Private Miracles

Private Miracles

It’s a Jetsons World

IN THE CLASSIC AND futuristic television series from 1962–63—I admit that I adore this show and could watch every episode 100 times—people work only a few hours a day, travel at 500 miles per hour in flying cars that go as fast as 2,500 mph, and the main job is “pushing buttons.” The galaxy is their home. Health care is a complete free market with extreme customer care. Technology is the best (but of course it still malfunctions and must be fixed, same as today). Business is rivalrous, prosperity is everywhere, and the state largely irrelevant except for the friendly policeman who shows up only every once in a while to check things out.

The whole scene—which anticipated so much of the technology we have today but, strangely, not email or texting—reflected the ethos of time: a love of progress and a vision of a future that stayed on course. Appropriately, it was the first show ever shown on ABC television in color instead of black and white. It was neither utopian nor dystopian. It was the best of life as we know it projected far into the future. People did not dress in uniforms or obey some dictator on a monitor in their homes. The people in the show were as fashion conscious as any American. Their food was not embedded in pill food unless they wanted it that way (same now). They had the equivalent of fast-food delivery services in their homes. The drive was always toward automation: more efficient ways of doing what needs to be done so that human energy can be saved for a more valuable purpose.

The message is a true one. Human nature and the structure of reality itself doesn’t change. Only the gizmos we use change, and this is the most glorious thing that can happen in the material world. We can become poorer or we can become richer. But the fundamental facts of how the world is built are immutable. Things are scarce but the possibilities for economic creation are infinite in a world of trade, boundaries, law, and private innovation.

Why is it so fun to watch? Because it is a cartoon, because neat gadgets are everywhere, but mostly it amuses us because everyone seems so strangely blasé about all the miracles that surround them. They are living in postmodern houses that seem to be braced on some giant pole in the sky, and yet they think and act just like the rest of us who live on the ground. They aren’t surprised by anything, no matter how amazing.

And despite the extraordinary conveniences of life, the essential problems are the same, the human vices documented since the beginning of the written human language. The kids have the same trouble as our kids. “Daughter Judy” is spoiled and pouts too much, “his boy Elroy” gets into trouble, George tries in vain to solve all troubles but is mainly concerned about keeping his job, and “Jane his wife” keeps the home together.

The persistence of choice leads to complaints that there isn’t enough. “Pushing buttons” is the main thing everyone complains about. When they want to get away and relax, they usually choose some enterprise that offers the experience of a made-up world of the past that seems to take them back to the old west (the “Beta Bar Ranch”), but it is only pretend. We have the equivalent with our fantasies of “returning to nature” by shopping at grocery stores with philosophies, or believing that by not printing “this email” we are saving the planet.

In what other ways is our world like theirs? We too are surrounded by amazing miracles generated by private enterprise and entrepreneurship. Every day we wake up to some overnight development that makes our lives slightly better. The advances have come along so quickly that articles on technology written just a few years ago now strike us as old fashioned.

Boy Elroy has a machine that can conjure up real-time worlds that allow him to play baseball and tennis with family members. We call that the Wii. The vacuum cleaners work without pushing them, and, sure enough, we have those. Just as the Jetsons’ home was in the clouds, ever more of our life is ascending to the digital world of cloud computing, where we meet with friends, do our work, spend leisure, seek truth and inspiration.

Video phone is the great dream that this show dreamed up. You had to pay. When you call long distance (does anyone remember that?) “collect” (does anyone remember that?), you had to accept or reject the charges. The video phone was strapped to the ceiling and couldn’t be moved, just like telephones were until the day before yesterday.

Peter Sidor, a heavy hitter at the Mises Wiki, recently called my Skype app on my iPhone, something I downloaded the other day just to test it out, and I answered and, voila, I’m video talking to a colleague in Germany. I walked around with my phone. The app was free. Skype begs me to use the service. The iPhone 4 came with “FaceTime” built in, not that the appearance of this miracle created much chatter at all.

All this stuff is amazing. It is astounding and beyond belief—more outrageously advanced than anything the makers of the Jetsons could even imagine. With this tiny box in my hand, I can do a real-time video chat with anyone on the planet and pay nothing more than my usual service fee. This means that anyone on the planet can do business with and be friends with any other person on the globe. The borders, the limits, the barriers—they are all being blasted away.

The pace of change is mind-boggling. The world is being reinvented in our lifetimes, every day. Email has only been mainstream for 15 years or so, and young people now regard it as a dated form of communication used only for the most formal correspondence. Today young people are brief instant messaging through social media, but that’s only for now, and who knows what next year will bring.

Oddly, hardly anyone seems to care, and even fewer care about the institutional force that makes all this possible, which is the market economy. Instead, we just adjust to the new reality. We even hear of the grave problem of “miracle fatigue”—too much great stuff, too often. Truly, this new world seems to have arrived without much fanfare at all. And why? It has something to do with the nature of the human mind, which does not and will not change so long as we live in a world of scarcity. We adjust to amazing things and don’t think much about their source or the system that produces them.

The Jetsons’ world is our world: explosive technological advances, entrenched bourgeois culture, a culture of enterprise that is the very font of the good life. But there is one major difference, and it isn’t the flying car, which we might already have were it not for the government’s promotion of roads and the central plan that manages transportation. It is this: we also live in the midst of a gigantic leviathan state that seeks to control every aspect of our life to its smallest detail.

The government is still Flintstones, an anachronism that operates as this massive drag on our lives. With its money manipulations, regulations, taxation, wars (on people, products, and services), prisons, and injustices, we similarly look the other way. We try to find the workaround and keep living like the Jetsons. Often times things don’t go right and the reason is the anachronism that rules us. And yet, unless we understand cause and effect in the way that the old liberal tradition explained it, we can miss the source.

Ditch the Planners

WHAT IS THE LAW of the land? Many Americans are under the impression that it is the U.S. Constitution, distorted by time perhaps and the plain meaning changed by bad (or good, depending on your point of view) amendment, court decision, or indifference. This is a complete myth. The actual law of the land is contained in the U.S. Code published every six years by the Government Printing Office.

No one so much as suggested such a thing as the U.S. Code in the first hundred years after the Constitution was enacted. It would have been only a little longer than the Constitution itself. The first attempt to create such a compilation of laws occurred in 1878 but it languished because no one felt the need to update it. Then in 1926, in the midst of Prohibition when the feds became deeply involved in regulating the details of life, Congress made the thing come into existence. It is printed every six years.

An institution was born, though most people know nothing of it. The next printing will come out in 2012, but the 2006 with annotations was 356 one-thousand-plus-page volumes that cover every aspect of life as we know it. The next one will add many new sections and probably more than 100,000 pages.

This is America’s central plan—our own Gosplan, so to speak—and it is as elaborate and detailed as any set of laws that have ever governed any society in the history of the world. Much of this central plan is absorbed into our daily lives in ways that we don’t notice or aren’t aware of. This is supplemented by an additional layer of state and local regulations that have been pushed on these governments by higher government or that grew up from within to adapt the central-planning ethos to the particular circumstances of place and time. The effect is the same: life amidst an impossibly tangled legal thicket that grows more elaborate and complex by the day.

It defies human comprehension but it is not without human effect. Every aspect of our lives is subjected to it from birth to death. Every product we buy, every service we use, every decision we make is filtered through this morass. You can try this on your own by going to the online search engine and typing in anything from chicken stock to funerals, and observe the state at work, managing the whole of life as we know it in the most minute detail one can imagine. Think of anything and search it, and then see if you think we enjoy “free enterprise.”

Just yesterday, I decided to look up the federal laws that govern the production and distribution of beer, wine, and spirits, which, thanks to the Internet, I can do without access to a law library. I immediately found myself swirling in an incredible maze of dictates and demands governing who can produce and under what conditions, how they must sell and to whom, what taxes apply and when, what warnings must be affixed to every product, and even the shape of bottles that can be exported and imported. Even if I had a month to do it, there was no way that I could read all that, much less understand it all.

Of course this is just the beginning. We are told when our kids should start school, when they are to learn to read and write, when they are to graduate from high school and under what conditions, at what point we can go to work and what we can be paid, what kinds of jobs we can accept and what we can be asked to do at them. Our speech at the office is controlled, as are the words that we can speak in any public setting such as radio and television. Every one of our home appliances is heavily regulated, mostly with the goal of making them perform more poorly than manufacturers would otherwise have them perform.

How our mattresses are made, where we can purchase them from, what materials they have in them, and how they are labeled are regulated to the nth degree. So it is with all our groceries, our trash pickup, our water use in our home, and how all things that are involved in each of these is constructed, distributed, and used. Our work lives are governed in great detail: coffee breaks, lunch breaks, hours per week, and the things we are allowed to think and say about others. Literally every aspect of life is touched in some way by this enormous apparatus.

In the world of computer code, legacy code that is no longer useful and ends up only making the program work more slowly is called “cruft.” All coders know that they must first get rid of the cruft if they are going to create clean and efficient code going forward.

So it is with government regulations. They choke off the functioning of society in its biggest and smallest parts. They prevent development in ways that we don’t see. They are hugely costly, again, in ways we can’t see, because, as Bastiat says, it is impossible to quantify the products and services we don’t have or otherwise see the ways life would be different in the absence of such controls.

Adding to the grim reality is the perverse irony that the whole of this code cruft came about in an age when the whole of our lives were restricted by physical space and time. The world has changed, and today we rely heavily on digital information and products. These, however, are not well covered in the U.S. Code. Sure enough, we wake every day to a digital world that is better than it was yesterday, with product improvements, lower prices, and better accessibility, generally in service to humanity.

As we look around the economic world, no sector better reflects the ideal than this one. It is not a coincidence that this is currently the least regulated part of life. The digital world is the frontier, the place of freedom where innovations are freely tested, service to the consumer (not bureaucrats) is the driving force, and competing for who is best at providing that service is the test of success or failure. This digital world gives us a window into how life would be in the absence of the state in the physical world.

This is one reason that the world of digits is so much more pleasing and useful to people than the physical world. The physical world is gummed up by this anachronism we call the state and its vast central-planning apparatus. The digital world (for now) is not. One feature is that boundaries of the nation-state tend to evaporate. We deal with people and associate with people as individuals—potentially with all 7 billion individuals, regardless of their locale or political identities (which is all that being from or living in a particular country really amounts to).

Nonetheless, we must live a large part of our lives in the physical world, making real decisions day-to-day that affect the quality of our lives. That means that we must find the workaround. We must see through the fog created by the state and find what is best for us. This is not always easy to do. It means going against the grain that the state has grown up around us.

For example, it might mean that we should find a way to homeschool rather than send the kids to public school. We have to hunt for loopholes in the law that permit us to do that. It might mean going to extra effort to hack our home appliances such as our water heaters or shower heads or toilets. It might mean that we eschew normal employment for self-employment or dare to move to some remote country where our job prospects are better. It might mean rejecting welfare, refusing to retire when the government tells us to, or embracing a faith that is out of the mainstream. In doing these things, we risk being called names or looked at as strange by others who just assume that the only way not to be strange is to comply with the plan.

We need to read books that are not on the approved list, explore forms of art that are not blessed by our masters, and otherwise smash the model that has been given to us. We might need to choose a profession that is not listed in the plan.

In fact, I would suggest that every truly successful person (successful in ways that deserve respect) has done this in one form or another. They have lived their lives outside of the plan. What usually happens is that only after making their own way in this world, they confront the rude discovery that they have upset the powers that be. The lawsuits pour in, the congressional hearings start, the media frenzies appear, and so on. Eventually the person figures out how to make his thing work within the prevailing plan; meanwhile, someone else is rising through the ranks—someone who cares nothing for the plan.

This is something we can all do. It can start at a young age. It can continue all through life. But the first step is to see the plan for what it is. The plan not only violates our liberty and contradicts the whole theory of freedom—which is that society can manage itself without government controls—but it causes ossification of the social order and our personal lives. There is no predetermined way to get around it. That requires creativity, plus lots of trial and error.

The question presents itself: if enough people reject the plan, does the plan still exist? It will always exist on the library shelves, and in the search engine for the U.S. Code, but in our own choices and in our own ways, we can all make a contribution to making the plan less relevant for the functioning of our lives.

A Political Theory of Geeks and Wonks

LOTS OF PEOPLE GET interested in political ideas through political campaigns. Maybe this is because politics forces you to decide who you are and what you believe.

I can vaguely recall when I was very young, perhaps 7 years old, that I discovered that my best friend’s family considered themselves Democratic whereas I was pretty sure that my family was Republican.

I asked someone what that meant and only received hazy answers that concerned seemingly big issues about government and public life. I didn’t think much about it but, nonetheless, they were my first thoughts on the thing that would consume my life.

So it is for lots of people: politics is the entry way into taking political ideas seriously. If your interest intensifies, you tend to go one of two ways: wonk or geek. These are terms that apply in many categories of life—Wikipedia gives serviceable definitions of both wonk and geek—but the terms take on new meaning in politics.

Political wonks are fascinated by process. They love the game. They get as much satisfaction from observing as changing. They want to be players above all else. Ideals bore them. History is mere data. Intellectuals seem irrelevant. What matters to the wonk are the hard realities of the ongoing political struggle. They defer to title and rank. They thrive on meetings, small victories, administrative details, and gossip about these matters. Knowing who is who and what is what is the very pith of life.

There are political wonks and policy wonks. They exist on all levels of society. They appear to be running things, because their aim is to control the levers of power in just the right and strategic way, which means in a way that benefits the other wonks of their tribe. Geographically, life begins and ends in the D.C. beltway, the border that encloses their world and outside of which is to be found the Hobbesian state of nature. They thrive on keeping information private and cartelizing their class. Their newspaper is the Washington Post, which they consider to be the insider report.

In contrast to this are the policy geeks. They are no less fascinated by detail but are drawn to ideals. Observation alone bores them. They are drawn to the prospect of change. They don’t want to be players as such; they question the very rules of the game and want to change them. They are happy to make a difference in the ideological infrastructure, whether big or small. They tend to work alone and totally disregard caste distinctions. They are interested not in the surface area but what’s underneath, not the veneer but the wood. In software terms, they are forever looking forward to the next build. They are risk takers, so they prefer to debug after the system is live.

In politics, this means that the geeks are drawn to ideas, even radical ideas. They can easily imagine what doesn’t exist, which makes them dreamers and entrepreneurs. And so they are attracted to and study history and philosophy and economics. It doesn’t matter if a lesson can be learned from the ancients or moderns; indeed, unearthing an old idea and bringing it back to life has a special appeal. They thrive on making information public, on smashing old structures, breaking cartels, and busting monopolies of power. Geographically, they can live and work anywhere, and they have no attachment to any single information source.

The geeks and wonks can work together but there will always be a natural tension between the two. The wonks think the geeks are hopeless, powerless, reckless outsiders whose heads are full of useless and unrealistic fantasies. The geeks think that the wonks are part of the system and, therefore, more than likely corrupted by it, and increasingly so.

Broadening the view, the struggle to control history is a battle between the wonks and the geeks. The wonks are the ones who consolidate, stabilize, and entrench the status quo; the geeks are the ones who prepare revolutionary change. The wonks freeze it into place and make it work more efficiently; the geeks imagine and work toward a future that no one thought was possible. The wonks rule out drastic and extreme measures as imprudent and reckless; the geeks think these paths are the only ones worth pursuing and have confidence that the unknown future will somehow work itself out. The wonks try to bring the king around to their point of view; the geeks kill the king.

Caesar: Wonk
Brutus: Geek
Hamilton: Wonk
Jefferson: Geek
Bush or Obama: Wonk
Ron Paul: Geek

Part of the agenda of democracy is to turn the whole of society into a herd of wonks who believe in the process and want to make it work. But it isn’t so easy to control human nature. There are always the geeks to contend with who see that the system is based on a lie and want to overturn it. Why should the majority rule the minority—or, more precisely, why should the well-organized minority rule the relatively indifferent majority? What we need is democracy 2.0 in which power and privilege is not steered, but abolished altogether.

Who will carry the day? In the short run, the wonks are right. They win. They rule. They ruled the ancient world for hundreds of years. They ruled the Soviet Union for 72. They rule the United States today. But the long run is another matter. Rome and the Soviet Union fell—in revolutions enacted by geeks. The wonks eventually come to underestimate the power of ideas and underappreciate the effect of ideals.

Which life is worth living? The wonk is famous, even legendary. The geek rarely achieves fame, even when he does change history. Why? The wonks write the history. But it is the geeks who make history happen in the first place. The geeks will look back at their lives with satisfaction that they did their best to realize a dream. The wonks, looking back at their lives, see that they were little more than a cog in a machine. Someday, even in the United States, they may have to concede that all they did crumbled into nothingness.

Scavengers of the Physical Universe

IT HAS BEEN TEN YEARS since my office was last cleaned. It was like opening a time capsule—and not just because what I found was old. What I found represented a different epoch, a time when all things that mattered were subject to the law of scarcity: what one had no one else could have and therefore it was treasured and hoarded for all eternity.

And then something changed dramatically. Most of what was once hoarded became digitized and reproducible unto infinity by pushing buttons, and therefore all things were accessible instantly from everywhere. And so within the last ten years, not all at once but bit by bit, what I owned became something that I no longer had to own. I could keep it or not, but it wasn’t going away.

Here’s some of what I found: videotapes of short clips of ideas and events that are now all on YouTube; a printout of contacts generated by my own PalmPilot, all of which are now back on a handheld device that syncs through cyberspace with any online device; my ancient Palm Pilot itself, which is about as useful as a pet rock; first print runs of legislation before Congress, now all on the Internet and searchable; two big plastic trays, one labeled “in box” and one labeled “out box,” now replaced by a gargantuan archive of emails that I can access in seconds; photographs of this and that, easily scanned and posted and shared with the world; scholarly journals (say no more); pile after pile of weekly magazines and newspaper clippings, all long ago digitized; cassette recorders for doing interviews; once-treasured software packages that now seem as sophisticated as cave drawings; a “world clock”; a thermometer with a wire you stick outside the window.

I put all 200 pounds of it into contractor bags and put it in the dumpster.

In the scheme of things, this is a lightning-fast change in the way we value things. Measured by the pace of life itself, it has been too slow for most of us to be entirely conscious of. We encounter the newest new thing several times per week. We get a kick out of it, but that kick evaporates in a day or two as the new technology is rolled into our daily lives. But then one day you clean out your office to discover that the technology has reshaped what we value and why, and that our lives are completely different than they used to be.

Somehow, the change from physical to digital strikes me as more significant than the move from iron to steel, from horses to internal combustion, or from land travel to air travel. In all other cases, the technological shift went from less to more efficient ways of accomplishing tasks by the use of things. But these things were still scarce. To make another book required felling another tree. To get from here to there still required fuel and everything that is associated with making it. My pile of paper could not simultaneously be your pile of paper. The space on the land on which I was driving could not be shared without causing a wreck and endangering life itself.

These limitations informed our valuations. Prices allocated distribution. Property rights in all things were essential, else we would fight with each other. What we acquired we kept. We only gave things up if we got something in return of higher value. Many things we knew were valued by no one but ourselves; and so we packed them away, hoarded them so they couldn’t get lost. Accumulation was the goal. We weren’t aware of it because we hadn’t been shown any other way. Our behavior was being dictated by our sense of what was possible, which thereby informed our sense of what should be done.

I had a friend once who moved from Russia to the United States in 1987. He moved from a place where offices chained typewriters to desks because they would otherwise be stolen. Citizens would brag about their private collection of paper clips. Spare parts for washing machines and cars were gold.

So when he first arrived, he got an apartment and began to fill it up. I visited. He had typewriters and stereos. He had washing machines and car parts. He had tables and chairs and desks piled high. He had vases and bowls and plates and cups. He had moose antlers mounted on a big piece of wood. He had golf bags with clubs, wooden and plastic bats, stuffed animals, music boxes, toys of all sorts, and piles and piles of shoes that didn’t even fit him. His apartment looked like a thrift store or the refuse of two dozen yard sales.

I was aghast and I asked him why he was accumulating all this ridiculous junk. He explained that in Russia, everything was treasure. He was vaguely aware that it was not valuable here but he had to have his fling, for he was in a constant state of shock that he could buy all this stuff so cheaply. He begged for indulgence. He just wanted to get through this stage in life, this period of adjustment. Fine, I said. Then he took me with him car shopping. At the end of the day, he was the proud owner of three used cars that barely ran.

In Russia, he had learned to grab anything he found because there was a shortage in everything. He was hardly alone in this. The whole society was informed by this sense of valuation. There was no free market at work, so one could be sure of nothing. Socialism led to shortages and poverty: a perfect recipe for rampant materialism.

I’m realizing now that we had more in common than I thought at the time. The only difference between us was in what we accumulated. His passion was what I regarded as junk. My passion was for documents: papers, journals, magazines, and books. He thought of all these as luxury goods that could be foregone until life’s essentials were provided for.

What we had in common was the assumption that we had to physically possess what we valued. We were both desperate scavengers of the physical world. This is what has changed, and all in a mere ten years or so. Digits take us away from the constraints. They have folded vast swaths of regular life into that magical realm that makes scarcity evaporate. If I have a document now, I can continue to possess it even as I unleash it on a globe that has the opportunity to consume it in exactly the same way I have, making hundreds, thousands, and millions of duplicates of the same thing in a matter of seconds. The same is true with any sort of information: databases, video, audio, and images.

No reflection on this topic can fail to credit the market economy for what has happened to us. Despite every attempt by governments to hobble it, the digital universe as we know it was made by the market economy. It is a market-built world, which is to say, a world built by human choices, entrepreneurship, and service one to another.

Socialism tried to make scarcity disappear through government fiat and only ended up creating huge shortages that spread misery and death. Capitalism sought to unleash the cooperative and competitive spirits of the human person and ended up abolishing scarcity in life’s most valuable things.

A Society of Mutual Benefactors

CHECKING OUT AT THE grocery store the other day, I paid for my sack of rolls. The checkout person handed me my bag.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re welcome,” she replied.

I walked away with a sense that something was wrong. Do checkout people usually say, “You’re welcome,” and nothing else? Not usually. Usually they say, “Thank you,” same as the customer says. (Remember, we are talking about the American South, land of politeness, here.)

I was left with an inchoate sense of: “Hey, I did something for you too.”

When do we say, “You’re welcome”? We say that when we give a gift (a good or service) to a person without receiving anything in return. For example, I might hold a door for a person. That person says, “Thank you,” and I say, “You’re welcome.” Another time might be at a birthday party when the recipient of a gift expresses thanks.

These are one-way examples of benefaction. We are giving but not necessarily getting anything tangible in return. What makes the case of the commercial exchange different? Why do both parties say, “Thank you”? It’s because each side gives a gift to the other.

When I bought those rolls, this is precisely what happened. I saw rolls available and I decided that the rolls were worth more to me than the $2 I had in my pocket. From the store’s point of view, the $2 was worth more than the rolls being given. Both parties walk away with a sense of being better off than they were before the exchange took place.

The checkout person is there to facilitate this exchange and speak as a proxy for the interests of the store. The store was receiving a gift of money (more highly valued than the rolls) and I was receiving the rolls (more highly valued from my point of view than the $2 I gave up to get them).

This is the essence of exchange and the core magic of what happens millions, billions, trillions of times every day all over the world. It happens in every single economic exchange that is undertaken by virtue of human choice. Both sides benefit.

Each side is a benefactor to the other side. This system of mutual benefaction, unrelenting and universal, leads to betterment all around. It increases the sense of personal welfare, which is to say, it increases social welfare when everyone is involved in the activity.

To be sure, a person might change his mind later. I might arrive home with my rolls and discover that I’m out of butter and that I would have been better off buying half as many rolls and using the rest of my money to buy butter. I might decide to drop bread from my diet. I might conclude that rolls are really not that tasty. All these things can happen. Such is the nature of the universe that the future is uncertain and human beings are inclined to be fickle. But at least at the time of the exchange, I believed I was better off, else I would not have made the exchange in the first place. I walked away with a sense of gain. The store owners had the same sense of gain. We both expect to gain, which is enough to recommend the exchange system, since no social system can guarantee a happy outcome for every action.

Now, if all of this seems obvious and not even worth pointing out, consider that most philosophers in the history of the world have missed this point. Aristotle, for example, reflected at length in his Nicomachean Ethics on the issue of economic exchange, but he started with the assumption that exchange takes place when valuation is equal or commensurate. But what about cases in which it seems obviously incommensurate, such as when highly valued and rare physician services are traded for something widely available like corn? Aristotle believed that the existence of money serves to somehow equalize the exchange and make it happen, when it should be apparent that money itself is only a good introduced to make exchange more convenient.

The problem he faced was his initial premise that economic exchange is based on the equal value of items in the exchange. This is just wrong. If two people value goods equally, an exchange would never take place, since no individual could be made better off than before. If exchange is based on equal value, people are merely wasting time engaging in it at all. Exchange in the real world is based on unequal valuations of goods and expectation of being made better off. It is a matter of two people who give each other gifts in their own self-interest.

The discovery of the correct theory of exchange had to wait until the late Middle Ages when the followers of St. Thomas Aquinas saw the logic for the first time. They saw that economic exchange was mutually beneficial, with each party to the exchange seeing an increase in personal welfare, subjectively perceived. Therefore the action of exchange on its own becomes a means of increasing the well-being of all people. Even if there is no new physical property available, no new innovations, no new productivity, wealth can be increased by the mere fact of exchange-based human associations.

As with many postulates of economics, this seems very obvious once you see it but it is evidently not obvious at all. In fact, I’ve observed that many people’s underappreciation of the contribution of the market order is rooted in the perception that buying and selling stuff really amounts to nothing wonderful at all. It is just a swirl of churning and burning for the sake of nothing in particular. Society could easily do away with it and be no worse off.

I have a hard time figuring out what people who believe this are thinking. Let’s say that I proposed abolishing gift giving. Wouldn’t it be obvious that society would be worse off if I got my way? We would no longer enjoy the material manifestation of the appreciation of others, and we would all be denied the chance to show others our appreciation of them.

Well, if it is true, as I’ve argued, that an economic exchange is a two-way gift, an instance of mutual benefaction that is pervasive throughout society, it becomes clear that society would be completely sunk without as many opportunities as possible for economic exchange. Anyone who champions the well-being of society should especially celebrate commercial centers, stock markets, international trade, and every sector in which money changes hands in exchange for assets or goods. It means nothing more than that people are finding ways to help each other get by and thrive.

As sixteenth-century Spanish theologian Bartolomé de Albornoz, known mostly for his opposition to slavery, wrote,

Buying and selling is the nerve of human life that sustains the universe. By means of buying and selling the world is united, joining distant lands and nations, people of different languages, laws and ways of life. If it were not for these contracts, some would lack the goods that others have in abundance and they would not be able to share the goods that they have in excess with those countries where they are scarce.

However, if we do not quite see the underlying logic of exchange and how it works to help everyone, it is easy to underappreciate what market trading means to society. This is a tendency in the circles that discuss issues of social justice. The market is rarely given the credit it deserves for helping humanity improve its lot. In fact, the market is nothing but the cooperative interaction of humanity in improving the commonweal.

The fallacy of value equivalence in exchange has been refuted for some 500 years, and yet it keeps reappearing. Economics is one of those sciences that require careful thought. It can’t be quickly intuited from a handful of moral postulates. It must be studied and understood with deductive tools and patient delineation of a wide range of concepts. It is because of this that economics as a science was so late in developing. But it is not too late for us to understand.

The understanding of economics leads to a direct appreciation of the contribution of free markets to the well-being of all. If you read something that seems to disparage the market economy, it is more than likely that a fallacy such as the above is at the root.

At some point today, you will undoubtedly engage in some economic exchange. Use the opportunity to reflect on what a glorious dynamic underlies it. You can say, “Thank you.” The person who takes your money can say, “Thank you.” Such opportunities account for most of the peace and prosperity we enjoy this side of heaven.

Obama on Auto-Defrosting Refrigerators

I’M THE GUY WHO just last week managed to find a plumber who would increase the water pressure in my entire house, defying government controls and thereby causing all appliances to work better. It’s not surprising that this was necessary. Government regulations have made a mess of our daily lives. Whether it is banning effective products or mandating inferior functionality in our appliances and fixtures, government’s role here is indisputably to degrade our quality of life.

So I was stunned to hear President Obama claim exactly the opposite in a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He ridiculed those who predicted disaster from government regulations as far back as 1848. “It didn’t happen,” he said. “None of these things came to pass.” Then he went further to say that government regulations “enhanced” industry and “made our lives better.” Regulations “often spark competition and innovation.”

What immediately came to mind is a picture of a race in which some overlord is clamping shackles on the runners’ feet. No, that does not stop the race. The runners develop innovative ways to keep going. Nor does competition stop; it might even become more intense as runners develop new skills they would otherwise not need. All that’s true, and yet we wouldn’t look to this race as the one that is going to set new speed records. Everyone would be better off without shackles.

But Obama’s claim really goes further than saying that somehow industry overcame the costs of regulation. He suggested that we are actually better off than we would otherwise be due to regulations. And he gave the specific example of automatically defrosting freezers. He really did. Here is the statement:

The government set modest targets a couple decades ago to start increasing efficiency over time. They were well thought through; they weren’t radical. Companies competed to hit these markers. And they hit them every time, and then exceeded them. And as a result, a typical fridge now costs half as much and uses a quarter of the energy that it once did—and you don’t have to defrost, chipping at that stuff and then putting the warm water inside the freezer and all that stuff. It saves families and businesses billions of dollars.

Well, this is a precise claim, and it can be checked out. Thanks to many commentators on the Mises Blog and LvMI’s Facebook page, who did some extensive sleuthing, here is what we found.

In 1928, the U.S. Patent Office issued a patent for “defrosting of the cooling element or unit of a refrigerating system.” Still, invention is one thing and marketing and production is another. It took a very long time for these to be seen in real life. More and more patents were issued all throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Most likely, the innovations occurred before this time and would have sped more quickly into the consumer market without the patents, but regardless, an article in Chain Store Age in 1947 writes as follows:

‘Auto Defrost,’ a recently developed electronic circuit for automatically controlling water defrosting of refrigeration coils has been announced by the Bush Mfg. Co., Hartford [founded 1907], Conn. Advantages claimed for this device are its low price, its ease of installation on existing water defrost systems, and it works independently from the refrigeration system.

Recall that Obama spoke of how the relevant regulations came about “a couple of decades ago.” Well, his timing is off by some 63 years! What’s more, these items were already reaching a retail market by 1948.

A March 13, 1948, edition of the Billboard posted a story datelined from Oakland, California:

Frosted Food O’Mat, Inc., of this city is readying a new ice cream vending machine, designed for grocery stores, super markets, and department stores. Dispenser will be offered both as a coin-operated and a manual device. The vendor will hold up to six flavors, and its makers claim that it has an automatic defroster.

By 1951, these items were already being pushed in homes. An advertisement in Popular Science reads as follows:

Von Schrader Mfg., Co.: Amazing Attachment MAKES OLD REFRIGERATORS INTO MODERN Automatic Defrosters! Thirty Million Prospects. Sell without ‘selling pressure’ on sensational Free Trial Plan. Just plug it in and leave it. Frees women from drudgery and mess of defrosting. Saves electricity. Keeps food longer, better. Gives longer life to refrigerator.… Women buying by the thousands!

By 1958, it seems like the great innovation was already old news. An advertisement in Life Magazine from 1958, this time from Westing-house, references a “frost-free, Auto-Defrost Refrigerator” as if it was nearly a standard feature. The main pitch here is that the refrigerator has “cold injector” that chills food faster. It is also styled in the “Shape of Tomorrow.”

Now, this is interesting to me since I can remember problems with freezers in my own lifetime, so it is not automatically crazy to believe that something happened in the regulatory environment of the early 1970s that would have prompted the universalization of frost-free freezers. During this period there began a government push for energy efficiency, and makers were required by government to meet certain targets, just as the President says.

But there is a serious problem. An automatic defroster increases, not decreases, the overall energy use of refrigerators and freezers. As this government report said in 1998: “Refrigerators with automatic defrost have higher occupant consumption (on a label-normalized basis) per unit of occupant activity than refrigerators with manual defrost.”

In other words, the more straightforward way to meet regulations would have been to take defrosting devices out, not put them in! The devices therefore exist not because of standards but in spite of them.

All evidence suggests that the truth is precisely the opposite of what Obama claimed. Frost-free freezers came about in the normal market way. A company found a way to package it as a luxury good available in some markets. Another company saw the advance and emulated it, offering it to still other markets (though the process was likely slowed by the government regulation called the patent). Other companies saw the potential for solving a monstrous household problem and began making them more cheaply and more efficiently, as the target market gradually went from luxury to mainstream. Over time, the improved product was ubiquitous.

This is pretty much the story of every innovation in the history of the world. Whether it is the spinning wheel or the smart phone, private companies innovate in order to outdo their competitors in serving the consumer. They all have reason to become ever more excellent in the service of others. They learn from each other and improve on what exists (in the absence of patents).

It is hard to imagine the alternative scenario that inhabits Obama’s mind. It goes something like this: Private enterprise comes up with a technology that it can fob off on customers and people like it fine but for some maddening problem. Private enterprise doesn’t care. So long as the profits are there, the problems persist. No one in the private sector has reason to change anything. Stasis prevails.

Government regulators, who are constantly scouring around consumer markets to find ways to innovate and improve products, notice the problem and issue some mandate. After some careful deliberation, they march into manufacturing plants with guns:

Listen up: our citizens have a problem with their freezers. They are building up ice. We want you to find a way, some way, to fix this problem. You have until next winter to figure it out. If you do not, you are dead meat.

Industry complies under the gun, scrambling to improve products only because government bureaucrats demand it. Under government edict, enterprise makes the thing, and problems go away. This process is repeated for thing after thing and we are gradually made better off, thanks to the central planners and wise public servants who know better than everyone else. Under this model, the entire developing world might be improved in a matter of months!

This is of course sheer fantasy. So is the claim of Obama that we should be grateful to regulators for all the blessings that flow to us. How many iPhone apps have bureaucrats invented? Will the president’s next claim be that bureaucrats gave us the Wii?

It’s a Broadband Life

I’M TRYING TO ORDER a hamburger, medium well, but the cook was involved in a heated argument with the customer who was insisting that DSL is better and faster than cable for a home internet connection.

“Man, DSL rocks!”

“You are crazy. DSL ain’t nothing. Cable’s bandwidth rocks!”

“You are paying for nothing. You can’t download nothing on cable!”

And so on.

A few years ago, these guys would have been talking about the weather or the game on TV. Now, they talk about their internet connections, using a technical language (well, a few technical words) that few people could understand a few months back.

As I wait for my burger, which seems to be taking forever, I was able to reflect on how broadband access is changing the face of middle-class life, especially domestic life.

Before I tell the following story, let me say upfront I’m really against it when police bust down the doors of a web domain owner and confiscate its servers on grounds that it might be being used as a conduit for illegal downloads. The report of this gross abuse against thepiratebay.org is wholly egregious and a violation of human rights.

On the other hand, I get my life back. For three or four days, my home internet connection was running as slowly as black-strap molasses. It seems that I found the culprit: a laptop managed by a certain young resident in my home that was set to download the complete Harry Potter movie set and a few Disney adventures.

You can set the software to start a new one the instant the old one finishes, so there’s no telling how many movies were slotted for download. If I hadn’t put a stop to it, my internet connection would have been clogged for the remainder of the decade.

For those of you not in the know, PirateBay specialized in BitTorrent downloads, the newest thing in web downloading that provides access to movies and videos. BitTorrents are said to account for 35% of internet traffic.

These downloads take an absurd amount of time. I used to complain about a 45 second download. For kids these days, a download of half a day, a day and a half, or even three days is completely normal. They run in the background and the user hardly notices them.

But everyone else does notice an extreme bandwidth shortage. I reminded the domestic culprit in question that there is a reason they are called “torrent” files, as in (Webster’s) “a tumultuous outpouring,” “a violent stream of a liquid (as water or lava),” “a channel of a mountain stream.” It crushes all before it.

I could see the future and it looked very much like the dial-up days. Remember when we used to fight over who got to use the single phone line? Then we got smart and got two phone lines, made the phone companies crazy with insane phone number demands—boom times for the baby bells!—just before we cancelled not only the new phone line but the old one too, because we were all switching to high speed, cell phones, and VOIP.

With BitTorrent, I would again be stuck yelling upstairs: “Hey, can you pause your week-long torrent download, so I can check my email?”

So, now there are strict household rules on BitTorrent. They can only be done between the hours of 11pm and 5am, or at times when no one else is home. If there is any more clogging the connection going on, two warnings will be delivered. On the third time, there will be no more. Period.

Now, that’s strict!

Of course all this could change in a matter of months, given the increased demand for bandwidth. It doesn’t matter how many people are arrested, in Sweden, Germany, or the U.S., or how many domains are taken off line. There will always be another source and another user willing to take the risk.

The saga of BitTorrent use and abuse is nicely chronicled at Wikipedia, which is another venue that was disparaged as ridiculous when it came out but has since become essential to modern life. Can you imagine the Oxford English Dictionary trying to keep up with our vocabularies, which add new words by the day and hour?

After these endless battles over broadband downloads, it is great to see at least one company getting smart. Warner Brothers has decided that if you can’t beat them, join them. It will be offering legal torrents of Star Wars: Revelations, and others are on the way.

We can see the future here. Just as illegal downloads of music paved the way for the spectacularly successful iTunes revolution, sites like PirateBay will deserve credit for alerting mainstream movie producers to a new and licit way to make a profit. With Netflix and other providers adding to their stock daily, it will only be a few years before most movies are delivered on demand.

Isn’t it interesting how the “criminal class” is increasingly shining the light on the direction that praiseworthy web entrepreneurship will take in the future? This alone shows that there is something very wrong with copyright law that would lead so many innocents to be snared while doing something that otherwise seems not the slightest bit wrong.

Ah! At last my hamburger is cooked, and served, the old-fashioned way.

The First Truly Literate Generation

REMEMBER THOSE SILLY DAYS in the 1990s, when Clinton, Gore, and their friends cobbled together our money to put computers in every classroom and community center? The hope was that the computer would at last do what the government has so far been unable to do after a century of work: make every child literate and high-minded. It turned out that most of the new computers gathered dust and became obsolete.

The web was dull and uneventful in those days. But no longer. It turns out that there was a kernel of truth in the Clinton view: computers can be a wonderful tool for learning. What looks like time wasting provides important technical training, a vehicle for healthy socializing, access to a vast world of information from all ages, and crucial practice for literary expression that will pay lifelong returns. No, it won’t turn a pig’s ear into a silk purse, but it can give a kid an extra boost in many ways.

(Hey, wow, my son just won the World Cup on his video game!)

Consider the major one: writing ability.

For practicing writing, getting feedback from peers, and just for the joy of composition, blogs and forums and even Facebook updates are wonderful opportunities for kids, though closer-knit kid boutiques are probably a more fruitful (and safer) venue. Such venues are a great way for kids to meet other kids who share their interests, expand geographical knowledge, gain broad cultural awareness, and gain technical web experience in writing, coding, working with images, and much more.

Such venues get kids past the technophobia that has crippled so many adult careers. They provide an outlet for creativity and they give kids what they need most: an opportunity and excuse to write every day.

Now, I know that we are supposed to bemoan the loss of the quill pen and parchment. We are supposed to weep because people no longer ache over long letters and put wax seals on their missives. I know how bad punctuation and crazy neologisms (LOL, brb, ttyl) are corrupting English.

But punctuation and abbreviations are small technical problems compared with the major issue that plagues bad writing: pomposity, jargon, preachiness, and prose that is stilted and labored. These are all the result of inexperience and a lack of direction—and blogging goes a long way toward addressing both problems.

What is true of blogs is also true of email, messaging, and texting. Don’t tell me that these are too informal. Informal is far better than prose strewn with words that the writer himself can’t deploy with competence, repeating words like “important” fifty times, as in: “At this stage in my narrative, I find that it is important to note the important distinction between what is important here and what is not.”

Ask any English teacher from any age. The first articles they get from students are riddled with these problems. The writer tries to sound smart but just ends up sounding puffed up and absurd. They have nothing to say, as if they composed the piece while forgetting that the main point of writing is to communicate!

This is not only a problem in our time. Mark Twain famously satirized the nineteenth-century approach to teaching writing in Tom Sawyer, in his reporting of a schoolgirl’s composition examination:

A prevalent feature in these compositions was a nursed and petted melancholy; another was a wasteful and opulent gush of ‘fine language’; another was a tendency to lug in by the ears particularly prized words and phrases until they were worn entirely out; and a peculiarity that conspicuously marked and marred them was the inveterate and intolerable sermon that wagged its crippled tail at the end of each and every one of them.

And so Twain gives an example from the first girl who read her composition:

In the common walks of life, with what delightful emotions does the youthful mind look forward to some anticipated scene of festivity! Imagination is busy sketching rose-tinted pictures of joy. In fancy, the voluptuous votary of fashion sees herself amid the festive throng, ‘the observed of all observers.’ Her graceful form, arrayed in snowy robes, is whirling through the mazes of the joyous dance; her eye is brightest, her step is lightest in the gay assembly. In such delicious fancies time quickly glides by, and the welcome hour arrives for her entrance into the Elysian world, of which she has had such bright dreams. How fairy-like does everything appear to her enchanted vision! Each new scene is more charming than the last. But after a while she finds that beneath this goodly exterior, all is vanity.

To be sure, a high school student who wrote this well today would be considered a genius. But it’s still insufferable. It’s artificial, affected, puffed up, and vacuous.

Why do students write this way? They don’t have an audience, they don’t have anything to say, and they haven’t written enough to acquire real skill.

Let’s take the last point first. The acquisition of expertise in any field is the product of relentless repetition. The World Series in baseball, for example, is the culmination of tens of thousands of batting sessions and casual games of catch in the backyard and practice field. But somehow we tend to forget this with writing and composition. The main experience kids have with it is through a string of high-pressure performances: term papers for class.

Digital communication is different. It is something you write every day. You fire off answers in a flash. You keep them short. You write and write and write, and you get your point across. Mostly you just do it and do it, again and again, and you get better and better at it. Writing becomes part of life, not a phony-baloney exercise you affect to please an authority figure.

And yes, digital communication overcomes the “something to say” problem too. The purpose is to make a point of some sort, even if it is “My little brother is driving me crazy!” That is far more substantive than “imagination is busy sketching rose-tinted pictures of joy.”

Finally, digital communication provides an audience. Knowing who is going to read what you are writing makes all the difference. A major cause of “writer’s block” is fear of what people you don’t know will think of what you say.

Kids need to know for whom they are writing in order to affect the correct voice. The audience for email is listed right up top in the “To:” bar.

The following happens all the time when people submit pieces to Mises.org. Someone will send an incoherent piece, and I’ll write back: “What are you trying to say?” They will write back with a crystal clear response, which forms the basis of a new draft. The writer had an audience in mind and it made all the difference.

Try this at home. Ask your child to write a report on some topic. Insist that it be 5 pages. If the kid is typical, he will labor for days and turn in pap. Give that same kid a Gmail account and ask him to drop you an email about what he knows about lizards, and you might find 5 pages arriving in less than an hour.

This is a wonderful and underappreciated medium! It should be exploited by all parents and educators.

Far from killing literacy, email is producing the first fully literate society in many eons, perhaps ever. Never before has it been so necessary that every person in the whole of the population be capable of writing well. For the first time in history, people are practicing the craft on a daily basis, even from the youngest ages. The sooner they begin, the better.

One last word on this topic. Do not let kids type using an incorrect method. Download TypingPal for $20 and your kid will be typing well in a matter of weeks—without having to endure the horrors of typing class, which is another subject entirely.

The People on the Move

THERE ARE MOMENTS in history when the people are on the move, consistent with the logic of history, and no force on earth can stop them. You can see it in the images of Russians in 1990 pulling down cast-iron statues of Lenin. You can see it in the images of the Romanian people charging Ceausescu’s palace in 1989.

And I just saw it last night at Bed, Bath, and Beyond as the people raided the towers of K-cups holding coffee and tea to go into the Keurig coffee maker that is the blazing-hot item for the holidays (second only to our new pocket paperback of Human Action).

To understand why the Keurig coffee maker is firing up the forces of history in a progressive direction, we need to reflect on the dynamics of the relentless technological trend from the collective to the individual. In ancient times, bathing, for example, was a community activity: one pool of water that all people would visit. With technological progress came the family tub, in which people would dunk themselves one after another. In modern times, we each fill our own bath or take an individual shower.

So it is with phones, which, when first invented, were found one per community in the general store. Then there were party lines that several households would share. Then the phone came to the single-family home. Finally, the process of individuation culminated in the pocket cell phone, with one phone number per person. And so it is all over the world, and throughout human history, provided there is the freedom to innovate, produce, and distribute.

It’s true with books too. There was the Library of Alexandria for the whole world. Then there were public libraries for whole cities. Then we progressed to private libraries in homes. Now we long for the ultimate individuation: libraries on our cell phones and books we can carry on our person. This relentless push to fulfill the demands of individualism is the driving force of human history.

And so it is with coffee. For too long we’ve lived with a community form of delivery. Whatever collectivist pot was made for the whole group is what we drank. Never mind that it is burned from the heating pad. Never mind that it is too strong or too weak, too dark or too light, or that it is just plain gross. Never mind that the preparation and cleanup requires that we stare at unappetizingly soaked coffee grounds that clog our sinks and stink up our trash. It was what we had, and we made do.

Then came Starbucks and other specialized shops. Here we could order what we wanted and every drink was prepared fresh and according to our specifications. We are all, after all, individuals, each of us with different tastes, desires, and demands. When given the chance to express our wishes, we take it, and therein lies a great entrepreneurial opportunity for those who are daring and creative enough, and willing to take on the responsibility for giving history a push forward.

In retrospect, the whole Keurig mania seems perfectly obvious, even inevitable. We want Starbucks in our homes. We want endless variety. We want it to be fast. We do not want to wake up to the shattering sound of coffee beans in a horrible grinding machine. In fact, though we had never thought of it before, we do not want to look at coffee grounds, before or after they become soaked.

When you first observe the K-cup that Keurig uses, your thought might be: this is ridiculously inefficient. Why would anyone take a tiny amount of coffee and package it in plastic with a complicated internal filtering system and waste foil to cover the top just to produce a single cup of coffee? But you know what? History is not about some outsider’s view of what is or is not efficient according to some preset calculus. History is about the ideas and preferences of real human beings.

K-cups also owe their success to a software-style model of development. Keurig developed the hardware and sold it (and its K-cup patent) to Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. The company might have then decided to cash in on its monopoly privileges but GMCR seemed to understand that there are more profits to be made through liberality than restriction. It licensed many different companies to produce the K-cup firmware, so that now there is a gigantic market for these things, and even a market for contraptions to display them.

When the patent expires in 2012, the price of the K-cup will probably fall but the blow to GMCR will be minimal (as this blogger argues) because so many are already competing for market share. Note too that the mainstreaming of the K-cup came only after this liberalization; only as recently as 2007, when you only found these coffee makers in upscale law firms, was the company still hammering knock-off cup makers with lawsuits.

When the patent expires next year, all bets are off. I fully predict that the next generation will never see another coffee ground, never have to deal with grungy wet filters, any more than people who eat bacon today have to watch pigs being rounded up and slaughtered. The division of labor will kick in so that consumers have only one job to do: drink great coffee according to their own individual preferences.

It’s expensive, you say, even three or five times as much as buying grounds and beans in bulk. So it is. Cell phones are expensive. Baths are expensive. Toilet paper is expensive, and so is shampoo, deodorant, beef, and clothing from the department store. Some things that make life wonderful are worth paying for. That’s the whole point of the material world, isn’t it? To make life wonderful?

Here’s the best part. Consider how this celebratory episode in capitalist decadence has been marketed. We are led to believe that this technology is European (fashionable people somehow love burned-out, low-growth economies) when in fact the company that owns it is American. And notice that all of the marketing vaguely hints at a PC sensibility. The word “green” appears everywhere. Paul Newman (don’t we just love everything this guy makes?) sponsors his own K-cups. People on the packages are doing things like standing around trees on green hills. Surely this ridiculous excess is all very ecofriendly. Surely it is! The genius of capitalism is never more on display than in the last few years when we’ve seen how the private sector can even sell anti-capitalism and make the big bucks.

Prepare the landfills for mountains of used K-cups because that it is what is headed our way. And when they are full, we can cover them with dirt and start again, and do this again and again until the invention of the Keurig coffee maker recedes into memory as just another landmark in the long struggle to leave the state of nature and climb to ever-higher stages of the great chain of being. At each stage, we can easily observe the path from the collective to the individual and also revel in the lovely irony that it is precisely our uniqueness that unites us all in the common cause of defending the freedom to buy and sell, which is the driving force of history.

There’s No Such Thing as Homemade Ice Cream

IN THE FREEZER SECTION of the grocery store, there’s Vanilla Bean, French Vanilla, and yet another vanilla flavor called Homemade Vanilla. Now, come on! I’m in the store here, looking at rows and rows of commercial products produced by a vast capitalistic machinery, a cornucopia of frozen goods made by advanced industrial technologies, made from goods and services that require a global division of labor and a sophisticated trading and price system rooted in private property and replete with entrepreneurial risk at every stage of production.

There’s nothing “homemade” about anything here, and surely everyone knows that. It’s just marketing—not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But it got me thinking. What is real homemade ice cream? Oh, I’ve made it before. It has always struck me that you can’t really make real homemade ice cream with an electric machine. Electricity is so artificial, and if you are going to plug in a machine, in what sense are you actually making the stuff? Pouring ingredients into an electric bucket and waiting isn’t really “making” anything. You might as well let someone else do that and buy it from them. You might as well make a trip to the freezer section of the grocery store.

Nope, homemade must be hand cranked all the way, so the “elbow muscle” does the hard work. And it can be exhausting. You turn and turn and crank and crank and it seems like it will never become thick like ice cream. Then when it finally happens, and you are tired out, the turning gets harder and harder until you have to throw your whole body into it and finally you just can’t turn it anymore. At that point, it is ready to eat.

Is it worth it? That’s a subjective judgment. But consider: how many of the ingredients themselves are homemade? Is the stuff that makes the ice cream really homemade and truly authentic? We’ve already dispensed with the need for an electrical plant in your backyard by settling on the hand-cranked method. This is a great step toward homemade.

But what about the rock salt, a product that seems useful for either breaking up ice on the sidewalk or for making ice cream but not much else? I bought my packet at the store. This is clearly a compromise of the seeming need for autarky in ice cream production, so what if we made this ourselves?

Wikipedia says that rock salt:

occurs in vast beds of sedimentary evaporite minerals that result from the drying up of enclosed lakes, playas, and seas. Salt beds may be hundreds of meters thick and underlie broad areas. In the United States and Canada extensive underground beds extend from the Appalachian basin of western New York through parts of Ontario and under much of the Michigan Basin. Other deposits are in Ohio, Kansas, New Mexico, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan. The Khewra salt mine is a massive deposit of rock salt near Islamabad, Pakistan. In the United Kingdom there are three mines, the largest of these is at Winsford in Cheshire producing half a million tonnes on average in six months.

All I can say is, Yikes!, I’ve got some travelling to do. And some crews to hire. And then I have the problem of packaging the stuff and shipping it back from Islamabad or Winsford or wherever. But wait, it seems like Morton sells a product that might be the same thing but, in any case, markets itself as Ice Cream Salt, as distinguished from just plain rock salt for driveways and the like. What the difference is, I don’t know. But I’m not taking any chances, so more research on this point is clearly necessary.

Then there’s the problem of milk. I could buy a cow but that’s a lot of upkeep. I understand that you have to milk one of these things regularly whether you are making ice cream or not. And there’s the problem of feed and waste and many other issues. Raising and keeping this animal healthy might turn into a full-time job, with no time left over for making, much less enjoying, ice cream.

Of course you need refrigeration and ice, without which matters are rather hopeless. It took most all of recorded human history to invent the refrigerator, which only became common in American homes in the 1920s and 1930s, and so it is pretty presumptuous for me to assume that I could construct one on my own. Plus, these things run on electricity, and I thought I had dispensed with that in the name of authenticity. So long as I’m using electricity to store the milk and ice, why not just let electricity turn the crank too?

I’m back to plan A: get a generator. I’ll pretend not to notice the problem of making homemade gasoline to power it. After all, I could use a river (need to get one of those) or erect a giant windmill (prepare for dead bird carcasses to litter up the yard), but then there’s no power on windless days. How about a solar-based generator? Break out the Windex (can I make that at home too?). This is getting expensive.

Of course you need eggs, which means chickens, which I wouldn’t entirely rule out, but everyone I know who has tried to raise chickens for eggs eventually throws in the towel. It is a disgusting job, full of unexpected headaches, like getting rid of varmints and keeping the chickens warm and buying expensive feeds and dealing with filthy critters and chicken coops.

It is doable, provided I wanted to quit my job in order to raise a cow and chickens. But there’s still the problem of sugar and flavor. Sugar can be had in many ways. I could raise bees or sugar cane or extract it from fruit and many others processes, each rather daunting. It would be far easier just to buy some, but then what about authenticity and that important “homemade” aspect of my ice cream?

Now let’s talk about vanilla. Apparently this derives from a bean grown in Mexico and Madagascar, and, says Wikipedia, “extensive labor required to grow the vanilla seed pods.” Now I seem to have bumped up against an impossible problem. I live in neither place, and apparently my climate just can’t do the vanilla-growing thing. Maybe I need a greenhouse. Artificial vanilla would require a chemistry lab out back.

I’ve said nothing about the ice cream maker itself, which uses stainless-steel gears and a crank. In the whole history of humanity, steel as we know it only became economically viable in the nineteenth century and stainless steel is very much a modern invention. It would require vast study for me to even figure out the metallurgical aspects of this. And at the least, I would need a blast furnace out back, and one wonders how the cow, the chickens, the electrical plant, and vanilla-producing greenhouse would fare amidst that.

Once I have the steel I would still need to form it. Then there’s the problem of the wood for the maker too, so I would need to cultivate trees and mill them and somehow shape them into round slats. Already, it would appear that I need a backyard full of stuff from all nations and all times, not to mention the physical impossibility of maintaining all these contraptions without a vast labor force that included engineers from many fields and experts in a huge range of tasks. Bankruptcy would begin even before this operation began.

The division of labor—global and involving thousands and even millions of people—is looking ever better, all beautifully coordinated by the price system and given forward motion by entrepreneurs at every stage, operating in coordination from all parts of the world.

In fact, it is pretty clear that there is no such thing as homemade ice cream, and that we use the phrase only in the most metaphorical sense. Thank goodness. In this case, I’m seeing the point: the store is just the last stop in a huge and extended process that emerged over centuries and requires the involvement of people all over the world.

They can call their vanilla ice cream homemade if they want to. Given what they go through to get us good food at good prices, capitalists have more than earned the right to stretch the language a bit when trying to persuade us to buy their products. We are the beneficiaries of a remarkable system of human cooperation.

Commodify My Grass, and Everything Else

EVERY ONCE IN A while, we gain a glimpse of how things might work in a fully privatized society. When it occurs, like a flash of light in the darkness, we should take notice, try to understand its source, and seek ways to make the flash the norm to light up the world.

And so it happened with my yard this week. Yes, I’m part of the whole American fetish for recreating English manor estates in miniature in our front yards, a legacy left by our former colonial owners whose rule we pretend to have thrown off 225 years ago. But this legacy of serfdom still oppresses us—in a self-imposed way—through our tendency to want large lawns of green grass that grows for no particular purpose in our front and back yards that also exist for no particular purpose.

And so we try to keep them up. We mow them. We water them. We try to keep the weeds away with fertilizers about which we know nothing. When I’m at the hardware store, I’m asked to choose between 5-40-10, 10-10-10, 40-15-30, and 0-40-15, and I have no idea what all this means, so I do the next best thing. I go for packaging and promotion.

This stuff claims to make my yard healthy and green, and that’s what I want, but wait: the next one claims the same! Oh, wait, here’s one that also controls the following 42 weeds, and surely my weeds are on this list, but how can I know for sure? Once I took a sprig of weed into the store and asked: what is this? The guy said he didn’t recognize it. Well, how can I control it if even the experts don’t recognize it?

Then there is the whole preemergence/postemergence issue. One bag of fertilizer says that I had better use this stuff before the weeds grow. So now I feel like a slacker because my weeds are already growing. And, anyway, how are you supposed to know that you have a weed problem until they grow? Am I supposed to be some kind of soil tester, with a laboratory in the basement?

This guy happened to mention to me over dinner that he uses a company called TruGreen, and sure enough, there is such a company. It takes care of all these issues for you. The slogan of the company is “go greener” but it is obviously a hilarious play on words. We aren’t talking environmentalism here. The company was formerly known as “Chem-Lawn” but then public opinion was browbeat into hating chemicals. Hence: TruGreen—same as Sugar Smacks was transformed into Honey Smacks when public opinion turned against sugar.

In any case, this company struck me as a dream come true. It turns out to be a national company like McDonald’s or CVS, with locally owned branches. I went to the national website and put in my address, and by the time I got home I had a full analytical chart stuck in my door. It turns out that I have a problem with

				Crabgrass	Chickweed	Bittercrass
				Bahia grass	Dichondra	Wild Onion
				Dallisgrass	Henbit	Buttonweed
				Nutsedge	Spurge	Carolina Geranium
				Poa Annua	Vetch	Fire Ants

But fortunately I have no active diseases and the mowing has been good (up with that!). But get this: the company says that I need to “aerate” my yard. And so now I recall a product I saw in one of those inflight magazines. It was a pair of shoes with huge spikes on them. They were called “yard aeration shoes” with the idea that you strap them on and walk around your yard poking holes everywhere. This struck me as something good to do, but that I could actually buy these shoes and do that seemed completely implausible. Ever since, I’ve had the feeling that my yard needed this done, but I had no way to figure out how to do it.

Well, all problems are solved thanks to TruGreen, and for a lot less money than one might expect. Why hadn’t I done this years ago? It’s a mystery. I was somehow under the impression that this was a job for a real man to do. I mean, what is my life worth if I can’t keep up a great-looking yard and impress all my neighbors with my lord-like control over my domain? Enough of that, I say. My grass is a commodity and it should be properly commodified, its care totally commercialized.

But it does start one to think about things. Here we have a national company, and there are probably many others, that is dedicated to making life’s stupidest tasks completely bearable and doable. Is there anything that private markets can’t do?

I’m thinking here of the trash problem. No, there’s no trash nightmare taking place in my town but there are persistent problems that drive me crazy over time. Why didn’t the city take my trash? Oh, I put a box in the clippings bag, and I’m not supposed to do that, or I put clippings in the official city trash container, and I’m not supposed to do that, or I put an old chair out on Monday and old chairs are only collected on every second Wednesday, or I put out limbs from a tree on the second Tuesday of the month and don’t I know that limbs are only collected on the third Thursday of the growing season.

Then there is the water problem. The city—all governments!—are dedicated to making us use less and less of the stuff. Our toilets don’t work. Our showers are reduced to a trickle. We are hectored not to water the grass. Our clothes washers and dishwashers are supposed to run on one gallon a day and nothing gets clean. And still: every time there is a spell without rain, we are warned that civilization may soon come to an end and the water must be severely rationed (as if it isn’t already).

Are we really supposed to believe that private markets can’t deliver water to our homes in a way that is economically rational and consumer friendly? Same with electricity, gas, sanitation, and everything else. Commodify all these things and we’d see local, regional, national, and even global companies competing to serve us, falling all over each other to bring us exactly what we want at prices that are low and falling like the prices of computer hardware.

As for mail, this is a no-brainer.

Thank goodness that no local government has decided that lawn care is a public good that must be provided by quasi-public companies. I can promise you this: if this were the case, we’d all have a set of aerator shoes in our closet, and the grass would still be infested with every weed listed above and then some, including untold diseases.

Private lawn care: here is the flash in the darkness that shows the way forward. Commodify yards, commodify water and trash, commodify everything. Then and only then will we become what all Americans secretly dream to become: lords of our estate in every sense.

The Peaceful Resistance

WHENEVER I’M FEELING BLUE about domestic politics—there is plenty about which to despair—something great happens that reminds me of the long-term case for optimism, which is all about the astonishing expansion of the division of labor globally and in ways that weren’t even possible just a few years ago.

The world has changed to permit ever more people in all corners of the globe to cooperate to their mutual betterment. The very prospect is inspiring people to claim their freedom and use it to make their lives better. By comparison to this activity, the disgusting behavior of nation states appears like a ridiculous anachronism that will be streamrolled by the forces of history.

And when these examples hit home, it is all the better.

So, for example, I was preparing dinner two nights ago, and the Skype plugin on my iPhone rang and it was a young man from some far-flung rural area of Australia. He had a charming accent that I could barely understand but he was full of smiles and exuberance. I showed him around my house and he showed me his rather barren room, full of computer stuff.

After pleasantries, we got down to business. I was contracting with him to fix one small module on our Mises Academy software, the one that generates certificates of completion. He had already answered an email requesting an expert. He was the last person I would have expected to be on this job.

Just ten minutes ago, he delivered his repaired module, and it is beautifully done with elegant code, along with an invoice for his work. I never would have imagined this possible, and the truth is that it would not have been possible even a few years ago. But with communication technology dramatically improving, the possibilities for international collaboration, in surprising ways, are more readily at hand.

I don’t have to move there and he doesn’t have to move here. We found each other through a tiny mention on a social networking site. And like magic, he had an opportunity for exchange. Everyone is better off. The world is a more beautiful place.

The same happened with some developers in India, who are now doing the Mises Institute’s eBooks at a very low price and with great expertise. This would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. But technology is making it happen.

Never underestimate the implications of global economic relationships. This is the stuff that makes the world go round. It is the engine of progress, and the producer of peace and understanding. Together we can cooperate to make the world a better place. Expand this model 100 fold, 1,000 fold, a million fold, and we create a glorious force for the betterment of the whole human race. It is mankind’s method of peaceful resistance.

How can some stupid government program or regulation compare to this? All the activities of the nation state pale by comparison to the significance of the globalization of communication and commerce. In the digital age, we are discovering that all people of the world have more in common with each other than any of us have in common with the states that rule us.

That’s why revolution in one country is a revolution in all countries. The cries for freedom by one man are the cries for the freedom of us all.

These advances are taking place right under our noses. They are the most significant since the industrial revolution, and our grandchildren will look back in history books on these times as the turning point. We are truly blessed to be living in them and experiencing them.

And it is not only the digital world at work here. Hyundai is a Korean car company that opened a plant in Montgomery, Alabama in 1986. The plant cost $1.4 billion to build. That Montgomery plant now employs 2,650 people. It operates around the clock on weekdays and during the day on Saturday. It has a sister company Kia that opened another plant in Georgia in 2010, and it employs even more.

As a result of these factories, parts suppliers are opening doors every few weeks. Today, 138 businesses have been founded just to support these companies, and thousands of other businesses owe their revenue stream to their presence. During the Great Recession, Hyundai hired while Detroit fired. Hyundai and Kia are now ahead of Ford Motor Co., and the 4th largest car maker worldwide. Hyundai alone built 300,000 cars in Montgomery last year. And for this reason, the jobless rate is very low in Alabama even though textiles are gone.

Ten Korean restaurants have opened in Montgomery and many thousands of Koreans have moved here. They are supporting Churches, symphonies, and theaters. The kids are taking violin lessons and playing in orchestras, bringing classical music to a land where it has never taken root.

Consider the ways in which this story runs contrary to government plans. Americans were supposed to make cars for Americans forever. The great threat to this idea was imported cars, and hardly anyone expected the importation of car manufacturing itself. Americans were supposed to be patriotic and buy American-made cars forever. Montgomery has had terrible economic times for some 50 years and every mayor and every governor has had a plan for recovery. No one expected it would come from abroad.

Koreans haven’t ruined Alabama culture but rather refurbished it and revitalized it. The spinoffs are widespread, helping to provide not only jobs in manufacturing cars but in manufacturing everything, plus improving retail and restaurants and even the arts. This recovery was not the result of any government plan or the carrying out of any centrally organized idea. It was never subjected to a political debate or vote.

This is the market at work. The state does not plan it and cannot anticipate its actions and shape, but one thing is for sure: it is consistent with human choice. It is us who makes or break these entrepreneurial plans. The market has the model for social organization. The law of association, first discovered by David Ricardo, and elaborated upon by Ludwig von Mises, is the energy here. It pointed to the advantages that come to all parties when they trade, even when a more efficient supplier is trading with a much less efficient supplier. Both are more efficient together than they would otherwise be producing in isolation.

Mises said that this law of association was responsible for a dramatic change in the outlook of humanity. People began to consider themselves not as rivals in a struggle for the appropriation of the limited means of subsistence. Instead we discovered that we can consort with one another for the sake of cooperative production.

And how does this come about? Not through compulsion. Not through social contract. It comes about because we recognize that it is in our interest to come together by mutual agreement. And this coming together comes about through differences among us, because of the realization that we each have something to contribute to a relationship. We are not sacrificing our well-being by doing this but exactly the opposite.

Agreement and not force: this is what will save us and continue to build civilization.