No Alternative to Capitalism Except Democratic Captitalism

All life is an effort at self-replication. Species that succeed survive and evolve. Those that don't enter the fossil record. All higher forms of life are driven by two elemental instincts, sex and self-preservation. (The former may often overcome the later but that's another issue.)

In human beings, these two drives are experienced as lust – and its “higher” form, love – and the chase after the means of survival – in modern life, money. Capitalism feeds off both of these – indeed combines them – and provides a wide range of products and services in return. (Look at how many combinations of human desire are served by social media such as Facebook and Twitter.) The struggle for the legal tender takes two gross forms in modern capitalist economies: the selling of labor and the reaping of profits by those who control any particular means of production. Capitalism requires both (at least as long as some people are needed to produce and run the machines that increasingly have taken over production).

We all seek more money than we currently have, in part from necessity but as much to provide us with a sense of security. We want to survive today and also tomorrow and the day after. We never know when enough might not be enough so we keep wanting more. Seeking riches is simply the highest manifestation of the drive for self-preservation. No other economic system so deeply satisfies this need than capitalism.

Capitalism is a complete economic system. It directly serves the human hunger for more and more and provides the means to satisfy that hunger. It does this through utilizing the division of labor that arises from the various forms of inequality – those which exist by nature, those that derive from human prejudices and vagaries and those that result from the workings of the capitalist system itself. Put simply, some people work to survive and some reap profit from the work (often including their own).

There seems no real alternative to capitalism because it works directly off of our two most basic drives. Many – most of the world's religions as well as Marx, Luddites, socialists, romantics, nihilists etc – have bemoaned this or looked for alternatives. But there seems no other way to organize an efficient, growing economy than through private ownership and a free market. State control and social ownership have no instinctual basis in human nature and don't work in practice.

The problem arises because capitalism is amoral and by itself produces unfair and unjust outcomes. The belief in some invisible hand that somehow makes it all come out right is an outdated religious notion that flies in the face of our actual experience.

The issue of morality and justice comes into it because humans do not live as monads but as members of society. We cannot survive as individuals outside society. The stability of society, any society, depends on a degree of social cohesion sufficient to keep it from breaking down into an Hobbesian state of nature. Government alone – however much a Leviathan – cannot provide sufficient efficient cohesion. Political dictatorship is incompatible with long-term economic prosperity, it dams the flow of individual freedom that drives the innovation that a capitalist economy requires to avoid stagnation. A widespread experience of the fairness and justice of how the economy functions is the only sound basis for social cohesion in a capitalist society. In other words, capitalism must be tempered sufficiently to provide a common sense of “ownership” or it becomes disruptive.

Capitalism must therefore be regulated for its – and our – own good. Such regulation must somehow represent everyone the system serves. It must therefore be democratic. Only through the functioning of democratic governance can the necessary element of fairness and justice be introduced in a way that serves everyone's efforts at self-preservation. Regulating a capitalist economy – placing limits and requirements on private ownership and market activities – by collective decisions taken through democratic means is the only alternative to capitalism. There seems no other.

Reading Ulysses

Just finished reading James Joyce's Ulysses.  Figured it was about time.  Read it on my Kindle using a free version downloaded from the Gutenberg Project.  Tried the free Amazon version but it was incomplete. 

I'm not a "Joycean."  And although I am traveling to Ireland shortly, I will not seek to follow Leopold Bloom's tracks through Dublin.  There was lots in the book that I didn't get, allusions to Dublin and local/Irish events, some of the untranslated text, some of the words Joyce used or coined.  Sometimes, I couldn't follow what was going on.  But none of this really mattered.  What Joyce managed to do in his 265,000 words was simply astonishing and wonderful.  Through his various techniques - most notably perhaps his stream-of-consciousness rendering of Bloom's wanderings and fantasies - is to convey a human being from the inside.  Over the hundreds of pages taking place in one long day, Bloom springs up in your apprehension as a full-formed presence, like a living flame in your mind.  His being is laid bare, his thoughts - free flowing and disjointed as are our own - his deepest fantasies and fears, his knowing efforts to avoid painful truths, his obsessions, his efforts to make sense of the world he perceives, his pleasures, his relationships with other, everything we reveal to and hide from the outside world.  Bloom becomes a friend - despite his hidden recesses he is quite likable - that you miss when the book ends.  In a bit less space, Joyce also bring you inside a projection of a younger self - Stephen Dedalus - on the day the book takes place - June 16, 1904 - and Bloom's wife Molly.

Shakespeare was the English language master of the social setting and dynamics, of the deep psychology of power, of eternal conflicts.  Joyce was the master of the individual person and Ulysses a truly marvelous book.

Lines I've plucked from reading Ulysses can be found here by searching on "Joyce."

Time to Found the Foundation?

Seventy years ago, Isaac Asimov's fictional character Hari Seldon invented the "science of psychohistory."  Psychohistory was a mathematical approach to predict and shape the future by influencing the course of events through manipulating the probabilistic laws of mass action.  A form of "mathematical sociology" modeled on mathematical economics, Seldon based psychohistory on his "discovery" that there existed formula and equations that could encapsulate societal dynamics and provide solutions to problems.  He used it to seek to manage the long term history of a human society that had spread throughout our Galaxy.  He foresaw a time of cyclical disintegration and sought to use his "science" and the two "Foundations" founded upon it to use the equations to tweak events and reduce the time of recovery.

Paul Krugman claims that his discovery of the fictional mathematical history is what led him to study economics.  Indeed, "psychohistory"  shares the economist assumption that society moves in cycles and that good times alternate with bad ones.  Like economics, Seldon's science could be used to try to extend the good and shorten the bad.  There was also a deeper tie between the two, the view that the best economy - and the society it was based upon - worked through the central mechanisms of individual choice and freedom in a free market of exchange. 

Democracy and capitalism do seem to be the most effective way to maximize social and economic  good in the long run.  Any society that limits either - that doesn't have both - will sooner or later limit its own ability to sustain itself.  In other words - in this optimistic view - democracy combined with free market capitalism are mutually re-enforcing and sure to win over all competitors in the long run.  The short run may be another matter.  And as Seldon foresaw, the short run may last a long time. 

I mention all this because it occurs to me that the key element of Asimov's fictional science - as it is for economics - is the assumption that there are formulas for understanding what is happening to us, predicting the future and undertaking actions to manage that future.  In other words, there are solutions to the complex equations that are determining events.  Furthermore, these solutions have as their aim - if not their immediate means - perfecting implementation of democratic governance and free market exchange.  Though economics traditionally postulated an "invisible hand," since Keynes it has been understood that a "free market" does not mean an untended one.  It is also understood that total government control of an economy is not efficient.  The best solution seems to require the intersection of democratic government and free markets, where the good of the whole society as determined by the body of citizens impacts the actions and interactions of individuals and groups seeking to maximize their own benefit.

So the question becomes, are there formula or possibly even equations for analyzing our evolving global society as the fictional Seldon foresaw?  Should we stop arguing about climate change, ideology, history and everything else and instead start looking for ways to identify and manage the trends and the likely futures we can foresee?  Is it time to found the Foundation?

Photo Homage to the C&O Canal

In 1753, Lt. Col. George Washington was sent to see if he could talk the French out of a fort they had constructed in what is now western Pennsylvania near Lake Erie.  He was rebuffed.  He returned to the area in 1754 to try to dislodge the French from their new Fort Dusquesne at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, where the two form the Ohio River at what is now Pittsburgh.  On the way there, he encountered the Ohiopyle rapids on the Youghiogheny River.  He could not go further by boat.

Washington remembered this years later when he envisioned a canal from Ohio to the Potomac to allow transport by water to and from the new American West.  He founded the Potowmack Company in 1785 to improve navigation along the river.  In 1824, the company passed its rights to the Chesapeake and Ohio Company, which started building the Canal up from Washington in 1828.  It reached Cumberland, Maryland in 1850 but was by then already facing competition from the railroads.  Plans to push on to Pittsburgh were abandoned but the C&O functioned as it was until 1924, 170 years after Washington first saw the possible water route west.

President Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps began rehabilitating the Canal during the Great Depression and today it's a National Park.  We in the DC area live with this treasure.  Many people visit some part of the 185 miles of the trail.  I've biked it or parts several times over the years, the latest in May as the second part of a trip down the original canal path from Pittsburgh.  It's a great park and really nice to hike and bike.  Here follows a homage of pictures I've taken through the seasons.

Leaving from Cumberland, Maryland

Exiting the Paw Paw Tunnel

Overgrown

At Hancock, Maryland

Along the Canal and through the woods

Some locks still work

Around Mile 40

Locks 2 and 3 in Georgetown

The Ignoble End

Biking the GAP and C&O

I picked up biking 20 years ago after an accident that stopped my running (which I began in 1978 after drinking beer on the Arkansas River).  Washington, DC is a great place for it with lots of trails of varying distances.  Rock Creek is my favorite.  Several years ago I did the C&O Canal from Cumberland to DC, 180 miles in three days.  Sixty miles in one day is pretty much my limit.  I could go more I guess if my life depended upon it but otherwise not.

When I got back from East Timor and read that the bike trail from Pittsburgh to Cumberland - the Great Allegheny Passage (GAP) - was now complete, I decided I'd have to try the whole thing back to DC.  This week I did it.  The trail goes through beautiful countryside and towns still struggling to recover from the loss of industry.  The trails followed the routes used for transport between east and west for almost two hundred years of American expansion, industry, agriculture and commerce.  The grade is train, and biker, friendly and the trail uses former train trestles and tunnels.  The trains still run but the goods come from everywhere but there.  The communities along the way have taken to varying degrees to the bikers.  There are bed & breakfasts along the way (and down-home eating too).  It was rivers, woods and the heartland.  A real adventure.

Here follows my daily record and some photos:

May 20: Nice ride, sunny but not too hot. The first several miles were paved trail and streets. I got lost in McKeesport but used my GAP app map to reorient myself and get back to the right path. On the way, saw a beautiful shiny black snake sunning himself on the asphalt, a jumping chipmunk, trains whistling, lots of chungalolos, people canoeing and floating down the Youghiogheny River and Sunday bikers and hikers. The trail, once it reached the old rail bed, ran next to the river and was easy to bike. Didn't really feel like uphill. My double padded seat worked well but my butt still was sore that last ten miles.

After checking in, went to the corner tavern and had an ice cold Bud (on tap) and watched a bit of the Pirates vs Tigers game. Then next door for a slice of pizza. Just spent the last half hour chatting with the nice lady (from Mt Lebanon) who does most of the work for their B&B while her husband mans the reservation desk. She was ironing.

Connellsville on a Monday evening is not much of a place. Wendy's for dinner tonight.

May 21: This is train country. The rail lines follow the river. Last night in Connellsville, they whistled and trundled on through all night, though not a problem for me. I love trains and the sound of trains. They kept me company most of the way to Myersdale and when I entered town, one followed me right in and passed though the middle of town. Reminds me that America still runs on rails.

On the way today, got rained on a bit but Andy's big purple poncho got me through dry if a bit muddy. (I was able to wash my bike when I got to the B&B.)  The Yough is a beautiful river with lots of rapids as it ascends into the mountains.   Passed through Ohiopyle, where we used to go when we were students at Pitt for the natural water slide and running rapids. Never dreamed I'd bike there.

Today I passed scads of scampering chipmunks, a box turtle, billion year old rock formations, outbursts of flowers, and lots of mountain laurel (not blooming yet).

Today was 56 miles and my butt again hurt the last twenty. Tomorrow will be a shorter but spectacular ride.

May 22: Shorter but nice way to complete the GAP. Had a nice breakfast in Myersdale after a night of getting woken and lulled back to sleep by the passing trains. The whistle woke me, the clickity clack sent me back to slumber.

Today the trail followed the river as it became a stream, a creek and finally a group of trickles lost in the moutains. The rail followed until the mountain got just too big. Then the ancient line that became the trail just punched through Savage Mountain. The trail passed over the Easter Continental Divide and then 3300 feet in the tunnel.

On the way passed by the first deer I saw and through wild roses. All along the way the air was delicious. The wild flowers, the deep green smell of the forest and just good clean mountain air. Today it was also honeysuckle and wild roses.

No rain today and even some sun. Tomorrow may be different.

Right now, nursing my second IPA sitting outside in downtown Cumberland.

May 23: Set off from Cumberland in fog this morning but turned out a good ride. No rain and though the trail was a bit wet in places, it was quite bikeable.  

Leaving Cumberland I saw a beautiful beaver duck into the bush. The air was heavy with honey suckle, quite intoxicating. Saw turtles, rabbits and deer along the trail and at one point a pair of crazy kamikaze squirrels jumped me. (No injuries to anyone.) 

The canal took all shapes, with water and without, and sometimes just became something else.  The C&O stopped functioning in 1924. Was being built 100 years before. The most interesting part of the day was walking my bike through the 3118 foot long Paw Paw tunnel built by 1848 to take the canal through a mountain. It is unlit and completely dark in the middle. There is a guard rail but it was kinda spooky walking when you can't see your feet. 

For the last 10 miles, I took a paved rail trail (WMRT) that runs on the other side of the canal. That was a treat. But not as good as the coconut cream pie at Weavers. One reason bikers take long trips is so they can eat pie!

May 24: The ride today was a bit tough. Started with a flat tire just outside of Hancock.  Had a spare tube so it only took me 15 minutes to get underway again. Then I got a bit lost trying to get from the rail trail back to the canal. But the real thing was that it was longer and wetter today. Lots of puddles I just had to go through. 

But a good ride nevertheless. Spoke to another biker camping his way from DC to Pittsburgh and back. He warned me the trail south of Harpers Ferry was really muddy. Also a local guy walking his dog. We wound up trading stories of how we almost drowned in rivers, while watching the Potomac flow by.

Saw turtles, rabbits, deer and chubby little groundhogs. Also squirrels, one of whom looked liked he wanted to bushwhack me. Instead of running away from the big thing on wheels, he ran in front of me to cut me off. Didn't let him bully me though. I rang my bell and pushed on.

Not much honeysuckle today but something that smelled like musky vanilla. Weather forecast aside, no rain but evening thunder now.

After dinner this evening, spoke with a visiting Austrian family that came to Harpers Ferry because the husband saw a picture of the view of the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah and liked it.  Also with a young Mennonite couple from Illinois who once lived in Belize. We talked produce, including why we can't get good tomatoes.

May 25: Back to DC, having gone 330 miles in six days. Left Harpers Ferry after a good night sleep – the trains provided their music again – and a hearty breakfast. Spoke with a couple from Seattle that was doing Cleveland to Washington and told them about the W&OD trail. If the C&O was as muddy today as yesterday, I'd switch over at mile 35 and take the ferry. The trail was even muddier – it rained during the night – and I did cross at Whites Ferry. The “Gen. Jubal Early” is the last of the ferries once used to cross the Potomac. Cost two bucks for bikes. I didn't even bid the C&O farewell.

I needed to go five miles on Rt 15 to Leesburg, Virginia to pick up the trail. Plus, it's paved. Negative, it is hilly. I seemed to be running out of gas by Hearndon (mile 20) but revived after a stop at my favorite bakery. By the time I left the W&OD for the way across the river and up the last hill, I was powering through.

On the way I saw a big fat groundhog, deer and a little toad sitting on the yellow line on the W&OD. One thing I did not mention yet but were with me all the time were the birds. Always singing in the woods. Their colors always striking against the green, especially the cardinals and bluebirds.

BTW, I finally figured out why the squirrels were attacking me. As they saw this big thing bearing down on them – I averaged 10 mph – they didn't think to run off the path into the bush but to escape by running down the path in front of the advancing danger. As I got closer, they turned to the next level of defense which is offense. But I'm smarter than a squirrel so eventually figured this out. I started ringing my bell as soon as I saw them up ahead and then they'd simply scatter into the trees. 

The 70's and the “Arab Spring”

Ok, I'm over 60 and listen to some music my loved ones call “moldy.” But I like to think that much of the music of the 70s holds up well. Anyway, in addition to the indie and alternative music my son and friends at ATG keep me current with, I still play that moldy stuff.

Much of 70's music – and for my purposes here that means the period from around 1968 to 78 – is just music, meant to entertain, get you “up” or help you get high. But two strains have had me thinking recently because they seem to pinpoint something that changed early on in the decade, something that maybe points to a broader dynamic we can see playing out in the recent “Arab Spring” and on the streets of American cities.

The first of the 70's music broke over the happy silliness of Beatlemania. It took rock and folk and added drugs to produce the psychedelic movement with Jefferson Airplane and then the Grateful Dead. The Beatles themselves started it with "Magical Mystical Tour." But while this and much else of the time was just escapism – not to denigrate such fun – the strain that I'm focused on here was the music of protest and revolution. In the aftermath of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention and in the middle of the Vietnam war movement, songs like “What About Me” by Quicksilver Messenger Service (1970) addressed the issues of pollution, war, repression, the 99% but also looked forward to change through confronting the forces of authority challenging them – “what you going to do about me?” Other songs of the period looked forward to just jumping over the mess of this world in the post-apocalyptic “Wooden Ships” (Jefferson Airplane & CS&N, 1969) or by hijacking a starship (Jefferson Starship's "Blows Against the Empire," 1970). Whether it was confronting the man or escaping him, this music looked toward a better future, a fundamental re-ordering of society.

But by 1972, disappointment, alienation and a sense of loss had already begun to set in, despite the fact that we would shortly be seeing the first seeming accomplishments of the “attack” against the old order. Richard Nixon would be forced to take us out of the Vietnam War (the Paris Peace Accords, 1973) and himself would be forced from office (1974). I was at a CSN&Y concert in Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City on the night of August 8, 1974. One of the group came out to explain a slight delay by informing us all “it's over,” Nixon had resigned. Music and fireworks celebrated this “victory.”

But The Who, sensing that maybe it would not be so easy, announced in “Won't Get Fooled Again” (1971) that after the “fighting in the streets” our team on the left would now be our team on the right. Jackson Browne was asking in “Doctor My Eyes” (1972) if perhaps we had already seen too much without anything really getting any better? Pink Floyd was suggesting that maybe it was all really about money and that anyone who doubted it was living on the "Dark Side of the Moon" (1973).  Jethro Tull – Ian Anderson always seeming to be bitingly aware of how real life disappoints our dreams – noted how each day was like “Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day” (1974) and, in “OneWhite Duck” (1975), that something must be wrong in our brains if we were “so patently unrewarding.”

By 1977, Jackson Browne was “Running on Empty” and the year later, Jefferson Starship began its transformation into pop. Most of the supergroups fell apart in a haze of booze and drugs. Everyone else went to work. And the Fall of Nixon led to the two hapless president – Ford and Carter – and then in 1980, the “return of the repressed” victory of Barry Goldwater in the form of Ronald Reagan.

The hopes and dreams of the 70s were real and so was the movement on the streets. We – and I am taking some liberties here including myself in this – did remove a president and end a war. But the hopes that any of this would really change anything fundamental or in some way make our daily lives “better” or “happier” were not realized.

We've seen in the past year new movements in the streets, toppling governments and challenging the economic order. The experience of the 70s reminds that the push for real change leads to reaction; the harder the push, the greater the reaction. Society is, by evolution, a essentially conservative adaptation. The force of inertia fights against any change of direction. But the movement of the Arab Spring is more powerful than anything we experienced in the 70s because it is more necessary, more mass based. The Occupy movement is more informed by history than we were in the 70s. And it is so much clearer now, and in so many ways, that the world we live in has serious problems that don't seem to be getting better on their own, by business as usual.

Leaving the last word to Neil Young, who remained sideways hopeful despite everything we've seen since the 70's, keep on rockin in the Free World.

Biking at the Speed of Light

Took a long bike ride yesterday from Northwest Washington to Needwood Lake in Rockville.  Fifty miles round-trip in just over four hours.  On the way back, it occurred to me that after a certain point, time had been suspended for me.  Each moment was part of the next and the whole ride was as one unified experience, one moment in time.  Each point I had passed was "just now" no matter how many miles had speed under my wheels since.

This doesn't happen on my shorter bike rides but seems to kick in after 15 miles or so.  Einstein explained that at the speed of light, time stops.  It had stopped for me at a considerably slower pace.

Maybe this is how to unify quantum physics and relativity?  For quantum physics, reality is subjective in the sense that its many possibilities don't become one thing until observed.  Einstein thought of his science as objective.  The speed of light is the same everywhere, independent of the observer.  But time is experienced subjectively.  It passes slow or fast depending on how we feel it.  And biking at our speed of light can suspend our experience of time entirely.  Time too doesn't become anything specific until we observe it.