2006 – Page 2 – Jonathan Rowe

Conservative Commoners

About half a century ago, a prominent writer described automobiles as “mechanical Jacobins” for their disruptive effects on American life and mores. It was not a young Ralph Nader rehearsing for Unsafe At Any Speed. . It was Russell Kirk, intellectual patriarch of the modern conservative movement, writing in his seminal book The Conservative Mind.

The difference between the two is instructive. Nader was writing from a standpoint of utility. He did not object to the social and cultural impacts of cars, not outwardly at least. His argument was that they weren’t safe. Kirk by contrast was talking values – the nature of our communities and ultimately of ourselves. This is the deeper territory that liberals in America pretty much have forfeited, with their focus on such things as consumer protection and safety. Safety is important; but we humans cannot live on it alone.

The Myopia of Price

Why is the commons invisible? Why does an air conditioner – and the electricity it uses – count in the computations of economic product, but not the cooling provided by shade trees? Why does Disneyland count, but not a national park or forest; Prozac, but not traditional neighborhoods and Main Streets that provide human connection and comfort without the need for pharmaceutical concoctions?

The reason, in a word, is money. What is called “economics” today is the world as seen through the myopic and tendentious lens of money and price. If something is transacted through money it has reality; if not it does not exist. It makes no difference that trees provide shade and neighbors provide comfort; it makes no difference that they serve real needs. They are not sold for money and therefore they do not count. As a result, the more “the economy” destroys these things – the more it displaces that which is free with commodities that we have to buy for money – the more the economy is growing and the better life is getting, or so we are told.

Disease-Led Recovery

If you doubt that economics has become a hermetic form of math that is disconnected from the world it purports to explain, then I suggest you read the cover story in the September 25^th Business Week. It’s called “What’s Really Propping Up The Economy?” and the answer is what is euphemistically called “health-care.” Since 2001, the story says, the nation’s medical system has accounted for just about every new job in the U.S. That’s 1.7 million new jobs for the medical system; and for the rest of the economy – zero.

How to Fix Almost Anything

If a problem can be fixed, there’s a way practically to guarantee that it gets the attention it needs. Just make sure that wealthy and important people have to suffer from it too. Junk faxes became an issue in Washington because Congressional fax machines were loaded with them. Magazine editors in New York became interested in ocean dumping when medical wastes and the like started showing up on their beaches in the Hamptons.

To put this another way, when big shots can glide through life in gilded cocoons, it breaks the social feedback loop. Those in a position to do something about a problem do not feel an urgency to do so. This, and not class envy, is the true reason for concern about the wealth gap in America; and is one reason why maintaining an estate tax is so important.

Perambulate That Parking Space

There was a time when commoners had legal rights, and could take matters into their own hands when it came to dealing with trespassers. Centuries ago in England, people with common rights to land would “perambulate” it – what a wonderful word — to make sure no bossy lords had installed fences or gates. Laborers might carry “an axe, a mattock, and an iron crow…for the purpose of demolishing any building or fence which had been raised without permission,” says E.P. Thompson, the British scholar, in his book Customs In Common, quoting a contemporary source.

These evictions had an established legal basis. Coke’s Institutes (an abridged version) noted that “[I]f the Lord doth enclose any part, and leave not sufficient common…commoners may break down the whole inclosure.” Today we can only wish. But while we don’t have many legal rights to stand up to the enclosers, there still are ways to challenge the psychology of defeat, and help people remember what they have lost.

The Right’s Own Welfare State

Why are right wing writers so dismissive of social security and other means of social support? Could more than ideology be involved – in particular, that many of them have their own private welfare system that insulates them from the rigors of the market they preach for the rest of us? That possibility has been on my mind since the day in New York that I ran into an acquaintance who recently had been fired from his job at a rightward magazine. I commiserated and asked what he would do next.

Oh, he said, he was going to talk with Bill Buckley and get money to write a book. He seemed totally unconcerned – and in New York where rents are not cheap. That contrasted with my own experience a few months later, when the magazine I worked for went under, and I had to go on unemployment, to my great discomfort and yes, shame. The champion of the market was coddled in a risk-free cocoon, while someone such as myself had to take the lumps.

DDT: Echoes of Iraq

We were on the farm in April, my wife’s parents’ rice farm in the Philippines, and our son got sick. At first we thought it was the heat. But as afternoon became evening he got worse and worse. Vomiting. Couldn’t eat or drink. A fever that kept rising. My wife’s parents sent word to the local manogluy-a, a kind of herb doctor, who scrunched down on spindly haunches and rubbed ginger on him, to no effect. He is three years old. There was not much sleep that night.

The next day we got a ride to a provincial hospital, and waited in a sweaty corridor with just occasional relief from an oscillating fan. Finally it was our turn – a kind doctor with a gentle touch. Josh was admitted right away. As the nurses put an intravenous tube into his hand, I became woozy. There followed three days and nights – nights especially — of torment. I kept thinking of mosquitoes, and dengue fever and other dread diseases. Was he still breathing?

Proposition 90 in California: They Sow, We Reap

Where does land value come from? Is it from the efforts of an individual owner, or from those of the society at large to which individual owners glom on? If the former, then owners might indeed be entitled to compensation when an act of government diminishes their possibility of monetary return.

But if land values come all or in part from the work and investment of the society at large, then so-called “takings” doctrine is itself a form of taking, from all of us.

Inkjet Printers, Patents and Business Plan Protection

It seems almost a law of human nature that we become replicas of that which we rebel against. Children turn into revised versions of the parent they hate. The karmic chains hold nations too. Look at America’s deepening class system, its hereditary entitlements enhanced by the rollback of the estate tax, and the spread of government-sanctioned commercial monopolies through the abuse of the patent system. It does sound a bit like the colonial power we once declared our independence from.

The patent system was supposed to help avert this cycle. It was supposed to spur innovation, and thus help the nation escape the swamps of commercial entitlement that Mother England had fallen into The system was not supposed to help corporations protect a business model and ensure a constant stream of monopoly gains. Yet that is what it often has become. Inkjet printers are a case in point.

Labor Day

Yesterday we drove out to Drake’s Beach, on the Point Reyes Peninsula, and the sand sculpture contest that is an annual event there on Labor Day week-end. It was overcast and a little dreary, as things tend to be out here at this time of year. But the parking lot was full, and the beach was bustling in a way that combined the paraphernalia of family outings – coolers, blankets, folding chairs – with the milling chatter of a gallery opening.

I had expected kids making sand castles with plastic shovels and buckets. Instead there were adults with sculpture tools and brushes, hunched over their work with the passionate intensity of kids. (The first time I wrote that sentence I said ”real artists” instead of “adults,” but what are they?) Some of the work was amazing. Elephants, alligators and hippos peeked from the sand as from slow rivers. Mice from the Wind in the Willowsmunched on cheese, next to a baited trap. Two feet, exquisite in detail, guarded the entrance to a walled human head.