March 25, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL

This is a long and interesting article about how happiness and material possessions don't necessarily go together. Psychologist Abraham Maslow developed ideas about the "hierarchy of needs." Once your essential material needs are met, according to his theory, then you can become "self-actualizing." Maybe it's time we concentrate on meeting the essential needs of people, which includes education, health care, decent housing, and social communities. It's time to stop emphasizing the big houses and big cars and other grandiose symbols of material success. As the planet's resources have become more stressed, it makes sense. This article by Bill McKibben is at www.alternet.org:

For most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch. You could toss one stone and hope to hit them both. That's why the centuries since Adam Smith launched modern economics with his book The Wealth of Nations have been so single-mindedly devoted to the dogged pursuit of maximum economic production.

Smith's core ideas -- that individuals pursuing their own interests in a market society end up making each other richer; and that increasing efficiency, usually by increasing scale, is the key to increasing wealth --have indisputably worked. They've produced more More than he could ever have imagined. They've built the unprecedented prosperity and ease that distinguish the lives of most of the people reading these words. It is no wonder and no accident that Smith's ideas still dominate our politics, our outlook, even our personalities.

But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest. And that changes everything. Now, with the stone of your life or your society gripped in your hand, you have to choose. It's More or Better.

CONSERVATISM IS TOO EXPENSIVE

Even if you can put away such exemplary traits as compassion and decency, you have to reject conservatism if you're a practical person. Conservatism is just too expensive. Jane Smiley makes some interesting points in this article about the glaring costs of conservatism. Carpet bombing is a lot more expensive than using good intelligence to find our enemies. Polluting the environment creates exponentially greater costs in the future. The article is at www.alternet.org:

What costs more -- a vast middle class who can support themselves and their towns and cities and schools and children and elderly relatives, or a vast class of working poor who can barely support themselves and certainly cannot take care of failing schools, deteriorating housing stock, surging crime, and chaos proliferating all around them? Just because the conservatives don't want to pay for something doesn't mean costs are not incurred; they are simply put off for another day, when they will be geometrically higher.

The root problem of conservatism is that it is tribal -- conservatives cannot or will not believe in such basic concepts as epidemiology, ecology, or even Keynesian economics (not to mention brotherly love). But even though conservatives have been fighting interconnectedness forever, it continues to exist (that "reality has a liberal bias" sort of thing). Regulations and benefits like healthcare and diplomacy exist not out of soft-hearted liberal guilt, but because taking care of matters before they get out of hand is cheaper, while hiding your head in the sand, clinging to us-and-them beliefs, and arming yourselves to the teeth is ever more expensive. In Bleak House, Charles Dickens pointed out to a ruling class that was reluctant to assume the expenses of public sanitation that smallpox could not be excluded from the houses of the rich simply because the rich disdained the poor. That was a hundred and fifty years ago, and we are still having to point the same thing out today. You don't have to recognize the connection (as in smallpox, as in global warming) in order for it to be there.