It seems that every form of government, regardless of how despotic or libertarian, must perforce grant its subjects the freedom to do what is necessary for survival; for to do otherwise is to invite open rebellion and the certain downfall of that government.

Where true freedom lies is in the freedom to do what is unnecessary: to travel as widely and frequently as one's budget can stand; to experiment with new forms of association, both business and personal; to love whom you will and reject the strictures of uninformed morality except where required to avoid real damage to others.

But it seems increasingly certain that, if the prophets of climatic doom and energy shortage are correct (or even if they manage to be acknowledged as correct and their prophecies are acted upon with enough vigor) that the actions we will be forced to take threaten to put such a stranglehold on precisely this freedom to do the unnecessary, that mankind will be forever impoverished as a result.

If these folks have their way, we will all be living quite circumscribed lives, unable to leave our tight-knit communities, freezing and starving ourselves in the name of impact-free living. Folks, impact-free living is an impossibility. Carbon dioxide is not the enemy; it is a byproduct of nature, produced by every living, breathing thing. And its effects are dwarfed by those of water vapor, which is not so easily demonized as the byproduct of human industry and is, in fact, impossible to control.

We need to come up with common-sense solutions to our economic issues. One of these common-sense solutions is: make stuff closer to the people who use it. Every time I visit the waterfront here in Seattle I see at least one of those ginormous container ships coming in with stuff made overseas because we can't afford to make stuff in the US anymore. And yet, the only way to create jobs that pay well enough is to make stuff here.

Raw materials need to be shipped hither and yon to support local manufacturing, but anyone can make stuff close to home so it doesn't have to be shipped yet again as finished goods. By decentralizing manufacturing, and allowing every nation to take responsibility for its own, we could create enough high-value work in every country that there would no longer be a need for mass migration for economic reasons alone. (Sadly, much mass migration is the result of political intransigence and outright warfare. It's difficult to set up infrastructure when your country is being blown to smithereens.)

Another common-sense solution might be to bring back rail travel, both medium and long-distance. Rail can be run on electricity which comes from renewable sources. It would be nice if aircraft could be powered in the same way, but most electric systems for locomotion, not to mention the batteries that must feed them, are just too danged heavy to power aircraft.

But we cannot let the doomsayers cripple human society in the name of trying to stop a natural process that is unstoppable. We can certainly be wiser in our energy use, but in the end it will not matter, and we should not enslave ourselves in the name of ineffectual attempts at impact-free living.

This morning gmjambear and I attended an organizing meeting for Approve R-71 at the Labor Temple in downtown Everett. Gary was inspired to create an LJ community for the cause, called approve_ref71wa. Go Gary!

Dear Mr. President:

Please allow me to introduce myself. ( Read the rest of this letter... )

I have the original of this letter signed and sealed, and waiting to be dropped off for delivery to the White House.

For more information:
Yes we can, but we won't.
Dismay Over Obama's 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Turnabout

fuzzbearmark posts a link to this article and asks if we are ready for "more stifling Government Controls?" While acknowledging the negative tone of the question, I submit to you all in answer that tighter regulation of financial institutions is precisely what we need.

The root cause of the credit crunch is that certain banks and insurers bet, in the guise of insurance contracts that were not regulated as such, vast sums of other people's money (read: yours and mine) that certain events would not happen. Then, for a number of reasons including overextended homeowners, house-flipping, predatory lending, and the soaring prices of oil and foodstuffs last summer, the bettors lost and the vast sums of money evaporated, impoverishing most of the nation.

Simply put, this kind of situation could not have happened with the kind of financial oversight wisely put into place during the aftermath of the Great Depression, and dismantled primarily under the Reagan administration with the final acts occurring as late as the Clinton administration. Absent these regulations, there has been far too much of the fox guarding the henhouse.

Unfortunately, whatever re-regulation Obama proposes will likely not go far enough, since it retains power in precisely the wrong institutions. The heads of Treasury and the Fed have ties to the very same banks and insurers that caused the crisis in the first place. And many folks blame the Fed for many of the nations' woes, arguing that Congress should never have allowed its prerogatives of making money to be delegated to a private entity beholden to its owners (the major banks of the country) -- and some argue that act was in fact unconstitutional.

But some form of re-regulation will have to be put in place, if only to assuage the anger of the defrauded American people, swindled out of their life's savings by predatory lenders and gamblers in the derivatives markets.

When Censorware Goes Too Far

Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of s***ch, nor the right of the people to peaceably ***emble, and to pe***ion the government for a redress of grievances.

Just to wrap up some recent events in a tidy little package, I thought I'd bring up the three topics near and dear to the hearts of our conservative brethren to the South: guns, gays, and God.

( Some possibly surprising takes on the issues... )

In explanation of the current crap economy, mcfnord wrote in response to a post in badrobot68's journal:

What has happened is people here and around the world freaked out and cut their spending way back. Furthermore, banks have freaked out. These are the two freakouts that need to end as part of our recovery.

I'd add that we're now in the phase where general employers are freaking out, which only makes matters that much worse, because employers freaking out and announcing layoffs gives their employees that much more reason to freak out themselves.

Now in times like these people act in their own self-interest by saving money under the reasonable assumption that one never knows when one's employer is going to freak out like everybody else. The basic problem is that leads to the Paradox of Thrift in which the individual self-interest in saving is actually in conflict with the wider economy's interest in spending.

These are but two parts of the vicious circle that makes economic downturns feel like they will spiral on until the world comes to an untimely end. But that cannot happen indefinitely on the grand and global scale. Simply put, while individuals may decide that life in these new and strange circumstances isn't worth living, for most people, survival instincts will kick in. Plus there will be a core of positions that will always need to be filled -- and some need even more people the worse the economy gets.

So there is a limit to how low the economy will go. And while it will certainly suck -- and not in a nice way -- for large numbers of people, it won't be "the death of America" or "the death of capitalism" or even "the death of American capitalism". The nation has been through this before. It will be ugly and inconvenient and will probably hang around a lot longer than one would wish, but anyone who can keep one's head while all around are losing theirs will be better off in the long term.

Oh, and as for the title tune, Le Freak was written because of the band's rejection from Studio 54 one fabulous New Years' Eve, and the famous "aaahhh... freak out!" was originally "aaahhh... fuck off!"

Bernie Madoff with a lot of other people's money. ;-)

While for the most part I have to discount conspiracy theories of all stripes as irrational, there's a little part of my brain that is drawn to them like a moth to a porch light. And so I wonder whether the folks behind Paulson and Bernanke making the request for the bailout pulled the right strings in the stock market on Monday to manufacture that big drop in the Dow, scaring the beJesus out of Congress and the American public alike, in order to get the bailout passed. Hmmm...

On a happier and more amusing front, I was talking with Mom the other day about my brother-in-law's job at GE Aircraft Engine and whether the Boeing strike had had any effect on it. She said no, he's actually busier than ever. I wondered aloud if perhaps Bombardier might be taking up some of the slack in production, pronouncing it "bom-ba-deer" as is common English pronunciation. This got gmjambear chuckling, as because Bombardier is based in Quebec, its name is properly pronounced in French, as "bom-bar-dee-yay".