The taxi driver in Maui picked the accent straight away.

“Look out!” he said. “The Aussies are here!”

Turns out he used to date a woman from Australia. She used to bring tour groups to Hawaii and when she did, she brought a leg of lamb for him.

“She’d drop the lamb on Maui, go do her tour on the big island, and then come back here and cook me the lamb. Pretty sweet set up.”

I asked him if he’d been to Australia.

“Spent some time in Sydney,” he told me. “Was thinking of settling there until you guys went all socialist.”

Oh, Jesus, I thought. Here we go. I’ve lived in the US and I’ve had these conversations before. You are on a hiding to nothing. No matter what facts you array against their anecdotes and Trivial Pursuit-level knowledge of your country, you cannot shift their preconceptions. Still, I couldn’t resist.

“So you want to compare economies?” I asked.

He didn’t miss a beat. “Oh, I know all about your mining industry, selling stuff to China. And you’ve got this lovely lifestyle and everything, with your socialized medicine and what not. But it’s costing you. Sydney’s one of the most expensive cities on earth.”

Unlike, say, Maui, I thought, where I was about to pay him twenty bucks for a five-minute taxi ride and where, as he’d pointed out as we drove past, a two-bedroom apartment in an average block of flats had just sold for two-million dollars (less in Australian money, of course, asshole, given the exchange rate) and where I was about to meet up with some American friends at a suburban-level hamburger joint and pay forty bucks a head for a burger with fries and where a “seventeen percent gratuity for parties of six or more would be added for my convenience” plus a tip on top of that, not to mention the tip I would be paying our socialist-hating cab driver for his over-priced cab ride and his ill-informed opinions because the whole basis of their delightfully unregulated labour market means that almost no-one is paid enough to survive without tips, a fact reinforced the next day when we went snorkelling out on the reef and the boat’s Captain openly asked us to tip his crew because, and I quote, “most of their pay comes from you guys.”

I also politely — okay, lazily — declined to mention that “socialist” Australia has a much higher rate of social mobility than his so-called land of opportunity, and that it wasn’t our financial sector that plunged most of the world (Australia excepted, just in case you forgot) into the biggest recession since the 1930s.

Look, I’m all for a market-based economy, but these stupid pissing competitions by the blinkered champions of the free market like my mate the taxi driver, underpinned as they are by this pathological and self-defeating hatred of “government”, miss the point badly.

The issue isn’t about the size of government but who government is for.

Australia has plenty of problems, but — the IPA not withstanding — we understand that simple fact a lot better than a country like the US where the founding myth of rugged individualism and government-is-the-problem-not-the-solution still reigns. Frankly, the empirical evidence is in and it ain’t supporting Maui’s answer to Ayn Rand sitting in the front seat.

As former US Secretary of Treasury, Robert Reich, notes:

Americans have never much liked government. After all, the nation was conceived in a revolution against government.

But the surge of cynicism now engulfing America isn’t about government’s size. The cynicism comes from a growing perception that government isn’t working for average people. It’s for big business, Wall Street, and the very rich instead.

Pity it’s taken them a disintegrating middle class and a near-depression to realise it.

None of which is to say that more government or even ‘big’ government is the answer. Nor is it to say that government is somehow benign: it isn’t and we need to be vigilant against its tendency to subsume personal freedom. I’m not even saying that we all somehow have to become super-citizens and be actively engaged, day and night, in politics in order to protect our interests.

We don’t. But enough of us need to pay enough attention enough of the time to keep an eye on things. It isn’t a lot to ask. We also need to have the sort of structural controls — like compulsory voting, unions, and political parties not in complete thrall to big business — that, while not perfect, work on a form of autopilot in order to stop us disenfranchising ourselves. We mostly need to not con ourselves into thinking a free society works the same way as a free market.

What the taxi-driver was dismissing as “socialism” in Australia is nothing more than a nation making an imperfect attempt to dedicate itself to the proposition that all of us are created equal. It’s a proposition too many Americans have forgotten, or rather, have confused with some notion of survival of the fittest.

Individual freedom is a defining condition of humanity, but the sleight of hand performed by those who decry “big government” is to ignore the fact that such freedom can’t exist separately from community. It is government — by, for and of the people — that provides the preconditions for individual freedom to flourish.

The sort of libertarian false consciousness the taxi-driver was indulging in lays the foundation for the rise and rise of the One Percent. It disempowers ordinary voters because it demonises their best chance of exerting any sort of influence over those who grow excessively wealthy and powerful on the benefits of a system that can’t exist without all of us. It’s a neat trick: poison people’s perceptions of the one tool they have to balance the social ledger (government) and then use that tool against them to rig the game in your own favour.

We shouldn’t fall for it.

—

Tim Dunlop writes regularly for The Drum and other publications. You can follow him on Twitter: @timdunlop and at his blog, B-Sides: www.tjd.posterous.com

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