A “Trickle-Down Economy” Government: Relaxed First, Authoritarian Later

The theory of trickle-down economics imagined: the rich get benefits from the government, and the prosperity which results 'trickles down' the economy to the poor, or, the rich get tax breaks, and the resultant additional income they have is invested into small businesses or used to employ more poor people. Perhaps one of the concept's inspirations was the law of gravity, just as gravity pulls liquid downward, so too does wealth trickle down to the poor. If the government believes in this image of a gravity-like, lawful and orderly process of trickling down, then the government does not have to intervene into the economy as an enforcer of law, but becomes a passive observer, a spectator, as the economy functions free from government interventions but still abides by the law of gravitational pull. Today trickle-down economics implies that the economy abides by natural and universal law. It is the government's job to first witness such a process within the economy and thereby resist the tendency to intervene. Just as one cannot do much about gravity but observe it, one cannot do much about the trickle-down effect, but must be grateful that it has been pointed out, even though it is difficult to imagine that human actors within the economy are determined/controlled by a non-human and universal law. 

Government believes that some higher authority is facilitating the functioning of a law-abiding economy, and so it recedes in importance and function in the economic sphere, in that, government seems to turn away from the economy. But this turning away is also problematic because it implies that the government is not the supreme power in matters of the economy. Some would be hesitant to give up the role of supreme power that government has played thus far, and so there may be some attempts to make the government seem all-powerful, more powerful than it actually is, and therefore comparisons between divinity and human government abound. The question becomes: can the government act against the trickle-down effect, or against gravity? Can the government meddle at all in this natural law of the economy which we call the trickle-down effect? At first, the passive/weak government just celebrates the 'innovativeness' of the trickle-down theory in its ability to show how the economy behaves in a law-abiding manner; initially, government is enamored by the theory/law, and theory exerts influence over the government.   

However, the receding of importance/turning away of the government may only be temporary, because as the trickle-down law has been observed in the economy, more authoritarian elements in the government can also come into power, elements who are themselves directly invested in the economy (and hence practical, political-economic actors who cannot afford to maintain a distance from the economy as pure theorists can) and anxious to see that the government has a more productive function in the economy by using the law of gravitational trickle-down to cement authority. The main function of these authoritarian elements is not to witness passively, but to monitor actively the flow of money and the eventual spread of prosperity within the economy. With the help of the tools that monitor the trickle-down effect, the government possesses a vantage point through which the entirety of the economy becomes an object of governmental knowledge. In a traditional theory, the rich are studied in isolation and the poor are studied in isolation, but with the trickle-down effect, the connectivity, the communication and the relation between the rich and the poor can be studied accurately, and the making of some into rich people and others into poor becomes the apparent; the very transaction in the economy is recorded by the government's tools, not the effect of the transaction on the people. The movement towards the study of the trickle-down effect is a movement away from sociology, which studies classes in isolation, towards the field of socio-economics, which studies non-isolated social classes interacting in the economic sphere. It is a movement away from economics, which in its primitive form is inspired by sociology and concentrates its study to classes in isolation, towards a study of the economic activities of the population in its entirety, including the rich and the poor under the same topic as actors in the market. 

The very material flow of money which regularly makes some rich and others poor becomes visible for once, the economy is seen as an economy at work and as 'alive.' As wealth trickles down, it highlights the channels through which it passes, making these channels visible objects of scrutiny and control via government intervention; the goal for government is to do the bidding of the law, meaning that the law of gravity has to be enforced no matter what. As the passage of money through the economy is traced, it enables the monitoring closely of points where the flow is hindered, the points that need fixing or removal from the economic system; (a flow does not 'jump' over the different individuals/groups of the economy, but it is in contact with everything that falls in its path, so that it implies a completeness of knowledge, a clarity of knowledge and a truthfulness of the knowledge generated.) After a relaxed government celebrating the natural lawfulness of the economy, there arises a more authoritarian and exploitative government using the trickle down law and the consequential visibility of the whole economic system for interventions in the name of the law.

The Left's Philosophical-Economics in the Neo-Liberal World

Neo-liberalism is thought of as the era of flows of money (money flows from multinationals to the people and vice versa, between nations, in daily transactions that make some rich and others poor etc), but money does not flow out of its own nature, rather, it has to be pushed through the global economy with the help of human intervention. Money tends to 'stand still' at some points in the global economy rather than flow through the economy freely; standing still, money allows for the accumulation and exploitation of wealth around certain privileged points in the economy. 

We hear of some multinational companies being worth hundreds of billions, and this is the measure of how much money became stationary in the contact with the multinationals (as trillions and trillions come into contact with the multinationals, it is only obvious that a fraction of these trillions stops flowing when coming into contact with multinationals); in a different kind of economy where money kept flowing around, the multinationals would not be worth so much. It is very possible that the measurement of the net worth/value of these multinationals pays more emphasis to how much money is in their 'bank vaults' at the time of measurement rather than to other features, like their buildings and machines, the quality of their workforce, their levels of innovation etc. But, money in the vault is not a very good indicator of measuring multinationals' worth because the money's flows and stoppages are erratic in nature, and that ultimately its stoppage in a multinational's 'bank vault' means nothing but a happenstance. Another different example of money standing still in the form of accumulated wealth is in families with inherited wealth: this inherited wealth of the elites even today does not flow through the neo-liberal economy because this wealth has very high sentimental/emotional/romantic value and is not conceived as wealth to be circulated within today's economy. Thus, it is in the smaller business, non-inheritance based pure capitalist economy of today that money keeps flowing around rapidly. Ironically, the left has enabled this rapid-flowing neo-liberal capitalism to arise, but such a system hasn't been implemented fully.  

The leftist feels that money does not belong to anyone anymore, it must simply be pushed along the system, ultimately with no meaning and no end to this flowing (flowflowflowflow...and so on with no 'Stop'). In hurrying money along the system, however, the leftist institution is motivated as much by political-symbolic reasons as by its philosophical-economics. The main political question for the left is how to participate in the capitalist, neo-liberal economy without critics deeming the left as being complicit in capitalist wealth accumulation. All sorts of leftist organizations exist that actively participate in the process of wealth accumulation, and there is perhaps a sense of guilt in participating in such a capitalist pursuit. Hence, the left tendencies have developed financial institutions and instruments which enable the left to keep the flows of money at maximum intensity, so that the money they generated flows away from them and gets lost in the economy; the whole of the left, in an ideal world of tomorrow, becomes money-maker but not wealth-accumulator. 

It is interesting to note that the left does not shun or avoid the multinationals in its ideal economy of rapid flows, but implicates multinationals, inherited wealth etc in its project of keeping money flowing: the money flows through to the multinationals as much as it flows through to the poor, and multinationals are not to be avoided or destroyed, but their roles re-configured within the global economy as 'money-makers' but not 'wealth-accumulators.' As a side note, employing the very contemporary and technological process of hurrying cash along, the leftist becomes archaically sacrificial and altruistic. Today, these ancient values such as altruism have gotten a chance to re-emerge with the help of the most cutting edge technologies.

The Climate Change Debate and the Religion of the Sun

As the climate change debate progresses, it will increasingly be polarized to form two opposite sides: on one side is the argument that climate change is caused by humans (the scientific view on certain occasions, and the social-scientific view), while the other side will claim that it is a result of divine will. This debate will be the first time that religion and science battle one another in such a great, global scale, and this debate will surpass debate between religions only. As a battle that exists only between the developed western countries, between the religious and scientist populations within them, we can expect a mass mobilization of resources, as in the western World Wars 1 and 2. The resources that will be mobilized by each side in the conflict, however, will not be men and women in the armies, but images, research-based knowledge, media organizations; both sides will compose campaigns to convince ordinary people about the causes of climate change. This debate will begin and survive with religious and scientific propaganda, but by the end it may make apparent a crisis in science's and religion's conceptions of humanity.

If we imagine the planet as getting even more and more warmer/colder more rapidly, we can expect religion to take a different shape compared to today. No longer will there be religion based on texts and scripts, rather, a direct, divine intervention of God becomes apparent to religious people, God is not revealed by priests and temples, but God is directly acting through climate change, apparent before the people and impacting upon people. No longer will there be need of scripts, priests and temples, in their place is the direct worship of the elements of the universe, and there will form a religion of the sun, a direct worship of the sun, unmediated by protocol and formalities, but with each person as a kind of priest or prophet, utilizing his/her own spiritual depth to form a relationship with the sun. These new priests and prophets will be in dialogue with the sun. The newest worshipers won't ask for forgiveness, for a pacification of the sun's rays, but they will let their lives hang on the whim and will of the sun; they are not asking for earth's return to normalcy, but rather will be ready to give up their lives as a celebration of the divine intervention.

In the midst of this new religion will be the west's science-religion debate. Whereas science will continuously attempt to prove itself through its experiments and ever more meticulous research, religion will respond by providing the media and ordinary people with revelations of the prophets and priests who communicated with the sun; and they may even proclaim their subjective research practices, in the form of the 'ethnographic-interview' with the sun, to be more superior than the objective research of scientists. At least in this sense, religion may prevail as the more persuasive orientation towards climate change. But religion also can compromise, if it does not attempt to take the all-powerful element of the sun as a God, and rather focuses on something smaller, the earth, as a God. Between science and religion will rise the social sciences, since the social sciences seem to begin with the premise that the earth is a God and not the sun, and, in fact, even the hard sciences that are concerned with astronomical entities may secretly harbor the feeling that the sun is God and the earth is nothing. If the social sciences do indeed rise in this way, they will enable the study of the effects of climate change on the earth, on people, rather than seeing the earth purely objectively, which science is guilty of in its research endeavors, and religion is guilty of by proclaiming the sun as subject and therefore the earth as necessary object. But even if this 'social-scientistic' knowledge about the earth may be the solution to climate change, it may not be the solution to exploitative productive practices by powers: the social-scientist only applies a "science of government," developing a statistical, mathematical, scientific knowledge of the natural earth, with the ultimate objective of controlling it, in a Foucauldian sense. For the first time we are beginning to see a monitoring of the natural earth (the data on the "hottest year on record" is an example), and the surpassing of the argument that nature is too unpredictable and cannot be monitored. The earth is thus not an almighty God for social-science, but is rather a God to be crisscrossed with social-scientific, that is, managerial/administrative, knowledge.