Erstwhile Urban Wanderer

September 27, 2008 – A lightweight, lighthearted and hopefully thought provoking examination of why so many problems seem to be coming to a head today.

By Dave Eriqat

With all the problems becoming evident in our world today – financial collapse, food shortages, peak oil – it seems opportune to examine the root cause of all these problems. The fundamental cause of all of them is our foolish quest for exponential growth on a finite planet. Here is what an exponential function looks like:

Classical exponential function, y = e^x (x -> 0.5 … 10.0)

Does that graph look familiar? Doesn’t it look like so many graphs you’ve seen? Of population, pollution levels, debt? If we ever observe any growth pattern here on finite Earth that looks like that graph, we ought to be scared to death! Exponential growth – or any form of boundless growth – on a finite planet is obviously impossible. Sooner or later such a growth pattern will slam right into the finite confines of our planet. In fact, with respect to debt, food production, oil supply and population growth, I think those sounds you hear of crumpling metal and tinkling glass means it just did.

Finance-Based Economy

Our entire finance-based economy depends on exponential growth in prices, simply because of interest. When debt is used to purchase assets, those assets must rise in price sufficiently to repay the principal plus the interest, not even taking into consideration one’s net profit. So P₁ = P₀ * I, where P₀ is the price at time 0 (zero), and I is the interest (one plus the interest expressed as a decimal fraction). To realize that price appreciation, the owner of the asset must sell it, and if the new buyer also buys the asset with debt, that debt is now exponentially larger because it includes the previous principal plus the previous interest. The asset must then appreciate again in order for the new buyer to pay back the new debt and the new interest, so P₂ = P₁ * I, which can be reduced to P₂ = ( P₀ * I ) * I. After a third iteration, P₃ = ( ( P₀ * I ) * I ) * I. Notice how I is getting propagated with each iteration? This is an exponential function that will repeat endlessly if permitted to, and can be expressed more concisely as P_n = P₀ * Iⁿ.

The problem is that such an exponential function simply cannot repeat endlessly. What would happen if house prices, which increased by 10% or more each year between say 2001 and 2006, kept on increasing at that rate for another 50 years? By 2056 they’d be 117 times the price they were in 2006 (1.10 raised to the 50^th power). Assuming that the median house price in 2006 was $200,000, then the median price in 2056 would be $23,478,000. It matters not whether we’re talking about houses or stocks or derivatives, the problem is the same for all of them.

Consider the U.S. GDP, shown in the graph below.

U.S. GDP, 1929-2007 [1]

Doesn’t that graph look eerily similar to the classical exponential function that appears at the top of this post? That’s because the government seeks to maintain economic “growth” in the neighborhood of 3% per year. That rate is considered “healthy”; less is considered anemic; more is considered overheated. But any figure above zero is an exponential function, as can be clearly seen in the graph above, and is ultimately unsustainable.

Population Growth

Consider the U.S. population, shown in the graph below.

U.S. Population, 1790-2008 [2]

Again, it looks a lot like all the preceding exponential functions. Fortunately, the rate of population growth is slowing, as can be seen in the table below. Nevertheless, even an annual growth rate as low as 1.22% is still an exponential function which cannot continue forever.

What’s interesting when comparing population growth to GDP growth is that while the rate of population growth has been slowing, the rate of GDP growth has apparently been increasing! From 1900-1950 the population grew at 1.38% annually, while from 1929-1950 the GDP grew at 5.09% annually, outpacing population growth. Yet from 1950-2008 population growth slowed to 1.22% annually, while from 1950-2007 GDP growth increased to 6.99% annually! The fact that GDP growth has continually outpaced population growth probably reflects growth of the money supply (i.e. monetary inflation) more than it does real growth. In a perfect world, GDP should rise in lockstep with population, or perhaps a little faster owing to productivity increases. However, productivity cannot rise forever any more than anything else can; eventually we will reach the limit of what a single human being can produce.

Crop Land Use

Not surprisingly, the amount of land used for growing crops has increased along with the human population, in other words, exponentially.

Global Crop Land, 1700-1992 [3]

It might be difficult to understand how much land that is in the chart above. So consider these facts:

Dividing 150,000,000 square kilometers of total land on Earth by 17,615,610 square kilometers used for crop land in 1992 gives us 8.515. In other words, we are presently using (or were using in 1992) 1/8.5 of all available land on earth to grow crops. I’m stunned that it is such a high proportion! So the question is how long, at a growth rate of 0.6% per year, will it be until we are using 100% of all available land on Earth for growing crops? The answer is approximately 358 years (1.006 raised to the 358^th power is approximately 8.5). Clearly, we cannot keep increasing the amount of land used for crops for more than another 358 years at the pace of the last 300 years, because by then we will have devoted 100% of all the land on Earth – including all the mountains, forests, deserts and cities – to growing crops!

Conclusion

I could go on and on, citing examples of one exponential function after another, but I hope the foregoing handful of examples are sufficient to persuade the reader that we cannot continue striving for a stable growth rate, as we do now with inflation, the GDP, population and so forth. Stable growth is not stable at all – it’s an exponential function! The only truly stable and sustainable condition is stasis: constant population, GDP, standard of living, land use, energy and food production. We should be striving for zero growth in all these areas. Of course, as I suggested at the beginning of this post, our finance-based economy is partly to blame for our omnipresent need to pursue perpetual growth. The reason we’ve become a finance-based economy is because it’s a heck of a lot easier to sit on one’s butt and collect interest from someone else than it is to toil away in the field or the factory. The only way to end the attraction of finance as a means to “earn” a living is to eliminate usury, popularly known as interest. The Bible – the U.S. is a Christian nation, right? – prohibits usury in a couple of dozen different places. It doesn’t stipulate how much interest constitutes usury:

Leviticus, 25:37. Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury: nor exact of him any increase of fruits.

Notice the word “any”? No amount of interest is permissible. A similar prohibition can be found in the Koran as well:

They who swallow down usury, shall arise in the resurrection only as he ariseth whom Satan hath infected by his touch. … O believers! fear God and abandon your remaining usury, if ye are indeed believers.

Perhaps the authors of these ancient, revered books wisely understood that usury leads societies down the path of ruin. I’ll close with this delightful chart showing the inflation rate in Zimbabwe over the last few years. Let it serve as a warning of what happens to a society that pursues unlimited growth.

Zimbabwe Inflation Rate, 2005-2008 [5]

References

1. U.S. Department of Commerce. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

2. U.S. Census Bureau.

3. University of Wisconsin, Madison; Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment.

4. Wikipedia: Earth; Area of Earth’s Land Surface.

5. I informally collected these numbers myself by doing a search for “Zimbabwe inflation rate” and recording the date and estimated inflation rate from each of the eight articles I examined.

Update – October 4, 2008

After writing this post I ran across a marvelous paper from 1974 by the esteemed geologist, Dr. M. King Hubbert, titled M. King Hubbert on the Nature of Growth (PDF version). While Dr. Hubbert is best known for his peak oil theory, this paper discusses exponential growth in general, making it a nice addition to this post. I did not cite energy production in my post as an example of exponential growth even though intuitively it ought to be. But as Dr. Hubbert persuasively shows, energy production is most definitely an example of exponential growth, at least during limited time intervals.

A couple of points in Dr. Hubbert’s paper that stand out are:

1) Human population growth, which was more or less zero (“steady state” in Hubbert’s terminology) until the discovery of fossil fuels, has since grown at an exponential rate that parallels the exponential growth in the production of fossil fuels.

2) By the year 2032 we will have consumed 90% (the first 10% plus the middle 80%) of the Earth’s entire estimated oil reserves.

Combining these two points yields a frightening future for us humans. Dr. Hubbert stated in this paper that the heyday of oil production is the period between 1968 and 2032, with the peak of oil production occurring in the year 2000 (remember, this paper was written in 1974). According to recent estimates by other geologists, the peak of oil production occurred around the year 2005, so Hubbert’s prediction was very close, just as was his prediction about the peak of U.S. oil production. The bottom line is that we are smack in the middle of the 80% area that Hubbert talks about, and according to him there are no easy alternatives to energy from oil. So what happens to the human population when 90% of the oil is gone? Human population growth has paralleled energy production on the way up. It stands to reason that human population growth will parallel energy production on the way down as well.

I’ll conclude with this quote from Dr. Hubbert’s paper:

Without further elaboration, It is demonstrable that the exponential phase of the industrial growth which has dominated human activities during the last couple of centuries is drawing to a close. …

Yet, during the last two centuries of unbroken industrial growth we have evolved what amounts to an exponential-growth culture. Our institutions, our legal system, our financial system, and our most cherished folkways and beliefs are all based upon the premise of continuing growth. Since physical and biological constraints make it impossible to continue such rates of growth indefinitely, it is inevitable that with the slowing down in the rates of physical growth cultural adjustments must be made.

One example of such a cultural difficulty is afforded by the fundamental difference between the properties of money and those of matter and energy upon which the operation of the physical world depends. Money, being a system of accounting, is, in effect, paper and so is not constrained by the laws within which material and energy systems must operate. In fact money grows exponentially by the rule of compound interest. If M₀ be a national monetary stock at an initial time, and i the mean value of the interest rate, then at a later time t the sum of money M₀ will have grown exponentially to a larger sum M given by the equation

M=M₀e^it. (6)

Wow! If I may pat myself on the back, these quotes succinctly summarize my entire post. There is much more in Dr. Hubbert’s paper. It’s highly readable and I highly recommend reading it.

Update – October 13, 2008

I was talking with a friend about financial derivatives and told him that I thought the explosive growth of derivatives had followed an exponential function. I also said that the explosive use of financial derivatives was due to the omnipresent need to generate more and more returns, thanks to the compounding of interest, which is an exponential function. So I expended some effort to find out if my suspicion about the growth function of financial derivatives was merited. Looking at the graph below, it certainly looks like a classic exponential curve (source: http://www.bis.org/statistics/otcder/dt1920a.csv, http://www.bis.org/statistics/derstats.htm; the final data point for 12/08 was added by me, based on estimates of $1-1.25 quadrillion being thrown around).

Global Derivatives (notional amounts outstanding), 1998-2008

September 25, 2008 – I’m being facetious, of course. A brief philosophical discussion about greed, its pros and cons, and where the deification of greed is taking us.

By Dave Eriqat

Sometime during the 1980s, perhaps beginning in 1980 itself with the dawn of “Mourning in America,” those three words became the mantra for our whole culture, and we’ve been sliding downhill into oblivion ever since. The emerging financial crises are borne of greed, and it is ongoing selfish greed that will prevent their proper resolution, prolonging their painful consequences for our society and economy.

Oddly enough, from the standpoint of genetics, a little greed is good because it increases the probability that one’s genes will be successfully propagated. But like so many things in life, too much greed is detrimental. Like so many things in life, the challenge is to identify the proper balance between too little and too much. Too little greed threatens the survival of the individual, while too much threatens the survival of the group. The latter might not matter much except that we are social creatures for whom the group is as important to our wellbeing as are food and water.

Today, greed is utterly out of control and beyond merely irrational: it’s bordering on pathological insanity. I honestly view people who are consumed with insatiable greed as suffering from mental illness or defective genetic wiring. At some point their quest for boundless wealth ceases to have any rational basis and becomes an end in itself, inevitably causing the person engaged in such a quest to lose all touch with their humanity and reality, not to mention the difference between moral and immoral, legal and illegal. All such considerations take a back seat to obtaining more, more, more.

Need For Balance

Although people have always pursued wealth, it seems that in the past there used to be more balance between the desires of the individual and the needs of society. Between religion, government regulation and societal mores greed was once viewed as repugnant and was, therefore, somewhat restrained. Company owners genuinely cared for their employees and understood that the wellbeing of their employees would ultimately benefit them. Henry Ford, for example, paid his employees well above the standard wage, in part so that they’d be able to buy his automobiles! [7] While some might scoff that his beneficence was self-serving – and he’d be the first to admit that – it was, nevertheless, a win-win arrangement from which the workers genuinely benefited. Such far-sighted philosophy has by now been completely abandoned on the trash heap of corporate history.

What caused us to throw such decent moral values out the window? Was it the two socially and economically tumultuous decades preceding the 1980s that caused people to “give up” on society, turn inward and focus on themselves? Were greedy people, so long restrained by the left-swinging pendulum of social mores, waiting in the wings for an opportunity to come out of the shadows, an opportunity afforded by Reagan’s faux laissez-faire ideology? Was it a gnawing, subconscious awareness of the unsustainability of our way of life that caused people, sensing a threat to their survival, to “go native” and start grabbing all they can?

Contrary to the ethos of greed, I have often fantasized about shedding myself of everything I own and wandering the world completely free, like Caine in the television show, Kung Fu. While I recognize that such a way of life poses challenges, especially in a world which restricts freedom of movement and frowns upon people who do not behave “normally,” and I recognize that it might not be practical once one reaches old age, such an ascetic existence still holds much appeal for me. Nevertheless, being a pragmatic person, I lead a rather conventional lifestyle. “Stuck” as I am in this life, I might as well be comfortable, so I have all the trappings of comfort: a roomy house, nice furniture, a well-equipped kitchen, a large collection of books, music, and movies, plus all the tools I need to maintain the house and yard. For the most part I feel content, just as I did a decade ago. I could use a little more money to ensure my financial security (I’m living a little too close to the hairy edge right now), but I have never felt the need to go on a money-making binge. Past mentors of mine have been utterly frustrated by my apathy toward making money.

Cost Of Greed

In the past, when everyone’s boats were rising because the country was generating genuine wealth, the greed of a few was less of an issue. But in today’s non-wealth-generating, zero-sum economy, one person’s greed is satisfied (and only temporarily) at the expense of others. Ironically, as the nation has become poorer, inequity has increased.

Evidence of this zero-sum redirection of wealth from the many to the few can be seen in how the ratio of executive pay to employee pay has changed over the years. I’ve read (I have no reference) that back in the 1960s the ratio of executive pay to employee pay was around 30:1; by 1980 it was 42:1; by 1990 it was 107:1; by 2000 it was 531:1. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Today the ratio has backed off a bit, but it’s still over 400:1. I seriously doubt that today’s executives are ten times as skilled as yesterday’s, especially looking at all the companies being run into the ground today, their former executives walking away from their smoldering disasters with severance packages in the tens of millions of dollars.

My reason for focusing on the executive-employee pay ratio is not to demonize executives or argue in favor of salary caps for executives, but merely to present evidence that greed has been running rampant since about 1980. This shocking ballooning of elite salaries is not limited to corporate executives, however. Entertainers (including professional athletes) have also enjoyed compensation increases that far outstrip both inflation and the salary gains of the rest of us. The first actor to earn a million dollars for a single film was Elizabeth Taylor, for the film Cleopatra in 1963. [6] Today the going rate for a top actor for a single film is upwards of $20 million. Inflation, even as high as it is, certainly did not elevate the cost of living by twenty times since 1963. Actors on television shows forty years ago earned hundreds to thousands of dollars per episode; today they earn as much as one million dollars per episode! Perhaps the most famous professional athlete ever, Babe Ruth, made $80,000 in 1930. [8] Today his peers easily earn hundreds of times that, again, far outstripping the increase in the cost of living. Meanwhile, their poor fans have to shell out unbelievable sums for tickets to see their games in person.

Moral issues aside, greed is detrimental to the economy. One person can only spend so much, so whatever money they accumulate in excess of what they need is money that won’t find its way into the economy. Most likely, such excess accumulations will end up parked in unproductive “investments,” possibly even outside the country. Consider a person with a $100 million fortune. A person cannot spend such a fortune in several lifetimes unless they squander it, so it will simply be locked up, out of reach of the economy. Alternatively, consider 10,000 people who each had another $10,000. They would spend that money, fuel economic growth and vitality, and ironically, help make the elites who control the economy even wealthier! Yet, unlike the wise Henry Ford, today’s elites are blind to this simple logic. Their focus is on immediate, short-sighted, and ultimately futile satisfaction of their greed.

This new ethos of greed has slowly trickled down from the top of the financial food chain to the masses. With wages declining and inflation ramping up, the means and incentive for the masses to save money the old fashioned way disappeared. Instead, people were forced to look for higher yield “investments” to generate income. Thus, they turned to stocks in the late 1990s, fueling the dot-com bubble, and then housing in the early 2000s, fueling the housing bubble. With no new bubbles to blow, the whole greed-engendered financial facade is now collapsing.

Conclusion

I support prohibitions on fraudulent and criminal behavior that directly harms others, but I don’t think greed falls into that category. Excessive greed has an indirect impact on others, making it difficult to precisely stipulate what constitutes excessive. I think that’s a decision best left to each individual. I think greed is really a moral issue, one that we seem to have forgotten to examine anymore. Believe it or not, I feel sorry for people who are greedy beyond necessity. Instead of forcibly restraining such people, who I regard as mentally ill, I would ask them to ask them to ask themselves, “Do I need all this money?”

References

1. June 15, 1997; Business Week magazine, Executive Pay (http://www.businessweek.com/1997/16/b35231.htm). The average compensation of the top dog was 209 times that of a factory employee, who garnered a tiny 3% raise in 1996.

2. April 19, 1999; Business Week magazine, Special Report: Executive Pay (http://www.businessweek.com/archives/1999/b3625002.arc.htm). This year, the boss earned 419 times the average wage of a blue-collar worker.

3. April 17, 2000; Business Week magazine, Executive Pay (http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_16/b3677014.htm). In 1999, the average CEO earned an astonishing 475 times the average wage of a blue-collar worker.

4. http://www.eridlc.com/onlinetextbook/index.cfm?fuseaction=textbook.chpt20. CEO salary compared to blue-collar worker: 1980: 42 times; 1990: 85 times; 2000: 531 times.

5. Demos (http://www.demos.org/inequality/ByNumbersMay31.pdf).

6. Answers.com (http://www.answers.com/topic/elizabeth-taylor). Taylor was the first actress to earn a million dollars for one film, for 1963’s Cleopatra.

7. Britannica Online Encyclopedia, Henry Ford (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/213223/Henry-Ford). In 1914 the Ford Motor Company announced that it would henceforth pay eligible workers a minimum wage of $5 a day (compared to an average of $2.34 for the industry) and would reduce the work day from nine hours to eight, thereby converting the factory to a three-shift day. Overnight Ford became a worldwide celebrity. People either praised him as a great humanitarian or excoriated him as a mad socialist. Ford said humanitarianism had nothing to do with it. Previously profit had been based on paying wages as low as workers would take and pricing cars as high as the traffic would bear. Ford, on the other hand, stressed low pricing (the Model T cost $950 in 1908 and $290 in 1927) in order to capture the widest possible market and then met the price by volume and efficiency. Ford’s success in making the automobile a basic necessity turned out to be but a prelude to a more widespread revolution. The development of mass-production techniques, which enabled the company eventually to turn out a Model T every 24 seconds; the frequent reductions in the price of the car made possible by economies of scale; and the payment of a living wage that raised workers above subsistence and made them potential customers for, among other things, automobiles—these innovations changed the very structure of society.

8. Wikipedia, Babe Ruth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babe_Ruth). In 1930, which was not a pennant year for the Yankees, Ruth was asked by a reporter what he thought of his yearly salary of $80,000 being more than President Hoover’s $75,000. His response: "I know, but I had a better year than Hoover."

September 15, 2008 – A fresh perspective on future crises that may become more and more frequent. The way things are going in the financial realm these days, serial crises may not be far behind.

By Dave Eriqat

I’m still a little stressed from yesterday’s events. The morning began with gale force winds, the remnants of hurricane Ike as it tore through town, snapping trees like toothpicks. My house shook with every gust and I thought the windows would pop out, but fortunately my house sustained only minor damage.

Tree snapped like a toothpick

While I’ve been planning contingencies for various collapse scenarios for a long time, I’ve never before considered combinations of events, until yesterday. We predictably lost electricity early in the morning. Now, in the past my contingency plans to deal with that might involve driving to the store to buy ice for the refrigerator, driving to a restaurant to eat, driving somewhere to get something. But yesterday a second thing happened: a tree fell over and blocked the only road out! So there I was, no electricity, and trapped!

Way out blocked

During the gale I felt at a loss for what to do. The groaning and shaking of the house were so harrowing that I wanted to get out of the house, but I feared that any minute a window would blow out and I’d have to scramble to board it up. Fortunately, the worst of the wind didn’t last very long – no more than a couple of hours – whereupon I took a walk, eyes tightly squinting shut to keep out the airborne debris flying about, and took some photos of the damage.

Normally when we lose power here – which happens several times a year – it’s restored within a few hours. So I waited a few hours yesterday to see if that pattern would hold. But by afternoon there were still no signs of repairs taking place and I feared that power might be out for a couple of days. So I made a reluctant decision to obtain a gasoline powered electric generator. I figured I could use it to power the refrigerator and save my perishable food, my computer so I could work, and the television so I could at least enjoy a little comfort. The funny thing is that for the last year I’ve been telling myself that I should buy such a generator for just this type of situation. I’ve looked at them more than a dozen times, but always declined to buy one because the likelihood of a prolonged power outage is so low. Of course, when you’re out of power and your refrigerator is warming up, “remote” goes right out the window and no sum of money is too much to pay for electricity. Yesterday, facing the possibility of a prolonged outage, I kicked myself for all the times I had an opportunity to buy one of these generators in advance.

It may seem like I overreacted in deciding to buy one yesterday, but looking at the damage and the power lines crushed under fallen trees, it really looked like it could be as much as a couple of days before power was restored. So, after helping my neighbor (and his dopey dog) saw up the tree blocking the road I went out in search of a generator. What I saw was remarkable and like one of those apocalyptic movies: at every one of the four stores I went to people were streaming out of the store with generators! Probably 90% of the people in the stores that Sunday were there to buy generators. In the parking lot of every store I went to, someone was loading one or more generators into their vehicle. Suddenly the abundant selection and range of prices that were available to me just days earlier when I last looked at generators was absent. People were grabbing whatever they could get their hands on. Frankly, I was surprised that so many people could afford to shell out $400-600 for these things. One guy bought four of them and was loading them into the back of his pickup truck as I entered the store. While I was stuffing the one I bought into the back seat of my little car two people who just pulled into the parking lot asked me if there were any left. It was surreal. I suppose this is a common phenomenon in places where they have such crises all the time, but it was new to me. It just goes to show that the time to prepare for an emergency is before the emergency, not after. I was lucky to find a generator at all. Had I not obtained one at the fourth store I went to, I would have simply bought a bunch of bags of ice and hoped for the best.

Anyway, I got home with my generator and a couple of long power cables and managed to get it set up in the dwindling twilight. I powered it up and was taken aback by how loud it was. I turned it off and felt a bit sheepish about making so much noise. But then I decided that this was an exceptional circumstance and people would just have to tolerate the noise for a few hours. So I powered up the generator again, hooked up the refrigerator and started it cooling down. Then I stringed a 100′ power cable from the generator all the way through the house to the living room and hooked up the television, the DVD player and a solitary lamp, and it was heaven! While the rest of the neighborhood was completely blacked out, save for the bright full moon, I had light and watched a movie while drinking a soothing vodka. I have to say, that’s the way to have a power outage!

I ran the generator for three hours and then went to bed, fully intending to start it up in the morning to make my coffee and run my computer. I was actually a little disappointed that the power came on in the middle of the night, more than 16 hours after it went off, because I wanted to try out my survival plan. Nevertheless, the brand new experience of having a generator was very instructive. I’ve been through many power outages lasting hours – and they always seem to happen at night – and it’s such an empty experience. There’s almost nothing one can do but go to bed. Most of my activities involve electricity, so when there isn’t any I practically cannot do anything I normally do. It’s extremely depressing. I imagine that the longer it persists, the more depressing it is. But what I discovered yesterday is that having a generator, even if it’s run only for a few hours makes life infinitely more tolerable than not having any electricity at all. Had the power outage persisted for several days, my plan was to run the generator from 6-10 AM and from 6-10 PM, during which times I would schedule my activities to take maximum advantage of the available electricity. While producing electricity that way is very expensive ($1.60 per hour), it at least makes life tolerable. With a mere eight hours of electricity per day – or even half that – one can do quite a lot. The rest of the time one can engage in activities that don’t require electricity.

Although I could not really afford to buy that generator and although I only got a few hours use out of it so far, I’m glad I bought it anyway because it was a good learning experience. I learned how much I appreciate electricity when there isn’t any! I learned how much more comfortable life can be if one is able to produce even a few hours of electricity a day during a crisis. And I learned to consider the possibility of multiple crises occurring simultaneously.

What I’d really like to do – and have wanted to do for a long time – is build a low cost solar- or wind-powered electricity generation system. The problem with the systems available is that they are too darned expensive.

While shopping for generators I also saw something else I’ve long been searching for: a low cost wood burning stove, for $150. I’m worried about soaring natural gas prices and gas shortages (gas is just as tenuous an energy source as oil), which would be disastrous in the winter. (Also, even if one has gas, if there is an electricity outage, the central heater won’t work.) So I’ve long thought about distributing three wood burning stoves around my house. I have tons of wood I can burn, especially after mother nature downed all those trees yesterday! Alas, I spent all my money on the generator, though! So I’ll have to wait until I come up with more funds.

Interestingly, I ran across this essay today as I was contemplating writing this post. Written by someone who sounds like he’s had far more experience with quality-of-life-impairing crises, it echoes my thoughts about the preciousness of having electricity.

See also A Preview Of Things To Come.

Update

I just ran across an article that says the governor has declared a state of emergency for Kentucky as a result of hurricane Ike.

September 11, 2008 – The trials and tribulations of battling plants, from the seat of a riding lawnmower.

By Dave Eriqat

There’s a macabre comfort in knowing the manner of one’s death. Mine will not be a peaceful nighttime passing from this world to the next. Nor will it arrive with me and my bicycle being unexpectedly plastered across the front of an old Chrysler, which has traditionally been my expectation (since I dislike Chryslers; I’d much rather be done in by a Ford or Cheby). No, the circumstances of my death will find me screaming in terror like a little girl, one white-knuckled hand wrapped around the steering wheel of my riding lawnmower, the other hand with a death grip on the seat, and one leg frantically stomping on the brake pedal, futilely trying to stop the mower from careening down the hill and into the dense bushes and thorny trees below. My body will (hopefully) be discovered a few days later, impaled against a thorny tree trunk, my face fused in a terrified grimace. All I ask of those who find my body is that my lawnmower keys be buried with me.

I live in what could be called a jungle. And as one living in a jungle might expect, much of my time is spent sealing gaps in the house siding to keep the bugs out, evicting varmints from the walls, roof and basement of the house and waging constant war against the relentlessly encroaching plants. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in one of those science fiction movies in which some alien life form finds its way to Earth and spreads out of control until it envelops everything. The grass grows a foot a week during its peak growing season (I’d sure like to meet the “rocket scientist” who thought grass would make a nice ground cover!); two-foot tall weeds seemingly sprout overnight; eight-foot tall weeds grow in a matter of weeks; vines cover everything and grow at lightening speed; heck, the kudzu grows a foot a day and is creeping across the street even now, the only thing keeping it at bay is the occasional car that runs over it! When I moved into my house portions of the roof were covered with vines that were literally five inches thick and had to be cut with a chainsaw. My least favorite type of battle is one waged against the two-foot tall, juicy weeds. Prior to battling them I dress in long pants, long-sleeved shirt, hat and sunglasses because when I weed whack them poor suckers plant guts fill the air, covering me from head to toe in green juice and plant body parts.

In my “War on Plants” – which I’m winning – I’ve steadily escalated the arms race, building up an arsenal of gasoline-powered weapons: a chainsaw, a hedge trimmer, a push mower, a weed whacker, and finally, last summer, the ultimate weapon, a riding lawnmower. Everybody around here has these – they are almost essential, in lieu of a herd of hungry goats. I was a bit late to the party, resisting purchasing one of these weapons as long as possible. Finally Lowe’s had a 10% off sale and offered free delivery, so I broke down and bought one. That’s when my yard decided to shift its war strategy from a brute force one of man-against-plant to a battle of wits.

My other car is a riding lawnmower

My property doesn’t have one square foot of flat ground on it. Every patch of ground has a bump, a depression or a slant to it. Merely positioning a ladder against the house requires five minutes to level it. So cutting the grass is more like offroading than anything else, except that when one goes offroading they don’t have to hold on for dear life, lest they fall off and come face to face with two high speed blades whirling right underneath their feet! My second time out on the mower I got a little too close to one of the many treacherous slopes around my property. “No problem,” I naively thought, as I popped the mower into reverse and tried to back out of my predicament. To my horror, the lawnmower would not back out; the tires just spun and spun in the ever so slightly moist grass. Now I had a real predicament on my hands: I could not go forward because that would send me deeper down the slope and into the thorny bushes; I could not back out because the tires had no traction; so I tried turning, but it was to no avail. Every little movement inched me further down the slope and into the bushes.

Finally I had a stroke of “genius,” or maybe it was just desperation. I figured the mower weighed about 300 pounds and I weighed over 200, so that put us in roughly the same weight class. I could use brute force to pull that silly mower up the hill to where it could gain some traction. So I put it in gear to hold it in place, turned it off and dismounted. I got a firm grip on the back of the mower and popped it into neutral. Oh, the hubris! This has to be one of the dumbest things I ever sought to do. To this day I wonder, “What was I thinking?” All I can say on my behalf is that I at least had the good sense to let go of the mower when it lurched down the hill and into the bushes. Otherwise it would have dragged me right through the thorny hell with it until it came to rest against a tree trunk. My second act after letting go of the mower was to look around and make sure nobody bore witness to my act of stupidity, which was worthy of one of those video shows on television.

Looking at the dense bushes one would never know that a brand spanking new, bright red riding lawnmower was buried in there. After slicing myself to pieces cutting away a dozen thorny branches to gain access to the mower, I assessed the situation. I briefly considered tying a rope from the mower to my car and hauling it out of the bushes. But after recalling all those funny videos I had seen on television of people doing similar things, and picturing my car sliding down the hill and coming to rest next to the lawnmower, I wisely decided (where was this wisdom when I grabbed onto the back of the darn thing?) not to involve any more vehicles in this mess.

So I returned to the scene of my initial crime – Lowe’s – and bought a hand winch and a long rope. I attached the rope to a tree, a thorny one just like the one the mower was resting against, attached the winch to the rope and then the mower, tightened everything up and winched the mower about five feet up the slope. After repeating the sequence of untying the rope, attaching it to a new anchor, tightening everything up, and moving the mower five more feet (the winch only has about five feet of cable), about ten times, which took at least an hour, the entire duration of which I was enjoyed by the mosquitos as some kind of bipedal smörgåsbord, my beautiful new mower was finally on level enough ground for the tires to gain some traction. For the better part of a year, having learned a good lesson, I used the mower without further incident, although to this day one of the front tires has a slow leak, undoubtedly from its youthful encounter with a thorny tree trunk.

Unfortunately I became complacent, and a couple of months ago I was happily mowing along and carelessly cruised over an old tree stump. Well, the tires were slightly deflated and the mower was riding a bit lower than usual, and well, you can probably guess the rest.

Walnut tree stump, still valiantly trying to grow back two years after being cut down, poor thing

The mower came to an abrupt stop, blade, engine, everything. The engine restarted just fine, but the blades made a terrible grinding sound, as if one of the blades was bent. So I parked the mower in the garage for several weeks and went back to the old school, punishing routine of cutting the grass with the push mower.

Over the next few weeks I hemmed and hawed about whether to sell the darn mower or fix it. One day I impulsively stopped by a lawnmower repair shop in a nearby town and talked to the owner about fixing my mower. While I was there I saw another mower, well, actually it was more like half a mower with just one rear wheel. The lawnmower repair guy informed me that the discombobulated mower had unfortunately fallen off a trailer onto the highway, presumably at highway speed! (That’s exactly why you should forgo that last beer after finishing cutting the grass for the day: you’re liable to forget to put the tailgate up on the trailer!) Admiring the totally butch tire on the one remaining wheel of that poor mower, I asked the lawnmower guy if he could put that tire on my mower. He said the fubar mower was being parted out and that he could put its tires on mine. I didn’t see the other wheel, but I assumed the lawnmower guy understood I wanted two tires, not just the one! A few days later the lawnmower guy came and picked up my mower, replaced the bent blades, put the two new tractor-type tires on it, and returned it to me. I was really awed by his unusual promptness because so many people around here are so lackadaisical about getting things done.

Lawnmower with new tires, compared to original one

The tree stump incident was actually fortuitous because I also got my long dreamed of tractor tires out of the deal. So with my upgraded weapon system, I was finally ready to tackle the front slope which had bedeviled me for years. Prior to today I had to pay a guy who has a monster of a mower $45 a visit to cut the front slope. Now, with my new tires, I can do it myself, although that exposes me to the life-threatening peril which is the subject of this piece.

Looking up the slope, tiny lawnmower in the middle

Slope from the side, showing the angle; the thorny trees where the mower got stuck the first time appear straight ahead

The front slope, a mere third of the grass I have to cut, is a wicked challenge. The reason it looks so brown is that until just recently I was unable to cut it, so it had become covered with weeds literally seven feet high. The brown you see is chopped up, drying weeds! The photos don’t do the steepness of the slope justice either. Cutting it with the riding mower is a cross between offroading and sailing. When “tacking,” one has to shift their weight to the uphill side to avoid tipping over. I generally steer with one hand and hold onto the seat with the other to keep from falling out (I ought to install a seatbelt). When turning downhill, one had better be real handy with the brake pedal. The last thing you want is to pick up any sort of momentum because the brake is woefully inadequate to stop the speeding lawnmower. I know this because several times I’ve come close to losing control and plunging straight down the hill. It was only gentle application of the brake, combined with judicious turning toward the trees, praying the whole time that I wouldn’t tip over and would stop before hitting the trees, that saved me! But time is not on my side. Someday I’ll slip up and that will be all she wrote. I’ve ridden on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland, and let me tell you, it’s nothing compared to this for sheer, hair-raising terror!

After cutting the slope this afternoon I had a rewarding encounter with a cute little toad. It reluctantly let me pick it up (as in, it was fleeing for its life) and it sat calmly in my hand. I actually had to nudge it off my hand and into the shady bushes.

September 10, 2008 – The U.S. used to be a safe harbor of stability. But the “legs” that supported that stability have been systematically cut off. Where will it all lead?

By Dave Eriqat

It seems like the people running our government and commercial apparatus are systematically and deliberately cutting the stabilizing legs off the stool we call our economy. It’s as if they are completely unaware of the inevitable consequences of their actions, which is total economic and societal collapse. Do they think they will survive such an eventuality unscathed? Do they think they will swoop in and buy all our distressed houses, lands, businesses and cars at bargain prices? Do they really want to be a part of a nation that’s reduced to third world conditions of abject poverty? Are they thinking ahead or focused on short term gratification of their insatiable greed?

For decades housing in America was a bedrock of stability, providing people with the security of a roof over their heads and a store of savings that could be passed on to their progeny. Long term residence in one house also contributed to a stable community. Thanks to encouragement and facilitation by the people running things, housing morphed from a place to live into a transient, can’t-fail “investment,” in just a few years transforming itself from a beacon of security into a ball-and-chain of debt servitude. I read recently that 9% of the nation’s mortgages are troubled! Think about that: one in eleven Americans with a mortgage is having trouble paying for their house.

U.S. Treasury bonds, which used to be “good as gold,” are being debased right and left, not even factoring in their declining value because of dollar devaluation. Today the Federal Reserve is trading treasury bonds for banks’ worthless mortgage-backed securities, tainting treasury bonds by association. The U.S. Treasury itself is now bailing out Fannie and Freddie, which I think can only harm the value of treasury bonds. Bailing out numerous more banks is a given. But then what, the automobile manufacturers and airlines? Where does it stop?

Its current irrational bounce notwithstanding, the U.S. dollar, which was once internationally accepted as “good as gold,” has been sliding downward into oblivion for years. Everything denominated in dollars has thus been covertly falling in value as well, including stocks, treasury bonds and bank accounts. Prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve a dollar retained the same value for decades. Like stocks or treasury bonds, one could dependably hold dollars as a stable store of wealth. That’s no longer true today and one is better off to spend their dollars on “real things” as soon as possible. Keeping dollars in a bank is to watch them lose 10% of their value every year. Since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, 95 years ago, the dollar has lost 95% of its value, according to many experts.

The stock market, once a relatively safe and stable place to park one’s money for long periods of time, has become a treacherous sea full of hungry sharks, some of whom have the power to manipulate the markets to their advantage. Even consummate stock market enthusiast, Jim Cramer, recently implied that people should pull their money out of the stock market because it’s become too treacherous and rigged.

Precious metals, the age-old safe haven for parking one’s wealth, have perhaps been irreparably harmed by overly aggressive manipulation, which has produced some bizarre and unprecedented consequences. For example, relative to soaring demand there is a clear global shortage of physical gold and silver, yet their prices are plummeting. Furthermore, there are now several prices for these precious metals: the “paper” price, the physical dealer price and the “eBay” price. The normal price discovery mechanism of the precious metals market is broken and it’s nearly impossible to determine what the prices ought to be. Perhaps that was the goal of the recent crescendo of manipulation: to break the back of these markets and send everyone scurrying in a panic back to fiat currencies. Although many refute the notion that precious metals prices are being manipulated, attributing the sharply declining prices to “normal” market activity, I disagree. For one thing, the primary driver of the prices is the so-called “paper” futures market. Unlike other futures markets, where the buyers genuinely intend to take delivery, almost nobody buying futures contracts for precious metals intends to take delivery; and almost nobody selling futures contracts intends to deliver any metal. These markets are knowingly trading little scraps of paper that ostensibly represent physical metal, but all the parties involved know that no metal will ever change hands. Moreover, more metal is being sold via these contracts than can likely be delivered. So the futures market for precious metals is fundamentally fraudulent and therefore “manipulative,” even if manipulation is not the primary intent of some of the participants. Another interesting consequence that may arise from this bizarre disconnect between the value of precious metals and their prices is that mining companies will not be able to make a profit at current prices. That means they will go out of business. That means that the new supply of precious metals will dry up, exacerbating the price/value disconnect. It remains to be seen if mining companies really do start going belly up.

Other major sources of stability in America were its vast industrial base, which provided good jobs and generated real wealth; and its vast agricultural base, which provided meaningful employment and a resilient supply of food. Today our industrial base has been largely exported to other nations and our agricultural system is concentrated in the hands of a few giant corporations instead of distributed amongst millions of family farmers. If all else failed, at least these former family farmers could put food on the table. Today they must work – typically for some corporation – to earn money to buy food, which is sold in grocery stores and often imported from other countries.

While I’m not a fan of regulation, in an economic system like that in the U.S., which is one of government-protected monopolies rather than a free market, government regulation is the only thing that can keep companies “honest.” There is no genuine free market to perform that role. The strong regulatory tradition in the U.S., up until about 1980, was a genuine stabilizing force. It prevented drug companies from unleashing unsafe drugs on an ignorant populace; it prevented banks from engaging in risky investments, using depositors’ money; it prevented people from getting in over their heads in a house purchase; it protected consumers from predatory corporations. Today, while most of the regulations remain in place, the important Glass-Steagall act being a notable exception, the regulations are simply not enforced. I don’t know why the FDA, EPA, SEC, FTC and CFTC even exist anymore because they don’t regulate anything; today they act more like industry lobbyists. Consequently corporations have pretty much been allowed to run amok in this country, abusing their financial power and implicit government backing to cheat people, bully them, prey on them and generally leave them feeling bewildered every time they turn around.

Until recently there was a far more equitable and stabilizing distribution of wealth in this country. Today something like 1% of the population owns 50% of the nation’s wealth. And whereas forty years ago a corporate executive might have earned thirty times the salary of the average employee, today it’s like five hundred times! There are people today who earn a salary of $1,000,000,000 ($1 billion) or more per year!

One by one, the legs of our once stable political and economic system have been sawn off. As I gaze over the ravaged landscape from a bird’s eye perspective, what I see is increasing volatility and instability in both the political and economic realms. Witness the increasingly volatile moves in the financial markets. Or consider the extreme intolerance exhibited by the “authorities” at the recent political conventions, or their fervent predilection to employ tasers to deal with the slightest recalcitrance or lack of respect. One observation worth noting is that over the last three decades we’ve seen only degradations to our political and economic system, no improvements of any kind. I guess that depends on your perspective, though. If you are among the 1% at the top of the pyramid, then I guess you’ve seen only improvements; if you’re among the bottom 99% you’ve seen only degradations.

While I marvel at the acumen with which the powers-that-be have managed to maintain the illusion of normalcy and prosperity, even as they systematically amputate the system’s stabilizing legs, I can’t help but wonder how much longer they can hold the system together. Nor can I help but wonder how it will all end and where it will leave us.

Update

I just ran across this humorous piece, which couldn’t be more timely.

September 9, 2008 – There’s no need to remain under the thumb of mighty corporations in order to use your computer. There’s a whole alternative universe of high quality, free software out there.

By Dave Eriqat

Any of you having read my posts on this blog are probably aware that “freedom” is my mantra. While it would be nice if someone could give us freedom on a platter without our having to extricate our posterior from its comfortable depression in the couch, real life doesn’t work that way. Finding true freedom in a world that’s controlled by powerful interests who do not want you to be free is quite difficult. For example, I just read yet another article about the U.S. financial crisis, which reinforced my belief that the so-called bailout of Fannie and Freddie will, among other things, result in increasing debt servitude for the people. The people at the top of the political and economic food chain don’t want us to be free; they want us to be blithely spinning our hamster wheels, making them richer.

So one has to seek out freedom whenever and wherever one can find it. One such area is computer software. Although people are accustomed to using a particular product, such as MW (list of abbreviations at bottom), and breathlessly await the next version, there is, in fact, a whole alternative universe of “open source” software out there, software that is often better than its counterparts in the for-profit parallel universe.

Open Source Philosophy

Many people will find open source software appealing simply because of its low cost: free. Fifteen to twenty years ago I used to routinely pay $500 or more (that would be like $1,000 today) for each piece of software I used! I would pay $700 for the cheapest version of Unix I could find, which came on 70 5¼" floppy disks that had to be inserted into the computer one by one! Installing the operating system was a several hour long, hands-on affair. I used to pay $500 for desktop publishing software, $500 for a C++ compiler, $500 for an office suite, plus hundreds more for lesser pieces of software, and these expenditures were more or less annual because the software was updated about once a year.

Today I get the equivalent of all that above and much more for free. But there’s more to open source software than just its low cost. I view open source software as a microcosm of the ideal model for society, one based on voluntary, cooperative networks of like-minded people, freedom of choice, egalitarian participation and the free sharing of ideas.

Quality of Open Source Versus For-Profit Software

People may assume that “you get what you pay for,” that free software cannot be as good as software that you pay a bundle for. Nothing could be further from the truth! In many cases open source software is every bit as good as for-profit software, and often better. Consider the Firefox web browser. Many of you reading this post are doing so with Firefox running on MW. That’s open source software, which you are using because you evidently feel it’s superior to MI. Over the years I’ve found that computers that are too old and “obsolete” to run MW will run Linux very well, and in general I find that Linux “feels” faster and more robust than MW.

Open source software is often quite good because it’s the product of passionate people who take a personal interest in the project. They are motivated, not by profit, but by an appreciation for good quality software. Open source software does tend to appear somewhat spartan compared to for-profit software, but that’s because the authors of open source software are usually focused on solving a particular problem, not creating a product with marketing appeal. Personally, I much prefer software that works well to software that looks snazzy, especially when such flourishes add little to the functionality of the software. I like my software like my women: lean, robust and spirited.

Open source software also offers better security than for-profit software. Probably 90% of viruses and malware target MW and its applications because they have a bigger market share than Linux and its applications. But in addition, source code is available for almost all open source applications, which permits the open source “community” to freely examine the code and ensure that it’s free of malicious code. By comparison we still don’t know what “NSAKEY,” which lurks within MW, refers to because the source is not available for us to examine (it probably means exactly what we think it means). Sophisticated users can even download the source code and compile applications themselves if that gives them an extra feeling of security.

Open source software offers more frequent upgrades than for-profit software, mainly because no elaborate marketing effort has to be orchestrated for each release. Updates are available nearly as soon as programmers make changes to the code. The frequency of upgrades is a blessing and a curse, although one is not obliged to download every new version.

Now, there are some drawbacks to open source software. Actually, they’re not really drawbacks, just differences. Linux and its applications evolved from the Unix philosophy of multiple, specialized programs. This was feasible in Unix – although not in its contemporary competing operating systems – because Unix was designed from the get-go as a multiuser, multitasking operating system. Thus, things that are often integrated in popular operating systems, such as MW, are separate in Linux. This segregation has advantages and disadvantages, but I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Usually this segregation creates no more of a burden than having to run two programs where you might otherwise have to run one. For instance, a popular music player from AP also rips music CDs. By comparison, I use Grip to rip CDs and Amarok to play the resulting MP3 files. It’s really not a big deal that two programs are involved in the process. Even Grip is not a self-contained application, as it uses another program, Lame, to do the actual encoding to MP3 format. This high degree of modularization is common in Linux, and while it slightly increases complexity, it’s also more flexible. For example, Lame can also be used from the command line or by other applications.

There is, in fact, a “cost” associated with using open source software: having to do your own support for the most part. But that’s often the case even with software you’ve paid for. I’ve heard countless tales of frustration from people who spent hours calling this telephone number and that, wading through phone trees and trying to understand foreign accents, in order to obtain support for some software they purchased. Open source software has problems too, just like its for-profit cousins. With open source software one must take the initiative and track down solutions for oneself, by searching the Internet, leaving pleas for assistance in myriad online forums, and sometimes downloading the source code and compiling it. Personally, I find it less exasperating to take matters into my own hands than to depend on some foreign neophyte for assistance.

Specifics: Switching From MW to Linux

Is Linux suitable for everyone? That’s a tough question. It has much to do with how intrepid you are! It also depends on how you use your computer. If you have a lot of specialized software that you depend on, Linux alternatives may not be available. If you have a lot of hardware doodads attached to your computer, Linux device drivers may not be available for them. However, in both these cases assiduously searching the Internet may yield solutions. MW-based computer games will definitely not work on Linux. Personally, I find playing games on the computer a dreadful experience anyway, and only play games on machines designed to play games.

When switching from MW to Linux, one needs to maintain an open mind and accept that Linux is not going to be as uniform a platform as MW. The downside of this lack of uniformity is that there’s a learning curve associated with each new application. Speaking for myself, however, I only use about ten applications on a regular basis and am quite familiar with them all, so the learning curve may not as high a hurdle as it might seem. On the plus side, the non-uniformity of Linux applications challenges one’s adaptability, offers variety and lets one appreciate that everything need not be the same to be worthwhile. (That’s sort of a paradigm for freedom itself.)

These conceptual challenges aside, Linux today is a user-friendly, fully graphical operating system. Were one to glance at the screen of a computer running Linux, one might easily mistake it for MW, as shown below.

Linux graphical user interface

Most people who are capable of installing MW on their computer can successfully install Linux as well. Anyone contemplating such a switch, who is unfamiliar with Linux, should first read an introductory book about Linux to become familiar with the fundamental differences between it and MW. If a book exists that specifically addresses switching from MW to Linux, then by all means, read that!

When you are ready to switch, archive all your personal files (you have them well organized on your hard disk, right?) onto CD or a USB memory device or an external hard disk drive. You can’t have too many copies of your files, so don’t be stingy. Then install Linux and reinstall your personal files from the archive media.

One question you might face is whether to set up a dual-boot computer that can boot either MW or Linux. This is a bit tricky and unless you absolutely need this capability my advice is to cut the cord and make the switch for good. To set up a dual-boot machine you will need to partition the hard disk into at least two partitions. Then install MW on one of the partitions. Then install Linux. Doing the installations in this order will ensure the highest likelihood of success. If I lost you at the word “partition,” then this is definitely too tricky for you.

Other potentially tricky issues involve broadband Internet access and wireless networking. Most cable and DSL modems do not require special software on the computer (such software is always for MW and won’t work on Linux anyway) and can be configured using any web browser. You just need to know the IP address of the modem and then type it into the web browser, as shown below.

Configuring modem with web browser

Once you get into the modem’s configuration page, you have full control over it without any special software on your computer. If you don’t know what the IP address of the modem is, try configuring the computer’s network interface to use the DHCP protocol. Then, hopefully, the modem will assign the computer an IP address. In Linux, the command “/sbin/ifconfig” will tell you what IP address has been assigned to the computer (on my machine this appears as “inet addr:192.168.1.65”). Try changing the rightmost digits after the last decimal point to a “1” or “254” and typing the resultant entire IP address into the web browser. If that fails to get you into the modem’s configuration page, then you will need to research what is its IP address (try the modem’s user manual!). Naturally, it would be a good idea to try and ascertain this information before you make any changes to your computer!

Configuring wireless networking is considerably more tricky on Linux. I’ve been told that some versions of Linux, such as Ubuntu, simplify this task, but on openSUSE at least, it’s a challenge. However, most desktop computers use wired, not wireless, networking, so this challenge is largely confined to laptops.

Linux also has a tool for dialing conventional analog modems.

Open Source Software I Highly Recommend

openSUSE – I’ve been using this version of Linux for years and it has enjoyed steady improvement. When it was acquired a few years ago by NV I feared the worst. But so far the anti-Midas touch of NV has not ruined openSUSE. This version of Linux comes with so many programs there’s almost certainly a tool for everyone’s needs; I’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s available in the complete installation. openSUSE comes with most of the programs listed below already installed and ready to use. In addition, just the Konqueror program that is built into KDE (the graphical user interface) is awesome. The thing can do everything under the sun, from browsing web sites, to displaying PDF files, to displaying image files, to navigating directory trees and within archive files, and probably much more that I’m unaware of.

OpenOffice – I’ve been using this outstanding office suite for about a decade, since it was called StarOffice. It includes a word processor, HTML editor, spreadsheet, diagramming tool, slide presentation editor, and more. I use it to manage my checking account, prepare my income taxes, prepare invoices, write blog posts and design holiday greeting cards, among other things. It’s available for multiple operating systems and the documents it creates are portable across different operating systems. It can also read and write documents created by MO.

Java – Java is both an “operating system” and a programming language that supports multiple operating system platforms. Compiled Java programs really do live up to the promise of working identically on multiple platforms. Java has come full circle, starting out as a small language for embedded systems (we used it for embedded system development at Sun back in the year 2000), migrating to web browsers in the form of powerful applets, maturing into a full-blown desktop application development language, and now being used in embedded systems again! This successful migration through different uses demonstrates its versatility. People wishing to do software development in Java may wish to visit this more programmer-oriented site.

jEdit – An outstanding, highly extensible Java-based text editor that runs on any operating system platform that can host Java. I recommend the BufferTabs and TextTools plugins, and for programmers I recommend the JDiff, Code2HTML, Character Map, and Hex Edit plugins, but there are many more plugins than these, and you can even write your own. Interestingly, I started using jEdit because I got fed up with a longstanding bug in VC that occasionally pasted multiple pieces of text into my source code, so I searched for and found this alternative editor.

GIMP – No, it’s not some kind of slur; it stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. I don’t know how it compares to expensive programs like PS since I’ve never used PS. However GIMP compares most favorably with other for-profit image manipulation tools I’ve paid hundreds of dollars for in the past. It’s available for multiple operating systems.

Firefox – An outgrowth of Netscape Navigator, Firefox is a nice web browser that introduced a feature I love: tabbed browsing. It’s available for multiple operating systems.

Thunderbird – Another outgrowth of Netscape Navigator, Thunderbird is a simple and competent e-mail client. It’s available for multiple operating systems.

VLC – A media player that plays video and audio. Can also convert files from one video format to another. It’s available for multiple operating systems.

MPlayer – A media player that plays video and audio. I’m not very familiar with this program, but I use it often and like it.

SMPlayer – “A complete front-end for MPlayer.” In keeping with the modular nature of Linux, SMPlayer is merely a graphical user interface for MPlayer, which does the grunt work. While you can use MPlayer in standalone fashion, it’s a lot easier to use with SMPlayer.

Amarok – An audio player. I hate to be critical, but this program has fallen out of favor with me because it’s become somewhat erratic. This morning, for example, I was listening to some music. When the music ended I added some more music to the playlist and tried to play it, and Amarok started telling me something like, “Could not connect to stream,” whatever that means. One minute it was playing just fine, the next it would not play. That recent flakiness is why I’ve started using MPlayer.

Grip – An excellent music CD ripper (also plays music CDs) and MP3 encoder (using Lame or another encoder).

Apache web server – An excellent web server, also useful for testing web sites and CGI programs on a local machine before uploading to the Internet.

Abbreviations

I use these abbreviations for well known companies and products, mainly because I feel the urge to gag when uttering their full names.

AP – Greedy, ruthless corporation that hides behind a friendly facade.

MI – Web browser from MS.

MO – Office suite from MS.

MS – Ruthless boss of the software dark side. Ironically, I used to love this company, but then its business practices turned me against it.

MW – Graphical operating system from MS.

NV – Utah-based, erstwhile competitor of MS in network operating systems, possessing a tragic anti-Midas touch.

PS – Popular and expensive program for image manipulation and graphic artistry.

VC – Software development environment from MS.

September 4, 2008 – A long-winded, no holds barred discussion of the philosophy of freedom and non-violence, versus the “progressive” agenda of nationalized health care, delivered from the barrel of a gun.* Beware, this will probably outrage most readers, left and right both!

By Dave Eriqat

Well, I’ve had yet another instructive encounter with so-called “progressives.” The word “progressive,” as it’s usually employed today, is just a politically safe replacement for the word “liberal,” which has become a dirty word of late. So I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that most “progressives” are really nothing but far left liberal types who shun personal responsibility and seek to be taken care of by the government at the expense of others, it doesn’t really matter who, although they usually propose taxing the ambiguous “rich” to pay for their care. Their attitude seems to be, if the loss of our freedom is the price we must pay so that people can be taken care of by the government, then so be it. Not surprisingly, this is the same attitude harbored by authoritarians of the right: if the loss of freedom is the price we must pay to be safe from terrorists, then so be it. As I observed in What Is Progress?, so-called progressives are simply authoritarians of the left, perfectly happy to use the oppressive power of government to achieve their goals, one of which is nationalized health care, which I’m going to discuss below.

It doesn’t seem to matter to “progressives” whether such government-disbursed largesse is backed by sound fiscal policies. These people seem to believe that, like the tooth fairy, the government can magically manufacture as much money as needed to pay for whatever entitlements the “progressives” demand. So far, in fact, that has been the case, but it obviously cannot continue forever.

Before I dive into the nationalized health care morass, take a look at this clipping from the front page of a “progressive” web site on September 1, 2008, which reveals the ambivalence of progressives toward government.

The first article is about Obama and his national health care plan. In the comment section of that article I got into a vigorous debate with people about the merits of such health care schemes and proposed an extremely sensible alternative, which addressed the root problem of high health care costs rather than the symptom of inability to pay those high costs. The second article vehemently condemned the preemptive police raids on the homes of would-be protesters in Denver, and the commenters universally agreed that such totalitarian-style raids are abhorrent.

So in the second article these people are condemning the government’s encroachment on our civil liberties, but in the first they are lauding the notion of the government managing our health care system! Over the years this particular web site has hosted many, many articles critical of the government’s behavior both domestically and internationally. On September 2, 2008 alone, the first ten headlines on this web site were implicitly critical of the government for one thing or another, and yet these people are willing to let the government manage health care?

In contrast, my comments condemning the government’s disrespect for our civil liberties and rejecting the notion of government control over our health care system both emanated from my unwavering commitment to freedom. Bear with me. This post is ultimately about freedom, but it might take me a while to get there. In fact, this is liable to be a long post, so if you intend reading the whole thing, I suggest you get comfortable.

In the last couple of years I’ve been called a far left extremist for opposing war against Iran, and described as “from the far-loony libertarian right” for my opposition to nationalized health care! Obviously I cannot be simultaneously on the far left and far right, so these people are clearly confused. What they really mean is that my beliefs are 180 degrees opposite theirs, and in that respect they are correct. Our views are diametrically opposed because people on the far right and people on the far left are actually unwitting dizygotic twins who live in the house called “Authoritarianism.” I, on the other hand, live on the opposite side of the street in the house called “Anarchy,” which is the epitome of freedom and the antipode of authoritarianism. My view of the political spectrum is succinctly depicted in the diagram below, which I’m regurgitating from another post because I’m so darned proud of it.

What “progressives” evidently cannot understand is that forcing people to pay for and participate in a system, such as nationalized health care, despite it being “for our own good,” is no less tyrannical than forcing people to pay taxes to have their front doors busted in by the police.

Strip Mall Health Care™

As I see it, the problem with health care in America is the cost, not the lack of “insurance” to pay for it. I remember when I was a child, if we went to the doctor my lower middle class parents paid for the visit out of their own pockets. The government didn’t pick up the tab. Nor did a “health insurance” company. The costs were reasonable and affordable, and the doctors were kind and spent as much time with their patients as needed. There was no bean counter lording over them, pressuring them to see as many patients in a day as possible. If this model was possible once, it can be again.

People did have health insurance back then, but it was for catastrophic medical problems that were unlikely to occur. Hence, the premiums were affordable, because that’s the way insurance is supposed to work. True insurance pools the risk of an unlikely event; since it’s unlikely and there are many policyholders, premiums are low. Modern health insurance, however, isn’t really insurance at all, but rather a health care access fee, so at the very least the term “health insurance” today is a misnomer.

The single biggest problem with involving government or health insurance companies in health care is that they are effectively middlemen between the patients and the doctors. Thus, patients have little incentive to look around for reasonably priced health care, like they do for automobile repair services, because they aren’t paying the full bill. And doctors and hospitals have little incentive to offer competitively priced services, because they know that the patients aren’t paying much of the bill, but rather, some health insurance company or the government is. I know some will point to other countries and insist that their government-run health care systems work just great. The flaw I described above pertains to the United States, in which health care is sold like any other market-based good or service, but paid for using socialist schemes such as government funding and health insurance. The two are incompatible and will obviously result in ever higher costs, because in a system that employs the two approaches the market mechanism is effectively broken. A hybrid of those two approaches is neither purely market-based nor purely socialist, it’s the worst of both approaches, combining the lack of freedom and oppressive taxation of socialism with the natural profit-seeking of capitalism, unrestrained by competition!

I’ve never had health insurance to cover routine services and never want it. I’ve been content to look around for the most reasonably priced services and pay for them out of my own pocket. And if I ever do have a catastrophic medical need, such as for a heart bypass operation, I’ll happily travel to India, Thailand or even Mexico to obtain such services at a far more reasonable cost. (I’ve long wondered how long it will be until hospitals in this country start outsourcing such medical care. For example, let’s say a patient enters a hospital in need of a heart bypass operation. It might be cheaper for the hospital to put that patient on a plane and send them to India for the operation than to pay an American doctor and deal with the American liability system. Many details would have to be worked out before such outsourcing could become practical, but as health care costs continue to rise so will the pressure to work out such details.) Most of the time when I’ve seen a doctor or a dentist and informed them that I don’t have insurance and am paying out of pocket, they have given me a substantial discount. That right there ought to be an indication of how much “health insurance” interferes with the proper functioning of the health care market. Again, the market-based approach is how health care is sold in the U.S., so at the very least it ought to function efficiently.

It should also be obvious that adding more people to the health care system, working for health insurance companies and government bureaucracies, would increase costs. If nothing else, their salaries have to be paid – in addition to the salaries of the hands-on medical practitioners – but in the case of for-profit health insurance companies, shareholders expect profits and executives expect fat bonuses as well. And these extra people contribute nothing to the direct care of the patients! It’s arguable that they add nothing whatsoever to the equation. After all, as I already said, health care worked just fine when I was a kid and we dealt directly with doctors and their nurses and secretaries. What have all these extra people contributed to the system we have today?

My plan for solving the health care affordability problem in America is what I call Strip Mall Health Care™. It consists of a distributed network of specialized medical services operating literally out of inexpensive strip malls. Imagine visiting a strip mall and seeing, next to the automobile parts store, a clinic specializing in prenatal care. (Something for the men and the women in one convenient location!) Perhaps a few doors down is another clinic specializing in preventive health care and alternative medicine. Because of their low overhead and competition with numerous other such clinics, the costs would be substantially lower than they are now. There’s another advantage to distributing health care this way, as opposed to centralizing it in huge hospitals: it’s a more resilient system. Should a storm or power outage or some other calamity knock out a portion of the network of clinics, in all likelihood at least some of them will continue to function. By comparison, how long can a big hospital operate on a backup generator in the event of an extended power outage? In addition, should one of these small clinics become infested with a super-germ like MRSA, it can be easily shut down and relocated. The same cannot be said of a huge hospital.

Innovation is another expected outgrowth of such a distributed, competitive system. More minds, more environments, more diversity yield more innovation. Look at health care services that aren’t typically covered by “insurance.” Lasik eye surgery has plummeted in price, while becoming better and more widely available. Laser hair removal, liposuction and plastic surgery have also become cheaper and more accessible. What’s more, these services can, in fact, be found in strip malls today!

Nevertheless, my serious, pragmatic solution was met with utter disbelief and actually dismissed as satire by the “progressives” on this web site:

The idea of shopping – in a mall yet, for the best, cheapest bargain life and death issues sure sounds like satire to me.

Gee, is it any wonder that health care costs keep climbing? People are unwilling to even entertain the notion of looking for lower cost care! This comment confirms what I asserted above, that patients have no incentive to look for competitively priced health care. I’ll tell you what constitutes satire: puerilely proposing that the government add yet another unfunded entitlement to the list of already insolvent entitlements known as Social Security and Medicare, against a backdrop of a government running an admitted half-trillion dollar annual deficit and a nation running a three-quarter trillion dollar annual trade deficit. What fairytale land do proponents of such drivel live in?

My solution was further ridiculed as “impractical for families,” as if it’s OK for a single person to search for low cost health care, but not OK to do so on behalf of several people. My own mother used to drag four children to the free clinic, and it didn’t seem terribly impractical for her. Inconvenient, yes, but not impractical. I was also criticized for being “selfishly self involved,” even though my solution would benefit everybody, and as I stated in my comments, make health care as affordable as groceries. I was called “arrogant” for suggesting that people seek out low cost health care services and pay for them with cash, something I have done my entire life! How can it be arrogant to ask people to do nothing more than what I do myself? You’d think I had said, “Let them eat cake”! I understand that some medical treatments may be too expensive (they don’t have to be) for people to pay for, but isn’t it more responsible to pay for our health care ourselves whenever we are able than to depend on someone else to foot the bill? Wouldn’t seeking out low cost health care let everybody participate directly in lowering health care costs? This is something that people can do without waiting for a government “solution.”

What these vitriolic comments reveal is a “gimme” mentality, especially among baby boomers who have enjoyed a comfortable and coddled existence. They want convenient cradle-to-grave care from the government: subsidized housing and transportation, low-cost education and gold-plated health care, the consequences be damned, as long as the costs are dumped on somebody else. Is it any great surprise, now that the baby boomers are facing retirement and more frequent health issues, that they are so universally in favor of these rich entitlements?

I proposed emphasizing prevention over the much costlier and more profitable treatment that’s emphasized today, but that proposal fell on deaf ears. It seems as if people don’t want to take responsibility for keeping themselves fit, exercising, eating properly, getting sufficient rest and avoiding stress. They apparently just want to live their lives with reckless abandon and then have the government come along and make them well, at somebody else’s expense, of course.

Anybody who has spent much time solving problems – I’ve been solving problems my whole professional life – knows that the best solution is one that treats the root problem rather than the symptoms. A proposal such as mine, which seeks to lower health care costs, addresses the root problem. Proposals to supply health insurance to everyone to pay for the high costs simply treat the symptoms. And proposals that force people to buy health insurance are not only antithetical to freedom, they simply reward insurance companies with more customers, whether they are worthy of such rewards or not.

Consider two recent examples of government involvement in health care and what they have done to health care costs. A couple of years ago Massachusetts passed a law requiring everybody to buy health insurance. This law was specifically intended to lower health care costs. What happened? Six months or so ago I read an article that said that health care costs in that state had failed to decline. Then a few days ago I read that health care costs in that state are expected to rise 10-12% during the next year, faster than the nationwide average! So much for treating the symptoms. All mandatory insurance has done in that state is maintain high health care costs and even accelerate their increase!

Then there’s the Medicare drug benefit passed a few years ago. Although I don’t recall any claims that it would lower drug costs, I’m sure lots of people assumed it would, at least for the beneficiaries! However, considering that the bill authorizing this new Medicare benefit specifically prohibited the government from negotiating lower drug prices, the writing was clearly on the wall before the bill even became law. Sure enough, a number of pharmaceutical companies recently announced price increases of 100-1,000% on some drugs, without any particular justification. I got the impression that they were raising prices simply because they could, because the government was paying the bill. If individuals were paying for those drugs out of their own pockets could the pharmaceutical companies raise the prices so? I doubt it, if for no other reason than the individuals simply cannot afford such price increases! I have a feeling that if the government and health insurance companies stopped paying for pharmaceutical drugs altogether, the prices would plummet.

Not surprisingly to me, a couple of intelligent, left-wing authoritarians I know, who would undoubtedly call themselves “progressive,” think it’s a good idea to force everyone to buy health insurance. Yet I know that their concern is not for the wellbeing of the people who lack insurance, because these acquaintances of mine sneeringly ridicule such people as boorish, stupid, worthless losers. No, their real objective – admitted by them – is to lower their own health insurance premiums! Talk about selfish. When I point out that I lack health insurance and am comfortable that way and not a burden on the “system,” they dismissively brush aside my point by implying that I ought to have insurance anyway, that it would be for my own good and that it’s the price we all should happily pay to live in a civilized society. And never mind that forcing everybody to buy health insurance would probably not result in lower premiums for these left-wing authoritarians anyway. Even if they could be convinced of that I don’t think it would matter. I think they’d still demand that everyone participate, because nationalized health care is as much about imposing behavioral control and thought conformity as it is about health care.

I addition, as has so often been the case, people pushing for nationalized health care are unwitting pawns of the conventional medical establishment that would like to stamp out competing and sometimes superior alternative medicine, because the elites in power own the system of conventional medicine and derive rich profits from it, whereas alternative medicine is often more egalitarian and less profitable. Ironically, “progressives” who claim to be interested in environmental protection, animal rights, sustainability, medical safety issues and health care accessibility ought to take more of an interest in alternative medicine rather than embracing conventional medicine. Their robust embrace of conventional medicine as the only possible solution demonstrates how thoroughly they’ve been co opted by the establishment.

Health Care and Freedom

One of the chief appeals of my solution to health care affordability is that it’s based on freedom and is entirely voluntary. The providers of health care services would do so voluntarily; the patients would visit those health care providers voluntarily. All of the “single payer” non-solutions are predicated on forced participation. People are forced to buy health insurance under penalty of severe reprisals. Or people are taxed under penalty of having their property taken literally at gunpoint. In addition to the ugliness of forced participation, these programs will surely result in a reduction of health care cost and quality options. How can anyone see this latter approach as a good one? People enjoy the freedom to choose what car to buy, what clothes to buy, what food to buy, weighing the costs and benefits of each choice. Why, then, do people believe a “one size fits all” approach to health care is desirable?

From my “selfish” perspective, another huge problem with nationalized health care is that everybody is made to pay an equal share of the costs, but not everybody shares equally in the benefits. (Witness the elderly people in Florida who have nothing better to do than queue up ten deep in medical offices for every minor complaint because Medicare is paying the bill. Would they be such profligate consumers of health care services if they were paying the bills themselves?) It seems that the people who most champion such schemes are those who intend to make the most generous use of them. I, however, am fortunate to be blessed with excellent health. I haven’t been to a doctor in a decade or more and have no intention of going to one anytime in the foreseeable future. As selfish as this may sound, why should I be forced to pay into a system that I’ll likely never use? Why should I pay for the health care of somebody who is sickly or just inclined to abuse the system? People will say that we already operate such forced participatory schemes in Social Security, Medicare, welfare, food stamps, and so on. But just because we’re already inflicting injustice upon the concept of freedom doesn’t mean we ought to compound those errors by branching into nationalized health care.

Granted, I’m blessed with good health, but I also do my part: I exercise regularly, I don’t eat or drink too much, I eat wholesome foods (not junk food), I get proper amounts of rest, I avoid stress and I avoid risky behavior. Since I cannot afford health insurance – even if I wanted it – my self-maintenance regimen is my health care plan! Why should I be denied that choice just because other people believe health insurance is the way to go? If they prefer buying health insurance to taking care of themselves, then let them pay for it. And why should I be penalized for my good health? Do we punish people who are smarter than others? Who are prettier than others? Who are sexier than others? Who are taller or stronger than others? (Actually, we reward such people.) There is no guarantee of equality in life. Some people are better endowed in some areas than others. It’s neither a sign of progress nor civilization to punish people for their naturally endowed advantages, regardless of how envious other people may be.

The Implicit Violence of Taxation Versus Voluntary Charity

Taxation, which is the oft-handy answer for how to pay for nationalized health care, is fundamentally violent. Oh, sure, it’s true nature is disguised and legitimized by a vast body of “laws,” but at its core lies the implicit threat of violence if one does not comply and pay their taxes. From time immemorial, taxation has always had as its primary purpose the financing of governments and especially their wars. The few table scraps government tosses our way and calls benefits are merely to keep us playing along.

If we humans expect to ever make genuine, self-directed evolutionary progress, we need to make a commitment to purge all forms of violence from our society.

Nobody in a society that’s based on violence and coercion (which is implicitly backed by the threat of escalation to violence) is truly free, neither the victims, nor their abusers. It’s obvious why the oppressed are not free. What’s not so obvious is that the oppressors aren’t free either because they must continue their oppression to maintain their status, power and wealth. If they relent in their application of violence and coercion, the oppressed will no longer do the bidding of the masters, because it’s generally against the interests of the oppressed. Thus, the masters are in effect slaves to the application of power, just as surely as are their oppressed victims. On the other hand, in a system of voluntary cooperation and charity, the beneficiaries of aid do not depend on coercion or violence; the aid they receive is freely given and will likely continue as long as the aid is needed and duly appreciated and the givers are able to give. Even though the same amount of wealth may be transferred from one party to another under a system of voluntary charity, both parties remain totally free; neither has oppressed the other.

I offer this trivial example of how person-to-person charity is superior to involving an intermediary to redistribute wealth. I recently received an e-mail from a young relative – seven years old – seeking a donation from me to pay for supplies for his school. The e-mail contained a link to a web site selling all manner of junk for about $10 per item, the sale of which would presumably net the school a small commission. I briefly glanced at the web site selling this junk and immediately realized that I don’t need anything anyway. I could have written back to my relative, telling him I don’t need anything sold by that site and that I’m too poor anyway to be subsidizing his public school several states away, and I think even at his young age he would have understood my explanation. Although I felt no obligation to make a donation I freely elected to drop a $10 bill in an envelope and mail it to him anyway. I did so because it made me feel good; it also made him feel good, and his school enjoyed 100% of my donation, not a small commission. In addition, I didn’t buy some useless piece of junk that would end up polluting the environment. It was an efficient, non-coerced transfer of wealth that left both the giver and recipient feeling good. Had some governmental authority presented me a bill for $10 to subsidize this boy’s school I would have been deeply resentful, but because it was voluntary I was happy to share my meager wealth. While this is a trivial example, if every person would engage in such charity dozens of times a year, imagine what a difference we could all make! (I emphasized that my young relative’s school is a public one because I view public school as analogous to public health care. The government long ago usurped the role of educator and has taxed us heavily ever since to pay for public schools. But even in the narrow realm of managing the financing of public schools, not to mention the abysmal results of public education, the government is failing. If the government were adequately managing the financing of schools, my little relative wouldn’t need to plead for funds from me. So if government assumes responsibility for paying for our health care, how long will it be until my little relative is asking me for donations to help pay for his health care?)

Charity doesn’t have to be in the form of cash. I’ve helped many people with their computers because that’s something I can offer. Doctors can offer free health care; lawyers, free consultations; handymen and plumbers and automobile mechanics, free repair jobs; grocers, free food; and so on. In fact, non-cash charity is even more efficient. Why give somebody cash, which they then have to spend to purchase goods and services at market rates, when one can give goods and services directly, typically below market rates?

A society based on coercion and violence, no matter how benignly or subtly it starts out, will inevitably become a tyranny because once coercion and violence are employed it initiates a positive feedback loop of oppression-declining freedom-declining prosperity-more oppression. The more government oppresses society, the more society’s prosperity diminishes, which necessitates even more oppression by the government to maintain the same revenue as before. In addition, government necessarily grows in size in order to inflict this greater level of oppression, making it hungrier for funds from the oppressed, even as the means for the oppressed to supply those funds diminishes! Ultimately the government has to resort to tricks like monetary debasement (“printing money”) to fund its growth, which simply accelerates the decline of prosperity.

Eventually the system reaches a breaking point, whereupon the demands of the government and the needs of the subjects cannot both be satisfied. At that point, when government becomes a competitor with its own people for increasingly limited resources, something has to give. I think the U.S. has reached that point already, and there are now two divergent trends at odds with one another: the one trend toward the ballooning of government, and the opposite trend toward sharply declining prosperity for the masses. Obviously these two divergent trends cannot persist for very long.

Witness today the government’s tentacle-like quest for more and more sources of revenue: traffic light cameras; the drug war; asset forfeiture for all manner of petty offenses, such as personal drug use and prostitution, and even non-offenses, such as carrying “too much” cash, which is then confiscated without any charges; digging deeper for evidence of tax evasion, even in foreign countries; rising fines for all manner of traffic violations. As the government fabricates all kinds of new restrictions on our freedom, puts our names on more and more lists of “undesirables,” and tacks on all kinds of new fees, society’s prosperity declines. People travel less, start fewer businesses, hire fewer employees and have less money to spend on things that actually contribute to our society’s prosperity and its quality of life.

Many will argue that in a “civilized” society it’s OK to tax people to ensure minimal support and comfort for all, but I disagree, not because I’m cold-hearted, but because providing for such minimal societal comfort through taxation is what I call a “win-lose-lose” proposition. The recipients of such benefits obviously “win.” However, the people who are taxed to pay for these benefits clearly “lose.” In addition, since the government administers this redistribution of wealth, it necessarily consumes a portion of the tax revenue for its own use, which represents the second “lose” part of the proposition. The money lost to government is money that helps neither the taxpayer nor the recipient of benefits.

On the other hand, a system of purely voluntary charity is what I call a “win-win” proposition that requires no government involvement. The recipients of this voluntary charity receive the same or more benefit, which is the first “win,” but the givers of such aid are rewarded as well, which is the second “win.” Speaking from personal experience, I can say that there’s no better feeling than knowing you’ve made a significant improvement to someone’s life. Moreover, 100% of the charity is transferred from the donor to the recipient; none is lost percolating through the many bureaucratic layers of government.

In addition, the recipient will feel gratitude to a real live person rather than take for granted an expected entitlement from a faceless government. Person-to-person charity encourages the giver to give more and establishes a positive example in the mind of the recipient, so that should the means and opportunity arise for them to help others, they probably will. Thus, when people directly help one another it initiates or fuels a positive feedback loop of more help and giving. And the best part is that this is all voluntary. There is no force, coercion or violence involved. The giver is free to give, and the recipient is free to receive. This is real freedom. Isn’t that a far more civilized, progressive and enlightened approach than forced taxation?

I know, people will scoff and assert that humans are fundamentally selfish and cannot be “trusted” to share with others, but I disagree. All I can say is that people who say that are more cynical than me, and I’m a cynic! In my experience people are quite generous when they are free to choose to be. In any case, if someone is selfish and chooses not to share, is that not their natural right? Do we really want to live in a society that forces people to share? How does a child feel when their parents force them to share something with a sibling? Pretty resentful. On the other hand, how do they feel when they voluntarily share that same thing with a sibling? Pretty good. Wouldn’t the latter approach be a better model for society? Wouldn’t it be better to inculcate in people a strong sense of compassion for their fellow human beings, so that they willingly share whenever they can? Wouldn’t that be a more progressive ideal to strive for?

Path to Freedom Without Government

I believe it is possible to imbue society with strong positive values such as these. I recall reading about Japan back in the 1980s and how the crime of burglary was so unthinkable that people didn’t have to lock their doors. I also recall spending many weeks in the city of Zurich, again back in the 1980s, where people would park their bicycles unlocked at the train station all day, and then come home from work and their bicycles would be sitting there waiting for them. Even where I live today there is a stronger cultural aversion to committing crime than in, say, San Francisco, where I used to live.

It may take several generations to breed strong values of compassion and non-violence into our society, but I believe it can be done. Now, I do believe that a small percentage of human beings – perhaps 5% as a nice round number – are natural born psychopaths, devoid of what we often refer to as a “conscience.” It’s not their fault, but these people are incapable of feeling empathy and love, which is an impediment to their understanding noble acts such as charity. However, even if such people are deficient of conscience, they still likely possess other natural traits that society can utilize to make such people behave in a desirable manner. Most animals, and especially humans, possess an instinct for mimicry. Humans also possess an instinct to belong to a group.

Even psychopaths seek to mimic others’ behavior, although it’s for the wrong reasons. When a “normal” person says, “I love you,” it’s an expression of a feeling that is sometimes subsequently rewarded, but obtaining the reward is not the motivation behind the expression of the feeling. However, a psychopath may take note of the stimulus and response and mimic the behavior, uttering the words, “I love you” in order to obtain the reward. There is no way a psychopath can be made to feel the things we “normal” people feel. So the best we can do is teach them to behave the way we want them to. If rewarding them for good behavior is what it takes, then that’s what we should do.

The other instinct, to belong to a group, can be exploited by using the threat of ostracism to give people an incentive to behave. Ostracism is perfectly compatible with my philosophy of freedom and non-violence because it doesn’t involve impinging upon the freedom of the ostracized; it involves simply withdrawing affection, support and association, which were voluntarily given in the first place. The threat of ostracism is well suited to a world built around voluntary cooperation and charity. The implication behind the threat of ostracism is that good behavior will continue to be rewarded, but bad behavior will incur a loss of that reward. The threat of ostracism is utterly impotent in a society where the government, which does not revolve around human values like ostracism, continues to redistribute wealth to the ostracized! In such a society, the misbehaving person has no disincentive to misbehave.

I believe that, with the exception of natural born psychopaths, most peoples’ antisocial behavior can be traced to poor socialization (by their parents, family, teachers, etc.), poor nutrition, or some other easily avoidable cause. If we as a society can break the cycle of poor socialization, poor education, poor nutrition, and violence for these people and instill new values in them, we can finally start to make real progress as a species. But when I say end the cycle of violence, I mean every single trace of violence, from taxation to the death penalty to war. I believe we can reverse the cycle of violence and replace it with a constructive cycle of cooperation, charity and compassion.

I expect people to utterly reject the idea of “coddling” malefactors. But how is society served by perpetuating the cycle of violence? It’s long been obvious to me that much of our so-called “justice” system is based not on justice and forgiveness, but on retribution. That’s certainly the case with the death penalty, which is nothing more than state-sponsored vengeance, but it’s also true of the way we lock up criminals in cruel and unusual prisons which, more than anything else, are intended to strip them of their dignity and humanity. Every right-wing authoritarian refers to the U.S. as a Christian nation, yet these people are the very first ones to urge locking up criminals and throwing away the key! Is not forgiveness a Christian value?

If someone commits a crime, instead of seeking retribution we should first give them the benefit of the doubt, assume that they possess defective genes or are a product of an unhealthy environment, and try to forgive them. We should, of course, expect such people to make reasonable restitution for their crime, but no more. Then we should temporarily isolate such people from society, not in a prison exactly, but in a facility where they can be properly socialized, where the deficiencies that led to their crime can be corrected. (Granted, the authority to isolate people against their will implies a form of government, but that government could be something as informal as a local council of elders. In any case, this essay is not meant to be a fully thought out blueprint, but rather a loose-knit vision.)

These resocialized people must then be given the means and opportunity to avoid returning to criminal behavior, such as an education and a job. Many people recognize even today that it would be cheaper for society, both in the short run and the long run, to send criminals to college than to prison. But we won’t even entertain doing that because our system of justice is based on retribution, and helping criminals would be seen as “coddling” them. We therefore punish such criminals rather than educate them, and simply perpetuate the cycle of violence, cutting off our nose to spite our face, so to speak. Society does itself no favors by zealously punishing such people, delicious as vengeance might taste. All that happens when someone is sent to a dehumanizing prison is that they come out even more angry and dangerous, and cause even more death, suffering and property loss. It’s truly in our best interests to stifle our instinctual urge for vengeance and try to help such people become an asset to society rather than a liability.

After many generations, the need to forcibly segregate people from society will diminish and possibly disappear altogether. People diagnosed at an early age as psychopaths can be given additional help early on to socialize them and additional guidance throughout their lives to maintain their good behavior. If we persist in this goal long enough – and it will take generations – and always set a good example, even when it makes us look ridiculous (“turning the other cheek”), we can become a species that shuns violence in all its forms, voluntarily cooperates to produce the best standard of living for all members of society, and lives in total freedom and harmony with each other and the planet.

Conclusion

I don’t blame you if you have patiently read this far and are now wondering, “How is all this stuff related?” How are nationalized health care, mandatory insurance, taxation, wealth redistribution, government, retributive “justice,” non-violence and voluntary charity related? They are all fundamentally related to freedom. Nationalized health care and its financing schemes, such as mandatory insurance and taxation, involuntary redistribution of wealth, all enforced by the power of government, are assaults on freedom. Shunning retribution and embracing non-violence and voluntary charity are nurturing of freedom.

I understand that there is a rather immediate need for health care reform in this country, which is why I proposed my rapidly realizable solution of Strip Mall Health Care™. But this essay attempts to look beyond this immediate need and address the larger philosophical question of where we as a species want to be in the future. Do we wish to remain a society based on arbitrary social hierarchy maintained by capricious force, or one based on egalitarianism, voluntary cooperation, non-violence and freedom?

If we rely solely on the principles of non-violence and freedom (for oneself and others) as our guideposts whenever making personal or societal decisions, we can steadily improve our society and our species. If enough people freely choose to live this way we can find our way to an enlightened, Utopian future even without the cooperation of – or rather, in spite of – government. Nationalized health care does not pass this simple test.

Although I was disparaged as “selfish” and for being a “rugged individual,” it is not selfish to defend one’s natural rights or resist being exploited by others, nor is it ruggedly individualistic to not want to so encumber others. My attitude stems from my lifelong adherence to the amorphous “golden rule,” which this passage from the Bible exemplifies:

Matthew 7:12. All things therefore whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do you also to them. For this is the law and the prophets.

(I do not believe in god and I’m not religious, yet I quote the Bible because so many other people claim to revere it. As I go through life, however, I find that my behavior and treatment of others reveal me to be more a disciple of the teachings of Christ than many Christians!)

It seems that authoritarians have a defective understanding of the golden rule. Authoritarians of the right misinterpret it in violent terms to mean, “Do unto others before they can do unto you.” Hence, preemptive wars, preemptive police raids, and so forth. Authoritarians of the left misinterpret it in collectivist terms to mean, “Make others do as you would do.” Hence, support for mandatory health care systems and opprobrium toward people “living large.”

In an ostensible, roundabout, pseudo, vague, superficial, loose-knit sort of way “progressives” and I have a similar goal, which is a more civil and compassionate society. However our approaches are diametrically opposed, mine being voluntary, directed from the bottom up, and theirs being compulsory and directed from the top down. What’s striking to me is the similarity between left-wing authoritarians’ civil society, delivered from the barrel of a gun*, and right-wing authoritarians’ democracy, delivered to other nations also from the barrel of a gun. Neither of these authoritarian siblings can see this similarity, and both take umbrage at the ingratitude of the “beneficiaries” of their noble efforts.

Throughout my life I’ve been extraordinarily generous and charitable to people, including strangers, freely giving my wealth and time to those who needed it. I’ve also readily accepted freely tendered offers of help from others when I needed it. This is the essence of my philosophy, which revolves around the golden rule, voluntary charity, compassion, respect, non-violence and freedom. It is simply not “right” to force others to behave as we wish. All we can do is see to it that we behave as we expect others to, which is why I find the quotation at the top of my blog so appealing.

Notes

* “Delivered from the barrel of a gun” is a most accurate characterization, for whenever people are forced by law to participate in something, such as nationalized health care, it is implicitly enforced by the threat of violence, which is itself ultimately backed up with guns.

Alternative medicine and preventive care resources:

• Natural Health Librarian
• Natural News