Six years ago Lew published my first article. You can read it here. It was my inaugural attempt at writing argumentatively using economics. The argument concerned the changes in poetry but was broadened to include all of the other arts where the Web had destroyed the cost of production, reducing it to the time and talent of the individual creating it. If you want to be a writer, get a free blog. A musician? Upload them to Soundcloud. I'm sure there are dozens of similar services that I haven't found yet.

Since the writing of that article the explosion of social media has taken place. I didn't anticipate that. In 2005, RSS was in its infancy and there was zero integration between websites. Building an audience required a lot of work.

Today it's taken for granted that one would leverage Facebook or Twitter to reach out to and stay connected with your intended audience. There are automated services to get you Twitter followers by the hundreds, if that's your gig. Even for an internet oldster like me, it is staggering how quickly the landscape changes and morphs into something new. Keeping up is a job unto itself. Moreover, we can now take the entire world with us on our smartphone of choice.

None of this should be construed as a complaint.

Quite the contrary, I think it's utterly fantastic. I got into writing on the internet in 2003 because I had something to say and the cost of production and dissemination fit my budget, ie. free. I like writing. Sometimes I can even convince myself that I love it and that I'm good at it. But, deep down I know that I don't love it. If I did, I would have not walked away from it so easily or the paycheck and the audience I had built up so carefully.

What I love is music. And it took a good friend, one who told me multiple times how much that first LRC article affected him, and his music to remind me of what I'd forgotten.

I loved being a musician as a young man. Back then I was a bass player. My well-worn 1985 Rickenbacker 4003 ("The Rick") has seen hundreds, if not thousands of hours of use. Today, I think of myself more of a drummer, well, not drummer per se, more like u2018one who earnestly and bravely flails behind the kit.' I have the heart of a drummer if not the hands and feet.

Something else happened in these last six years. The cost of home recording has dropped along with the cost of publishing. Access to high quality digital tools is everywhere. Thank you Moore's Law. I envy anyone who owns a Mac. Garage Band is friggin' awesome. If I had any money to spare I would buy a Mac just for it and Logic. What once cost millions now cost hundreds. I stopped playing because I had no outlet that would satisfy me given my lifestyle. The tools and the infrastructure weren't there for me to pursue things my way. Even if they were there (and I just wasn't paying attention), there was no real outlet for the music anyway. I wasn't going to be picked up by a label. So, what was the point? I'd taken my playing as far as I could go without other people and finding people with my tastes was difficult. So, over time The Rick spent more time in the case.

I bought myself an electronic drum kit at the tender age of 35 to scratch the itch that had been gnawing at me since I was 15. I'd been studying drumming technically for years. I knew what to do, what to practice, how to hold the sticks (for the most part), I never had anything to practice on, except myself. My wife and friends can go on for hours about how crazy I drive/have driven them tapping on the steering wheel, the door frame, my desk, my knees, them etc. They eventually chipped in to buy me a Djembe for a past birthday to at least have the noise be something musical. Any spare minute can be used to work on my Swiss triplets or paradiddles. The drumkit, to me, is the closest thing to an altar in my cosmology. There something magical happens. I watch great drummers with nothing near envy, it's pure joy and awe at what they do. I know I'll never be one. And that's fine.

So, after a few years of practicing I felt competent enough to offer my services to my friend. He had been creating music, not of the highest quality to be sure, for a few years. Honestly, he knew it wasn't good, but it didn't matter. That wasn't the point. He'd wanted to do this for most of his life and he could do so now. Bravely, more bravely than me, certainly, he put his apprenticeship out there for all the world to ignore, ridicule or exhort. I was just plain proud of him. He'd become that guy I mentioned at the end of my article, someone putting up his work saying, "I hope you like what I've done here."

I listened to his latest set of songs one night last November and realized that he'd become a pretty good songwriter. The songs were honest. A couple of them were wonderful. And maybe I could help him (and myself) improve the presentation. I offered and he happily agreed. We trusted each other's judgment, though our tastes are almost diametrically opposed. The work could get done from home, 80 miles away from each other, when it was convenient for us. And the best part was that we were in constant contact for the first time in years because of the music, not letting months go by without a word. All of these songs could suck and they would still hold immense value to me because of this re-connection.

Isn't that what music is supposed to be about?

This is taken for granted now, but even 5 years ago this arrangement wasn't really feasible. The bandwidth cost was too high and availability was too low. I solved how to record my drumkit by spending all of $418 at Amazon on a 16 track digital recorder that is everything a home recording artist could need. When I first picked up a bass guitar that box would have been a roomful of equipment costing $10,000 or more, given all that it could do. A good condenser mic for recording vocals can be had for less than $100 now. That was unheard of even 4 years ago.

I've recorded 5 tracks for him so far, he's published 2 of them. My favorite is here. I play drums and bass on his tracks, he plays guitar on mine.

Within days I had ideas for my own work spinning out of my head. It was cool. I knew I had ideas worth exploring and for the first time I could see a path to making them worth spending the time to develop.

This is why the changes brought about by the Web are so astounding. The number of free or nearly free resources for full-scale production of music is overwhelming. I felt like I had just discovered the internet for the first time. I still don't think I've scratched the surface.

I now have an album planned out, and a band name that's better than "Fistful of Prozac." Two songs are finished, two instrumentals are in production and the others are mostly written. Since I started work on these songs and their videos I've spent a total of $23.57 on some strings and a cable. Everything else is fully depreciated.

I'm using Reaper to do the mixing and recording of any MIDI instruments, Bandcamp.com to publish the album, YouTube to publish tie-in videos, DropBox and Soundcloud to move files between people and my Twitter and Facebook feeds to help promote the work. Even the video production software was free. Xtranormal, the text to animation service, just published their stand-alone application, State, which I used to create this video. The app is free and I used the given points to purchase the assets I used in the video, 1 set. 2 actors. Zero dollars.

With all of the changes to the economics of music production, nothing substitutes for quality. I don't know at this point whether what I've produced is quality work. It's not for me to judge. I know I had a blast working on it and can't wait to finish the other songs. I hope that these snippets of my insanity and the story thereof move you to do something: laugh, cry, cringe, tap your foot or create your own music.

In other words, "I hope you like what I've done here."

Thomas Luongo [send him email] is an out-of-work chemist, amateur economist and obstreperous recovering Yankee/Goat-herder living in North Florida. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Check out his band, The Myo-Tonics.

The Best of Thomas Luongo

It is nearly impossible for me to put into words how much the work of Philip K. Dick has impacted my life. It started in December 1981 and the pending release of the film Blade Runner that summer. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) had just been re-printed and my life would change from the moment I plunked down that $1.75 plus tax at the Caldor's in Vail's Gate, NY. I was about to turn 13 and my opinion of what a book was capable of was about to be changed forever. Over the next few months many of his books were reprinted in anticipation of Blade Runner and I bought them all. My collection numbers more than 30 novels, all of his short-fiction and more than a half dozen biographies, interview collections and excerpts from his exegesis. I don't claim to understand half of what is contained in those books but it doesn't matter.

I went from a kid who only read when forced to someone with a book under his arm everywhere I went. I didn't read quickly or easily. It's always been a bit of a chore for me. Androids is one of Dick's great books, a brilliant look at what defines us as human beings worth being loved and cared for. That Rick Deckard is a cop who "retires" androids looking for a better life than being a slave was a point lost on me until I discovered the other man who has had a profound effect on my adult life, Murray Rothbard.

As a mostly lonely and awkward teenager, I saw Dick's story solely in human terms. The tragedy of J.R. Isidore losing his friends, Deckard's conversion to Mercerism (a religion based on human empathy) after executing the Battys and the reconciliation with his wife were the things that I focused on. But, now, looking back through older, possibly wiser eyes, I see conflicts created solely as consequences of State action. Rothbard's condemnation of the State in all of its guises were easy to accept as I had been primed for years by Dick, whose work informed so many of my favorite films, comics and music. Reading Rothbard was like adding another member to my family.

Androids is soaked with the horrors of State policy. World War Terminus turns Earth into a near graveyard so the U.N. institutes a colonization plan, enticing people to emigrate by gifting them with android slave labor who are so human-like they escape and have to be killed to protect the humans from their behavior. In the novel, the Nexus-6 androids are like children without parents (state incubated?) who have some emotions but no context in which to put them. They have no empathy. It is the dividing line between them and us. The scene where they are fascinated while pulling the legs off of a spider, one by one, while Isidore looks on in horror was a turning point in my life. I can't look at a spider today without recalling that scene. That Deckard is accused of being one of them by his wife in the novel's opening scene is telling of Dick's view of the State.

This is not the only book of Dick's that uses the State as the driver of the conflict, most of his novels have some form of government bureaucracy pushing the protagonist forward. In The Man in the High Castle (1962) the entire plot rests on the unreality of a world in which absolute evil exists, as represented by Nazi Germany, not tempered by the Taoist understanding that without both good and evil neither can flourish. All of the characters are pushed by interaction with the State towards finding out that they are, in effect, not real. This was heady stuff for a 14-year-old.

Dr. Bloodmoney (1965), an obvious influence on Stephen King's The Stand, is set after a nuclear war wipes out most of the human population. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) denounces the corporatist state, the nascent War on Drugs as well as enforced slavery through the drafting of people to become colonists on Mars, it was written in 1963. Martian Time-Slip (1964) explores the abuse of power by a water-monopolist on Mars, a monopoly granted by UN edict. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) deals with identity loss in a police-state that is purely the drug-addled delusion of a woman repeatedly sexually-abused by her Police Chief brother. Other books from Now Wait for Last Year (1966) to the novella We Can Remember it for you Wholesale (1966) as well as a number of his early short-stories portray various government forces from the malevolent to the inept and sometimes both, which, to me are the most frightening images of all.

In the much lauded A Scanner Darkly (1976) and the mostly un-loved and forgotten Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) Dick creates two black comedies of malevolent state ineptitude that in the former ultimately chills you to the bone as the corporatist drug-war is unveiled as a vast government program and in the latter as a playground on which individuals can indulge their violent fantasies and psychopathology with little to no consequence even though they gave all the crazies their own home. It also has a portrayal of psychiatry that the great libertarian Dr. Thomas Szasz would be proud of. Space constraints keep me from detailing the plots of these two gems but they are two of my very favorites of Philip K. Dick's novels; Scanner for its pain and pathos and Clans for its sheer audacity and hilarity. I re-read Clans recently and just marveled at his command of the material, embracing its absurdity while maintaining the story's very human core. The anti-state perspectives of these two novels cannot be over-stated.

Ironically, of Dick's major novels, it is only Ubik (1969) which eschews the state as plot driver. It is, however, in my opinion, his most brilliant and influential work. A "Gordian Knot" of a story that the political left sees as a useful idiot, to butcher a term, in their attempt to destroy perception and, by extension, justify any and all abrogations of human rights. Dick is embraced by the post-modernists as one who played with the definitions of reality and explored our humanity in relation to our perceptions of it. But, where Sartre or Camus would come to the conclusion that reality is unknowable and therefore all human action is meaningless in the face of this, Dick (and his literary progeny) would argue exactly the opposite. It is because of this unknown ideal that we should therefore hold fast to each other, respecting both ours and others struggles to find peace and meaning in the world. Joe Chip, like Ella Runciter before him, ultimately accepts the burden of fighting against the Jory Millers of their world and shepherding others to their final ends because otherwise there is only death without meaning. I love some post-modernist writers, those that don't see it as an end, but rather a means to storytelling, cf. the early work of Grant Morrison at DC Comics, Animal Man, Arkham Asylum and Doom Patrol in particular. Because, while writers may be gods to their creations, they can still be moved by them and with the simplest gestures change the world. Stories exist to reveal our humanity through shared experience, not belittle it. This is the main lesson I learned from Philip K. Dick.

Dick's fascination with the pre-Christian Gnostics and casting of many of his books in Gnostic terms reflects this search for meaning. The aforementioned Palmer Eldrich is a fine example as well as Valis (1981) which details his struggle explicitly. Indeed the whole Valis trilogy (1981-1982) along with Radio Free Albemuth (1985) would chronicle his search for understanding using his now vast literary arsenal. No discussion of Valis would be complete without mentioning Michael Bishop's Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas (1987) which is set in a Dick-inspired world Phil and his death are an important part of the plot. It's sadly been out of print for over 20 years.

And writing that seems a bit odd. Philip K. Dick has been with me for so long that it's hard to have a perspective on just how long my life has been to this point and where it will go from here. I can remember finishing Ubik and thinking to myself, "Okay… that was fantastic, what the hell did it mean?" like it was yesterday. I was 16. I've read it probably a dozen times since then, including every year on June 5th while I was in college and beyond. I've got screenplay outlines buried on a hard-drive somewhere and multiple term papers written about it since then.

Philip K. Dick introduced me to what writing was capable of. He taught me to be unafraid to look behind the curtain and see what motivates people at their core. More importantly, he taught me that cruelty is the purest form of evil and that power will always be exercised. His work was a springboard for a life of embracing the unconventional, the audacious and the downright odd but it was through him that I found the help I needed to define who I wanted to be, in terms of what I was not in terms of what I wasn't.

Thomas Luongo [send him email] is a professional chemist, amateur economist and obstreperous recovering Yankee residing in North Florida. Look him up on Facebook.

The Best of Thomas Luongo

"Do you
hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability. It
is the sound of your death." Those
words, spoken by Agent Smith to Neo while choking him in The
Matrix, articulate the great lie that statists use to force
us to accept their rule. Sometimes the arguments are nakedly dismissive
of human potential, la Agent Smith, and sometimes their arguments
are more subtle; masked by literary pretension and cloaked in a
veneer of pragmatism and realpolitik. However, the underlying philosophy
of statism is the same; man is a beast/virus/plague that needs to
be controlled by their betters. There has to be something above
man controlling his actions, someone higher up the food chain, as
it were. It is the way of things. It is inevitable, so stop resisting,
submit, and be thankful for our guidance.

Inevitability
is a central theme in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel,
Watchmen.
John Osterman's transformation into Dr. Manhattan, a being that
is "…proof God exists, and he's an American," is the son
of a watch-maker who sees all of time concurrently, not as a linear
stream as we do, but as a tapestry depicting the interplay of the
natural laws of motion. So does Adrian Veidt, Ozymandias, or so
he thinks, and it is for this reason that he embarks on a lifelong
quest to alter the shape of humanity, remolding it in his image.
If Dr. Manhattan is the embodiment of the Deist god the cosmic clock-maker,
then Adrian is the opposite, a meddling god, intent on improving
his creation through his intervention. Veidt believes he is the
only person with the insight, compassion and the will to do what
is necessary in the face of man's inherent barbarism. He executes
his plan with a single-minded ruthlessness leading to the climactic
wiping out of New York City.

The conflict
of Watchmen is predicated on the Cold War between the Soviets
and the Americans, the communists vs. fascists. It is presented
as an eternal conflict held in check by Dr. Manhattan. It is a classic
Hobbesian set up, where two groups of humans, in a natural state
of war of "all
against all," are prevented from violence by a higher
power, normally the state but, in this case, the ultimate super-human.
The minute that structure is altered, the state is removed, they
revert to ever-escalating aggression towards each other, which must
culminate in the destruction of one or both. Since the only beings
available are other humans, we should place the best and brightest
in these supervisory roles and accept any mistakes they make. In
Watchmen, the spectre of unbridled nuclear war is the issue
and the destruction of the human race is the end game.

At least that's
what Adrian Veidt (and Alan Moore) would like us to believe.

The problem
is the whole setup is a lie. To paraphrase the Comedian, it's all
a big joke. And the joke, unfortunately, is on Alan Moore. For all
of his skill and attention to detail, his Hobbesian world-view,
like Veidt's, blinds him to the economic reality of the world he's
created. Both he and Veidt envision a world where fatal conflict
between the US and the Soviets is both inevitable and eternal. The
world will remain thus until Dr. Manhattan loses interest in us,
leaves, and thereby unleashes hell No consideration is made for
the economic engines that drive this world. That is neatly removed
from the equation. It is a stochastic view of a dynamic system,
the flaw that undermines the entire narrative.

Veidt, for
being the smartest man in the world, and a monumentally successful
capitalist, one who would have had to navigate the dynamics of the
market to build his economic empire is unbelievably stupid, as he
should have seen this stasis was unsustainable economically, regardless
of Dr. Manhattan, and did not require his guidance and eventual
murdering of millions. We knew, as Austrian Economists and Praxeologists
that the structures of both the U. S. and Soviet economies would
collapse under the weight of their own inefficiencies and lack of
an adequate pricing system for risk. Austrian Business Cycle theory,
which Veidt should have been aware of, described and predicted this.
There were plenty of critiques of the welfare/warfare state for
him to read. If not, the balance sheets of his competitors would
have confirmed this analysis to such a smart man. Why did he think
Nixon closed the gold window? For fun? The two economies could only
be sustained with an iron-fist by the Soviets and the use of the
printing press by the U.S. Once either of those mechanisms failed
to scare/bribe the populous, the political class, which is the source
of the potential nuclear war, would lose its power base rendering
moot the conflict of the story.

Viewed through
this lens, Veidt's plan then reduces to a life-long obsession with
beating God (Dr. Manhattan) and replacing him, manipulating events
to suit his own needs, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom
that only he can avert, because he created it in the first place.
He is nothing more than the vain, hubristic Alexander that he modeled
his life after; the ultimate narcissist. His cry of "I did
it!" when looking at the newscasts of the world uniting against
his fake alien invasion is more a cry of personal validation than
any altruistic desire to save humanity. That his u2018solution' to the
world's problem is to substitute one Hobbesian system for another
also betrays Moore's story at its core, as this center cannot hold
either. At least Moore had the good sense to have Dr. Manhattan
voice this before exiting the stage.

Lest you think
I'm daft in my analysis, remember that within 2 years of the publication
of Watchmen #12, the Soviet Union imploded, rendering the
entire conflict of this meticulously-crafted, beautifully-rendered
piece of literature moot. As the reader, how am I supposed to take
this seriously when the central conflict was proven a false one?

Do you hear
that Alan Moore? That is truly the sound of inevitability. It is
the sound of economic death and rebirth. It is, as they say, The
Day of Reckoning.

If you think
the U.S. is immune from the economic law of its system, one only
need look outside the window today or scan the headlines. Granted,
at the time it was written the conflict had been in place since
the 1950's and looked eternal. If Veidt had such a god-like gift
of foresight, couldn’t he see the implosion of the Soviet Empire
was imminent?

I applaud Alan
Moore for creating a powerful statement about the nature of governments
and the danger of nuclear weapons. Watchmen vexed me for
years, as I loved its craft but had a vague feeling of being manipulated
to its conclusions. At its core, Watchmen is a cautionary
tale about power and how no man should wield the kind of power that
Adrian Veidt or governments have; that trusting in heroes or philosopher-kings,
be they private citizens or public servants, is not only dangerous
but also counter-intuitive. On that level, it succeeds brilliantly.

But, for a
work which attempted to put super-heroes into a real world context,
the lack of economic understanding is unforgivable. Its central
premise is based on a cartoonish view of economics, making the modern
left's mistake of equating capitalism with corporatism, believing
that all commerce is a zero-sum game, calling that an economic verity
and using these false conclusions to justify the wholesale slaughter
of those that dare to disagree with their nihilistic worldview.

Moore again
betrays his inherent leftism by casting Veidt not as a President
or Senator with a secret identity, but as a successful capitalist,
whose company is a leviathan conglomerate producing everything from
perfume to exercise equipment to military arms who uses his public
image as the hook for the sale. He is the evil Bruce Wayne. The
story ends with this leviathan extending its tentacles over the
rebuilding of New York, a Marxian view of capitalism if I ever saw
one.

For a libertarian,
what is most compelling is the dichotomy between The Comedian, Edward
Blake, and Rorschach, Walter Kovacs. Both are disgusting, violent
psychopaths, but one is state-subsidized and is able to indulge
his every whim without fear of retribution while the other defies
The State's mandate, attempts to find the truth and punish evil
(at what cost is the question). He is rewarded by being hounded,
marginalized and eventually, imprisoned. The U.S. government protects
its secrets, the identity of their pet assassin Blake, while demanding
that all the other "Masks" be political scapegoats for
failed government policies which result in civil unrest. One lives
in a penthouse overlooking New York City while the other lives in
squalor. One shoots women carrying his baby for expecting him to
make good, the other blows up a child molester who fed a little
girl to his dogs. One dies searching out the cause of the other's
death. Both are sacrificed on the altar of Veidt's brave, new world.

Ultimately,
it is Rorschach, and his objectivist roots in
Steve Ditko's The Question, that have the final laugh in this
story. Not only does his diary make it into the hands of someone
who can reveal the truth, but the character becomes the conscience
of the story itself, embodying Mises' motto, "Never give in
to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it." For all
of his faults, and they are legion, Rorschach does that. He is the
story's protagonist. That this story's conscience is that of a brutal
psychotic is even more revealing. Moore has stated how much he despises
Objectivism, saying it ultimately justifies fascism. While I agree
with him to an extent, it is the economic reality elucidated by
Mises et al. and partially articulated by Ayn Rand which renders
Moore's work a thinly-veiled paean to Marx and Hobbes, rejecting
peace. Considering the history of the 20th century where their ideas
dominated, that puts the blood firmly on his hands when he, like
Adrian Veidt, should have known better; to let us find better solutions
than butchering each other, covering it up and consoling ourselves
by saying it was inevitable.

December
9, 2010

Thomas
Luongo [send him email]
is a professional chemist, amateur economist and obstreperous recovering
Yankee residing in North Florida. Look him up on Facebook.

The
Best of Thomas Luongo

The Emperor of Ice Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

~ Wallace Stevens (1922)

To follow up on Karen Kwiatkowski’s recent article on the manifest differences between Jonah Goldberg and Julian Assange, I would like to remind everyone of the still-relevant words of the great Wallace Stevens and his portrayal of a poor family’s funeral preparations written during the depression of 1920—21, the one no one remembers. Though the subject matters could not be farther apart in scope, the dynamics portrayed are inextricably linked. Both speak to the horrors of detached, authoritarian rule and the corruption it spawns. While the violence of Stevens’ poem is implied, the violence advocated by people such as Goldberg is real. How real? We can thank Julian Assange and his staff at Wikileaks for telling us.

The numbers are horrifying.

Rather than face the magnitude of the violence unleashed by our collective insanity, it is better to scramble around, doing the bidding of the Emperor in his chair, barking irrelevant orders. If there is one thing I have come to accept about humans, it is their near infinite capacity for absolving themselves and those they identify with of blame for that which they have done. Complain about the Emperor and his insanity and you will likely hear some riff on, "He may be a bad u2018king’ but he’s our king." Press the issue with facts and reason and the response will likely be, "My country, right or wrong." Lastly, when you remind them of the immorality of it all their last response is usually, "If you don’t like it here, leave." Interspersed with these proclamations of group loyalty will be ad hominem attacks on those that are the victims, as if name-calling and xenophobia will wash away the culpability. I am reminded of the great scene at the end of Clint Eastwood’s "Unforgiven" where The Kid tries to console himself with the horror of killing a man he didn’t know and had no claim to press by saying, "Well, I guess he had it comin’." To which Bill Munny replies, "We’ve all got it comin’, Kid."

Given the magnitude of the slaughter performed with our personal capital, if not with the blessing of many, we, as Americans, are going to have to come to terms with the fact that we do, indeed, have it coming to us. Our victims will not treat us kindly. I am not just talking about Iraq here, but of the cumulative effect of all of the myriad agencies’ actions throughout our history. All of the wars, be they overt or covert, have created generations of enemies; altered the course of innumerable lives spanning dozens of cultures for no other reason than because we could. While a people and their government may not be the same thing, it is our actions or lack thereof, especially in a democratic system that enables those in government to do these things. They are, therefore, our responsibility, whether we approve of them or not.

I just recently re-watched the entire run of Babylon 5 and the fate of the Centauri as a race and the character of Londo in particular is an apt metaphor for what may be coming our way when our empire of violence and theft begins to truly unravel. By embracing powers he did not understand, Londo allowed his people to rampage across the landscape, reveling in the power and fame it brought him and them. It unleashed a cycle of violence that culminates in those most affected by their slaughter to slaughter them in return. The only way to stop wholesale destruction of his culture and race is for Londo to give up his humanity; making him a slave to the very power that he so craved at the beginning of the story; a slave, ultimately, to his own choices. His is the story of what would have happened to Boromir had he wrested the Ring from Frodo at the Ford of Rauros and taken it back to Gondor, even if his motives were less noble than Boromir’s.

Ours was supposedly a society founded on the liberal principles of self-ownership and self-governance and yet we have morphed into a gigantic, fascist police state whose chief exports are debt and violence. Moreover, those most entrusted with shedding light on the truth turn their eyes inward, looking only at and serving those issuing the edicts as opposed to the effects of those edicts; cheerleading the empire, or worse, making excuses for it, while everyone else suffers.

And now, here we stand after our supposed bi-annual peaceful revolution via the ballot box faced with a Congress which has been given a clear message to change our course; take us back from the brink of disaster. But, within 24 hours of that the body which greases the wheels of our empire, the Fed, announced a plan to inject so much grease into the engine so that it can spin out of control even faster than it already is. And the cheerleaders say it was necessary.

So, with the Repuglicans in charge the violence abroad will not end and with the Fed ramping up the printing press the debt will continue, so what, if anything has changed by this little drama? If elections are a morality play then we are definitely on course for a grisly end come Act V. At least Londo had the decency to be horrified by what he unleashed and attempted to make amends even with the foreknowledge that it would be the death of him. It makes his story poignant and sad, maybe even forgivable. Is there anyone recently (re)elected to Congress who is willing to go that far to save us? Can we, at this point, even be saved even if this mythical person existed? Looking at the debt numbers and their context I would have to say no. Did we wake up to the magnitude of our depravity just in time to see the source of the light be a train as opposed to the way out?

Our empire of violence and debt is melting like the ice cream ordered by the "roller of big cigars" in Stevens’ poem in the light of the truth of its corruption. As a libertarian I know that the heart of this corruption is the monetary system and degradation of individual property rights. As an Austrian Economist I know that the "center cannot hold," to quote W.B. Yeats, and that there will be a reckoning, "mere Anarchy is loosed upon the world." I also know that when it falls, no matter who we were beforehand, unfortunately, none of us will be spared the outcome. Do we deserve it? I don’t know. I do know, as Bill Munny knew that "deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it." Let be truly be finale of seem. The past is, as they say, prologue. What you do in the meantime is between you and your conscience.

Thomas Luongo [send him email] is a professional chemist, amateur economist and obstreperous recovering Yankee residing in North Florida.

The Best of Thomas Luongo

There must be something fundamentally wrong with me. It’s the only conclusion I can draw. Maybe I’m a transplant from a different time or parallel universe, brought here borne on a cosmic whim through a rift in the space/time continuum and unceremoniously dumped into this place which makes so little sense. On the other hand, this could just be some vast controlled experiment by vaster powers that have created an illogical set of boundary conditions to falsify some unknown (and unknowable) hypothesis about us, the subjects.

Then again, I could just have indigestion. But, I’ve given up refined sugar? So, that doesn’t track either. It must be something else.

You see, I feel like Charlton Heston, though I refuse to take my shirt off in public lest I scare the natives, wandering through a violent wasteland bereft of ideas, intimacy or even a coherent thought. A u2018brute squad’ is in charge of a mass of voiceless people, living in perpetual fear, disrupting their lives arbitrarily for no other reason than because they can. Standing on a hill watching this drama play out, I’m confused as to why anyone would continue to live this way. I understand that we’re predators needing to sustain ourselves at some other being’s expense and can see the parallels reflected within the behavior of groups of people, though without overt cannibalism. I just don’t understand why anyone would put up with it.

Worse, we not only put up with it, we’ve come to embrace it as fait accompli. As opposed to fighting this small group of sociopaths’ tendency towards violence, we institutionalize it, put it on a pedestal and call it government. Moreover, some of us engage in feats of intellectual gymnastics so convoluted it defies metaphor in service of patently false hypotheses about our essential natures just to salve their consciences about what they wish to believe, evidence or logic be damned.

For an easy example, how about that little thought experiment by Hobbes that assumed that everyone was at war with each other before agreeing not to be so any longer, bellum omnium contra omnes, out of which came social contract theory. On its face, this is moronic, and yet, the society I live in is organized around this fundamentally stupid idea. If all humans, before there was government, were at war with everything then how in the hell did we survive long enough to procreate beyond our first generation? In other words, if man is infinitely aggressive towards other men, if that is the basic nature of all life itself, doesn’t the existence of that life act as prima facia evidence to the contrary? Maybe I’m weird, there is that whole feeling like Chuck Heston thing, but I didn’t sign a social contract with my government before I decided to fall in love with my wife and pledge to spend the rest of my life with her. And I never viewed life as an enormous game of D&D as played by 14-year-olds, otherwise known as "Kill u2018em and Take Their Stuff!" Then again, Hobbes’ entire analysis of humanity feels like it was created by a 14-year-old.

Fearful Symmetry that.

Even if you grant that man is somewhat aggressive, and I certainly would, that doesn’t justify the use of this idea as a valid organizing principle. If anything, that only makes the argument against it stronger. Because some of us are willing to use violence to achieve our goals, does it make any sense whatsoever to create organizations that will meet that violence with more violence? It seems axiomatic to me, but, then again, I’m weird, that if you don’t want a violent community of people you don’t organize that community around the idea that some people get to use violence with impunity. Moreover, who is going to be attracted to the violence-wielding jobs? The pacifists or the sociopaths? Hayek, thy name should have been Cassandra.

What I find really disconcerting is the pure cognitive dissonance that emanates from defenders of Hobbes like stink from a 5-day-old fish. Well, maybe more like a 7-day-old fish, but you get my point. If the social contract took us from a state of nature (total war against everything) to a state of civilization (relative peace) then why is it that the proponents of such a philosophy are constantly waging war of one kind or another against every conceivable thing they disagree with? Terrorism, Drugs, Corporations, Smoking, Racism, Fatty-Foods, Carbon, Raw Milk, the New York Yankees, etc.

In short, Other People. Q.E.D.

By contrast, those that defend John Locke’s view that rights are inherent and come from our creator (or from our humanity, the secular version of the argument) seem to want nothing more than to be left free to rise and fall on our own merits or lack thereof.

When I look at history, I see a time when the country I live in once got involved in a war against fascists in Germany by allying with communists in Russia to kick them out and hand France back to the socialists. When the war was over we instituted a u2018cold war’ with those same communists by enacting a fascist military-industrial state replete with secret police and backyard bomb shelters. And fully half, if not more, of the country’s current population still considers this the pinnacle of our civilization. A war fought on multiple continents destroying hundreds of years worth of accumulated wealth, destroying literally incalculable numbers of families and which culminated with the dropping of nuclear bombs on civilians. And I’m supposed to be proud when I watch the History Channel?

And yet, since my view on this is so in the minority I have to conclude that there must be something wrong with me. Did I miss the lynchpin to the argument in favor of fascism? Did I sleep through that lecture in school? I was bored a lot of the time, so there’s some merit to that thought. Maybe it was that my parents didn’t have enough money during the depression of the 1970′s to send me away to Fascist Camp during my summers off from school. Or maybe they didn’t drop me on my head enough.

I remember being bored to death at catechism classes while going over in grave detail the 10 commandments. But, then I look around at people who claim to be followers of Christ, otherwise known as The Prince of Peace, who believe it’s okay to break the sixth commandment as long as 1 more person votes for a taxing initiative than against it. That, of course, is the least of their sins vis–vis government that I can see.

But, since I have memories of growing up within the borders of Fascist-Land, if I did come here from some variation on a wormhole or quirk of relativity, it must have happened before my brain had developed memory. More’s the pity, frankly, but I digress. Having been inculcated in the ways of the fascists it was hard not to absorb some of their culture. I’m quick to anger and have a near infinite capacity for wielding verbal violence against those that have done nothing more than slightly inconvenience me while driving home from work. There was even a time when I felt that it was okay to bomb brown people in Iraq because they had invaded other brown people from Kuwait with tanks.

I shudder to think how close I was to giving in to the Dark Side on that one. It was only the prospect of being drafted against my will that opened my eyes to how ludicrous the entire situation was. I guess, for some, enlightened self-interest trumps propaganda. Unfortunately, for many it doesn’t. And yet, if you ask nearly anyone you meet, "Should a person be able to peaceably go about his business?" They would say, "Yes, of course." But, if that’s the case why is there so much violence and hatred of other people? If nearly everyone wants peace, why isn’t there peace?

If we know, for example, that punishing someone for doing something we don’t like doesn’t reform the person’s perspective, it only creates potential obedience as well as anger and resentment, then why do we still persist in using punishment models in dispute resolutions, i.e., fines and imprisonment? If a small punishment isn’t deterrent enough, why do we make it bigger and bigger until such point as they’re either dead or permanently imprisoned? Three Strikes anyone? Why do we persist in this system where the victim pays the room and board for the criminal, diminishing himself on top of the diminishment from the original crime?

The problem must be that I’m asking the wrong questions; looking at this from the wrong perspective. Maybe I’m wrong in expecting people who live in Fascist-Land to be capable of seeing anything other than fascist-style solutions to these problems. Maybe living in Fascist-Land requires one to cultivate contradictory positions and views of themselves in order to survive? That must be why I’m having such a hard time with this, because I refuse to embrace schizophrenia as a survival mechanism.

I told you there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

Thomas Luongo [send him email] is a professional chemist, amateur economist and obstreperous recovering Yankee residing in North Florida.

The Best of Thomas Luongo

The consequences of the division of labor are difficult to predict and a wonder to behold. As humans, we have the capacity to see advantages to our future selves in nearly every natural resource. This ability first domesticated the goat, lo some 10,000 years ago, creating a symbiotic relationship with this versatile and ingenious creation of the natural world. That relationship continues making the goat one of the most successful species on the planet, much like the other animals we have "domesticated" for our use. In short, they trade the uncertainty of the wild for the certainty of protection, food, a safe place to reproduce and, for many, death at an early age as food for us. That’s our end of the bargain. As a newly minted goat rancher, I can tell you that the foremost thing on my mind besides the twists and turns of my daughter’s childhood is the health of our herd, lest anyone think me callous. Our investment of time and money will only be worth it if we can produce an ever-improving animal at an ever-decreasing price.

So, through the alchemy of human needs fulfillment and selective breeding there are now hundreds of breeds of goats optimized along multiple vectors such as conformation, coat composition, milk production, carcass weight, parasite resistance, and cuteness, cf. the pygmy goat. But, as livestock, they are harder to keep than other species as you have to free range them. They’re smart little buggers who can climb, pick at or wallow down fencing and the bucks well, frankly, stink to high heaven.

This brings me to the myotonic goat, or more commonly, the fainting goat. For an introduction, see this video. In short, these goats seize up when they get excited due to a quirk in their genetics, called myotonia congenita. Thankfully, it’s mostly harmless, if a bit embarrassing. Though I’m not sure for whom, the goat or the rancher. This is a catastrophic mutation, which, in the wild, would be fatal and winnowed out of the gene pool almost immediately upon its expression that has survived because some humans saw value where others did not. In fact, the earliest uses of myotonics was as herd protection for more valuable sheep, the sacrificial goat to the attacking canine or feline. On the best of days, the goat doesn’t hold a high place in American culture, no less the even lowlier fainter.

It has come a long way from its nigh-mythical introduction to the world from the mountains of Tennessee in the 1870′s so that now the myotonic goat is recognized as an excellent meat goat, capable of producing higher carcass percentages than other breeds. Every time you snicker or giggle at a video on YouTube realize that that goat just had an intense isometric workout, which is the optimal path, other than anabolic steroids, to building dense muscle fiber. Moreover, these goats are generally easier to handle than other breeds as rambunctious behavior results in unintended comedy. I own myotonics goats. They get stiff-legged for practically no reason. They are also the calmest, tamest goats I’ve been around, almost depressingly so. The breeder I got them from has all of her bucks in one pasture. Fights between them don’t last very long.

This evolutionary dead-end has become something to cultivate in the drive to perfectly match the demand of humans for chevon. It’s too bad such similar evolutions in the marketplace didn’t produce such results with money.

Central banking was sold to us as the next evolutionary step in banking, the panacea for correcting the excessive risk-taking of individual banks’ fractional reserve lending, believed necessary to fund the new forms of industry demanded by industrialization. The lender of last resort would be able to provide liquidity to a market that had seized up due to the whims of us unpredictable animals as well as the well-intended miscalculations of the bankers themselves. In conjunction with legal tender, it would normalize our collective irrationality and set the macro economy on a path to constant prosperity and peace, making history the conflicts over flows of gold from one country to another.

Of course, the Austrian school of economics disagrees and with good reason, all puns intended.

In essence, one bank to rule them all is/was the argument. But, anyone with a shred of intelligence knows that concentration of power is the surest path to instability. Cut off the head and the body dies, goes the aphorism. What is more capable of withstanding the loss of a worker, the business which is organized in cells of cross-trained equals or one in which each person is capable of only one task? Data and electrical networks that are interconnected can work around the loss of any one node on that network and your Facebook page will still update. Our brains are a cross-linked series of neurons capable of re-mapping functions lost to trauma. Think of how a spider constructs its web or a tree plants roots in the ground. Even a species itself, seen from that level, is a distributed network capable of individual response to localized stimuli. The loss of one, while regrettable, does not have much effect overall.

As the division of labor increases, the structure of the economy should be reinforced, building webs and networks of connections between people to alleviate shortages because of localized increases in demand, due to natural disaster, changes in local regulations, population influx, etc. As well, a greater variety of skills is needed to fulfill these tasks, granting opportunity to people of different levels of ability.

But, in this distributed network of information that is an economy, accuracy of that information is essential to its proper function. GIGO is the law of the land, it does not matter the context. If the prices paid for goods and services carry no meaning, then humans cannot make coherent decisions between the value of potential choices. To invoke Hayek, it is not possible for the central bank to know what amount of money the economy needs or what the rate of interest should be any more than they can know what I want for dinner tomorrow. Nevertheless, they decide so anyways. In addition, we have let them, for some unfathomable reason, even though they are telling us things that are counter-intuitive to our own experience. That flaw compounds itself, propagating itself like a virus and infecting every single decision made by the people who use the central bank’s currency. While we may predictably respond to stimuli, as we are rational actors, the central bank cannot possibly know the details of those responses and that is where the irrationality lies.

Why, then, should we be surprised when their mistakes, inherent to their being human rather than godly, create chaos instead of order?

Rather than stable prices and full employment, our central bank has devalued the dollar by over 95% since its inception and pushed more people onto the welfare roles. Since losing convertibility of the dollar to gold, we have been subject to shock after shock, economic incidents of myotonia, of increasing rate and severity. These "Black Swans" or "Rogue Waves" hit more frequently than our masters would like us to remember. They are not isolated events, but rather currents, forever changing the course of our economic choices.

The Crash of ’87, Long Term Capital Management, The Mexican Bailout, The Asian Crisis, Y2K, 9-11, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Fannie and Freddie, AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, 41 million Americans on Food Stamps… When will the next one happen? Tomorrow? Next week? Before the mid-term elections? With Bernanke’s current policy of holding the monetary base flat and propping up the balance sheets of banks with reserves held at the Fed, it could easily be said that we’ve been in a constant state of paralysis since October of 2008, waiting for the next big shock to come. If the economy were a goat it would have starved to death by now, and looking at the current indicators, that may be true. Companies and banks flush with cash, scared stiff to invest in new technology and new projects.

Instead of smoothing out the shocks, the Fed has given us an economy in a constant state of it.

The truth is that central banking has destroyed the relationship between us and the banks; turning us into the goat to be sacrificed in order to protect the more valuable sheep from attack. When it’s obvious, as well, that the central banks are the predators inciting the attacks, well, the metaphor no longer looks so strained, at least from where I’m sitting. Thanks to the mass acceptance of central banking, the division of labor is contracting, at least here in the U.S. How long this goes on depends on how long the Fed will continue to deny reality. It seems to me that if we don’t want the next generation to go through this again we should hear the bleating of our goats as warnings rather than as cries for help.

Thomas Luongo [send him email] is a professional chemist, amateur economist and obstreperous recovering Yankee residing in North Florida.

The Best of Thomas Luongo

My wife and I have an excellent division of labor, as I’m sure most successful couples do. I’m obsessed with money and politics, she in improving our diet and health. She’s the problem-solver while I think up the problems to be solved. If I’m forward-looking then she’s goal-oriented.

So, when I turned to her during the fall of 2007 and said that I thought things were beginning to unravel and it may be time to start stockpiling food she took care of it; reorganizing the house for storage, stepping up her plans for our garden and dusting off her canning equipment.

And, when a few months later I asked her to come up with ways of trimming our budget she responded by saying, "We could put in chickens. Eggs are a big portion of our food budget." After I picked my phone back up I stammered out a, "We can?" I’d only ever heard my wife talk about chickens in two contexts previously. The first was, "Mmmm, tasty!" and the second was, "I hate friggin’ chickens!" She grew up on a farm and was flogged by hens as a kid. I wasn’t.

Today on any given day we have between 75 and 100 chickens, depending on hatch rates.

Since that conversation, I’ve come to realize how important the chicken is to our civilization. It may be the most important animal that we have "domesticated." To those that know chickens I’m sure this will seem obvious, but, to me it was a revelation. I’d always taken the chicken for granted. Now I believe that anyone serious about "surviving" the crash had better have at a minimum a small flock of chickens to ease the transition.

Unlike us carnivores, they are naturally omnivorous, greedily chasing bugs as well as picking at grass and, if you let them, your garden. They are little garbage disposals with legs that you can feed nearly every food scrap you generate and recycle back into high-quality food for you and your family. The only things my chickens won’t eat are celery and onion skins, because even a chicken knows that eating celery is like Keynesian stimulus, a waste of time and energy, costing more to consume than the act will generate.

While their digestive tracks are grossly inefficient and chicken feed is expensive, they will produce eggs of similar quality at a far-lower price. With even just a small amount of free ranging, you will produce eggs far superior in quality to anything at the supermarket, regardless of price. Fully free-ranged eggs are like a gift from on high. Moreover, they produce a high-nitrogen fertilizer as a by-product that is essential for a successful vegetable garden.

The egg is one of the world’s most perfect foods, combining easily digested proteins with a mix of saturated fats, beta-carotene and cholesterol that are all essential for proper energy production at the cellular level. Your mitochondria will thank you for every free-range egg you consume. Like global warming, the lipid hypothesis is one of the most idiotic things ever promulgated by one human towards another. If you want to survive the crash, begin divesting yourself of its consequences immediately.

Keeping chickens is relatively easy; just ask the people at Backyardchickens.com if you aren’t sure. Build them a small enclosure with a bar to roost on and a box to lay in and they will take care of the rest. I do suggest an enclosed yard or u2018chicken run’ for most places as well as designing a coop that is easy to clean out twice a year. For suburban or urban operations, check your local ordinances to find out how many hens you can keep. You may be surprised. Your grass clippings are excellent chicken food if you can’t free-range them.

Some breeds are better foragers than others, while some are more consistent layers and some are both. There is a chicken breed to meet your needs, believe me. For all-around good laying hens that you won’t mistake for pets I cannot recommend the so-called "sex-linked" crosses, the Black Star and the Red Star, highly enough.

On top of our laying hens, my wife has a small breeding program as well. She produces Delawares, a rare breed but an excellent dual-purpose bird producing both meat and eggs. They are easy to handle, tame and almost friendly, while the roosters are relatively calm, well, for roosters.

As I mentioned, their digestive tracts are inefficient so while feeding them your scraps is a good start to recycling your waste food, there exists an even better system that nature provides if you are open to it. For those living in growing zone 7 or higher the black soldier fly’s life-cycle should become part of yours. They will lay their eggs above a mass of rotting material for the larva to fall into and eat. When they mature, they will seek to climb out of the muck they’ve produced to pupate. With a properly designed composter they will self-harvest into a catch-bin, leaving behind a liquid fertilizer that is simply amazing for your garden. The captured grubs are excellent chicken food, better than the table scraps were in the first place. They can be dried and held as winter stores for your chickens.

Traditional composting methods are slow and inefficient, producing variable quality humic acid. In addition, one can only compost vegetable material so as to not attract flies. The black-soldier fly larva produces a natural anti-biotic, which repels flies, and they will eat nearly anything that isn’t wood. That means you can compost your rotten dairy and meats along with your fruits and vegetables. Moreover, they will do this overnight. The hardest part is keeping them fed. You can even compost your chicken manure.

The effect of having chickens extends beyond the practicality of what they can produce. A full-blown chicken operation like the one we now have is also an opportunity for education. We have become adamant about our daughter understanding where her food comes from and what her relation to it is. She knows that the young roosters will be slaughtered at some point and become her dinner. She once asked me why the chickens had to die and I told her that like all of our animals we are responsible for them. We brought them into this world for a purpose so they are our responsibility. If we do not have the stomach to kill them then why did we raise them in the first place? Little chicks may be cute and fun to play with but they grow up to be roosters who are neither.

So, I keep my hatchet sharp.

I’ve learned a lot about what I’m capable of. And, I know now that I’m capable of killing something that has done me no harm. Slaughtering day is not happy fun time at my home. However, the task is done quickly and respectfully.

Our chickens have formed the backbone of our preparation strategy, helping to make more efficient our entire lifestyle, not to be "green" but out of simple economic necessity, which in effect is "green." They provide a means to lower our cash flow for food as well as hedging against a disruption of the food supply chain. If things go that badly we will have food to trade, doing our part to ensure that the local economy does not completely seize up. This is the model for everything we’re doing. Everything must serve a present need as well as potentially serve many possible futures.

Recently, we have finished building a paddock and pasture for a small herd of goats. My land is perfect for them, a mixture of pasture and north Florida hardwood forest. We bought myotonics, the fainting goats, because they are a perfect fit for us (docile, smallish meat goats) and the breeder we found was local and well-respected. I’ve always wanted goats and finally have them. They will clear my land, provide me with food and lower my property taxes.

To me, the history of humanity can be summed up thusly. There once was a group of people living peacefully until some jackass decided that because he controlled a resource he had leverage over them and thought it a good idea to enslave them to his control. That attempt to control can be rendered moot by vacating that place, which some members of the group did. However, they can only do so if they have the means to sustain themselves. Well, to me, the chicken and the goat represent the two animals that give you the best chance at survival on your own. Both can turn low-quality land into high-quality food and other resources. Both can work with a nomadic group. Cows can’t do that, neither can sheep. Horses provide work and transport once you have become established in a place. They all need high-quality land to survive, no less thrive. But, the chicken and the goat, well, to me, they just scream liberty in a way that few others can1. The Free State Project missed the boat on their choice of mascot. My choice to raise these animals is on the one hand accidental (the chicken) and on the other planned (the goat) but both represent the life I want as well as the world I want to live in. They form the foundation while the others provide the super-structure.

But you may say, now there are no new places to "run away" to. The jackasses seem to have everything under their control. Standing and fighting is the State’s method to affect change and that results in you becoming them in the end. So, that option is out. Therefore, it is only by withdrawing your support first intellectually, then removing yourself from their control physically, bit by bit, that you can create the reality you want. In that sense, the chicken and the goat still perform the same function, only the context is different. Each decision along that path is another brick removed from their wall.

Like refusing to vote, buying a gun or home-schooling your children, if you want a world of peace and prosperity then practicing peaceful methods is the example to set. For me it only makes sense that it starts with your food.

Ta,

1. namely the pig. I prefer goats to pigs.

Thomas Luongo [send him email] is a professional chemist, amateur economist and obstreperous recovering Yankee residing in North Florida.

The Best of Thomas Luongo

Well, you torture yourself with what’s behind you
Torture yourself with what awaits you,
Dragging that guilt everywhere inside you
Anxious of the goals that always elude you
Your mind will find a way to be unkind to you somehow
But all we really have is happening to us right now.

~ Marillion, Happiness Is the Road

Having spent years preparing and worrying about what the dreaded Day of Reckoning was going to look like had a subtle yet profound effect on me. When you live with something for long enough, you kinda get used to it being there, like some homunculus sitting on your shoulder urging you to do things you would never have thought to do previously. And there’s a danger in that. You become comfortable living in a heightened state of anxiety, forgetting to stop and remind yourself just how great being alive is and enjoying the people and things you have. Spending all your time devouring/researching different techniques for survival and resource gathering will muddle your priorities; making everything seem like the single most important task to accomplish right now…dammit.. OMG! I’ve spent years beating myself up because I haven’t been as successful as I thought I needed to be in gathering what I felt was adequate to the task. A lot of energy that could have been spent productively was spent in self-recrimination and self-doubt, compounding poor decisions with others. It is this realization of wasted time that has changed my attitude towards the u2018pocky’clipse’ and my place within it.

Simply put, I saw myself reflected in someone else and was a little scared.

My wife’s family has come together with us recently to embrace the vision of the future that I had and we’ve decided to pool our resources around our home and property. I’d like to think that we set a good example but it doesn’t matter, though it was a bit gratifying. What does matter is watching someone else go through the same stages of development you did and realizing where you are in relation to that and why it is that they thought you were bug-nuts crazy five years previously. All of a sudden, I found myself being the voice of reason and restraint prioritizing our task list from the flood of, admittedly, good ideas that were being proffered; playing the same role my wife did for me.

I fell back on my extensive self-training in basic economics and realized that everything has an opportunity cost. There isn’t enough time or money in the world to do all the things we’d like to do, be it learning the piano, playing with your kid(s) or preparing for the crack-up boom and bust. All the enthusiasm in the world cannot substitute for the time needed to acquire and become proficient with a new skill. As well, money cannot substitute for knowledge. It can help speed things along, but that is all. You have to learn how to grow food on your land, as every plot of land is different. You have to learn how to shoot your guns, no amount of reading can substitute for rounds put down-range. Etc.

As I like to say, all knowledge is fractal and the more you learn the more you realize just how little you know. Each new discovery opens up a host of new questions begging for answers. This is especially true when learning how to farm! Seeing the big picture is the easy part. Boring into the guts of what it takes to become even adequate at one or two particular tasks is where the work comes in. What a shock, becoming an expert at something you have no knowledge of takes a long time. Again, no matter how talented or intelligent you think you are, there is no substitute for time and attention to detail.

This brings me to the cottage industry of internet survival experts that has flourished in the wake of the Fed’s New Depression. My attitude about this has changed considerably as well. It is obvious that they are preying on those newly-minted Chicken Littles who are, rightfully, scared about the near-term future; hyperbolically describing their particular area of expertise as the most important thing you can do to prepare. They do have subscriptions to sell and Google ads to promote. The gun sites are the worst, in my opinion. Forever touting their personal choices (and love of guns and shootings) in terms of life and death, conjuring up scenarios, which have an infinitesimal chance of happening to any of us (unless we go looking for trouble), as things to rationally prepare yourself for. In my opinion, while you absolutely need to train with your gun, it is the right attitude and mindset you need to cultivate in order to use it properly. That can’t be taught in an article. It’s like these people have walked out of the mythical land of plenty promulgated by leftist-anarchists like The Venus Project and have forgotten that we have jobs, kids, dogs and what normal people call, "a life,’ when they talk about how much you need to train with your weapon. Ammunition is bloody expensive if you haven’t noticed.

To me, your gun must be first, comfortable to hold and shoot. Anyone who does not stress this is not worth reading another word from. My wife and I each have 20 ounce hammers, hers is an expensive, anti-vibration one, while mine was the cheapest one on sale that day, but it fit my hand perfectly. I can’t drive a nail straight with hers, while I can drive literally anything with mine. I love my hammer in a nigh-inappropriate way and without it, my house would never have gotten finished. I won’t start a project without it. Same thing with our handguns. I can leave my CZ-85 Combat lay around for years, pick it up, put some clay targets in tree branches, step back 20 yards and hit them all without thinking much about it. It is simply perfect, even with the stock plastic grips. I can’t hit the broad-side of a bull’s butt with her Beretta. Gods forbid you hand me some awful 1911! I know this is gun-sacrilege but I hate them. I know I’m using a u2018hole-poker’ (9mm) rather than a u2018man-stopper’(45ACP), but I’d rather poke a hole in a guy with my CZ than not stop him with a 1911. Pick a gun you like, get comfortable with it, practice with it intensely at first, do maintenance at the range and spend the rest of your time asking yourself when you’d be capable of pointing it at another human being and pulling the trigger, because that’s the biggest obstacle any still-rational person will have to self-defense.

Would I like my farm to be totally self-sufficient in the event of a complete breakdown of services and society? Sure. Do I have the money and time to make that happen? It is to laugh. I don’t have the time to become a sharp-shooter. I’m not prepping a u2018bug-out’ bag and I’m certainly not going to drop $20,000 on an off-grid solar power system. In the end, I’ve come to embrace The Pareto Rule. What can I do to 80% prepare for what I think I’ll need that will cost me 20% of my available capital? In other words, where can I get my biggest preparedness bang for the non-proverbial buck. This approach keeps my prodigious imagination in check.

More importantly, what am I preparing for? What do I really think is going to happen and given my circumstances what should I do to react? I can’t tell you how to answer that, but I can tell you that stockpiling 2 years worth of MRE’s is probably a waste of money. In response to my first article in this series, many of the people who contacted me offered to me that I wasn’t alone in this; that I had family and friends to rely on. They were, of course, right. I came to realize this through time. Our actions (and ideas) had consequences and affected those around us to want to find their place within our division of labor. I guess it is that whole, u2018if you build it,’ thing. Well, in my case it was.

I’ve decided that I can’t prepare for the total breakdown of all things good and decent. I won’t go there. Moreover, it’s not cost-effective and likely a waste of my precious time on this planet. The most surprising thing that happened on my way to the pocky’clipse is that I’m not preparing for it anymore. I’ve come to realize that I have to have faith in people’s ability to adapt and be resourceful; responding to the incentives before them. We’ve built so many great things because of our ability to press our personal comparative advantages, it seems silly to think that that will not continue in the face of some kind of monetary spasm. If capitalism truly did build everything good in the world, and I subscribe to that belief, shouldn’t I act accordingly? If I’m wrong. Oh well. There was likely nothing I could do about it anyways. The priorities we’ve set now involve shoring up the basics of food and water while having those preparations serve as good uses of our time/money in case we’re wrong, hedging our bets and changing the overall direction of our lives. I’ll go into the specifics in a future article. There is always that possibility that the Sword of Damocles will not fall as hard or as swift as we think it will. In such a case, all that bottled water and ammunition will look pretty silly won’t it?

Ta,

Thomas Luongo [send him email] is a professional chemist, amateur economist and obstreperous recovering Yankee residing in North Florida.

The Best of Thomas Luongo

When
last we left off
it was early 2005 and "The Plan" had been mostly a success.
We were, though, approaching the next crisis in the story. The madness
of the bubble economy had driven my boss slightly insane. Her research
program, which I managed, was in the process of blowing apart at
the seams. Government money, the only kind available, was now coming
with a (to me, not her) deal-breaking string attached, NELAP
Certification, that which drove me screaming from the private
(sic) sector to the state in the first place. How's that for a perverse
incentive? I refused to become a de-facto employee of the EPA. Doing
research of marginal value was one thing. Doing that same research
while submitting to government audits of unnecessary paper-work,
which could land me in jail, was another. Some of the grants, as
well, looked suspiciously like intellectual cover for the seizure
of property being used in a politically unpopular way, read shooting
ranges.

I had come
to my ethical limits of being a tax-consumer.

Against this
backdrop, Larry still hadn't bought his property, we were building
an addition, hadn't rolled the various debts into a mortgage and
Camille was stubbornly refusing to get pregnant. I tested my own
hair for arsenic and lead poisoning one morning, just in case.

This situation
went on like this until late June. While negotiating on a mortgage
I insisted on borrowing no more than so much money as a fixed-rate,
20-year note. Well, they kept trying to get me to consider an ARM,
more money and/or more term. Finally, the manager came in, younger
than me, and tried pushing me to go up to six figures on the loan.
I told him, "Thanks, but this whole market is going to crash
and none of you will have jobs in 2 years. So just shut up and get
out." I'm really not a very nice person. By 2008 they were
gone.

In early July
we finally went to see a fertility doctor, who told us our only
option was adoption. Without paying attention to details; doing
either blood work or a full medical history or asking about current
life issues, he concluded my boys were too dysfunctional. He cut
off Camille's protests with, "If you want to have kids, you're
not having them with him," and "There's a lot of information
on the Internet, most of it is wrong." Part of me was relieved,
I'm ashamed to admit. The same traits that allowed me to see the
events on the horizon were also the ones that made me fear bringing
a child into the middle of it. Is it any wonder that birth rates
in the West are dropping like mooks in a Jackie Chan flick? Stress-induced
male infertility is real. I blame The Fed. It may not be true, but
I don't care.

She immediately
went home, put me on a vitamin regimen and swore me off my nightly
whiskey or two. That weekend we went to visit a good friend in Miami
very depressed. It turned out to be just another twist in the road;
this one for the good. He introduced me to the man, again younger
than me, who by year's end would be my boss from that point forward.

The problem
was the job was in Stuart, which is south of Gainesville… oh, like,
250 miles south. It was a great opportunity to combine the two things
I'm really good at, problem solving and generating data, all to
bring a much-needed technology to maturity. This was a chance to
put those free-market principles I was so good at espousing into
action while getting off the government dole and possibly getting
rich as a consequence. Camille just knew I would be happy doing
research as opposed to baby-sitting academics. Still, she had to
push me to accept the job. It wasn't a calling, but it was finally
a career.

By they way,
she was pregnant by mid-August.

We closed on
Larry's property in November and I moved into an apartment in early
December. The addition wasn't finished. I would travel home on the
weekends. I still do. Camille tiled her tub surround seven months
pregnant. The wood-burning stove was installed the day before the
first overnight frost along with the front door, which I built that
same day.

We had decided
to have our child at home, as we knew the hospital, for us, would
not be an optimal environment for Camille, which is paramount. The
cesarean rates in Florida were over 25%, now
over 28%. The fear of lawsuit has driven hospital assistance
of the most basic of human functions irretrievably insane. Besides,
if a couple we knew could deliver their two kids themselves without
any help, in the words
of Jeremy Clarkson, "How hard could it be?!" Then
again, we said that about the house. Isn't it a system designed
to succeed? We are all prima facia evidence of that. Having watched
a film of a woman give birth to twins by herself (one of them a
footling breach!) there was no way we couldn't handle this. Moreover,
Camille was very worried about me turning the birthing into something
reported on the evening news. "No. Mr. Luongo you can't bring
a gun into the delivery room." Honestly, the only way someone
was doing an episiotomy on her was if I got to do one on them first…Comma
dammit! Camille found a mid-wife who handled all of the pre-natal
care. She and her two students were fantastic.

We refused
to find out the sex beforehand. For eight months everyone asked
me, so what do you want, boy or girl. I would reply, "2,
10, 11… eyes, fingers, toes!" One Shatner-esque pause later…
"Healthy. That's all I care about." I got a call from
her around eleven O'clock one night saying she might be going into
labor, but she wasn't sure. Then she had a contraction. "I'll
be home by 2." I was. If my average speed was less than 100
miles per hour on that trip home, I'll have lost faith in both math
and the space/time continuum. Born in our bedroom in April 2006,
my lil girl is nothing more than what every father says she is,
u2018The
Most Beautiful Damn Thing in the Entire Universe."

It is one of
the rare moments when I'm proud to be utterly conventional.

The story settles
down as we figure out how to be parents/spouses who aren't together
enough. Larry had done the unthinkable, acquired and maintained
a girlfriend, and moved out just before the birth. Now that "The
Plan" had been implemented, we could get on with the real preparations
for whatever future awaited us as a family.

Ta,

August
19, 2010

Thomas
Luongo [send him email]
is a professional chemist, amateur economist and obstreperous recovering
Yankee residing in North Florida.

As I related
in my
last article, my wife said to me one evening after work, "I
think it's time we had a kid…. And, I'm not raising it in this house."
Little did I realize how profoundly those last 8 words would alter
the course of my life, and not in the way you're expecting. This
came out of her mouth literally days after we'd paid off the car
we'd bought a year previously as well as all of our revolving debt.
Visions of small piles of gold and silver coins were dancing in
my head. This was August of 2002, gold hadn't even begun to embarrass
Gordon Brown yet. The mortgage-burning party was moving up our
entertainment calendar.

But the logic
of my wife's clock refused to be ignored.

She was right.
The house was really a glorified bungalow. It was 50 years old,
1100 square feet (generously) with 2-wire electricity and a septic
system that needed a complete overhaul. On the plus side we owed
around $42,000 on it and, PITI,
was less than $450/month. So, it was either put all of our equity
into rebuilding this house or finding other arrangements.

As I said,
this was 2002 and the housing bubble was already being blown in
north Florida. My house appraised at around $68,000. Land prices
had tripled in the past 5 years. Our desire was always to have a
rural home. Given the local taxing structure this also meant finding
a place outside of Alachua County. My wife had asked for only three
things over the course of our lives together; one new car (done
and paid for), one vacation and a horse. She grew up on a 200-acre
farm in rural Ohio raising quarter horses (among other things) and
she missed owning a horse. So, knowing that this was likely the
last time we would do anything like this, the requirement for anything
we did had to include this. And it had to be done on a one-income
budget. We'd agreed that no child of ours would ever set foot in
a government school unless it was serving as a hurricane shelter.

Unfortunately,
the best we could do was a similar house on 5 acres. That wasn't
enough either house or land. I'm not sure whose idea it was originally
to build our own house, but once it got in my head, I wouldn't let
it go. After a short conversation with a co-worker who did in the
1970's what I was considering doing now, I became convinced it could
be done. I didn't think temporary insanity lasted this long, but
hey, now I had a guru!

A plan had
formed. We would find a plot of land between 10 and 15 acres, build
a house on it, and then begin the fun part. I researched what/how
we were going to build while Camille worked on finding the right
piece of property. The perfect parcel fell out of the sky one Tuesday
in November with one caveat; it was too big (19 acres) and, therefore,
too expensive. Undaunted, we pitched an offer to a good friend,
who agreed to become a cog in "The Plan" by pledging both
to buy 5 acres and help us build the house. We would all then move
into said home, allowing him to straighten his finances out and
then we'd help him build his house when he was ready.

Amazingly,
a lot of that has come true.

We closed on
the property on December 16th, 2002, which commemorates
not only the Boston Tea Party but also the births of Beethoven and
Philip K. Dick. I don't really believe in omens, but there it is.
It was a 20-acre parcel (1/4 by 1/8 mile) with an acre cut out b/c
there was a trailer on that acre. We were even able to convince
Camille's parents that we weren't nuts and that we'd need their
help. That Christmas my father-in-law gifted me with a wooden tool
box filled to the brim. Financing would be handled via a HELOC at
4.5% and VISA as I refused to pay 11% on a construction loan when
I was using 0% (for up to 18 months) credit card offers to light
the charcoal for my BBQ.

Thanks Alan
Greenspan, I bet you never saw that coming did you?!

We set upon
building the house like a bunch of inept Amish-men in March of 2003.
My father-in-law's experience was invaluable. Since Camille didn't
work on Fridays I took off every Friday from March to December of
that year. Yes, Virginia, state employees really do get too much
time off. Yes, my boss deserves my thanks. Larry, the cog, came
out on the weekends. Every weekend. We worked 7 days a week for
nearly a year straight with only a week off that Christmas, which
was spent in front of a PS/2 drinking coffee and developing tendonitis.
I contracted only the well drilling, the septic, the trusses (to
my design), the temporary power pole and the insulation. Everything
else we did, including digging the 200-foot trench for the underground
electrical conduit. And we did most of it in the North Florida summer.
I thought roofing was hard, so I built two stories to minimize the
amount of roof. A decision that could best be described as moronic.
Camille was the electrician, I was the plumber. She tiled the bathroom,
I did the kitchen counter. Larry was general labor, gadfly and part-time
marriage consultant.

In spite of
doing nearly everything wrong at least once, the house went up.

We sold the
house in Gainesville for 15% more than I had budgeted that October
and moved in then, though there was still a ton to do. We passed
our final inspection on January 7th, 2004 and filed for
the Homestead exemption the following Monday. Larry moved in that
May. We immediately started on a shed/work area.

From the beginning
of the project though, I knew there was something else to this than
just trying to save a few thousand dollars in top-line expenditures.
It was the investment in ourselves building skills that we didn't
have that we knew, deep down, we were going to need. Sure, my comparative
advantage was as a chemist. I could have used my time more "productively"
by leveraging those skills at a higher rate of remuneration and
paid the contractor to build my house leveraging his skills accordingly.

Feh! If what
I thought was coming was coming, I was going to need to know how
to build stuff. Besides, while I'm very good at my profession, it
ain't no calling. At the time it was just a job. This was my first
taste of being an entrepreneur in my entire life and I wasn't going
to shrink from it for any rational or sane reason like comparative
advantage. Building a house sparked my imagination; the idea of
building a consulting business cured my insomnia.

There was something
else at work here. Our house became a group project of a sort. Maybe
it was because of the sheer madness of it, but whenever I put out
the call for people to come out and help they came. On one early
Saturday I had 16 people on site building and flying the beams and
building the walls. It became an opportunity for an old friend and
me to rectify a regrettable alienation as well as a chance to help
another who was between jobs and needed both a sense of purpose
and some cash. It was beyond humbling and every time I look at the
center 6×10 beam running through the middle of my house, I think
about everyone who was there that day.

How could you
not?

The last part
of the plan, though, was the part that was beyond our control; our
parents. From the beginning we embarked on this path to provide
a place for them to choose to come before it became necessary for
us to do so for them. The carrot for this was the grandchild. It
was a big carrot. I'm the youngest of four; my sisters are 10 and
12 years older than me and had their kids in the 80's. My brother
splits the age gap and is gay, so no grandkids from him. As for
Camille, her sister had one child and he was nearly out of high
school. So, our kid would be quite the occasion and another chance
for them to help us, while ensuring that we were coming together
at the right moment in time.

Honestly, I
never thought I would be the one to be the caretaker of my mom.
I'm the child that left at 18 and never came back. But, in creating
"The Plan" I realized I was putting myself in that position.
My siblings were willing, but not able to provide a place for her
that would be suitable in the right time frame.

My mom was
reluctant at first. She came up from Marco Island to visit early
in the construction and my brother told me later that she expected
to see a pile of crap on the ground. She would never say that to
me. But, her expectations weren't unfounded. Imagine her surprise
to find me putting the finishing touches on the stair well and most
of the first floor shell finished when she arrived. Ironically the
last of my father's tools I had inherited died that day. Again,
omens. I walked her around the property and told her to pick a plot
of land she liked, for future consideration.

She didn't
make that decision until nearly a year later but, with our help
and guidance, in February 2005 she moved into her new (and last)
house on what was the northeast corner of our property.

The trailer,
which I mentioned at the beginning, came up for sale cheap and my
in-laws bought it as a winter home; my mother-in-law still has family
in Ohio. They had sold most of their farm to an Amish family over
the past 10 years. By this time, we had finished the shed, fenced
the yard, survived two hurricanes and built a south-facing porch.
We started work on the first addition that summer with seed money
from them as a down payment on a future acre.

In the end,
"The Plan" survived contact with us better than we could
have imagined. Most of the things we set out to do, we did. The
particulars may have changed along the way and the schedules may
have slipped a bit, but all good plans leave room for improvisation.
Moreover, the effects it had on our families and friends were bigger
than I would have ever imagined. You don't set out on something
like this and not wind up leading by example.

You also are
not the same person you were before you started.

Is my house
a paragon of architectural design and refinement? Ha! No way. Is
the interior finished, most certainly not. But, it's ours, it didn't
break us and I have the smallest mortgage of anyone I know which
was exactly what I budgeted in 2002.

There were
only two problems at this point. The first was I hated my job at
the University and it was beginning to kill me.

And the second
was I couldn't get my wife pregnant.

Ta,

August
10, 2010

Thomas
Luongo [send him email]
is a professional chemist, amateur economist and obstreperous recovering
Yankee residing in North Florida.

I have memories
of being aware that the society we were living within was unsustainable
that I place between 9 and 11 years old. They may be earlier than
that, but we studied Rome in either 5th or 6th
grade so that seems a reasonable assumption. I grew up during the
last depression of the 1970's in safe, suburban New York. Dad was
NYPD, mom was a nurse at a local psychiatric hospital and I was
the youngest of four in a house full of type-A, lower-middle class
pragmatics of Italian descent. The memories of note revolve around
holidays; driving into "The City" to visit the Luongo
family demesne in Brooklyn where my grandparents (who died nearly
a generation before I was born) raised 11 children, my mother's
parents in Little Neck and seemingly everyone else in between. These
trips, with the soundtrack of my parents discussing the financial
woes of a bankrupt NYC, opened my eyes to the enormity of the problems
facing my generation and beyond.

The West Side
Highway fell down in 1976, never to be rebuilt. I distinctly remember
the left lane of the East River Drive being closed as the sea wall
was being reclaimed by the river. The city was broke, there was
the Blackout, Son of Sam, the NYPD forking over some of their pensions
to fund City operations and the infrastructure was failing. Wages
were stagnant but price inflation was rampant. To a naïve 10-year-old
(who was very good at math) I kept thinking to myself, "If
they can't pay for these things now, how am I going to pay for them
later?" I grew up with a real fear of bridges and over-passes,
expecting them to fail at any moment. I would have silent panic
attacks whenever we crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge. This fear of
bridges persists, but I'm much better at controlling it, mostly
by avoidance.

We still had
air-raid drills in school and I read a lot of Philip K. Dick, starting
at age 13. I learned a lot about the insanity of our culture and
bureaucracies in his books; the inherent schizophrenia of having
to be different people at different times in your day in order to
keep your position all the while being ground down by arbitrary
and capricious authorities either mundane or supernatural. As
T.S. Eliot observed, "Preparing a face to meet the faces
that you meet…until human voices wake us and we drown." I see
Penfield Mood Organs
and Dr.
Smiles everywhere. We call them Ritalin, Paxil, or Dr. Phil.

I bring these
things up to provide perspective. In a way, my whole life has been
leading up to these interesting times we are living through. I knew
that this was the end of the American Empire; the parallels to Rome
were unmistakable even to a pre-teen. So, the question is, knowing
this, what do you do about it? Well, for a long time I ignored it,
studying music and poetry intensely while earning a degree in chemistry
perfunctorily. I may have understood the macro-problem but I didn't
understand the causes, and besides, I had a lot of growing up to
do. Angry and obnoxious, I passionately misdirected my time and
energy. A natural-born iconoclast, I distrusted authority and institutions
but didn't have any clue of how to successfully avoid them. I absolutely
didn't vote. But, by gods, I was willing to give anyone an earful
of what I thought, no matter how idiotic or half-baked the opinion.
[Ask me sometime about my disastrous first impression on my wife's
family.] Thankfully, I had the family work-ethic and met my future
wife in college. A more religious man would consider her a gift
from on high.

Without realizing
it, I studied the law and politics through games, specifically games
that broke their own rules and learned the futility of controlling
complex systems. I know why chess is such a good game; it was simple
and had been beta-tested for 5000 years. I'm a miserable chess player,
but was one of the best Shadowfist
players in the world; king of the ant pile, I suppose.

On discovering
libertarianism and Austrian economics, the acceptance of the ideas
came easily and without reservation. I won't bore you with the details.
Think eyes opening, falling into rabbit holes, touching the Monolith;
pick whatever metaphor suits you, but it happened to me and every
day I am thankful that it did. I would have gone insane or, more
likely, just continued down that fatalistic path of mild self-destruction
and wasted potential had it not. No longer did I feel like the protagonist
in one of Phil Dick's many books.

With this knowledge,
though, comes a price. There's always a price. It is an economic
verity.

That price
is clarity. Before, I had a vague feeling that the inevitable collapse
was a natural, organic process, too big for me to either understand
or affect the outcome of and sweeping me along with the forces of
history. Now, I knew there was a causal link to specific systems,
namely the monetary one (and the problems inherent in the institutions
it subsidizes) and it focused my criticism. Moreover, as I devoured
knowledge of just how sick, corrupt and immoral the whole thing
was I also realized that what I thought was coming was a mild breeze
compared to the whirlwind we were actually creating.

So much for
mastering my fear.

Because at
that moment you realize just how unprepared physically you are for
what you see coming at you. For me, the intellectual process was
easy. I'd been living with it my entire life. But fear isn't an
intellectual response, it's a limbic one. It's why economics is
not a dry, dusty discipline, but rather a bloody and visceral one.
Time preference is linked with a fear of the future and the plans
you make to combat it. On 9/11, I'm not ashamed to admit that after
a conversation with a friend about what would happen if "they
nuked The Mouse (Disney)" that I ran out to Wal-Mart and bought
a water-filter, a 5 gallon water can and two 7 gallon gas cans in
case we had to pile our life into our two-seater beater and retreat
to my in-law's farm in Ohio. After that, my wife and I went car
shopping; it's what we had planned to do after work anyways. I horrified
the salesman at the Nissan dealership while watching the footage
for the first time by saying, "You know, I wouldn't be surprised
if our government didn't pull this off." He swallowed hard
(his salesman's face didn't drop) and tacitly agreed with me.

We didn't buy
a car from him, though we did buy a car.

I bought an
AK-47 the following Saturday and ordered 1000 rounds of 7.62×39
when I got to work on Monday. For Christmas that year, my wife bought
me my first 1/20th oz. Gold Canadian Maple Leaf (I'm
a huge hockey fan). If she had not done so I may never have pulled
that trigger, so to speak. Have I mentioned how unutterably fantastic
she is?

The point is
that during those early days of understanding a lot of my behavior
was driven by fear. It didn't help that there were plenty of people
out there stoking that fear and profiting from it. I remember making
completely unrealistic lists of guns that I wanted to own, where
to place the defensive positions on the property I hadn't bought
yet, and whether my house should have a cupola with a 360-degree
view and rifle slits. Temporary insanity? Maybe, but I didn't act
on any of them, thankfully. All of this on 35 grand a year! "Christ,
what an imagination I've got," (with apologies to John
Brunner).

Because, here's
the rub, while I imagined all of these catastrophic outcomes, preparations
for them are more mundane. We are governed by the law of Diminishing
Marginal Return so, as I took steps towards my goals, I satisfied
my biggest anxieties. Can we defend ourselves? Yes, a few years
of Tae Kwon Do took care of that. Can I defend my home? Yes, we
bought his and hers 9mm pistols, a couple of cheap but functional
rifles and already had a couple of dogs. Is my meager wealth protected?
Yes, I was acquiring gold and silver for the future. Most importantly,
for the first time in our marriage we were both gainfully employed
and cash-flow positive. I had a small house in Gainesville with
an even smaller mortgage (by today's standards), and our health
was improving from being early adopters of a low-carb lifestyle.
I was beginning to feel good about our prospects of riding things
out. It was an illusion, but, hey, baby steps.

Then, after
work one evening, my wife uttered the words which, like any good
story, took the stakes to a different level, "I think it's
time we had a kid."

This was just
the beginning, I thought.1

1. The last
   sentence of Philip K. Dick's novel Ubik,
   which, in essence, negates everything that had preceded it.

August
5, 2010

Thomas
Luongo [send him email]
is a professional chemist, amateur economist and obstreperous recovering
Yankee residing in North Florida.

Since those
moments of awakening I've spent much of my time thinking about how
to inject a new currency into an existing regime without using force
like with the Euro. I was an adopter of The
Liberty Dollar, which was an interesting idea until the raid
by the FBI in 2007. It highlighted the growing concern with
the US Dollar; giving people the illusion of a silver-backed currency
while hedging against its own success or failure by buying their
coins and storing them away.

E-Gold's
troubles
with The Man were equally predictable; thieves hate competition.
The Liberty Dollar was being persecuted over a broad interpretation
of counterfeiting laws (irony duly noted) while E-Gold was harassed
over their customer's actions, not any actions of their own. The
Federal Government is allowed to run the twin Ponzi Schemes of Social
Security and Medicare but U.S. citizens are not allowed to engage
in commerce with those engaging in similar activities while not
actively engaging in those activities themselves.

In other news,
water is wet.

E-Gold is still
in business, as are others like GoldMoney.
They are all solutions for overcoming one of the real problems with
hard currencies; the physical movement of metal from point A to
point B in a speed of light economy. Unfortunately, they are all
built on the same poor foundation, which the modern banking system
exploits ruthlessly; trusting a third party to manage your property
from a remote, central location. For GoldMoney, this is a feature
not a bug, having vaults located outside the U.S.; a hedge against
potential flight-of-capital diktats issued from Mordor-on-the-Potomac.

I have been
tempted by these systems, but I have not placed funds with them.
I'm willing to believe that many of them are legitimate in both
their intentions and business practices, but I can't afford to take
that risk.

I prefer the
promise of my dogs to someone I've never met.

It's funny
that I have no issue with using PayPal linked to my checking account
but am unwilling to fund a GoldMoney account for the same purpose.
Of course, I can hear Gary North on my shoulder whispering in my
ear like a fiscally savvy Iago saying, "Obviously, you have
a problem with that. Gold
isn't money." He is right. Because of Gresham's law I value
it more highly than its notional value. Why would I transact in
it, when people will take these
stoopid federal reserve notes? Gold is insurance against the
depredations of the central bank upon the dollar. It may trade on
the COMEX like a currency, but a medium of exchange it is not. As
this hilarious video shows, the people of Harvard Square do
not even know what to do with silver being offered to them for practically
nothing; no less conceive of a use for it as a monetary instrument.

This is a warning
to the hard money crowd that a return to commodity money will happen
organically or not at all; an outgrowth of a loss of confidence
in the dollar and the institutions that circumscribe our daily reality.
Without any kind of fundamental shift in mass perspective, I see
no future for a commodity exchange standard that bears any resemblance
to the International Gold Standard.

People are
more trusting of digits than physical gold.

To that end,
I came across something the other day that piqued my curiosity.
It was called Bitcoin. Compared
to the systems mentioned previously, to call this idea a currency
would do violence to the idea of a currency. It is, as of right
now (vers. 0.3.2 beta), an exercise in what a digital currency could
look like that is not dependent on third-party trust or centrally
issued by a monopolistic agent of force.

Quoting from
the FAQ Bitcoin is:

…a peer-to-peer
network based anonymous digital currency. ”… there is no central
authority to issue new money or to keep track of the transactions.
Instead, those tasks are managed collectively by the nodes of
the network.

Yes, but what
is it? In deference to Dr. North again, the answer is simply, "Digits."

But, they are
digits with a twist. New bitcoins are generated via lottery within
its proof-of-work system where the records of previous time-stamped
transactions are
hashed into a chain, which is verified by all the members of
the P2P system. There is planned inflation of a known and slowing
rate up to a point. After that, deflation is built into its structure.
It is currently in this early phase of development. The longer the
chain the more secure the system is by nature of the algorithms
at work. For details, see the
white paper. They are currently divisible to 8 decimal places.
Transactions can be completely anonymous.

Seriously,
Tom, digits? These are intriguing digits, though.

It's obvious
to see (after translating the geek-speak) that the system was designed
to be a digital analogue to gold and silver mining. The rate of
generation is normalized to a set rate regardless of the number
of people (CPU's) working on it. The cost to generate digits is
the electricity used by the CPU and the opportunity cost of using
your computer for something else. Increasing the network size increases
the rate at which independent verification of the transactions is
performed.

How resistant
to attack this is has yet to be seen. There is one
underway right now. How successful can this be? I have no earthly
idea and could care less. For me watching the rate at which new
ideas are spawned when people are motivated to produce solutions
to ancient problems is what is important.

So, yes, digits,
which I said I believe to be the future of money, sadly. But, these
are digits whose movements are verified by hundreds of incentivized
auditors 24/7/365. Hell, the FED won't submit to a one-time audit
by those for whom they supposedly work! Yet we are loath to stop
using their product.

I see Bitcoin
as a metaphor for the Web itself. It is what happens when people
of common tastes are able to find each other over vast distance
to find their niche in the division of labor. Synthesizing cryptography,
programming and monetary theory into a unique offering could not
have happened without the Web; itself that which subverts attempts
at control as a natural consequence of its own structure. Any success
Bitcoin enjoys exists as a means to an end (improving how humans
interact via mutual exchange), not the end itself (adoption in the
marketplace). All knowledge is fractal; each new exploration implying
a completely new host of questions that need answers… and right
now we need answers.

I know that
the current system is not only immoral but also failing. I'm fond
of saying that the two most abundant things in the universe are
hydrogen and the human capacity for self-delusion. Hyperinflation
always occurs after a mass awakening from the delusion about the
issuer's ability to protect a currency's value. We are flying into
the monetary equivalent of "coffin
corner" and will eventually stall. If, as Gary North has
been saying for years that gold is not money, digits are, then digits
that are designed to be "as good as gold" may be one way
to disabuse us of our delusions.

And, if the
empire does strike back at us for doing so, so what? Someone is
working on that problem as well. It'll be in version 2.0.

July
23, 2010

Thomas
Luongo [send him email]
is a professional chemist, amateur economist and obstreperous recovering
Yankee residing in North Florida.

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Remember, Remember, the 5th of November The Gunpowder Treason, and plot. I see no reason why Gunpowder Treason Should ever be forgot.

I’m sure the idea of using Catholic-conspirator Guy Fawkes and his anarchic anti-hero V as the basis for a political fund-raising campaign has Alan Moore seething, seeing red and cursing the moment he signed away the rights to his and David Lloyd’s brilliant V for Vendetta to DC/TimeWarner even more so than when he read the first draft of the Wachowski Brothers’ screenplay and had his name removed from the film.

But, that’s the funny thing about creating something.  Quality work not only sells itself, it self-replicates and evolves into something far beyond what you intended for it. In an interview during the film’s production Moore’s biggest issue with the screenplay was the expunging from the story of any overt discussion of anarchy (a criticism I share, frankly). But, much like the libertarian movement there were those who were afraid of Ron Paul’s campaign at the outset, life-long LP’ers and beltway libertarians mostly, afraid that the ideas they thought were important would be lost within the morass of Republican politics and Dr. Paul’s perceived missteps in presenting the message in previous venues. 

But, in the end, if you love something you must allow it to roam free and, like any good plan, give it the chance to survive contact with the enemy; to trust that you’ve done your best to communicate the truth as you see it and allow it to gestate in the minds of those you were trying to reach in the first place.  Ideas without an audience will never become anything more than ideas, no matter how bullet-proof they might be, to quote Alan Moore.

Those highly-prized ideas behind V’s violent revolution and Ron Paul’s peaceful one are the same.  The Wachowski Brothers screenplay took Moore’s dystopic vision in the final act of the comic and toned the violence down to a personal struggle, V’s vendetta, and the destruction of an inanimate object, as opposed to the unleashing of societal chaos on a mass scale, the culmination of which is Evey’s appearance at the right moment dressed as V to galvanize the movement and transform his persona from sacrificial destroyer to that of architect of the reconstruction. 

The realist in me says that Moore’s vision is closer to what will actually happen when (not if) the United States reaches the state of affairs depicted in Moore and Lloyd’s original work.  But, like the Wachowski brothers more-fanciful re-telling for film suggests, I'd like to hope that there is another way; a grand statement made by a large number of people peacefully letting the authorities know that they want to be treated differently without resorting to violence.  By doing in anonymity what they could not do singularly, namely converging on Parliament to witness and sanction the destruction of the old social order (if only symbolically) and complete the work that Fawkes could not, the people of England in the film state that they are rejecting violence as the means of change; that this event is their catharsis even if they aren’t quite sure what it all will mean tomorrow.

We too have that choice; our system of social organization has not so completely broken down that we cannot make ourselves heard individually, within a group, and reject the notion of state control of our lives. This is where Guy Fawkes and Alan Moore meet Ron Paul. As flawed, immoral and cynical as the political system is inherently, at times, it can serve as a mechanism for us to do great things; to make great statements no matter how much our masters may hate us for doing so or those that inspired us to make such gestures may not like what we did with their work.

In my mind it becomes even more ironic and poignant to use the state's own mechanism of control, i.e., electing a President, to do so.

As he has noted multiple times, Paul has offered himself as the figure-head for a revolution that was mature enough, finally, to find him.  His campaign is a spontaneous and self-organizing uprising of human frustration; acknowledging that it’s truly time for a change in direction for this society and the responsibility that comes with that knowledge.  It’s a role he has taken on willingly, with great enthusiasm, and for that his supporters, many of whom are not even remotely acquainted with the ideas of market anarchism no less would agree with them if they were, have rewarded him with the only thing that truly talks in politics, money.

And while our money is as corrupt as our political system, anathema to the very demands that created it in the first place, it is, in essence, a voluntary and peaceful medium of exchange and in this application a force for political change.  Individual people are paying Ron and his staff to help them defend themselves from further pillage by their government and its masters.  Donations to the Ron Paul campaign can almost be looked at as insurance against violence; the Private Production of Defense that Prof. Hans Hermann Hoppe has done so much work defining the mechanisms of.  So, in essence, this is a defensive revolution.  At its core it is peaceful and voluntary, the hallmarks of the polite and orderly society we all want, but now realize we cannot achieve through violence and coercion. 

Guy Fawkes will be remembered, rightly or wrongly, as the leader of a violent uprising but whose legacy persists some 400 years after his death at the hands of the State. Ironically, on the day where he is burned in effigy and the thwarting of his plot by the State is celebrated, these activities have been deemed dangerous to public safety and greater state control over them exercised.

We are rapidly approaching the day of remembrance for this year and this time a group of people dedicated to peace and freedom want to update his memory with a singular event, namely donating an unprecedented amount of money in one day, to mark the beginning of a new way of doing things, a new means of organization. In essence, to drop the proverbial bomb on the U.S. political establishment, testifying to the raw power of the people to self-organize when motivated by something in their best interest and shaking the power structure at its core.

Whether they achieve their stated goal or not is irrelevant, the idea now exists on its own, and like a self-replicating virus from another work of speculative animation, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (but that is an article for a different day) it infects us looking for a new and inventive way to express itself. For right now, Ron Paul is its conduit.

In the end, isn't that what Alan Moore wanted us to take from his story of fascism and anarchy? Isn't that what anarchy is supposed to celebrate?

So while Guy Fawkes' revolution died on the vine of violence and V's is forever stuck at its moment of crisis, Ron Paul's grows peacefully stronger and more interesting every day.

Thomas Luongo [send him email] is a professional chemist, amateur economist and obstreperous Southerner-in-Training. In addition to publishing his personal blog, he currently contributes to AOL’s NHL Fan House as well as covers the Buffalo Sabres at Sabre Rattling.

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On Friday July
6th, Edmonton Oilers General Manager Kevin Lowe tendered a 7-year,
$50 million contract offer to Thomas Vanek of the Buffalo Sabres,
a type of contract known to those in hockey as an “RFA Offer Sheet.”
To fully explain the ramifications of this to those ignorant of
the NHL’s business methods is something I will undertake in a moment,
but for now, understand that if Thomas Vanek were to play in the
NHL next fall, he was the property of the Buffalo Sabres for as
long as they held his rights.

As of Friday
morning Thomas Vanek was not under contract to play for Buffalo
and, if he so chose, could go play in any other league that did
not have an agreement with the NHL which would inhibit his doing
so, the Russian Super League for example. But, as per the rules
of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between the
NHL and the NHL Players Association, if he chose to remain in the
NHL then the Buffalo Sabres would have leverage over the 29 other
teams in the league.

His status
on Friday was that of a Group II Restricted Free Agent without Arbitration
Rights. And, before I go any further, I believe it’s necessary to
explain how he got to this point, which will illuminate some of
the rules which bear on this moment in NHL history.

Thomas Vanek
was drafted 5th overall by the Sabres in the 2003 NHL Entry Draft.
That act by the Sabres meant that they had the exclusive negotiating
rights to him for two years. If the two parties could not reach
an agreement then Mr. Vanek would re-enter the draft in 2005 for
any other team to choose him. If he was not drafted then, he would
be completely unfettered in which team he could play for.

The Sabres
and Vanek did, indeed, agree on a 3-year contract in 2004. After
spending another year at the University of Minnesota where he’d
scored the NCAA Championship clinching goal 2 months before being
drafted by the Sabres at the HSBC Arena in Buffalo, Vanek spent
the next year with the Rochester Americans of the AHL, tearing that
league up. The past two seasons he’s been a member of the Buffalo
Sabres, scoring 68 goals in the process and becoming one of the
premier offensive forces in the NHL, seemingly fulfilling the promise
he showed in junior hockey. In this observer’s opinion he’s an improved
version of Jaromir Jagr playing on the left wing at 6’2,” 222 lbs.

Entry-level
contracts, like the one Vanek just completed, have a maximum length
of 3 years under both the previous and current CBA. During that
contract Vanek made $942,000 while playing for Buffalo, and a whole
lot less for the year he spent in Rochester.

So, here he
is, playing on one of the best teams in the NHL, leading them in
goal-scoring (43) while playing significantly fewer minutes per
game than any other player so prolific (just under 17 minutes/game),
selected to the 2nd team All-Star unit by the hockey intelligencia,
and, heading into the Free Agent signing period, which opened on
July 1st at noon, one of the most coveted players on the market,
along with a couple of his teammates (Chris Drury and Daniel Briere,
both of whom signed with different teams).

But, if the
Sabres had his rights, then how was he available for Lowe to sign
him to a contract?

After a player
fulfills his entry-level contract he is then in the category Vanek
was, Group II RFA w/o arbitration rights, and as such could be tendered
an offer from any team in the league which the Sabres would have
the right to match, thereby signing him to that contract and retaining
the player. If they declined to match the offer they would be awarded
compensatory draft picks from the Oilers based on the value of the
contract signed, in this case 4 first-round picks.

That is exactly
what transpired Friday morning. The Oilers entered into an agreement
with Vanek to a 7-year, $50 million contract and the Sabres decided
to match the offer and forego the draft pick compensation. Considering
the quality of the Oilers situation right now, they would have been
fairly high picks for at least the next two years (and supposedly
deep, talent-rich drafts they are).

Alright, now
that you have the background and understand the situation, now let’s
look at what is wrong with that arrangement. There’s so much…
where to begin?

First, let
me state, that as an Austrian and free marketeer all of this seems
terribly complicated. But, given that the internal economics of
a sports league create capital allocation problems that fall under
the purview of games theory and the NHL exists in the imperfect
legislative landscape that is the United States and Canada at both
the national and local levels, it is understandable that some framework
to normalize capital amongst the 30 franchises is needed to maximize
the NHL seemingly at the expense of some of its members. Given that
the revenues of the league are growing at an astonishing rate even
without a television contract in the US that generates any, I’d
say some of what has been implemented is working.

As well, the
problems in this CBA relative to that described above should be
the subject of a completely different article or series thereof.
For this one, I simply want to point out how to fix Restricted Free
Agency and make it more free-market in its approach.

For all of
the complications and variables that are bearing on the situation
that played itself out last week, the fix, in my mind, is a very
simple one.

Given that
the NHL has a varied geographic and economic background it makes
sense that one of the ways in which teams of more limited resources
(and, more importantly resource potential) can remain competitive
is to retain the rights to the players they draft and develop for
far longer than they could afford to pay them in an freer marketplace,
thereby granting themselves a huge discount for their younger players
and, in their minds, maximizing their return on investment. This
is the thinking that went into the whole RFA process.

It is safe
to say, though, that market forces have been systematically breaking
that system down in all sports over the past 40 years, and hockey,
in particular, over the past 15 or so. Even this latest CBA, which
was widely perceived as a home run for management insofar as they
got most of their demands for ‘cost certainty,’ there were serious
concessions to the NHLPA in terms of the length and strength of
Restricted Free Agency.

One of them
was the lowering of the compensation packages to be paid in the
event of signing
away a player via the Group II Offer Sheet provision. Contracts
up to $2.3 million dollars in value would yield only a 2nd round
pick in compensation. Whereas for top-end players the cost dropped
from five first-round picks to four. Couple this with a salary cap
the system could turn predatory very quickly. Believe me, I’ve envisioned
many a doomsday scenario concerning the Sabres collection of young
and relatively inexpensive talent…. not a $50 million one, mind
you, but others most especially.

The problem
though, is that the team having their player signed away is in no
position to have a say in the compensation received, and this is
where the market imbalance created by Restricted Free Agency perpetuates
itself. The NHL and the NHLPA, two organizations with much different
agendas than the parties involved in the transaction, have set the
terms of the transaction to the point of assigning an arbitrary
value to the worth of a player and the contract he is supposedly
due.

But, as we
all know, there is absolutely no way to predict what anyone will
value these things at the moment a transaction is possible. Moreover,
it follows that an offer sheet will only be made when a player is
worth far more than the compensation stipulated in the CBA to the
team making the offer. That team will use that arbitrage as leverage
to take a player from one team after the other team has spent the
resources and time to develop that player into the one he is when
the contract is offered.

Conversely,
the team whose player is being signed away has to accept either
the contract offer made by another team or a set of future assets
of unknown quality, forsaking any immediate goals. No option exists
to trade present assets for present assets.

This is the
fulcrum of the problem and the solution, as always, lies in creating
opportunity for both sides to have their specific needs met in the
most voluntary manner possible. Therefore, a more effective solution
to this situation is for the following process to be implemented:

1. Team A enters
   into an agreement with Player from Team B for his employment.
2. Teams A
   and B then enter into negotiations for a potential compensation
   package for the player in question, if they agree then Team B
   decides to either accept or match the contract offer. This period
   lasts 7 days, which is the current length of time a team has to
   decide to match or take compensation.
3. At the end
   of 7 days, if no agreement is reached the NHL appoints an arbitrator
   to use the two packages on the table to craft a compromise which
   Team B can then either accept or match the initial contract offer.

Ultimately,
the Group II system should be changed to be a system where the team
which holds the player’s rights can be forced to assess the real
worth of the player in the marketplace while at the same time preserving
the capital expended by them to develop that player. As well, it
should help the capital stock of the NHL find the teams where it
is most needed. In the case of Thomas Vanek, a model small-market
franchise who realizes they have to be exceptionally prudent with
their home-grown talent to even survive in the league, no less thrive
like they have in recent years, spent the time and resources helping
mould him into an elite player was preyed upon by an incompetent
smaller-market franchise, the Edmonton Oilers, who don’t value their
draft picks because they can never seem to pick or develop them
into great players.

And, given
that the NHL is not a free market, it’s imperative that they must.
The NHL is a corporation with 30 divisions who are not only dependent
upon one another for revenue (with no opposition, there are no games
to be played) but compete internally amongst themselves in a nigh-perpetual
manner. For the NHL to be successful and expand its reach into new
markets all of the markets they have must remain competitive in
the long run. A team that is competent at drafting and developing
talent may not be any good at assessing its value, which might be
an adequate description of the Buffalo Sabres.

So, while Restricted
Free Agency may be a bad mechanism to reward teams for their capital
investment, the Group II Offer Sheet system only compounds the problem
by not letting the teams reap the full reward of their investment.
And, while the proposed change to the system is not perfect, by
any stretch, it is superior to the one currently in place, especially
within the context of the salary cap and the rest of the current
CBA.

And, if this
system was in place, Kevin Lowe’s offer sheet might not have been
quite so outlandish, feeling the need to make it so big that Regier
would not match it, along with the compensation staying the same.
Conversely, Darcy Regier and the Sabres might have taken more than
20 seconds to decide to match the contract offer, if only out of
principle and the desire to stand by the other players he has under
contract. As well, he might not have been so angry at Lowe for not
doing what Lowe should have been doing well before that he reached
the crisis moment of offering Vanek that contract, namely being
a GM actually making good decisions to improve his hockey club.
Frankly, this might have been the best decision he’s made since
the Oilers lost to Carolina in Game 7 of the 2006 Cup Finals and
he allowed Chris Pronger to renege on the contract he signed the
previous summer. Vanek is 5 times the player than that which exists
currently on the Oilers.

The RFA system
has now essentially, for top-end talent of which there is precious
little, made them Unrestricted Free Agents at the end of their entry
level contract, as early as 21 and as late as 23 years of age. The
Pittsburgh Penguins are learning that with 20-year-old Sidney Crosby,
who is already the best player in the league and a “generational”
talent, and have already locked him up for the next 5 years at an
average salary of just under $9 million per year. If they hadn't
done that, ask anyone in hockey, and there isn’t one of us who wouldn’t
gladly trade 4 first-rounders for him. Because, on average, it takes
about 300 first-round picks to uncover one Sidney Crosby.

Ta,

July
11, 2007

Thomas
Luongo [send him email]
is a professional chemist, amateur economist and obstreperous Southerner-in-Training.
In addition to publishing his personal blog, he currently contributes
to AOL’s NHL Fan
House as well as covers the Buffalo Sabres at Sabre
Rattling.

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Currently,
I work away from home at a small company with large aspirations
for the future as their R&D Chemist.  What I do is
not germane to the discussion but my situation is.  My home
is approximately 270 miles from where I work and I commute home
on the weekends to spend roughly 48 hours with my wife and little
girl.  In the past 18 months I’ve become quite familiar with
Florida’s Turnpike and an 80 mile stretch of I-75, as I make this
pilgrimage to my life two to three times every month. 

The wear and
tear is significant but, in many ways, so worth it when I make it
home Friday evening to see Capt. Charity Vain and The Woogie (my
nickname for my lil’un) smiling and pointing as I drive up to the
homestead in Outer Luongolia. 

It’s funny,
I used to hate long-distance driving a lot more than I do now. 
But the anticipation of being reunited with those that mean the
most to me makes the three- to four-hour trip home so worth it. 
The trip back is harder, but, thanks to the invention of the cell
phone (and my not living in an advanced civilization like New York),
it tends to go by reasonably quickly.  It’s time that can be
spent catching up with friends or hashing out ideas with my partner
Matt over at Sabre Rattling. 
My car is
reasonably new, comfortable and a joy to drive at highway speeds
(and beyond).  The only thing it lacks is an auxiliary jack
for my MP3 player and a willingness to stay below 90 mph.

When I bought
the car I never thought I’d have to factor in the cost of speeding
tickets and the commensurately higher insurance premiums that go
with them. Maybe I should have negotiated a Traffic Violation Allowance
along with my salary.  It’s a good thing my wallet at the time
(or now, frankly) could not afford my desire for the turbo-charged
version of this car or the State of Florida and me would be in serious
negotiations as to the suitability of my presence on their roads,
which, finally, brings me to the point of this article.

The posted
speed limit on most Florida highways is 70 mph, while the de facto
limit is closer to 85 or, depending on the disposition of the FHP
officer working the area, 90 mph.  For those of you still living
in the dark ages, or New York, I’m sure you’re in a state of shock
at the idea of driving that fast.  But, remember, most, if
not all, of the state is flat and the roads so straight that it’s
really more like steering than driving. The only challenge comes
from having to deal with the other drivers on the road and their
desire to ignore the first rule of highway driving, namely slower
traffic should keep right. 

Floridians
are notorious for there inability to grasp such a simple concept. 
But, in my mind, this deterioration of good driving practices is
really the State’s fault.  You know, the people who we designated
to set the boundary conditions in the name of providing order. 
Think about this for a second.  The actual speeds people are
traveling are all in excess of the posted speed limit, and even
the slow-pokes are still within the legal "warning" zone
of 1–4 mph over the limit.  So, the net effect is
that even though there are people on the road who really want to
flaunt the law, they are consistently impeded by those who only
want to break the law somewhat and feel perfectly justified parking
their car in the left lane at speeds which are still unacceptable
to the others on the road.  You can almost feel the tension
mount as the cars jockey for position to try and get around this
guy who refuses to yield for a minute to let the faster traffic
pass.

Of course,
the net effect of this behavior is a less-predictable roadway as
the "go-really-fast" people will seek to break another
rule of the road, namely "don’t pass on the right," to
satisfy their desires and, by extension, increase the probability
of a serious accident.  Frustrated drivers are dangerous drivers. 
I know this, as I become one at lest once per trip home and it takes
a lot of work to remind myself of the prize at the end of the road
and to let the little things go.  I was reminded of this constantly
during the 4-hour Driver’s Improvement Class I took to avoid the
points for a speeding infraction going on my license.  Ahh,
sweet irony.

Why this is
the State’s fault is that they set a speed limit that is obviously
at odds with most of the driving population and which, in effect,
encourages erratic driving conditions.  The
speed limit is set by utilizing a number of considerations,
only a few of which take into consideration the actual behavior
of the people driving on the roads.  The 85th percentile rule,
which, in effect would set the speed limit at one standard deviation
above the mean speed traveled on the road, is usually invoked by
traffic engineers as the right limit, but, in many cases that data
is ignored for political reasons, be it resistance to raising the
speed limit, existing statutory limits or, as I suspect, the desire
by law enforcement agencies to provide increased revenue for themselves
directly or indirectly.

In fact, the
speed limits are invariably set at between 8 and 12 mph lower than
the 85th percentile, according to a 2003 report of the Transportation
Research Board of National Academics.

All I have
to say to that is, “Cui Bono?”

We all know
the answer to that question, of course.  It is precisely those
who enforce that arbitrary limit who benefit from it.  Up until
recently, Highway(men) Police in Florida benefitted directly, getting
a portion of the ticket revenue as bonus money; now the revenue
just goes to the county in which the ticket was issued.  If
you don’t think speeding tickets are big business then you
haven’t been paying attention.  I knew the situation was
bad, but I had no idea that cops were now dressing themselves up
as hobos to hide their radar guns, setting up "speeding stings"
and the like in residential zones.  Yet another reason not
to live in a burbclave.

From personal experience I ran into the worst possible scenario,
one that literally had me shaking from fright, anger, frustration
and everything in between for about a week. On February 11th of
this year, I got pulled over along with another guy (at the same
time, mind you… how the cop clocked both of us I don’t know) for
doing 91 in a 70 just north of Ft. Pierce.  Fine, great, whatever,
I thought as I waited for the cop (who barely even looked at me)
to hand me my ticket so I can get on with my life, pay the thing
and be done with it.  I think I was actually reaching for my
checkbook and stamps when he returned to my car.

When he returned he asked for my keys.  You see it’s a full-fledged
crime against the state to drive on an expired license in Florida
now.  My birthday passed that week and I hadn’t re-upped my
$15 privilege to use the roads that I paid for in the first place.
I had to plead with them not to impound my car. 

For being 3 days late with a $15 dollar payment (which I never received
a bill for) their response was to take my $20,000 automobile away
from me.  Somehow the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. 
The best part was their (a 2nd one showed up to do berate me, I
guess) insistence that all of this was my fault, a classic example
of the State blaming the customer for using the services that they
provide.  Moreover, Florida’s Turnpike is a pay-per-use road,
on top of the taxes that I pay in the first place.

So, someone please explain to me why is it that a late payment for
a fee should result in my property being taken from me until such
time as I present to them proof that I paid them?    Never
once was there the option presented to me to pay the debt immediately,
on the spot.  Why not?  Why is it that these "cops,"
who are mostly just interested in the revenue their inconsistent
and arbitrary enforcement of their own rules generates, not willing
to accept a guaranteed payment at the moment that such a deficit
is discovered?

If this renewal of my license was the equivalent of a membership
fee for road access, then why not consider the ticket for the violation
a payment for the late membership fee?   Why is it necessary
to give these people the power to potentially impound my vehicle,
in essence stealing it, when the problem is one I’m willing to rectify
at that time, including a late penalty?  What’s the purpose
of such a law?  Why does it have to be enforced this way? 
Can’t they just take Visa? 

They know that there are no reasons why my renewal would be turned
down. They can look that information up, so there’s no reason not
to solve the problem without further damage to my wallet, less wasting
of my time and less paperwork for them.  They have an internet
connection in their car and we have on-line renewal in this state. 
The solution seems axiomatic to me.

The reason it’s this way is control, of course.  You see, the
State doesn’t care about you.  The police officer that I argued
with told me that he wasn’t to blame, that he cannot knowingly let
me commit a crime by driving on an expired license and that if I
was mad then I should be mad at myself for putting myself in this
situation.  I could understand the first part of his argument
and, in a sense was sympathetic.  But, considering that the
speed limit law that I violated which uncovered this clerical error
is an arbitrary one and was actively being violated by every person
driving by witnessing our conversation, this line of reasoning seemed
dubious to me, to say the least.  Why am I to be singled out
when everyone else is just as guilty?  According to the tow
truck driver (and recipient of even more state-created welfare),
I was lucky because if the Lieutenant was on duty he would have,
“taken my butt to jail.”

To be fair to the situation I experienced, the issue is not the
speed at which I was going or the decision by the cop to pull me
over for that behavior.  The issue is the law itself which
sets a limit that does not and, by definition, cannot take stock
of the situation as it existed on the road at that time.  Traffic
was flowing smoothly, the weather was clear and there was no need
for us to do anything other than sit in the left lane and drive. 
Couple that with the fiduciary incentive of both the FHP officer
and the county government to maximize the revenue based on the selective
enforcement of that law and we have a situation that balloons to
a point where I could have spent the night on a bench in the Port
St. Lucie rest area while waiting for my wife to drive down from
High Springs to take me to my apartment, or in jail.

All for being 3 days late with a payment and going 5 miles per hour
faster than the people in the right lane. 

You know, if I’m late with a payment to Cingular, they call me and
ask for payment before shutting off my phone, 4 or 5 times. 
They know that if they treat an arbitrary payment due date so rigidly
that I’ll tell them to go shove their service into a smelly bodily
opening and switch to one of their competitors.  While the
State just collects more and more money to use to buy more cops
and more cars, planes, helicopters and Santa Suits to fleece people
for the non-crime of using their automobile in a way that displeases
them that day.

The issue of driver’s licensure is one that was enacted originally
to help create an account of those who do horrible things while
at the wheel of their automobiles.  Regardless of whether this
was a good implementation for that desired service, it is important
to understand its roots.  The system has morphed from one designed
to facilitate the investigation of crimes committed while driving,
like running people over or running into other cars, to one which
conflates the enforcement of rules put in place to prevent these
things from happening (regardless of their real effects) with them
actually happening.  If I have to hear the phrase, “Cops write
tickets to save lives,” one more time I’m going to puke on my keyboard.

My real issue with all of this is that highway patrolmen should
be spending their time actually looking for those that do real harm
and helping emergency service people when an accident occurs; protecting
and serving those that pay for that service.  They should not
be out there randomly stopping people for violations of rules that
in the end clog up the roads, and create erratic behavior and possibly
accidents just by their mere presence. 

On my last trip home this past weekend I saw a Dodge Neon with Osceola
County plates, fully-tinted windows and flashing blue and red lights
pulling over a minivan for doing around 82 just south of I-4 in
Orlando.  Not two minutes later a Ford Explorer (also with
Osceola County Plates) turned its lights on to slow down and
enter the cut-out between the north and southbound lanes. 

We have Secret Police in Florida now.  Just think, the person
driving next to you in the future, you know the one who decides
to pull up next to you on an empty 2-lane road and stay there in
the most dangerous place he could possibly be, might just be trying
to goad you into speeding up to pull you over.

Ta,

May
31, 2007

Thomas
Luongo [send him email]
is a professional chemist, amateur economist and obstreperous Southerner-in-Training.
In addition to publishing his personal blog, he currently contributes
to AOL’s NHL Fan
House as well as covers the Buffalo Sabres at Sabre
Rattling.

I’ve
been a fan of Mrs. Sheehan since her first article appeared on LRC
last year. Whenever I finished one of her pieces (usually sitting
in the dark, alone, at work, with a fresh cup of coffee — my own
private vigil) I nodded silently and took a deep breath in an attempt
to hold back tears. There was always a little more effort needed
to click the mouse button on her link than some others, but I knew
I would be the worst kind of coward to ignore her, even though I
knew how reading her thoughts would turn out.

After
years of my talking about making the world a better place, Cindy
Sheehan is actually doing it, in the process making all of us connected
with the Libertarian Party, and many others in ‘the movement,’ look
like the navel-gazing blow-hards we are constantly accused of being.
Personally, my taste for any kind of political activism has been
soured by personal events of the past few months, to the point of
neglecting the only positive thing I was doing to affect the kind
of change I wished to see. Too painful, I rationalized. Too much
work, too little return, I whined. My wrists hurt from all the typing.
Whatever the excuse was it seemed like a good idea at the time….
sorta.

So
again, why today, after months of barely putting a coherent thought
on paper, am I bringing this up?

Simple.
The answer is shame.

This
past Sunday was one of those days that reminded me of just what
I have in this world, and it's a great deal more than I thought
it was. It didn’t seem like anything odd would happen when I got
up that morning. I never considered that this day would be that
much different than any other. But, it was. That morning was the
christening of my friend's second son. For a present, my wife had
spent the past couple of days sewing a blanket with a map of the
world on it, a small world indeed, while nursing a broken toe. I
blew off working on the addition to the house because of that and
a strange urge to read all day, having succumbed to the power of
J.K. Rowling. I haven’t been in a church since my grandmother died
and my friends, knowing this, hadn’t invited us directly, not because
of any painful associations but that neither of us is terribly religious
and they figured we wouldn't be interested. They had, however, invited
my mother because they knew she would want to be there, which was
an absolutely brilliant gesture. They were right, of course, as
she was absolutely delighted to go, saying over and over that it
was so great to go to something as a family that wasn’t a funeral.
She’s buried a lot of people in the last twelve years. There are
only the widows and my cousins left on my father's side of the family.

When
I told my wife about the christening she asked me why we weren't
going, and I honestly didn't have an answer for her. I just didn't
think about it. Thoughtless? Probably. I'm guilty of that more often
then I'd like to admit. Then she looked at me and said, "If
it's important to them, shouldn't it be important to us?" She
was right, of course, "Well, then I guess we need to get them
something," I said. She, of course, handled that with all of
her predictable competence.

When
we got there I was drafted into looking after his elder boy, who
is a couple of months short of three, in case he got bored. Sure
enough less than 2 minutes into the service he and I left at his
behest and proceeded to spend the next hour playing with cars and
reviewing his letters and colors. He calls me, “Mr. Tom.” We had
a fantastic time. He’s a wonderful little boy, who makes his parents
very proud and well they should be. After lunch with his family
we went home to laze the day away. On the way home I knew it would
have been shameful for me to have missed this.

Later,
another friend and his fiancé knocked on the door without
warning, having just gotten back from her family reunion in Wisconsin.
They had brought ‘cheese curds’ and they were good. As I said, they’re
getting married in a couple of months (and it’s about time, if he
hadn’t proposed soon I was going to do it for him!), and strangely
enough, I’m going to be the best man. My mom has been bemoaning
the fact that she will be in New York on the same day being the
sponsor to her youngest grandson's confirmation. Again, saying that
it's a shame because there are so few opportunities to celebrate
that we should take every opportunity to cherish them.

When
he asked me to be his best man I said yes without hesitation (I’ve
been given the choice of a Tux or a Kilt… well, that was easy.)
knowing that he doesn’t make these decisions lightly, but was taken
aback all the same. We’ve been friends for nearly 20 years but there’s
always been a little antagonism between us, healthy, I would guess.
It’s a very long story and a complicated relationship, but a strong
one built on respect for each other’s character (if not each other’s
worldview). His relationship with his family is more than admirable,
it's envious. On the other hand mine has been, at best, tenuous.
I guess you can say we’re living proof that friends can disagree
about most everything, except whiskey, but still remain friends.
We’re all family to each other in our own strange way. And, it would
have been shameful of me to turn him down for any self-perceived
inadequacy.

And
that’s the point of this: Family. I’ve had a lot of that this year,
with my mom moving in at the head of my driveway, the endless procession
of sibling visits, and having been found by a long-lost friend (he's
family too) from high school who, by my account, has become a far
better man than I have. We all have our differences about how things
are being handled politically but regardless of how strongly we
feel about each other’s opinion we’re still family. We still have
that luxury. Cindy Sheehan, on the other hand, does not, and is
reminding us just what the costs of war are and what it is to put
your trust in someone who doesn’t know you at all, who isn’t your
family. This point is underscored every day when I go to work and
I see my friend and co-worker who happens to be Iraqi. I'm reminded
of the pride with which he talks about his children and there's
that ever-so-slight twinge of shame.

Relationships
such as these are born of both time and effort. They thrive on the
exchange of real information, something our politics are dangerously
lacking in, and die from a dearth of. They are the most precious
of commodities, and Mrs. Sheehan's growing movement in central Texas
is generating more wealth than any number of bombs or guns or speeches
could ever dream of. Out of the horror of her son's death she is
trying to create something new. She's certainly braver and stronger
than I am to even contemplate it, no less act as she has. By doing
so she has created bonds with people she will never meet, but who
will never forget her, even after her stand in Crawford, Texas comes
to its conclusion, regardless of its outcome.

The
justifications for this war are like the Boggart in J.K. Rowling's
books, reflective of what each of us fears most, but itself scared
of our derision. Nothing good can ever come from actions arising
out of fear. Fear doesn't create friends; it separates them. In
the same way war doesn’t build relationships; it destroys them.
It doesn't create friendships; it keeps them from ever having been.
It is not an opportunity, but rather an opportunity cost. For a
man who supposedly has an education in business George Bush has
shown a complete ignorance of why the customer is always right.
His refusal to meet with her is a testament that he doesn't understand
this basic human function: how to make and keep friends. He lives
in fear of being ridiculed by Cindy Sheehan, and like the Boggart,
will continue to change his reasons for why we need to be fearful
and stay the course.

So
far thousands of Iraqi and over 1800 American families have been
torn apart over our fears, while, thankfully, mine has not…. Yet.
Because something else happened this weekend that I'd nearly given
up hope of happening. My wife, having returned from food shopping
on Saturday, came into the bedroom with my bottle of The Macallan
and one glass with a huge smile on her face. After a few minutes
of confusion on my part (I've been forbidden to drink at all for
the past 2 months as abstinence is supposed to help) and asking,
"How?" and, "But, I thought…?" and, "Are
you sure," she finally showed me the little test kit, which
revealed the truth. I guess I won't be blowing off working on the
addition this weekend.

So,
now what? Tomorrow I'm going to have the same decision I had this
morning, turn left or right. Mike Rogers is on his way, and while
I'd love to be there, I hope Mrs. Sheehan will understand and forgive
my absence. But, I think it's high time that we all stand with her
and welcome her into our families, because, there is no nobler a
cause than creating a family, it's the least we can do. Nothing
more worth u2018straying off course' for. No higher calling. For me
it started today, with a donation,
I'll see what I have strength for tomorrow. I know one thing, though,
I know I'm not afraid.

Ta,

August
18, 2005

Thomas
Luongo [send him email]
is a professional chemist, amateur economist, and obstreperous Southerner-in-training
in North Florida. See
his website.

The
story starts in 2002 when my wife had a project working near Alachua
County Animal Services. She would go out there periodically and
would always take a few minutes to look over the dogs available
for adoption.

One
day a beautiful German Shepherd male was there. Now, let's clear
something up, I was in no way looking for another dog. We had two
at the time, along with three cats and were living in a small house
(1100 sq. ft. on 1/3 of an acre) in Gainesville, but neither were
effective watch/guard dogs. Phoebe is a wonderful dog but a coward,
and while Random was the cutest thing, and certainly game, he was
not much of a threat (35lb Border Collie/Beagle mix). So, while
I didn't want another dog, the wife did and kept coming home and
talking up this German Shepherd out at the pound. My wife, part
of the County Survey Crew, was able to get a little information
from one of the people who worked out back who told her that he
was both an owner turn-in and heartworm positive.

During
one of her lunch breaks, my wife went inside to inquire about the
dog only to get rebuffed immediately. No information was forthcoming
from the person behind the desk about the dog. You see, he was in
the "Stray Dog" area as opposed to the "To Be Adopted"
area. They didn't give out information on Stray Dogs. But, this
was not a Stray Dog. He was an owner turn-in, which are usually
gassed immediately. So, now nothing about this dog made any sense.

Why
was he in with the Stray Dogs? Because he was heartworm positive
and it is against policy to adopt out heartworm positive dogs. So,
he was being held in purgatory, too adoptable to kill but not adoptable
enough to be treated for his worms and malnutrition. My wife told
me all of this and I, of course, got really angry. Here was a dog,
whose irresponsible owner used the County Animal Services to dump
his problem off his back onto that of the taxpayers. Moreover, the
dog was being badly taken care of and pretty much left to die.

This
is the fulcrum of the story. How many people would not make the
emotional decision to get a dog if there was no easy means of disposing
of their potential mistake? How many people would work harder to
find homes for these unwanted animals if they had to pay directly
to have the animal killed and disposed of? Stray animals and irresponsible/abusive
owners exist regardless of county animal control services. So, institutionalizing
the system only makes it worse. The taxpayers get sold pet registration
on the idea that it will be a check on abuse and a mechanism to
remove dangerous animals from the area, among other things. All
of this is funded by general taxation (and a minimal registration
fee) so there is no direct link between the services provided and
the funding received. The whole scheme undermines the property rights
of the county residents, extending governmental control while diminishing
individual responsibility. The people who work there hate that they
have been turned into concentration camp oven-tenders and the public
never really gets the message that little Fluffy is going to be
little Ashie after they turn their back to go home. It's a disgusting,
socialist model that obfuscates the value of animal life to the
point where it eventually reaches zero.

Moreover,
the County can't use any judgment. A private rescue would have recognized
the dog for what he was, wormed him and fattened him up with both
his papers and reproductive organs intact, preserving both his life
and the efforts of the breeders who produced him. Animal Services
had just enough leeway to keep him alive until he starved to death
or was eventually gassed. The rules and laws governing animal services
are designed to remove judgment, flexibility and, most importantly,
liability, all of which is at the expense of the animal they were
empowered to protect.

The
very thing that animal registration was supposed to combat becomes
its primary function.

As
a libertarian I get accused regularly of having the overly charitable
view that people are inherently good (whatever that means). That
is not in any way true. I simply believe that given the opportunity
to shirk a responsibility people will tend to do so and the state
does nothing except define the parameters of shirking. Ultimately,
animal services, much like child services, becomes nothing more
than a mechanism for someone else to relieve us of the burden of
our bad choices.

Okay,
then. Rant over. Let's get back to the incarcerated German Shepherd
wasting away on death row. After my wife's initial inquiry about
the dog, and another conversation about him, we took a trip out
there one Saturday morning to see if we could get anywhere. We snuck
around back so I could see him (which I hadn't), and he was, indeed,
an absolutely gorgeous animal, 25 pounds underweight, but very handsome.
There's little doubt he had papers. Long story short, I got the
same treatment from the desk clerk that my wife had gotten earlier.
They were not allowed to discuss the "Stray Dogs." I tried
to cajole and wheedle the person but no dice. He was unavailable.
If I wanted a dog there were plenty out back to be adopted. In other
words, "Get the hint, stupid, we decide who gets to live and
who gets to die. Not you." Angry, we left. I fumed that they
were trying to kill this dog. We didn't think at this point there
was any hope of getting him and half-seriously discussed getting
some bolt cutters and breaking into the compound.

But,
I really didn't want to take in a third dog, and at the same time
I knew I couldn't let him die either. The great injustice of it
all made me so angry, and my wife used that against me perfectly.

That
Monday morning I get a call from the wife. She said that if I wanted
the dog there is a way. You see, my wife talked with her co-worker
who gave her the rest of the story. This woman was on the "No
More Homeless Pets Coalition" (a coalition of private rescue
groups and Animal Services) and she had been there when the dog
was dropped off by his owner and spoke to him about the dog. It
was because of her efforts that the dog was still alive. Apparently
Animal Services was trying to get him taken by a German Shepherd
Rescue in Ocala but the rescue didn't want him. It was my wife's
co-worker who insisted that he be made a part of a "Special
Needs Adopt-a-thon" that "No More Homeless Pets"
held just after his drop off and which pre-dated our involvement
with him. Animal Services didn't want to include him in this event,
and for the life of all of us we could not understand why. Why keep
him alive if you're not going to let anyone adopt him?

We
were out of town the weekend this event was held, and we wouldn't
have gone anyway as we didn't even know it was happening. He had
been adopted there but kept jumping his adopter's fence and was
returned. This is why he was u2018available' the morning of this phone
call.

To
get him, all I had to do was lie and say that I saw him at the Adopt-a-thon
and give the Disposition Number to the clerk (the same woman I'd
talked to on Saturday, by the way) and he would be mine. My wife
then told me, "Ball's in your court. It's your decision."
(yeah right!)

Well,
suffice it to say when I went down there with a co-worker and said
the magic words, the gatekeeper changed from being an obstacle to
an enabler, and the process of my acquiring the dog began. It took
a while to find his paperwork as it was misfiled and in the exact
wrong pile. After that was found, she then had the god-forsaken
gall to demand the registration renewals for 4 of my other animals
(2 dogs and 2 cats = $80 total) that I would have to rectify before
I could have the dog, which was on top of the adoption fee of $30.
I guess, no good deed truly does go unpunished. Lastly, I had to
sign a contract stating that I would begin the heartworm treatment
within 10 days of receiving him or be subject to fines and imprisonment.
All of this I did with only minor hesitation (and a bit of invective).
They gave me a small bag of dog food, which I threw back in their
face. All of our dogs are on a proper diet of raw meat and bones.

Finally,
I got him out of the building and to my truck. Now I had the problem
of getting him into the bed of my pickup. He and I have no relationship
at this point. He doesn't even have a name. I had no way of getting
him into the truck short of picking him up and hooking him to the
harness. I looked at my friend and she looked back at me and we
thought about it for a minute. Then I just bent down next to him,
stroked his chest and quietly told him that as long as I was good
to him and he was good to me that we'd have a great life together
and he would never want for anything. "Is that okay with you?"
I asked. He licked my face once.

"Well,
then, get in the back of the truck," I said. To my amazement,
he did. I get a lump in my throat every time I think about that
moment. It was honestly one of the most surreal things I've ever
experienced.

The
next hurdle we crossed together was that first trip to the vet.
The dog not only had heartworms, but hookworm and Coccidia
as well, which had to be treated first. That bill was $140+. The
heartworm treatment would cost over $350. Also, in hindsight, he
should not have been put through the heartworm treatment so quickly
as he was very unhealthy and weak. Animal Services had had him for
weeks and he was still emaciated. They feed all the dogs the same
regardless of size or condition. [For those who don't know, the
treatment for heartworms involves giving the animal enough arsenical
poison to kill the worms but not the animal. Then you keep the animal
sedate for 6 weeks while the worms dissolve and are removed from
the bloodstream. There is always the danger of a piece of dead worm
clogging the heart or the aorta and killing them. We found out during
this time (my wife is a phenomenal researcher) that the active ingredient
in most Heartworm prevention medication, Ivermectin, acts to kill
the immature worms and prevent reproduction. What should have happened
is that we took the dog home, put him on Ivermectin for three months
to improve his health and then have the heartworm treatment done.]

As
it was, the treatment nearly killed him. If he wasn't such a young
dog and so strong-willed, I don't think he would have survived.
The first day after being treated he coughed up blood and looked
just awful. We had to get him prednisolone to counter the massive
inflammation in his lungs and dull the coughing. I would not have
been shocked it he'd died that day. It frustrates me to no end that
the County would remove the decision as to when to start treating
the animal out of the hands of both the adopter (one footing the
bill) and veterinarian (one with the expertise). But, remember,
they have liability issues from which they have to be covered that,
obviously, are far more important than the health of some animal
and the money/time of the person who adopted them. And, you better
believe that I got a threatening phone call a week after I adopted
him following up as to whether we'd started the treatment.

I
named him Benedict (from Roger Zelazny's classic sci-fi series,

The Chronicles of Amber, Master of Arms, the most feared
by an entire pantheon of gods.). Of course, in time, as he healed,
his true personality came to the fore. And, when I drive up every
night to see him prancing goofily around on his line after a hard
day chasing bees and bugs, all I can think of is that great scene
in the movie Patton, where he introduces his dog as "William"
after William the Conqueror. I think to myself, "You're not
a Benedict… You're a Bennie!" He's a big, sensitive, strong-willed
survivor, somewhat insecure, a little needy, intensely loyal and
all male. Kinda like his pop.

I
wouldn't have him any other way.

But,
I also remember what I went through to get him, and the twists and
turns of a story that should have been as simple as, "Dog needs
good home. Please take him," and I get angry and sad all at
the same time. He looks at me in that undeserving way that dogs
do which reminds me of the saying "Please let me be half the
person my dog thinks I am."

I
get asked pretty often why it is that I take such a hard-line stance
on the use/abuse of state power, and all I do is point to Bennie.
He is a constant reminder of the state's indifference to life and
prosperity, to all that humans strive and sweat for. I used to say
that the state was good at one thing, "Killing People!"
I have now revised that to say, "Killing Everything."

Ta.

April
1, 2005

Thomas
Luongo [send him email]
is a professional chemist, amateur economist, and obstreperous Southerner-in-training
in North Florida. See
his website.

Before
looking at the Economics of poetry, in specific, and art in general,
you first have to define its purpose. The question to ask is, what
are the motivations of the artist? I see two answers to this question:
The artist creates to communicate or the artist creates for the
sake of creating. Personally, I see the second as both self-defeating
and self-delusional. This formed the basis of an argument I had
with my instructor, William Logan, at the time Head of the Creative
Writing Department at the University of Florida. He contended that
art could exist for its own sake and not be intended for communication.
I disagreed saying that for art to exist implies a desire to communicate
with someone, even a later, older version of yourself, otherwise
you would not spend time creating it. The essence of Mr. Logan’s
assertion is that the creation of this art has no purpose at all,
that the action is purposeless. The extension of this argument,
of course, is that the purity of one’s art exists at the point where
you can destroy it immediately after producing it. Even if this
were true, once produced the memory of the creative process will
communicate itself to you through time, thereby polluting your original
intent.

For
me this seems self-referential and, to be blunt, stupid.

Art is the by-product of human action and therefore can be treated
as an economic commodity, regardless of your intention. Art is,
hopefully, born of a passion for a particular moment, event, thing,
person, etc. The artist will then tend to seek out both the form(s)
(poetry, prose, film, clay, beer!) that best suits his talents and
ways to improve his ability to express those talents. This is his
contribution to the Division of Labor. In addition, like physicists
or engineers or architects (all arguably artists, by the way), the
size of the audience with which you can converse knowledgably is
inversely proportional to the level of expertise of the artist.
This is especially true of poets, whose potential audience beyond
pop music lyrics and greeting cards decreases sharply, as does the
commercial viability of the poetry. Because these are the boundaries
of the market into which they have devoted themselves and, as stated
above, their work is born of a passion for both the form itself
and the subjects of their work, it is easy to see why elitism born
of resentment for the consumer happens. This reaction is akin to
the guy who opens up a pork barbecue restaurant in the middle of
a Jewish neighborhood and blames his customers for not appreciating
his food.

The
natural refuge for the serious aspiring poet is then, of course,
academia. By the early 20th century in America most, if not all,
of the major poets that we still read today were academics, the
notable exception being Wallace Stevens who worked as an insurance
adjustor. Historically, the patronage system was a direct link between
performance and funding. If one did not entertain the Duke who was
footing the bill, one was kicked out. In America, before heavy governmental
subsidization of university level education became the norm, campuses
served as a proxy for the patronage system that preceded it. There
was, at some functional level, a direct link between the performance
of the artists in a college’s employ and the funding it received.
Once tax dollars were used to fund English departments the link
between the funding and the product being produced was broken, and
whatever lethargy or inefficiency evident in the system previously
was now free to flourish. The socialist problem of inadequate pricing
information for poetry was the norm rather than the exception.

All
of this is in service of an art form with limited appeal and commercial
viability.

There
are few outlets for work to be published. Very few, if any, poetry
magazines exist which are not outgrowths of university presses.
There are notable exceptions like Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker
or New Republic. Even they only publish a few pieces amidst the
rest of their content. The very people who stock the English departments
of universities also double as the editors of these journals as
well as being the instructors of aspiring poets attending said universities.
The entire situation is very insular and self-referential.

The
end result is predictable with these established poets acting like
the gatekeepers of the True Art, a classic economic barrier-to-entry
problem. They decide what is and what is not acceptable. The students
must fit that mold if they want to become part of the club. Court
politics and currying personal favor is given far more weight than
the quality of the work. Students waste energy vying for place in
the pack order as opposed to studying their craft. Individuality
is paid lip service, as are concepts like u2018finding your unique voice'
and u2018carving out your own niche,' but all within certain arbitrary
parameters. The student who wants to become a poet must submit to
this system or fail. This is not to say that there is necessarily
malicious intent at work. Quite the contrary, the people who are
in power more often than not think they are upholding the standards
of the form through their passion for it.

The
net effect to this inadvertent monopoly created by government appropriation
of capital is to produce fewer poets of ever decreasing quality
and relevance to the society of which their work is supposed to
be commenting on. Taking a step back, they themselves become a piece
of performance art showcasing the massive economic miscalculation
born of misguided good intentions.

Now,
that's all the bad news I can come up with. The good news is that
this is changing rapidly. Much of this system as described above
is an outgrowth of the cost of publishing the work. This is perfectly
analogous to the recording and film industries. All of these business
models are based on staggering production and distribution costs
being the prime determiner of profitability. Today, with the tools
available to animators, filmmakers, novelists, poets, musicians,
etc., those costs have dropped to nearly zero, or will within the
next five years. If you want to be a poet and have someone read
your work then start a blog, syndicate it, promote it, advertise
it and (most importantly) populate it with your best material. The
same thing goes for being a talk-show host, disk jockey, pundit,
comedian, comic strip writer, what have you.

Nothing
will ever be a substitute for quality. The first rule of blogging
is, "Be interesting or Be ignored," or, at least be prolific.
While I've been prolific in my blog,
I'm unsure as to whether I've been all that interesting considering
that my traffic counter works less than most State Employees. The
proof of your quality shows up everyday in our Inboxes.

Being
a good poet (which I am not) is not born of inspiration alone. There
is craft, and it is a learned craft. Writers should read each other's
work, comment on it and critique it. Removing the ossified gatekeepers
from the situation not only removes them from the equation it stops
the setting of aspiring writers against one another in internecine
squabbles for the instructor's favor.

Creative
Writing Departments are rapidly being replaced by internet writers'
groups. I have a friend who started out writing sci-fi fan pornography
who is now seriously working towards completing her first novel.
She has a group of like-minded friends who she trusts to give her
constructive criticism and who have invested themselves in nurturing
her raw writing talent (which she has) to its current potential
and she does the same for them in return. Her goal is the completion
of the novel itself, not the monetary reward thereof. While she
apprentices herself in this way she is building a fan-base by publishing
her other work. Eventually, she may or may not feel comfortable
with charging money for it. The choice is hers. Her readers may
decide to reward her with a little hint of immortality.

It
is not hard to see a time when it will be the norm that we will
stop by a budding artist's blog and see five songs he's written
and recorded on his computer offered up with a simple, "Hey,
I hope you like what I've done here."

Ta.

March
23, 2005

Thomas
Luongo [send him email]
is a professional chemist, amateur economist, and obstreperous Southerner-in-training
in North Florida. See
his website.