caper_est | Libertarian Challenge #1.2 - Sacrificing Chickens to Eleutheria (Reply)

Not the post I'd expected to make next, but an important one.

Contributing towards free resources with cash has one inarguable side-effect - one has less cash afterwards. This isn't an acceptable net result for me, for several reasons. Firstly, I don't earn a lot of money, and I'd rather not look for a less congenial job in order to achieve some modest improvement. I'm not saving enough for my liking now. Moreover, I see hard times ahead and more need to scrimp and save than before. Finally, there are straight questions of both goodwill and freedom involved - the more financially secure I am, the less likely I am to need to touch other people for their hard-earned, and the more able I am to tell the government/my employer/whoever to go to blazes, if they start behaving as if they belonged there. Since relative self-reliance is presently an option for me, it would be a really bad idea to do anything to undermine it.

There are limits to this sort of thing, and very stringent ones, because financial narcissism is a disease illimitably creepy and always morally fatal, and it is one to which some perfectly decent traits in libertarians' worldview render us dangerously liable. But that is another discussion, or several discussions, for other occasions. For the moment I want to focus on one modest and essential part of the project: funding every commitment I make as I go along. In other words, every part of this challenge has to leave the resulting lifestyle at least as sustainable for me as the one I went in with.

Sustainability -

Back in my days as a political activist in the early '90s, I knew - as I thought - a woman who would give the shirt off her back to help a vulnerable person in distress. Tireless in campaign, dogged in labour, fierce and glad and inspiredly merry in company, she had a great wealth of friendships, mine among them, and a partner - one of the most honourable men it has ever been my own honour to know - who thought she hung the Moon. Not only of her time, but of her money too, she gave and gave and gave to the helpless. For her worth and good-fellowship, she was known and widely admired even amongst people who thought her ideas were battier than Castle Dracula. When she got into a frightening but apparently temporary financial difficulty, through a generosity-induced cashflow problem, there were literally dozens of us falling over ourselves to lend her enough to tide her over it. Few if any of us cared how long it took her to repay us, since her word was a considerably safer commodity than most banks, and if by some chance her honest efforts failed - hey, she was who she was, and it could have happened to anyone, and in the end it was only money.

None of us, however, knew that she was touching all the others simultaneously.

She did a flit, and was never heard of again, and left her partner to deal with what turned out to be a truly impressive accumulation of debt. The problem was not that he was legally liable for any of it. The problem was that, despite never having seen any of the cash nor even known about it before her flight, he was absolutely convinced that it was up to him to make sure none of their mutual friends ended up stiffed. And they had a lot of mutual friends. Many of whom had contributed... substantially. To speak only of those I knew, we had a great deal of difficulty persuading this struggling Bohemian writer that by no means might he liquidate his own life in order to pay for his ex's indulgences. He hung around the area for some months making things right with those who were not in a position to write the debts off, and then dropped off the radar in deep and haunt-eyed mortification.

We did discover a few things. She had not, in fact, run off with a small fortune. She had spent the last several years giving away money lavishly to good causes and indigent acquaintances, not out of her modest but respectable salary as all had supposed, but by running up various debts and juggling of various bills, because Doing The Right Thing was more important. When her legally dangerous obligations approached a state of crisis, she could not bring herself to tell anyone the whole hole she had gotten herself into: she did what she did instead, and walked out on her partner with a terse and considerably less than accurate explanation as soon as she had the bogeyman off her track. The full extent of the disaster emerged only over the subsequent couple of months.

I got off pretty lightly - though it is still the most money I've ever dropped on one bad call - and the experience stood me in good stead later, in a situation I can't really detail here. The episode made as deep an impression on me as one might imagine. As to lending money, anybody with any sense knows that is a risk anyhow. But I never saw the risk of putting personal image and moral buzz before plain neighbourly honesty, as starkly as in the self-delusion and corruption of my old fellow and friend. And the dead man's look on her abandoned partner's face, as he struggled to redeem his own honour from the wreck of it - is one that will not leave me, while my mind has eyes to see it with.

I fear that road, and the stricken folk run down along its side. I can't drift towards it by doing the feelgood thing now, and finding the means to maintain it later.

So, coming firmly down to earth, how am I going to pay for all my new commitments to pay for that lovely free stuff I've been lapping up?

One simple economy will pay for more charges than I've yet managed to identify. Except to sound out a new place for some social gathering, in future I shall only dine in Indian restaurants when in company. My own inordinate curry-cravings must otherwise be satisfied either at the work refectory, or by my own hands. This will have the happy side-effect of forcing me to learn many more curry recipes than those few I've already mastered. I estimate this will save a good £150 a year.

So with a last ceremonial butter chicken and saag aloo at the admirable Punjab restaurant in Covent Garden, the resolution is sealed, and my formerly-free subscriptions are now funded!