The Game is Rigged. The Wire.

I was watching Bill Moyers interview David Simon on PBS the other night and realized that many people missed out on one of the great TV series ever produced: The Wire. Here’s a clip from season one where the drug dealers teach each other how to play chess.

And here’s the description of the show from wikipedi:

The Wire is an American television drama series set in Baltimore, Maryland, where it was also produced. Created, produced, and primarily written by author and former police reporter David Simon, the series was broadcast by the premium cable network HBO in the United States. The Wire premiered on June 2, 2002 and ended on March 9, 2008, with 60 episodes airing over the course of its five seasons.

Each season of The Wire focuses on a different facet of the city of Baltimore. They are, in order: the drug trade, the port, the city government and bureaucracy, the school system, and the print news media. The large cast consists mainly of character actors who are little known for their other roles. Simon has said that despite its presentation as a crime drama, the show is "really about the American city, and about how we live together. It's about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how "whether you're a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge [or] lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you've committed to."

The show is very much about how our systems, by using economic incentives, corrupt individuals within each system, and create a mobius loop of corruption and/or stupidity.
A show like The Wire actually does a better job, as a fiction piece, than does journalism, in explaining a world most of us don’t understand. David Simon is correct in his assessment that our society doesn’t need 10% to 15% of our population from an economic perspective. They’re under educated and will never find a place in society. Our solution has been to create drug laws that marginalize the underclass and create a “drug war” that widens this gap.

I am a proponent of removing the drug laws. Consuming chemicals should be a personal choice. Right or wrong, this type of activity is a matter of freedom – not government mandate. But the question pops up – what do you do with 30 million people (in the U.S.) who are under educated and basically unemployable once our ridiculous drug laws are removed? Short-term I think the solution is negative income tax. Long-term it’s education. But the fact remains…..as Huxley presented in Brave New World….we have our Alphas and our Epsilons. A rich society like ours should have a plan, or better yet, a path for the people who can’t perform within the system.

So kids. What is that plan?