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.