WATER & LIFE 1 The Bureaucrat in Your Shower

January 10, 2006

The Department of Energy may soon be paying a visit to a certain shower head manufacturer in Arizona. The company is Zoe Industries Manufacturing. It runs Showerbuddy.com, a popular site that sells amazing equipment for bathrooms.

Consumers love the company but one man doesn’t. He is Al Dietemann, head of conservation for the Seattle Water Board. Al ordered some products and sent them to BR Laboratories in Hungtington, California, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. And sure enough, Bureaucrat Al gained enough data to report Zoe to the feds, accusing Zoe of “blatant violations of environmental protection laws.” Now the heat is on.

What’s the big deal? What critical matter of American public life is at stake? It’s all about water flow and gallons per minute.

You might have some vague memory from childhood, and perhaps it returns when visiting someone who lives in an old home. You turn on the shower and the water washes over your whole self as if you are standing under a warm-spring waterfall. It is generous and therapeutic. The spray is heavy and hard, enough even to work muscle cramps out of your back, enough to wash the conditioner out of your hair, enough to leave you feeling wholly renewed—enough to get you completely clean.

Somehow, these days, it seems nearly impossible to recreate this in your new home. You go to the hardware store to find dozens and dozens of choices of shower heads. They have 3, 5, 7, even 9 settings, from spray to massage to rainfall. Some have long necks. Some you can hold in your hand. Some are huge like the lid to a pot and promise buckets of rainfall. The options seem endless.

But you buy and buy, and in the end, they disappoint. It’s just water, and it never seems like enough.

Why? As with most things in life that fall short of their promise, the government is involved. There are local regulations. Here is one example of a government regulation on the matter, from the Santa Cruz City Water Conservation Office: “If you purchased and installed a new showerhead in the last ten years, it will be a 2.5 gpm [gallons-per-minute] model, since all showerheads sold in California were low consumption models beginning in 1992.”

You mean they regulate how much my shower sprays? Yes indeed they do. Government believes that it has an interest in your shower? Yes it does.

And it is not just crazy California. The Federal Energy Policy Act of 1992 mandates that “all faucet fixtures manufactured in the United States restrict maximum water flow at or below 2.5 gallons per minute (gpm) at 80 pounds per square inch (psi) of water pressure or 2.2 gpm at 60 psi.”

Or as the Department of Energy itself declares to all consumers and manufacturers: “Federal regulations mandate that new showerhead flow rates can’t exceed more than 2.5 gallons per minute (gpm) at a water pressure of 80 pounds per square inch (psi).”

As with all regulations, the restriction on how much water can pour over you at once while standing in a shower is ultimately enforced at the point of a gun.

Manufacturers must adhere to these regulations under penalty of law, and to be on the safe side, and adjust for high-water-pressure systems, they typically undershoot. If you try your showers right now, you will probably find that they dispense water at 2 gallons per minute or even less. Together with other regulations concerning water pressure, your shower could fall to as low as 1.5 gallons per minute!

This creates a rather serious problem for nearly everyone in the country. America is the land of the shower. Popular lore holds that Americans are some of the most showered people in the world, and this stands in contrast to, well, to lands of the less showered. (Not naming any names!)

As for Zoe Industries, they set out to address this strange problem that has made our showers less functional than they ought to be.

They are not water anarchists; we aren’t talking about shower-reg secessionists here. But the company did insightfully observe that the restriction applies on a per-shower-head basis.

So Zoe sells full units that have three full heads per shower! What a solution—truly in the spirit of American enterprise in the best sense. These remarkable units are both brilliant and beautiful, and they comply with the letter of the law. The one that annoyed Bureaucrat Al is the Nautilus II Chrome—and what a piece of work it is!

If it turns out that the feds can’t prove him in violation, Congress might have to go back to work. The regs might have to be changed to specify one head per shower space.

But then what can the government do about the length of showers? After all, there is no real way to regulate how much water we use (and pay for). Maybe the shower heads have to have timers on them. And maybe the feds need to put up little monitors in our showers to make sure that we have stopped and started them.

And what happens to shower offenders? One can see federal S.W.A.T. Teams screeching up to your house, black-clad men pouring out, securing the perimeter, and shouting through a bull horn: “Drop the soap and come out of the shower with your hands up!”

Most manufacturers adhere to the regulations. But savvy consumers know how to get around the problem.

Warning: The following section is for information purposes only; I am not advocating egregious violations of federal law as some trouble-making rebel might. Do not endanger your status as a law-abiding citizen who takes wimpy showers.

Many people now hack their showers—or customize them, if you prefer. You can take your shower head down, pull the washer out with a screwdriver, and remove the offending intrusion that is restricting water flow. It can be a tiny second washer or it can be a hard plastic piece. Just pop it out and replace the washer. Sometimes it is necessary to trim it out using a pen knife or even a drill.

Using such strategies, you can increase your water flow from 2 gallons per minute to 3 and even 4 gallons per minute. You can easily clock this using a stopwatch and a milk carton.

Using this method (just as an experiment for the sake of journalism—again, do not try this at home) I was easily able to expand my gallons per minute on each shower in my house to an average of 3.4 gpm, thereby recreating that childhood sense of gushes of water pouring down.

Now, that doesn’t compare to the amazing 12.7 gallons per minute that BR Labs claims they were able to clock with the Nautilus II (wow wow wow!) but it still exceeds federal regulations.

Why would anyone want to do this? According to the head of Zoe Industries, people somehow have the sense that I described above. “Generally, they don’t like the water savers,” he says, “the flow of water is too weak and they feel as though they haven’t gotten a shower.”

The whole craziness here recalls the similar frenzy about toilet tank size that resulted from the same act of Congress. Eventually manufacturers figured out ways to make the toilets flush, but, even today, you never want a plunger to be too far from the toilet. Thus has it spawned an entire industry of designer plungers!

You might say that water needs to be conserved. Yes, and so does every other scarce good. The peaceful way to do this is through the price system. But because municipal water systems have created artificial shortages, other means become necessary. One regulation piles on top of another, and the next thing you know, you have shower commissars telling you what you can or cannot do in the most private spaces.

Has central planning ever been more ridiculous, intrusive, and self-defeating? The U.S. Geological Survey of the U.S. government reports that all domestic water use (“Common indoor uses include drinking, preparing food, bathing, washing clothes and dishes, and flushing toilets; the major outdoor uses are watering lawns and gardens”) constitute less than one percent of the total water use. Whether our showers spray a lot or a little makes no notable difference at all. If we want pay slightly more to be clean and happy, we are so entitled.

If Zoe Industries is bankrupted by federal fines, who will stand up for our rights to take showers our own way and make our own judgments about how much water to use?

2

The Turn of the Screw

February 20, 2004

You may have had a sense lately that something is just not right in your domestic life, not calamitously bad but just bad enough to be annoying on a daily basis and in seemingly unpredictable ways.

You are not alone. In fact, a huge variety of personal and social problems trace to a single source.

First an inventory to establish what I mean:

• You have the vague sense that your bed linens are not so much comforting you as hemming you in, restricting you and just not breathing as they should;

• To clean your bathtub and kitchen sink requires an inordinate amount of cleanser and bleach;

• Whereas you remember showers that once refreshed you, they now leave you only feeling wet;

• It should be pleasure to put on a bright white crisp undershirt but instead it seems rather routine, dull, even uneventful;

• The mop has a dusky smell of an old rag and you keep having to replace it to get rid of the reappearing and never disappearing stink;

• Your dinner tonight reminds you of your dinner last night and that night before, and the flavors seem to be piling up into one big haze.

These are just six of the many dozens of typical symptoms of one of the most common household problems in American today. What is that problem? The simplicity of the answer might shock you: your water heater is set at too low a temperature.

Most people don’t want to think about their water heaters. It is a subject we would rather avoid. It just sort of sits there like a steel totem pole in a dusty closet that is otherwise not used for much because there is not room for much else. The heater itself seems intimidating, plastered with strange insulating devices and warning stickers. It is something to be touched only by specialists. We even fear cleaning behind it, worrying that we will be zapped or scorched.

Sure, we know people who have had to “replace their water heaters” because their “water heater went out,” but because this has never happened to us, we don’t worry about it. Besides, what if it turns out that the water heater has some sort of scary blue flame and a clicking starter or something? Better to leave it alone so that it doesn’t become volcanic.

All of these impulses are wrong. The water heater can be your friend. It can be your greatest friend in your struggle to create and maintain a happy domestic environment. It wants to be useful. There is nothing to be frightened of. There are no blue flames (they are mostly electric now.) A water heater is made to heat and hold water. It is begging you to do something that will change your life from grey to bright white: turn up the temperature!

Chances are that your water temperature is set at 120 degrees. This is the preferred temperature of the establishment. Water heaters are shipped this way and installed this way. The regulations on new home construction mandate it to be this way. Who thinks to change it?

But 120 degrees? Come on. By the time the water leaves the heater and travels through the pipes and hits the air before landing whenever it is supposed to land, chances are that it will fall to 118 degrees. In the dead of Winter, with pipes running under the house, it can be even lower.

Think about this: 118 degrees is the temperature at which yeast thrives. It is the temperature for proofing. What does that tell you? It tells you that things can grow at 118 degrees.

In other words, this is too cool! To know what 118 degrees feels like, imagine a bowl of water that you stick your hand in. It is warm, even quite warm, but you don’t really have the drive to pull your hand out to keep yourself safe. You can adjust. You know what? Everything adjusts to 118 degrees: germs, viruses, bacteria, dirt, smudge, sludge, stink, dust, and every other damnable thing in the world. All of this lives, even thrives, at 118 degrees.

Revelation 3:16 has it right: “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.”

Who came up with the idea that the standard temperature should be 120 degrees? The usual bunch: governments that want to impose a variety of deprivations on you, anti-energy people who think the less technological consumption the better, environmentalists who want to stamp out all things bright and beautiful, litigious lawyers who have intimidated heater makers, and safety freaks of all sorts. A quick search shows all.

We know these people. They are the people who say we should eat our own garbage, invite bats to live in our attics, and refrain from killing mosquitoes in the marsh. They are the ones who gave us toilets that don’t flush and shower heads that don’t spray. They seem to think we should all go around dirty and dissatisfied, and that anything resembling clean, neat, and, well, civilized has to be stamped out.

These people are always worrying about the risks of life, but what about the health risks of living in squalor of their creation?

Defy them all in one fell swoop! Turn your temperature up to 130 degrees. How hot is this? Contrary to the claims, it will not scald you. Imagine again a bowl full of water. Put your hand into this temperature and you will say: “Yikes!” or “Ouch!” or “Yeow!” and pull it right out and shake your hand in the air. However, it leaves nothing red, no burns, nothing awful. It is just what used to be called hot water before the lukewarm crowd changed everything.

How does yeast respond to 130 degrees? It dies. Bread bakers know this. You know what else dies? All the icky things mentioned above. They all die mercifully quick deaths at this temperature. Clean clothes! Clean sinks! Satisfyingly hot showers! Comfortable sheets! Clean-smelling mops! Plates that come out of the dish washer without dinner build-up on them! All of this awaits your act of defiance.

A brief note on shoes. Have you ever bought a new pair because your old ones…stank? Of course they did. Your socks are not getting clean. They infect your shoes. Oh sure, try to keep it at bay with Dr. Scholl’s. It won’t work. A shoe stink sticks forever. You thought you had a physical disability, and embarrassing foot odor problem. Nope. It’s your hot water heater.

How to fix all this? It will take less than a minute. If your temperature dial is in the open, good for you. Turn it to 130 degrees or higher. There is a reason these tanks go up to 170 degrees. I read a manual for a dishwasher that says it wants water of 145 degrees. When I was in the dish-washing business, you had to use heavy rubber gloves just to get near water. So be it.

If your dial is covered, ignore all stickers and scary warnings about scalded babies. Take off the steel plate that covers up the setting. Remove the Styrofoam. There you will find a tiny little dial. Use a dime or a screwdriver and give the dial a teeny tiny little turn over to 130 degrees. The benefits will start within hours. Within a day, you will experience the greatest increase in your standard of living since your gas grill and automated sprinkler system.

Your new life begins with a comfortable and happy sleep, a blasting hot and refreshing shower, a crisp T-shirt, and clean socks, followed by breakfast on a plate so clean it squeaks. Even cleaning up breakfast will be pure pleasure: the sink gleams, the floor has never been cleaner, and your mop will end up as fresh as the day you bought it.

Indeed, with a water heater set at 130 degrees, all is right with the world—at least that part of it that you can control. Even if the whole world is conspiring against civilization, you can preserve your part of it with the smallest turn of a screwdriver.

3

Rain, Rain, Go Away

February 26, 2008

Once again, for the umpteenth time this month, I arrive at work soaking wet. Just getting from the car to the front door of the Mises Institute is like going through the rinse cycle—and umbrellas just aren’t my thing. What’s striking is how this weather pattern follows a year of dire warnings from government officials about the deadly drought that is destroying the region, as you can easily see from the government’s own U.S. Drought Assessment maps.

Actually, these are interesting maps. They give the impression that the whole of the nation is a parched land that vacillates between persistent drought and improving droughts. Nowhere is listed as “soaked” or “just the right amount of rain.” And if you reflect on government announcements of these things, all places seem to fall into one of three categories: catastrophic flooding, catastrophic drought, or forgettable.

Some years ago, the head of the local bureaucracy in charge of the distribution of water was quoted in the newspaper along these lines: “If these conditions persist, rationing will certainly become necessary.” If these conditions persist? That’s quite the assumption. We could say during the next rainfall: “If these conditions persist, it will become necessary for everyone to build an ark.” Conditions never persist. They change. Bureaucrats really hate that.

One suspects that these same people love droughts. Droughts give them power, not just over the aggregate use of water. They enjoy pressing people on the smallest details of life. They get to tell you that you must take short showers. They tell you that you must flush less. They impose a profound sense of guilt on your for watering the basil growing in your window box.

Droughts can turn the most innocent public employee into the moral equivalent of a Gestapo agent, issuing dictates and imposing fines, ferreting out the water thieves, all in the name of the public interest.

Droughts turn neighbor against neighbor, and force the whole of everyone into the criminal class, reduced to sneaking around at night to water tomato plants. Droughts make everyone feel dependent on the state. We must read their rules, such as, “Even-numbered houses may water their lawns from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m., Monday, Thursday, and Sunday.”

So rain, rain, go away. That’s their theme.

Bureaucrat International has a common feature: loathing of “consumerism.” Whereas people want to have choice over how they spend their money, bureaucrats want us to suffer constantly, and be intensely aware of what we use, not trusting the price system to determine our consumption patterns but rather obeying regulations and strictures.

Note that no drought ever officially ends. The papers are packed with warnings of impending doom during the worst of it. But when the torrents of rain come—and they invariably do, eventually—there is no press release that says something along the lines of: “Praise Be to God, the drought is over. Use as much water as you are willing to pay for!”

Never, never, never. They never say this. They would rather that we carry with us some sense that the drought is never really over, since, after all, it could come again.

The core of the problem here has nothing to do with rain and changing weather patterns. The weather has in fact been changing since the dawn of time. What creates the problem is public ownership of the means of production and the utterly irrational system under which the price doesn’t change regardless of availability. There is no real profitability here. Nor are there losses. So there is no economic calculation going on. Prices are determined by extra-market indicators.

Think of the difference with the market system. Every day we are enticed to consume every product you can imagine: cars, celery, computers, anything. There is constant calibrating of supply and demand. If anyone attempts to overprice a product and make profits, another entrepreneur sweeps in to offer the same for less and draw profits away. Innovation is everywhere, so that suppliers are required to adopt the latest thing in order to stay afloat. No profits are permanent. They are always and everywhere threatened. These days, this happens almost overnight.

Now think of the difference with public water markets, in which the theme is always: you are using too much. Interesting isn’t it? Why is this? It’s because the market is not being allowed to work. This has nothing to do with the product in question. If you doubt it, make a visit to your local grocery and the bottled water section in particular. There are vast numbers of choices, with each supplier begging you to consume. But in public water markets, they demand that you conserve. State ownership and management of the means of production are the key reason. Privatize—completely privatize—the supply of water and a change would emerge overnight.

People immediately respond that this is a crazy idea. Streams, lakes, reservoirs, and water towers can’t be owned privately! But is that really so? There are many cases of partial privatization on record, though the mandates are extreme. No doubt that there are efficiency gains that come with contracting out and privatized but regulated markets. The best solution is the same one that applies to all of the areas of life that are considered public goods, from trash collection and disposal to schools and defense: the government should get out of the business entirely.

Talk about opposition. Labor unions go bonkers when presented with the idea. Bureaucrats do too. Even religious groups have gotten in on the act. See, for example, the growing movement of Nuns Against Bottled Water. Presbyterians for Restoring Creation are circulating pledges for people to sign that foreswear drinking bottled water. These people claim that we shouldn’t have to pay for what should be a free gift from God. But, oddly, these same people don’t seem to have a problem with people’s paying of the government’s water bill.

Look, it’s not complicated: drought is another name for shortage. Government is capable of creating a shortage in any good through bureaucratic management. Prices do not respond to supply and demand, and a lack of innovation characterizes production. We see this in schooling, mails, defense, courts, and every other area in which government enjoys a monopoly. It shouldn’t surprise us that the same is true in water provision. Instead of blaming Mother Nature and the consumer, the water commissioners should look closer to home to see why everyone is required to live in fear and is reduced to doing rain dances to keep the water gods happy.

4

The Relentless Misery
of 1.6 Gallons

January 5, 2010

My order at my favorite Chinese takeout was taking too long. I stopped into the men’s room. There I witnessed a common scene: the modern toilet disaster. An otherwise clean business had a restroom calamity on its hands, one so grim that I hesitate to describe it.

The conjectural history is not difficult to reconstruct. The toilet apparently had trouble flushing. There was a plunger by the toilet, of course, as we see everywhere today. The toilet was plunged to get rid of the obstruction, while the obstruction itself spilled all over the floor and stuck to the plunger too.

The customer probably left the ghastly scene in a rush. Management knew nothing. But now customers were coming and going into this bathroom, surely losing all inspiration to eat or order food.

It would be easy to blame the restaurant owners. What is with these people and why can’t they at least have a clean restroom? But reacting this way would be unjust. The hidden hand behind this unsanitary calamity is the U.S. government. The true origin of the mess was not in the hour before I arrived but back in 1994, after Congress passed the Energy Policy Act (passed in 1992).

This act, passed during an environmentalist hysteria, mandated that all toilets sold in the United States use no more than 1.6 gallons of water per flush. This was a devastating setback in the progress of civilization. The conventional toilet in the U.S. ranges from 3.5 gallons to 5 gallons. The new law was enforced with fines and imprisonment.

For years, there was a vibrant black market for Canadian toilet tanks and a profitable smuggling operation in effect. This seems either to have subsided or to have gone so far underground that it doesn’t make the news. I’ve searched the web in vain for evidence of any 3.5 or 5.0 gallon toilet tanks for sale through normal channels. I wonder what one of these fetches in the black market. This possible source has no prices and an uncertain locale.

The toilet manufacturers, meanwhile, are all touting their latest patented innovations as a reason for the reduced hysteria surrounding the toilet disaster. I suspect something different. We have all gotten used to a reduced standard of living—just as the people living in the Soviet Union became accustomed to cold apartments, long bread lines, and poor dental care. There is nothing about our standard of living that is intrinsic to our sense of how things ought to be. Let enough time pass and people forget things.

So let us remember way back when:

• Toilets did not need plungers next to them, and thank goodness. Used plungers are nasty, disease carrying, and filthy. It doesn’t matter how cute the manufacturer tries to make them or in how many colors you can buy them. In the old days, you would never have one exposed for guests. It was kept out in the garage for the rare occasion when someone threw a ham or something stranger down the toilet.

• Toilet paper was super thick and getting thicker. None of this one-ply nonsense.

• You never had any doubt about the capacity of the toilet to flush completely, with only one pull of the handle. The toilet stayed clean thanks to five gallons of rushing water pouring through it after each flush.

These were great cultural and civilizational achievements. In a state of nature, the problem of human waste and what to do about it is persistent. Do the wrong thing and you spread disease and misery.

Indoor plumbing since the time of the ancient world has been a sign of prosperity and human well-being. Indoor toilets that flow into a sewer have been around since 1500 B.C., but every new settlement of people in a new area presents the problem anew. In rural America, indoor toilets weren’t common until the 1930s. That today everyone assumes them to be part of life is a testament to the creative power of economic progress.

What we have in these regulations passed since the 1990s is therefore a step backwards from a central aspiration of mankind to dispose of human waste in the best possible way. We have here an instance of government having forced society into a lower stage of existence.

Government has reduced us as people to the point that we either have to enter the black market to get good sewage or come to terms with living amidst periodic spreading of human waste all over our domestic and commercial environment.

Again, this is wholly unnecessary. Capitalism achieved something spectacular in waste disposal. Government came along and took it away from us. That’s the story in a nutshell.

Today, every toilet company touts its latest innovations to overcome the problem. There are high-pressure blasters that run off electricity, designed to force a paltry 1.6 gallons of water through fast enough to make the difference. They are shockingly loud and scary. There are new shapes of tanks and new flow mechanisms that are said to compensate for the calamity, but this works only some of the time.

Each of these innovations is patented—meaning that a successful project cannot be copied and improved by other companies. So even if these are improvements, their distribution is limited and the successful aspects of them are not extended by others, for fear of patent lawsuits. The entire market is hobbled.

The result is an entire society of poorly working toilets and a life of adjustment to the omnipresence of human feces, all in a short 15 years. Thanks so much, Congress!

Of course the environmentalists are in on the whole project. They started telling us back in the 1970s that our large tanks were sheer waste. We should put bricks in them to save and conserve. If you didn’t have a brick in your toilet, you were considered irresponsible and a social misfit. Eventually of course the brick became, in effect, a mandate, and finally toilet tanks were reduced to one third of their previous size.

Back then, it was just assumed that toilet manufacturers cared nothing at all about wasting water. Surely there was no rationale at all for why they consumed five gallons per flush as opposed to 1.6 gallons. This is just capitalist excess and down with it!

Well, think again: there was wisdom in those old designs. The environmentalists didn’t account for the present reality in which people typically flush twice, three times, or even four times during a single toilet event. Whether this ends up using more or less in the long run is entirely an empirical question, but let us just suppose that the new microtanks do indeed save water. In the same way, letting people die of infections conserves antibiotics, not brushing teeth conserves toothpaste, and not using anesthesia during surgery conserves needles and syringes.

Here is the truth that environmentalists do not face: Sometimes conserving is not a good idea. There are some life activities that cry out for the expenditure of resources, even in the most generous possible way. I would count waste disposal as one of those.

It is also possible that some people just like to get their kicks out of spreading misery and making it impossible for us to enjoy a clean and prosperous life. Like Puritans of old, they see virtue in suffering and would like to see ever more of it. It sounds perverse, but such an ethos does exist. And clearly, government doesn’t care in the slightest.

There are many tragedies associated with the toilet calamity. There are private embarrassments at guest houses and disgust at every turn. Many of the customers at that Chinese takeout probably blame the owners, who themselves are probably mystified as to why toilets in communist China probably worked just fine but in capitalist America are throwing filth all over their restaurant.

It’s the hidden hand of government that has mandated this leap back to barbarism.

5

The Great Drain Debacle

September 26, 2006

In Purgatory, there probably aren’t any garbage disposals. People there will have to scrape all food remains into the trash, and if so much as an onion bit gets into the drain, it will have to be carefully fished out before the water is turned on, lest the drain clog.

And also it will be as in many cities on the East and West coasts: the garbage will have to be separated into plastic, glass, cans, and food muck. So there will be no peace after dinner, no shoving all leftovers down a hole in the sink and flipping the switch to grind it up. No, we will have to think really hard about all our trash, let bottles soak to remove labels, put the foil from the potato in a separate bag from the potato itself.

But so long as we are on earth, the garbage disposal and the unified trash system seem perks of life itself. For years, I’ve reveled in it. They still don’t have them in Europe, where things seem to have regressed since the Middle Ages when sewage systems became more common. Nowadays, the Euro-people commonly toss their trash in their own yards, and try to cover up for this primitive reality by calling it “composting.” If you were a New Yorker before 1997, you were guilty of a crime if you used a garbage disposal. But the state finally relented and granted the freedom to grind.

When my last garbage disposal wore out, the search for a replacement was a joy. You can get a normal household disposal with ½ horsepower or you can step it up with a ¾ horsepower engine. Or you can dare to step into the future with X-treme disposals with 1 horsepower engines, capable of grinding up a whole pineapple or a sack of potatoes or set of glass tumblers you are tired of.

And so of course there was no choice for me. With my new unit, there was nothing that wouldn’t go down. That crab leg dinner left piles and piles of orange crustaceans on plates, but in they went. Thanksgiving turkey remains: in goes the corpse! My double batch of muffins overcooked, but no problem: down the grinding machine go 24 muffins. Chickens, pork chop bones, and even the much-dreaded banana peel.

It all worked so well. Where’s the downside? I couldn’t see any. The next step of course is grease. Everyone knows, or so we are told: never ever put grease down the drain. But, hey, this the modern age! Why take household appliance advice from people who are still living in the 50s?

So it started with bacon grease. Zoom! Then I pushed the envelope further and further. In the most outrageous act of disposal extremism ever, I dumped a full gallon of hot grease straight into the sink and watched with pride as it slid lazily and effortlessly down. Again, where’s the downside?

For a time, it seemed that I could get away with these “sink sins” forever. Then one day I noticed a certain bogginess. The disposal side didn’t seem quite as robust. Water would back up sometimes before flowing out again. Then one day—and now it seemed inevitable—it stopped. A bit of plunging pushed it right through again, and I figured that all was well. But then the plunging became more frequent.

I must have slipped into some state of denial as my plunging became weekly, then daily, and then several times daily. I had to have the plunger very nearby if I was to work in the kitchen at all. My conscience was telling me the truth: all my abuse of the system was finally catching up to me. But I ignored that quiet inner voice, and figured I could live this way. I was living an illusion. My dream of grinding a mountain of trash came to an end.

Finally one day I gave in and called a plumber. He came and went, announcing that all was well. Fine, I thought: back to my old ways. But of course all was not well. Then it finally happened this past weekend: a stoppage that would not be broken. As if to confirm the persistence of natural law, it began following another bacon-grease dump. The water wouldn’t move.

I plunged and plunged until my back muscles were sore. Sometimes if I put the plunger in the wrong spot, water would splash up and I would taste the muck, that combination of old garbage with the overriding smell of bacon, a tepid and thick gray-brown oily muck. The more it splashed in my face, the more I didn’t care. The muck soared high in the air, dropping on countertops far and wide, landing in my hair, soaking my clothes. Sweat mixed with the bacon muck and dripped all over my face. Blisters began to appear on my hands. But the pain was not an issue: I had to beat this clog!

No progress.

It was time to break out the chemicals. Liquid Plumber Gel. Baking Soda. Lye. Boiling Water. Vinegar. Anything! Nothing worked.

Should I call a plumber? Heck, I thought, what does a plumber have but the right tools? So it was off to Wal-Mart to acquire them myself, and I ended up with a dazzling little addition to my do-it-yourself toolkit: a 15-foot drain snake. This would surely to it! I put that snake down, a free passage for 15 feet until I reached the end. No blockage. But still the sink did not drain.

Despair set in. I imagined the crews from the city arriving the next day, with city officials and even the city planner. They would have to dig up my yard with huge tractors. The sidewalks would be ripped up. Specialists would have to be brought it to assess the damage I had caused. There are probably 15 different agencies that oversee the water supply and they would all be allied against me.

I would be sitting there in my kitchen alone, vulnerable, guilty, and they would be writing citations, wagging their fingers at me, fining me—maybe even hauling me off to jail for failing to abide by sink regulations. My neighbors will hate me. My life will fall apart. I would sit in prison and rethink my life. This is the price I would pay for ignoring my conscience.

Another day passed, another day of tepid sink muck. And then something struck me. The left side of the sink works fine. Only the garbage disposal side is stuck. But both the garbage disposal and the other sink flow down the same tube, so how does this make any sense? And I’ve already snaked out the garbage disposal, so that can’t be it.

Then, finally, a revelation. There are two tubes coming from the disposal unit. One goes to the main drainage and one goes to the dishwasher. I had snaked out the wrong one! But then another problem arose. I could not get the snake down the right one, because the entry point was hidden beneath the choppers on the disposal unit. How will I get in?

At long last, I opened the counter door. The pipes were plastic PVC. They all fit together nicely with large bolts that can be twisted by hand. I twisted the one that led from the disposal to the main pipe and gently moved it to the side.

And there was the offending glob. It was just sticking there, sort of lifelike. With a fork I removed it. It was an accumulation of six months of grindings. But tangled up at the very front of the glob was the most marvelous thing. It was a big piece of green plastic, something shaped sort of like a washer. It could have been from anything. No one had ever seen it before. It might have been there for years. It had evidently fallen down the sink, managed to slip through the grinding and then rammed into the pipes were it stayed lodged and began to accumulate muck. It might have been there for many years, for all I knew.

Once having removed this, I screwed the pipe back together, and voilà: everything worked perfectly again. Better than ever! Three days of hell were over, after an operation that took maybe 90 seconds. Unbelievable!

But here was the real triumph. This little green plastic thing had expiated my sins. It turned out that none of my supposedly bad habits had done anything to clog my disposal. In fact, to the extent that some of those bones and grease finally caused a choking, that was a good thing because it led me to the fundamental source of the problem. I was guilt free! I could again walk with an upright heart.

Every civic culture in human history has attempted to distort our moral sense. They want us to believe that right and wrong consist in obeying social and civic priorities. But there is no moral norm involved in such issues as whether we own disposal units or what we put in them. Those are merely issues of technology that change with the times; our only restriction is not to impose on others’ person or property.

Morals do not come from the state and society. Morality deals with weightier matters that measure our thoughts, words, and deeds against universals that are true regardless of time and place. And in this time and this place, we can grind our garbage to our hearts’ content.

6

Crush the Sprinkler Guild

May 9, 2006

I suspected as much! What the lady at Home Depot called the “sprinkler repair cult” is an emerging guild seeking privileges and regulations from the government. That means a supply restriction, high prices, or another do-it-yourself project. But there is a way around it.

I first began to smell a rat when the automatic irrigation system on my front yard needed work but I had unusual struggles in trying to find a repair guy.

The first place I called informed me that they could accept no more clients. Clients? I just wanted a new sprinkler thing, for goodness sake. I don’t want to be a client; I want to be a customer. Is there no one who can put on a new sprayer or stick a screwdriver in there or whatever it needs?

Nope, all full.

The next call was not returned.

The next call ended with the person on the line fearfully saying that they do landscaping but will have nothing to do with sprinklers or “automated irrigation systems.” Umm, ok.

The next call seemed more promising. The secretary said they had an opening on the schedule in three weeks. Three weeks? In that period of time, my yard will be the color of a brown paper bag.

The next call failed. And the next one. And the next. Finally I was back to the off-putting secretary. I made the appointment but the guy never came. Fortunately, in the meantime, a good rain came, and then at regular intervals for the whole season, and I was spared having to deal with this strangely maddening situation.

Why all the fuss? We aren’t talking brain surgery here. These are sprinklers, little spray nozzles connected to tubes connected to a water supply. Why was everyone so touchy about the subject?

Why did all the power seem to be in their hands, and none in mine? Must I crawl and beg?

Above all, I wonder why, with most all lawns in new subdivisions sporting these little things, why oh why are the people who repair them in such sort supply?

Little did I know that I had stumbled onto the real existence of a most peculiar thing in our otherwise highly competitive economy: a guild.

It had all the earmarks. If you want your nails buffed, there are thousand people in town who stand ready. If you want someone to make you dinner, you can take your pick among a thousand restaurants. If you want to buy a beer, you can barely go a block without bumping into a merchant who is glad to sell you one. None of that is true with sprinkler repair.

What does a guild do? It attempts to restrict service. And why? To keep the price as high as possible. And how? By admitting only specialists, or supposed specialists, to the ranks of service providers, usually through the creation of some strange but largely artificial system of exams or payments or whatever.

Guilds don’t last in a free market. No one can blame producers for trying to pull it off. But they must always deal with defectors. Even the prospects of defectors can cause people who might not otherwise defect, to turn and attempt to beat others to the punch.

There is just no keeping a producer clique together for long when profits are at stake.

There is also the problem that temporarily successful guilds face: high profits attract new entrants into the field. They must either join the guild or go their own way. This creates an economically unviable situation in a market setting that is always driving toward a market-clearing rate of return.

Further evidence of the existence of a sprinkler guild came from the checkout lady at the Home Depot. I was buying a sprinkler head and she said in passing that they didn’t used to carry these things, and the decision of the manufacturer to supply them in retail got some people mighty upset. She spoke of the sprinkler repair people as a cult that should be smashed!

Now, does this guild really exist or is it an informal arrangement among a handful of local suppliers? As best I can tell, here is the guild’s website (http://www.irrigation.org/default.aspx). The Irrigation Association is active in:

• Providing a voice for the industry on public policy issues related to standards, conservation and water-use on local, national and international levels

• Acting as a source of technical and public policy information within the industry

• Raising awareness of the benefits of professional irrigation services

• Offering professional training and certification

• Uniting irrigation professionals, including irrigation equipment manufacturers, distributors and dealers, irrigation system designers, contractors, educators, researchers, and technicians from the public and private sectors.

Catch that? Certification. Unity. Standards! Public policy. These are all dangerous words, that come down to the same result: high prices and bad service.

Why should anyone become certified? “Prestige and credibility among peers and customers”; “professional advancement opportunities”; “Enhances the professional image of the industry—your industry.”

I thought I needed a sprinkler repairman but these people want me to hire a Certified Landscape Irrigation Manager, a CLIM. How do you become a CLIM? Well you have to send in $400 plus a résumé that includes an “overview summary of how you plan to meet program criteria:

Two examples of project development to include:

• System design objective

• System budget estimate

• Water source development

• System design drawings: hydraulic, electrical, detail drawings, pump station

Project specifications:

• General specification

• Installation specification

• Material specification

• Pump station

Two system audits or evaluations to include:

AUDIT

• System performance (uniformity)

• Base schedule

• Recommendations for improvement

EVALUATION

• System performance (uniformity)

• Hydraulic analysis

• Electrical analysis

• Grounding

• Water source

• Product performance

• Recommendations for improvement

Two construction and/or construction management projects:

• Site visit reports

• Drawing of record

• Final irrigation schedule

• Punch lists

Of course they are working with government, federal, state, and local. They want restrictions of every sort. They want their own Turf and Landscape Irrigation Best Management Practices or BMP to be the law of the land. You can read more about this here.

How hip-deep are these people in government? It’s hard to say. But I’m guessing that local developers, landscapers, builders, and others are intimidated by all these and are reluctant to challenge their monopoly.

So thank goodness for hardware stores! They are working to bust up this vicious little guild, to the benefit of the consumer and everyone else. It means having to stick your fingers in mud and read instruction manuals and the like but sometimes the defense of liberty requires that you get your hands a little dirty.

7

The Key to a Happy Life

April 17, 2003

Ah, Spring, the time when the landscape appears as if it were painted by a great artist, when the birds make music of symphonic quality, and when the very air we breath feels air conditioned. That last point is particularly important, because it is only true so long as we are outside.

If we are inside, it is a different matter altogether.

Most of the year, indoor air is fabulously fresh, clean, and circulating at the right temperature, thanks to the greatest source for clean wonderful air: not the Clean Air Act but central air conditioning and heating. When people say, hey, turn on the air, it is literally true. We hardly open windows anymore, which (not being Mr. Outdoors) I think is fine in principle.

But in the Spring, the air goes off. It is no longer cold enough for heat but not yet warm enough for air conditioning. The thermostat tells the machine to stay put. You could turn on just the blower, but who thinks of doing that? So the air just sort of sits there, dormant and still. It is the right temperature, but it is not moving.

You might not notice this at first. But once you focus on it, you suddenly realize: I’m suffocating!

This is precisely the revelation that hit me two nights ago. For two weeks, nights had been oddly miserable. I wasn’t too hot or too cold, just oddly and unidentifiably uncomfortable. I would wake somehow unrested. Am I sick? Am I getting old? Finally it hit me. The only circulation in this room comes from human breath!

This room needs a fan running! On it came, and with it, life itself. The night was suddenly glorious, clean, and happy. All dreams were dreamy. I awoke and there was once again music in the air, the feel of flowers, the sound of birds (metaphorically of course). The fan had brought the Spring indoors.

Then I began to notice something. This problem isn’t limited to the bedroom. It afflicts virtually all indoor space. In the Spring, with neither heater nor air conditioner, indoor air begins to sink into a stultifying blechiness. If you are sitting in the same spot, you are breathing the same air again and again.

My office needed a fan too! I turned it on to the same effect: the flowers appeared, the birds sang, the air moved! Suddenly my day has become as glorious as my night, filled with rapturous, Spring-like freshness. The fan! God bless it.

At this point in a superficially trivial essay such as this, one is supposed to plunge into history and reveal all the details that one knows about the history of the fan, so that the reader won’t walk away thinking: I can’t believe this guy thinks that his personal fan experience is worthy of an article.

Or I could plunge into the economics of the fan, how it is the system of free enterprise that gives us such choice: ceiling fans, stand-up fans, desk fans, clip-on fans, hand-held fans, and more. Hence the system of delivery must be guarded against all encroachment by the state.

But thanks to the fan running in my office, I feel no burdens to defer to any model of writing that is so tediously conventional. In any case, the economic point is obvious enough in that fans are available everywhere. As for the history, it turns out that this isn’t necessary. The history of the fan is already well documented at the website of the Fan Museum in London (http://www.fan-museum.org/history.htm).

Of course the history on this site, a bit pompous, deals with the inferior and primitive hand-held fan. For the serious stuff that we use in real life, you have to go to the site of the Fan Collectors Association (http://www.fancollectors.org/) in Andover, Kansas, which is appropriately hip to the magnificence of the electric fan. This site has an amazing array of pictures of its fans. You can also participate in the Fan Forum. You can attend an event, which, the site says, is “a great way to meet new friends, share fan stories, and buy, sell and trade fans.”

Maybe so. What I do know is that a fan is the key to a happy sleep. It is the key to a happy, productive day. And because nights and days make up the whole of life, the fan is the key to a happy life. For a mere $9–20, you can bring the Spring indoors without the bugs, or pollen, or other natural menaces. Buy a fan and live a full life!

8

Municipalized Trash:
It’s Uncivilized

September 14, 2009

Driving in to work today, I saw garbage bins overflowing and city dumpsters spilling out with trash. It stinks. It’s disgusting. It’s uncivilized. It’s probably dangerous to some extent.

It’s a holiday, so of course the government workers charged with picking up this nasty refuse can’t work, even though construction workers in private firms are busy bees taking advantage of the extra time.

It’s true with house trash too: pickup is once per week—on schedule—and there is nothing you can do to make it more frequent. It’s part of the master plan, don’t you know, and if you make more trash than the once-per-week pickup can contain, that is your problem, not the city’s.

The very fear that people have about private trash collection—that trash will pile up and no one will do anything about it—turns out to be a regular feature of government trash collection. But we look the other way. Why?

Before getting to this, let us first establish that garbage is a serious issue. William F. Buckley, his head full of schemes for threatening populations with nuclear annihilation, once chided libertarians for bothering with such petty concerns as trash collection.

“It is only because of the conservatives’ disposition to sacrifice in order to withstand the enemy,” wrote Buckley in 1961, “that [libertarians] are able to enjoy their monasticism, and pursue their busy little seminars on whether or not to demunicipalize the garbage collectors.”

Ah yes, little seminars. Seminars about such things as the avoiding the plague. Humanity has some experience with the results of failing to dispose of trash properly, and that experience was deadly. Plagues swept the ancient world every 50 years or so, spread mainly through a lack of good sanitation. The Black Death in Europe might have been avoided with better sanitation and a decent system for disposing of trash rather than letting it pile up on the streets.

History’s fight with the plague in the developed world came to an end at the time of the rise of capitalism in the late middle ages, and no surprise there. With the accumulation of capital came innovation in trash disposal, since living in sanitary conditions and staying alive turns out to be something of a priority for people. This is why the largest advances in garbage collection came about during the Industrial Revolution.

And yet here we are in 2009, with trash piled up on the streets and stinking to high heaven, bags full of raw animal parts (chickens, pigs, cows, fish), baby diapers stuffed with waste, rotting eggs mixed with sour cream dip from game-day parties, piles that are right now being scavenged by roaches and rats. This is in a town that prides itself on its tidiness.

And we put up with this for the same reason that we put up with lost mail, potholes in roads, dilapidated schools, depreciated money, and a clogged court system: because these services are monopolized by government.

Now you can make all the public-goods arguments you want to about roads and courts, but trash disposal is not rocket science and could be easily handled by the market. Everyone wants trash removed, and the sooner the better.

That means that there is a market demand for the service. There is money to be made. The only way to keep something like this at bay is to make it illegal.

If the market were in charge, pickup would surely be more than once per week. We wouldn’t have to drag our trash bins out to the curb. In fact, we would be faced with several or many options for trash pickup.

If we made more trash than we “should,” we wouldn’t get angry notes from the city government. The private pickup companies would be thrilled. We might be paying by frequency of pickup or perhaps by the pound. That would be for the market to decide.

In fact, trash pickup services might actually be characterized by—perish the thought—innovation, just as they were in the early part of the 20th century, when trash collection was mostly private. Our houses might be directly connected to underground trash-transmission services that would whisk it all away in an instant. Our kitchens might have highly effective trash chutes that would zap away trash as we make it.

But because of this ghastly tradition of municipalizing trash pickup (or we might call it Sovietizing), the entire industry is stuck in the past, utterly impervious to improvement and modernization.

We get our news through fiber optics, walk around with tiny wireless phones that can instantly connect with anyone anywhere, and shop digitally with any vendor in the world. But when it comes to trash, we are still relying on once-per-week, strictly scheduled pickups by tax-funded workers driving monstrous, old-model trucks.

In my town, even the trashcans are paid for and owned by the government, as if the private sector has yet to figure out on its own initiative how to make a tub for holding things.

So why does this system persist? I asked a few people about this, and the answer usually came down to some system of graft. Powerful people make the trucks, manage the landfills, and dole out the contracts. Perhaps so, but why do we put up with it?

It seems like a preposterously unobjectionable plan: open this system to private ownership and competition, and thereby innovation.

I don’t just mean contracting out. I mean abolishing city trash pickup and letting private enterprise completely take over. There is just no way that the existing muck would persist, for it offends every aesthetic sensibility and it may pose a ghastly health risk.

As for the old conservative claim that libertarians are insufficiently worried about the Soviet threat and too worried about garbage collection, note that the Soviet Union is gone and the garbage problem is still with us.

9

A Lesson in Mortality

January 19, 2005

A death in the family is always hard, but three in three weeks is especially difficult for children, even though it only involved pets.

First it was the green tree frog discovered at the local car repair shop and taken home to be cared for. “Sticky” lived two months, long enough for the kids to become very attached. One day we found him dead in his cage.

Then it was the two chickens brought home soon after being hatched at a friend’s chicken coop. They lived only two days, and died so innocent, so young and vulnerable.

Below I reprint the grave-side homilies that I offered when they were buried. But first: a reflection on mortality, a fact of life even more inevitable than taxes that modernity still can’t seem to come to terms with.

Death impresses upon us the limits of technology and ideology. It comes in time no matter what we do. Prosperity has lengthened life spans and science and entrepreneurship have made available amazing technologies that have forestalled and delayed it.

Yet, it must come.

As Mises puts it: “Man lives in the shadow of death. Whatever he may have achieved in the course of his pilgrimage, he must one day pass away and abandon all that he has built. Each instant can become his last. There is only one thing that is certain about the individual’s future—death.”

Modernity has a problem intellectually processing the reality of death because we are so unwilling to defer to the implacable constraints imposed on us within the material world. Whole ideologies have been concocted on the supposition that such constraints do not have to exist. That is the essence of socialism. It is the foundation of U.S. imperialism too, with its cocky supposition that there is nothing force cannot accomplish, that there are no limits to the uses of power.

To recognize the inevitability of death means confessing that there are limits to our power to manufacture a reality for ourselves. It is akin to admitting that certain fundamental facts of the world, like the ubiquity of scarcity, cannot be changed. Instead of attempting to change it, we must imagine social systems that come to terms with it. This is the core claim of economic science, and it is also the very reason so many refuse to acknowledge its legitimacy or intellectual binding power.

To discover the fountain of youth is a perpetual obsession, one that finds its fulfillment in the vitamin cults that promise immortality. We create government programs to pay for people to be kept alive forever on the assumption that death is always and everywhere unwarranted and ought to be stopped. There is no such thing as “natural death” anymore; the very notion strikes us as a cop out.

Thus do we insist on always knowing the “cause” of death, as if it only comes about through an exogenous intervention, like hurricanes, traffic accidents, shootings, and bombs. But even when a person dies of his own accord, we always want to know so that we have something to blame. Heart failure? Well, he or she might have done a bit more exercise. Let this be a lesson. Cancer? It’s probably due to smoking, or perhaps second-hand smoke. Or maybe it was the carcinogens introduced by food manufacturers or factories. We don’t want to admit that it was just time for a person to die.

The denial of death’s inevitability is especially strange since life itself serves up constant reminders of our physical limits. Sleep serves as a kind of metaphor for death. We can stay awake working and having fun up to 18 hours, even 24 or 36, but eventually we must bow to our natures and collapse and sleep. We must fall unconscious so that we can be revived to continue on with our life.

Pills can delay the need for sleep but cannot obliterate it. There are no substitutes for sleep, no foods we can eat, no exercise we can undertake, no special words we can say. We can shake our fist in anger at our body’s demand for sleep but we still must give in. Sleep wins out over our individual wills every day of our lives, just as death wins out over our will to live forever.

Our struggle against mortality can take productive forms of course, as when we seek to leave great legacies in the material world: wealth, art, children, literature, charity, changed lives. We do all this in part because we seek ways to make our brief lives take on meaning beyond themselves. To be high-minded means to care not only about our own times but also about those that follow. If we cannot live forever, we at least want our impact on this world to live longer than nature permits us to live.

All these impulses appear to be unique to the human person, a reflection of our unique rationality and (for theists) the presence of a soul. Animals are another matter entirely. They avoid death by instinct (yes, I realize the term explains nothing) but they do not seek immortality or strive to leave legacies or work to extend the life span of their species, or otherwise improve the lot of their fellows through innovation. They are what we would be if we lacked rationality and souls.

When a pet dies, all children ask the question: will my pet go to heaven? I suppose the answer must be: not in the way we will find heaven. And yet the children want hope that their pet will live again, and that they will see them living again. And because no Scripture seems to say that there cannot be, it is reasonable to say that animals can live eternally if God so desires it. There are many problems with this idea, of course, since orthodoxy says there is no flesh in heaven but if animals have no souls, how, precisely, would they go there?

In the moments following the death of a pet, such theological ramblings have no place. What the moment calls for is “closure,” to use an overused buzz word.

And so we gather in silence and dig the hole in the ground, place the corpse in and say some words.

We gather to bury and pay tribute to Sticky, a tree frog who has been a good friend to us all. Quiet and unassuming, he lived a good life, stirred our imaginations, and delighted us with his antics. We will miss you, Sticky. We are grateful for the life you lived. If there were ever a tree frog that deserved to enter the gates of heaven, it was surely Sticky.

Each child takes some dirt on the shovel and tosses it in the grave, and it is patted down. We stand in silence for a few moments, and walk away in the quiet evening.

A similar scene repeated itself with the tiny chicks.

We gather to bury these two tiny chicks. Though they were so young, and lived such short lives, we still gave them names: One-Minute Egg, and Two-Minute Egg. We will always remember them. Let us remember that we too will die one day, and, when considering the whole length of eternity, our lives are not much longer than theirs. May our souls be as innocent as theirs when we breathe our last breath.

By this time, the children were rather bored with funeral drama. They quickly scampered off to live full lives in the sunshine of day, deciding right then to think about death only when they must, but otherwise to live and love every breath. And so it should be.