Free Market Fantasy---brought to you by the Cato Institute

I got a snazzy little pamphlet in the mail from the Cato Institute today. It "goes beyond the 'green eyeshades' debate" to help me understand what's really at stake.

Apparently I too can live the life of the blonde haired blue eyed family of wealthy people on the cover. I'm comforted to discover that "there has never been a 20-year period in U.S. history during which you would have lost money in the stock market."

I also got a soft-sell pitch from my 401K plan advisor today at our company meeting. He stated that "If you get personal accounts as part of social security, you'll be able to invest money in Target retirement funds like Fidelity's."

It's a comfortable sort of vision. Wall Street doesn't want to take money from suckers, it wants to help us afford velvet sofas in our golden years. Wall Street will just skim a little money off the top--it won't hurt one bit. Stocks are safe. Totally safe. The SEC is just a little fussy about companies saying that there is no risk. Bunch of bullshit legislation passed after the Great Depression. But they're safe. Totally safe. Don't you want some?

One interesting phrase is the ownership society. If stocks turn into worthless pieces of paper, we're still owners. And if your home is in hock for more than it's worth, you're still an owner.

On Friendship

I wrote my senior thesis on this topic, so I have a lot to say on the subject. I've recently joined an existentialist reading group and I found it interesting that Sartre thought that friendships were important too. Somehow it doesn't seem to fit with the radical choosing things. Because friends influence choices in a big way.

But I think Sartre is hearkening back to Montaigne who saw friendship as a rare and essentially philosophical relationship. He thought you were lucky if you had one true friend in your life and that friendship was the most important relationship that anyone could aspire to. Montaigne also saw a friendship as defining and an essentially non-manipulative relationship (in contrast to romantic relationships). We've inherited that idea, but I don't think it's accurate. Friendships can be very manipulative and romantic relationships can be a defining relationship (in the sense of the central relationship in a person's life that allows them to define who they are as an individual).

So, if you want to do radical choosing you need to do it by yourself or with the help of a thoughtful non-manipulative philosophical friend. Ironically, Sartre was apparently personal very manipulative. Poor Simone.

I think my existentialist reading group will involve a lot of me trying to determine why I don't stay on the boat with the existentialists and where I get off. We'll see.

Workers Compensation was a really broken form of income redistribution....

And now, after Arnold blew up the box, the face of our economy may change. I forgot the exact figures, but in California the workers' compensation industry was a measurable portion of the economy. Billions of dollars transferred every year from companies to insurance companies to injured (and not so injured) workers. Workers' Compensation was generally very good at paying the doctors and the lawyers and not so good at paying the injured workers. And it encouraged people to become professional victims.

We don't have a truly progressive tax structure. We don't have a true social safety net. The court system in this country replaces more rational structures that other countries enjoy. Unless you're a lawyer, the court system is not a reliable way to redistribute income because people will pay or get paid according to luck or fault rather than need. But, it does redistribute and it is one of the few institutions in our society that effectuates that.

Connections

So, just like I was on economics jag a few months ago, now I'm on an architecture/suburbia jag. Books in this series include: The Geography of Nowhere--my current read and very excellent Consumer's Republic--repetitive and probably only of interest to someone on a jag of reading about cities and the consumerism. The City in Mind--Another Kunstler book, but not as good as the Geography of Nowhere Home- Wytold Rybczynski City Life--Also by Wytold Rybczynski, my second favorite to Geography of Nowhere in this genre
The Devil in the White City--Sensationalistic and lame--I was skipping by the end
The Power Broker--Caro biography of Robert Moses. I really liked this one too. It was incredibly rich in detail and Moses was a compelling character.

I'm going to try to quit while I'm ahead with Geography of Nowhere.

Since I've been an adult and freely able to choose where I live, I've chosen to live near where I work--within walking distance preferably. I probably wouldn't be so fascinated by the suburbs if I had to live in them. Just like I probably wouldn't be so fascinated by economic distress if I were struggling to make ends meet.

Geography of Nowhere

What an awesome book. I haven't had this much fun reading something in ages. I'll give a full book report when I'm finished.

The Downing Street Memo

I'm not sure if this is the smoking gun that people think it is, but it brings up the absolutely cynical nature of the Democrats votes on the Iraq War.

It seems to me that anyone with half a brain could see that we were going to war with Iraq for reasons unrelated to terrorism or weapons of mass destruction or any of the other nonsense that the Bush administration was pushing at the time. The reasons offered were simply not good reasons. Had the Democrats had anything remotely resembling a backbone, they would have voted against the war.

As far as Bush is concerned, either he is so stupid as to believe his own lies and therefore shouldn't be President on intelligence grounds or he knowingly lied to the American people and shouldn't be President on moral, ethical, and legal grounds.

But this has all been obvious for a long time. So, what will a smoking gun do for us anyways?

My current thought on this whole situation is that it is a little bit like Enron. The Bush administration got away with it because of greed--not just their own, but the others who were supposed to act as checks on their power. If the Democrats hadn't been so craven, they would have risked their political careers to voice true opposition to the war in Iraq. If the media hadn't been so afraid of losing access, they would have reported more honestly. If the Supreme Court hadn't acted as the judicial arm of the Republican party, the man wouldn't be President in the first place.

It'll be interesting to watch when it all turns (if it turns). We'll be treated to the spectacle of all of the people who should have stopped this mad ride condemning the Bush administration as if Bush and his cronies were the only ones who did anything wrong. "We didn't know! We had no smoking gun! We could only speculate...."

And so it goes....

Things I Saw at 24 Hour Fitness Last Night

1. A man working out for like 45 minutes with a towel in his mouth the whole time.

2. The world's loudest French girls--I could hear them over the punk rock on my ipod.

3. A man who picked up a piece of dirty paper off the floor, spit on it, and then wiped down a machine with it.

4. A girl with "Bling Bling" written on the rear end of her sweat pants

Japan and Nukes

So, my excerpting of Robert's blog wasn't entirely fair in the context of us dropping the bomb on Japan. I actually took that quote out from some parentheses.

The real issue is how do we as a culture think about our past actions and how do we attempt to make it so that we have better sets of choices in the future. And the bomb is not something we've come to terms with. We don't like other people having it but we like having it. We like to act all ethical about nuclear weapons but we aren't about to apply the ethical standards to ourselves (It just wouldn't be realistic).

On the question of whether or not we should have dropped the bomb. I don't know. If we and the rest of the world learned from it and if some lives were saved, maybe it was the right decision. It's hard to imagine a non-nuclear world anymore, so it's not a question that can really be answered.

Robert's blog

http://blogs.salon.com/0001517/


I think Robert's blog is probably the funniest blog I've ever read and although sometimes it's over the top, some times it is right on..... I love that he's an angry smart funny lefty instead of a wimpy dumb toe-the-party line lefty.

The other thing is that I get actually upset when I read his blog. Maybe it's the pictures? I think it has something to do with the combination of humor and truly shocking and appalling things that he is being humorous about. I dunno. But the way things are presented sometimes in the mainstream media (beheadings, gitmo, soldiers dying in Iraq) it's so sanitized that you don't realize that you're supposed to feel something about these things.

Robert's blog is not for the faint at heart and his humor is definately gallows humor but that's the kind of humor that makes some sense right now. And if humor about these things is what it takes to shock people, then so be it.

I haven't asked Robert's permission for this (cause I'm attributing properly and he's a nice guy) but here are some funnies from recent entries:

Get a life, get a blog, get something...

So is this what the civil rights movement has come to? Al Sharpton is like a superhero -- maybe we can call him Blackman -- who, when he sees in the night sky the signal of possible racism in progress -- maybe the signal can be the pointy-headed silouette of a KKK member -- he rushes to the scene to set everything right again?

*****

And if you aren't a conservative white male, you'd better fucking think and act like one if you want to play in any Republican reindeer games.

*****

And the irony of us Americans saying how important it is that other nations don't get nukes and "throw [their] weight around" when we remain the only nation in the history of the planet to have thrown its weight around by nuking another nation keeps me in fucking stitches. When we Americans do something, God is on our side and it's for freedom and democracy and love and butterflies, blah, blah, blah; when someone else does the same exact thing, they're evil.

http://blogs.salon.com/0001517/

Imagination

It's funny how parents are big into developing imagination in their children. A powerful imagination is actually about half way to delusional and not a very good thing. So, why do so many parents think its cute and essential to growing up?

On pictures

I was watching the girl next to me on the bus flip through a photo album and I got to thinking about why people take pictures. Interestingly, there's a girl at work has decorated her cubicle entirely with glamour shots of herself. She's an underwriter, but clearly there's something in her that wants to be model.

Photos of people seem to be a young person's game. Most semi-intellectual guys go through a phase where they take pictures of everything. Most semi-pretty girls want to be photographed. Old people take a lot of scenery shots unless grandchildren are involved. A lot of family photo albums seem to be mercifully blank when it comes to photographs of 13-15 year olds.

I guess it's something I want to think about some more.