I sometimes hear that new buildings no longer are made with beautiful decoration because decoration is expensive, as if in the past somehow builders were richer, and could afford such things. Of course, it’s not about price, but taste. Civilization is a good, and you generally have to pay for goods. If you’re not willing to pay, then you aren’t interested.
I do not know which is more telling of American decline, the fact that China is willing to invest in bridges, while we are not, or that, rather than marvel and praise, we comfort ourselves with the notion that only a third are really being used, and all the building could lead to a financial crisis. The books in the dark ages were balanced. Indeed, there were none.
Once, we standardized the price, and let the airlines compete on the product. That was nice, but elitist, because the standardized price was high.
Now, we standardize nothing, except safety. Because the consumer notices only price, the airlines compete on headline fares, to fool the consumer, and debase the product to maximize profit.
The solution is to standardize the product, and let the airlines compete on price. Federally-mandated minimum standards for leg room, food service, customer service, and so on.
Death is a discrete phenomenon. It is a creature of units. Vegetation relies on sunlight for life. A plant can die, however, only because it is a unit of vegetation. When the amount of light falls from 3.481 to 2.377 on some scale, there is death only because each plant requires a minimum of 0.05 of light, or 0.3, or 0.4.
So, why? Why this discreteness?
Suppose that you are indifferent between two fountain pens and one pencil and one fountain pen and a hundred pencils. But at current prices you need more wealth to buy a fountain pen plus a hundred pencils than to buy two fountain pens and one pencil. Are you therefore poorer if you are forced to give up 99 pencils in exchange for a fountain pen?
Bigness is billions of human beings working together to make each others’ lives better, in perfect harmony and love. What’s wrong with that? I’m with Galbraith, not Brandeis.
The transatlantic left’s isolationism is a huge problem. And uncharacteristic. But that’s what happens when you make everything a matter of principle.
Biden: “They seek a return to a world where the strong impose their will through military might, corruption or criminality — while weaker neighbors fall in line.”
How can you be in politics that long and not think military might has something to do with our global influence? I mean, the only country that has taken out the government of another by arms in the last 20 years is us. It’s one thing to think our power is a force for good, but quite another to think we don’t exercise power. We want to run the world and enjoy the dignity of the meek. That’s not a good basis for negotiation with the rest of the world. No, no. I don’t think we can do business along those lines.
I am much concerned these days with self-determination as a bad thing in American foreign policy. By self-determination I mean the notion that we should support whatever groups wish to be free. The Kurds in Turkey. The Tibetans in China, and so on.
By a very fortunate coincidence, the more we promote freedom of this kind the weaker our enemies become; at an extreme the world entire consists of us plus an infinity of finely divided completely free groups. It is a commonplace that the larger the number of independent decisionmakers the harder it is for them to do anything together as a group. The collective action problem. It is for this reason that we don’t rely on victims to organize to solve environmental problems (we have the EPA instead) and for which we chose to form the United States and then killed hundreds of thousands of people in order to preserve them.
We tend to treat the promotion of self-determination as a selfless act of foreign policy, but it is not. Another name for it is the sowing of division, a very old tool of empire. A really selfless bit of policy would be for us not only not to encourage self-determination but instead affirmatively to promote the empires of others. But that would be folly, for we would simply be creating the wolves that one day would turn upon us!
But wait, the definition of a selfless act is one that is against interest. If we don’t feel threatened by the promotion of self-determination abroad, that means it cannot be self-less. In our bones we know the promotion of self-determination to be a power play, a mode of domination all the sweeter in that it allows us both to dominate and to carry the mantle of selflessness.
Nine are enough.
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