What a delight it is that the citizens of Massachusetts have risen up against the federal leviathan. All across the country, the tea party movement is furiously aboil, angry Americans anxiously awaiting the opportunity to pull some levers in a voting booth.

But if the current populist uprising is nothing more than yet another throw-the-bums-out movement, it will come to nothing. We threw the bums out good and hard in 1994, and yet the federal leviathan has done nothing but grow since then. By now the national government is so huge that it threatens to crush the nation and its people and productive plant beneath its enormous weight.

It is not enough to throw the bums out. To contain the federal government, we have to cut its powers. Nothing else will stop its long-term growth.

The United States was originally conceived of as a confederation of sovereign states. The states joined together for those common purposes that seemed to make sense to them, with each state retaining is sovereignty in all other matters.

That was the theory — the federal government was to be the hand-servant of the states. In practice, the federal government has usurped the power of the states from the very beginning, with the abuses becoming more bold and more comprehensive with each passing decade.

This turns out to have been a mistake — as we are discovering. Where each state is independent of all the others, each one can try different policies. The states can become the laboratories of democracy that the founding fathers envisioned.

But to achieve this, we will have to rein in the federal leviathan. The states and the people need to reassert their ownership of and control over the national government.

How? By constitutional amendment. Probably by constitutional convention, since it seems unlikely that sitting members of Congress will vote to circumscribe their awesome and terrifying powers.

But here, in a very short summary, is what needs to be done, if the head of steam built up by the tea party movement is not to be wasted. The text within the quotation marks is proposed amendatory language, followed by a discussion of the objective to be achieved.

1. “The words ‘general welfare’ appearing in the United States Constitution or its Amendments do not create any powers of the legislative, executive or judicial branches of the government of the United States. Any legislation authorized by the words ‘general welfare’ is repealed.” This gets rid of one of the most pernicious pieces of federal elasticity. The pretext for forcing people to buy health insurance under Obamacare — now dead, one may hope — was to have been the general welfare clause.

2. “Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution is stricken in its entirety. Any legislation authorized by that clause is repealed.” This does away with the power of the federal government to regulate commerce. The interstate commerce clause is second only to the general welfare clause as a means of enlarging the power of the national government.

3. “Amendement 16 to the United States Constitution is stricken in its entirety. Any legislation authorized by that Amendment is repealed.” Goodbye federal income tax. The federal government will have to return to taxation by capitation — the head tax.

4. “Amendement 17 to the United States Constitution is stricken in its entirety. Any legislation authorized by that Amendment is repealed.” This language puts the Senate back under the control of the states. This was a vital check on federal power. Its absence is what has permitted the most abusive usurpations of power by the federal leviathan.

5. “No governmental entity in the United States nor any office-holder or employee of any governmental entity in the United States is immune from criminal prosecution or civil litigation.” This eliminates the legal doctrine called sovereign immunity. The argument is that the people ought not be able to sue themselves. But when government officials commit crimes against citizens, they should be held fully accountable to the law. Americans fought and died so that no sovereign could tread on the rights of the people.

Taken as a whole, this language will eliminate much of the federal government. The power to defend the nation will be retained, but most of the alphabet soup agencies will be gone, as will be most of the taxes and regulations strangling our economy. The states will have to fill some gaps, but I think we will all be quietly amazed at how little value the national government brings to civic life — and how relieved we all will be to be out from under its enormous weight.

I don’t go to the doctor very often. I don’t get sick much, and, even when I do, I’m not always willing to make time to do anything about it. I work very hard, and all I want to do is work, and I don’t want to have to take time to slow down even when my body really needs to slow down.

In consequence, I am the perfect stooge for the ObamaCare scheme that Americans seem hell-bent on ramming down each other’s throats. Welfare scams only work when there are people willing to produce wealth long after it has become obvious that working hard is for suckers — when all the clued-in people have already jumped on the gravy train.

In the case of socialized medicine, the clued-in people will discover more and more things wrong with their health. Why not? It will be people like me — who don’t get sick and who refuse to let illness keep us from working — who will be footing the bill.

And that’s just the way things are in the welfare-state we have made of this once-free country. Working women defer motherhood so welfare moms can pop out kid after kid, each one endowed at birth with a tax-funded sinecure. Conscientious parents pay twice for their children’s education, once in taxes to pay for useless public schools and once again in tuition for the private schools their children actually attend. If you refuse to live on the dole, you have to save for two retirements: One that you won’t take and one that you will have to guard, night and day, so it won’t be taken from you.

That’s what we are, by now. Suckers on one side of the room, proud but tight-lipped. And blood-suckers on the other side, belligerent and bellicose, constantly demanding more and more largesse from the stoical, stolid suckers.

Fine. It is what it is, and nothing is going to change any time soon — except for the worse. But as much as I might be in this mess, as much as I might be the stooge who makes the welfare state possible, I refuse to be a part of it. I refuse to be a parasite. I’ll be a sucker if I have to, but I refuse to be a blood-sucker.

Socialized medicine must be universal. How can the voluntary victims of freelance pharmacy go to rehab again and again if they have to pay their own health insurance premiums? How can we buy aromatherapy for the addlepated when they already don’t have sense enough to buy their own scents? The clued-in people who will be consuming the lion’s share of the “free” health care are already lousy at producing wealth. How much worse are they going to be at paying their own way once they start spending all their time in the hospital?

So in order to have socialized medicine, the state is going to have to socialize me — and you, and everyone. The system can’t work without suckers. But the larger agenda is to turn all of us into blood-suckers, into parasites, into belligerent, bellicose beggars. You might plan to go along with this, but I will not.

Why? It’s not because of the confiscation of my earnings. I’m already putting up with that. But once the entire health care system is socialized, I won’t be permitted to pay my own way. I won’t just be a sucker, I’ll be a blood-sucker, living at the involuntary expense of every other hard-working sucker in America.

This I will not do. President Obama and his minions can fine me if they like. They can jail me if they choose. But I have never been a beggar, a parasite, and I never will.

So come and get me, Coppers! In a nation where self-reliance is a crime, we are all criminals now. This is what we have done to what was once the greatest country on earth.

In the meantime, I suppose I’ll have to find a way to get back-alley chest X-rays and contraband antibiotics. That’s what I get for working for a living…

 
Pass this on: If you feel the way I do, feel free to pass this on to anyone you know — and especially to your congressman and senators. But please include the link back to http://SplendorQuest.com/?p=38 so that others can find it.

When I moved to Chandler, Arizona, 16 years ago, I was informed that, not only would I be expected to participate in the community’s curbside recycling program, but that enforcement officers would come around at random to inspect the special blue trash barrels to make sure they were not being used to dispose of yard waste or other forbidden items.

This seemed funny to me at the time — so outrageously offensive as to be comical. I thought about updating Homer with a tale about Ulysses versus the Recyclops.

It’s not so funny to me now. For one thing, the idea of a government functionary trespassing on private property to pass judgement on one’s trash is the kind of intrusion that should drive any American to thoughts of armed rebellion. And for another, things have gotten quite a bit worse since then.

By now there is no outrage too comically absurd for some government functionary — as humorless a specimen of humanity as has ever existed — to attempt to ram down your throat.

Consider these as examples:

• The State of Michigan is attempting to forbid a mom from hosting neighborhood kids at her home before school. Why? Because she is providing day-care without a license.

• In Saratoga Springs, New York, children are forbidden to walk or to ride their bikes to school.
• To build a new home in Los Angeles, California — a place where virtually no one is building new homes just now — you will be required to add an anti-graffiti coating to the finish at your own expense.
• Worst of all, the federal government is straining mightily to pass legislation that will put the entire health-care industry under state control. Opposed to abortion? You’ll be paying for them anyway. Don’t want to participate? You’ll be fined or sent to prison.

How tough a job was it to come up with those four examples? Well, I found them all on the Drudge Report, an internet news portal. All of them today. All of them from the first column of the page.

When we hear about some humorless jackass ticketing a five-year-old at a lemonade stand for operating without a food service license, we are apt to think, “Why doesn’t someone fire that stupid son-of-a-bitch?” But the actual reality of our lives is that we are encysted at every pore with humorless jackasses, each one of them looking for more and more bizarre ways to inflict government upon us.

Think of it. There was a time in our lives when we all thought that the purpose of government was to fight crimes, which were committed by a very small number of people. But then we got the notion that government should supervise commerce, an activity engaged in by a far larger number of people. But by now the government clearly believes that its function is to police all of us, all the time, over the smallest minutiae of our lives. We are all criminals now.

The question to ask is not, “What the hell is wrong with those stupid sons-of-bitches?”

The question that we desperately need to ask is this one: “What the hell is wrong with us?”

We are Americans — or we were at one time. A proud and free people who defied the armed might of Britannia to win our independence, who conquered and tamed a wild and unforgiving continent, who created vast riches for even the poorest of the poor, who stood fast for the idea of human liberty at home and abroad, who proudly upheld an idea of freedom for the common man never before known anywhere on the earth at any time in human history.

Can you imagine what our grandfathers would have done if someone had tried to tell them how to dispose of their trash? Tried to tell them who they could or could not have as guests in their homes? Actually tried to forbid their children to stand up on their own two feet and walk to school?

If our grandfathers were alive today, they would be denounced on the six o’clock news as militia-mad gun nuts — but they would not have gone down without a fight.

But the state of human liberty in modern-day America is much worse than any of that.

• We all know that we have a permanent underclass of welfare clients, perpetually impoverished people who have become addicted to the free milk flowing from Big Mother’s teats, robbed thereby of any incentive to act in their own behalf.

• And we have a not-so-obvious permanent overclass of welfare clients — alleged businessmen who cannot seem to get by without subsidies or legislation relieving them of the burdens of competition.
• And, of course, we have vast hordes of humorless jackasses on the payroll at every level of government, each one doing his damnedest to destroy at least as much wealth as he consumes.
• And while those humorless jackasses will fawn and preen about how much they love you and want to help you, what they actually love in you is squalid — your poverty, your addictions, your diseases. And in order to express that love for the negative, they must tax and penalize everything that is positive in human life — your sense of purpose, your productivity, your pride in your accomplishments. Can you think of better exemplars of the idea that to get ahead you must work and study hard than doctors? And yet it is the doctors that the state’s functionaries are most avid to enslave.
• And to make everything worse, we have taken an entire generation of ordinary Americans — the Greatest Generation, we call them — and turned them into another huge cadre of sniveling welfare clients, wailing, like the paupers of ancient Rome, “Increase the dole!”
• And to top it all off, we have managed to spawn an elite class of humorless jackasses — extra-humorless, but almost-implausibly clueless — who by now presume to poke their noses into every aspect of your life — public, private, intimate or embarrassingly indelicate.

Face facts: If they can snoop in your trash, what’s to keep them from snooping in your bathroom? If they can confiscate your money to pay for someone else’s abortion, why can’t they confiscate one of your kidneys and give it to someone suffering renal failure? Can’t happen here? That’s what your grandfather would have said about the Recyclops.

O, my people! What have we done to America?

That’s the bad news, and it is really bad news.

Here’s the good news: I’m not the only person asking that question.

I’m writing this text on October 1, 2009, nine months into the administration of President Barrack Hussein Obama. Mr. Obama has proved himself to be so much a socialist — and so frighteningly brash a socialist — that people all over America are thinking seriously about politics, perhaps for the first time in their lives. They have come together at town halls and organized themselves into tea parties modeled on the historic Boston Tea Party. They’re buying books and watching populist demagogues on television. They know something is very wrong with America, and they want to do whatever it takes to fix it.

That much really is good news. The American people, in large measure, can too often be complacent and anti-intellectual. Work matters. Family and church matter. Sports matters. But the life of the mind? Not so much. It’s hard to fault them for regarding intellectual pursuits as being boring, since the people charged with guarding the work of the mind are so often such colossal bores. So when the sleeping giant that is the American public stirs itself to try to figure out what it is getting wrong, this is a cause for celebration.

But there is quite a lot of bad news among the good. For one thing, there is essentially only one political party in the United States right now. The Democrats are camouflaged Marxist socialists who are committed to the stealthy confiscation of all private wealth in the country. And the Republicans are camouflaged national socialists who are committed to the steady surrender of all control over all private wealth in the country. We lurch from one to the other looking for remedies, but all we get is the same socialist poison in superficially-different bottles.

By now, both parties are exponents of an oligarchic kind of cronyism: When their friends and allies win, they win. And when they lose, the taxpayer — that would be you, known in the corridors of power as John Q. Sucker — foots the bill. Each political party uses the taxing and regulatory power of the state to buy votes, to reward its friends and to penalize its enemies. When George Washington spoke to us of “a government of laws and not of men” — he was talking about the exact opposite of what we have now.

What’s worse, even though the American people are looking for intellectual guidance to explain to them what happened to the great American dream of individual human liberty, there is no one to whom they can turn for that leadership. The left proposes more socialism for the poor, the right more socialism for the rich, and the clowns at court rage on about random nonsense.

Take note: We are where we are as the unavoidable consequence of our errors — of one error, really, that we have made over and over again throughout all of human history. And yet even now, as we plan to enslave twenty percent or more of our economy, we as Americans are better off than most of the people now alive on earth. And we are far better off than most of the human beings who have preceded us in death.

We are as alarmed as we are right now — to our credit — because we can recall having it better, we ourselves and our parents and grandparents. We have never been so rich as we are now, but we have been far more free in the past, in the not-at-all-distant past. It is our awareness of our loss of personal freedom that goads us to try to figure out what we are getting wrong.

So: The bad news is really bad.

And the good news is very far from being wholly good.

But here is the best news of all: The error we are making, the error we have always made, is very simple to correct. All we have to do is come to understand humanity for what it really is…

[This is not for the book, except as context. This is an essay I wrote in the mid-1990s, an attempt to explain to libertarians, especially various flavors of devotees of Ayn Rand, why the idea of a minimal state must always fail -- just as the minimal state as envisioned in 1789 is failing right now. The argument holds up well, I think -- though I am by now less lean-look'd a prophet. It's just that no one wants to hear it... --GSS]

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

The first thing to do is laugh, of course.

We stare tragedy right in the face, so close to it we can smell its stale breath, and it is reaching for us.

Everything we say should not, must not, cannot happen — every bit of it does happen. Teenage gang-bangers with AR-15s car-jack Sally Suburbanite and toss her baby out the window. Middle-aged speed freaks imprison their own mothers and force them to write bad checks. One-hundred-thirty-five years after emancipation, people are owned as slaves and the value of their labor is stolen from them. The falcon cannot hear the falconer and Vicky Weaver and 81 Branch Davidians lay slain.

Should not. Must not. Cannot. Does.

And there’s plenty more, of course, and every bit of it is tragic. Except us, for we are tragic and ridiculous. We wag our fingers and deliver pithy little lectures on morality. Or we wag our fingers and deliver pithy little lectures on utility. And we argue amongst ourselves and hone and polish and perfect our pithy little arguments until they are fit to be inscribed on parchment. And we wag our fingers and deliver them from whatever soap-box we can find.

And until lately no one was listening. And even though we have contrived a nearly perfect roadmap to civilization, it is being incinerated in a conflagration of savagery.

So laugh, damnit. Laughter is what’s left when every other precious thing is gone…

Our tragedy arises not from the precious things that have been taken from us, but from the precious things we have spurned. They have not beaten us yet, but they are winning. And they are winning not because of their strength, but because of our refusal to do battle from our strength. We have crippled ourselves, and in doing it we have given them an advantage they could never have gained on their own.

Without remorse — as a matter of pride even — we have conceded their most basic premise, and they are using our own power to destroy us. To destroy civilization, really, to raze in twenty years what is still unraised after twenty centuries. The worst specimens of humanity are full of passionate intensity, and they stand unopposed.

And who could oppose them, taking account that we are one among them? Indeed, I have seen the enemy and I’ll be damned if it isn’t us!

And I have a lot of nerve, haven’t I? You were gracious enough to invite me into your mind, and I repay your hospitality by blaming you for everything on Earth that’s wrong. There ought to be a law…

Oops!

Which team are we on again…?

Which team do we think we’re on?

Why, we’re the people who fight naked savagery, of course. Right…? Yes, yes, of course. We fight that naked savagery tooth and claw, hammer and tong, sixes and sevens and nines. By god, we hate that naked savagery. Don’t we…?

Yup.

We hate it so much we clothe it in bright-striped tails and call it Uncle Sam. We stick a feather in its cap and call it blood pudding. Or something. But we can’t bear that naked savagery, and we won’t let it bare its head around us.

And when we go up against an AR-15 with a pen knife, it’s just not right that our tail lights vanish in the distance.

Just not right!

There ought to be a law, damnit! Better yet, a bolt of lightning ought to shoot down out of the angry sky to smite the wicked. All of them, all at once. Today, if it can be arranged.

And yes, I am making fun of you. And of me. Of all of us, and all of our forebears. We sought to civilize savagery by inventing an inhibited form of savagery, and we deserve everything we’re getting. It’s right, it’s just, and it’s predictable to nine decimal places.

What did we do wrong?

Instead of renouncing savagery, we sought to rationalize it.

We are no less savages than the gang-bangers or the federal falcons, we’re just not as good at savagery. We don’t revel in our naked bloodlust, we hide it behind a fig leaf and argue to ourselves that we are not bloodthirsty, that our spasms of sadism are right and necessary and justified. We are inhibited, and where they can kill casually on a whim, we can kill only after beating our breasts for months or years. But kill we do, smiting the wicked in the name of the Greater Good.

Those naked savages are capricious, but we clothed savages are deliberate. They brutalize on impulse, but we have sound, detailed, carefully considered reasons for our brutality. Their crimes are random, but, by god, our crimes are justified!

How could they not be? Look at all those philosophy books. Look at that immense pile of law books. Listen to those orators, the finest minds of the West. After twenty centuries of civilization, how can what we do not be justified?

Because it’s not. Because it’s grounded in a savage premise. Because what we have dared to call civilization rejects caprice and replaces it with dementia. And, my gentle and long-suffering libertarian friends, you are not exempted from this charge.

In fact, I think I’m going to run you in. You look peaceful enough, but why should I take chances? I’m going to drive your wrist back up against your shoulder blades and frog-march you down to the station-house. How about a strip search? How about a cavity search?; can’t buy that thrill, now can you? How about some sleep deprivation to give you the opportunity to reflect upon your right to remain silent? And while you’re locked up for months, awaiting your speedy trial, I think I’ll seize and sell your assets. Teach you a lesson. Let you know who’s boss.

Should not. Must not. Cannot. Does.

And the question is: if I can do all that vicious stuff to you, why can’t you do it all right back to me?

The savage answer is: because I have an AR-15 and you have a pen knife.

The allegedly civilized answer is: because I have a sanction and you do not.

Say what…?

Meet the Third Thing, gentle readers. A decidedly behind-the-scenes political operative. The man behind the curtain, so to speak.

When I come to arrest you, there is only you and only me. I am like you and you are like me. We are equal as things, as equal as two rocks or two cans of soup or two kittens. You can jump a little higher than me and I can run a little faster than you, but these are merely differences of degree. There is no power or potential that you have that I lack, nor do I have any special capacities that you do not have. We are equal. If I have the right or power or capacity to do something to you, then you have the right or power or capacity to do it right back to me.

So how is it that I have the right to use pain compliance on you and submit you to a cavity search, but you lack the right to do those same things right back to me?

For this brutality to be justified, there must be some Third Thing present with us. There is you and there is me, and if we are alone, then we are equal. If we are not equal, then there must be a Third Thing in the room that confers upon me super-human powers and consigns you to sub-human responses.

Before, there were two rocks, and they differed in color, weight, dimension, density and mineral content, but they were equally rocks. Neither rock was more rock than the other. They differed in measurement, but they were equal in their rockness. And then the Third Thing appeared on the scene and suddenly one rock was ultra-rock and the other became infra-rock.

And where the gang-banger steals and sells your car and justifies it by pointing his AR-15 at your surrender reflex, the statesman steals and sells your car and justifies it by reference to magic or mysticism or undiluted insanity. The gangster acts like a savage, like a two-legged animal. But the statesman attempts to act like a god, like Dionysus drunk on the nectar of his own imaginary righteousness.

This is important, perhaps the most important thing I have to say. We are not talking about what one can do; the gang-bangers are walking object lessons in what human beings are capable of doing. We are not talking about what one ought to do, not here. What we are talking about is what one can justify doing, the set of actions one can rationally defend taking with respect to other people. We are talking not just about human social interaction but about human social interaction that can be rigorously defended in persuasively valid terms.

In other words, we are talking not merely about politics but about political philosophy. We are ignoring the savages and the gang-bangers; their political philosophy is nothing more than “might makes right”. We concern ourselves here with those political philosophies that presume to reject, to rise above “might makes right”. We concern ourselves with you gentle libertarian, with the charming little bungalow you’ve made into your ideological home.

“Might makes right” is a crude attempt at a philosophical distinction. The argument runs, “I have martial prowess or superior weaponry, therefore I am different from you. My domination of you is justified, just as I am justified in the dominion I claim over my horse. Because I have the ability to inflict pain upon you, you are no more than a beast to me, without liberty, without rights, without autonomy. You are a thing, an extension of me, and I am fundamentally distinct from you.”

We might wish that savages spoke and reasoned that well, but that’s what they’re saying, however incoherently. The distinction itself is idiotic; a human being is not changed into another thing by acquisition of a skill or possession of a chattel. And it’s worth pointing out that the savage himself does not believe it. He wouldn’t offer up his incoherent explanation if he did. We don’t dominate horses in the same way we dominate non-living things, but we do dominate them to a degree, and we don’t bother to rationalize our domination to them. The savage must declare that you are a beast because he knows you aren’t.

And the statesman, although he is marginally more coherent, also makes philosophical distinctions that do not bear up to close scrutiny. For example, he may say, “My domination of you is justified because you have consented to it in every particular.” He will hold up his empty hand and say, “See here? See this Social Contract? You’re committed. You’re obliged. I have your consent.” Meet the Third Thing.

Or he might say, “My domination of you is justified because I have been selected by god himself to guard you from the exponents of evil who falsely claim to have been selected by god himself to protect you from me. It’s the Divine Right of Kings.” Meet the Third Thing.

Or he might say, “My domination of you is the will of the people, the little people, the common people. The weak. The halt. The lame. The children…” Meet the Third Thing.

The zeitgeist, the spirt of the times? Meet the Third Thing.

The practical benefit of uniform law? Meet the Third Thing.

The individual’s natural right not to be injured? Meet the Third Thing.

The consent of the governed? Meet the Third Thing.

The purity of the race? Meet the Third Thing.

The inevitability of one-world Socialism? Meet the Third Thing.

And we can traverse our way down the tree of philosophy until we arrive at a pitiful little proto-statesman with a shaman by his side. He will tell us with a devout solemnity that he is justified in claiming domination over us because he alone possesses the sacred ceremonial amulet. Meet the Third Thing in its undiluted form…

For the Third Thing, ultimately, is insanity defended with devout solemnity. There is no Social Contract imagined by you but binding upon me. There is no Divine Right of Kings. Every person is possessed of free will, but there is no accumulation of that will, and the voluntary support of many or even most people does not justify anything. There is no zeitgeist. Neither your convenience nor mine justifies our domination of our neighbors, or each other. You have the capacity to act in self-defense, but it absurd to argue that this somehow prevents future injuries. “The consent of the governed” could only have meaning if the consent were explicit and unanimous. The “race” has no rights. Neither Socialism nor any other creation of the mind of man is inevitable. And, finally, the sacred ceremonial amulet is just a rock suspended from a rope.

These are all products of the imagination. They are wholly products of the imagination. They are all extremely elaborate, often very confusing, pantomimes of philosophy. They all concede that “might makes right” is not a philosophical argument; it is brutal, unsavory, and, as above, idiotic. And the question that each one of these creeds — and many others — is an answer to is this:

How can we dominate people without claiming that “might makes right”?

It’s a good question. A noble question. And the people who have striven to answer it have been, for the most part, proud and noble people. The answers they’ve come up with have been demented, of course, but that’s unavoidable: the question is demented.

When the gang-banger invites you to stand on the curb while he drives away in your car, “might makes right” is his only justification. And when the cop invites you to grab your ankles so he can search your rectum for contraband, “might makes right” is his only justification. No one volunteers to be pushed around against his will. “Volunteers against his will” is a meaningless construct. And “dominate without ‘might makes right’” is also a meaningless construct.

The question the political philosophers don’t ask is: how can we elicit the cooperation of people? They don’t ask it because the answer is obvious; we all know how to elicit cooperation. The problem, they say, is: what about people who will not cooperate?

Well, what about them? We’re not asking whether or not one has the right to retaliate — respond “like for like” — to injury. We’re asking whether or not you have the right or power or capacity to dominate me, to break me like you’d break your horse to saddle. If you don’t, then we must either find a way to cooperate or part company. But if you do, then we are not the same kind of thing, we are as unlike as you and your horse, and “might makes right” is the only philosophical justification for your actions.

This is vital: one person cannot dominate another without deploying superior martial prowess, superior weaponry, or both. To dominate means to rule by force. There is no other way to rule, and there is no justification for ruling by force except force, “might makes right”. The Third Thing is the means by which philosophical proto-savages attempt to convince themselves that brutality-for-a-cause is in some meaningful way distinct from ordinary random brutality.

The Third Thing is the thing that stands between the political philosopher and his own recognition that he has not renounced savagery, he has merely rationalized it.

The Third Thing is the things that, you say, joins the two of us when you claim that you are right to do to me what you would insist would be wrong for me to do right back to you. If you can arrest me but I can’t arrest you, there must be some distinction between us, something that makes us not equal, and that distinction is the Third Thing. If you can imprison me but I can’t imprison you, there must be some distinction between us, something that makes us not equal, and that distinction is the Third Thing. If you can punish me — for my own good, to teach me a lesson — but I can’t punish you, there must be some distinction between us, something that makes us not equal, and that distinction is the Third Thing.

In order for you to claim any justification for your domination of me, you must insist that there is some distinction between us, some right or power or capacity that makes you super-human and renders me sub-human. This distinguishing property, whatever it is, is the Third Thing.

And, whatever it is, it is imaginary. It does not exist. We are equal. You are what I am and I am what you are. We are equally human, the same kind of thing, and there is no basis in evidence for claiming that we are in some way distinct.

And where the savage says, “I am distinct from you because I have a weapon in my hand,” the political philosopher insists, “I am distinct from you because I have nothing in my hand, nothing but an unreadable book and a sacred amulet.”

The Third Thing does not exist. And because it does not exist, there is no defensible creed of the domination of one person by another. You can try to dominate me, but you cannot argue that you are justified in trying to dominate me. There can be no such thing as the just domination of one person by another.

And our charming little bungalow turns out to be a house of cards.

And our pithy little lectures turn out to be carefully crafted nonsense.

And we have taken on that naked savagery and fought it by wrapping it in the raiments of our impenetrable verbiage. And the emperor is not merely naked, the emperor is just another naked savage.

And I have seen the enemy and I’ll be damned if it isn’t us…

Ayn Rand said that libertarianism leads to anarchism, and this is correct. If we adopt her own admonition that one must never initiate violence, we must conclude that every form of government is invalid, since every form of government is a coercive monopoly on the dispute resolution business. If instead we argue that each person owns his own life, then we must conclude that every form of government is invalid, since every sort of domination of one person by another is an attempt to express ownership — rightful use or disposal — of the person being dominated. And if we wander into my corner of the universe, Planet Third Thing, we discover that every form of government is invalid, because every form of government is validated in imagination alone, in dementia.

Kind of a problem if, like Rand, like Nozick, you want a state at any price.

But Aristotle said we must follow the argument wherever it leads. Well, what if we do? We arrive at anarchism, of course. Not for any affirmative reason, but simply by the process of elimination. There are good, sound, well-reasoned arguments for affirming anarchism as a political philosophy, but they’re beyond the scope of this essay. But we have kicked the stilts out from under two millennia of political philosophers, and their living exponents are probably not very happy about it. We have shown that their basic question — how can we dominate people without claiming that “might makes right”? — is nonsense. What can we say to them when they demand to know, as they will, “Well then, what does make sense?”

What does make sense…?

Rationality makes sense, of course. Claiming to have a different identity as a thing because you carry a weapon makes no sense, obviously, and there is no end of snickering to be had at the expense of those stupid, stupid savages. But claiming to have a different identity as a thing because you uphold a peculiar idea or carry a ceremonial totem also makes no sense, and we refrain from snickering only because the advocates of these sorts of positions are barely visible behind the fog of their rationalizations. But what makes sense, obviously, is acting upon things according to their own true, unchangeable identity.

Anything else is insanity, and it is a testament to the foggy facility of the political philosophers that it is necessary to say that it is insane to attempt to act toward human beings as if they were something else.

I am discrete, separate, detached. I am not a part of you and you are not a part of me and we are not together parts of something else. I am free. My actions are initiated and controlled solely from within my body, operating on the direction of my mind. There is no circumstance by which you or anyone else can assert control over my mind or my body. I am sovereign. My body is a dominion over which I alone am master — not as a matter of right, but as a matter of physiology. I have the capacity to defend my life from any peril that presents itself, and there is nothing you can do, short of killing me, to deny me the power of self-defense. To dominate me, you must use force, and your use of force is your admission that I am not your property to do with as you choose.

And you are just like me. We are alike as things, equal in our separateness, our freedom, our sovereignty. We are alike in our equal possession of the power to act in self-defense, and we are alike in our ability to comprehend that we have this power. Considered as things, we are the same thing, and there can be no rational basis for concluding otherwise. We can conclude differently, or pretend that we have, but we cannot justify such a conclusion in reason.

We cannot dominate people without claiming that “might makes right”. And we cannot rationally claim that “might makes right”. Ergo, we cannot in justice attempt to dominate each other. We can do it, if we want, but cannot justify it in reason.

Trying to justify domination, trying to rationalize it with the Third Thing, has unhappy consequences, as we can see all around us. Again it is absurd that we need to say this, but we do: operating from insane premises results in insane conclusions. It’s not the gang-banger with the AR-15 who is crazy, it’s the political philosopher who stands on the curb sputtering, “Should not! Must not! Cannot!”

Does.

What doesn’t make sense is striving to contrive ever more absurd Rube Goldberg machines, senseless contraptions that enable you to drive away in my car but forbid the gang-banger to drive away in yours, all without anybody getting hurt. You can do this if you want, but it should surprise no one that the trousered, inhibited savages will lose every battle to the uninhibited, naked savages.

And what does make sense is to renounce savagery. This is what the political philosophers has been aiming at for 2,000 years, and it’s no stain on them that they missed a target they couldn’t see and could barely imagine. Civilization is the slow march to the recognition that each of us is separate from all the others, that each of us is free from all the others, and that each of us is sovereign to rule over our own lives. We have risen from the animals, and the animals have never tired of demanding that we rejoin them. But we are human — unique among creatures — as we leave the savagery of the animals behind us.

What makes sense is to acknowledge that we cannot actually dominate one another, that we stare tragedy right in the face whenever we try to dominate one another. What makes sense is to devote our incomparable minds to discovering ways to live together without attempts at domination. We can do this, of course. We already do it almost all of the time. And I can name dozens of simple and effective non-coercive ways of dealing with people who insist on attempting domination. That is also beyond the scope of this essay, but it is sufficient to say that it is possible for human beings to find ways to get along without pushing each other around at gunpoint. And again this is an absurdity that is necessary to state: we can live without killing each other. In peace, in harmony, in prosperity, in splendor…

The bay-trees in our country are all wither’d
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth
And lean-look’d prophets whisper fearful change;
Rich men look sad and ruffians dance and leap,
The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,
The other to enjoy by rage and war:
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.

William Shakespeare, Richard II

We rub our eyes at the dawn of a new millennium, and for this reason if for no other, people are awake to the possibility of new and better ideas. We have them — a nearly perfect roadmap to civilization — and we are skilled at conveying our philosophy.

Our appeal as libertarians to the rest of the political spectrum is our immense consistency. They see us from a distance, and we appear to them to be monolithic in our advocacy of human liberty. Well we are, almost. But that little bit of corruption, that tiny little claim that force can sometimes be justified, will in due course destroy the rest. Just like the last time.

Savagery does not make sense. The proto-savagery called statesmanship does not make sense. What makes sense is the renunciation of savagery, the renunciation of “might makes right”.

We can convince them of what is right. Probably we can’t convert them by the busload, but they are listening to us, and they never were before. We can tell them about the Third Thing all day and all night, describe it in perfect and loving detail, and in short order they will stop listening; they’ve heard it all before, after all, and the competing brands of imaginary amulets are kinder, gentler and more forgiving. Or we can strive to convince them of what is really right. But first we have to discover it.

I’ve known for more than a year that I want to write a book about what we’re getting wrong.

As a species, that is.

Through all of human history.

Surely that’s a man-sized ambition — and perhaps also a new high-water mark for the abstract concept denoted by the word “hubris.”

That’s as may be. In truth, this is an undertaking I would rather not undertake. For one thing, I’m busy and, in consequence, I’m physically tired much of the time. For another, this is less a thankless job than it is a task for which I can reasonably expect to be punished. Not officially punished, one may hope, but it seems likely that I will be derided, hectored or hounded as I proceed with this project. I don’t shun that sort of thing, not ever, but it’s not something I actively court.

But none of that matters. The ideas I want to talk about drive me wild — in the best of all possible senses. I abhor every form of the claim of unchosen duty, and yet I feel that I must go through all this, that I cannot live in peace, much less die in peace, until I have transcribed every bit of everything that races through my brain.

But I can laugh at myself, too, so much am I alike, in my incipient dotage, to Dostoevsky’s Underground Man: “I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man.” Saving the world is a madman’s obsession, after all, a belfry awaiting its loyal complement of bats.

So that’s one caveat, one of plenty more to come: I might be completely mad. Or I might simply be madly wrong. Or I might be so cloyingly clever as a demagogue that I can make you think that wrong is right and right is wrong. I believe with everything I have within me that I am telling the full truth about everything I understand, but I understand, too well, that your mind is your own to maintain. I will do my best to speak the truth as best as I can, but I will also point out what I consider to be weaknesses in my arguments, as I go along, so that you can be that much better prepared to maintain your own mind.

There’s more: I have no education to speak of, and I bear my ignorance like a curse, like a bloody caul over my eyes, obscuring everything I see. I’m a clumsy oaf in Latin, and I have no Greek at all. I am a mongrel dog without pedigree, so much a child of the gutter as to make making distinctions a vanity. I argue well, I think, and I hope validly, but I want to give you every excuse I can think of to dismiss me, to turn your back and insist — at full voice — that there is nothing here of interest to you or to anyone. I don’t reject your disagreement, but I don’t intend to waste my time on people seeking to undermine my case. If you want to spurn this offering of my mind, you could not possibly want that outcome more than I do.

Even so, I want to do my best to be nice about this. I’m not a nice person, and I suffer fools very badly, but I am not doing this to whip anyone into line. Too much the contrary! It happens that much of what I have to talk about will cause just about everyone some pain, but neither pain nor pain-compliance are among my objectives.

Again: Too much the contrary! The essence of everything I have to say, the thing humanity has gotten most wrong through all of human history, is an idea I call Splendor. We’ll define that concept again and again, as we go along, but this is the shortest definition I have come up with so far:

Splendor is the interior experience of being so enthralled by the act of creating the values that contribute to and ultimately comprise your idealized perfect self that, while you are experiencing it, you are your idealized perfect self.

What is the meaning of life? What is the purpose of man’s existence on Earth? The objective of questions like those two and many others is to absolve the questioner’s furtively pre-planned failures in advance. But the purpose of a properly functioning human consciousness is Splendor. Whether or not there is anything like a designer of the human mind, Splendor is what the human mind is designed to do.

And that’s what this book is about, this instead-of-a-book for now. I have a lot to talk about, and for a solid year I’ve been thinking about how to commence. But I had no idea how to begin this project until I understood that — no matter how much Squalor we might have to slog through to understand the mess we have made of the world — the proper subject and object of all truly human thought is Splendor — attaining it, sustaining it, transmitting it to and cultivating it within other human minds, spreading it to every last corner of this too-often-benighted orb.

Do you want to talk about ambition? I know how to heal the global economy. I know how to win the War on Terror. I know how best to safeguard the environment, and how, even, to rid the world of virtually all conflict. I wrote the headline above — “Save the world from home in your spare time!” — a long time ago as a parody of matchbook advertisements. But it’s really no joke: I can show you and your neighbors and everyone on the planet how to save the world — how to make this world the paradise we have so far only dared to imagine in other realms.

How much more ambition must I claim for myself? This much, at least: I am writing this now in the hope that humanity can avoid yet another Dark Age, yet another descent into centuries of tyranny and unreason. But it seems plausible to me that I might well be writing to the other side of that awful crevasse. It is hubris indeed to plant myself in the path of Socrates as he saves the human race for the third time, but the world needs saving for a third time because of the vital work the Greeks and their children of the mind have never yet been fully able to accomplish.

To the Greeks, to the Romans, to the British and to the Americans, each at the finest moments in their histories, individual human beings were suffered to be free in their bodies. But never in human history have we acknowledged the simple ontological fact that the human mind, by its nature, is free of every bond that might be imposed upon it by other people.

When we “suffer” human liberty, we imply that the natural and ongoing state of human existence is slavery, an existence confined by cages and chains, constrained by whips and guns and contained, ultimately, by a silent language of shame and fear. But every bit of this is false. The would be masters of human minds require chains and whips and fear to effect their tyranny precisely because the human mind cannot be compelled by any force whatever. You cannot be caused to believe some external doctrine, and you cannot be prevented from upholding whatever ideas you might choose. You can be pushed around like a barrel or locked up like an animal. But you cannot be controlled by anyone, ever, from the outside.

The purpose of human consciousness is Splendor, but Splendor is itself a secondary consequence of a properly-functioning human mind. And the nature of that mind, thriving in delight, aglow with wonder for itself? The inescapable ontological nature of the human mind is independence. That’s not an “ought,” not a moral ideal invented by the Greeks, cherished and improved upon by their students. This is simply the way we are made, the way all of us are made, no matter how oppressive our upbringing might have been.

I would free the Americans because I am one — and I crave freedom with an American’s outsized hunger. But there are people on this Earth who are much more terribly constrained than the Americans, and I would deliver the gifts of Splendor to them, as well. I know what I want to say, and I believe that if I can say it in the way it should be said, I can correct this awful error, this awful omission of the Greeks, for every one of us, forevermore.

That’s right. You, too, can save the world — forevermore — from home in your spare time! It’s not even hard — and that just by itself is funny to me. The errors we make, the errors we have always made, are pitiful and small. Here’s what I want for you, here’s what I want for me, here’s what I want for all of us: I want for the human race to be admirable and immense. Consciously. Conscientiously. Constantly.

I can’t say that people will do as I advise them to — although you can rest assured that my advice will never extend beyond rational persuasion. But I know that what I have to say is important, and I know that if some people elect to pursue and perfect the ideas discussed here, they will live better, happier lives. And if enough people act upon these ideas, the world around them will change for the better, too.

Can I promise you a better world? No, alas. All I can do is show you the world as I can envision it. If I am mad, to do as I do will result in disaster. And if I am wrong, willfully or not, so much the worse. But in the end I am doing this because I must, because I desperately want for my fellow human beings to do better — to be better — and so I am taking the time to explain what I know about the science of being a better human being.

What you do about it — now or later or never — is your business.

“Choose your corner, pick away at it carefully, intensely and to the best of your ability and that way you might change the world.”Charles Eames

“You gotta pick your battles”.-Mom

There are dragons at the drawbridge, there are demons inside the fortress. The goal is to understand which dragons are the threat and which demons must be purged.

Physical safety is mandatory. Health is a priority: Physical, mental, emotional, spiritual health. Health, safety, and security must be maintained or created, the rest is going to depend on personality, time, desire. You gotta pick your battles, although, once health is attained the rest is simply a matter of balance.

I can’t do anything unless I’m brutally honest with myself about what is going on. What must be done? What should be done? What could be done? What can’t be done? How will it affect the balance in my life? Can I answer these questions honestly? If not, who can help me find the truth?

Then, you have to get to work. Every day. Wake up ready, get something accomplished, go to bed satisfied. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Adjust as necessary, find the truth always, get something accomplished every day.

I’m not sure the method is as important as the doing, especially at first. Just doing something that chips away at a goal is often enough to attain a goal. Might not be the most productive way to do something, but it’s usually, for most of us, enough to be productive, enough to produce good, repeatable, bankable results. Worrying the methods can get in the way of some productivity. Nike was right- Just do it.

Some of the demons and dragons I’m fighting: Daily advertising and improved qualifying processes, record-keeping and management processes. Changing my diet, exercise. Goal is to spend no more than 3 hours on either group of tasks, and to become efficient enough at everything to whittle them down to 4 hours per day. More if I choose, but I want it to be a choice, not necessity.

The “Why”. Everyone needs to know why they do whatever they do. Me? I want time. I am trying to create time.

I edited 1,407 files in 1,407 folders on Friday. Not by hand, mind you. That would have been a tedious and error-prone path to an inevitable suicide for someone like me. No, I built a spider to do the job, and it took a surprisingly long time to run — almost four minutes.

But I wanted to put the Phoenix Area Headlines Scenius scene into every engenu web page we’ve built so far, and that entailed editing 1,407 files in 1,407 folders — dispersed among thousands of folders in dozens of domains all over our file server.

I didn’t really edit them, of course. Software doesn’t work that way. I sucked the files to be altered into memory, concatenated my new code on at the end, killed the original file and then wrote down my new version under the same name. I built the engenu file architecture anticipating that I might want to do things like this.

And that kind of thing makes me a hard sell on the idea of Attitude with a capital A. I definitely believe in working from a positive frame of mind toward positive goals — all based firmly in reason and logic. But it doesn’t matter how many times you say, “I can do it!” — if you don’t actually know how to edit 1,407 files in four minutes. Attitude is nothing without Aptitude.

But Aptitude is nothing without Application. We are all of us buried up to our necks in work we could be doing, and our success at digging ourselves out is entirely a function of how we apply ourselves.

Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” For most of my life, I’ve regarded that as being the essence of human character. But there is an interesting question about those 1,407 engenu pages: Where did they come from?

Each one of those engenu folders represents a web page, and many of them are grouped together into web sites. A single-property web site might consist of 20 or more engenu folders. An extensive home search could run to 60 or more folders — 60 or more web pages linked into a hierarchical web site.

There are two people working in this brokerage — Cathleen Collins and myself. We’ve had engenu available for live work for ten months today. And in those ten months, on top of everything else we’ve been doing, we’ve managed to pound out 1,407 unique web pages for our clients.

So I’m changing my bet. Application still comes first with me. To make dinner, you have to want to make dinner and you have to know how to make dinner. But you won’t eat until you actually make dinner. Attitude and Aptitude can make you hunger for success, but only hard work will fill your belly.

You can’t do your best work without wanting to do your best. And you can’t do your best without knowing how to do your best. But no matter how hard you work, you cannot do your best work without combining the best of your will with the best of your mind and the best of your laboring.

It’s the three together — Attitude, Aptitude and Application — that slay dragons and then serve up dragon stew.

I don’t do well in despair.

Clarify that. I don’t mean that, when I find myself in despair, I fare especially badly.

What is mean is, if despair were a classroom discipline for which one could be tested and graded, I would probably flunk out.

I’ve lived through some ugly stuff in my life — who hasn’t? — but mostly I didn’t notice. I’m good at thinking — or so I like to think. And, good at it or not, I really do like to think. But I can only think about one thing at a time. For most of my time, for most of my life, I like to think about work. I like to think about what I’m doing. I like to think about what I’m getting done.

That doesn’t leave much room in my mind for despair. Or depression. Or gloom or sadness or fear or doubt or pain or worry or any of the things that people talk about when they’re not talking about work. I know about those ideas, much as I know about ideas like schadenfreude or universal guilt, things that I’ve heard about or read about but never seen from the inside.

You could say that’s my good luck, I suppose, but I’m sure it’s a choice on my part. Who hasn’t known sadness, after all? It’s not that I’ve never lived with painful emotions, it’s simply that I choose not to live with them any longer than I have to — which almost always turns out to be no time at all. I turn to my work not to escape from pain, nor even to to work alleviate it. I turn to my work because that’s what I love most in my life — and my purpose in living is to love my life.

But I come up short, I think, because I’m so badly equipped to prepare for desperate times. We’re headed into an economic recession, perhaps a depression, and I truly don’t know what to think about it. I’ve lived through several of these episodes in the past, and I worked right through all of them and didn’t notice a thing. It was all just newspaper noise to me, and not really even much of that. News — other people’s business — is a narcotic you use to quiet your mind when it’s not busy enough.

And yet, and yet, and yet…

I’m willing to concede that I might look at the world through rose-colored glasses if you are willing to concede that my way of seeing the world is simply better. That, whether my way of tilting at the clouds of gloom may be in some way incorrect — according to some imaginary arbiter — nevertheless my way is the way that things get done. It’s always raining somewhere, but if you have time enough to care, you’re not working hard enough.

So: Consider this: The Federal Reserve Bank has been pumping paper money into the American economy since 9/11. Before then, really — since the dot.com bomb. This is actual inflation — what inflation actually means — the inflation of the supply of currency. Your whole life you’ve been taught — by newspapers — to regard inflation as price inflation, but this is a secondary consequence. The quantity of currency is increased — actual inflation — and thus there are more dollars chasing the same quantity of goods, in turn causing prices to rise.

Here’s my question: Since we’ve got a good head of steam going on the currency inflation engine — most especially in the past few months — where is the corresponding price inflation?

Gold is up by double or triple, as are some other basic commodities. Oil, real estate and securities have been all over the map. But everyday stuff is still pretty cheap. The “market basket of goods and services” is probably useless, by now, as a measure of price inflation. But we haven’t seen anything like the kind of price inflation we have every right to expect, given our ten-plus year orgy of currency inflation.

What gives?

Here’s what: The idea of price inflation presumes that, as the quantity of currency increases, the quantity of goods — and the demand for those goods — will remain stable. When that happens, prices have to go up. Economics 101. But what happens if the quantity of goods is also going up dramatically? What happens if the cost of bringing those goods to market is going down — in some cases plummeting?

Generals are always fighting the last war and economists are always making devastatingly logical predictions about the last recession.

What’s different this time? Data-processing, for one major thing. An industrial revolution in China, for another. An intellectual blossoming like manna from the heavens in India. The world is a much richer place than it was 15 years ago — before the internet changed everything.

Everything that is touched in any way by the data-processing economy is better, cheaper, faster than it has ever been before. We have come so far so fast that we have grown blithely accustomed to getting many, many services of incomparable value for free.

Do you doubt me? What would you have had to pay, in 1993, for the research you do casually today, at no cost — often on a whim! — at Google.com? You are submerged to unfathomable depths in wealth uncounted and all you can do is whimper about your poverty!

Ah, but it’s not the same, is it? You can’t eat a free Google search or a free Rhapsody tune or a a free episode of South Park with all the potty-mouth words unbowdlerized. But you can find love for free in dozens of places on the nets. And you can make friends for free at MySpace and Facebook. And you can network your way into a better job, for free, in your spare time, at LinkedIn. None of those are immediately edible, either, but man does not live by bread alone.

But that’s still not enough, is it? The newspaper noise is despair unbounded, despair unleashed, despair and gloom and doom unending, unrelenting, unforgiving, unsparing and unstoppable. All that and you still have an appetite!

Fine. Let’s talk about what is — the world we can see and feel and smell and touch — and not the horrifying specters that haunt our fears.

First, the productive capacity of the world has not changed. If anything, it continues to go up, even if perhaps at a temporarily slower pace. Wealth is not money. Wealth is goods and the intellect and husbandry and manufacturing capacity to produce more goods. Every bit of the real wealth we had yesterday, we have today. A lot of people have lost a lot of money, but our store of produced goods and our fixed capital base for producing more goods is undiminished.

Do you understand? If there had been a war, and if some significant fraction of the world’s capacity for producing goods and services had been destroyed, that would be a very bad thing. That would be a cause, going forward, for concerns about systemic poverty.

This hasn’t happened. We are richer today than we have ever been, expressed in terms of our ability to produce goods and services, and — because of the spread of data-processing, because of the enterprise of the Chinese, and because of the intellectual renaissance in India — we will be quite a bit richer — by those same standards — as soon as tomorrow. I mean that literally: Tomorrow.

That’s the silver lining. Here’s the cloud: The government of the United States — and probably all of the governments it routinely bosses around — are about to set on an unprecedented course of actual wealth destruction. Remember, wealth is goods, not money. But if the federal government makes it unpalatable for very smart young people to seek careers in medicine, the supply of health care will go down just as demand for health care is soaring. Again, this is Economics 101, a class taught to everyone except presidential candidates.

Governments destroy wealth best with wars, but they destroy wealth with almost everything they do. Anything that a government does that makes it harder for an honest trader to either produce, purchase or sell a marketable good or service is a net destruction of wealth. Money is not wealth, but money is the seed stock of new wealth, so, by despoiling the currency, by taxing productivity, and by rewarding stupidity, waste and sloth at the expense of wisdom, thrift and enterprise, governments systemically destroy wealth. This is all painfully obvious — by which I mean, the less obvious is it to you, the greater your pain.

Even so, it almost doesn’t matter. The Federal Reserve Bank had to despoil the American dollar for eleven years before it could bring on this recession, and, in the end, it required a lot of extra-especially-stupid intervention from other branches of the government to bring the economy to its knees. Just exactly how strong is the Atlas that is our semi-sorta-free enterprise system? Almost strong enough to bear the nearly infinite weight of ignorance of the American government.

But wait. There’s more.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon in ten years. Not to say anything nice about a government boondoggle, but they actually got the job done in seven years. And then, the Federal government being what it is, Congress promptly cut the budget for everything associated with space exploration.

Was this a depression? Only if you worked in the aerospace industry. But a whole lot of people who had had a whole lot of grounding in data-processing and micro-electronics suddenly had a lot of time on their hands and a huge need to come up with ways of feeding their families.

The result? The birth of the electronics industry as you know it. Clunky digital calculators. Goofy digital watches with huge displays in ruby-red LEDs. And then smaller, cheaper calculators and incredibly cheap multi-function watches. And hand-held games and coin-operated games and game consoles. And micro-computers, first as do-it-yourself kludges and then as little desktop boxes like the TRS-80 and the Apple II. And then — the deluge…

All of this would have happened anyway, one way or another. But it happened the way it did because there was a “depression” among people who had been very well educated in electrical engineering and the computer sciences.

Fast forward to now. Since 1995 or so, people all over the world have been quietly improving their intellectual capital on the internet. Each one of them is pursuing his or her own interests, and each one is working at his or her own pace. But never in the history of human life on earth have so many people been so assiduously devoted to improving their minds. This is an amazing thing — and it has gone essentially unheralded. Like the priceless searches we take for granted on Google, the fact that everyone we know on-line is constantly getting smarter simply seems natural to us, by now. We are on the cusp of a real Athens, a global Agora where everyone can participate and it is so obvious to us that it’s hardly worth thinking about.

And yet all of us — not everyone in the world, but everyone in the wired world — is a part of this thing, and we’re all studying and reading and writing and learning and growing at a pace never once imagined by anyone on earth, not even the haughty Greeks of ancient Athens. They built an Agora for their elite, but we have spread the refinements of the elites to where anyone can take them up, if they choose. This just by itself is an amazing redistribution of intellectual capital that has come about right under our noses.

And all of us are wired a lot, perhaps a lot more than we might want to admit among strangers. But some of us are wired virtually all of the time. There is a subset of American young people, especially young males, for whom all the world takes second place to the internet. To the extent they work in the off-line world, it’s to pay for their time on-line. They may live with their folks or with roommates, but they live as cheaply as they can, thus to be able to devote as much time as they can to their lives on-line. I am not judging these people, not their overall priorities nor what they choose to do with their time on the nets. I am simply observing that they exist — in vast and uncounted numbers.

It seems reasonable to me that, if we are entering a recession or a depression, all of us are going to have to tighten our belts. We may pass on a vacation or two, or we may drive the sedan a year longer than we had planned. Dinner out? Let’s call Pizza Hut instead. But here’s what won’t happen: Absolutely none of us will cut our broadband connections. The kids can see the damned dermatologist half as often, but we’re keeping the DSL line!

Even people who lose their jobs will do what they have to to keep their internet connections. They may give up a wired phone line, but Cox Cable will still be sending a monthly bill.

Now stop and think. Don’t despair. Don’t fear. Don’t worry. Just think. Vast hordes of people all over the world who have just spent the last five or ten or thirteen years massively improving their intellectual capital are about to have a great deal of time on their hands — along with broadband connections to the internet.

Will things get bad? Maybe.

Will these be hard years to live through? Possibly.

Are we doomed? Get real!

We are immersed in wealth we are too insensate to sense, and we are about to increase that wealth by incalculable exponents. The greatest wealth the human mind can know is the time to think — hale, healthy, fed to satisfaction and nothing exigent weighing upon the mind. This condition won’t apply to everyone, and we each of us make better and worse use of the time to think when we have it. But billions of eager, active human minds will be free to think — and free too communicate their thoughts to one another.

No one should wish for the economic storms we are about to weather — and we could wish instead that some of the thinking that is done in the next few years is devoted to ridding the human race of the wealth-destroying pestilence that is government.

But taking account that we are going to weather these storms, they simply could not have come at a better time for the human race.

You can tell me about despair if you wish, but I won’t hear you, and I won’t understand you. You can tell me about fear and worry and depression — if you insist. You can tell me all about the dark, dank tunnel in which your feel yourself entombed…

But all I can see — all I can think about — all I can care about — is the light of mind that leads us out.

The Asia Times:

America outspends China on defense by a margin of more than six to one, the Pentagon estimates. In another strategic dimension, though, China already holds a six-to-one advantage over the United States. Thirty-six million Chinese children study piano today, compared to only 6 million in the United States. The numbers understate the difference, for musical study in China is more demanding.

It must be a conspiracy. Chinese parents are selling plasma-screen TVs to America, and saving their wages to buy their kids pianos - making American kids stupider and Chinese kids smarter. Watch out, Americans - a generation from now, your kid is going to fetch coffee for a Chinese boss. That is a bit of an exaggeration, of course - some of the bosses will be Indian. Americans really, really don’t have a clue what is coming down the pike. The present shift in intellectual capital in favor of the East has no precedent in world history.

“Chinese parents urge their children to excel at instrumental music with the same ferocity that American parents [urge] theirs to perform well in soccer or Little League,” wrote Jennifer Lin in the Philadelphia Inquirer June 8 in an article entitled China’s ‘piano fever’.

The world’s largest country is well along the way to forming an intellectual elite on a scale that the world has never seen, and against which nothing in today’s world - surely not the inbred products of the Ivy League puppy mills - can compete. Few of its piano students will earn a living at the keyboard, to be sure, but many of the 36 million will become much better scientists, engineers, physicians, businessmen and military officers.

More:

Any activity that requires discipline and deferred gratification benefits children, but classical music does more than sports or crafts. Playing tennis at a high level requires great concentration, but nothing like the concentration required to perform the major repertoire of classical music. Perhaps the only pursuit with comparable benefits is the study of classical languages. It is not just concentration as such, but its content that makes classical music such a formative tool. Music, contrary to a common misconception, does not foster mathematical ability, although individuals with a talent for one often show aptitude for the other.

Western classical music does something that mathematics and physics cannot: it allows us to play with time itself. It is a commonplace that our perception of time depends upon the pace of events (so that time in graduate school seems to proceed slower than time in prison). Classical music, though, gives the composer the tools to extend or elide time in the service of beauty and irony.

And more:

Something more than the mental mechanics of classical music makes this decisive for China. In classical music, China has embraced the least Chinese, and the most explicitly Western, of all art forms. Even the best Chinese musicians still depend on Western mentors. Lang Lang may be a star, but in some respects he remains an apprentice in the pantheon of Western musicians. The Chinese, in some ways the most arrogant of peoples, can elicit a deadly kind of humility in matters of learning. Their eclecticism befits an empire that is determined to succeed, as opposed to a mere nation that needs to console itself by sticking to its supposed cultural roots. Great empires transcend national culture and naturalize the culture they require.

China’s commitment to classical music will have effects that are at once too subtle and too powerful to categorize easily. It is not that classical music helps to train good scientists, for example. Music and the sciences are different disciplines to begin with. Mathematicians who learn music, though, are more likely to cast an ironic eye upon their craft, and look for flaws and opportunity in its cracks and crannies. It is not Mozart’s sense of order, but his sense of irony that refines the mind of the mathematician. Mozart goes unerringly toward what is not mathematical in music, but instead is asymmetrical, strange and ambiguous. He can be inspiring, or frightening. Years of instrumental practice, knowledge of repertoire and study of theory are necessary to approach this sort of genius.

It is hard to explain what is important about something that most people never will understand. That is what makes America’s music gap with China so difficult to remedy. Except in a vague way, one cannot explain the uniqueness of Western classical music to non-musicians, and America is governed not by musicians, but by sports fans (the lone recent exception was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is both). Hearing music is a skill somewhat like understanding a foreign language, and to appreciate music is like getting jokes told in a foreign language. Rare is the listener who can do this without having been reared in the language.

American musical education remains the best in the world, the legacy of the European refugees who staffed the great conservatories, and the best Asian musicians come to America to study. Thirty to 40% of students at the top schools are Asian, and another 20 to 30% are Eastern European (or Israeli). There are few Americans or Western Europeans among the best instrumentalists. According to the head of one conservatory, Americans simply don’t have the discipline to practice eight hours a day.

Now all of that is interesting — and perhaps frightening if you are a xenophobe. I am a dismayed Hellenist and I am inspired — a poetical word from Latin that means infused with the breath of hope.

To my left I see the decayed remnants of Greek culture, by now a cannibal cult, drawing lots to see who will be accorded the sacred right to devour whom. To my right I see self-righteous barbarians mere days away from acquiring nuclear weapons. And then, lilting in from the East, I hear the delicate strains of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Can we hope that a new West will arise to deliver us to transcendence before the absolute worst of the old East delivers us to incandescence?

Here’s the rub, alas:

As a practical matter, though, American policy-makers might think about it this way. Until now, the West has tended to dismiss China’s scientists as imitators rather than originators. As a practical matter, China had little incentive to innovate; an emerging economy does not have to re-invent the wheel, or the Volkswagen, for that matter.

This was not true in the remote past, of course. China invented the clock, the magnetic compass, the printing press, geared machines, gunpowder, and the other technologies that began the industrial revolution, long before the West. When it comes time to develop the next generation of anti-missile radar, or electric car batteries, Chinese originality may assert itself once again. Chinese who have mastered the most elevated as well as the most characteristically Western forms of high culture will also think with originality. Anyone who doubts this should watch Lang Lang’s performance of the Mozart C Minor Concerto once again.

It means nothing to say that Identity Group X “invented” Technological Marvel Y without the context that only Hellenism provides: If the Chinese printing press was not instantly turned to the task of printing cartoons mocking the emperor, then it was not an invention in the Greek sense, but simply an artifact — the sort of thing that the Greeks, alone among human cultures, put into museums. Camille Paglia wonders why the overwhelming majority of peaceful Muslims do not rise up against the Islamofascists who slaughtered so many innocents in Mumbai. The complex answer is cowardice — the word Islam means submission, after all — but the simple answer is that they are not Greeks. We only get to see the outrage of non-Islamofascist Muslims when we print cartoons mocking the Prophet — peace be unto him alone, apparently.

Read the whole article. I am inspired most by the amount of space given over to discussion of the understanding, by Chinese musicians, of the great Greek mocking joy that is Mozart.

America has been the world’s teenager for sixty years, doted upon and indulged. But sooner or later we all grow up. When we do, being cool means a whole lot less than being talented, educated, experienced, creative, honest and hard-working. It would be wonderful if Americans once again grew serious about the virtues of virtue and the virtues of the mind, but that’s a hard breath to hold. But I can hold my breath listening for the jokes in Mozart and hope that there is much more to be heard of the classical West from the so-very-modern East.

I say that just about every time I speak in public, and people always ask me to repeat it, and they inscribe it carefully into their notes.

It’s a simple enough idea: What you’ve thought of all your life as privacy has simply been a function of inefficient data processing tools. The more efficacious the means of acquiring and storing data become, the less privacy — unintentional ignorance by others of observable facts — you will have.

If you find this idea repellent — dang…

It is what it is, and it’s absurd to rebel against it. We are real, physical entities. Our purposive actions sometimes have secondary physical consequences that are potentially observable to other people — and to data acquisition devices. Your best hope of achieving privacy, going forward, is to expire. Short of that, you might try to exist in some sort of extra-physical way. And short of that, you might try doing everything you do where no one — and nothing — else can observe you. And short of all that, swallow hard and prepare to have every fact of your life known, at least potentially, by anyone or everyone else.

This does not bother me at all. I deliberately lead a hugely public life. I’m not showy, I hope, but I never want for someone to be able to say something truthful about me that I have not said first myself. I try to lead a very moral life, but no one is perfect. But what I don’t want, ever, is to give the impression that I am trying to hide my imperfections. (Disclosure: I caused a car accident earlier this evening. No one was hurt, but the front end of my car was smacked up pretty good.)

(People who send me email will have grown used to me replying with multiple names in the CC line. I’m never trying to hide facts about my life, but, I am normally trying very hard to not-hide those facts.)

Another thing I say in speeches is that the world is becoming more and more the realm I would have imagined for myself. Mostly the private details of human lives are banal and boring. But if keeping secrets gives other people power over me, then I choose to have no secrets of any sort. (Briefs. Force of habit.)

Anyway, all that’s by way of introducing an article on privacy and data processing from today’s New York Times. I think the article misses more targets than it manages to hit, but the discussion of the massively macro-scale heuristics made possible by the internet is worth pursuing.

“The guilty flee where none pursueth.” It has never occurred to me to try to keep secrets because I know that no purposive human action ever goes unwitnessed. The fact is that most purposive human behavior is completely introspective. No one else can see — but I cannot avoid being aware of my own behavior. To hide from others, I would first have to affect to have hidden myself from myself. This is not an efficient use of a human mind. I expect I’m at the right edge of the Bell Curve when it comes to contempt for privacy — and feel free to ask me why if you want to know — but it remains that just about everything evil in human behavior emerges from secrets and lies.

And, like it or don’t, secrets and lies are soon to be dusty artifacts of the past…