying. 

My juices don't get going based on the wikipedia definition of Neomercantalism:

Neomercantilism (also spelt as neo-mercantilism) is a policy regime that encourages exports, discourages imports, controls capital movement, and centralizes currency decisions in the hands of a central government.[1] The objective of neomercantilist policies is to increase the level of foreign reserves held by the government, allowing more effective monetary policy and fiscal policy.

There's nothing I strongly object to in that description, but for me the end-goal isn't allowing more effective monetary and fiscal policy. For me it is simply, I don't want to live in a world where we have to wait for Viet Nam, China, Brazil, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh etc. to sort out their industrial relations, nor do I want to live in a world where we have to wait for The US, China, EU, Brazil, India, Australia...pretty much everywhere outside a few Scandanavian countries to sort out their environmental regulations (and enforcement).

Unfortunately regarding the climate, we simply do live in a world where we depend on others getting their shit together, and in that sense I'm a "globalist".  

I have both positive and negative experiences of Labor Unions. This is not to say I have both been a worker and a Construction Mogul. I have worked in industries with collective bargaining agreements, jobs that would be inhumane without a unionised workforce, that force a lot of good management practices onto both good and bad employers. 

But the bad was from attending Union end-of-year events at Trades Hall, and the bad is largely because the unions come across as broken. I am but one of maybe a hundred or so in the audience, but the staple of Victorian Trades Hall end of year events is a pantomime of a debate, curiously, for the two I've seen the pantomime went wrong. Both debates were rigged to ensure the affirmative won, the topics of debate were chronologically )for me, I missed several years) "the system needs to change" and "the time to strike is now" since the entire debate is populated by union representatives, you would expect it would be resolved that the system needs to change and the time to strike is now. Sure enough, that's how the debates panned out. Curiously though, declared winner aside, in both debates the more interesting and compelling arguments came from the losers. 

I take the pantomime, and it is just my interpretation, as the insecurity of a paper tiger. I am no expert on the history of industrial relations in my own country, even growing up in the town of the Eureka Stockade. 

I feel endanger of belabouring the same point ad nauseum. So I should address the "(Sort of)" in the room. For the same reason I am sympathetic to neo-mercantalism, I am ever reluctant to sign on the dotted line of being this or that. I feel safest in the universally reviled position of "pluralist" because there's no statement a fellow pluralist can make that cannot be responded to with "well..."

So that sort of, is that I'm reluctant to join up, I'm not a joiner to any "Neo-Mercantalist Internet Alliance" or whatever for the same reason I don't want my job prospects to be contingent on my Chinese counterparts unionizing, I never want to hitch my identity wagon in such a way as I have to depend on my fellow identifiers sorting their shit out. 

It's quite an aside, and can only be followed by this post fizzling out with a whimper, but this is somewhat what has plagued social discourse for getting onto a decade now. I find identity politics both regressive and stupid for example, and two types of people will tend to agree with me, one such group are universalists people who just believe in a single standard for everyone, on principle. But also some tribalists, people who for example do not like cancel culture, not because it is a para-legal process that inhibits freedom of speech, though the tribe will certainly become sudden experts and adherents of free speech - but because it effects people they agree with, but when it comes to banning books from public libraries like...I don't know... "Anti-racist baby" or "Stacy has three moms" whatever, their outrage is nowhere to be found.

I refuse to take responsibility for the full suite of opinions of people who may incidentally agree with me. I would always prefer to speak on my own behalf, then any group by virtue of a genetic lotto draw or other twist of fate I may qualify as a member of. I would prefer to eat my elephants one bite at a time, especially the penis.

Hence, I'm a neomercantalist. Sort of.