Booksellers versus Bestsellers

What is the economy for? (revised)

2026-09-24T17:27:07.229-07:00

CHINA Hunan Famine 1946: Emaciated boy begging for food in front of black market rice shop during famine. (Photo by George Silk/Life Magazine)

by John MacBeath Watkins

In Adam Smith's book, The Wealth of Nations, the following passage appears:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

       Smith was a moral philosopher, and what interested him as such was the way a system of values enabled people, entirely without compulsion, to provide for each other.
       What we expect this system of values to produce is not economic growth, it is our dinner. The object of the system is not to grow the system, it is to serve the needs of its participants.
       This may seem an obvious and mundane observation, but it seems to get little mention in modern economics. There is a great deal of talk about efficiency and economic growth, but little talk about what the economy is for.

Some questions are so fundamental, we fail to ask them.

The whole point of having an economy is to provide the goods and services a society needs.
Some economists have argued that we must balance between economic efficiency and economic equity. But if the economy grows and only a few see the benefit, what is the point of the growth?

Suppose we have a simple society in which 12 people need to be housed. Our economist works out that we need 12,000 square feet of housing. It turns out that you can build one 12,000 house for one of the twelve people for 10% less than building 12 houses that are 1,000 square feet each. Granted, this means 11 people will be living under bridges like common trolls while one lives in sybaritic luxury, but if your goal is economic production rather than housing the participants in the economy, it looks more efficient. The problem is that to reach this conclusion, you must forget what the economic system is for. If you remember what the economy is for, it looks like a market failure.

       In a book of photojournalism my family had when I was a child, I remember a 1946 photograph by George Silk of a Chinese rice merchant, chubby and beaming, sitting at her black market stall while a boy whose face held no hope and whose skeletal frame carried little flesh sat with his begging bowl before him. The Chinese Communist Party came to power promising to fix such injustice, and produced an even worse famine in 1959-62, demonstrating that more than one economic system can produce disaster.
       One of the worst famines of all time, proportionate to the population affected, was the Bengal famine of 1770. Estimates go as high as 10 million deaths amounting to perhaps a quarter or a third of the population in a region controlled at the time by the East India Company.
       Drought resulted in crop failure, a weakened people were more susceptible to disease, and the Company continued exporting rice from the region while people were starving (most famine regions export food, because the farmers have lost not only the food they planned to eat, but the crops they meant to sell, producing a market failure that is entirely predictable.)
       Tax farmers and Company employees had enough to eat. The East India Company increased its tax revenues 10% while the famine continued, maintaining shareholder value throughout the calamity, but then revenue fell because there were too few survivors to work the land or weave the cloth. What perverted system of values could produce such an outcome? One of the functions of government is to provide that which the market cannot. The Company was a creature of the market, and while it had the resources to have provided for the starving, its structure was not designed to deal with market failure.

The East India Company failed as a government because it did not serve all members of society. It had an incentive structure designed to serve the owners and managers of the Company, and failed to serve not only all members of the society it found itself governing; it did not even serve all participants in the economy it governed. It let its workers starve while the shareholders, in the short run, prospered.

       The point is, we don't have an economy so that we can grow the economy, and we don't have an economy to increase shareholder value. We have an economy to produce the food we eat, to put a roof over our heads, to provide the heat and comfort we need to live out healthy lives. We may valorize investment, but the point of the economy is consumption. An economy that produces a few people rich beyond the wildest dreams of avarice while hundreds of thousands go homeless is failing.
       And the trade-off between equality and efficiency? Is a society with a high level of inequality really more efficient than a more equitable economy? Certainly the post-WWII era, when the American economy distributed income more equitably was a period of higher growth than the post-Reagan era when inequality increased. It turned out that in a society where people could not afford to meet their needs, more investment by the rich just turned into investment bubbles.
       The title of The Wealth of Nations is a bit deceptive. It is not about achieving some sort of national greatness by producing a few men more powerful and wealthy than most entire nations. It is about a value system which can enable a nation's people to lead comfortable lives, and prosper by doing things for others.
      An economy that fails in its purpose -- to provide the goods and services needed by its participants -- has failed. Market failures require a change in the system. In China in the 1959-62 example, this meant ditching some of the government's policies. Sometimes capitalism requires a change in market incentives, sometimes, as when the elderly in America could not get health insurance in the 1960s it meant direct government intervention, in that case with Medicare. When we speak of whether an economy is efficient, this is meaningless unless we know what the economy is for.

Smith was not arguing that 'greed is good.' He was arguing that it is possible to design a value system in which the interests of the individual are aligned with the needs of society. He was very much alive to the notion that it was possible to pervert this system of values. Consider one of the most famous lines in The Wealth of Nations:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices

In a different post, we discussed how exactly this has happened, starting in the 1970s, when the class that owns companies conspired to seize more of society's wealth from those who work for them. Here it is.

https://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2015/04/on-political-movement-to-create.html

The Schatterman E-mails

2026-09-04T20:32:41.622-07:00

This is a short story I wrote many years ago, long before Trump's funding cuts for research, but it seems more timely now than it was back in the 1980s when I wrote it (originally the format was memos rather than e-mails.):

By John MacBeath Watkins

In the beginning was the e-mail, and the e-mail was with Zorba and the e-mail was about Zorba.

All were made by him and without him were not made any who were made. In him was life; and the life was the light of us all.

And the e-mail said:

To: CliveWallroose@BigLabs.com

From: Ivan_Peckerwood_Schatterman_III@BigLabs.com

Re: Annoying results of experiments by Zorba the Geek

Clive, I have had enough. Zorba Papadopolis is mooning over the little monkeys he has produced as if the world needed nothing more desperately than smaller monkeys. I am doing important work, which, by the way, is fully funded by the Department of Defense, while Zorba's work is simply a drain on our resources. His so-called "children" are a dead-end project for a need that is simply a fantasy.

The monkeys have been teasing my flying piranha lungfish, getting them to fly out of the tank and into the fan, which has killed three valuable specimens so far and resulted in some stains that will not come out of the wall. Zorba claims they are too intelligent to be controlled in the way normal experimental subjects are controlled, but clearly he has made no effort to take ordinary precautions.

I demand that his self-indulgent project be put to an end. NASA funding ended almost a year ago, and for some reason this lab has continued to find funding for his project by draining resources from more worthy endeavors. I want the experiment terminated and the organisms produced by this fruitless endeavor destroyed before they can do any more harm.

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

To: _Ivan_Peckerwood_Schatterman_III@BigLabs.com

From: CliveWallroose@BigLabs.com

Re: Controversial experiment

Ivan, I must remind you that Mr. Papadopolis came to us with impeccable credentials, and there are those who regard his work as groundbreaking and extremely important. I have again warned him that further complaints about his organisms getting loose will result in his termination and the destruction of his organisms. I have hopes that after the election next week, a new administration may view his work more favorably. As you know, NASA has recommended vastly increased funding for his work, but the administration blocked it. In any case, we should know soon whether funding for this project can be justified.

He came unto his own, and his own received him not.

To: CliveWallroose@BigLabs.com

From: Ivan_Peckerwood_Schatterman_III@BigLabs.com

Re: Goddamn monkeys

Clive, the damn monkeys have got to go, or I take my project and my funding to another lab. They are completely out of control, and because they cannot be controlled they will never be any use to anyone. The only person I know who thinks Zorba the Geek's work is any good is old timid Timothy Toole, who spends his time trying to figure out how to go to sleep for a thousand years at a time. He just told me that waking one of the monkeys after three months sleep was the greatest achievement of his life. All this guy wants is a really long nap.

Let me tell you something, Zorba's pinko buddies aren't winning this election and when they don't, things are going to look pretty dim for him and the whole head-in-the-stars batch of researchers at this lab. I'm sure you'll want my help when that happens, so let me tell you, those miniature monkeys will fit in my one big blender, and it has a setting for "juice."

For the law was given by Clive, but grace and truth came by Timothy Toole.

To: CliveWallroose@BigLabs.com

From: Timothy_Toole@BigLabs.com

Re: Termination of all funding for space-exploration projects

Mr. Wallroose, I appreciate your decision in light of the recent elections. My own project will find a home with some research institute, I am sure, but I must admit that I believe my work is less important than that of Dr. Papadopolis. It will never be possible to build starships with crews of adequate numbers unless the crews can be made smaller, longer-living and more intelligent than any humans available for the task. Even with deep sleep, size is vitally important. If the people can be one-third scale in terms of height, the laws of mechanical similitude dictate that the weight of everything – deep sleep units, control area, food supplies, etc., can be can be one-twenty-seventh what it would be with normal-sized people. What is more, while my machinery can be put in storage until funding appears, the Children are growing up, and nothing can stop that. They need to be cared for and educated between now and any new research grants.

To: Timothy_Toole@BigLabs.com

From: CliveWallroose@BigLabs.com

Re: Termination of space-related projects.

Dr. Toole, I am sorry that nothing more can be done for the "star children" project. We have extended funding as far as we can. It is now time to terminate these projects. You and Dr. Papadopolis can both put your equipment in storage, and I'm sure something can be worked out to reimburse the lab for the equipment when your new source of funding comes through. In the meantime, all current organisms must be destroyed. Please keep in mind that while Dr. Papadopolis refers to his subjects as "children" current law does not permit experimentation with human genetic material, and these organisms are nothing more than lab monkeys. I am going on vacation for three weeks, and I'm leaving Dr. Schatterman in charge during my absence. He will be responsible for winding down the experiments that have lost funding.

And he confessed, and denied not; but confessed, I am not the Savior.

To: Zorba@BigLabs.com

From: Timothy_Toole@BigLabs.com

Re: Destruction of our projects

Zorba, I'm sorry, but I was wrong. I couldn't sway the big guy. Things are worse than I could imagine them ever becoming. If Clive were not running away, we might have a chance. With Schatterman in charge, we don't have a chance. Have you got anyone who will give the Children safe haven? We must get them out of the lab before Schatterman gets his hands on them.

To: Zorba@BigLabs.com

From: Ivan_Peckerwood_Schatterman_III@BigLabs.com

Re: Winding down unfunded projects.

Dr. Papadopolis, I must require you to deliver all organisms produced by your experiments to my lab by 3 p.m. today for destruction. I hope there are no bad feelings about the termination of your project. To show my good will, I'd like you to join me in a protein drink I've been working on at 3:15.

To: Ivan_Peckerwood_Schatterman_III@BigLabs.com

From: Zorba@BigLabs.com

Re: Killing the children and making me drink their blood.

Dr. Schatterman, I'm afraid it will be impossible to deliver my children to you for execution. They have escaped. I seem to have inadvertently let something slip about what you said as regards you wanting to put them in a blender and set it on "juice," and they vacated their quarters as soon as I turned my back. I'm sure they are somewhere in the lab. Unless they aren't, for which who could blame them? Anyway, they are on their own now and they aren't going to drain any resources from your precious fish. Give the piranha a hug for me.

To: Zorba@BigLabs.com

From: Ivan_Peckerwood_Schatterman_III@BigLabs.com

Re: Setting the damn monkeys loose.

Geek, you are toast. You will never work in a research lab again. And don't think you've saved the mini-monkeys. I'll have my own flying piranha lungfish hunt them down and kill them.

To: Ivan_Peckerwood_Schatterman_III@BigLabs.com

From: GeorgeHogg@BigLabs.com

Re: Janitors killed by strange nightmare fish.

Boss, I don't think I can hire any more janitors. Word has got out that three were killed while cleaning the restrooms. I don't know whether the fish were produced by this lab or if they are just something that came in the bilge of a ship and I don't think I want to know secret stuff like that, but I can't get anybody to clean the restrooms anymore and I sure ain't doing it personally. I was in the Mens on floor seven about to take a dump when a fish come whizzing out at me and if I'd of sat down before it came out my wife could of started not takeing the birth controls. A small person killed it and I thankd him for it, but he was no baby and he was smaller than a baby.

I never made so much as I make now but I could go panhandle or something before I ever go through what happened in the Mens again. You got to get those science guys to keep the experiments in cages or something or I get some other work. Now I don't even go in our Mens but go to the burger place across the street and I'm not so sure about there either so I stand on the seat and sort of squat so I'm not putting the wedding tackle down to catch some crazy bad dream fish. If you think what I am saying is crazy and I am going nutzo you are right but the fish are real and tomorrow I'm bringing in my own Porta Potty and I'm not letting it out of my site between times I use the thing.

To: GeorgeHogg@BigLabs.com

From: Ivan_Peckerwood_Schatterman_III@BigLabs.com

Re: Cowardice in the face of the enemy.

Hogg, you are a swine and a coward and a disgrace to your profession. And your spelling is terrible. The fish are not the threat, the monkeys are. Rally your troops and stiffen your spine and kill any of those "small people" you can find. They are abominations intended to raise animals to the level of humans. The law of our nation and the law of nature allows us to do what we will with animals, but these monkeys have been made to look like humans. Zorba is trying to blur the distinction between us and the animals, and I won't stand for it.

To: Ivan_Peckerwood_Schatterman_III@BigLabs.com

From: GeorgeHogg@BigLabs.com

Re: Killing the guy that saved my life.

That little person who saved me from the nightmare dreamfish is smarter than me and nicer than you so he is a good person for me. Murdering someone smaller than me anyway don’t seem right. He wasnt so old either so you are wanting me to kill a child I think. I hope you go to the bathroom and are sitting with the fishes and then you will know how important it is to have somebody on your side that isn't scared of the fishes. I know the cops cant come here because this is so secret and the security guys are all on your side but one time one of them are going to get bit on the bottom and then they will all be on your backside. Think of that.

To: GeorgeHogg@BigLabs.com

From: Nightmaredreamfishkiller@BigLabs.com

Re: Nightmare dreamfish

Sir, may I first congratulate you on your compelling and unconventional prose. The word picture you paint of the possible consequences of Security having a personal encounter with Dr. Schatterman's genetically engineered fish has kept us smiling for hours. Unfortunately we've disposed of most of the fish and have the rest on the run, so that will remain a fantasy. We've been cleaning the restrooms for you and will continue to do so until you can replace your staff.

We are Zorba's children. Well, I mean he created us genetically, not that he had carnal knowledge of a small female monkey and produced offspring. But he did create us and he treats us as his children. When we were babies he cradled us in his hands and sang to us and we all think of him as Our Father.

He doesn't treat us like a lab experiment, he is kind and treats us as his moral and intellectual equals.

We are worried about our Creator. Zorba has lived for his work – well, for us -- and has no personal life to speak of, and now, thanks to us, he is unlikely to work in research again. We know almost nothing about the world outside the lab, so we don't know how to make him feel better, and honestly Tim Toole is in the same boat we are. You seem to be the only person we know who has a normal sort of life. Have you any idea how we can make the Creator feel better? Oh, and don't worry about the spelling.

To: Nightmaredreamfishkiller@BigLabs.com

From: GeorgeHogg@BigLabs.com

Re: Helping God

I go to church and praise God every Sunday and I never know if I'm making my Creator feel better. You get to have a two-way conversation. I can get Zorba a job as a janitor but I don't think he would be good at it from looking at his messy desk. He's kind of funny looking with the fringe of gray hair and skinny shoulders and pot belly but if he goes to my church there are divorced ladies who will pounce and if he doesn't run away they will take him over and make him over. Whether that will make him feel happy I don’t know but marriage has been good to me. I also notice he works late most nights and Kate over in Nanotech makes sure she leaves the building at the same time. She has five cats and looks kind of fierce but I think she likes Zorba.

To: GeorgeHogg@BigLabs.com

From: Yonderboy@BigLabs.com

Re: Helping our Creator

Yonderboy is my real name, not Nightmaredreamfishkiller, although I like that one.

We don't actually think Zorba is God, but I guess we do revere him. Please don't do anything about the elevator not working tonight. Kate and Zorba are in there and we want them to get to know each other better.

To: GeorgeHogg@BigLabs.com

From: Kate_Sadrouski@BigLabs.com

Re: Leaving me in the elevator all night

Mr. Hogg, I cannot express how angry I am about being stuck in the elevator for several hours with Zorba Papadopolis and the mewling idiot, Minerva from accounting. The alarm is supposed to attract attention, and I'm sure it would if our household staff remained on the premises during their shift, rather than fleeing to the burger place to use the bathrooms there. I would have been trapped all night if not for the timely intervention of Dr. Schatterman. I am complaining to our Director, and I believe you will be called on the carpet.

To: George Hogg@BigLabs.com

From: Yonderboy@BigLabs.com

Re: Memo to end your career

We intercepted Kate's e-mail. Things didn't work out as we planned, but we'll make sure you don't suffer for it.

Kate kind of lost it when the elevator stopped between floors, so anyway we decided we didn't want our Creator stuck with someone who thinks shouting will fix mechanical objects. Anyway, however she may feel about him, Zorba was scared of her.

Zorba missed the last bus home, so Minerva gave him a ride. We like Minerva. Is she Greek? Is she single?

To: Yonderboy@BigLabs.com

From: GeorgeHogg@BigLabs.com

Re: Minerva

I thought she was Jewish but I don’t think it matters to Zorba who I don’t think has a church and anyway I don’t think Minnie goes to temple. I saw her eat a ham and cheeze sanwich so she don’t keep kosher. She seems nice but is much younger so I don’t know. Her husband left to marry someone even younger so she dosnt date I think.

Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!

To: GeorgeHogg@BigLabs.com

From: Yonderboy@BigLabs.com

Re: Our Creator

We smuggled some of our people into Zorba's house a month ago, and I can tell you, he's stopped going home. So we sent some of the girls to follow him and Minerva home, and they came back giggling and red-faced, so we think Zorba will be okay. We're almost done with the flying piranha lungfish, but it would be a shame to deprive Ivan of all his creations. He goes into the 6th-floor Mens' room every morning and reads his paper while sitting on the crapper. Would it be possible to make sure only one particular stall is working tomorrow morning? Third from the left.

By the way, he reads his horoscope. It's not the divination aspect of this that puzzles us, it's the geocentric nature of that system of divination. Do you suppose that he has never accepted Galileo's mad theory that the cosmos does not revolve around Ivan Peckerwood Schatterman III?

Thou shalt see greater things than these.

From: CliveWallroose@BigLabs.com

To: Timothy_Toole@BigLabs.com

Re: Sixth-floor office space

I was delighted to hear about your funding being restored. If you can in fact revive Sen. Bull's wife when a cure is found for brain death, I'm sure he will be eternally grateful. Of course, we will only find out if the revival is successful after a cure is found, won't we?

In any case, you're right, of course, Schatterman's old lab will provide you with the space you need for the additional equipment. I'm delighted to hear that Zorba's specimens were recovered, because without the small-scale aspect of your new project design, we could not possibly have accommodated the number of subjects needed for statistically significant tests. As you pointed out, the law of large numbers dictates at least 30 subjects are needed.

I wasn’t sure why you insisted on volunteers from what are, after all, animal subjects, but they are cute little things and when you demonstrated awakening one after a week of deep sleep at the press conference, his willingness to assure the reporters he had volunteered for the experiment took us through what could have been a bad moment. Now there’s talk of broadening the definition of a person, so it’s good that we were ahead of the curve.

Thank you for your concern about Ivan. His physical recovery seems certain, but his psychiatric state is still delicate. He kept babbling about children taking over the earth, which is odd since his injuries mean he can no longer produce children by conventional means. When I told him safety concerns for our troops had resulted in termination of his funding, the only response I got was a high-pitched laugh that went on and on and on.

Time to say goodbye to Black Swan

2026-07-31T17:49:51.773-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

I guess it's time to say goodbye to my sharpie, Black Swan Here's a picture my friend Tim Yeadon took of it:

She has a rig from a racing Snipe, with an aluminum Proctor mast, an almost new mainsail and two jibs. The deck needs to be sanded, resealed, and painted, the interior should be repainted, and the running rigging should be inspected and possibly cleaned or replaced.

She comes with a galvanized trailer. The boat is stable, fast, quick to windward, and far roomier than the Snipe the rig came from. I'm asking a very reasonable $2,500.

More about her design and construction here:

https://www.scribd.com/doc/21456843/Building-the-Sharpie-Black-Swan

AI and tax reform, a modest proposal

2026-06-11T15:22:06.909-07:00

by John MacBreath Watkins

Lately, I've been thinking about artificial intelligence ("when you can't get enough of the real thing!") and the replicator economy.

In Star Trek, when a crewmember gets peckish, they simply go to the replicator in their chambers and order what they want, and in less time than it takes to heat a cup of coffee in a microwave, they have a nice dinner.

But what happens when society can make whatever it needs without human labor? Well, in Star Trek, the answer seems to be that most people work for the government.

But what are the tax implications? Here I will introduce a couple of charts.

From this websiteI https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-are-sources-revenue-federal-government

From this website: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=2Xa#

As you can see, taxes are more and more paid by people who work for wages -- all of the payroll taxes and a large percentage of the individual income taxes. One discrepancy here is that 'individual income tax' includes passive income such as dividends, and capital gains. However, the ultra-rich are increasingly avoiding both of these revenue streams and using the 'buy, borrow, die' strategy. You buy stocks (or get them from your startup), and instead of selling them to get money to live on, you borrow money using the stock as collateral to get the money to live on. Rich people can borrow at much lower rates than the poor, so the stock is likely to increase in value at a higher rate than the interest on the loan. When the robber baron dies, the heirs don't have to pay capital gains. They can sell the stock immediately to pay back the loan, and any capital gains owing will only be on the increase in value since they inherited it.

As a result, much of the money enjoyed by the ultra-rich is never taxed at all.

As AI continues a trend started with the mass production of goods, constantly reducing the need for human labor, we will need to reform our tax system. If capital goods, including AI, are doing most of the work, a system increasingly based on taxing labor will become unworkable. If labor plays a diminishing role in producing wealth, and capital is producing wealth instead, we will need to tax capital. Not just capital gains, capital itself.

Middle-class people already pay taxes on their assets. Typically, their largest asset is their home, and they pay property tax on that property. Rich people have homes too, but they typically have far more assets in forms that are not subject to property tax. We don't need to tax middle-class people's retirement savings, but if someone has, say, $100 million in stock, why not tax the assets above $5 million? Companies that have economized by not raising real wages for wage and salary workers since about 1973 could help save Social Security by paying a small property tax every year.

They will object that this is some sort of double taxation, since the owner of the stock will presumably pay a tax in capital gain. Well, see above. And besides, people paid taxes on the money they paid to buy their house, and the money thay paid in sales taxes if they live in a state with such taxes.

The Bookstore Crawl & Banned Book Sale

2026-05-11T14:39:11.327-07:00

May 22-24 Ballard's bookstores are putting on a bookstore crawl, like a pub crawl but you end up under the influence of literature.

Twice Sold Tales/Ballard will have a 25%-off sale on banned books as our part of it. To prevent disputes about which books qualify, we will be using the American Library Association of 100 most banned books, 2010-2019 as our list of qualifying banned books.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
Captain Underpants (series) by Dav Pilkey
Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
Looking for Alaska by John Green
Melissa (previously published as George) by Alex Gino
And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
Drama by Raina Telgemeier
Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James
Internet Girls (series) by Lauren Myracle
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
I Am Jazz by Jazz Jennings and Jessica Herthel
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Bone (series) by Jeff Smith
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan
A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo by Jill Twiss
Sex is a Funny Word by Cory Silverberg
Alice McKinley (series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
It's Perfectly Normal by Robie H. Harris
Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
Scary Stories (series) by Alvin Schwartz
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
It's a Book by Lane Smith
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
What My Mother Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones
A Child Called "It" by Dave Pelzer
Bad Kitty (series) by Nick Bruel
Crank by Ellen Hopkins
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby by Dav Pilkey
This Day in June by Gayle E. Pitman
This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki
A Bad Boy Can Be Good For A Girl by Tanya Lee Stone
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Goosebumps (series) by R.L. Stine
In Our Mothers' House by Patricia Polacco
Lush by Natasha Friend
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
The Holy Bible
This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson
Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
Gossip Girl (series) by Cecily von Ziegesar
House of Night (series) by P.C. Cast
My Mom's Having A Baby by Dori Hillestad Butler
Neonomicon by Alan Moore
The Dirty Cowboy by Amy Timberlake
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya
Draw Me a Star by Eric Carle
Dreaming In Cuban by Cristina Garcia
Fade by Lisa McMann
The Family Book by Todd Parr
Feed by M.T. Anderson
Go the Fuck to Sleep by Adam Mansbach
Habibi by Craig Thompson
House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
Jacob's New Dress by Sarah Hoffman
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Monster by Walter Dean Myers
Nasreen’s Secret School by Jeanette Winter
Saga by Brian K. Vaughan
Stuck in the Middle by Ariel Schrag
The Kingdom of Little Wounds by Susann Cokal
1984 by George Orwell
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Almost Perfect by Brian Katcher
Awakening by Kate Chopin
Burned by Ellen Hopkins
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
Glass by Ellen Hopkins
Heather Has Two Mommies by Lesle´a Newman
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Madeline and the Gypsies by Ludwig Bemelmans
My Princess Boy by Cheryl Kilodavis
Prince and Knight by Daniel Haack
Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology by Amy Sonnie
Skippyjon Jones (series) by Judith Schachner
So Far from the Bamboo Grove by Yoko Kawashima Watkins
The Color of Earth (series) by Tong-hwa Kim
The Librarian of Basra by Jeanette Winter
The Walking Dead (series) by Robert Kirkman
Tricks by Ellen Hopkins
Uncle Bobby’s Wedding by Sarah S Brannen
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

Look, up in the sky!

2025-12-19T18:33:00.000-08:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

I don't know why people are surprised that American voters elected Trump. We learned in the 1930s that Americans can't tell the difference between a bird, a plane, and Superman.

I imagine that exchange went something like this. We have three observers, plus a supervillain. To avoid confusion, I will call the observers Observer 1, Observer A, and Observer 2B.

Observer 1: Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird!

Lex Luthor: Why are you so excited? There are birds in the sky much of the time.

1: I think it's a red-booted Boobie. Hardly any bird perverts -- I mean, bird watchers -- have spotted one of those. Man, I'd like to watch it mate!

Observer A: That's no bird. It's a plane. I'm fairly certain that is a Supermarine Walrus, the type that won the 1922 Schneider Cup trophy.

Observer 2B: The Supermarine Walrus was a biplane flying boat. I don't think that's a biplane or a flying boat.

Lex Luthor: It has two arms and two legs, you idiots. That's an illegal immigrant, arrived as an unaccompanied minor, no papers even today.

2B: You can tell his immigration status just from looking at him?

Lex: Actually, I'm with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We're going after everyone with black hair.

A: Isn't he doing the kind of job Americans don't want to do?

Lex: Yeah, he's a newspaper reporter.

A: Couldn't get a job picking cabbages? Hey, now you mention it, he looks like Superman in those pajamas. If it's really Superman, how will you take him down?

Lex: Well, I've made a fake green card out of kryptonite...

On religion, tribalism, and the madness of civilization

2025-11-17T13:20:00.000-08:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

Let us think of mankind in the state of nature, a clever, naked primate living in a small troop. It finds a way to communicate better than most mammals, inventing words to describe objects, not just sounds that describe feelings or suggest actions.

Consider the word 'tree.' All the aspects of treeness are addressed in the word, yet the word applies to all trees, not to a specific example with its particular shape and smell. Our primate has created a category to think with, a word that holds within it all trees, and which gives each tree an aspect it never had before.

For most of humanity's existence, we have not organized our life around reason. We must ask ourselves, how did our primate feel about this new essence of treeness. It would feel as if the tree now had a new, non-physical existence. This might be poetically understood as the spirit of the tree. The next step is to try to understand the spirit of the tree, what it feels, what it desires, and how we might appeal to the spirit of the tree for the things we need from trees.

Soon, the brook no longer babbles aimlessly or meaninglessly, it has something to say, and perhaps the tree sways in the wind because it likes to dance. Or perhaps its movements have purpose, and the trees will march to avenge the blood of a person loved by trees.

Here we have the beginnings of religion. As people consider the spirits around them, some become more important than others. A dryad may be the spirit of a single tree, which will not be equal to the importance of the spirit of the sun, who is a god.

We also have the beginnings of the dual nature of humanity, the very strangeness of being human, living in the animal world of birth and death, and at the same time in the ethereal world of language and ideas. This new world, this life of the mind, is shared by all who have language, even if it isn't the same language, because the essential nature of this new world is that we all know ourselves not just as animals, but as minds. This world of language and ideas is the essence of what we call civilizations, a sort of shared hallucination that there is a world beyond the animal world.

We can think of this as the madness of civilization. This madness makes us act in ways no other animal would. In addition to the selfish genes that have shaped us to reproduce strings of genetic information, we also carry selfish memes, strings of information carried in our minds and in our stories that have shaped us to reproduce them as well. These memes may be ways of expressing ourselves, they may be ways of shaping tools, or systems of logic, or systems of technology. The madness of civilization has caused us to send people to the moon, to build monuments to our egos, to fight wars and poison our home planet. We cannot escape our shared hallucination, nor should we want to, because it has given us the tools to support more people that the planet could without this crazy structure of imagination, reason, spirituality, technology, and language.

But it all goes back to language and the strange new world we discovered with it, a world where everything has an existence beyond its concrete physical presence.

As troops of primates move around, our primate meets other primates, who have their own understanding of the spirits and the gods. They compare notes, discover that each troop knows one of the spirits better than the other, and each adopts from the other any useful intelligence on how to get along with the spirits and navigate their strange existence. The gods are mythopoetic, creatures of emotional and metaphorical truth. One could suppose that they are real, and language gave us a way to see them, although this is not necessary for this theory to work.

The stories the troops share are sometimes an excellent guide to how to live, teaching behaviors that may not be based in logical truth, but behaviors that are useful to the troop, such as when to plant crops. The stories of the gods are shared around the campfire, and perhaps troops from all around meet up to each champion their own god and share their spiritual knowledge. The troops form troupes, that is, theatrical groups to declaim the stories of their tribe's gods and to persuade others that theirs is the right way to live. The players become priests, the troupes become churches, and there is a permanent structure to keep their gods alive.

The gods are closely associated with the tribes, but as long as each tribe is willing to recognize the puissance of other tribes' gods, the size of the civilization can become bigger. Troops join together to form tribes, tribes join together to become nations.

Now, the nation can function in a couple of different ways. It can be inclusive, adopting new gods as they are encountered, which increases the size of the spiritual community by minimizing the friction between competing beliefs, or it can come under the sway of one god, who becomes so important as to be capitalized as God. Imagine someone who feels strongly about their tribe and has fused their tribal identity to one God. They can build an exclusive tribe based on religious identity. When ancient Rome was expanding, it was inclusive in many ways, religion among them. When it was falling apart and needed to defend itself from outsiders, it became monotheistic. Polytheistic religions can also become ossified and unaccepting of outside influence, and act just as monotheism does.

Now, there are some interesting things about monotheism. The way it kills off most of the gods makes it the next best thing to atheism, which then has only one god to deny. And, to the extent that religion is a power node in civilization, it represents centralized power which brooks no competition from foreign gods. In Europe, monotheism in the shape of Christianity formed a cohesive spiritual identity for a European community that lacked common languages and unified political leadership. This allowed them to treat non-Christians as heathen followers of false gods. If you have the power of God, you're good, and if you failed by worshiping the wrong god, well, it is up to the followers of the true God to mend the error of your ways.

Another matter of note is that early monotheistic religions were hereditary. Orthodox Jews were organized so that if your mother was Jewish, you were Jewish. I once knew a Zoroastrian who assured me that you could only be a Zoroastrian if your father was one. Christianity changed that, with its imperative to convert the heathen. The Muslim religion followed the same path. Each managed to carve out a recognized region of civilization.

In the ancient and medieval world, kings did not serve their subjects, they served God. Kings were part of this mythopoetic state, relying on the Church for their legitimacy. As the Church became more powerful, wealthy, and corrupt, it undermined its own legitimacy. The Protestant Reformation questioned the ethics, theology, and morality of the Catholic Church.

One way to work out this problem is with a war, the victor gaining the upper hand and wiping out the followers of the 'other' monotheistic faith. This worked for the suppression of the Cathars, but the schism was too great when the Protestant Reformation came along. The 30-Years War did not produce a decisive win for either side, and in some countries, Britain notable among them, neither side had a large enough majority to give the king a mandate of heaven. Whichever form of Christianity the king served, a substantial part of their subjects would think they were an apostate.

A new form of legitimacy for leaders was needed. And that is where social contract theory came to the rescue. Social contract theory, the basis for the system we call liberal democracy, posits that religious matters can be left in their own sphere, while the state protects the rights of its citizens to live as freely as possible without interfering with each other's rights. In short, the ruler's sovereignty is justified because the ruler serves the people, not because he or she serves God.

But the social contract in a secular state does more than that: It strives to give the people living in it the freedom to be fully human, to question, explore, and express themselves in ways prohibited in a more stringent system of control. When secular and spiritual authorities are combined, thought control is the basis for authority.

Locke's notion of natural rights, which we now more commonly call human rights, were not a description of natural laws like gravity, which cannot be broken. They were aspirational, the rights we need to fully function as human beings. And to the (imperfect) degree that liberal democracy has made it possible for us to enjoy those rights, it has engendered a blossoming of science, arts, and letters, and of previously unthinkable prosperity, never before seen in the world. We may think our lives are hard, but how many of our siblings died of childhood diseases? When was the last time we went hungry for weeks at a time? We cook with spices even kings could not lay hands on a few centuries ago, bathe in hot water, drink coffee or tea or chocolate without thinking of the luxury they represent.

Locke's description of the social contract was not so much an invention as an articulation of something we intuitively knew. Language is by its nature social: There is no point in having language if it is not social. Being human means living both as an animal and as a mind, living in the physical world and the world our ideas have created. Locke wrote about rights in terms of property because property is not objects, which exist whether they are owned or not, it is a system of rights that define how people may use the things in our society. What better way to express that people should not be treated as things than to say that they alone among all things own themselves? After that, the question becomes, who gets treated as a person? Slaves? Women? It would be nice to think that these issues are long settled, but it's well to remember that white privilege consists of being treated the way everyone should be treated, which is why it is invisible to most who enjoy it.

To be fully human, we must be able to think for ourselves, express ourselves, and help shape the mass hallucination we call civilization. When Sigmund Freud invented the concept of self-esteem, he said it came from the feeling of an erotic connection with the world. In plain English and stripped of his obsession with sex, that means the ability to effect change in the world. The problem with the mythopoetic state dominated by a single religion is that it can develop into a system that suppresses our need to be human in order to control us. The system of liberal democracy has succeeded so well because it is designed to allow people to be fully human. This is attractive to the people it governs, but it is also a system that allows the creative spark in humanity to catch fire.

But what happens to tribalism, the original form of primates forming communities? Polytheism allowed us to unite tribes by recognizing each others' gods, monotheism allowed more centralized control through insisting all within its area of influence worship the same god, but the social contract promises that people can worship as they please while united by a common dream of living together in a system justified by reason rather than faith.

Those old scripts that have shown persistence in reproducing themselves are still running in human heads. If you lose faith in reason, faith in gods and patriarchs will present themselves as alternatives. The Arab world once spread Greek philosophy and science, Indian mathematics, and its own understanding of astronomy and of new things in the world. When they were pressured by Crusaders from the West and Mongols from the East, there was a crisis of confidence, and a retreat to faith as the only form of truth that was needed.

Something like that could happen in Western society. There are philosophers who speak of a 'dark enlightenment,' an oxymoron intended to conceal the goal of an 'endarkenment,' a sort of counter-Enlightenment that purports to rescue Western culture by attacking 'the cathedral,' that is, the institutions that have advanced the goals of the Enlightenment. Only the most muddled mind could think that attacking the funding of scientific research at institutions like Harvard University is somehow a defense of Western culture, and yet, here we are.

This represents a craven retreat from the bold spirit of inquiry that has made the arts, letters, and sciences bloom and our society prosper. Its advocates would have us cower from the phantoms of imagined threats, hunker in the bunker of tribal prejudice and fear, knowing these are the levers by which they would like to control us.

On Being an Alien in my Homeland

2025-10-31T12:41:00.000-07:00

By John MacBeath Watkins

I assure you, sir, that my people are no threat
to your way of life.

If you wish to subsist
on raw steak and hate,
Hey, follow your bliss.
Just don't expect me
to be part of this.

My people are curious in every sense of the word.
Some are queer as a clockwork orange, which is a very queer thing.

Some are insatiable, for knowledge, for experience, for the taste of adventure
and ghost peppers, pursuing that wave on the horizon
until it turns into an island where the marketplace is ripe with foreign tongues.

And they will bring back their love of the world
of its peoples, its platters, its notions, and potions, and pearls,
and some will bring back its boys and its girls.

The ideology of capitalism is not the ideology of liberal democracy

2025-04-20T16:18:00.000-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

We have discussed in an earlier post the fact that none of America's founding fathers would have called themselves capitalists.

Some would have called themselves physiocrats, some were mercantilists, but the term capitalism had not yet been invented, and the system the term describes was still being invented. This matters, because during the Cold War, some people started to confuse capitalism with liberal democracy.

None of the founding fathers thought that their economic system was itself a mechanism that brought about freedom, because it was the same economic system used by monarchies and empires which lacked freedom.

Liberal democracy was born only a little before the invention of capitalism, and long before the ideology of capitalism. By this, I mean that capitalism as an economic system is useful for organizing how we produce and distribute what we need, but it was not always a system of values, beliefs, and ideas that shape how we relate to politics and society. We know a great deal about what markets do well and what government does well, and could simply organize how we produce and distribute goods and have our form of government in a separate box, but we have had the ideology for so long that we typically think capitalism is a political ideology, not just an economic system. The problem is, it is not the same political ideology as liberal democracy, though it is often associated with it. Capitalism as an economic system and an ideology proved compatible with fascism, and seems to be compatible with oligarchy.

Why Authoritarians think Empathy is the Enemy

2025-04-19T18:31:00.000-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

I have defined politics as the process by which our individual moral sense becomes the rules we all must live by. Personally, my moral sense is defined, more than anything, by empathy. I am distressed by the suffering of others, and I think causing people to suffer is a bad thing. But sometimes people think it is moral to impose suffering.

Most of us have empathy (psychopaths excluded) and this informs our moral sense. Some are balanced more toward a moral sense informed by the attitudes they learned growing up. They may regard whole groups as evil. All of us have some element of this – who has any sympathy for sadists, or for people who abuse children? – but some large percentage of us are more wedded to traditional rules and less inclined to allow our empathy to overcome such feelings. Many of my gay friends were kicked out of the house when their parents learned that they were gay, because gay people were traditionally considered evil, and their parents (well, usually their fathers) could not abide a family member they regarded as evil.

If you can convince your followers that your opponents belong to an evil group, you can exploit this often emotional response to the violation of traditional mores to tie them more firmly to your movement. This is why the Q anon movement was so eager to convince its followers that liberals were doing terrible things to children. When Adolph Hitler cited The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his speeches and in Mein Kampf, The fraudulent nature of the Protocols was well known, but the Nazis found the lie useful. When you wish to drum up tribalism and make people feel united by defining the boundaries of the group through setting some people outside of it, such lies are useful.

From my perspective, as a person whose moral sense is informed by empathy, people whose moral sense is informed mostly by the attitudes they learned growing up mistake personal prejudice for moral clarity. From their perspective, I'm a woke pansy who doesn't know what evil looks like.

For the authoritarian, empathy is the enemy, because people might identify with the suffering of individuals consigned to the torturable class. If you want people to feel part of the in-group, any feelings of empathy with the out-groups undermines your efforts, and may cause an outbreak of humanity and toleration.

If your claim is that gay people are evil and must be punished for violating social norms, the very acts of cruelty to them bind together the group oppressing them. If you have been cruel to someone because they are outside of social norms, you can only justify this to yourself if those you have been cruel to are evil.

They can only justify their actions because belonging to the group makes it right, and they cannot defect from the group without making themselves subject to similar oppression, and acknowledging that they have been cruel to someone without cause.

If someone says, 'I don't know what you've got against homosexuals, they've always been very sweet to me,' authority has lost a hold on them. Next, they will be consorting with bohemians, that is, the sort of people authority wishes to condemn, gypsies, tramps and thieves, but also rebel poets.

Force, Faith, and Custom

2025-01-06T16:23:00.000-08:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

For most of human history, we have been ruled by force, faith, and custom.
Force is easy enough to understand. The man on horseback in the expensive armor, helped by his knights, could physically compel commoners into doing his will (and for most of history, it was men who held this role, especially in young dynasties where someone had to establish dominance.)

Any enemy to liberal democracy will need to align themselves with force, in the form of the police and military. They will also need to align themselves with a politically potent faith community, and assure the people that they will be comfortable with the return to faith, force, and custom by aligning themselves with traditional mores. Sexual mores, in particular, are also tied in with religious teachings.

Allow me to make an aside here. Liberals often mourn that the working class votes against their interest in putting into office politicians whose economic policies favor the rich. If that is what they think, they are mistaken about what interests those voters. Reducing them to their economic well-being simply obscures most of what they live for.

Consider that microcosm of human society, the high school. Students are there (in theory) to learn things that will enable them to be productive members of society, but for many students, that is merely an obligation imposed on them by parents and authority figures. What many students spend most of their time doing is fitting themselves into their social environment, being pecked into their place in the pecking order, and learning and at the same time defining their place in the social order.

When you ask students who self-identifies as a bully, only the most troubled students will claim that status, but when you ask students who bullies them, it is often high-status people like those on the football team. These people don't identify themselves as bullies, but they know there is a pecking order, and they are often determined to be the ones doing the pecking.

Novelist Graham Greene, in Our Man in Havana, wrote a scene in which the protagonist has a conversation with a secret policeman about whether he belongs to the torturable class. One of the main goals of high school students is not to fall into the status of the torturable class of students. Those students will be marked by difference. They may be small, fat, inward-looking, homosexual, or bear other marks that they are not like the others.

Some bullies are not despised, but admired. They enforce social norms by making it clear that if you belong to the wrong group, or have the wrong characteristics, you are bound by the rules but not protected by them. When the state of Washington considered anti-bullying legislation, social conservatives opposed it. In the internal logic of organic conservatism, prejudice against out-groups is the wisdom of the culture, a fact clearly stated by Edmund Burke and generally obscured since then. Bullying may seem brutal, but the cruelty is the point. It is often the enforcement mechanism for social norms.

Composer Frank Wilhoit asserted that this was the central premise of conservatism:

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

He further proposed that anti-conservatism would consist of a different proposition:

“The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.”

This is essentially what the U.S. Constitution says in the 14^th Amendment, usually called the equal protection clause:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The 14^th Amendment was ratified in 1868. In the wake of the Civil War, states that had been in the Confederacy began passing Black Codes, that is, laws that restricted the rights of blacks. The 14^th Amendment was a response to those laws. It was an effort to keep blacks from being marked as part of the torturable class, those whose difference makes them an out-group that the law binds but does not protect. It was an attempt to legislate fairness, which is usually the purpose of legislation, but it went against the gut feelings and the interests of those who held power in many communities, so at times, the success of the 14^th Amendment has been quite limited.

History can happen quickly. Culture changes more slowly.

Some seem to think that pointing out that a conservative politician is a bully, or is being unkind to the homosexuals, transsexuals, and others who have difficulty being accepted by the wider society, is damning to that politician. But remember, just as in high school, some bullies hold high status. Some bullies enforce social norms. And if you say, must we be unkind to these people?, you may be seen as advocating the violation of social norms. We call some people conservatives because they wish to conserve something, and often, it is social norms. When the right speaks of the 'woke mind virus,' they speak of people deciding that the social norms they hold dear should no longer apply. Such people, by advocating for the morality of better treatment for those who have been cast into the torturable class, associate themselves with those considered by more traditional-minded people to be tainted. They fear that if their children are inculcated with such sympathies, their own flesh and blood may fall into the unclean world of the torturable class.

This is not only a strongly-held social norm, it is a real fear for one's offspring, and a real fear of divisions between generations. A parent does not want their child to be associated with the torturable class because they may be tormented, but they also do not want their child to adopt the view that their parent's norms are wrong, because they want their children to continue to be a part of their parent's social milieu. They therefore do not want their children taught that their parents are wrong in the views of such issues as race relations and sexual mores.

Tradition dictates much of what we view as right or wrong, but it is not the only source of these notions.

Religion concerns itself with the greater questions about why we exist and how we should live our lives. It is also concerned with our concept of virtue more intimately than most institutions.
The question of virtue is the question of who is acting rightly. The role of deciding who is acting rightly is a position of great power, determining who shall be stoned to death in the public square and who shall be heaped with praise and rewards. Virtue addresses the question of who may act legitimately and how, and who, if they act, will be acting illegitimately.
It takes a lot less force to rule a willing people, so if the holder of force can get the arbiters of virtue to approve their rule as legitimate, the ruler will have greater stability and require less expenditure on force.
When someone comes along and questions the legitimacy of the Gods themselves, that person is a threat to both church and state. Athens executed Socrates on charges of impiety and corrupting the minds of the youth, because he questioned the accepted notions of justice. Those notions came from the Gods, according to the state and the state religion.
I find it revealing that this happened during a period of Athenian decline, when they were being defeated in the Peloponnesian wars. It is when a society most needs a major rethink that those who have led it into decline are most eager to suppress those who would question their wisdom. Perhaps that is why we so often see this behavior in places where people fear they are weak, such as Germany during the Depression or Islamic State, which viewed Islam as under siege by Western culture. If you think this is a trick elites use to keep power, please review how one gets power in a society such as Athens, famously a democracy. One of the more effective means is to see which way the mob is headed, get in front of them and shout “This way!” while pointing in the direction the mob was going. The problem is that in a time of decline, it isn't just the leaders who feel threatened. A sizable chunk of the body politic is likely to feel the values on which they've based their lives are threatened.
Part of the problem was that Socrates did not live in a secular society, and with no separation of church and state, there was every incentive for those who could use the force of the state to kill him to do so on behalf of those who were the arbiters of virtue. Socrates was a threat to religious authority not just because he questioned their judgment, but also because of the way he did it. He started from a position of doubt, and tried to determine the truth through reason.
Reason is not always a friend to power, and it has not been the dominant means of organizing society for most of human existence.
For most of the time there have been humans on this earth, living with their strange, symbolic world of language and culture, the world has been explained in terms of myth and metaphor. These things deal with truth in a very different way than reason does.
Consider the evolution of culture. Does culture need to be rational or even explicable in order to work? In theory, you could have the people of a culture believing things that are neither rational nor, in any rational or empirical sense, true, and those beliefs could get people to act in ways that produced an orderly, productive society that is able to perpetuate itself and produce generation after generation that hold those same beliefs.
Such a society might not be terribly adaptable or able to deal with a rapidly changing world, but as long as things are stable, this might be the best way for a society to function. For example, little changed in the 1,500 years of the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms of Egypt. In such a society, kings were gods and priests were servants of God, and things went smoothly, all great and good fun until someone invents iron.^{^*}
The Golden Age of Greece followed the Late Bronze Age Collapse, a dark age in which populations fell and knowledge was lost. The old ways stopped working, the new technology of iron was creating new winners in the world and the old Gods were falling. Doubt set in, and new thoughts flourished. When the old ways didn’t work, people had to find new ways of thinking. Until, or course, the vibrant new civilization started to get old, and to fear the questioning of its arbiters of virtue. From the beginning of the late bronze age collapse in about 1200 BCE to the trial of Socrates in 399 BCE took about 800 years.
But it turned out the Greeks were real pikers when it came to fearing those who questioned the arbiters of virtue. Later Europeans made a regular practice of killing people who questioned the arbiters of virtue, and gained great power by this tactic. And great power led to corruption, and rebellion against corruption, and reformation. One of the things that happened was a 30-year long war that killed off so many people in parts of Europe – Germany in particular – that they had a third fewer people at the end of it than at the beginning.
Does questioning the wisdom of an established religion cause violence? John Locke, in A Letter Concerning Toleration, argued that people believing different things did not cause violence, it was trying to get everyone to believe the same thing that led to religious strife.

That points to a society where religion does not dominate the state, and the state itself is not the ultimate enforcer of religious orthodoxy (such as when a judge in Scotland ordered Thomas Aikenhead to be hanged for making atheist statements in 1697, and an executioner employed by the government did so.)

Locke's insight still holds. Islamic State hoped that a few terrorists could change the way the liberal democracies treat Muslims, and they hoped this would make the very regime some Muslims are fleeing seem more attractive to them. Only if they could spread intolerance would they have a chance of being proved right.

In fact, the tactics of religious terrorists are designed to force their enemies to frame the conflict the same way they do, as if those who hold differing religious views were a direct threat of disorder. Framed in John Locke's logic, it is the effort to impose religious uniformity that causes conflict. Framed in Islamic State or Al Qaeda's terms, only one faith can win, and only people living with one belief system can live in peace. Yet refusing to accept the religious extremist's frame is how the West became wealthy, peaceful, and free.

Locke's insight came from the painful experiences of the Reformation, and the wars that went with it. So, to understand liberalism, we must first review the religious conflicts that made it necessary.

*About 1200 BCE in the Near East.

The 2024 U.S. Elections and the strange new information environment

2024-11-15T15:48:00.001-08:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

News media have certain characteristics. They have paid news gatherers and paid editors who are in charge, respectively, of of gathering and curating the news presented in the newspaper, internet site, or television or radio broadcast. Editors and journalists are relatively easy to hold accountable for their accuracy and fairness.

In the wake of the 2024 U.S. Election, it soon became evident that most of the people who relied on sites that are held accountable for their accuracy and fairness tended to vote for Harris, while those who relied on social media, Youtube, or search engines tended to vote for Trump. Young people tended to rely more on social media, search engines, or Youtube for their news than older people.^*

Fox News is a bit of an outlier here. It employs editors and journalists, but it isn't really selling news, it's selling its bias to an audience that prefers a right-leaning bias. Its adherence to scrupulous truth-telling was clearly lacking when it paid a record settlement in a defamation suite brought by Dominion, a company that makes voting machines.

It is odd that so many people get their news from social media, because they are not news media. The commodity they have to sell is attention, and they sell it to advertisers. As more and more news sites are locked behind a paywall, more people are inclined to rely on social media, which do not employ journalists or editors. They display, not news, but 'content,' which is supplied by people who don't work for the social media company. What people may view on the site is not curated by an editor, but by an algorithm, which is designed to maximize viewer's engagement.

If you click on a video or some other snippet, the algorithm learns that you like that content, and feeds you more of the same, encouraging bias confirmation. If you view the content all the way through, it learns that you will have viewed more advertisements. And what algorithms have learned gets the most engagement are things that evoke fear and anger. Anger is often sparked by resentment, so the things selected for people by algorithms tend to be those that get a response of anger, fear, and/or resentment.

The algorithm is designed to provide different content to different people, and is not transparent about how it makes decisions, but in any case, its ghostly presence in our social media is not held responsible for the factuality or fairness of the content it provides. Content providers, unless they are sued for libel, are seldom held accountable for the factuality or fairness of the content they provide.

This impoverished information environment is made worse by deliberate bad actors, such as influence campaigns by foreign governments. Russian influence campaigns have infamously targeted Facebook and Twitter (now awkwardly renamed X) users. While the established social media are getting better at detecting misinformation campaigns, they are getting pushback by political actors who benefit from those campaigns, who complain of censorship

Authoritarian countries, where governments try to tightly control information, have adopted the rhetoric of freedom, condemning as 'fake news' anything they do not want their people to hear, and American politicians inclined to feel a kinship with the Russian right-wing leadership use the same language in the same way.

Authoritarian control of the information space can pose problems even for the rulers who have shaped that space, From the Feb. 5, 2024 issue of Newsweek:

Subject matter experts have long questioned the veracity of Beijing's economic reports in general, including former Chinese premier Li Keqiang, who in 2007 dismissed his country's economic data as "man-made."

One study found that without the corrective influence of a free press, authoritarian regimes report growth 0.5 to 1.5 % higher than it actually is.^* This has been so persistent and so prevalent that, for example, China's GDP may well be about 40% of what official statistics say it is, based on metrics such as energy consumption. Local officials are promoted when they report high growth, punished when they don't, and since they are writing their own report cards, they are inclined to be what might charitably be called 'optimistic' in their reports of economic growth.

In both social media and authoritarian regimes, we see perverse results from perverse incentives. In both cases, we are seeing market failures in the provision of accurate information to the public.

*https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2024/10/10/where-americans-turn-for-election-news/

*Reconsidering Regime Type and Growth: Lies, Dictatorships, and Statistics

Christopher S. P. Magee and John A. Doces

International Studies Quarterly

Vol. 59, No. 2 (June 2015), pp. 223-237 (15 pages)

Published By: Oxford University Press

186,000 miles per second. It's not just a good idea, it's the law. (a brief meditation on natural law.)

2023-03-31T16:21:00.003-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

I used to have a poster that said, '186,000 miles per second. It's not just a good idea, it's the law.'

That is, in old-fashioned imperial measurements, roughly the speed limit of light. It can be made to go slower in some media, but not faster. At the time the poster came out, America had adopted a national highway speed limit of 55 miles per hour to save fuel during an oil crisis, and the poster was a play on the motto chosen to gain acceptance for the law.

The speed of light is an example of the sort of thing we usually regard as a law of nature -- a law that can't be broken, because it is physically impossible to do so. T.S. Eliot, in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, may have told us that McCavity could do so...

McCavity, McCavity, there's no one like McCavity

He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity

...but outside of fiction and poetry, it is impossible, as far as has been so far determined, to break the law of gravity or the cosmic speed limit of light (shut up about spooky action a distance, no one understands that beyond 'because of quantum.')

In political theory, the stuff we talk about as natural law does not have this characteristic. In fact, natural rights stemming from the concept of natural law are violated all the time. This conception of natural law goes back to the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, and it is a contemplation of what it is to be human.

St. Thomas Aquinas formulated natural law as a consequence of humanity possessing reason. Reason, (he reasoned,) is a spark of the divine, and every human possesses that spark. In that respect, all humans are equal, and each is infinitely more precious than any other thing.

John Locke was not Catholic, his father having served in the Puritan cavalry during the English civil war. But he certainly knew of the long tradition of natural law and natural rights.

Locke did not just write about politics. He also did groundbreaking work in epistemology, and in the process did a great deal to shape our modern conception of the self.

Science seeks objective knowledge of the world. We see a certain kind of light, and we may perceive it as having color. The frequency of the light is objective, say for example 540-610 THz. To me, light in that frequency looks green. One of my grandfathers was color blind, and to him, it looked gray, which made picking berries with the right degree of ripeness a challenge for him. This is one difference between object and subject. All things that cannot be recorded as the physical properties of objects are subjective, leaving to the subject such things as color and taste, but also such things as beauty, morality, and meaning. The subjective, which is a large part of the world humans experience, is that which depends on the interior life of a subject.

That's a long walk compared to simply saying humans have a spark of the divine, but it does explain how different the human subject is from an object, and raises the question of how we should respond to the difference between subjects and objects. An object, for example, doesn't feel pain or object to its treatment.

But even a one-celled creature responds to stimulus. If bacteria feel pain, is my immune system a mass murderer? I think not. A bacteria does not meet the threshold of a consciousness worthy of personhood.

Which begs the question, what is that threshold, and who should be treated as a person? Slavery was an institution probably older than writing, but it involved treating people like objects. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, sought to justify slavery in the "Cornerstone Speech" by defining enslaved people as less than human, because in a moral universe reshaped by the enlightenment thought of people like Locke, treating people like objects seemed morally repugnant.

"Our new government['s]...foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

Historically, most slaves had been very similar to the people who enslaved them, usually from a neighboring tribe or city-state. The stoic philosopher Epictetus, of Greek extraction, spent his youth as a slave, and by some account had his leg deliberately broken by his Roman master. But while his master did not regard a slave as his equal, he did not deny the humanity of Epictetus, who he allowed an education and eventually freedom.

But by the time slavery was disappearing from the Western world, Stephens found it essential to deny the humanity of the enslaved people in order to achieve the moral flexibility his cause required. In fact, a great many Americans, not just in the South, bought into white supremacy. It was a belief that made it easy to justify not just slavery, but the western expansion and the taking of what had been Native American land. At an earlier time in history, such justifications for slavery and conquest were not needed. But Locke's thought had done something very difficult; it had changed what people regarded as ethical treatment of their fellow human beings.

This happened because the project that gave rise to liberal democracies was never about building the strongest empire, the most wealthy economy, or the tribe that conquers other tribes. It was about building a society that allows people to exercise their humanity to the utmost, by respecting what is interior to the person.

What Locke would have called natural rights we now more commonly call human rights -- the rights one needs to live as a human being. Locke said these rights are inalienable -- that is, you cannot sell them or otherwise alienate them from yourself, because it's always going to be you looking out of your eyes, and you cannot assign your humanity to anyone else, even if you want to. Nor can anyone else strip you of your humanity, because being a person is not to do with how you are treated, it's inherent in what you are. That's why Stephens, in the Cornerstone Speech, attempted to assert that slaves were not people.

In religious terms, the question is, who is ensouled? In scientific terms, what level of consciousness qualifies a being as a person? Happily, Stephens and the Confederate government he served lost that argument, although in some ways we are still fighting that war.

What rights do we need to live as human beings? Life, liberty, and property are the basics, according to Locke.

Clearly, we need to be alive, else what rights can we exercise? The right to live our natural lives leads to questions of when life begins and when it ends, and what we need to remain alive. Should the state ensure that people don't starve, that they have sufficient shelter not to die from exposure, that enough medical care is provided to treat readily treatable illness? Are we still alive when our heart is beating but our brain isn't functioning? Should an ectopic pregnancy, which might have a heartbeat, but no brain activity, a being worthy of human rights even though there is no chance that it could result in a live birth and its existence is a threat to the health and life of the mother? These are all questions that have been hotly debated in American politics of late.

Liberty doesn't mean we can do whatever we want, because (for example) serial killers want to kill other people, which deprives them of their rights. Locke, after all, was a social contract theorist. The idea is that in what Thomas Hobbes called 'the war of each against all,' no one is able to exercise their rights, even the right to be alive. People form a social contract so that their rights are protected from the actions of other people, and in return, they are restrained from engaging in actions that will interfere with the rights of others.

When I hear that someone has dozens of weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition, I can't help but think this person is preparing for the war of each against all, in the mistaken belief that it is possible to win that war. If an epidemic is under way, we all have an obligation under the social contract not to engage in behavior likely to spread a potentially deadly disease, because while you have a right to die from said disease, others have a right to live.

Liberty is the basis for many of the rights enumerated in the U.S. Bill of Rights. We have a right to say what we wish (no promises about consequences that may stem from what you've said, like getting sued.) The First Amendment also prohibits the establishment of a state religion, because to have freedom of conscience, you must be free from having a religion imposed upon you. Liberty is also the basis for the right to privacy, essentially the right to be let alone. This right is not enumerated in the Bill of Rights, but the courts have made it part of American law.

Property may seem an odd thing to mention in the same breath as life and liberty, but recall that Locke felt one's property started with one's self. Historically, it seems one could be property or one could own property, not both. Slaves were treated as property and not as people until slavery was ended. Women did not get the vote until their right to own property was sorted out. If you did not own yourself, you could be treated as property and denied all human rights.

Many human relationships were based on treating people as property, including the wives and children of patriarchs, which is why liberalism continues to change the institution of marriage.

Preface to The Outlaw John Locke: A republic, if you can keep it

2021-02-24T13:30:00.009-08:00

(I've rewritten the preface to my book, The Outlaw John Locke, in light of the events of Jan. 6, 2021.)

by John MacBeath Watkins

Preface: A republic, if you can keep it

America is the most successful large Utopian experiment of all time.

The events of Jan. 6, 2021, showed how easily we could lose the benefits of that experiment. President Donald Trump had rescheduled a rally nearby to occur shortly before Vice President Mike Pence was to go before congress and certify the election of Trump's replacement, Joe Biden.

Trump directed his followers to march to the Capitol Building, where Pence was to engage in the ceremony. They marched to the building, set up a (not very well built) gallows, overwhelmed the police guarding the Capitol Building, and invaded the building. Some seemed to be there on a lark, others came in full G.I. Joe cosplay, equipped with Flexcuffs and communications gear, apparently ready to take congressional representatives and senators captive. The Capitol Police succeeded in evacuating the elected officials, and only five people died in the attempted putsch, none of them elected representatives or senators.

They were attempting a sort of counterrevolution. The United States of America was an effort to find a better, more rational way for people to govern themselves than the ethno-religious states that had preceded it. When Trump's followers said they would 'make America great again,' what they aspired to was a nation dominated by Christian Whites. Yet the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, said there would be no establishment of religion. Those claiming America is a Christian nation have probably forgotten the evils of an established church, which at one point led Christians to burn booksellers for selling English-language Bibles (see Chapter 13.)

It is no coincidence that the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, or attempted putsch, or whatever it was (I favor the term 'beer belly putsch,' but I doubt that will make it into the Associated Press stylebook), happened at a time when Whites and Christians were both declining as the defining groups in American identity. As long as those groups dominated, it was easy enough to paper over one of the most radical aspects of the American experiment, the fact that the country was not based on ethnicity or religion. It now begins to appear that the next effort to paper over that radicalism will be an attempt to entrench minority rule by disenfranchising people who are not part of the concurrent White Christian majority as it fades into minority status.

The entire premise of the attempted putsch was silly. Had the participants managed to "hang Mike Pence," the intention they chanted, and prevented him from formally recognizing that Joe Biden won the presidential election, Biden would still be the president-elect, and Trump would still be the loser. It's as if an aspirant to power had heard of "seizing the throne" and decided that possession of the right piece of furniture would give them power over all the land. But however delusional the putsch may have been, the intentions behind it are tearing America apart.

Nick Fuentes, leader of the Proud Boys, one of the groups that was accused of organizing the putsch, followed the keynote speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference about six weeks later with a speech in which voiced support for the putsch. He explained the goal of the participants this way:

“If [America] loses its white demographic core … then this is not America anymore,” the AFPAC founder told the crowd. Fuentes went on to praise the Capitol attack, boasting about it leading to a delay in the certification of the election results. “While I was there in D.C., outside of the building, and I saw hundreds of thousands of patriots surrounding the U.S. Capitol building and I saw the police retreating … I said to myself: ‘This is awesome,'” Fuentes said to the applause of the crowd… “To see that Capitol under siege, to see the people of this country rise up and mobilize to D.C. with the pitchforks and the torches — we need a little bit more of that energy in the future,” he said.^*

For Fuentes and his comrades, America would not be America if it were not ruled by White Christians. But this was not the essence of the American revolution.

When the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was wrapping up, Elizabeth Willing Powell, who maintained a salon that attracted some of the brightest minds of the age, asked Benjamin Franklin what sort of government the delegates had come up with, a monarchy or a republic. Franklin famously replied:

“A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

It is now fashionable on the right to tell people that America is a republic, not a democracy, as a justification for making the country less democratic. They usually quote James Madison as authority, even though Americas is generally considered a pioneer among what are now called liberal democracies. Madison, in fact, made it very clear that what he opposed was direct democracy, in which people vote directly on every political issue. He was a believer in elites, and advocated elected representatives. When he helped found a political party, it was called the Democrat-Republican Party, embodying two ideals he held dear. For short, I will be referring to the system of liberal democracy as liberalism. It is a system based on social contract theory. The idea is that the government gains its legitimacy from serving the people it governs, in a social contract periodically renewed by elections in which the people may choose to keep their current representatives or elect new ones.

Up until America's founding, most nations were made up of territories where a majority of people belonged to one ethnicity, whose language, religion, customs, and appearance were similar enough that people could recognized their fellow citizens as "one of us." This was one of the major differences between nation states and multinational empires such as the Austrian, Persian, or Roman empires. Ethnic homogeneity had become the new requirement for a coherent political unit.

In contrast, consider this charge against King George III listed in the Declaration of Independence:

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

Not only were they building a new country not based on ethnicity, America's founding fathers were upset that the king was not allowing them to encourage people who were not English to come to this land and become citizens.

America was founded not as an ethno-religious state like those of Europe, but as an experiment in building a society based on reason. Americans would have no king, no nobility, no state religion. People could worship as they saw fit, they could speak their minds, and they could select their leaders -- or, should they find their leaders needed to be removed, they could remove them without violence. The American constitution provides two ways of removing a bad president, elections and impeachment. In adopting impeachment, they were following the example set in the English Civil War, when Charles I became the first head of state to be impeached. The theory was that there might be a need to remove a head of state between elections, either before they could do more damage, or because they had corrupted the means of replacing them by election. Locke argued that people have a right to revolution when a bad leader could not be removed by other means, and the American constitution was written to make revolutions unnecessary.

There was nothing else like it in the world. There had been democratic and republican states in the ancient world, but not states without a state religion. Even the Netherlands, governed as a republic after 1649 and considered a bastion of free speech, was an ethnically homogeneous state founded in a war between Catholics and Protestants.

There are countries where more than one language is spoken, such as Switzerland and Belgium, but America never has had an official language. The Pennsylvania Dutch (ethnically Deutsch, that is, German) developed their own version of German. Our 8th president, Martin Van Buren, spoke Dutch as his first language, as did most of the residents of Kinderhook, N.Y., where he grew up (he was the first president born after the American revolution, therefore the first president born an American citizen.) Thorstein Veblen, one of America's most famous academics and the inventor of the concept of conspicuous consumption, spoke Norwegian as his first language and only started to learn English when he went to school (he was born in Wisconsin to Norwegian immigrant parents and had plenty of Norwegian-speaking playmates.)

And as a bookseller, I frequently get old books in German that were published in Chicago, because many German-speaking communities in America wanted books in their language.

The term “melting pot” was not at all common until about Word War I, when war propaganda made preserving German culture less popular.

The truth is, 18th and 19th century America was more multicultural^{^*} than melting pot, which was fine, because America was not founded to be an ethnic or religious state. It was intended to be a bold experiment to find a better way for humanity to live together, to reduce conflict and increase happiness. Consider the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

No medieval monarch would have recognized this as a proper way of governing. The sovereign served God, not the people, and God's earthly representatives gave their approval (or not) to the sovereign's reign.

We have lived so long by the founders' principles that we no longer appreciate how unique the experiment is. Faced with enemies who wish to frame conflicts in ethnic and religious terms, some wish to respond in kind instead of playing to America's strengths, such as a tolerance of differences that allows us to absorb instead of conquer, and a freewheeling, vibrant culture that attracts others, instead of subjugating people outside of it.

Keep in mind during our journey, those who held these ideals were human, inconsistent, and as prone to failures as we who live today. But ideas have their own life; they spread and grow more like a forest than a subdivision, not because of coordinated effort but because they found fertile minds.

*https://abcnews.go.com/US/gop-congressman-headlines-conference-organizers-push-white-nationalist/story?id=76152780

*Although the term 'multicultural' did not become current until the 1970s.

What is socialism?

2021-02-22T15:40:00.001-08:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

It seems socialism was a big issue for some voters in the 2020 election, particularly in Florida.

For example, in a Nov. 17, 2020, article New York Magazine recounted the following:

“It was a McCarthyism type of pounding,” said Congresswoman Donna Shalala, looking back on the election she narrowly lost this month. Shalala had spent eight years serving in the Cabinet of Bill Clinton, the paragon of Democratic moderates, but by the end of her reelection campaign, she told Intelligencer, people were coming up to her and saying, “You’re a communist.”

The smears relied heavily on lies, and on linking to the few people who caucus with the Democrats who embrace the socialist label, such as independent Bernie Sanders, a senator for Vermont, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, elected to congress on the Democratic ticket in New York.

Part of the problem here is that socialism means different things to different people. From that New York Magazine article

As Rick Wilson, a longtime Florida-based Republican consultant, put it: “Socialism broadly speaking in the United States is a bad brand. In Florida, it is a horrific brand.” Wilson, who is now a leading “never Trump” voice through his perch at the Lincoln Project, noted that to south Florida Hispanic voters “socialism isn’t universal health care and day care, socialism was secret police knocking at their door and shooting a family member in the head.”

Wikipedia, that voice of consensus knowledge, says that socialism is characterized by social ownership of the means of production. This was most famously carried out in the Soviet Union and other Communist regimes, but the Fabian socialists associated with the Labour Party in the United Kingdom also advocated social ownership of the means of production, producing a National Health Service, nationalized coal industry, steel industry, and other industries. Most of their program produced terrible results, but the NHS is well loved, and produces results comparable to the American medical system at a fraction of the cost.

Social Democrats have embraced democracy, and in general have been more inclined to advocate for a social safety net without wanting to nationalize the whole economy. There is a huge difference between a Labour government in Britain or a social democratic one in Denmark and the sort of socialist government found in Cuba and Venezuela.

Social Democrats and Fabian socialists have embraced democracy, believing that their ideas would sell themselves to people once they saw them in action. When they failed to produce results, they were voted out of office, but some of what they did remained. No Conservative government has been able to privatize the NHS, though Margaret Thatcher did manage to privatize the coal and steel industries, where the socialist experiment had failed badly.

We actually know a great deal about what goods are best handled by markets and what goods are naturally public goods. Even the most radical of our elected conservatives would probably not advocate privatizing the military and having everyone hire their own mercenaries to prevent their turf from being invaded. The military is insurance against invasion, and the peace it ensures within those borders is not something you can easily exclude people from if they don't want to buy it. People are therefore not required to buy that peace in order to enjoy it, so markets are not practical as a means to deliver it.

But the rhetorical use of the term 'socialist' goes well beyond social ownership. For example, the conservative Heritage Foundation came up with a market-based system for reforming the provision of health insurance, and the Republicans adopted it in opposition to the Clinton administration's proposal for a reform based on having employers provide the insurance. Years later, President Barak Obama used that plan as the basis for the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. Republicans denounced it as 'socialist,' although it did not involve nationalizing anything, it was just a way of changing the incentives in the market for health insurance. The ACA also gave states the option of expanding Medicaid, a program for government payment of medical bills for those who cannot afford medical care. In states that have not availed themselves of this provision, hospitals absorb the cost and pay for it by raising prices on everyone else.

Most nations, in the end, have public and private sectors, and there is not much controversy about it. People drive on public roads and stand on sidewalks paid for with taxes while protesting against socialism. Few of them would prefer police departments be disbanded so that we could all hire our own guards. At the moment, Medicare seems sacrosanct, although conservatives claimed it was socialist before it became the law of the land.

In a 1965 speech, Ronald Reagan said, “[I]f you don’t [stop Medicare] and I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”

Providing medical insurance to the elderly was not profitable. Retired people tend to have less money than working people, and old people tend to have more expensive medical needs than a younger population. Yet Americans found it unconscionable to have people dying prematurely because they couldn't buy health insurance or pay for care out of pocket or afford expensive medical insurance.

Does one become more free or less free with the provision of Medicare? If you are not wealthy, surely Medicare makes you more free, as you can get your ills treated sufficiently to go about life in a normal fashion, rather than be bound to your bed by debilitating disease. Certainly Medicare is sufficiently popular that it would be difficult to reverse the policy based on the ideological argument that it is socialism. The other problem with this argument is that Medicare isn't socialism. Medicare owns no hospitals. It is a subsidy to those in need, not an effort to take over the means of production.

Sen. Mitch McConnel, leader of the Republican faction in the U.S. Senate, called the part of President Joe Biden's covid-19 relief plan providing for $1,400 checks sent to all taxpayers socialism. He did not call the $600 checks Republicans had voted to send the same people socialism, and he didn't call former president Donald Trump's call for the checks to be $2,000 instead of $600 socialism, but then when President Biden decided to pursue the same policy Trump advocated by topping up the amount so it would total $2,000, McConnel decided it was socialism.

This definition of socialism, then, means that socialism occurs when Democrats try to use government to help those not already wealthy and powerful. The same policies, when proposed by Republicans, are not socialism. By using the term this way, Republicans have a rhetorical cudgel they can use to claim that those who, for example, support higher funding for Medicare, are equivalent to violent, oppressive regimes along the lines of the one now ruling Venezuela.

Rethinking liberal theory 2: The outlaw John Locke, terrorist, liberal, and advocate of freedom of property

2020-10-07T14:01:00.000-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

By the time the British government set out to arrest John Locke, he'd set out for France, fleeing his native country under suspicion of conspiring to kill the British king, Charles II.

Yes, that's the same Charles II whose reign Thomas Hobbes went to so much trouble to legitimize. Hobbes wanted him to take his father's throne, and Locke wanted him to leave it feet first. He faced arrest as one of the conspirators involved in the Rye House Plot.

This was a plot to trap the king's carriage in a narrow street overlooked by Rye House, a sturdy stone structure, and rain fire down on it with muskets until all within died. Word got out, the king changed his route, and many of the conspirators were rounded up and several executed.

Locke was the sort of fellow the Department of Homeland Security now calls a terrorist.

Locke is remembered fondly as one of the giants of liberal theory, the man who made freedom all about property. Students forced to study his Second Treatise on Government (or even, more rarely, to actually read it) are not typically informed that the pamphlet was so inflammatory that Locke never allowed it to be published under his own name during his lifetime. Charles II might not be so sure Locke was trying to kill him that he'd send agents to France to kill Locke for the Rye House Plot, but a pamphlet that said the subjects had a right to remove their sovereign if he did not serve them well might have sealed his fate.

To understand why property was so important in Locke's thinking, you must keep in mind that at the time he was writing, the voting franchise in England was given only to people who owned real property and paid tax on it.

During the English Civil War, the Levelers had argued for equality before the law, for popular sovereignty (the idea that legitimacy of the state rests on the consent of the governed) and extending the franchise. They also advocated religious tolerance, a principle that became dear to Thomas Hobbes when he was accused of blasphemy. One way of saying that every man should have the vote (women's suffrage was far in the future) was to claim that everyone owned property in the form of their own person.

This expresses a conflict inherent in the system of value Thomas Hobbes proposed. Remember, he said:

The Value, or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power...

Which would seem to say that our values must be expressed in the marketplace, with money. Thus, your work must not only be desired, there must be effective demand, that is, demand backed by money. A starving pauper, then, would not be able to express what bread meant to him, and would not have his needs met. But the sentence continues on,

...and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependant on the need and judgement of another.

Must need and judgment only be expressed through property? The New Model Army, raised by parliament to oppose the royalist forces, had officers who were often difficult to tell from the enlisted men, because they did not possess wealth and rich clothing. The technology of the time relied heavily on foot soldiers with muskets and teams of men working artillery pieces. The age in which a knight wearing armor that cost more than most people would see in a lifetime was nearly invincible when faced with foot soldiers (unless they carried bows and kept their distance) was a distant memory.

It was an army that relied on the infantryman for its victories, and the people who carry the arms that are decisive in putting the government in power are not to be denied a voice in what that government does, even if they lack property. If the "need and judgment" of moneyed men is difficult to ignore, how much more difficult is it to ignore the "need and judgment" of armed men?

Yet, in the end, the new king, Charles II was crowned. The property requirement for voting, far from being eliminated, was retained and eventually strengthened. In 1712, the amount of property that was required to vote was changed (it had been set at 40 shillings in 1430, when that was a lot of money) to restrict the franchise more than it had been. In 1832, when the franchise was given to men owning property worth at least £10, vastly increasing the number of voters, only one man in five qualified to vote.

Locke's radical idea was that we are all born owning ourselves, therefore we all should have the rights of citizens. Further, he asserted that these rights are inalienable, meaning some rich fellow couldn't buy them off you, because you could not sell yourself.

That last bit caused a lot of trouble. Locke was aware of slavery, and in fact was complicit in it. He was a stockholder in the Royal African Company, which was in the business of purchasing slaves in Africa and selling them in the new world. He also helped draft the constitution of the Carolinas, which established a feudal aristocracy and made a slave owner the absolute master of his slaves. He did this while serving his great benefactor, Lord Shaftsbury, a Whig who should have known better. Locke wrote the Two Treatises of Government at Shaftsbury's prompting, and in the second, laid out his theory that we are all born owning ourselves and cannot be owned by another.

South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union, in its declaration of the causes of secession clearly stating that it had to leave the union because the North was threatening to take away its citizens' property, the slaves, and pointing out that the constitution recognized the legal status of slavery.

But Locke's subversive notion that we all have some basic rights because we are born owning ourselves resonated precisely because so many didn't have those rights. And the progress toward greater liberty came because he understood that property was central to our understanding of rights, yet strangely, while Locke wrote extensively about what things and people might be regarded as property, he never defined what property is.

So let me have a stab at it.

Property is not objects, which exist whether they are owned or not. It is the rights, privileges and obligations society assigns people in regards to objects, and a system for expressing our values regarding objects. One might even say, it is the meaning of objects. We are, after all creatures who create meaning -- it is the essence of human society. Locke changed our understanding of human rights by addressing how humans fit into this system of rights, privileges and obligations.

But we should not think this is the only system of value and define all human action in the Procrustean bed of property. It is the essence of our political system that we have more than one way of expressing our values. We can express them through property interactions, directing our worldly goods toward some end, or we can express them outside the realm of property.

We express who we value as a political leader by voting, and consider it corruption when votes are bought. Voting, in fact, is meant to be a counterbalance to property rights, a way for the political sphere to correct the imbalances that can occur in property relations. After all, we've accepted Locke's notion that we own ourselves and cannot lose the rights we have as property to ourselves, but where is the effective demand if we have no money? After all, we've seen famine areas exporting food in Ireland during the potato famine and in the Soviet Union under Stalin. One man, one vote is a way of giving effective demand to people who have no power to express their values in the marketplace.

In the English Civil War, the Cavaliers supported the rights of the propertied nobility. The Roundheads, of which the Levelers were a sub-category, supported the rights of commoners. Our civil war was not so different, and we are still fighting those wars, of the propertied and their supporters against the commoners.

Links to the rest

The Outlaw John Locke is now out in paperback

2020-09-19T14:01:00.000-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

My book, The Outlaw John Lock and Why Liberalism is Worth Fighting For, is now available in paperback. As of Sept 19, 2020, I don't have copies in the store yet, but it's available on Amazon and I'll make sure we have copies in both Twice Sold Tales soon.

For those unfamiliar with the book, it had its origins in this blog. I started writing about political theory as ideas came to me, dealing with the forgotten radicalism of John Lock and other theorists who helped us on the way to liberal democracy as a way of government and a way of thinking, and demonstrating how Locke's theories continue to change our society and our politics.

Anyone interested in the book should follow this link:

https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AJohn+MacBeath+Watkins&s=relevancerank&text=John+MacBeath+Watkins&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1

Public versus private, lighthouses, libaries, and medicine

2020-08-24T16:17:00.002-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

One of the more peculiar things about the current state of American politics is that an entire political party devalues all things public (except police and the military) and valorizes all things private.

Like many Netizens, I spend too much time arguing with idiots on the internet. One exchange involved me and an Australian librarian discussing the need for libraries with a business consultant, who argued that libraries are not needed.

"Where's the market failure?" he asked, as if no form of human organization was legitimate unless it could not be provided by the market. Markets Über Alles has long been the cry of business conservatives, but other than assuming that markets are superior, they don't seem to spend much time justifying this choice.

The truth is, we have centuries of experience and thought that help us understand the difference between public and private institutions, but few people seem to avail themselves of this knowledge.

Markets work very well when used for goods from which people can be excluded, both physically and morally. The example usually cited is lighthouses. Everyone can see a lighthouse and use it in navigation, but because no one can be excluded, it is difficult to collect a fee for the services provided by the lighthouse. In England, private companies built lighthouses, then found they could not collect money from those who used their service, so they got the ports to collect port fees to support lighthouses. Then, the profit incentive was to spend as little as possible on maintaining the lighthouse while still using the power of the state to collect the fees. Eventually it was discovered that only government had the means to collect the fees and the incentive to provide decent service. This is the essence of a public good.

At one time, excluding people from health care services was considered morally tenable. Physicians served the rich, barber-surgeons served the rest, and neither had an enviable record of curing people, so home remedies were often as effective as medical care in any case. John Locke argued that natural law shows we all have a right to life, liberty, health and property, and he first gained a powerful patron by acting as a physician to Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Ashley, not long after getting a medical degree at Oxford (Locke got the medical degree in 1665 and treated Ashley in 1667.)

As medical care improved, it became increasingly evident that to exclude someone from medical care could result in them losing their health or even their life. If we are all born owning ourselves, depriving us of such things interferes with our fundamental right to exist and our property right to ourselves.

In 1986, Ronald Reagan signed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which said hospitals could not refuse treatment at their emergency rooms for people because of citizenship, legal status, or the ability to pay, in order to end the practice of "patient dumping," that is, discharging patients because they might cost the hospital too much money. It was possible to physically exclude people from treatment, but was in morally acceptable?

Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 campaigned on a promise of social welfare insurance, including a national health service (he founded the Progressive Party, better known as the Bull Moose Party, for the purpose of running.) Medicare, Medicaid, and the Reagan-era emergency room mandate were all patchwork attempts to deal with the failure of American politics to provide a path to universal access to healthcare when it had ceased to be morally acceptable to exclude people from healthcare. The Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare) attempted to solve the same problem more comprehensively while not eliminating the private-sector actors in the insurance and health care industries.

We have, at this point, spent more than 100 years trying to solve the problem of medicine becoming good enough to be worth having, while private enterprise could not provide the service in a morally acceptable way. Medical care has made a transition from private good to public good.

Oh, and returning to the business consultant's question, where's the market failure that justifies the existence of libraries?

First, no market failure is required to justify people's desire to have a public amenity. We are free to organize our society however we want, provided we don't infringe on the rights of our citizens. If we elect a government to build public institutions and keep electing those who found and fund libraries, we are free to spend our money though taxes just as we are free to spend our money in markets.

Second, libraries provide goods from which it is immoral to exclude people. They provide knowledge, both in the form of non-fiction and in the form of literature, that people ought to have access to in order to realize their potential and to have sufficient knowledge to exercise their freedom of conscience.

A brief history of my obsession with plagues

2020-04-14T12:24:00.001-07:00

by Jamie Lutton

The last few weeks I have been watching the news about eight hours a day. watching Covid 19 spread around the world, the mounting numbers of the dead,and watching doctors begging for medical supplies, to mostly deaf ears. Learning about what a horrible illness and death it was. And that no one took the warnings from China seriously.

Like Malcolm in Jurassic Park. I hate it when I am right. I am horrified twice over, once for the world, my nation, and my city, But also that I saw it coming, and I said little as I did not think anyone would believe me. This all goes back to when I quit reading SF books for fun. Back in the early eighties, when I was half way through college, I had gone on a history kick, reading about history books that year, besides my school work..I am a speed reader, so I could read a book every day or every two days.

Got interested in ancient and medieval history, first off. Several of the books became personal favorites, ones I would re-read.

A chapter in one book sparked a lifelong interest in disease for me. Chapter 5 of A Distant Mirror by the historian Barbara Tuchman.

The book's thesis was that the 14th century was a 'distant' mirror to our own time. The years 1340 to 1390 was her main focus {she left out the great horror of 1312 to 1318, where due to a climate cooling down 10% of Europe died of starvation. The cooling was caused by a large volcanic eruption in Indonesia. Reference THE GREAT FAMINE by William Chester Jordan.) This was a time of two Popes, wars about the schism, political rivalries that shed a lot of blood, and worst of all, the Black Death killing as much as 40% of the population, mostly but not limited to the poor. And it came back, every 10 to 15 years, for centuries.

I bought and read as many books as I could on that first beakout, then went on to read about the plague outbreak of the 1660's, and the ones in the classical world, esp the one in the 7th century that led to the final collapse of the Roman Empire.

When I opened a bookstore in 1987 I was looking for a theme for the shop t-shirt. In 1993 I hit on the idea of a shirt with partying rats on the front, and the motto 'Celebrating 650 years of the Plague,' with the name of the store on it. Part of the logic was that the Black Death had made more rags from clothing available for paper-making and raised the average income, which helped make the printed word viable as a medium. And with the chronic labor shortage, the struggle for human rights for the mass of people began.

A decade later, the shirts were still popular, but the 650 year anniversary was long gone, so my business partner, John Watkins, came up with a design celebrating the next significant anniversary, 666 years, To make the shirt relevant for a longer period, he listed the history of the plague's passage on the back, like a band's tour t-shirt.

Plagues Progress

1331 China

1339 Central Asia

1340 South Asia

1345 Crimea

1347 Constantinople, Genoa

1348 Marseilles, Bristol

1349 Oxford, Dublin Bergen

The front had a rat, or two rats (the design change year by year) on the front either in a party hat or drinking champagne together: with a modern city background. The shirts were, of course, black, with white lettering. I had to defend that shirt from time to time, but it always sold well to people who worked in the hospitals around me. I kept thinking about other diseases, and reading more, and worrying more. That shirt for me was warning everyone, through making at a macabre joke

I began to collect books on the history of disease - books on cholera, a 19th century pandemic from India that swept the world then (( one last holdout was Haiti, which got its first cases I know of after their earthquake, when UN soldiers introduced it there)

In England in 1854, there was a waterborne cholera epidemic killing hundreds of thousands of their poor. The outbreak in Soho, London was stopped when a brilliant doctor, John Snow, convinced the local council to disable the public water pump there. There are many doctors who were unsung heroes fighting disease before the germ theory, even the journalist Daniel DeFoe, in his novel Journal of the Plague Year speculated that the 'creatures' discovered using the newly invented microscope, 'might' be causing the disease.

Other books on smallpox, the yellow fever epidemic of the 1790's, Polio, Typhoid, measles. rabies, syphilis, gonorrhea, A lot of these books were older, focused on historical outbreaks, ending up with the discovery of the rat-flea-disease link with the plague, and Dr Jonas Salk and his Polio vaccine. Some spoke of Penicillin and the conquering of Syphilis at the end of World War ll. which had ruined millions of lives. Third stage syphilis and the birth defects from syphilis are nearly unknown now.

They nearly all implied that we knew better now, with the advances in medicine, we would never have

a rampaging pandemic. Even the flu was conquered, with vaccination.

Then in 1995 a book that sounded the alarm about new diseases on the horizon was published, The Coming Plague: Newly emerging diseases in a world out of Balance, by Laurie Garrett.

This book and others that came after linked the ravaging of the Earth's environment, with eating wild animals and cutting down ancient forests letting lose new disease on humanity.

Doctors had thought in the 1960's, 1970's that that battle was over, and that studying epidemic disease as a specialty was foolish, as humanity had conquered all the major diseases that afflicted people, with only malaria, and mopping up the last of polio left, with venereal diseases as a rather minor problem.

They had not thought about, or did not know yet that our biggest scourges jumped from animals to humans, nor realized that the wild held scourges to come, such as AIDS from wild apes, etc that arrived in the mid 1970's. AIDS woke up the world of medicine

that there were scourges just waiting to emerge, the recklessness in ignoring a small breakout. AIDS was ignored in the US

until a friend of the POTUS of the time, Ronald Reagan died from it - Rock Hudson. But then it was far too late,

AIDS was sweeping the world.

There are several books on this theme. Spillover, by David Quammen starts out with a mysterious disease jumping from the environment of Australia, killing horses there, then killing veterinarians. His focus also was the jump from wild animals, to domestic animals to humans. The book is more academic than, say, The Hot Zone, but has frightening accounts of what was on the horizon. It is also very well written.

Those books, and many others stressed that an virus of some kind, new to humanity, would arise and sweep the planet, causing many deaths and great anguish.

The more I read, the more alarmed I got. I had wanted to be a doctor, long ago, but I was not a good enough student of chemistry. I had been reading paleontology for pleasure, along with books on the history of disease, but The Coming Plague got me focusing on what was could be on the horizon, just waiting for a chance encounter to sweep the world.

I began to read all the books I could on mysterious diseases, like the 'sweating' illness that killed the children of

Thomas Cromwell, a minister in king Henry Vlll's court; the fictional biography of whom was Bring Up the Bodies, by Hillary Mantel. That disease came and went, killed thousands, and has not been named yet. It is an unknown illness of an unknown nature.

I got a subscription the CDC magazine to Emerging Infections.I tried to read every issue, they all had alarming/ interesting articles in them. Some diseases just last year jumped from Africa to the new world, the mosquito borne illness called Zika which would make fetuses damaged, giving them microcephaly, i.e. severely small heads and other brain damage. This spread to Central America and even Florida, and is endemic there now.

In 2014, I called up an ex employee ''Joe'' who and told him in May that year to start watching the news out of Africa. I watched the Ebola epidemic. in May or so there was only about 100 cases and 30 or so deaths, but having read The Hot Zone, I knew that this would go bad fast.

It had sprung up in a completely different part of Africa, where it had never been seen before. The death rate and spread went up week by week, until by August thousands had died, and it had spread to three countries on the West Coast. I would call Joe and give him briefings, as I was worried that, like Zika later, it could jump and spread to other tropical nations.

I but did not think America was in any danger, as it was spread by blood and bodily fluids and would not get far in the West. The experts that year kept saying that we did not have to be ''that'' alarmed as it would not spread easily in the West. I watched the struggles of Doctors Without Borders in Africa, as they were accused of spreading the disease, were threatened, as they went and tried to quarantine and treat the sick and dying, some of them catching it themselves and dying. The local doctors and nurses died in great numbers, they put their own lives at risk by exposure to Ebola from the sick and dying. I got into the habit of reading international news for stories like this after that.

In fact, the world missed a worse threat than Ebola, when in Madagascar in the fall of 2017, a form of Pneumonic Plague akin to the Black Death -- spread by breath -- broke out there. The local government is a dictatorship, and did not care about the health of Madagascar's people. They had been in power so long, the health infrastructure was in shambles. So, there the Plague was 'endemic' - Black Death there for decades. The island had a lot of non native rats that carried it. Every fall there would be an outbreak around the time of the harvest, when the rats would multiply in great numbers, spread the disease to the population, who would catch the rats to eat them.

So that country had ''minor'' Black Death outbreaks every year for decades. Turns out that if you ignore a Black Death outbreak, especially a moderate sized one, it can and will make the ''jump'' to change it's nature and be spread by breath. A case would settle in the lungs, and be expelled in the victim's breath. Pneumonic Black Death is a real threat. Not spread by rat-flea-human link, but just by breath, as contagious as a cold, symptoms like a bad cold, but untreated the fatality rate is 80%. And it kills quicker, sometimes in 24 hours.

Doctors Without Borders went in and did a big cleanup, medical exams, got rid of a lot of rats, tested thousands,

and after a month or so, stamped that epidemic out. We were very lucky - - that time.

I read the news every day that fall, reading the local news in English coming from Madagascar as I knew how bad the Pneumonic version could be. Planes leave Madagascar going to at least 5 countries, and it could easily

have 'jumped' to Africa, India, Saudi Arabia , Australia in one flight. All it would take would be people not paying attention, ignoring a disease breakout in a poor country like Madagascar.

So what with those two outbreaks, I read a lot of international news. About this time I read up on SARS and MERS. The fatality rate for both is very high, but both seem to only be contagious when symptoms are showing themselves, so it didn't spread very easily. Also, people went in and suppressed it, mostly again Doctors Without Borders. And other worried epidemiologists who saw the threat and acted right away. One expert at least died trying to treat the patients. One thing I learned from my reading about SARS and MERS then that some of our 'old' diseases, like the measles, smallpox, etc jumped from domestic animals pigs, cattle, sheep. Sheep may be the origin of measles - as in the modern era MERS jumped from camels. The more I read, the more alarmed I got. It became a minor obsession. I would take customers aside and suggest they read books on plagues of all kinds, when they said they liked nonfiction. I looked for these books for my shop as well. Whenever I had a customer who did not know what they wanted to read, I pushed The Hot Zone, books on the plague, books on Yellow Fever, etc.

I realized that I had made a career mistake, I should have gone into public health. I kept discussing this subject with customers, as I was alarmed, and I wanted others to be. The shop T Shirt was my way of making people think about disease, and maybe, like me, start paying attention. The aftermath of the Black Death pushed the West towards a better world. But at what human cost.

Now up to the present.

I am used to not being believed. I am bi/polar, and an old woman, who does not 'nice' clothing, heels -- I have these two strikes against me being believed.

Also, I am not a medical expert, just a bookseller.

In early February, I went to my kidney specialist, who I like a lot - he cracks jokes about Trump -- in mid January 2020 I told him I was worried about my own health -- but everyone's health. I was getting very alarmed. by the news out of China. also, I had a kidney transplant a year ago,and was worried about catching this. I am high risk of getting very sick. I asked him - I cornered him, speaking earnestly - - What did he think? Could someone raise an alarm?? No one in America seemed to be worried enough . . . I thought that this was going to get really bad.

But, He patted me on the head, told me not to worry, and handed me some face masks. laughing just a little. He thought I was being amusing, again. So worried about nothing.

-----------------------

I had a phone conference with him three weeks ago, about my health, I have to check in with him every 2 months or so. I did not come in as the Covid was raging by then, and doctors were only doing phone conferences. After the usual visit, I said ''I hope you can admit I was right' Silence, then he laughed again.

Wish I could have seen his face.

I am very sorry I did not call the local media - at least the Seattle Times?? The Stranger?? and say 'you should write about this, this is going to be very bad. This is going to sweep over us!' But I did not expect to be believed. I could not even get my step son to move Stock Market money around to protect our savings. He thought I was an alarmist. FYI I had been trying to get him to read the old books about Market crashes, some of which are hilarious, as well as informative (THE GREAT CRASH 1929 by J.K. Galbraith. Read the Second edition where he talks about the death threats he got around the time he wrote the book. I have read it in excess of 15 times. It is a penny and postage on ABE Books. Go order it - it is a must read. very good writer.)

It is my nature to get excited about a lot of things, and try to get others excited. Most people can't be made excited by such ''dry'' stuff. This has discouraged me from years of me getting excited by this book or that - but I should have seen this time it was an emergency, that I should have been yelling about this outbreak. .

So, I apologize for not making a bigger fuss.

I am sick at heart. Even if I had started yelling in January, I do not think any one would believe me. I should have tried harder, but like the 2017 Pneumonic plague outbreak in Madagascar. I still thought- well maybe it wont get here. . . I was wrong about that one. I had been really alarmed by that outbreak, as pneumonic plague is so easy to catch and has such a high mortality rate.

Doctors Without Borders reigned that outbreak in. And surely the experts in charge of worrying about this has it well in hand . . .right? The experts know what they are doing, right? They will tell us what to do. This is not my job to raise the alarm. So, I only bugged my doctor. And talked to a few customers, employees.

I did not want to be Horton, trying to get hostile people to see something invisible and to take it seriously. Horton was laughed at by everyone over something they could not see. Dr. Seuss can be quite profound about human nature.

But - the people who did know better -who tried to brief Trump in early February about how bad it would get - the ones who also saw, and had the credentials - the people who run this country, the POTUS blew them off. He thought doing anything would 'spook' the Stock Market. He called Covid 19 a 'Democrat's Hoax' etc for weeks.

And here we are, locked down, and the people we hired to look after us failed us. Let us never forget the experts knew months ago but could not get our leaders to act in time. To create hundreds of thousands of Covid 19 tests, find people infected, and trace their contacts - - isolate the infected, before the disease was everywhere, like South Korea did. We now have the worst pandemic of Covid 19 in the world, and will lose, according to Trump, if we are lucky, ''only'' 200,000 American lives.

We have a terrible time ahead of us. We must remember the spring of 2020, the stay at home orders, the deaths of our family and friends, the overrun pleading hospitals, tent hospitals, hospital ships, Governors who laughed and refused to issue the orders for a quarantine that would save the lives of their citizens, saying it was 'bad for business'.

We can prevent, finally and forever being run over by epidemic, pandemic disease. Listen to experts and act - and teach our kids to love science, and believing experts over wishful thinkers. To not think of money first, when bad news comes. Ever see the movie Jaws? The mayor refused to close the beaches, chose money over the safety of the people on the beach. That movie is still a favorite - not so much for the shark, but of everyday fighting for reason over avarice, shortsightedness in the modern world.

----------------------------------------------------

Here is a list of books I liked, read more than once, about pandemics and plagues. This is in no way complete, I probably left out some very good tiles, please tell me if you read some I missed and did not list here. For fiction, I recommend JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR by Daniel DeFoe, He fictionalized stories his uncle had told him, who had lived through the Black Death pandemic of 1666, that swept through London and killed 40% of the population. The Norton Edition has very good notes, points out that DeFoe references the microscope, and seeing creatures in it, remarking that 'perhaps they cause this plague' . . . then moving on. We were very close to seeing the connection centuries before we did, the evidence is in DeFoe's book. Fiction sometimes teaches better than nonfiction.

Also - THE BLACK DEATH, A PERSONAL HISTORY -- by John Hatcher -- Set in a market town in England. this title is about 15 years old. you follow the fates of several characters in that town. Touches on the fact that citizens of England saw Black Death coming for months before it reached England, the news carried to them by fleeing people gave the word. Very good novel, lots of small details of the time, what it was like to live then. written by a Black Death expert.

YEAR OF WONDERS is pretty good, following a woman's fate in the Black Death year of 1666.

For non-fiction

THE BLACK DEATH 1346 to 1353, by Ole J. Benedictow, This is the best modern book on the 14th century Black Death. It the raises the possibility that there was an anthrax outbreak at the same time. Lots of math in it. Very long. I read it twice.

Other modern books:

THE BLACK DEATH a chronicle of the plague. All original sources like Petrarch, DeFoe, Boccaccio, and Machivelli.

Am re reading this one right now

THE COMING PLAGUE- I mentioned before,

SPILLOVER by Quannem - same

RABID - A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE WORLD'S MOST

DIABOLICAL VIRUS by Bill Wasik this disease is carried

primarly by bats, like Ebola, do not miss this book.

The horrible days before a vaccine - really worth reading.

NO TIME TO LOSE by Peter Piot, the discoverer of Ebola

VIRUS by Frank Ryan - Tracking the new killer plagues.

other older titles

BRING OUT YOUR DEAD J.H. Powell 1949 history of 'The Great

Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793

VIRUSES, PLAGUES, & HISTORY Micheal B. A. Oldstone

A good Ebola book about the first big outbreak in the 1990's is

THE HOT ZONE + CRISIS IN THE RED ZONE about

the huge outbreak of Ebola in 2014,

DEMON IN THE FREEZER all of these are by Richard Preston -- the second book is about the history of

Germ warfare. Not to be missed!! There has been a lot of paranoia that Covid 19

was release as 'germ warfare'. This book covers real germ warfare of the 20th century,

including accidents with a virus in Russia in the 1970's that killed thousands.

The first book I read on the 14tth century outbreak alone was Philip Zegler's

THE BLACK DEATH, written in 1969.

PLAGUES AND PEOPLES wrtten in 1976 by William H. McNeill, covers

classical plague outbreaks, the post Colombian disease exchange, with

a chapter on the history of fighting plagues, diseases from 1700 on.

RATS LICE AND HISTORY by HANS ZINSSER written in 1934.

Also Pepy's diaries of that year, as he stayed in London.

((There is a book with just extracts of that, could not find the title))

THE PLAGUE IN SHAKESPEARE's LONDON,

good background to what London was like then, the backdrop of so many of Shakespeare's plays.

and how the Black Death was a scourge that would sweep through Europe every 15 years or so

for nearly 400 years.

One last thought. The only way the Black Death and other diseases after that were stopped was quarantine. Thought up by the Venetians, they would make ships wait for 40 days before unloading, the term quarantine' comes from the Italian word 'quarantine", or '40'. It worked to stop epidemic Black Death in 1740s, when all nations in Europe finally quarantined houses when they had a case of the disease in that house. The practice was being tried in the plague of 1666 in London. In cities, people would hang out of a window, lowering baskets with money in it, and food would be put in it, and the basket would be hauled in. If they left that house, they would be killed. .

As we hide in our own houses, One last thought. The only way the Black Death and other diseases after that was quarantine. .

As we hide in our houses in 2020, with a 'shelter in place' order to stop or at least slow down Covid 19,

the methods we use today have not changed much since centuries.

Our basic weapon against pandemics have not changed that much -

with all the advances in science, we have only added masks and washing our hands - germ theory.

. The front doors would be marked

in red, the doors were boarded up, and guards put in place.

At least we dont have our doors boarded up. Yet.

On Passover, I remembered the Jews surviving the hand of God by staying inside

as Egypt lost their first born, and have never forgotten that night.

I always thought that might be a memory of a plague, waiting inside, till the disease was stopped.

It always was strange to me that being inside, staying inside, saved the Jews, thousands of years ago.

Please stay inside - have patience -

and keep washing your hands.

And remember this horrible time when you vote in the fall.

PS saw this online "Why is it that every disaster movie starts with people

in charge not believing the scientists?"

Meet the new cat

2019-07-01T15:21:00.000-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

We have a new cat. Our large luxury cat, Bea Geste, is slowly adapting to the presence of an interloper, and if you come in, please offer him reassurance that people still love him, don't just heap love on the small new sports cat, Joan Jett.

Beau Geste offers the Paw of Peace to our new companion, Joan Jett.

Beau is now more than three years old, Joan just about two months old.

Patriarchy versus liberalism, a war of tradition and reason

2019-06-28T17:31:00.002-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

The most remarkable thing about patriarchy is that after millennia of organizing societies around it, we have now become uncomfortable with it.

A remarkably large number of human societies treat people as things. It is a foundation patriarchy, a system in which dominant males treat women and children as property. There is even a debate about whether such behavior is innate or socially conditioned (full disclosure, I come down on the socially conditioned side of the debate.)

Abraham Lincoln was rented out as a laborer by his father for 10 cents to 31 cents an hour, and wages earned by him were paid to his father. "I used to be a slave," is the way he described the situation in an early political speech.

The legal situation that allowed this was part of what we now call patriarchy. While American society never allowed men to buy and sell children or wives, fathers and husbands have long held a dominant property position in the family. Under the doctrine of coveture, when a woman married a man, they became, for purposes of property, one person, and that person was the man. Any property the woman had passed to the man, and in event of a divorce, would remain property of the man unless there were an ironclad prenuptial agreement. This meant that for a very long time, divorce meant ruin for a woman.

Being, essentially, property, meant that you were not treated as fully human. Neither slaves nor women got to vote until they got property rights, and the first property right is to own yourself. And who would not want to own themselves? I'm not aware of any slaves that wished to remain a thing used by others. I am aware that a few women prefer traditional gender roles. Perhaps it is comforting to know your place and not have to invent your own place in the world, but it seems to be a comfort few wish to avail themselves of.

Patriarchy played a role in the justification of monarchy, and is perhaps part of what attracts people to all autocratic forms of government. No one needed to justify the right of kings to rule until it came into question, but when it did, some of the justifications founded the king's authority in parental authority. In fact, a book some considered the definitive defense of the divine right of kings was titled Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings. In it, Sir Robert Filmer argued that Adam had complete power over his descendants, including the power of life and death, and it was from this basis that kings could trace their power. Filmer had a son, who seems to have survived his parenting.

John Locke, who never married or had children, seemed to have a better understanding about how families work. He pointed out that the father shares his authority over the children with their mother, and his power is not absolute. Locke argued that we are all born owning ourselves, and that fathers do not have the power of life and death over their children, because such authority is not needed for the purpose of the relationship, which is to care for and nurture children until they reach the age of reason, and can be responsible for themselves and embrace their freedom.

It is fashionable to study the ethics John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant, who addressed the question of how we may know right from wrong directly, attempting to codify behavior that was already accepted. But Locke's ideas changed the way we conceive of people, and changed the way we treat them. He changed what we regard as ethical in a way no ethicist could.

Once we encounter Locke's idea that we are all born owning ourselves, and cannot sell the rights to ourselves as property, it seems intuitively obvious. A pot has no mind to care who cooks with it, or whether the food is good or bad, a chair cannot resent the weight it bears, but we cannot help but care how we are used. Once we understand this about ourselves, we cannot escape a natural human empathy to others who are used as objects are used, and we sympathize with their plight. Slavery, an institution probably as old as war, becomes an abomination. Coveture, and parallel institutions in other patriarchal cultures, becomes absurd.

The process of the logic of liberalism spreading through human institutions has not been terribly rapid, but it has been inexorable, and the effects of its logic continue to change traditional elements of our society.

Consider Locke's theory of property. We apply our labor to nature, and this makes property. Now consider the patriarchal way of life. A man plants his seed in the land, and makes it fruitful, he plants his seed in a woman and makes her fruitful. In each case, the land and the woman, both the thing he plants his seed in and the fruit of his planting becomes his.

Clearly, this is more a founding myth than how the world has ever worked, but myths are the way we understand the way the world is supposed to work. The patriarch is supposed to build a little world in which he owns the land, governs his family, and provides for all. This is a model for the larger society, as well.

Not all men could do this, particularly in a world where most of the land was already owned. One solution to this was to have disenfranchised men who had little or nothing, and wealthy men with many acres, cattle, chattel, and wives. The entire system was based on perpetuating little empires of property, and the relationship to most of the things in a household was one of the patriarch's ownership. Traditional institutions of law and government existed, to a great extent, to adjudicate and enforce this system of property, and thereby bring order to society. Men of property wielded great power in such societies. Women of property, and therefore women of power, in many societies did not exist. Instead of owning property, they were property.

Not owning yourself, of course, has a spiritual side, but more obviously, it has a physical side. If you do not own yourself, you do not own your body, and you do not control what is done with your body. When Ohio Republicans blocked an amendment that would have made it illegal to rape one's spouse while they are drunk, drugged, or incapacitated, this was part of the same philosophy that caused them to pass a law banning all abortions, even in cases of rape or incest, if a heartbeat can be detected (usually around six weeks after conception, often before the mother is aware of the pregnancy.) In either case, the object is to keep women from having control of their bodies.

I'm not sure to what extent there is a conscious realization among the people doing these things about the connection between women controlling their bodies and and women owning themselves and having agency and power in the world. One would think that people who find abortion abhorrent would favor availability of birth control, which makes abortion less necessary, but this is not the case. Nor is it the case that they consistently advocate for society to provide better prenatal care for the unborn or for children after they are born. The logic of their actions does not support the notion that what they care about is mainly children. However, in matters of birth control, abortion, and marital rape, the same group of people act on a unified theory that women should not control their bodies.

Granting them control of their bodies grants them ownership of themselves, which in turn means granting them agency and power in the world. Changing who owns the woman's womb challenges the entire traditional edifice of a society based on a system in which women and children were property.

And if men of property really should wield great power in a society, power over women, over those who have less property, and over those who previously were property, that at last explains the mystery of why poor whites have been voting for a political party that gives benefits mainly to those who have a lot of property. They are voting for a traditional society in which patriarchs run things, because something deeply embedded in our society tells them this is how it should be.

Locke's idea that we are all born owning ourselves is deeply subversive, even more subversive than he realized in his lifetime (and Locke knew it was explosive enough that it could cost his life or liberty, which is why he never allowed his Treatises on Government to be published under his own name during his lifetime.) Property, after all, is not things, it is the set of rules about how we use things, about our rights and responsibilities in relation to them. When you decide that a person is not property, you change a great deal about how that person is to be treated. And when you do that, you change the very structure of society.

We are in the midst of a slow-motion revolution that is changing first our minds, then changing everything else. We must not underestimate the disruption this is causing, or the resistance it will engender. The imperatives of a society in which we each own ourselves are very different from those of traditional societies, and we will find ourselves reinventing ourselves and our societies.

Liberalism, therefore, is not for the faint of heart. There is no certainty that what the logic of liberalism leads to is even possible. This reinvention of society is a product of the enlightenment, and it will require courage and persistence to avoid sinking back into the dark age in which we were governed by force, faith, and custom.

The Outlaw John Locke is published!

2019-02-09T17:58:00.001-08:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

Long-time followers of this blog will know that I've been working on a book about liberalism for several years. It is now available on Kindle.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07LC6Y934/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_tmb

This is a book on political economy, about the most successful large Utopian experiment ever attempted, liberal democracy.

None of America's founding fathers would have called themselves capitalists, because capitalism was in its gestation while liberalism was already producing revolutions. The Ur text of capitalism, The Wealth of Nations, was published in 1776, and I would say that capitalism was not fully developed as an ideology until the marginal revolution of the 1870s, when it finally got a working value system. Liberalism became complete as an ideology with the publication of A Letter Concerning Toleration and Two Treatises of Government, both by John Locke, in 1689.

Locke fled England in 1683, a wanted man. He had been implicated in the Rye House Plot, a plan to kill King Charles II. He was unable to return to England safely until he could do so in the company of an invading army, during the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

We don't teach this much anymore, but Locke argued for the right to revolution, when a terrible leader could be removed by no other means, and apparently he practiced what he preached.

His ideas continue to change our society. In his day, many people were treated as property, not just slaves, but wives and children as well. He introduced the notion that we are all born owning ourselves, and cannot ever stop owning ourselves -- that's what 'inalienable' means, as in 'inalienable rights.' This idea upended such ancient institutions as slavery and marriage.

The notion that government should rule for the good of the people would have been an unfamiliar notion to leaders through most of human history. Kings served God (or Gods) with the blessing of whatever church they belonged to. Many parts of the world are still ruled by force, faith, and custom.

And while liberalism has held sway in much of the developed world, industrialization has changed the way we live, and with industrialization has come capitalism. It used to be that increasing wealth required controlling more resources, such as land, minerals, and labor. Under capitalism, the key to increasing wealth is wealth itself. Capitalism has shown it can function under dictatorships and kleptocracies, but it seems to produce the most wealth in liberal democracies. The relationship between the ideologies has always been an uneasy one, with democracy often acting as a check on capitalism.

These are some of the themes I explore in The Outlaw John Locke & why liberalism is worth fighting for. I've priced it low -- $2.99 -- in hopes at least a few people will read it.

The move is under way!

2019-01-15T10:42:00.000-08:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

We have now been working on the move for one full week, and we've made great progress. The books are at the new store, and we've got some shelves up, and we're getting books up.

Those of you who have volunteered, thank you! Those who haven't, you've got a standing invitation to help out. Just give me a call on my cell, two O six, nine three one, thirteen thirty one.

Beau is coming with us, but he's very nervous right now. As near as he can tell, the world is slowly disappearing around him. I believe he is contemplating going feral.

Soon, we will move him, and all will be well.

We have found a new spot for the store!

2018-11-07T18:57:00.001-08:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

Twice Sold Tales is staying in Ballard!

We've reached an agreement with the International Order of Odd Fellows local chapter to rent the retail space in the front of the Odd Fellows Hall at 17th and Market. Our new address will be 1708 N.W. Market St. We take possession in January, and begin the arduous task of moving thousands of books and scores of shelves.

As some of you know, the building the store is now in will be torn down to be replaced by something much taller, an apartment building with about 170 units. We were told to be out by March 31, but we are now planning to be out by the end of February.

Being a bookstore, we have little money, so any volunteer help moving would be welcome! Just send us an email at twicesoldtalesud@gmailcom if your're interested. We live in hopes that we will never have to move again!

A society without money

2018-10-07T22:16:00.000-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

In this post, we explored what money is. Short version, money is a sign that the holder of it is owed favors. But what if you had a society that didn't have money?

Money is an ancient institution, Standardized coinage goes back almost 3,000 years, commodity money, representing a given weight of a commodity such as copper, further than that. But most people living in ancient civilizations never saw money. Most were peasants who paid their taxes in commodities and labor, or slave who labored without pay and we given what little they had by their masters, or serfs who were in some cases little better off than slaves.

Some societies, such as the Inca civilization, had no money system at all. The Inca had a centralized system of government, and people worked for the government and were given what they needed by the government. Ancient Egyptians paid their taxes in grain and labor. While we use money to track almost all of our economic obligations, these societies kept track of peoples' obligations largely without the use of money.

The problem is, if you don't have money, you have to keep track of peoples' obligations somehow, and that's easiest to do by defining their obligation very rigidly. If you were an Inca, you labored, and all you produced went to the state, and all you got back came from the state. If you were an Egyptian, you labored on land surveyed by the priests, your obligation depended on your relationship with the state, in time of famine you looked to the state for sustenance, and when the country needed a new pyramid, you got in the harvest, then worked on the pyramid.

There wasn't a lot of freedom in a society like this, because freedom made it hard to know what your obligations were, whether you had met them, and what was owed to you. It was just simpler to have a regimented society in which you were told what to do.

Perhaps most people in these societies liked it that way. They had a place in the world, and they didn't need to go through the business of inventing themselves.

But then, the world started changing too fast for this system to thrive. The late bronze age collapse started about 1200 BCE, and the first standardized coinage showed up on the Anatolian Peninsula about 600 BCE. Instead of the unchanging life promised by the Egyptian Old Kingdom, the kingdom of Lydia, which occupied most of what is now Turkey, arose during the chaos of the late bronze age collapse as one of the new iron age kingdoms. The Lydians needed a system that worked better than barter and could deal with shocks better than the system of bondage to the land that Egypt used.

Trade goods such as grain or copper are not ideal media of exchange, although their use is sometimes referred to as 'commodity money.' We see something similar in prisons, where tins of tuna or packs of cigarettes have been used as media of exchange. Real money is a much more abstract, and has not got the value for use that a bushel of grain or a tin of tuna has. Eating hundred dollar bills might be extravagant, but it would hardly be nutritious.

Using coinage allowed for a much more flexible system, in which trade could follow whatever patterns the current harvest suggested was best, and a stranger could do business in a new town without building the kind of relationship the Egyptians had to their god-king and his representatives.

It also made it a lot easier to cheat. Pirates who stole grain could eat, but pirates who stole money could have whatever they wanted. Instead of conning people for a meal, you could con them for enough money to buy many meals.

Institutions had to adapt. The rule of law had once dealt mainly with stolen animals and such, now it had to deal with new ways of stealing the more abstract thing that was money. Some even said money was the root of all evil.

That saying gives too little credit to the inventiveness of the ancients, who I'm sure found plenty of ways of being evil before money came along. Human beings have never been angels.

The evil of concentrated wealth and power was as much a part of the pre-money civilizations as of those that used money. In fact, without the regimented systems many of these civilizations employed, and the centralized power of the god-king, it would have been impossible to have a large civilization.

So, let's count our blessings. And our money. The concentration of power and wealth that we decry is as old as civilization, and much, much older than the humble coin.