Free at Last by Nick Manning
Prose
Elsa is standing outside Teeters. She has just joined the line of the unemployed. ‘Unemployed,’ that’s what she calls them, although she knows that since so many now are without work, or without enough work, or without enough work that pays enough, that it would be more accurate to simply call them poor. She is tired and would like to sit on the sidewalk, or even just lean against the wall, but looking anything less than energetic and ready to roll would not be a great selling point. She is one of millions standing outside supermarkets and major outlets across the country, hoping that those with enough money to go to the store will think of some unpleasant task that they want someone else to do.
She knows from MeTube that the tradition evolved from the groups of Hispanic workers who used to wait outside Home Depot in the early 2000s, hoping that someone would buy their labor to nail up some newly purchased sheetrock. Now it’s everywhere. Every large store has demarcated hiring areas near their doors. Ropes separate those without money but with labor from those who have the money to buy them. More upmarket stores have ingenious slatted screens which allow shoppers to see the outlines of faces without being troubled by the accompanying expressions of desperation.
Elsa looks around at her fellow poor as they signal the talent that they are selling. Baby-sitters are carrying webcams, actuaries are holding up framed certificates, electricians have cables and dressmakers, the poor bastards, lumber heavy sewing machines around with them like the crosses of the insufficiently penitent. She is carrying disposable gloves and adult diapers. Her talent for sale is the ability to clean up the neglected and incontinent elderly without retching.
Elsa is tired. She lives outside the city, in one of the ‘unchosen’ spaces. She left home early this morning to walk to Teeters. She has no car. There are no cars in her neighborhood.
Her mum used to tell her about the history of their settlement. In the late 2030s places like theirs started disappearing from all of the competing Global Positioning Systems. One of the digital navigation systems recognized that customers preferred to deny the existence of poor areas and gave drivers the option to set a median property value below which neighborhoods showed on their screens as a soft beige mass labeled ‘terra pericolosa.’ All the others followed pretty quickly. Now, no one in their right mind would attempt to drive there. Her mum told Elsa about these bits of history when she home schooled her. The other choice that her mum could have made was for her not to be schooled at all. There are no schools in her neighborhood.
It was a big moment for her mum when the Supreme Court issued its deregulatory Chevron Ruling. She said to Elsa that it was a bit hard to work out what it all meant but she could sense that ‘Freedom of Choice’ was going to bring boundless life opportunities to her then seven-year old daughter’s life. Freedom to carry guns, any guns, any weapons. Freedom to worship some form or other of the Christian God, in any place at any time. Freedom to refuse to serve anyone who loves, or looks, different. Freedom to share anything, with anyone, about your thoughts on the value of their background or lifestyle. Freedom for small clumps of fetal cells to develop into something larger, regardless of the impact on their maternal host.
In the late 2020s, the “End the Tyranny of the Bureaucratic Class” Act was passed by an enthusiastic Congress. The unelected overseers of the hated administrative state, the oppressive so-called experts with their liberal agendas, were at last to be cut down to size. Regulators were made subject to the rigors of a competitive market. Providers anywhere in the country could choose to be certified under regulations from anywhere else. Citizens could choose schools for their kids which were held to account by the authorities in another state, electricians could advertise themselves as being licensed by a county on the other side of the country and doctors could be accredited by any state whose exams they felt that they could easily pass. Want some work done on your house plumbing? Since the passing of the Act, you can buy a list of plumbers operating in Denver approved by the city of Minneapolis. Had a bad experience? Feel that the safety standards of the Indiana Department of Consumer Affairs are unduly burdensome? Look for contractors operating in your area licensed by the city of Galveston.
The initial consequences were predictable and Elsa’s mum told her that they were profoundly satisfying. The over-educated and doubtless over-paid building inspectors in Cambridge, Massachusetts found themselves out of work as home extensions and wiring plans were approved by the Department of Buildings in Matewan Town, West Virginia and a crop of new charter schools in that Harvard-dominated jurisdiction were staffed by teachers whose qualifications were approved by the one-person town hall staff of Boligee, Alabama, the same person who approved the qualifications for the dentists in Lagrange Town, Arkansas.
Apparently the pilot program allowing the purchase of pharmaceuticals and garden chemicals approved by any country which was contributing active duty soldiers to the long running “War of the Righteous” against Iran was abandoned following the disaster in the White House garden. New soil and staff are still being trucked in from Virginia.
Some of the jurisdictions who saw the quality of the professionals servicing their populations declining, financed their own high quality services and accompanying regulators. They employed electricians and dentists whose qualifications they felt that they could trust. Congress reacted by passing the “Tax Payer Freedom to Choose Act” in 2033. No city, town or state could impose taxes on its residents other than for the military. Tax returns were accompanied by an annual option to tithe to local and state jurisdictions. Contributors could specify where the funds were to be directed and, equally importantly, could specify where their money was not to be used. The moral conundrum of how to tax the many to serve the poor was resolved. All transfers to the poor were to be based on the choices that others made about how much to give. The overwhelming majority of the funds raised across the country through these voluntary contributions has always been dedicated to new road construction. No one wants to tithe to health and safety inspectors.
This led to the near extinction of that entire oppressive class of officious regulators and, more importantly, the end of the idea of regulation. The administrative state is dead and there is no appetite for its return. Rudimentary oversight of standards remains in force, but few trust an ophthalmologist whose training is validated by the licensing department of a small community in Alaska.
A new generation of apps emerged, offering various aggregations of consumer ratings and avoiding any reliance on those arrogant experts. Her mum said that it was probably inevitable that the apps would be developed further, allowing users to specify whose ratings mattered, sorting them by income and location. In essence, this is when it became possible for the rich to see which services other rich people valued. Her mum told her that this is also when she began to see the downside of all this.
Some of the Fox media streams, not all by a long way but many, discussed the possibility that the introduction of this individual fiscal and regulatory freedom would lead to disruptive internal migration as the rich would seek neighborhoods where the quality of services was valued by others at their income level. But they need not have worried. It was soon evident that the country was already so sorted by class and income group, and equalizing tax transfers were already so low, that the rich had already settled in areas with others who chose to pay for public services similar to the ones that they wanted and could afford.
So this gets the two of them to where they are now. The rich have trash collectors, street lights and even police. Lower income people live in areas where all that is wanted and can be afforded in the way of public services is rodent poisoning and armed curfew enforcement. The very poor live in settlements with nothing much more than a town sign and some sporadically self-organized hygiene squads which burn down collapsing houses where the sick and the criminal gather in sufficient numbers to suggest risks of disease or insurrection. And then there are the “unchosen” spaces, like the place where they live. These places have nothing. People in unchosen spaces are referred to as “refusers,” suggesting that they couldn’t even be bothered to choose a better location, a better life.
Elsa re-emerges from her reveries as an older, although not really elderly, woman stops and peers at her. “My step father needs sorting out” she says, rather directly. No preamble, no greetings. Elsa bridles but does not react, reminding herself that she is just a person-shaped lump of labor – recasting herself in the woman’s eyes as a full human will not help her get the work. “What ratings apps are you registered with?” the woman asks. Elsa rattles off a list while the woman holds out her phone for Elsa’s facial scan. She has registered with seventeen of the more common ratings apps. Elsa feels the familiar apprehension – the newer generation of aggregators, created to scan the universe of rating apps, do not always get it right. They all too readily pick up ratings of people with similar names or those posted by reputational hostage takers who give shockingly bad reviews unless a ransom is paid.
The older woman looks puzzled. Elsa could not immediately interpret her expression and was choosing from her repertoire of closing remarks to claim the minor satisfaction of being the one that indicates that the interaction is over, thank you very much.
The woman laughs and says “OK, let’s go. You’re a refuser so I’m hoping that I’ve made a good choice.”
About the author:
Nick is a clock-mending, stained glass window-constructing, family and dog-loving, British man, living with his husband, dog and, sometimes, stepson in Washington DC and New York. He retired from the World Bank a few years ago. He is the author of a large number of distinctly dry technical books and papers about governments and their dysfunctions, an output which kept him busy for most of my career.