armchair pundit

I was a good Bryn Athyn boy once.

Many people reading this will have no idea what that means, but briefly, Bryn Athyn is a suburb of Philadelphia. It is (or was – I haven’t lived there in decades) very much a bubble, a pleasant Christian community centered around a church that is officially called The New Church but more colloquially the Swedenborgian Church. Many families in Bryn Athyn have lived there for generations.

I went to the Bryn Athyn Church Elementary School as it was called at the time, then the Bryn Athyn Boys School. I was valedictorian of my graduating class in eighth grade. I grew up singing in all kinds of Bryn Athyn choirs and ensembles, played trumpet in the Bryn Athyn orchestra, performed in dozens if not hundreds of church and community functions over the years. I believed in, and aspired to everything my neighbors would have associated with the label “good Bryn Athyn boy.”

Now, at 41, I almost never think about Bryn Athyn, or the church.

I moved away soon after graduating from high school, and I didn’t attend church at all for about two decades – really until I started dating a Catholic woman a few years ago. I’m married to her now, and for the last few years I’ve accompanied her to church on the high holidays and around certain special family occasions.

I’m certainly not the only person who grew up in the heart of a church community then left and never looked back, but I’ve been reflecting on my particular journey over the past few weeks, so I thought I’d write about it.

I didn’t shed my “New Churchness” immediately when I moved away. After Bryn Athyn, I lived in New York City, and my roommates were old Bryn Athyn friends. We didn’t attend church at that time, but it still felt very much a part of my DNA. I can’t speak for my roommates, but I think they felt the same way. I’m embarrassed to admit I was still a virgin, and my roommates were as well until they ultimately married each other. I was still very much intending to hold onto my virginity until… well, if not marriage then at least until I met the person I intended to marry.

At the same time, my horizon was rapidly broadening. Our circle of friends in New York was much wider – culturally speaking – than anything we could have cultivated in Bryn Athyn. I had gay friends for the first time in my life – that I was aware of anyway. I also had good friends who were Muslim, Jewish, Buddhists, atheists, pot smokers, political activists. Many of my friends were single and regularly set out to meet – and sleep with – people of the opposite sex (I know, amazing!). I knew a lot of couples who were living together with no plans to marry, as well as couples who were divorced and still living together, and friends who were in uncomfortable (to me) open relationships. I laugh now to remember how new it was and how radical it all seemed at the time.

What I started to learn very quickly though, was that “lifestyles” were not really defining principles per se, but merely details in the rich tapestries of my friends’ lives. Homosexuality wasn’t the single defining factor of my gay friends for example any more than the fact that they were white or Hispanic or parents or artists or cancer survivors. I didn’t choose my friends because of their lifestyles. They were my friends because I admired and enjoyed them for their compassion, kindness, integrity, intellect, creativity, curiosity, humor, humility.

Maybe I felt some initial dissonance when I first considered things about them I ostensibly disagreed with alongside their objectively good qualities, but I don’t remember experiencing any such feeling. I didn’t imagine those friendships as having asterisks. There’s no denying my friends engaged in things I was told were wrong – or even evil. I had been taught that even some of the things they did alone or only with other consenting adults – which affected no one else in any measurable way – were harmful to their souls, and indeed the collective “soul” of any society that permits such things.

At the time I didn’t feel any dissonance between my friends’ supposed badness and their obvious goodness, but I feel it now as I look back, and I can pinpoint this as the time I really began to reject many of the things I’d been taught growing up.

I’d been taught that my friends’ behaviors were things that were corroding them from the inside, like a spiritual cancer. I was just supposed to believe this, even in the face of their many virtues. My New Church friends would have expected me to put asterisks on those friendships or end them entirely, on the basis of behaviors that don’t hurt anyone. It’s qualities like compassion, kindness, humility and integrity that truly make a difference in the world, and it was obvious to me that these qualities are totally disconnected from a person’s sexual orientation, virginity status, opinions about marijuana and so on.

It’s funny to write this now because it has seemed so self-evident to me for so long, and most of my friends would have trouble seeing it any other way. But many of my old New Church friends would totally disagree with the way I see things now.

Anyway, from New York I moved to Phoenix and eventually to Tucson, where there was a thriving New Church community. I didn’t participate though. I never even found myself in the neighborhood of the church until more than a year after I arrived, when another Bryn Athyn friend moved to Tucson with his wife. They were active in the church, and I attended once or twice with them.

I didn’t avoid the church out of any kind of principle. I had simply drifted away from it, and it hardly seemed relevant to my life anymore.

My occasional contact with that church and others, however, often left a bad taste. The pastors in their sermons, and my church acquaintences in conversations, would pronounce sweeping judgments against people based on the lifestyles I’d come to see as benign details of my friends’ private lives. They would also speak with utter certainty about things I’d come to see as fuzzy and unknowable.

As an aside, it’s fair to say I distrust certainty by default. Certainty without evidence or logic is dangerous. Without evidence or logic, “certainty” is really just ideology, and ideology has led humanity to dark dark places.

Also, one group’s ideology can so easily collide with another group’s, which is what the landscape of religion feels like to me. Every religion claims to be the one true religion, which means that almost everyone is wrong by definition. On top of that, most religions would reject or damn a lot of people I truly admire, based on details that don’t remotely define them as people.

On the other hand, I recognize that church communities do a lot of great things. A coworker of mine, for example, is involved with a group through his church that sponsors schools for autistic children in poor countries – where such children are otherwise abused and neglected. I’m a big fan of churches as a vehicle for this kind of enterprise, and churches are arguably the most effective possbile means of mobilizing people toward good deeds.

Of course, churches have historically engaged in these kinds of pursuits partly as a way to spread themselves, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I imagine much of this is motivated by a belief in their own righteousness and a genuine desire to “save” people who would otherwise go to hell. On the other hand, I imagine there is also a certain amount of pure profit motive there too.

My church was somewhat different in the sense that it didn’t work very hard to spread itself. We were taught that divine providence was at work everywhere, and that the “church” is really an internal thing within every individual. We were taught, of course, that our church alone held the whole story – that it was the one true religion – but also that it wasn’t necessary to know or even believe the whole story or belong to our church to be saved.

This is the essence of my response when religious people ask, “what if you’re wrong?” By this they mean, what if you – an atheist – are wrong in thinking that god does not exist. Most of these people think that people like me are bound for hell, but I believe that if I’m wrong and there is a god, then god is like the one I learned about in my church. This god doesn’t require me to belong to any particular church or subscribe to a particular set of beliefs; this god only requires that I do my best to act with compassion, kindness, integrity, humility…

These days I go to church a few times a year, and mostly it affirms my disinterest in the whole thing, for the reasons I’ve already stated, and also for its unrelenting mediocrity. Pastors and priests have large captive audiences week after week, and so often they drone through academic dissections of doctrine or trot out tired clichés. I don’t know which is worse, but it irks me to see such wasted opportunities.

In my church, there was always a lot of abstract discussion about what we called “correspondences” in the bible. References to “water” for example were really talking about “truth,” but it was the rare sermon that succeeded in connecting this abstract notion of “truth” to the real challenges and questions in our daily lives. What does “truth” really mean? What are some concrete examples? It’s sad how few ministers and priests are capable of telling a compelling story and making it stick.

I live in San Francisco now, and I’m as solid in my non-belief as ever. My experience continues to confirm that religion doesn’t have any kind of monopoly on goodness or principled living (and non-belief has no correlation to the contrary). Many of my non-religious friends work more tirelessly on behalf of their fellow man than anyone I knew growing up in my church community. And many people in our culture – religious and otherwise – go to work every day knowing on some level that their employers are complicit in various kinds of abuses. In short, goodness and badness in all of us.

My Christian past feels like a dream of a former life. A mostly happy dream that opened my mind in certain ways (while keeping it closed in others). I’ve awakened from that dream, and I’ll never belong to a church again. Luckily my Catholic wife is OK with that. I’m happy in my non-belief, but I’m no less good for not believing.

Things are ugly right now.

After the healthcare bill passed, we all heard how a few so-called tea baggers hurled racial slurs and other insults at Democratic lawmakers, broke windows of party offices and engaged in other such foolery.

Yesterday, I saw Mitt Romney’s new book on display in Borders. It’s called “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness” – an obvious swipe at Obama liberals for acting as if the United States is something short of infallible.

Glenn Beck absurdly compares progressives to Hitler and Stalin, and warns us that universal healthcare will take us down a slippery slope to tyranny.

On the other side, countless voices on the left dismiss the tea baggers entirely as the wingnut fringe and draw as much attention as they can to the most outrageous, classless antics of its most extreme members.

When Bush was president, the left portrayed him as an idiot, a manchild, a cowboy. Cheney was Darth Vader. They and their cohorts were bent on destroying everything America stands for. The Bush Administration and their supporters in turn portrayed the left as unpatriotic, soft, weak, elitist.

I admit I’m pretty squarely on one side of this ideological divide, but I’m tired of all of it.

For a decade now, we’ve all been fooled and misled into hating each other. Kids in their teens and twenties must think America has always been this divided, this polarized, and that’s sad.

The saddest thing is how it distracts us from all the things we have in common.

The tea-baggers are mad at the government, whom they perceive has been bought by Wall Street. The anger over the healthcare bill is about money (unemployment, the deficit), and it can be seen as a proxy for their anger at Wall Street – whose robber barons broke the economy, stole from the American people and then walked away richer than before. But guess what? Progressives are mad at Wall Street too. So why are we attacking each other? Wall Street must love watching us fight amongst ourselves. They could not have engineered a situation that better enables them to keep on doing what they’re doing to us – or maybe that’s exactly what’s going on. Either way, I really don’t want to let them win.

As much as it pains me not to argue with climate change deniers, Sarah Palin lovers and Fox News watchers, I hereby call for a truce. We will continue to disagree about global warming, same-sex marriage, Sarah Palin, President Obama and a host of other things. One side will make a little headway, then the other. What little progress is made by either side will be so full of compromises that it won’t satisfy anyone.

Conservatives don’t think we should all pay hundreds of billions of dollars for universal healthcare. Liberals don’t want to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to wage war in Iraq. How about we call it even now and agree that we’ve all been screwed.

Let’s not let our disagreements stop us from making real progress in the areas where we agree. Like Wall Street. Congress is finally getting ready to debate legislation to regulate the financial industry. Let’s pay attention to this, and let’s refuse to allow the political parties, the media pundits and the lobbyists pit us against each other. Let’s not blindly listen to supposed experts whose impassioned arguments invent an enemy – a “them” – that isn’t Wall Street itself. Let’s think critically for ourselves, and give each other credit for doing the same, instead of shoving each other into knee-jerk categories like “tea-baggers” and “progressives”. Let’s assume good intentions in our fellow Americans.

And after we’re done with Wall Street, there are a lot of other things we agree on. Chew on these statistics:

A recent poll found that 60% of Americans feel that improving treatment of women in other countries is “very important” and that 30% feel it’s “somewhat important.” Despite all our other differences, that’s 90% of Americans who agree on something. That’s huge. And it’s something we actually have the power to change.

Here’s another example… I was working in Southeast Asia in 2004 when the tsunami devastated the region. Despite our differences, Americans stepped up and donated 1.2 billion dollars to tsunami relief. 30% of American households contributed to the cause – across all the ideological lines that seem important enough to divide us so much of the time.

These are just a couple of random examples, but the point is let’s ignore rhetoric that would turn us against each other. Let’s be careful about how we listen to the Karl Roves and Glenn Becks on the right, and the Bill Mahers, Olbermans and Moveon.orgs on the left. Better yet, let’s take a break altogether from listening to people who would persuade “us” to oppose “them.”

Let’s not get so sidetracked by the things that divide us that we become unable to make progress in the areas where we share common ground.

I feel like the media constantly bombards us with two completely opposite visions of the future:

In future #1 I can talk to my home appliances and have virtual sex with supermodels while my hydrogen-powered biodegradable car drives me to work.

In future #2 I’m learning to make fire and trying to defend my survival garden against roving bands of marauders.

I don’t know which one we’re headed for, but I’m stockpiling canned food.

When future archaeologists unearth the cities of what was once the great empire called America, and they sift through the remains of our civilization looking for the causes of our collapse, this commercial will tell them all they need to know…

We had lots of opportunities to save ourselves, but we preferred to party.

“[The writer] does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.” – J.G. Ballard

I’ve been on a kind of media fast since around Christmas of last year. It started accidentally; I was so busy with holiday madness and projects at work that I didn’t check in to Twitter or Facebook for about a week. Nor did I watch the Daily Show, listen to NPR, peruse my staple of blogs.

I didn’t miss it at all.

In fact, after the holidays passed and I had some free time again, I found I’d completely lost my appetite for commentary on healthcare, tea baggers, Glenn Beck, Copenhagen, the economy, the iPhone, Android, social media, Web 2.0 and pretty much everything else. I found I could only tolerate maybe an hour of TV at most per day.

Instead, I read a couple of books. Fiction. I also spent a lot of time just sitting and… not even thinking really, just sensing. Pretty soon I started to feel a familiar tingle somewhere deep in my consciousness, like an arm waking up after you’ve slept on it wrong. I began to see the hidden layers of life again.

A few times since I started this fast, I’ve tried to dip myself back into the stream of information I once bathed in, but all the things I spent so much time consuming over the last few years feel like junk food all of a sudden. Some of it was obviously junk the whole time, but a lot of it seemed kind of important once.

When you read a novel, a short story, a personal essay, a historical narrative or even a good anecdote, your mind – your imagination – has to create pictures, sounds, smells, textures. This doesn’t happen when Jon Stewart cleverly lampoons Glenn Beck’s latest ravings. Nor does it happen when you read someone’s pithy little insight about Twitter, on Twitter. Nor when you read someone’s passionate indictment of Apple’s iPhone app approval process – or the thread of vitriolic comments below it.

And then there’s television. So much TV these days leaves nothing for your mind to fill in. The dramas that unfold on Reality TV shows – by definition – were never imagined in the true sense of the word. Other shows assault us with useless information. Still others insult us by over-explaining everything and neatly wrapping up crimes, arrests and entire trials in the space of an hour.

We used to be a storytelling species. We took turns talking and listening, and when we listened, our imaginations had to do some real work. Now there is either no work for your imagination to do at all (in pithy tweets or long rants about the iPhone), or the work is done for us by professionals, via scripts (or not), actors (or not), cameras and editors.

I will admit there is also some excellent TV happening these days. Shows that rival the best written stories. I’m thinking of The Wire, Mad Men, Deadwood and even seemingly lightweight shows like 30 Rock and The Office. All of these have unfolded at a pace that has allowed the characters to develop complex inner lives that we as viewers have to piece together in our own minds. Imagination again.

Anyway, none of this is to say there’s not a place in our lives for junk information and Reality TV, and I’m not sure how long this fast of mine will last; already It’s more like a diet than a fast, which will be evident if you discover this post on Twitter of Facebook.

I’m only saying that as a species, we’ve never been so connected to the outside world as we are now. But neither, perhaps, have we been less connected to ourselves.

Americans, it’s well known, aren’t interested in soccer. Americans prefer the other football. We don’t like hockey either, which isn’t surprising, since it’s a lot like soccer played on skates. It’s hard to find definitive rankings of U.S. sports by popularity, but every source I’ve found lists the top three as:

1. Football
2. Baseball
3. Basketball

Hockey is always fourth or fifth, or even lower, and soccer barely makes the list. UFC, NASCAR and WWE (which isn’t even a sport) are way more popular.

Soccer, of course, is the world’s most popular sport, so this yet another way the U.S. is an outlier on this earth. But why is it so?

Here’s a theory:

Soccer and hockey go for long stretches where there’s no clear winner. You see lots of players running (or skating) around in a beautiful exhibition of athleticism, but the scoreboard is the only thing that tells you what team is on top.

This is not the case with football, baseball and basketball.

Football is split up into four downs and ten yard spans. The team with the ball gets four chances to go ten yards. The game completely stops between each down. A down lasts for maybe five to ten seconds, and during those few seconds the team with the ball either moves forward or they get pushed back. If they don’t move at least ten yards forward in four tries (really, three), they have to give the ball to the other team.

So for every down – and every set of four downs – there’s a clear winner and loser. That’s a winner every five to ten seconds.

Baseball is even more atomic. Baseball is broken down into pitches, outs and innings. Every pitch results in a ball, strike, foul, hit or out. In other words, every pitch has a winner and a loser. Every inning too.

In basketball, it’s possessions. You get the idea.

Americans like things we can win, and the more opportunities there are to win, the more we like it. If a sporting event is a metaphor for life, then Americans don’t want to wait til the end to know whether they won or not. We want the opportunity to win over and over again; we want another shot after losing a down, or a pitch or a possession.

This is how we do everything in America. Look at our financial industry or our healthcare system. We seem to prefer a healthcare system with clear winners and losers, over one where everyone is protected. We prefer to an arguably corrupt financial system that we can game, over one that would guarantee prosperity for all. Not only do we like to win, we like there to be losers.

The chance to win once every few seconds  is more enticing than the idea of running around for 90 minutes having fun.

[image above via juiceanalytics.com]

Yes old friend, I’m talking to you. You with the high-paying office job, the fine house in the suburbs, the lovely wife and the precocious daughter who’s just about to start first grade at a fancy private school – a fancy private school incidentally that has not ceased to exist despite the fact that free public education exists too (some of it very good even). But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I have come into possession of something you might be interested in. It’s a one-way ticket to a place called Alternate America. An America where the federal government is small, minuscule. Where it stays out of the way and doesn’t meddle in the business of business. Where markets and men are free. It has always been this way in Alternate America. Oh, yes, and this ticket is good for your whole family.

Whoa, hold on there friend. I’ll give it to you in a minute. Let me read you some fine print first. There are some warnings and disclaimers here… I know I know, lawyers. Always covering somebody’s ass. But bear with me.

Here’s some stuff about food:

In Alternate America, there are no ingredients on many food labels. There’s no nutrition information either, because the FDA doesn’t exist. Liberals created the FDA in 1906, during what has come to be called the “Progressive Era.” Scary! On the other hand, some food labels have more nutrition information than you could ever want. There are breakfast cereals that guarantee a boost in IQ for example, and potato chips that prevent certain cancers. And there are some magical drugs. Something called “thalidomide” for example is a wonder cure for insomnia, coughs, colds and headaches. At least that’s what the advertisements say. Anyway, if you decide to take this ticket to Alternate America, you should definitely buy some of that IQ-boosting cereal for your little girl, to help her do well in school! I’m sure it’s safe.

You might want to be careful about fruits and vegetables. There’s no EPA to set pesticide residue limits or regulate the chemicals that can be used for food packaging. But all plastics are basically the same, right? I doubt there’s any chance something bad could leech out of the container into your daughter’s apple juice. And the companies that make those pesticides say there’s nothing to worry about.

Oh… says here that some people have been claiming their kids have been getting sick a lot – stomachaches, headaches, fatigue – ever since they bought some toys made in China. Just something to keep in mind. Maybe you could buy some kind of lead-testing kit, just to be safe, since no one else will be testing the toys. Some companies say their toys are 100% lead-free. Just buy those “lead-free” toys. You believe em, right? One more thing… Stay away from the tap water. Definitely.

Hmm… there’s a lot more here about food and drugs, but let me skim ahead…

Oh, liberals were responsible for that whole women’s suffrage thing, so your wife isn’t eligible to vote. But you probably don’t care about that, because you don’t like the government anyway.

Let’s see, what else…?

If you lose your job, you’re kind of screwed. There’s no unemployment insurance. More big government stuff created by liberals. At least you don’t have to pay to help other people who lose their jobs.

Medicare and Social Security don’t exist, so make sure you save your money wisely. Hopefully you’ll always have that high-paying office job, and hopefully you won’t hit any unexpected financial speed bumps in the next 25-30 years. I’ll cross my fingers for you. Some of your friends probably won’t be so lucky, but screw em.

Travel in Alternate America is a little dicey. There are no interstate highways. The roads in general are really bad, but they do the job I guess. No one really owns them, and no one has found a good way to make money by building and maintaining them. Luckily you’ll be able to afford a car with seatbelts. The nicer cars have em. Hopefully you’ll never have an accident, because most drivers don’t have any kind of insurance. Why would you pay for insurance if you don’t have to? There aren’t a lot of really beautiful things to see in Alternate America anyway. There’s no Grand Canyon for example, because the government didn’t want to get in the way of all the companies who wanted to build dams along the Colorado River.

Oh, I should also warn you that airplanes are pretty scary. Regular maintenance costs a lot of money, so the airlines in Alternate America try to milk everything they can out of the parts they have before replacing them.

I’ll skip ahead here… there have got to be some things you’ll really like about Alternate America…

Oh, here’s one… No progressive taxation! Of course, that means Alternate America was not able to wage WWII, build the atomic bomb, put a man on the moon or win the Cold War, since most of the revenue in regular America comes from progressive taxation. And you like all that awesome war stuff, right? Go America!

No progressive taxation also means there’s no Internet in Alternate America, because it cost the Department of Defense (in regular America) a lot of money to build.

Well, those are some of the highlights of the fine print. Still want that ticket?

If Sarah Palin falls in the forest and the media ignores her, does it make a sound?

I shouldn’t have to wish for Sarah Palin to go away. After all, what is Sarah Palin but the losing candidate for vice-president in an election that happened 10 months ago, and the former governor of a state most of us never think about (sorry Alaska)? If the winner of the vice presidency is awarded with “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived” (in the immortal words of John Adams), then what does the loser get?

As far as I can tell, Sarah Palin generated a lot of media buzz last summer because she was a woman that no one had ever heard of, and the GOP picked her to be John McCain’s running mate. Pure shock value basically. In a sensible world, the buzz would have quickly dwindled to the sub-audible hum that most veep candidates garner. Except that it turned out she was kind of a dimwit. OK, so that was a bit newsworthy, and Palin was good for a few ammusing “joe six packs” and “you betchas.”

But then it really should have been over.

When McCain lost the election, and she went back to Alaska, that should have been the last we heard from or about her – barring a sex scandal or some kind of meltdown. Like suddenly quitting her job.

But this is the governor of Alaska we’re talking about, and we only care about her because she ran for vice president. When a former veep candidate resigns from office in the least-populous state, it warrants a few paragraphs of coverage for a day or two.

So who’s still talking about Sarah Palin? I don’t read the conservative press, but the New York Times has run several Op-Ed pieces in the last few days and another front-page story yesterday. The Huffington Post has posted probably 50 Palin stories in the last week. The Daily Dish, which usually has better things to talk about, has been beating the dead horse too.

Can y’all stop now please?

It’s been a while since I posted here, and I’m introducing a new category: Elimination Dance.

Instructions: An elimination dance begins with a crowded dance floor.  At a signal, the band stops playing and the announcer reads an elimination, say, “Any lover who has gone into a flower shop on Valentine’s Day and asked for clitoris when he meant clematis.” Any dancer answering this description must sit down, and his partner is also disqualified. The process continues (e.g. “Any person who has burst into tears at the Liquor Control Board”) until a single couple remains.

(from the description of Michael Ondaatje’s book by the same title)

This new category, in other words, is for all the things I wish would go away. My first is small-government fanatics. For some reason I’ve allowed myself to rant in the comments of a couple friends’ blogs this week in response to passionate small-government fanaticism and comments I somewhat unfairly deemed as such.

The rest of this post is a lightly-edited re-post of a comment I left on my friend Jay’s blog…

Small-government fanatics seem to believe we are a prosperous and successful country in spite of our government – rather than because of it, whereas I believe the truth is very much both.

We are beneficiaries of two centuries of government protection and support – much of which we basically seem to take for granted at this point, and much of which few people would really want to go back and undo. Of course there have been missteps too, but the small-government libertarian crowd usually fails to acknowledge the ways in which we have benefited.

One core principle of small-government fanatics is free markets, or as my friend Jay unambiguously put it: “The free market is one of the greatest gifts to mankind in all of our history.”

I think, however, that total market freedom almost inevitably leads to “tragedy of the commons” scenarios. People and businesses will pursue their own desires even to the detriment of everyone’s needs. They pursue immediate individual gains that risk (and often cause) generalized future catastrophe.

If government does not serve to protect the commons from the individual, then what – or who – will?

Before the FDA required drug companies to prove their products were not dangerous prior to putting them on the market, there were numerous incidents of contamination – sometimes maiming or killing thousands (thalidomide, diethylene glycol). What’s the free-market alternative to this? The free-market response might be to put a company out of business because one of their products killed a few thousand people, but um… the company KILLED people. That was the free-market drug industry before the FDA.

What about a more straightforward tragedy of the commons? I have a hard time envisioning a free-market solution to protecting fisheries from individual companies competing against each other to pull in the biggest catches. The companies know when they are pushing fisheries toward collapse, but they also know that if they hold back, then others will just step in and out-fish them. What’s the free-market answer?

This is similar in nature to what happened in our financial markets. Smart people knew they were taking insane risks that were not sustainable, in order to reap huge short-term gains. But they also knew that if they didn’t do it, plenty of other people would out-gain them in the short term, and they would be fired.

For whatever reason, it’s easier for me to stomach this problem with the financial markets (as part of the cost of doing business – even if it hurts a lot of innocent bystanders), than with things like forests and fisheries. Damage done to forests and fisheries is longer-lasting.

I have a hard time believing our country’s major parks and wilderness areas would ever have been created without our government deciding to do so (imagine how many more dams could have been built along the Colorado River and how many more trees harvested in Appalachia if companies were free to do so). I’m personally happier to have the parks and wildernesses.

Scientists have been sounding alarms about atmospheric carbon and climate change for five decades, warning us about a point-of-no-return. We probably needed to start doing things differently 10 years ago to avoid the point-of-no-return, but what free market incentive existed to do so? None, and that’s why we’re in the predicament we’re in.

If you believe there are no situations when the collective good is more important than individual gains, then my argument is lost on you. I don’t believe this. And it’s hard to imagine who would aim us toward the collective good if the government was not trying to do so.

It’s fair to argue that the government does not operate effectively or efficiently enough, but I think the answer is to improve it, not to eviscerate it.

I think it’s good and necessary to debate each threshold of government intervention (currently, healthcare), but I think we need to acknowledge how much existing government protection and support we take for granted and would not want to give up.