Free Association, Peace, and Plenty

Free Association, Peace, and plenty

The Olive Bar, the State, and Rule Ambiguity

THERE I STOOD WITH eight olive pits in my cheek, talking to the checkout lady at the grocery store as she waved my half-pound container of antipasto over the scanner light. All the while, I hoped she that she wouldn’t notice or ask why I sounded like I had marbles in my mouth.

Like many shoppers before and after, I had been standing at the olive bar “sampling” red, green, and black olives—first the ones without seeds, so that there would be no evidence of my deed, then the ones stuffed with cheese and garlic, and then finally the ones with seeds because I couldn’t resist the temptation.

Sure, there is no sign on the bar that says: “Do not sample.” Nor is there a sign that says: “Free samples.” It is all kind of vague. The beautiful olives are displayed in the open, under a small canopy, in this self-service bar that only invites the customer to fill up plastic containers with food and pay based on weight.

Was I stealing? Was everyone? In a sense yes: the food I ate, I did not pay for. So feeling a sense of guilt, I filled up a tub of olives and bought them—my tribute paid to expiate my grocery-store sin.

I would never do this in the produce section. People don’t usually sample the lettuce, carrots, or even apples. Please! That would be tacky and wrong. But an olive bar’s status is oddly ambiguous: everything looks immediately edible, almost like the store managers are inviting you to sample.

Maybe they are, maybe they are not.

It later occurred to me that the ambiguity might be the whole point. People eat and then feel a sense of obligation, and then buy. Might this really be a marketing scheme?

Later, with a small team of researchers, I staked out the olive bar to see if this theory holds up.

We pretended to be regular shoppers. Over the course of an hour, we observed unscrupulous people walking by quickly, stuffing a few in their mouths without buying anything; other scrupulous people bought without sampling any. After an hour of watching, our team only saw one other customer who replicated my own behavior.

The next day, our team observed several people who bought olives but did not sample, one man who ate handfuls and walked away, and one person who sampled an olive and proceeded to fill up a container and purchased.

So while we saw plenty of sampling, only two people in two days both sampled and bought.

Not ready to declare the theory a bust, it was time to interview people who watch this bar all the time: the baker and the wine salesman. The baker said people steal olives all the time, and he laughed about it. I asked why he doesn’t put up a sign that forbids it, and he just laughed and shrugged.

The wine guy was more forthcoming. If people ask him, he freely suggests that they try some samples. People who do sample also usually buy. We asked if this was the point after all, and he answered with a general theory of his own.

Paraphrasing: A grocery store lives on the fence, neither claiming their food is their own nor inviting people to freely sample what they want. We create zones of uncertainty and let people wander within them freely, letting people take their own path. The hope is that they will imagine the store’s food as their own, and then make that come true. The olive bar is a case in point: it not only lives on the fence; by being so beautifully displayed, it suggests a home environment, and has thus spawned antipasto parties all over town.

At this point, the baker became more open with his knowledge of olive-bar sociology. He revealed that the olive bar is one of the most consistently profitable sectors of the store. “It brings in $1,450 per week,” he said excitedly.

Our team of researchers had the theory confirmed: the bar’s profitability—which is a measure of how well it serves the public—is related to its shades of grey concerning the legitimacy of sampling from it. We also found that one customer cited an authority for olive sampling: a guy on the Food Network actually recommends that people do this!

Clearly, the rule ambiguity here is deliberate but it serves a larger social goal of bringing us what we want. Yes, there are those who take advantage, and there is some slippage. But the appearance of generosity, combined with people’s sense of fairness, ends up being quite profitable.

Contrast the shades of grey in the private sector with the same phenomenon in the public sector. There is a huge range of government-created rules that are notoriously unclear:

Insider trading rules (all profits are based on inside knowledge in some sense)

Antitrust laws (how big is too big?)

Money laundering (who is to say that a person intends to hide from the state or just exercise privacy)

Discrimination (business actors are left to guess what will be considered evil and what will be considered legitimate)

So it goes with a million regulations that live on the fence: regulations on accounting, environmental protection, tax shelters, and on and on. The law depends not on the letter of the law but on the whim of enforcers.

When dealing with the state, we need certain rules, not grey areas—the less discretion the better. But the state doesn’t like certainty. There is an obvious advantage to vagueness for the government. It keeps everyone living in a state of fear. The arbitrariness of it all makes us nervous and constantly aware of who or what is in charge.

But to what end? It’s not like the olive bar run by the grocery store, where rule ambiguity is concocted with the final goal of serving us. When the state creates legal ambiguity—and it does so with deliberation—it is for the purpose of allowing them to trap us, tax us, coerce us, keep us on edge and living in fear.

If you eat the state’s olives, you might get away with it but you might not, and if you do not, you will not like the result.

Freedom lovers often rally around the idea of the rule of law. But the private sector, where freedom thrives, doesn’t always give us that. Sometimes the rule of conscience and guesswork is enough, provided it is administered by a private sector that wants to serve you rather than a state that wants to control you.

Let the private sector live on the fence. But the state should be required to live on one side or the other.

Repeal the Drinking Age

SOMEHOW, AND NO ONE seems to even imagine how, this country managed to survive and thrive before 1984 without a national minimum drinking age. Before that, the drinking question was left to the states.

In the nineteenth century, and looking back even before—prepare yourself to imagine horrific anarchistic nightmares—there were no drinking laws anywhere, so far as anyone can tell. The regulation of drinking and age was left to society, which is to say families, churches, and communities with varying sensibilities who regulated such things with varying degrees of intensity. Probably some kids drank themselves silly—and we all know that this doesn’t happen now (wink, wink)—but many others learned to drink responsibly from an early age, even drinking bourbon for breakfast.

Really, it is only because we are somehow used to it that we accept the complete absurdity of a national law that prohibits the sale of beer, wine, and liquor to anyone under the age of 21. This is a restriction unknown in the developed world. Most countries set 18 as the limit, and countries like Germany and Austria allow 16-year-olds to buy wine and beer. In the home of the brave, the police are busting up teen parties, shutting down bars, hectoring restaurants, fining convenience stores, and otherwise bullying people into clean living. We read the news and think: crazy kids, they shouldn’t be doing this.

And yet every day, young people are finding ways around these preposterous restrictions that are hardly ever questioned, imbibing with their booze a disdain for the law and a creative spirit of criminality, along with a disposition to binge drink when their legal workarounds succeed.

On college campuses, the industry of the fake ID thrives as never before. It seems nearly true that almost every student believes himself or herself in need of getting one. Do the restaurants and bars know this? Of course they do. They have every interest in having these fake IDs look as real as possible to give themselves some degree of legal immunity if someone gets caught. The whole thing is a gigantic fakeroo, a mass exercise in open but unspoken hypocrisy, and everyone knows it.

If you think about it, it is the very definition of a state gone mad that a society would have a law of this sort spread out over an entire nation that tells people that they cannot drink before the age of 21—even as most everyone in a position to do so happily breaks the law. In Virginia, in the colonial period, where the average lifespan was 25, this law would have provided only 4 years of drinking in the last fifth of one’s life (but what a way to go).

However, if you think about the history of this country in the twentieth century, one might say that the age of 21 is actually rather liberal, as strange as that may sound. After all, it was in this country, the “land of the free,” that the federal government actually added as part of its Constitution a total banning of liquor, wine, and beer from sea to shining sea (1920 to 1933). The 1920s roared, in any case, with organized crime, speakeasies, police corruption, rampant criminality, and alcohol abuse.

The mystery to me is not the failure of Prohibition but the sheer insanity of the attempt to do this in the first place. It seems utterly bizarre in a country that habitually proclaims its devotion to liberty and freedom that such a thing would have ever been attempted. But here is Amendment XVIII, passed in 1917, in the same epoch in which government was going to rid the world of despotism and stabilize all business cycles through scientific monetary policy:

The manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

Yes, it really happened, right here in the good ol’ U.S.A., and I’m grateful to Mark Thornton for documenting the politics and economics of the whole sad affair in his book The Economics of Prohibition. In a rare case of reversion and admission of error, the same constitution was later amended again: “The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.”

But the habit of prohibition was already ingrained. For the state, it was two steps forward and one step back. For the rest of the population, what was previously a very normal part of life—drinking potentially intoxicating liquids, something integral to normal living from the Paleolithic era forward—took on a special ethos of hipness and derring-do. The father of our country might have been the largest distiller of whiskey in the late 1700s, but after Prohibition, liquor took on associations of decadence and bad behavior generally. A distiller today wouldn’t be elected to the city council, much less as the U.S. president.

Now, it wasn’t too many years ago that the laws tended to be a bit more reasonable, with the drinking age starting at 18. But that was changed with a universal law for the age of 21, and many people remember what this was like: for two years, a person was able to order a beer with a burger and, then one day, doing the same thing was a criminal act.

Digging around for explanations about these silly laws, there is one overarching argument: driving. We don’t want drunken teenagers on the road. These laws have saved thousands, millions, of lives, and the desire to change them is the equivalent of harboring a death wish for a generation. Now, one libertarian response might be: then get rid of the public roads and let road owners manage whether and to what extent its drivers drink. That’s a principled position but a bit impractical. The biggest problem with that response is that it concedes too much.

The closer you look at these studies, the fishier they appear. It turns out that most of the declines in binge drinking among high school kids, according to trends in drug use report, took place before the change in the law and, according to researchers Jeffrey A. Miron and Elina Tetelbaum, the changes in trends after are heavily biased by data sampling from a single state. Therefore, data on drunk driving, whatever the trends, cannot be statistically attributed to the national minimum drinking age law.

In any case, “underage” drinking is still sky high, even with the law, making cause and effect even more difficult to trace. As to why drinking is still high among college students, the National Institute on Drug Abuse offers the following polite reason: “Campuses provided some insulation from the effects of changes in the drinking age laws that took place during that interval.” You can say that again. Human beings are remarkable things: when they want to do something, no amount of tyranny, even that of jail, can stop them.

Still, it is impossible to silence the screams of the prohibition advocates, who trace every car accident among teen drivers to alcohol. I find this all fascinating to read because it bears so much in common with the Prohibition literature from the 1910s and 1920s. Their propaganda blamed alcohol for the destruction of the family, the persistence of poverty, the high rate of crime, the problem of illiteracy, and the ubiquity of sin generally. Clearly, their arguments were widely accepted even though it is all a big and fallacious mix-up of cause and effect. It’s not that liquor caused all these terrible things; it’s that the people who engage in terrible behaviors tend to also be drinkers. Abolishing the drink won’t fix the problems of the human heart.

So it is with teenage drinking. With two thirds and more of people under the age of 21 reporting that they have consumed alcohol in the last year, it should be obvious that the law is doing nothing but providing a gigantic excuse for arbitrary police-state impositions on human liberty, and also socializing young people in a habit of hypocrisy and law breaking. It’s like the old Soviet-style joke: they pretend to regulate us and we pretend to be regulated.

Still, shouldn’t it be illegal for young people to drink and drive? Murray Rothbard sums up the libertarian point in For A New Liberty:

Only the overt commission of a crime should be illegal, and the way to combat crimes committed under the influence of alcohol is to be more diligent about the crimes themselves, not to outlaw the alcohol. And this would have the further beneficial effect of reducing crimes not committed under the influence of alcohol.

We’ve just been through our annual celebration of Independence Day, the day on which every radio and television commentator gives pious speeches about the glories of American liberty and all the sacrifices that have been made to preserve it.

Do we really believe it? The founders would have never imagined such a thing as a national law regulating the age at which beer, wine, port, and other alcoholic beverages are consumed. If we are serious about embracing their vision of a free society, as opposed to just blathering about it, let’s start with something that is supremely practical and would have immediate effects on an entire generation: repeal the national minimum drinking age law.

You say that this is unthinkable? I say that you don’t really believe in human liberty.

Meet My Benefactor

BY PURE LUCK, I happened to sit down next to a man last week who has been my benefactor for my entire life and the large part of his, and yet we had never met. In fact, though he has been serving me faithfully for three decades, looking after my well-being and trying to improve my standard of living, he didn’t even know my name. Actually he still doesn’t, because it is slightly odd to get too personal with the guy in the next seat on a plane. We all know this. And yet I did tell him of my deep gratitude for all he has done.

This man is in charge of marketing for one of six manufacturing plants in North America that makes oriented polypropylene for packaging materials. This substance is called OPP for short. He goes around to companies that make stuff like drinks and candies and other products and explains to them the advantages of OPP—about which more in a bit.

This man is on the road constantly and has a stack of airline-rewards cards to prove it. He is like the George Clooney character in the movie Up in the Air—a seasoned traveler married to his work. His work is to be the eyes and ears of the company as it deals with its product purchasers. His life is lived in the B2B—the business-to-business transactions that are invisible to the consuming public.

His vocabulary is industry specific, filled with neologisms that no one outside of the packaging world could understand. He can tell you the chemical properties of a bag from five feet away. He can explain why a bag is easier to tear one way and harder the other. He knows the history, the process, the competition, plus the name of every large-scale bag-purchasing manager in North America, and he is happy to talk about it all.

What is his function? He is the man who makes the inventions and the productions part of our lives. Without the person on the front lines actually selling the product, everything that went into the invention and production is pointless. He is the interface between the raw materials and the final product, the man who has to have all the answers that link the great chain of the structure of production from first to last.

As for his product, you and I both know OPP well, though we probably didn’t know what it is called. It is the stuff that is used to make potato-chip bags. It is the reason that the contents stay crisp no matter what the humidity outside. You can dip the bag in water and it changes nothing. The air can be hot or cold, and still the chips inside are unchanged. The same material wraps candy like Snickers and the effect is the same.

It is also the reason that these bags can be so beautiful. OPP loves printing. It is a perfect template for designers. The results never rub off on your fingers. Nor does the printing fade in the sun. It can accept even the most subtle gradations in color. You could print a work of Michelangelo on OPP and hang it in a museum.

It turns out that potatoes fried in oil are super vulnerable to becoming rancid. Maybe you thought it was chemical preservatives (up with those too!) that prevented this. That is part of the answer but not the whole answer. The real reason is OPP. This is what stops the degenerative process. This is not a problem for other fried items, like pork rinds, which is why they often come in see-through bags. OPP is not see-through, and that is good. The product inside doesn’t like the light. OPP keeps that out too.

OPP has other nice features. It has a very low “dead-fold” capacity, which is why, when you wad up a potato chip bag, it bounces right back to its original shape. This is to protect the contents inside. That’s why, in the 1960s, bags of potato chips came with crumbled contents but today they are mostly intact and perfect. You thought it was just because it was filled with air? Well, ask yourself why the air doesn’t escape. The answer again: OPP. It seals perfectly. This stuff is impenetrable.

And get this: this is a petroleum product. That’s right, it is made of a material derived from oil. So the price of the stuff fluctuates according to the price of oil. When the price of oil goes up, your chips become more expensive, due mainly to the packaging, which is also why the OPP industry is firmly attached to the idea of liberalizing the regulations on the discovery and refining of oil. My benefactor marketing manager is very interested in this.

Now, all of this is pretty cool and wonderful. But let’s get down to the core rationale here. What is all the fuss about? Why was OPP invented, and why is it marketed, and why is it used so much around the world? Why does this man spend his life on the road and follow every bit of industry news? What is the point of all of this?

It is for one reason: my well-being. Yours, too. It is to please us and make our lives that much better. It is for the consumer that the producer produces, and it is for the consumer that everyone in all stages of production strives to make an ever-better product. It all comes down to that bag of chips you pick up with your submarine sandwich. This is why millions of people in the OPP industry around the world dance the dance. It is why the potatoes are grown, chopped, fried, bagged, and shipped to millions and millions of places.

The heck of it is that these people get no credit. No bag of chips says: this bag is made by Joe’s OPP factory. No, they are anonymous benefactors of society. Hardly anyone thinks of them. And yet, if you bought a bag of chips that was full of rancid crumbs, you would know the difference. You would be annoyed at the store that sold them, at the company that made them, and maybe even at the economic system that allows people to profit from selling bad stuff. Private OPP producers prevent this from happening, millions and millions of times per day.

You and I are running this show, and we didn’t even know it. The producers of these bags are serving us slavishly every day, and we don’t know or care. And somehow it all happens without a central planner, without government mandates, and without state-owned factories or smart people at the top directing the process from beginning to end. All that needs to take place to bring about this complex and brilliant system is that we have to have a desire: a desire for a good potato chip. The rest happens on its own—a self-managing system that responds to the tiniest of signals.

So, I would like to send a message to my benefactor who has devoted his life to explaining to food producers the merits of OPP. My message is, thank you. I suspect that I might be the first consumer who has ever said so, but in my ideal world, billions of people would be giving thanks to you and everyone else like you. You are all servants of the great cause of making the world a better place to live.

The Permanent Thing Called Cereal

SOMETIMES, FOR YOUR OWN mental well-being, it is a meritorious act to remove yourself from the hustle-bustle of daily life, with its mind-boggling busyness, technological frenzy, ever-changing professional demands, and relentless pressure to be drawn into ephemeral fripperies, and instead reflect on what T.S. Elliot called the Permanent Things—the things that bind us across time and space and unite the generations, the things that we know will long outlive our limited days on earth.

I speak, of course, of breakfast cereal. This is America’s number one choice of morning food.

As with many of the Permanent Things, its origin is religious. In the ancient days, people ate very little fiber for breakfast. Then in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a Protestant religious reformer who ran a sanatorium had the idea that eating grains was good for mind and spirit. The idea was then picked up by John Harvey Kellogg, a Seventh Day Adventist.

Specifically our minds are drawn to the brands that seem to have always been with us and always will be. They are permanent fixtures of the cultural landscape, as alive and present in the life of someone born a few years ago as those who were born many decades ago. Even today, a walk through the grocery aisle is a blast from the past for many of us. We feel nostalgia even as our children feel a sense of excitement at what is, for them, something completely new.

Nothing lifts the spirit like watching a young member of a new generation discover a classic we know so well. “Hey, Dad, can we get these great-tasting Smacks?” That phrase—which can be heard around the world—should be accompanied by music!

It is evidently very difficult to introduce a new cereal into the market. Which is as it should be. Consider the ever old, ever new. As you do, think of this. We all recognize these names from our childhood. The young today know them all too. Our children’s children will know them too, most likely. How many icons of popular culture are there—brand names no less—of which this can be said?

					Cheerios (since 1941, and still the most popular)	Boo Berry Lucky Charms
					Shredded Wheat (since 1893)	Cookie Crisp
					Rice Krispies (since 1929)	Fruity Pebbles
					Wheaties (since 1924)	Frosted Flakes
					Grape Nuts (since 1897)	Cocoa Puffs
					Kellogg’s Corn Flakes (since 1906)	Cocoa Krispies
					Cap’n Crunch (since 1963)	Froot Loops
					Smacks	Raisin Bran
					Kix	Frosted Mini-Wheats
					Trix	Life
					Alpha-Bits	Honeycombs
					Apple Jacks	Wackies

Half of Americans eat cereal every day. We eat 2.7 billion packages of cereal every year. The wonderful cereal industry uses 816 million pounds of sugar every year to produce them.

Truly, Americans love cereal! But not as much as societies where tradition is valued even more highly than here. Ireland ranks number one in cereal consumption, England second, and Australia third. And how marvelously impervious to the complaints of the puritans we are. Amazon sells a number of books denouncing cereal for its supposed dangers. How often do we hear complaints that these companies are attempting to sell junk food as if it were health food?

But we ignore it all, and just keep crunching away.

It’s true, of course, that anyone with an all-cereal diet wouldn’t fare well. But that’s not what we are talking about here.

What makes cereal great? Of course it only takes a minute to prepare: pour, pour, eat. Also, I’m not kidding about its ability to link the generations. It is comfort food, a breakfast that we eat when we are very young and very old.

It’s true that our tastes change. Young kids fall for every advertising gimmick: cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs! Middle-agers go for the grainy-health thing with the soothing voice. Never mind that it is basically the same stuff. We are what we eat, and we want to eat what we are. Cereal is there through all stages of life.

How happy are my memories from my mid-teen years, when I would get the largest mixing bowl in the house, pour in an entire box of Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries, along with half a carton of milk, and start crunching away using the largest spoon I could find.

These are the memorable scenes from our “coming of age” that we carry with us throughout life even unto death.

There are some mysteries yet to solve in the cereal world. I’ve never understood why some cereals like Sugar Smacks come wrapped in foil, whereas others, like Froot Loops, come wrapped in plastic.

I wrote Kellogg’s, and they sent back the following answer:

We base our choices for both inner and outer packaging materials on our need to deliver fresh product to stores in the best possible condition. We look at our packaging to control the absorption of moisture, control breakage and prevent any other type of damage that might occur during the shipping and handling of our foods.

Well, that’s not quite was I was after, but good for them for answering at all!

I confess to some disappointments. As you might guess from the above, my number one top favorite cereal of all time is Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries. When I was growing up there was only one kind of crunch berry: red. The idea was to eat all the “crunch” and save the crunch berries for later (unless you were 15 and you no longer cared).

Then somewhere along the way, some jerk decided that crunchberries should be many different colors, even though it is not the case in nature. So now Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries comes with green, blue, purple, and who knows-what-else crunch berries. I don’t know what’s with the people who would dare to make such a change.

Respect the classics, I say!

Homesteading for Fun and Survival

Co-authored with Manuel Lora

SOMEONE NOTED A STRANGE aspect of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989: before being broken, the students had made an exceptionally organized life for themselves—a cell of ordered liberty on so-called public property in a totalitarian society. For a brief time, they lived and experienced the possibility of self-organized social order but failed to see the implications.

So it is whenever people are confronted with the need to make sense of government-owned space (public property). Without formal law or title, they assume a kind of ownership of the space through a form of homesteading.

Think of annual parades, gatherings before sports or music events, or any other place where the property is common in name only. The same groups somehow manage to meet year after year in the same spot and hold it for themselves. In practice, the space—limited by the uses to which its temporary owners put it—is treated as if it were owned by the individuals who use it.

Why is this? What does this imply for economics and politics?

In the Lockean-libertarian tradition, homesteading is a means to establish an initial claim to a scarce resource. It consists of the exercise of purposeful action over nature. The resource is usually land, but it can extend to bodies of water and also animals.

One of the rules of homesteading is that you have to mix your labor with the resource if you are going to claim to own it. This is perfectly reasonable and intuitively correct. Christopher Columbus can’t show up to North America and declare that he owns it all any more than the first settler in space can claim to own the galaxy. The resource must be put to specific use by the claimant.

Today, we rarely see real homesteading in action because much of the land we see already has a legitimate owner. But we do observe many types of informal homesteading, the practice of which underscores the universality of the idea of ownership.

Let us consider a common example: a day at the beach. When people head to the beach, they bring chairs, set up umbrellas and roll out towels. Once their things are in order they have effectively homesteaded that area of the beach for as long as they stay. The area under their tutelage extends beyond the perimeter of their initial space.

Given cultural and density constraints, groups do not usually set up their belongings right next to one another. Rather, some breathing space is left for personal comfort and to allow others to walk between groups.

So how much space is legitimate? Imagine you are standing at the check out lane at the grocery store and the person in front of you turns around and says, “By the way, I am holding 10 spaces behind me.”

The response would be: The heck you do!

How about if you are searching for a seat at a theater and are told by one person that he is holding an entire row for some friends who are late? Or what if some guy wants to prevent people from parking in a lot because he says he is using every space when there are no cars there?

In each case, we instinctively recognize the absurdity of those claims. Homesteading stands on solid ground yet its practical application can often be a grey area.

The case of Mardi Gras

The last weekend of Mardi Gras is well known for the influx of tourists. Some might travel there to drink heavily, others to observe or participate in the debauchery, and others to enjoy the parades and admire the floats.

Whatever their reason for traveling to the Big Easy one thing is certain: it is crowded. And since the parades roll down major avenues, the median (called “neutral ground” by the locals) gets packed with revelers and the problem of land scarcity is exacerbated. There are tens of thousands of people competing for a relatively small amount of space. To make things worse, many Mardi Gras enthusiasts, particularly the residents, often camp early and set aside space to watch the parades later, homesteading their spot.

Mardi Gras tradition has established that anyone who wants to reserve a space on a parade route must do so by setting down a useful and accepted carnival good. Generally, people use tarps, chairs, ladders, grills, or coolers.

Let’s return to the hypothetical avaricious homesteader who wishes to claim large spaces for himself. Suppose that he rolls out a piece of tarp that is 100 feet long and 20 feet wide. Further, assume that he is alone.

Just as the farmer cannot simply claim he owns land that he himself has not used, our greedy parade watcher does not have a proper claim to the entire area under the large tarp. What happens with bogus claims? Other groups of people would (and do indeed) see through the farce and call him on it. They could very well order him to release most of the space he has falsely claimed as his own.

Other enforcement techniques could go further. Competing groups could disregard the egregious exaggeration and simply use the wasted space. It could very well come to the use of force. But this would be rare, unnecessary, and counterproductive: a rogue homesteader would have to continually battle with everyone else.

These norms did not occur due to legislation or special mandate. Over the years, people recognized the legitimacy of the first user, the homesteader. Today, the preoccupation is no longer about whether one can homestead a piece of land to watch parades. The worry is about getting there early to be the first one and enjoy the show.

The case of tailgating

Tailgating is the practice of gathering together with friends before a sports event to eat, drink, and talk until the game begins, and sometimes to watch the game on television if people find themselves too inebriated to walk to the sports event.

They sometimes arrive a day in advance, driving their travel trailers and preparing for the long haul. Far from being a mere picnic, this is a huge institution with a tradition that dates far back. Vast sums are spent on food, special clothing, decorations, electronic contraptions, transportation, special grills, and refrigeration equipment—all in the interest of tailgating.

The tailgaters gather at spots public and private. The private interests sell space to them for profit. The public authorities permit them to homestead the space because they are pressured to do so by public opinion.

But it is far from being a free for all. Tailgating groups constitute private clubs and they congregate in the same space week after week in the football season, and year after year, even for decades. The groups manage themselves as clubs, with rules letting people in or out of the group. Some are run like dictatorships and others like democracy, but, in each case, the members consent to the management structure.

The space they occupy is as large as necessary for the group, which usually consists of between five and thirty people. Each group claims a space by putting up a tent, parking a trailer, or setting up a large screen television with chairs in front. A claimant who insisted on possessing more than is necessary is quickly set straight by other would-be claimants of this scarce space.

There are enforcement mechanisms to keep people out. Interlopers are scolded, shunned, and sometimes blasted with exhaust fumes and horn blasts. In the culture of tailgating, people have a surprisingly certain sense of ownership, and even others are willing to assist in the enforcement of order lest their own homesteading assumptions come to be challenged.

Year after year, it comes to be known that certain allocations belong to certain tailgating groups. Here is the Jones group. There is the Smith group. There is the Jefferson group. Surprisingly, these homesteading rights are even transferable. If one group falls apart or fails to come together one year, another would-be claimant is notified and given permission to use the space.

This pattern of ownership repeats itself over many acres and even miles of property, with lots of various sizes and shapes honeycombing all available space. To watch a town be transformed in a matter of hours, from unoccupied to completely occupied, and do so in an orderly fashion, without any titles to property being issued, and conflict kept to a minimum, is a thing of enormous beauty, a testament to the capacity of people to organize themselves in the absence of a central planner, formalized rules, formal title, or even the opportunity to trade their property at a profit.

So the Lockean rule about mixing one’s labor should conjure up no great controversy. It is a principle that is practiced on a regular basis. When public property is truly in demand, it is effectively privatized by the actions of individuals who understand that ownership precedes order. And their claims, however temporary or intertemporally elaborate, are reasonable and enforced by widely accepted norms: what Rothbard called the Relevant Technological Unit, the size of which depends on the type of good or resource in question.

The reality of informal homesteading also illustrates that the concept of ownership is not something that must be imposed by the state or even law. It is built into the very fabric of human action in a world of scarce resources, and it requires massive force to undo. Conjure up visions of equality and collective sharing, if you must, but in the real world, property and ownership are part of the way we think, act, and get along in the world.

In Defense of Indifference

A MERICA RETURNED FROM THANKSGIVING holiday oblivious that Washington is still whipped up into a frenzy about the War on Terror, the prospects for another attack on the homeland, the creation of a new homeland security department, and the impending war.

What’s odd is that these people are convinced that everyone else in the country is as hysterical as they are, following every twist and turn in the on-again-off-again war, glued to the newspaper’s details about the new department, hanging on every new terror war.

No way. My visit to my extended family in Texas has convinced me of what I’ve suspected for a long time: no one outside the Beltway really cares about or even notices much of what consumes the Beltway people from day to day, not even concerning big issues like terrorism and national security. Okay, some Manhattan residents care because they were hit by terror the last time—not that anyone there believes that the feds are going to be able to prevent the next attack.

As for the rest of the country, using Texas as a proxy, nothing. Not a word. In answer to a question about a poll showing plummeting regard for U.S. foreign policy, Bush said that his terror war is about “freedom and doing my obligation to make sure our children can grow up in a free and safe society.”

Now, this is clearly a goal everyone shares. Every day parents work to make sure their children are safe and grow up in freedom. Is there a living soul who actually believes that Bush is playing any role in ensuring safety and freedom for our children? If so, wouldn’t they constantly be expressing gratitude as versus completely ignoring such statements?

Instead, the issues dominating the central Texas town in which I spent a week run as follows: too little rainfall, the merits of a new bridge downtown, the prospects for the local high school football team, the modernizing tendencies of the new pastor of First Baptist, the produce selection at the new grocery store, the local real estate market, and the upcoming tour of homes.

Within my family, the major issues were the glories of my mom’s new Dell computer and her free-standing turkey roaster (success!). My own cloverleaf yeast rolls were a bigger deal than the prospect of war in the Persian Gulf.

In fact, not once, not once, in seven days of visiting with friends and relatives in all directions—and these are politically-minded people, well educated, and unusually attentive to public affairs—did anyone provide an expression of thanks concerning Bush’s efforts. In fact, national politics didn’t come up at all. Once, someone mentioned Bush’s wife’s suits. Other than that, nothing. It wasn’t quite taboo; it just wasn’t on the radar screen. This is the first time in 20 years that issues of politics and government were completely absent from discussion.

My nephew came close to raising a political issue. He is on a high school debate team, and the subject is what the government ought to do about providing care for the insane (an idea akin to suggesting that the blind lead the blind). But this is a debate that could have taken place in the nineteenth century as much as the twenty-first century. It has no unique bearing on current-day controversies or realities. The topic was raised in the same way a boy would discuss his science project.

Now, whether you oppose or support what is going on in Washington, one has to admit it is important, and probably ought to be discussed. Bush is proposing a state of permanent war. He has created a fascistic monstrosity in the form of the Department of Homeland Security that aggressively shreds Constitutional safeguards of civil liberties. The U.S. is preparing to obliterate a poor, defenseless country in the Persian Gulf in order to grab its oil fields for government-connected corporations. Columnists on the left and right have raised alarm bells about the Nazification of America, and no one cares. Is this a good thing or bad thing?

It is both. On the one hand, the indifference of the public is a sign of resistance to our D.C. masters. All the nonsense about how 9/11 “unified” the country, brought everyone together in the new realization of the importance of civic uplift and the state, is mostly mythical. There is no gratitude shown toward the political, and, in fact, there seems to be less civic unity and nationalist fervor than ever. The government has failed to shore up the public image of itself and its power ambitions, as polls are increasingly showing.

The patriotism in Texas, Bush’s home state, is for Texas and for institutions close to home. The Texas flag is far more commonly flown than the national flag. This has always been true, and it is true now. It seems that the common judgment in this land so far away from Washington, a place where the sense of being on a frontier is still quite intense, is that the goings-on in Congress just seem to have no bearing on their lives.

On the downside, does public indifference grant Washington something of a license to reconstruct the country in ways of which people are unaware when they should be aware? Quite possibly. And yet from the perspective of the state, an indifferent public can be compared to a bear that is neither violent nor tame but merely asleep.

What about government surveillance powers and the shredding of the 4th amendment? Doesn’t anyone care about that? The typical Texan doesn’t believe that the government would ever go after him personally, or that the national government really has the power to do so should it want to. All the talk of the impending doom of essential liberties seems like an abstraction. That thing called the federal government is an eternity away, an institution that collects taxes and other dumb things but otherwise has little impact on anyone’s life.

Even more of an abstraction is concern for the fate of innocents abroad to be killed by U.S. bombs. I recall in the early days of my political enlightenment (1979-ish), the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, committing every manner of atrocity on a daily basis. I remember thinking: How can the Russian people sit by as their sons engage in a massacre against this innocent country next door? What must it be like to live daily with the knowledge that one’s own government is both totalitarian at home and militarily imperialists outside its borders? Why don’t people do something to stop the insanity?

Why, indeed. Now I think I know the process by which a population comes to tolerate despotic foreign rule. It must be a universal process. First, the government establishes precedents in small ways and steadily tightens the grip. Second, it uses a crisis as a way of dramatically stepping up what used to be the exception and making it the rule. Third, the government disempowers the people by foreclosing all opportunities for those who do care to do anything about the problem. Eventually, people come to shut out unpleasant information and focus on other things.

What would libertarians have these people to do? Must they become intensely concerned for their future and throw themselves into the political battle? Anyone under the age of 60 in Texas who is concerned about liberty is conditioned to support the Republicans, the party of low taxes and small government. But it is the Republicans who are doing this to us! What is the politically active person supposed to do? Back more Republicans? Toil away in the vineyards of the Libertarian Party?

Another traditional option would be to let your president know your views. But the Bush administration is notoriously aloof to outside opinion. Consider the Iraq War. There is a massive and international antiwar movement alive and growing. But how does it affect the Bush administration, which has all the guns? The White House spokesman doesn’t even bother to address the arguments of the opposition. You have to be Brent Scowcroft writing in the Wall Street Journal to merit so much as a public denunciation.

What else can a person do? Write a letter to a Congressman and get a form letter back? Bother your friends and neighbors with your political opinions and cause them to think of you as a fanatic oddly interested in irrelevant things? Collect petitions; participate in rallies; sport bumper stickers? None of these options hold out promise of success.

So from the average person’s point of view, there is really nothing that can be done about the current state of affairs. As Paul Gottfried says, the power elite are running things and everyone else is disenfranchised and disempowered, so instead people just go on with their lives. Indifference is the only civilized option, or so it would seem. Such is the way average people have come to think about American liberty and the rise of tyranny in our time. The public doesn’t consist of “willing executioners” so much as indifferent spectators to the demise of freedom and the slaughter of innocents abroad.

And yet, in a quiet and potentially revolutionary way, these Texans are involved in activities that constitute a threat to the regime. They are refusing to believe, refusing to show gratitude, refusing to be drawn in. Instead, they are raising families, faithfully attending church, passing on solid values to their children, turning off their televisions, and doggedly pursuing normalcy and bourgeois life rather than becoming part of the frenzy that Washington and the media is demanding from all of us.

Where D.C. demands our first loyalties, the loyalties of the Texas middle class are with family and friends. Where D.C. demands all authority, the bourgeoisie in Texas is dismissive of such demands as the ranting of the political class. Where D.C. insists on the supremacy of the nation state, most Americans, it would appear, still believe in the supremacy of the individual, family, kinfolk, and faith.

So long as this is the case, the battle to save our freedoms is not won but neither has it been lost. The bear is hibernating, and no one knows what it will do if it is poked on to too great an extent. The uncertainty alone works as a kind of restraint on power.

Three Cheers for “Petty” Concerns

MY 7-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER ASKED me the other day whether I was born before email. “Yes,” I confessed. Then she quickly followed up: “Where you born before plastic?” “No,” I said, “I was born after plastic but before email.” Satisfied that she had placed me within the structure of the history of the world, she went back to her weekend play.

There’s important truth here. That this tribe and not that tribe controls Kabul isn’t the kind of thing that changes our lives, so it’s hard to understand the hysteria. What really drives forward the data of history as we know it are the products we use in everyday life, things like the computer, the DVD, or the CD burner. These simple and so-called petty economic concerns—not war and politics—are what define progress and distinguish one generation from another.

Thus it is extremely newsworthy that baby bells are suffering because everyone is canceling his second phone line, what with the advent of high-speed internet access. Turns out that the second-phone-line shtick was big business for these little monopolists. Other ominous signs include the tendency of college kids and even small businesses choosing the cell-phone-only option, just like they do in the Third World. Now, tell the truth: isn’t this more interesting than the latest squabbles between the Tajiks and the Pashtuns in that other planet we call the Middle East?

So let’s talk about the trends that really matter, the first one concerning fast food and the second one dealing with the color of our teeth. There are revolutions taking place in both sectors that will transform our lives within the next twelve months.

The fast-food revolution begins at Arby’s. That’s right, that old fuddy-duddy of a fast-food outlet, founded in 1964, that hasn’t even been in the running during the wars that have pit Burger King against McDonald’s. The idea of a hot roast beef sandwich was big stuff in the 1970s, but it’s been downhill ever since.

Even during the market hysteria of 1998, the Triarc Restaurant Group (which also own T.J. Cinnamons and the Pasta Connection) suffered startling blows, with the value of the invested dollar falling by half. In 1999, Arby’s captured only 3.9 percent of the fast-food market. Does anyone really look forward to an Arby’s? It’s only what you eat if you can’t find any other outlet where the drive-through lines are short.

Now to the big news: Arby’s revolutionary “Market Fresh Sandwich.” It may be the greatest sandwich you have ever tasted, and this is not hyperbole. Whoever came up with this sandwich, first introduced in May 2001, is a genius, a person who thinks completely outside the box, as they say. It is a radical departure from everything that has ever defined Arby’s, or fast food itself, for that matter.

There are no warming lights, no greasy buns, and no wilted lettuce. You open the wrapper—and it’s a deli-style wrapper—to find a magnificent meal, a thing of beauty, stacked high with all-fresh ingredients. It comes on whole grain bread, and contains real Swiss cheese, sweet red onions, and fancy honey mustard. With the first bite you will swoon with delirium. You have finally found the perfect lunch, a sandwich to rival the best New York deli at fast-food prices (under $5).

Not only that, but there’s no waiting. The sandwich is sitting right there for you to pick up in an instant. It comes in four varieties, and every one is fantastic: Roast Beef and Swiss, Roast Turkey and Swiss, Roast Ham and Swiss, and Roast Chicken Caesar. To insure quality, the company decided in favor of a national distribution of the ingredients, on solid grounds that they didn’t trust the quality of local produce.

I was so astonished by the quality that I did an informal look around the restaurant to see who else had ordered this item. It turns out that more than two-thirds of the patrons had the Market Fresh on the table, and just talking to a few people, it was clear that they had the same impression I had, that this is an incredibly good meal.

Now, Arby’s has started a second round of national promotion for this item, based on interviews with real customers. If this takes off and how can it not, think what this could mean for the whole industry. McDonald’s will have to follow suit, then Burger King, then Wendy’s, and then everyone else. Still, in the end, Arby’s will remain the leader, simply because they were first past the post.

The delis and deli chains are going to suffer some serious competition. And the political left, which has been fulminating against the great American hamburger for a decade, won’t know what to do. The “fast-food nation,” as the title of a book by some leftist prig puts it, will be eating a completely different product, supplied in the same capitalist manner that put the hamburger on the map.

One can never tire of watching with amazement at how the market responds to consumer demands with new innovations. Thus, we come to the second example of the great revolution of our times: teeth-whitening strips, as introduced by Crest this past summer. A box costs between $30 and $40.

These simple strips contain hydrogen peroxide, and are worn on the teeth for 30 minutes at a time, twice a day for two weeks. They turn your teeth pearly white, thus achieving every consumer’s dream that has been promised but never achieved by the toothpaste industry for 30 years. The effect lasts for six months and then you have to do it again. They are now available in every pharmacy, and they have become so popular that they are put in the checkout stands at grocery stores.

The phenomenon first appeared to me about a month ago, when someone I’ve known for years smiled and I noticed that his teeth were incredibly white. I happened to comment on it, and he revealed the great secret. Then I was at the flower shop and noticed that the checkout lady had sparkling white teeth. Then I began to take greater notice, and saw that every student at the university library was walking around with super-white teeth, and everyone seemed oddly smiley.

Now the South is a smiley place to begin with, but these strips have made it even more so. You wonder if these strips could even enact something of a cultural revolution in crabby places like New York and Detroit. We all know that when you laugh the world laughs with you, whereas you cry alone, but soon the whole world will have every reason to smile as widely as possible. Soon, stained teeth could become odd and even regarded as unsanitary. Thus the advent of teeth-whitening strips could be as revolutionary as the invention of deodorant itself.

I know the neoconservatives and state builders say concerns like this are “petty.” They would rather us live in a world where people think only about building the warfare state and sacrificing for the common good, where we huddle up to dream about sending our youngsters off to fly bombers and kill enemies of the nation state. Not I. To me, the great society is one that loves inexpensive deli sandwiches and the whitest teeth in the history of the world, and relies on voluntary market cooperation to get them.

I envy the generation born after today that can brag that it came after teeth whitening strips, fast-food deli sandwiches, and CD burners. I’m willing to bet that six months from now, not even the people of Afghanistan will speak of the liberation of Kabul from the Taliban as a decisive moment in the history of the world.

In Praise of the Tourist Trap

I’M IN FLORIDA FOR an event sponsored by the Mises Institute, and flying into Fort Myers meant walking through the glorious micro-civilization that airports have become, little utopias of commerce and plenty. In the airport, you can stand in one spot and choose to walk twenty feet in any direction and find yourself in a Spanish or Thai restaurant, or grab a book from a literary looking place, or have a Star-bucks, or eat a decadent cinnamon roll, or pretend to be on Savile Row at a high end men’s store, or perhaps get a massage or toss down a martini or two, trying on the high life for as long as it lasts.

You say it is all sheer fantasy, that this is, after all, just a stupid airport. I say: what does it matter? They have the stuff and we want the stuff. What’s not to like? Should we prefer some barren building like the Driver’s License Bureau? You know that if government were wholly in charge, this is the way it would look. Thank goodness for free enterprise and what it is permitted to do to make life more interesting. All these commercial establishments are wholly dedicated to slavishly serving you and me and every other traveler, giving us what we want in the most convenient way possible. This stands in contrast to, for example, the TSA.

Ah, but what about the “tourist trap”? These are stores that specialize in heavily marketing what passes for local culture and fobbing off tchotchkes on us at inflated prices. So, here is how it works. You fly into Dallas and you are confronted with a hat store that sells 10-gallon hats and tacky belt buckles, plus rattle snake tails, and every variety of prickly pear jelly you can imagine. What an outrage that a store would dare to make money on people’s crazy lust for things related to Texas!

But, you know what? It turns out that in Texas people really do wear hats like that. They really do. And those rattle snakes are real. They are crawling around right now in surprising places, and such things are not altogether common in others places like Maine and Singapore. So, yes, these are distinctively Texan. And so it is with all the rest of this seeming junk. This is the very essence of Texas culture, boiled down into consumable bites. And it turns out that people actually do want these things.

How often does it happen that you fly into some odd place, decline to buy the local tchotchkes, and then kick yourself later? Maybe when you get home to Chicago, you might wish that you had brought back some prickly pear jelly and a rattle snake tail to show your friends? It turns out that these shops really do meet a need. They allow us to experience local culture and take home a memento without having to do much work at all.

The first shop I found when flying into Fort Myers offered these fantastic shells, 5 for $10. I picked up a big starfish, a sand dollar, some fancy looking crab condominium, a long pointy thing from the bottom of the sea, and I threw in one more shell for good measure. Now, you say, this was a really stupid purchase, for I could have easily walked out on the beach and picked up buckets of shells for free.

That might be true enough, but I’m not out walking on the beach. I’m in my hotel room blogging, and blogging all the more joyfully knowing that I have a suitcase full of really cool looking seashells.

But I haven’t mentioned the greatest find of all. And tell me whether you have ever seen anything like this before: it is the head of an alligator! It is not a big thing. It is a small alligator but it is real, with teeth and all. It was $14.99. I consider this to be a bargain. I’ve never seen one before, and I hope that I will never encounter the live version. Someone else went to the trouble of raising these nasty things, hacking off their heads, freeze drying them or whatever they do, painting them with some shiny stuff, packaging them up, and then finally slogging them to the airport to sell to a “tourist trap” store, which then in turn sells it to me.

And I now have a treasure from Florida to take home—without having to visit a single swamp or risk life and limb. You say that I’m a victim of a scam, a naïve tourist who coughed up money for a worthless thing? That I’ve been taken advantage of by a voracious merchant who preys on unknowing non-Floridians? None of this seems true to me. It seems to me that this “tourist trap” gave me exactly what I wanted and I’m deeply grateful.

The more traveling I’ve done, the more I’m alert to the need not to be suspicious of these local merchants. When in Rome, buy rosaries blessed by the Pope. When in Mecca, buy some tickets to paradise. When in New York, buy a Big Apple tee. When in Paris, snag that tiny model of the Eiffel Tower. In Russia, get some of the dolls that stack inside of each other. In Pittsburgh, revel in beer and steel.

These tchotchkes are made for us. We should be happy to be trapped by the prospect of owning them all. If this is oppression by shysters, the world could use even more of it.

What Lawnmowers Can Teach Us

THE GREATEST SINGLE LIFE-ENHANCING step you can take in early summer is to change your lawnmower blade. It’s a thing that gets ever duller with use, and you adjust and adjust to the diminished cutting ability with each mow, until the point that you think it is normal that it takes all your strength to shove the thing across the yard and leave a trail of clippings and unevenly cut grass in your wake.

You can do something about this, and it doesn’t involve sharpening with a whetstone. A new blade costs ten bucks or so. In a few minutes, you will find yourself gliding across the lawn as if on rollerblades.

Maybe you think that your mower is an old, off brand and it’s not likely that the hardware store will have it. Not so. There is one right there on the shelf that fits perfectly, as you will see. The length will be right, the holes for the screws will be in the right place, and it will have the right groove things that make it settle in there like it was meant to be.

The existence of replacement parts of this sort is nothing to take for granted. Note that the replacement part is probably not made by the same company that made your mower, which might be very old, even by a defunct company. An amazing market standardization has taken place, and how? To me, it is not intuitively obvious why this sort of standardization would happen.

Imagine that you are the king and in charge of economic planning. It occurs to you that people need new lawnmower blades, lest summers in your kingdom be a relentless source of frustration for all the people. Perhaps the first thought is that we need some sort of regulation that will impose a sort of uniformity so that new blades will fit old mowers and that blades will be compatible across brand names.

In any case, this is how someone who has no faith in the market might think. But look at the market in fact: the best possible standardization has occurred in a way that provides the highest benefit to the broadest swath of consumers. And it happens without a single edict or vote, and without any commission meetings or bureaucratic investigations. It turns out to be in everyone’s interest, and so it is done.

The problem of replacement parts is a huge part of the engineering process for any good you buy. This is because capitalist production considers the long-term value of a good, and how it will be used in real life. This is not the norm under socialism. In the experience of the Soviet Union, fantastic amounts of machines of all sorts stood idle, year after year, because the users couldn’t find replacement parts, which weren’t typically part of the central plan, or, if they were, they were the parts you didn’t need. When anything broke, it stayed that way or was replaced with an entirely new machine that broke in the same way, and so on. This problem tended to play havoc with the production data. It means nothing for 50,000 farm tractors to be produced in a factory for each of three straight years if one-third of them are useless at any given time.

That’s not to say that all capitalist production encourages fixing things rather than replacing them. When I was younger, it was common to fix everything: clocks, irons, radios, stereos, televisions (I vaguely remember tubes). Now of course you have guarantees that guarantee replacement, and, if the guarantee is out, you just toss it in the trash. My mother had the iron she received at her wedding shower for 20 years. Now we think nothing of tossing them out and getting a new one for $6 at Walmart.

So whether something should be replaced or fixed isn’t something you can know a priori. This is an economics question that is entirely dependent on economic conditions that are known only in the real-world experience of the market economy. We might, for example, someday advance to the point that farm equipment should be tossed out rather than fixed—just as with microwaves, stereos, iPods, and so many other small machines. Again, no central plan can determine, in advance, what is the most economically advantageous practice apart from real market experience.

It turns out, for example, that there was more wrong with my lawn-mower this year than just the blade. One minute it ran fine, and then when I tried to restart, it would run for 3 or 4 seconds and then sort of sputter out like it was out of gas. Now, I knew all about air filters, oil, blades, but how the fuel gets to the engine involved a part of this machine that I just hadn’t had any experience with.

I took it to the repair guy at the small-engine shop, who said he would be happy to work on it but it wouldn’t be ready for two weeks. This of course is ridiculous. I asked him if he could fix it right now, since it will probably only take ten minutes. He said no, that would not be “fair to other customers.” I pointed out that fairness had nothing to do with it since his existing customers have already contracted to wait up to two weeks, whereas I would like to have mine fixed now. Still, even in the face of this impenetrable logic, he refused.

The next step was perfectly obvious. I had to go to a convenience store at the outskirts of town and wait for a customer who had the look of someone who knew about lawnmowers and ask him. Finally, the obvious candidate appeared and I marched up to him and told him what my mower was doing, replicating the sound. He knew immediately that it was the carburetor and explained how to clean it. Back home, I did what he said and the mower started right up again, and it gave me great satisfaction to know that the fool who was babbling on about fairness was denied my business.

Now, part of the reason it was urgent that I get this fixed right away had to do with an unlikely charitable act on my part, which brings me to another life lesson given to us by the lawn experience. One day about a month ago, my neighbor’s lawn was looking pretty shabby but she was out of town. I waited as long as I could, and finally decided to undertake the good deed of mowing it. I did one better: I edged it, weed-and-feeded it, and weed-whacked it.

Glorious results, and when the neighbor returned she praised me to the skies.

Now, the wise reader is right now laughing at my incredible stupidity. Apparently the whole world knows a rule in life that had entirely escaped me: never mow your neighbor’s lawn lest you be stuck with the unpaid job for 20 years. It’s like giving a stray cat milk. It only seems like the right thing to do but you end up having to do it at regular intervals. Since my unfortunate act of charity, I found several people who have stumbled into this precise situation in which they ended up mowing several people’s lawns on the weekend, and resenting the heck out of it.

So as I mowed and mowed, I began to think about opportunity costs. I wonder what I could be doing right now that would actually earn me money. Perhaps, just perhaps, it is in my interest to actually pay someone to mow my neighbor’s lawn, pay someone to do my act of charity, so that I can earn money doing something else. Maybe everyone would benefit.

This really got me thinking about paid charity in general. What are the ethical issues associated with, for example, paying someone to stand in your place at the soup kitchen? Perhaps you could pay many people to do all your volunteer work for you, provided it is not too specialized and that the opportunity costs associated with your doing it exceed what you would have to shell out to volunteer by proxy. Isn’t this what we are really doing when we donate to charity?

You might say: hey, you are giving up the spiritual benefit that comes from doing the work yourself! Well, I can assure you that the benefit I get from mowing my neighbor’s lawn is subject to the law of diminishing marginal utility. It is at least conceptually possible that doing good deeds should also be subject to the logic of the division of labor like everything else. You might say that is crass, but this much we learn from a weekend’s experience with the lawnmower: the market may not give us a perfect world, but market-based thinking can get us closer to the best possible world on which no amount of central planning could possibly ever improve.

Tortillas: The Promise and the Tragedy

EVERY EVENING WAS A magic evening in the household of Mrs. Rede who lived across the street and made fresh flour tortillas for dinner every day in her kitchen that smelled of cumin and peppers and in which hung a captivating Aztec calendar that enticed me with pagan charms.

There was no rolling pin anywhere in sight. She would mix up the ingredients (Recipe? What recipe?) and let them rest in a bowl in the shape of balls.

As dinner hour approached, she would flatten them with her hands in some special way and put them on an iron griddle one by one, and place them each in a plate with another plate on top. They were always there—flat, fresh, slightly toasted but always moist—in the middle of the table, free for the taking and stuffing, by anyone, anytime, and they were always perfect.

Can you imagine?

How many of us have attempted to make tortillas? Many, many. But we don’t have the mastery that is necessary. You can spend an hour and come up with a decent result but at great expense of time and energy. And why do it when there are so many wonderful and seemingly authentic brands of tortillas on sale at the store?

But now let us face the tragedy. As good as these store-bought tortillas look in the package they never quite make it to the table in a form that seems right. You can turn them into enchiladas of course. But that’s no great thrill. What you really want are burritos: a clean package that forms around the insides in a way that conforms to the ideal of the Redes’s house or a great Mexican restaurant.

But here’s what happens. You try to wrap stuff in them, and they begin to sort of crack in strange places. Yes, you can roll them like a carpet but that’s sort of silly. (Don’t get me started on so-called wraps and “roll ups.”) There’s the option of placing them in the microwave, but that just creates a warm version of the same problem. You can place them on a griddle, but that just creates a hard exterior and can even make the cracking problem worse.

It turns out that there is a way around this problem, and forgive me if you already know of this. Maybe I’m the last person on earth to discover this, but just in case, I’m going to lay it all out here.

My discovery began with a visit to one of those fast Mexican food stops, the kind where you stand behind the counter and order the ingredients of your choice. I ordered the steak burrito. They took out a tortilla and put it into some magic steam machine for a few seconds, which made it pliable, stretchy, and cooked. Then they added ingredients and packed them in tight. They snapped it closed to create a neat and clean packet of joy.

Ah, so steam is the secret! But how can you do this at home? I lost sleep one night thinking this through and finally it hit me.

The next morning, it was breakfast burrito time, using a new technique. I pulled out a large pot and filled it one-third full of water (hot water, to save time). I set it to boil hard. On top of the pot, I set a pie-cooling rack. Really anything will work: a pizza pan with holes, a cookie cooling rack, anything that will hold something solid and let steam through them.

Once the eggs, salsa, and cheese were completed in the pan next to the pot, I set my first store-bought tortilla on top of the rack and let the steam rise. Wow, it works! I left it there for about 15 seconds, flipped it over, and did the same, and took it off. What I had here was a tortilla transformed.

Now I added the egg-cheese mixture, turned the sides in, and rolled it up. The folding action at the end was a snap. It adhered together on all sides, like it was meant to be shaped that way. The whole package cooled in a couple of minutes and it was ready to eat. No crumbs, no folds, no tears, no leaks. It was perfect!

Oh Mama Rede, have mercy on me for not making my own! I would never presume to attempt to recreate your nightly wonders! But with the aide of commerce and a bit of kitchen ingenuity, we may finally have a system that comes close to replicating that ideal you created for all of us who had the pleasure of watching your hands at work!

The tortilla: from promise, to tragedy, and back again.

Rebecca Black’s “Friday”: A Libertarian Allegory

THE ASTONISHING POPULARITY OF Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video—which became the YouTube meme of all memes in the course of a wild six weeks—has mystified many critics.

Was it shared and watched so wildly because it was so bad? Certainly the overwhelming judgment on the part of viewers is that it is atrocious—and yet it is hard to know what that means, since 85 million people not only watched the video, but also downloaded the song, bought the ring tone, and devoured every available bit of news about the singer and the song.

Using the principle of “demonstrated preference,” this music video ranks as the most popular in human history.

Perhaps it is the digital-age version of Mel Brooks’s smash Broadway play The Producers, a story about an attempt to write a play so bad that it flops on the first night. But, in Brooks’s hilarious telling, the results were the opposite: the play was so bad that it was brilliant, and it became a smash success, however inadvertently.

Lovers of liberty are often drawn to such scenarios because they highlight the unknowability of the future, the unpredictability of human choice, and the way in which the intentions of the planners (in this case, the producers and writers) are easily upended by consumer choice, which is the driving force of economic progress.

The Producers-like irony is deepened in the case of Black’s “Friday” video because it was not intended as a parody or an attempt to create a flop. That makes it all the more brilliant as a piece of viral art. It somehow captured an archetype of bubblegum pop but with innocence and the absence of an edge.

Kids say it is awful and they hate it. They do not, despite what they say. Teens often claim to hate what they really love—as only a passing familiarity with teen romance patterns illustrates. The girl who can’t stop talking about the guy she hates is surely protesting too much.

Musically, the song wouldn’t seem to offer that much, but I would point out that its word play is not entirely conventional. The repeated placement of a three-syllable word “partying” into a duple meter creates some off-accent downbeats that are not entirely intuitive.

Far more significant is the underlying celebration of liberation that the day Friday represents. The kids featured in the video are of junior high age, a time when adulthood is beginning to dawn and, with it, the realization of the captive state that the public school represents.

From the time that children are first institutionalized in these tax-funded cement structures, they are told the rules. Show up, obey the rules, accept the grades you are given, and never even think of escaping until you hear the bell. If you do escape, even peacefully of your own choice, you will be declared “truant,” which is the intentional and unauthorized absence from compulsory school.

This prison-like environment runs from Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to late afternoon, for at least ten years of every child’s life. It’s been called the “twelve-year sentence” for good reason. At some point, every kid in public school gains consciousness of the strange reality. You can acquiesce as the civic order demands, or you can protest and be declared a bum and a loser by society.

“Friday” beautifully illustrates the sheer banality of a life spent in this prison-like system, and the prospect of liberation that the weekend means. Partying, in this case, is just another word for freedom from state authority.

The largest segment of the video then deals with what this window of liberty, the weekend, means in the life of someone otherwise ensnared in a thicket of statism. Keep in mind here that the celebration of Friday in this context means more than it would for a worker in a factory, for the worker is free to come and go, to apply for a job or quit, to negotiate terms of a contract, or whatever. All of this is denied to the kid in public school.

In the video, the rush to comply and conform to the system begins with the main character in the morning, when the drill begins with waking up and preparing to go. She eats cereal for breakfast—a bit of trivia that one would hardly expect in a pop song but a first sign that the topic is reality-based and not idyllic or romanticized.

And where is she headed? To catch the official, tax-funded school bus, which, though it is not shown, we know is painted yellow today just as it has been from time immemorial, since there is never really progress or change in the state-run system. The tax-fueled machine comes to your door to snatch you away from home, where you are loved and valued, in order to transport you to the cement structure that teaches you about the glory of fitting in and believing what you are supposed to believe.

But then the protagonist experiences a foreshadowing of the liberation at hand. Arriving before the school bus is a car with “my friends.” They are smiling and inviting her to join them on the ride. And it is in this context that she confronts that glorious institution that is otherwise denied to her and every student in government school: human choice.

It might at first seem like a trivial choice: whether to sit in the front seat or the back seat. But the point is not the choice set; the point is the opportunity to exercise some degree of human volition, to use one’s own brain to control one’s own body (“gotta make my mind up”) and live with the consequences of that choice. It is a similar situation to anyone who has found himself let out of prison. These people will report the sense of elation that they feel in even the smallest opportunity to make a choice on their own.

At this moment of choice, note that the melody departs from its single-note, drill-like recitation to suddenly rise up a fifth, a musical interval that has traditionally been used as a trumpet-like announcement. And once surrounded by friends of her own choosing, the imaginings of Friday’s end become more real, and thus does the melody become more complex and celebratory, exploring a great range of musical colors and rhythms.

The protagonist returns, again and again, to the profound meaning behind the seemingly trivial choice to sit in one seat or another. Again, it is not the choice set that matters here but the reality of choice itself that is otherwise denied to her and all her friends in the state-run system.

The remainder of the video features scenes of “partying,” which turns out not to be about drugs or drinking, but merely hanging around in yards and milling about with friends. There is no attempt here to manufacture a predetermined order, no standing in lines or obeying some central plan. Rather, the beauty is seen in the pure fact of voluntary human association, with kids milling around and joining this group or that, wearing clothes of their own choosing and talking with friends of their own choosing.

Even the recitation of the days of the week—a portion of the video that has been most subjected to ridicule—underscores the theme of captivity and liberation. What is there to do in prison but count the days? In story and legend, the prisoner watches the light outside and makes tick marks on the wall to mark the passage of time. So it is with this protagonist, who uses calendar pages to do the same.

When she finally announces, elatedly, that “I don’t want the weekend to end,” she is expressing more than just the desire to be permanently relieved of educational tasks; it is a cry for the civic order to recognize the human right of liberty itself. The video ends with that hope that there will be no return to the twelve-year sentence, but rather that “partying” could become a permanent state of being, not just for her but for everyone.

To be sure, I’m not arguing that all of this was overtly intended by the songwriter or the singer. The point, rather, is that the plight, the hopes, and the dreams that are reflected in this video, however inadvertently, tap into a sensibility and a longing of a generation for a certain kind of freedom from a system that has ensnared them against their will. This might be the driving force of its popularity—and precisely why something that people claim not to like is evidently so loved.

A child-like dream of Friday and what it represents for kids trapped in public school, kids who are transported around on tax-funded buses and ordered around by tax-funded propagandists for the state, is a plausible allegory for the plight of all people imprisoned in state-controlled environments.

America’s Underground

THESE WERE SHARP BUSINESSMEN, the four guys who pointed out that there were three dead trees in my backyard that needed to be cut down lest they attract horrible bugs that would infest my entire property. They would cut them down and remove them for $475.

In cash.

We dickered back and forth and finally settled on $350. In cash.

They attacked the trees like ants on ice cream. In 45 minutes, the trees were gone without a trace.

I paid them. In cash.

I didn’t break any laws in paying them this way. They broke no laws in accepting cash only. The state is egregiously invasive in our financial affairs but it hasn’t actually banned the use of cash.

So it was last weekend when I was traveling and needed some copies made from a Pakistani-owned copy shop in the Midwest. They would provide them on high quality, colored paper for 15 cents each, but only if I paid in cash. And so I did.

I asked for a receipt. Whoops, the printer on the receipt machine was acting up so she had to write a receipt by hand. It was indecipherable, but I took it anyway. Again, I wasn’t breaking any laws in paying with cash and she wasn’t either.

And yet we all intuit that there is some reason why cash payments are more valuable in the American service sector than checks or credit cards, nudge nudge, know what I mean? With cash, you enjoy the highest likelihood of staying out of harm’s way. If you don’t want to formalize your business model and get embroiled in the entire public-sector apparatus of withholding tax, social security, mandated health care, minimum wages, and the rest of the mind-boggling apparatus of central planning, doing a cash-only business is the wisest choice.

Now, this is interesting. The social apparatus of taxing and regulating is said to be good for us all. Without it, our sense of well-being would plummet. We need worker protection and all the glorious services of the state. We need protection in old age, and protection from exploitative capitalists. We comply with the whole command-and-control burden because we are better off as a people than if we acted merely on our own.

So let’s say that I apply this in the two cases mentioned above. I have a sneaking suspicion that my tree-cutting friends are cutting their tax burden as well, and I wonder about this Pakistani printer. Maybe they are not paying minimum wage to those employees, nor taking out social security, nor providing medical benefits. So, as a good citizen, I make an inquiry. I demand to see their immigration papers and tax records. I look them up in the official directory of obedient businesses, if such a thing exists.

I conclude that these are unseemly operators. It’s true that I know I can get good service from them but I do not want to partake in a transaction that will hurt others in society. Regulations and taxes are good for everyone, and so I will have no part in this black-market activity. So I decline to hire these tree cutters. I decline to let this lady make copies for me. I wash my hands of the unsightly mess and move on.

What happens? Well, my dead trees still stand, and my copies are unmade. The suppliers are denied a chance to serve others and profit from it. A transaction that both sides desired does not take place. Under the theory that regulations and taxes are good for us, we should both feel better that we didn’t exchange. Somehow we don’t.

Or let’s say that the suppliers of these services suddenly experience a conversion, and, newly enlightened as to their civic obligations, they decide to formalize their operations. But of course that means that the tree cutting service is now one third more expensive, and the copies cost that much more too. I decide that it’s just not worth it, and the exchange doesn’t happen. Again, we should feel better but somehow we do not.

The question I keep asking is: how is society actually better off? My copies are unmade, my trees are uncut, and these businesses lose profits, which means they have less for providing for their children and for making a good life for themselves. This is especially tough in recessionary times when the prices of everything are rising and unemployment threatens all marginal workers. Try as I might, I just don’t believe that anyone is really getting hurt in a cash exchange that enters into the grey area between the underground economy and the official economy.

In the developing world where government bureaucrats rule everything with outrageous arbitrariness, the sector of society that functions in this grey area is called the “informal sector.” It is a burgeoning area of study for many academics on the right and the left and for different reasons. It is mostly populated by the poor and the poor have the largest stake in the outcome.

Hans Sennholz wrote an excellent little study on the topic for the Mises Institute back in 1984. The upshot is that the larger and more intrusive the government, the more the informal sector flourishes. It is a safety valve of sorts, one that is ignored by GDP counters and nearly invisible to macroeconomic planners. One wonders just how large the U.S. informal sector truly is. I’m not just talking about the drug trade or prostitution or off-the-books gambling. I’m referring to wholly legitimate and wholly legal trades of goods and services that take place outside the purview of the public sector. I’m going to venture a guess that every single reader of this article is capable of telling stories similar to mine above. The cash-only economy is pervasive in the United States. How big, no one knows for sure, obviously. The lesson here represents a wholesale overturning of the official rationale for the interventionist state: that it is good for us. You can turn these informal scenarios around in your head again and again and still fail to see how we as a society are better off when mutually beneficial exchanges that would take place absent intervention fail to take place because of the intervention.

What’s more, the existence of the informal sector provides a useful blueprint for reform. They can be completely abolished by lowering the costs associated with compliance. If the costs of compliance fall low enough, what is informal becomes formal and no one has any reason to continue to hide anything. The agenda for a free market might be summed up as nothing more than the complete legalization of the prevailing informal sector, which itself is created and sustained by a tax and regulatory burden that is too heavy to be sustained.

And yet the impetus for reform is precisely the opposite. The politicians believe that if they could stamp out the informal sector, crack down on cash-only business, shut down the fly-by-night tree cutters and photocopiers, we would all be better off. What will it take for the public sector to begin seeing the informal sector as a model to replicate rather than a symbol of anti-social economic activity? In a phrase, it will take an enlightened political class that is more interested in the well-being of society than the power and glory of the state.

In Praise of Lard

THE USE OF LARD in cooking is slowly being rehabilitated but the cultural shock of the stuff hasn’t diminished in the slightest.

There I was at the store buying just two products: lard and salt. They sat on the black conveyor belt awaiting checkout at the store. The guy behind me—something like this happens every time I buy lard—asked incredulously: “What are you going to make with that?”

So my routine lecture began. I use lard for making biscuits. Sometimes I fry those lard biscuits in lard, and these I call “hot puffs” and eat them with honey. Lard is essential for pie crusts. It makes great chocolate chip cookies. I can’t imagine frying potatoes in anything else. It is excellent for chicken. Pancakes and waffles are never better than when made with lard. Popcorn not fried in lard (Air pop? Please!) is noticeably inferior. Cakes are wonderful with lard. The refried beans you eat are not authentic if they do not include lard. All that amounts to nearly a bucket per week of lard use. I admit it.

All the while as I’m giving this list, the interrogator is looking me up and down and checking whether I look fat and unhealthy, with a slight upturned lip of disgust. Look, I really don’t know if lard is unhealthy as compared with vegetable oil or butter or peanut oil or some other poor substitute. I do know that when I fry with lard as opposed to vegetable oil, there is more lard remaining in the fryer, from which I conclude that less is in the food. And don’t even talk to me about that fake lard product called “shortening.”

I also know that lard has a very high smoke point, so it is cleaner and makes less of a mess. Also, lard, which is nothing but rendered pig fat, has been a staple of the Western diet for many centuries. I see no reason why I must automatically adopt the widespread prejudice against it and regard it as a poor-person food. Nor do I trust what some government expert says. As regards dieticians, you can find one around who will endorse or condemn anything you want. And do I need to point out that Crisco has recently come under fire for its trans fat content—a problem that lard does not have?

What I do find interesting is that the campaign against lard began during and after World War II, when lard was put on the list of rationed items in the United States and England. Every government intervention is an opportunity for some private company to come along with some substitute. Sure enough, this was when margarine and shortening began to be pushed on the American diet. Somehow, butter made a solid comeback many decades later. But lard somehow never did. I can only credit a very effective marketing campaign by the shortening producers.

Are we going to let government’s wartime central planners control our lives 70 years after the fact? I don’t think so. Not in my case anyway, regardless of what my fellow shoppers say. Sometimes embracing a life of freedom involves taking risks and paying the price. You can have my lard when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.

In Praise of McCafe

IT’S A STRANGE THING that all the leading progressives feel schadenfreude toward all the Starbucks closings around the country.

I mean, this institution samples all the fashionable attitudes in music, aesthetics, and politics, subtly embracing the ethos of the archlefty consumer class: happy to promote commercialism provided that the commercialism points to all the right environmental and social-justice causes.

Still, Starbucks expanded too quickly and too aggressively and eventually, for whatever reason, earned the wrath of the tribe. (The Wobblies seem particularly annoyed that they have avoided unionizing.)

For my part, I’m glad to see Starbucks go down the old-fashioned way: bested by a rival. In this case, it is the least likely rival that one might expect: McDonald’s. Have you seen their amazing coffee machines that crank out lattes and cappuccinos with the best of them? Yes, I know that these treats have long been available in urban areas, but they only recently reached my home town.

The machines that make the stuff are sheer wonders. They have two canisters on top with beans that get ground fresh with each new cup ordered. The entire machine is self-contained with digital operation. And they do it all in minutes for $2 per cup. I’ll never stand around Star-bucks for 10 minutes listening to bad 1980s alternative rock again.

The blogs are furious about it all, of course, with people denouncing McDonald’s for stirring in the foam and other heresies of coffee-drink making, but I could not care less. I find them delicious and I’m thrilled to be free of all that Starbucks pretense.

McDonald’s feigns attempts at latching on to current political trends, offering low-fat this or that or claiming to be environmentally friendly, but it is never very convincing (“Our standard operating procedures include regular litter patrols of the areas around our restaurants.”), and thank goodness. This is a company that is all about the thing they do well, which is bringing to life the Jetsons world of push-button food, a vision that has enticed me since childhood.

One has to appreciate this company’s capacity for continually reinventing itself and bringing all of its products to all social classes. They perfected the kids’ playground. They have a pitch for the hip urban class. They have a country side too. They do fish. They do breakfast. And sometimes it seems like a Quarter Pounder is the best thing in the world. What’s more, they don’t do what they know they can’t do.

Now they have taken a luxury drink like a cappuccino and found a way to bring it to every living soul, in a package that is a beautiful and unashamed mimic of the competition. In this sense, it embodies the very soul of capitalism: efficiently universalizing society’s most desirable things.

One of the reasons that the elites loathe places like McDonald’s, or Walmart, or Target, or any of these places that cater to Everyman—and you might suppose that the champions of the workers and peasants would love these places—is precisely their capacity to rob the rich of their distinctive social markers. One day it was a sign of class and distinction to drink a latte; the next day, every construction worker is doing it.

Places like this make it difficult for the rich to set themselves apart from everyone else. This is a message I pick up from both Mises’s Anti-Capitalistic Mentality and Garet Garrett’s wonderful novel Harangue. They both seek to explain the strange elitism of the Left and its opposition to capitalism for the masses. And they both discern that the answer lies in the way that the market is so slavishly devoted to serving the needs of the average person as opposed to society’s philosopher kings.

And that’s why McDonald’s efforts to latitudinize the latte is not garnering accolades from the blogosphere. No matter: this is a success, as you can see by the lines and all the excitement. It is especially pleasing to see how much the employees enjoy the action. Next time you are in, ask about the machine and talk to the management about it how it works, how they were trained, and how it is drawing new crowds into the restaurant.

Yes, it is all about profits. Sorry socialists: this also means that it is all about people.