by Tom Pantera
Columnist

I did something last weekend that I very rarely do. I got into a flame war.

For those of you who don’t spend much time on the Interwebs, a flame war basically is an insult battle. They often take place on discussion boards or in online chat rooms. The one I got into was on Facebook.

As I said, I don’t usually indulge in trading insults. Flame wars are, as the old saying goes, like wrestling a pig; it just gets you dirty and it annoys the pig. But for whatever reason, I was feeling pugnacious. The discussion was about the Koch brothers, whom I believe to be among the worst things to ever happen to American democracy, so I wasn’t in a mood to hear the usual lame defenses of what they do.

But of course, as such things often do, the discussion went rather far afield. One of the people involved said that what was needed was to either get rid of or prosecute “Federal Reserve, UN, DHS, FEMA, Dept of Education, Dept of Energy, FDA, EPA, Congress, Big Pharma, Monsanto/GMO, Solar/Wind/Green Energy, NAFTA, GAT, WTO.” He had a particular bee in his bonnet about the Federal Reserve.

Obviously, the guy is a little bit of a wingnut, if only for believing you actually could just get rid of all those agencies, laws, industries and organizations by sort of waving a magic wand. Hell, if it were that easy, I’d be doing that to the Koch brothers. By the way, he also did the normal wingnut thing of accusing me of “ignorance” because I disagreed with him. You know the old tactic: If I knew what he knew, I’d agree with him. It is, as the writer Ron Rosenbaum has said, part of the thrill of being a conspiracy nut; you’re privy to secret, even dangerous, knowledge that most people don’t have.

Still, my flame war buddy is nothing more than an extreme version of the current right-wing push to get government out of the way of the rich so they can accumulate more money. Some of the agencies he mentioned, like the Department of Education, have been named by mainstream political candidates as targets for elimination. And there are plenty of people out there who think the government should do nothing more than provide roads and police and fire protection, with all other matters left to the sacred market.

It took me about a day after the flame war to realize what really bugs me about people like this guy, as well as the Tea Party types who want the government’s hands off their Medicare. People like that often pride themselves on their activism and their knowledge of The Way Things Really Are. They often don’t know as much as they think they do, but I’ll grant they probably are more conversant with some subjects than the average guy.

But here’s what they don’t know: History.

One of the most maddening things about those who want to gut government and let everybody sink or swim is that they either don’t know, or just ignore, that we’ve tried that before. Government regulation was a response to problems caused by unregulated free markets.

Let’s take one example from my flame war pal, the Food and Drug Administration. More broadly, take the whole area of food safety.

If you haven’t read it, I recommend “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair. It’s about pre-turn-of-the-century meat packing in Chicago. A lot of it is a frankly silly socialist screed, but it also includes vivid descriptions of those packing plants. If you’re going to read it, don’t eat before you do. It talks about piles of meat covered with rat droppings and in one of its most memorable scenes, a worker falls into a rendering vat and leaves the plant as an ingredient in lard. Sinclair was an investigative journalist, so his depiction of Chicago meat packing plants was heavily researched. The book became one of the driving forces behind enactment of the first federal food safety legislation.

The FDA now handles that kind of thing. If we get rid of the FDA, and its food inspectors, there would be nothing to stop the meat packing business from returning to those days. After all, food safety costs processors money.

In fact, the whole gilded age of the 1890s is the era to which the government-is-bad folks would have us return. It was an age of unrestrained greed, which was good for the people who owned the companies but was bad for the average working person, whose life was nasty, brutish and short. Again, read some history. Read about what it was like to be poor at the turn of the century, before there was any government safety net at all.

Do we really want to go back to that? I don’t think most people would. And if current economic conditions persist long enough, and the middle class entirely disappears, most of us are going to be living on the short end of that particular stick. People like the Kochs will do just fine, but for us non-millionaires, the mobility will go in one direction: down.

If you don’t believe that, I say it again: Read some history.

The famous Santayana quote has become a cliché. Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But this is something worse. Our country’s future may be determined by people who did not just forget the past; they never knew it in the first place. It has much to teach us and unless we take the time for some study, we could be in for a very ugly repeat of a terrible, cruel time.