Middle thoughts on the limitations of the market

When I was in high school, I probably would have told you I was a libertarian, classical liberal, or capitalist. Recently a coworker told me that the reason libertarians don't get many votes is because people don't know what they are; when you explain libertarianism to people, everybody agrees with it.

I think libertarianism is perniciously idealistic. Free markets aren't enough to care for the poor, the disabled, unwanted children, the environment, or public education. It's easy to become disenchanted with governments and their often-destructive policies, but other policies really do promote the public welfare, and the stand-out countries in the world provide public services.

On the other hand, I recognize the power of the market mechanism--when properly applied. For instance, a cap-and-trade system can reduce pollutants or become an unstable, ineffectual financial game. Similarly, a good environment for business combined with universal education can quickly grow an economy.

When I stop and think, I'm also sympathetic to libertarian accusations that non-minimal-government types are wrongly imposing their values on other people. What right do I have to advocate policy against consumerism when it's what so many people choose? (I originally wrote "choose freely," but a choice is always dependent on context--including cultural and institutional necessities that one might hate, not to mention all the forces that guide and warp one's perceptions.)

Of course, I do have a case: Consumerism is causing and will continue to cause suffering and deaths because of its environmental impacts. If stuff was free or close to it, I'd love it. If the costs fell solely on the individuals choosing to participate in the transaction, I'd be fine with it. But instead they fall upon the entire world, especially the least empowered, the poor, the ill, the non-human, and future generations. This knowledge came before and drove my dislike of consumerism, which was only then joined by my own disgust with the shallowness, loneliness, and pointlessness of my American life.

I look forward to learning more about libertarian thinkers' ideas. I think they have a great deal to add to the public discussion and to future policy decisions (if only we could get past the damage conservatives do!). Economic efficiency is good in many contexts, personal liberty in even more.

I don't know anything about the philosophy, but I've gotten the idea that my beliefs tend toward "libertarian socialism". Unfortunately, another thing that I think the libertarians get right most of the time is the value of private property--people are more likely to protect the things they have a stake in or a sense of ownership over, spoil the things they don't.

I enjoy having no sweeping political/economic ideology that I can put a name to. There are certainly many political ideologies I ascribe to, including many I've never noticed, but I have no faith in one system or other that will bring us to utopia. Lack of such faith both strikes me as realistic and relieves me of the emotional friction experienced by someone possessed of answers the mainstream don't ask for.

Possible success paper?

One of the things I am not that great at that I would expect someone of my education level to be better at: Writing papers.

In the past few weeks I've found myself shutting down and acting oddly from the stress of having to write a 10-page paper using high-quality sources for Environmental Politics and Policy. I submitted a last-minute research proposal last Thursday and instantly felt relieved, but I was sick again today from the prospect of meeting with my professor. In addition to the fears I already had about completing the paper, I thought ze would be harsh on my initial effort. Instead, ze gave me a list of sources to look up following a possible focus for my paper: the legislative history of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and the innovative tradeable sulfur allowances.

This is quite possibly the most positive academic mentoring experience I have ever had. Which, retrospectively, is probably sad, but I'm stoked. Now I think this professor rocks.

I'm telling myself that I now know how to deal with the anxiety: Do the work. I'm so glad I have a direction to go in, and I'll probably be posting my progress and setbacks on this blog.

Crossed fingers. This could be a major breakthrough in my academic career.

Mental Growing Pangs

This summer, I took an intro to ethics class. The sole paper I wrote for that class was on assisted suicide. Since I had been suicidal from depression for many months in the prior year and since the belief that living probably isn't really worth it hadn't gone away (and is still with me in several forms), the arguments against suicide challenged me and opened my eyes.

The death of a college professor who wrote often about suicide, didn't seem depressed, but took zir own life at a certain age--"rational suicide" to avoid the toll of terminal illness--was attributed by some to "rigid thinking," the inability to see or take seriously alternative solutions to a problem or interpretations of reality.

Lately I've found myself metaphorically and literally blinking in confusion at life as my own patterns of "rigid thinking" temporarily subside. I would like to truly be open to new ideas.

I never saw myself as someone who was not able to think outside my preconceived notions before, but in retrospect I have found it very difficult to accept uncertainty or contradictory information or lines of thinking. In high school, I struggled with my own misogyny, and later I struggled to find a new identity after realizing that conservatism wasn't the white-knight ideology I had thought it was.

During my first year of college, I agonized endlessly over my choice to call my gender identity "androgyne"--even though I adopted that label almost as soon as I first considered transgendered people, assimilating new information and new conceptual structures felt threatening, like it invalidated me as a person to realize that other people might disagree with the basis for my self-labeling or choose to see gender in a different way.

After that year, I strangely dropped the label. I still call myself genderqueer occasionally, but I wanted to be seen as a cisgendered person. I didn't change my grooming habits to become gender normative, but I didn't and don't talk much about gender identity, and I also refer to myself in thought and word--honestly--as my biological gender. Not long ago I felt disoriented at the shape of my own body for a week or so, but that's rare.

I still think that, if I have a gender identity, it's definitely not plain cis, but how many standard deviations does that put me away from the average person? Less than one? More than two? I have no way of telling, and that's okay with me. There are cultural conceptual problems with gender, and I have no desire to stake out territory and argue about what's real, what's innate, what's imagined, what's culturally instilled, what's changeable.

Instead, I accept people's concepts of their own experience of gender as valid, and I reject generalizations about "men" or "women" or other gender-related categories. I'm not very vocal about it, but that's probably more related to self-confidence than anything else.

Rigid thinking relates complexly to self-confidence. On the one hand, it can lead to pigheaded brashness. On the other, awareness of that flaw gives me reason to doubt myself, and the rigid thinking itself makes it hard to learn and grow.

This largely explains my current impulse to write more. I think better when I write. I'm more likely to realize when my ideas hold no water, or to follow a promising line of thought further along. It helps me connect with my own past thoughts and experiences instead of floating in vague ideas about myself that don't turn out to be true upon further inspection.

Election Day-After

U.S. midterm elections were yesterday. I voted for the first time. In 2008 I wasn't old enough, but I lived on a college campus along with a lot of first-time voters feverish for Obama. Lacking their optimism, I was still willing to go along, happy to see an African-American elected president, happy to see McCain/Palin lose.

But the morning after the elections still sucked, with me wandering down to the student center to see the strained faces of students from California whose marriage rights had just been revoked by their own mean-spirited neighbors.

Today I checked the news to see another string of deaths in Iraq, legacy of America's failed politics, and a defeat for drug decriminalization, promising more wars and unrest in foreign countries, a triumph for private prisons and racial discrimination in the US.

Republicans won the House and significant seats across the country, a frustrating shift to the right to those of us far left of the current government. For me, even more frustrating is the reason: Dissatisfaction with the poor recovery from the economic crisis the current administration inherited.

I don't agree that economic growth is an important goal.

The economy is a means to several ends: Distribution of necessary resources, attainment of things people want, and giving people something to do, among and overlapping with others. Right now, I think the marginal utility of economic growth is significantly less than the marginal cost.

What I'm trying to say is, I'm an environmentalist.

Growth is (a) unsustainable, and (b) incredibly destructive. These two combined mean that the more we produce and consume now, the more we hurt later on. And the more non-humans and poor humans who aren't responsible for this mess also hurt. I find this morally repugnant.

Additionally, I don't think consumption makes us happier. Because we insist on hiring full-time workers for 40 hours a week or else relying on temps who don't get the pay or the benefits they need to live well, we need to keep producing more and more as production becomes less labor-intensive. Ergo we need to convince people they need to buy more and more even after their demand has been met. Is it any surprise that job recovery is slow when we don't actually need 40 hours of labor a week from everyone in the labor pool of this country?

We can grow quality of life without increasing worldwide production or transportation. We could start by setting up a true socialized health care system, but Americans didn't like the idea. We could decrease the work week, but Americans wouldn't like the idea. We could require international firms to comply with fair trade practices before we bought anything from them, but China wouldn't like the idea. We could start pricing carbon emissions, but, yeah, both Americans and free trade types would get into a tizzy about that.

So my beliefs are firmly in the counter-culture, while my life is not. I boycott the products of factory farms, I use a combination of biking, walking, public transit, and carpooling instead of owning a car, but even though those choices greatly reduce my individual environmental footprint, it doesn't seem like enough. And neither choice is primarily for the environment. I want to step away from frivolous consumerism, want to dig into a place and make long-term connections with the community. Yet I feel rootless and shallow in my relationships with place and my fellow humans, more so with the remnants of the environment that spring up between concrete slabs.

I don't know how to reach my goal. My life is inherently unstable at this point in time: I'm a student. I don't know what my employment opportunities will be after I graduate, where I'll live, whether I'll even then have the sense of security in an income able to support my desired lifestyle. But people do it, live in the same town for years or even decades, so perhaps I shouldn't worry so much. Some people even live in the same house, which is what I would want--although really I want to find a fertile plot of land and build on it an energy-efficient abode from recycled and natural materials. I want there to be rodents and birds and spiders and many species of native and cultivated plants.

But I also want a social life with people who accept my radical ideas, and are those two hopes compatible?

Capitalists would tell me that my environmental tendencies are a personal preference. And at this point in the world's mess, maybe they are. Personal changes in consumption aren't going to save us, and there are quite possibly too many people for everyone to live sustainably. More importantly, too many people are wrapped up in ideologies hostile or oblivious to prioritizing the environment. Fighting the environmental battle now seems like a lost cause overall, even though possible future victories are very important bandaids. They will determine which ecological and human communities collapse, how many, how badly, and how soon.

So the environment is, to my knowledge, the most important issue facing the world today. Its recovery is far, far more important than that of the economy.