Money Monarch Masters
According to The New Yorker article, “Caitlin Clark’s New Reality,” Russia paid a WNBA star 200 thousand dollars, twice what her salary could have been in the United States to not play in the United States. This was in addition to her Russian salary which was over 1 million dollars. Hegel said that money is ethical substance, which is a bit of an obscure statement. I always took it to mean that money literally creates structural ethics, in part. With Hegel, you never simply understand within a one-sentence summary.
What does it mean that a state can decide to make a professional class, such as women’s basketball players, more wealthy? If the incentives are high enough, it seems that there is no independent ethical decision to not participate typically, except in limit cases such as Saudi Arabian golfing or soccer/football. When an American Women’s basketball star had a pot seed in her bag and was arrested by Russia, it shows that money means feudal right, and feudal right means the right to use people however one wants, because people are property.
Is a salary the same as slavery? No, but a state offering much better benefits can import people and make them subject to the laws that their citizens are subjected to (or worse). Incentives can overwhelm, and in a sense over a large quantity of people, they can take over quantitatively enough that one’s own views about whether or not to take the incentive are less important than the real capturing which that incentive does to create an ethical block, a feudal patch. Returning to Hegel, money as ethical substance meaning money as the thing which creates an order as well as a feudal lord.
The libertarian fantasy that there can be a patchwork system beyond states where you have some right of “free exit” but no freedom within a patch, which is totally controlled by a monarch with total right to enact their will within that patch, always struck me as some sort of fantasy. Not insofar as it is far fetched, but it is extremely close to the reality of money.
The libertarian alternative is really, in essence, for most people, simply a description of the reality of the situation. I can work for this platform or another platform, or I can try to strike it on my own, and maybe make my own patch where I am the master, but to transcend the master form is not so simple. Can true co-operative ownership overcome this? Maybe! I’ve not seen it implemented in my entire life, and I certainly never accidentally run into a co-operative ownership structure where I am invited in taking ownership of something and made an equal partner.
The main freedom, as the libertarians fantasize they would like, but in fact is the reality of the world, is freedom of exit. Within structures we have no freedom. This is to say, we are subject to the money monarch. The freedom of exit may not feel like a real freedom, but it is the realest freedom we have.