Outcomes, Not Intentions

You know what’s weird about leftist/feminist iconography? One of the things they borrow heavily from is the WWII-era Rosie the Riveter image. You know, that woman flexing her muscle in a 1940s empowerment message from the federal government?

Can you think of any crowd less inclined to support anything war-related nowadays? We’re supposed to believe they’re all heroes now for buying Michael Moore books, throwing bricks through shop windows, and peddling conspiracies about how Bush knocked down the towers. If ever there were a nationalist female hero, it was the Rosie the Riveter types who toiled thanklessly in manufacturing plants across America in support of the national war effort, and now their image—all they have to show for their efforts, really—has been coopted by a bunch of lazy subversive degenerates who hate their country. Genuinely disgusting.

And while I genuinely want to give Rosie types their due, another crowd fond of them are those intoxicated by the notion of women rolling up their sleeves and doing big things. That, to them, is proof of women “kicking ass” and showing that not only can they do everything men can do, but they can—and do—do even more. Only problem is, YOU DIDN’T. Icons of Rosie the Riveter depict great feats, but why is there any reason to believe that things women did 70 years ago spill over into the accomplishments of women today? Last I checked, wearing heels and a pantsuit to your HR job and getting Starbucks protein platters at lunch does not confer upon you the same strength, character, and heroism it did upon the women who assembled B-17s in factories in the midwest with the country, not their 401ks, on the line.

And in any case, much as the Rosies are owed their due, do women REALLY want to go toe to toe on might and sacrifices here? You think squeezing the trigger on a pop rivet gun is more courageous than taking a belt of MG42 ammo in the chest on Utah Beach? You think moving sheet metal around a warehouse is equal to foot patrols in the sweltering humidity of Guadalcanal? Sweat on the brow vs. PTSD, getting bayonetted, the Bataan Death March, chronic diarrhea, suicidal thoughts, diving on a grenade, storming buildings, snipers in the trees? Not even close!

One more thought is that morons who think the message is substantially about male vs. female relations have missed the point in the HUGEST and most INSULTING way possible. The lingering lessons from the Rosies is about American men and women working together—NOT about which gender “kicks the most ass,” as many of these knuckle-dragging ideologues seem to think. I’d like to think the REAL Rosies would be spinning in their graves to know that, for all their sacrifices, their iconography was being coopted by cowards and degenerates, and that the only lesson modern women were taking away from their toils was that “women kick more ass than men!”

I was reading an article about a new-ish exhibit by Gunther “Doctor Death” von Hagens, who is famous/infamous for his “art” in which real human cadavers are posed to mimic some kind of activity. The thought of allowing a corpse, whether or not it belongs to you, to be glibly posed and molested for the purposes of art, which is to say for purposes of entertainment, is an indication of a cultural shift waaay away from a healthy respect for the dead. I don’t care if these people donated their bodies; it’s macabre.

In any case, the new-ish exhibit posed a female corpse atop a male corpse; his sinewy penis presumably stuffed up inside her vagina as the couple were made to mimic the act of reverse cowgirl sex. Ghastly. Yet we have apparently produced a generation of people who, in the comments section, seemed to get their jollies off by daring anyone to criticize the “work,” and if they did so they would unleash vindictive accusations of excessive propriety (all propriety is excessive, to them), and then, perversely, insist that it was “childish” for anyone to be a detractor to such an exhibit.

But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this was the reference to the blindness of creation. Note that I neglected to capitalize ‘creation,’ it being a process assumed by this self-described “mature” audience to be random, cold, and unguided. It’s quarter to midnight on a weekday and I still have things to do so I can’t dwell on this as much as I’d like to someday; for now, suffice it to say Answers in Genesis (AiG) were right when they predicted that the general theory of evolution would turn masses into sociopathic apologists for all manner of horrors. The commenters demanded to know what was truly so shocking about the exhibit, particularly since, as they argued, we’re all just a bunch of random, false-conscienced hunks of meat anyway. Wonder if that’s what they remind themselves when they hear of a toddler’s decomposed corpse turning up in a ditch somewhere? Just meat, folks—nothing to see here!

Anyway, among my many complaints about this tendency, how about the fact that they act like cosmic toughs, and how they act unmoved by the prospect of ending up in the ground someday and “that’s it,” and how, in their infinitely comfortable and invincible lives, they act as if they fear not death? Puh-leeze. From the falsely empowered “science”-touting high school grad up to the Christopher Hitchenses of the world, these wind-pissers can act as tough and as un-a-feared of God and death as they want, but anybody who understands the human condition—which is to say most of us—knows better. They’re pissing their intellectual pants.

The second complaint is the “science”-induced sociopathy that they like to suddenly turn off for just long enough to insist there is some kind of a priori morality outside of organized religion. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Either embrace the animal sociopathy of your we’re-just-meat philosophy, or adopt a religious code of morality—just don’t pretend you can wield both.

Initiative 1125 would have worked to ensure that (a) Washington road and bridge tolls are spent on the roads and bridges where they were collected only, (b) that tolls are set by state legislators (politicians) rather than unilaterally by unelected DOT bureaucrats, (c) that light rail would not be allowed to travel along the I-90 bridge, (d) that tolling would end when a project was paid for, (e) that variable-rate tolling would be banned, and (f) that transpo tolls would not be spent on non-transpo-related projects, among other things. The failure of 1125 ensures that tolls can be spent on any transpo project, that DOT bureaucrats can unilaterally jack up tolls, that light rail can travel along I-90, that tolling can continue forever, that variable-rate tolling will be permitted, and that transpo tolls can be spent on virtually anything the state fancies.

I can’t help but think that the failure of 1125 owes to its muddled approach. I think letters a, b, d, e, and f probably could have passed muster with voters, but Eyman et al. threw in light rail (a good policy prescription) and in the process lost a bunch of people. The initiative lost by just 2%, and with zero advertising campaign (versus the millions spent by the opposition), the inclusion of a ban on light rail on I-90 was easily enough to move gormless independent voters, tipsy on quaint Europhilic tales of rail success, into the “no” camp. Had he excluded light rail, and possibly variable tolling, no doubt the thing wins safely.

As an aside, I’m actually in favor of variable rate tolling. Seattle is a geographically difficult city for traffic engineering, and as steady population growth pairs with other constraints, we suffer a tragedy-of-the-commons-like scenario in which we ultimately (now or in the future) just don’t have the capacity and the resources to handle all the new demands being placed on the system by motorists. I have a problem with everything else that 1125 does, but variable-rate tolling, in my view, is probably necessary going forward. It’s not about social engineering in any sinister kind of way; it’s about accommodating ALL the traffic that an unmolested engineering scheme would accommodate, just at different times of the day. With our constraints, I don’t believe there is any immediate, superior alternative going forward.

It’s too bad, though: light rail and commuter rail have bankrupted (and are bankrupting) government agencies around the nation and the world, and pernicious bureaucratic lies have been covering up passenger rail’s systemic waste and unfeasibility for decades now, and yet as all this comes to a head, recession and all, the gormless liberals and independents of Washington State are begging to be saddled by something they admit they will probably rarely (if ever) ride, to the point where they are willing to accept a toxic mess of policy disasters as a tradeoff for a single heady abstraction about transit.

Another angle of this to consider is that 1125 and 1183 (liquor) were both castigated by the Left, and some in the middle, as having been paid for or, ideally for proponents, “bought” by corporations. The No on 1183 campaign spent much of its $7.5 million telling us that Costco felt our vote was worth just $16 apiece—broken down, that’s how much Costco was spending per voter. Before I go any further, though, think how insulting is their “will you be bought for $16” approach. Assuming, probably incorrectly, that the $16 is in any way accurate, what does a “no” vote get us? It ensures continued, undue union financial and political dominance, undue government influence, the retention of nanny-statist, Prohibition-era law, hundreds of millions of uncaptured tax dollars, a steady lack of competition, a government monopoly, continued high prices and taxes, consumers working around a government agency’s often-inconvenient schedule, and more. And I’m supposed to be deterred from eliminating this loathsome bureaucracy because I want to retain my “my vote can’t be bought” street cred? Leave it to the bureaucracy to try to sway you with a predictably inefficient argument: preserve the leviathan because it’s a leviathan!

The greatest curiosity, however, is this whole anticorporate approach, particularly given that 93% of the “no” campaign’s funds came from out-of-state wine and beer distributors, who together spent about 1/3 what Issaquah-based Costco spent. Hey, at least Costco wants to pony up $16 for my vote—these asshats only wanted to spring for around $5 for my vote, and they’re not even from around here!

Meanwhile, Eyman and the 1125 campaign were criticized as being bought and paid for by nefarious corporate interests. In fact, only Bellevue real estate owner Kemper Freeman kicked into the “yes” campaign, and even then for under $1.1 million. The guy is a private individual; not sure why his grant qualifies as nefarious corporate stoogery. Genuine corporate donors to the “yes” campaign contributed a scant $7500, which probably wasn’t even enough to print out petitions. All other donations, which came from other private individuals (or associations), together comprise fewer than 10% of 1125’s income. The people decrying 1125’s “corporate” stamp—which amounts to less than 1% of its income—need to examine the $700,000 contribution made by crony capitalist-leviathan Microsoft, the $40,000 donation from insurance giant Pemco, the $30,000 from commercial developer Wright & Runstad, and the $25,000 gift from government contractor Puget Sound Energy. The No’s raised $2.3 million in funds, of which more than a third came from mega-corporations, and spent $1.3 million on things like (dishonest) advertising—something “yes,” with its allegedly vast and nefarious corporate receivership, could never afford to do.

In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek said this:

The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule; there is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves ‘the good of the whole,’ because the ‘good of the whole’ is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done. …[C]ollectivist ethics… knows no other limit than that set by expediency—the suitability of the particular act for the end in view.

This seems apt, considering that the statist Left can be seen fulminating on and on about the pernicious stamp of corporations, and about corporate sponsorship, and about corporations “buying” elections, but when a couple of mega-corps offer to pony up deep six- and seven-figures to support their cause, suddenly they’re not so bothered by corporate sponsorship. I don’t think everybody has their price, but I think the statist Left certainly does.

A couple of weeks ago I accompanied my dad to an event he told me was “a seminar on house flipping”; something he had signed me up for without my knowledge or permission. As we pulled into the parking lot of Everett’s freeway-adjacent Holiday Inn, and for the first time examined the event flyer, realizing it was hosted by none other than apparent TV scammer-twerp Dean Graziosi, it occurred to me that I had been taken, twice: first insofar as “Everett” really meant the I-5 Holiday Inn, and second insofar as “seminar” meant a get-together for devotees of a get-rich-quick charlatan. I then realized I had been taken a third time, this time by the organizers, as the self-proclaimed guru Dean Graziosi was not even in the same state at the time. Instead, it was being run by Dean’s regional lackeys, who donned the usual charlatan uniform of penny loafers, Dockers, and a polo (so that we know (or just think) that these guys have enough F-U money that they can just show up to their own events looking like they just finished up the back nine at Eagle Crest). When I saw the cast of characters waiting in the conference antechamber, I didn’t look terribly closely (I wasn’t captivated by anything I had seen, frankly) but they looked sympathetic in that they were clearly frustrated, beaten-down contractor types. The all-too-slick administrators handed us forms to sign, and I naturally omitted a bunch of information they were prying for that was frankly none of their business: my email? My personal cell phone number? Not gonna happen.

When we finally filtered into the conference room, I realized what a poor judgment I had made about the other attendees. There was not much to be sympathetic about. I won’t describe everyone, but let me paint you an outline here: lots of gray hair pulled back into pony tails, obesity so acute as to require canes (even Rascal Scooters) and sitting on the edge of one’s chair so the gut could spill through the knees, phlegm-saturated smoker’s coughs, lots of sweatpants and elastic attire, lots of people that look vaguely familiar to characters I’ve seen on 1993 episodes of COPS Atlanta. We were also way over the beard quota: when we entered I didn’t know if this was a real estate seminar, a Civil War reenactment, or a private screening of Alex Jones’ Loose Change.

The presentation begins, complete with that type of crowdwork in which we’re initially browbeaten for not being adequately excited, plus a bizarre lecture by the head lackey on how he doesn’t have to be here and if we don’t want to be there we’re welcome to scram. Huh? Anyway, the thing is way too rehearsed, and he’s way too good with the Powerpoint remote. There’s an embarrassing “outsider moment” where he pronounces “Redmond” as “Richmond,” as in Richmond, Virginia, which I think of as the equivalent of a performer shouting “what’s up Newark?!” at a concert in Denver. He starts off by introducing the paradigm that a “paycheck-to-paycheck mentality” is one that looks at an investment opportunity by asking how much it will cost them, but a “wealth creator’s mindset” (or something of that nature) is to ask how much it will make them. I’m instantly turned off at the hokum, but only later do I realize the true brilliance of it: it is ultimately used to get people to loosen the grip on their own wallets when the team’s dozen useless products are hocked throughout the seminar. Right: “don’t think about our obscene prices for vague services with no guarantees, just get out your checkbook.” And that is its own irritation throughout the seminar, as after about a half hour it becomes apparent that the whole seminar is really a protracted infomercial. We are introduced to no fewer than a dozen pricey services, some promising-sounding (to be generous) and others calculatingly frivolous add-ons. I wrote down all the usable information they provided, some of which was genuinely useful, but even then it took up no more than a half-page on an undersized notepad. Meanwhile, the oddities easily consumed two full pages, at which point I became pickier about what I wrote down so as not to exhaust my hand.

On to the meat and potatoes of the thing, we are told first about how we can get a government grant for a first home. Forget for a moment the libertarian outrage of using your neighbors’ money to subsidize your personal lifestyle, and let me add that when the speaker clarified that you must not have already owned a home—including a mobile home—the guy behind us was audibly let down. Clearly the prospect of a government-subsidized first home appealed to him, but was shattered since he already owned a mobile home. I should also point out that the same guy was later audibly disappointed to discover that Graziosi’s hard-money lending services didn’t deal with loans above $500,000. Not sure which kind of character is living in a trailer and needs a loan clearing a half-mil. Back to the government grant, we are further instructed that if we choose to use such grants to build Section 8 housing, our revenues can be further guaranteed by the fact that the federal government will be delivering our rent checks! What’s more, we can get even more subsidies for facility repair if our low-income tenants destroy our property, and yet more grants for property improvement. In other words, we can get our neighbors to pay for the building, and to pay the tenants’ rents, as well as for their damages and our own maintenance. In fact, we can get our neighbors to underwrite and assume all risk for the entirety of our personal investments! It obviously struck me as absolutely scummy that outlining this scheme was the first order of business for the Graziosi Gang. Clearly recognizing the sketchy nature of multifaceted government exploitation, the speaker then tries to cleanse the palate by launching into a truly bizarre, unsolicited, and in any case inexplicable soliloquy about some marginal, one-off home-for-mentally-retarded-adults he set up, possibly to convince us that behind these openly duplicitous moneymaking scams lies the heart of a charity warrior. Yet to the lucid, it was clear this was a tax writeoff to bump him into a lower bracket, making the appeal that much more disturbing.

Some other notes: in attendance were some familiar characters, including the woman (in this case) who believes public speeches are being delivered specifically to her, and responds at full volume as if this is a one-on-one conversation. The hilarious part was that the monologue was packed with rhetorical questions, which audience members (mainly this woman) would chronically respond to with the wrong answer! Thus, after the speaker had just made clear that “winners” think about how much an investment will make them, audience members will respond to a prompt to that effect by shouting that winners think about how much it will cost them, showing at once that the audience, however engaged, not only failed to grasp the basic concepts behind the speech after an hour of presentation, but had apparently armed themselves with what the speaker believes to be exactly the antithesis of his message.

There is another instance wherein a gray-ponytailed man who looks like a less fit, more redfaced Ocelot from the Metal Gear Solid games, responds to a prompt asking who in here can’t spare even a single moment for this side-career by announcing that he cannot spare a single moment. Clearly the speaker’s point was to say we all have stuff to do and we all have down time and that the ratios are different for everyone, but that we all have some time to spare, whether it’s 15 minutes a day or 5 hours. But Ocelot is hung up on what is apparently a boast about what a busy guy he is, such that he derails the speaker’s “spare time” spiel for the purpose of this strange self-aggrandizement. The speaker takes him on but the guy is relentless, insisting that he has not a moment of spare time. The speaker asks if he ever watches TV, to which the guy replies “very little,” and even though the speaker has therein proved his point, Ocelot refuses to budge and even seeks the speaker out after to plead his case with him that he hasn’t a moment to spare. He couldn’t have done any better if he came in as a heckler.

The guy behind us was surely a bit unstable, and had what was surely a clinically diagnosable tic wherein he made an unsettling lipsmacking noise. I couldn’t figure out what it was at first, and kept turning around to find out who was eating what at that volume, but every time I did the noise would cease. Ultimately I realized it was the creepy mustachioed man behind me, and I swear to you I am not exaggerating one iota when I say he did it more than 1000 times over the course of the presentation.

The Powerpoint presentation contained a million images of stock business photography, and was reminiscent of those career-counselor days in high school Home Economics classes where a mortally flawed questionnaire incorrectly identified dozens of eighteen year-old boys as born manicurists (this was literally my “most suitable career” in high school, according to one such battery).

At one point I leave to eat some food (the three-speaker monologues go on for no fewer than five hours), and while I’m sitting outside, the most depressing moments of all occur. As I’m sitting out there, I realize we are sandwiched in between health care professional conferences. On either side of us are legitimate businessmen, and when some come out for lunch, they see the erect screenprint promo in which Dean Graziosi, resembling an upright Internet banner ad, entices. They wander over in morbid curiosity, scanning the room to confirm that in fact there really are enough desperate rubes to fill a room, and to see what desperate rubes look like, and they’re actually laughing and making contemptuous jokes about Dean and the sheeple who buy into his pap. I’m nearly crestfallen to think my own dad might buy this on any level.

As I said, the services were introduced piecemeal throughout the seminar (upselling was probably 60% of the seminar), and the costs were downright criminal. The main takeaway from this Everett seminar was that in order to get the really juicy tidbits, we needed to stop wasting our time at this picayune get-together and ante up $2000 (plus $1000 per guest) to go to the 3-day “workshop” in Bellevue next week. In a seriously depressing moment, there was a mass exodus to the back when it was announced that the first six individuals to pony up two Gs would receive personal help from the Graziosi Gang on their next “investment.” If it’s not already clear, these are not people to whom $2000 comes easy, so it was saying something that they bought into the high-pressure sales pitch and parted with what probably represents three months of income for them right now. I would be remiss in not pointing out that the exodus to the back, complete with its audible, cathartic gasps and shrieks of excitement, was reminiscent of the altar calls I witnessed at parochial school wherein emotionally confused adolescents dashed to the front of the room to dedicate their lives to Christ (the same people did this roughly every two weeks). But instead of running to the altar for religious redemption, these people ran to the folding tables in the back to offer their nearly-depleted credit cards to the Graziosi Gang in a bid for financial salvation—and the passions were at least as high. Sadly, once these people had parted with the entirety of Q2 FY2011’s earnings, they learned that they also needed to buy in to another $2000 audio series they simply could not live without, but that since they already bought into next week’s workshop they could have it for the practically free sum of $600! Moreover, how would they get by without Graziosi’s $1000 grant writing service?

And if those services (and more) were just too much right now, not to worry: for only a few hundred bucks you can go home today with Graziosi software that, with your help, can assist you in (a) setting up a portal site to make commissions on drop-shipped items and (b) more easily list your items on eBay. The efficacy of this pitch was somewhat diminished by the fact that the speaker had started out by getting the audience to agree on how easy it was to use eBay, then had to call an audible as he realized that in fact he needed to make listing things on eBay seem arcane to make the software appear to be indispensable. Credibility was further diminished by the fact that these predictably pricey add-ons were totally unrelated to Graziosi’s realty business, are notoriously spammy to any veteran Internet user, transparently exploitative of the computer illiterate, manipulative of people who were told that their kids deserved something like this and it would be cruel to withhold it from them, and finally by the fact that attendees were ultimately urged to use this specifically as a means of buying into the entirety of the Graziosi merch collection. Yet I have to think that if you’re close to the retirement age (as most of these people were) and you don’t have $2000 in savings, you’ve got bigger fish to fry than getting your ass out to a Dean Graziosi real estate seminar.

The main speaker concludes his monologue by showing us rubes what this kind of scrilla can buy you. He shows us a picture of his massive, custom houseboat on Lake Powell. I’m actually intrigued by the idea of houseboating down Lake Powell with friends someday, so I look it up when I get home. Completely unintentionally, my search leads me to a Google Images page on which I realize that, unless someone leaked his private photos, the pictures the speaker was using are from his own Google Image search! Scandalous!

There were about 60-70 people in attendance, and at least a dozen people ponied up for the $2000 workshop and more, so I have to believe the Graziosi Gang cleared $30,000 on this one pathetic event. Apparently they do two or three (maybe more) of these every time they’re in town, so again I have to think they close on $100,000 per city. And all this time you thought Dean was getting rich off of real estate!

I should also point out that one surefire way to know Dean is a knowingly ruthless exploiter is that he is covering his tracks with what probably amounts to thousands—maybe tens of thousands—of dollars dollars in SEM and SEO-optimized websites. Thus, when you search for “Dean Graziosi Scam,” the first results will be a Dean Graziosi website in which Dean promises to help you navigate through real estate scams! You’ll find that this is the case on dozens of other websites, as Dean and his team have done preemptive damage control by “being his own critic” and framing the narrative against him, rather than letting his victims frame it. On genuinely critical sites, Dean’s yesmen have populated the comments sections with pat, cut-and-pasted sycophantic endorsements of the Graziosi system. Ten years ago this was diabolical; today, it’s sociopathic.

An article in the WSJ today reflects on a new study—the largest of its kind, apparently—demonstrating that yoga has moderate ameliorative effects on lower back pain, but that its mental effects don’t appear to be measurably positive. More telling, its ameliorative effects on lower back pain were mirrored in similar classes which practiced non-yoga stretching. Also interesting, a third group was given a self-help book about stretching and meditation, but their effects were less than half as positive as the other two groups’ effects because the non-class setting is not conducive to keeping people honest and faithful to the regimen.

This all appears to suggest that the only effective part of yoga is its stretching, but since the mental effects just don’t exist, the whole Asian/Indian collectivist spirituality element is just a frill for spiritually insecure Westerner-contrarians (and exploitative eastern charlatans) to latch onto. Of course, the notion that any of yoga’s benefits have everything to do with stretching and nothing to do with yoga itself has sent the yoga spin machine into a tizzy, and I see in the comments that yoga apologists are fulminating wildly and coming up with all sorts of explanations for why this just isn’t true: this is viniyoga, of course that kind doesn’t provide mental benefits! Yoga worked for me, don’t believe a stupid article! The study is miguided, and the reporter didn’t understand yoga holistically! Yoga does have effects, they just can’t be measured!

I did Yoga X through P90X, and when I wrote a comprehensive review at Amazon of the whole P90X program, in the process dismissing Yoga X as “not worth doing” for many people, some yoga apologist came in over the top claiming that in fact yoga had all sorts of superior health benefits. These benefits were not only benefits in general, but they were superior to the benefits offered by other means like weight lifting, he claimed. “Yoga…sculpts the body in a way that weights do not,” he said, and argued it might be P90X’s “most demanding” workout (totally ludicrous, by the way), going on to imply mental and spiritual benefits that can not be achieved by “merely” stretching (I had suggested supplanting Yoga X with a MPT-approved stretching regimen). When I politely pointed out that there appears to be no evidence for the idea that yoga “sculpts the body” in a way that weights do not, he agreed, but then went on to say “it can be observed,” urging me to “look at photos” of people in dance etc. Riiight. So I can look at Ronnie Coleman on one end of the weightlifter spectrum and perhaps Ryan Reynolds on the other, and then I can look at one yoga classmate and another, and I’m really supposed to admit that you’re right, yoga DOES appear to have body-sculpting benefits that weightlifting does not! What are those benefits, other than being correlated with a possibly vegan lifestyle that leaves people looking frail, malnourished, and spiritually deluded?

The point of that anecdote is just to note how intractable people can be once they find an alternative spirituality to call their own. Those people, steadfast in their belief in the psuedoscience’s material benefits, would do well to remember that people like them die every year because they choose their imaginations over proven treatments. Steve Jobs died earlier this month, having refused a cancer treatment for fear of putting chemicals into his body (!), opting instead to remedy his life-threatening illness the natural way, with macrobiotic cures. Now that he’s dead, I wonder if his family would recommend the approach to a friend. Adam Carolla points out a similar case with his mother, who was going to take care of her body in a way that other vulgar Americans were not with her smoothies and vitamins, and whose limbs now have the consistency of dessicated cordwood, thanks to her subsequent osteoperosis.

I suspect that the popularity of yoga in the West nowadays owes largely to the fact that, as Western traditions and fidelities like Christianity have become passé, a naturally spiritual people seek to find something “indie” and eastern, and therefore presumably wise and mystical, to supplant it. For women and many extraverts, the class setting provides social fulfillment and accountability. For the doctrinally untethered and the spiritually insecure, the meditative aspect of yoga offers a vague and undemanding—and therefore attractive—means of deriving a sense of cosmic purpose and nobility. Where yoga apologists go too far is in imagining it provides anything more than stretching, social contact, and mass spiritual delusions.

Over at the National Review, oceans of ink have been spilled trying to debunk Massachusetts Democratic Senate Candidate Elizabeth Warren’s collectivist riff about how “the rich” substantially owe more of their fortunes to “us” since “we” paid for “their” goods and services; the ones that put them where they are. Here’s her riff:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea — God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

It sounds like a sanctimonious diatribe from one of the villains in Atlas Shrugged. Would love to hear what Rand would think about this money-lusted, intellectually confused, nakedly self-interested jeremiad. In any case, note the unapologetic “us vs. them” juxtaposition: “us” respresents the presumably disgruntled lower- and middle-class Morlocks, and “them” the exploitative rich Eloi. It’s important not to define specifically who these people are, lest the flames of emotionally incontinent class warfare be diminished. Once you break it down and start trying to find out who these people are who are being exploited for the upper classes’ gain, or who these exploitative rich people are who are seeking rent from the lower classes, the mean-spirited and intellectually silly nature of the diatribe becomes apparent.

Substantively speaking, countering this ought to be easy, and yet the fulminations at NRO seem inadequate to me: focusing on “the social contract” and wasted tax monies is its own waste when there is one obvious answer to all of this:

You built the roads? You educated the workers? You paid for emergency services? And so “you” (who are “you”?) want more than what “we” (who are “we”?) already give?

Let’s look at roads. At the city and county level, roads are paid for by property taxes. If a municipal roadway costs $100 million to build, you’re right that “we” will probably never pay the $100 million it cost to build, let alone the extra monies it takes to maintain. This would be outrageous if “we” were the only ones allowed to use those roads. However, the roads were not built for “us”—the roads are built for everyone, including you, and you use them just like we do. Since we all want to use these roads, how will we divy up the funding? Well, in the case of city and county roads, we pay for them out of our property taxes. And if the effective annual property tax rate is 2% and I own $10 million in industrial real estate in the area, I’m paying $200,000 per year in property taxes, of which some fixed percentage goes to pay for those roads. If you’re lucky enough to own a $500,000 home and you’re on the hook for 2% as well, some fixed percentage of your resultant $10,000 in property taxes goes to the roads. Note, already, that I am paying $200,000 to your $10,000 in raw property taxes, with a commensurate proportion going to municipal roads. If I own industrial space in the Sodo District of Seattle and I use the Alaska Way Viaduct (ignoring, for a moment, the jurisdiction of roads), which moves more than 100,000 cars per day, to move all 10 of my delivery trucks, so what? Without me and each of my thousands of “exploitative” rich contemporaries paying $25,000, $50,000 or more into those roads, many of the roadways you travel on to work and to play would never get built. It’s this type of baseless ingratitude that inspired Ayn Rand to come up with the idea of “shrugging,” where all of the unappreciated “robberbarons” just went away and left the rent-seekers and complainers to experience life without society’s top producers.

And those are just city and county roads. At the state level, roads are paid for out of gas taxes. In Washington State, all but 1 cent per passenger mile is paid for out of user fees, and even that number may be conservative considering that so much of our user-generated revenues are diverted to other things, which then require a possibly imaginary subsidy to replace. Still, let’s assume it’s 1 cent per PM. I, for one, have always said I would happily pay that extra 1 cent per PM if only you would stop taking the money I (personally, or on behalf of my imaginary business) pay to drive on the highways and diverting it to things like light rail which require subsidies of up to $10 per passenger mile (versus a single penny). Still, my 10 uneconomical delivery trucks are each burning 50 gallons a day, and so in Washington State (with 37.5 cents per gallon state gas tax) are generating nearly $200 a day in state gas tax revenues. You, in your Prius, are generating an average of $1.13 a day in state gas tax revenue. If it’s not already clear, I’m paying about 177 times more than you are every single day in gas taxes, and by extension for the state roads I drive on. Still want to tell me what “you” are paying for? Again, if me and my rich “crony” pals don’t pay $200 a day in state gas taxes, many of these roads you enjoy—and subsidy programs like buses and light rail—don’t exist.

On the federal level, roads and highways, I believe, are paid for not only by the federal gas tax but also out of the various federal taxes: income, capital gains, estate, alternative minimum, corporate, and now even payroll taxes, to name just a few. In most cases, I and my company are paying in more than you are; a LOT more. If I’m Richie Rich and my company does $20 million in taxable business, of which I accept $1 million as my own salary, then I pay, in addition to all the other state and local taxes I pay, $7 million a year in corporate federal income tax, nearly $400,000 a year in personal federal income tax (when rates soon go to Obama’s 39.6%), and nearly $100 a day in additional federal gas taxes on behalf of my company and myself. This is to say nothing of other possible federal (and state and municipal) taxes: capital gains, estate, AMT, payroll, and more. Myself and my company bring in $20 million a year, and between those two entities I’m already paying more than $8 million of it to the federal government alone, much of which is then used for these highways. And you mean to tell me you paid for this? You made $50,000 last year, you don’t own a business, and you pay half of your (lower) payroll taxes. Congratulations: assuming you’re feckless enough to have passed up on any deductions or exemptions, you paid $12,500 in federal income tax, $53 in federal gas taxes, and $2825 in payroll taxes, for a subtotal of just more than $15,000. Again, to be clear, I paid more than $8 million so that, among other things, me and my ten trucks can hop on I-90, and you paid $15,000 so you and your Prius can do the same, and I should be thanking you? How many times do I need to say it: without me and my exploiter-contemporaries, many of these roads, even if they did exist, would be in a state of unusable disrepair. I’m paying far more for those highways than should be my cut if it were simply user-based. And as Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan points out, upwards of 40 percent of Americans aren’t even paying federal income tax, and the remaining 60%–particularly those nearer to the top—are picking up their slack. And you want to talk to me about what YOU are doing for ME?

Then there are emergency services, and of course education, the latter of which I believe commonly consumes about half of a property tax bill. Even if I have kids who go to school in the area in which I locate my properties, my $200,000 annual corporate property tax bill over the course of the 50 years into the future that my company exists will generate no less than $10 million in my lifetime. Pretty sure my corporate property tax bill alone is paying for my kid’s entire schooling, as well as the schooling of the rest of the block. Meanwhile, you—you the renter, who are paying a few grand over the course of your life, and you the middle-class homeowner, who are paying a few hundred grand over the course of your life—you think that you are what is keeping union firefighters and policemen happy with their lavish six-figure salaries and outrageous pensions? You think paying a few grand properly bought your education and kept the school district fat with $40-an-hour teachers and superfluous administrators and diversity liaisons? Think again. “We” pay for far more than what we use, and “you” pay for far less. And yet again, without our contributions, high schools wouldn’t be the frivolous, amenities-rich palaces that they often are.

And “we” still need to thank “you,” and as tribute offer even more than the twice-, three times-, and four-times-taxed dollars that we already do? Don’t forget how much of this is impossible without us, and don’t forget that somewhere between one-quarter and one-half of you are net receivers; net rent-seekers, while almost categorically we are paying for far more than we are using. It’s time to drop the self-aggrandizing, false, Marxist-collectivist rage. Don’t demand more of us as tribute to your own shortcomings; demand more of yourself.

Recently on Facebook, a friend of mine posted an article, which I presume to have come from a Republican, that derided the simplistic folly of libertarianism in the wake of Ron Paul’s presence at the GOP debate. I mostly disagreed with the article, because it resorted to complete caricatures of libertarian philosophy to explain why it’s absurd, but in the process it only proved that caricatures of libertarian philosophy are absurd, not libertarian philosophy itself. I’m also irritated that national columns can be penned in an attempt to preempt certain strains of ideology that one finds distasteful, within otherwise “Big Tent” Republicanism. I’m also incredulous that it can be done by way of knowingly ludicrous straw men.

Among the libertarian ideas ridiculed was the notion that the private sector can keep pace with “public charity.” First off, good to see that establishment Republicans have abandoned the “bootstraps” worldview and joined Democrats in becoming the “charity” suck-monster Neal Boortz has decried:

A politician cannot spend one dime on any spending project without first taking that dime from the person who earned it. So, when a politician votes for a spending bill he is saying that he believes the government should spend that particular dollar rather than the individual who worked for it.

So it’s good to see they’ve capitulated there. Second, anyone who doubts private charity can keep pace with public “need” would do well to read, as I have, Victorian society expert Gertrude Himmelfarb’s “The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values” (and other works I’m sure). They will find that the Victorian era boasted the greatest outpouring of private charity and private unemployment programs the world has ever known. I’m not as sure about the possibilities here nowadays, seeing as how it was specifically Christian brotherhood and goodwill that produced that outpouring and we are now a relatively amoral society (at least to an extent that would make replicating Victorian charity difficult). This is only to say it is false to think if the government doesn’t do it, nobody will. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the burgeoning supply of rent and subsidies for seekers of such things has inevitably resulted in an induced demand for rent and subsidies. As a corollary, if the plug were to be pulled on many of these things and rent-seekers were to be apprised that they’re actually going to have to hustle to pay for their own goods and services, rather than waiting for someone else to go to work and do it for them, I think the prevailing knowledge about our “inevitable” levels of “public need” would be made utterly foolish. As we become docile and pacified by handouts from on high, we not only lose our dignity, we lose our knowledge of how much we are really capable of, and begin to think ourselves feeble and inadequate and therefore ever more dependent. In any case, these—as well as shameless emotional appeals—were the types of distortions offered to describe libertarianism in a nutshell, after which the article’s author unhesitatingly dismissed the entire philosophy.

On the other hand, I recognize that there is a core part of libertarianism which seeks to produce a temporal utopia (much like liberalism), and actually believes it’s capable of doing so. Sure, libertarians will acknowledge as an abstraction that it won’t occur, but deep down it is every bit as evangelistic and millenarian as theocracy, “social democracy” or communism, and at least as hopeful about producing heaven on earth. But, like the article says, do libertarians (including myself) really believe society will be better off by legalizing drugs wholesale? Is there any question that this will lead to myriad new problems? I honestly wouldn’t be shocked if, under such a free society, we would have the most economically liberated Escape From New York wasteland in the world.

Still, the article’s author makes himself sound ridiculous decrying the new freedoms and individual responsibilities championed by libertarianism, and in the process undertook the unsavory task of selectively ridiculing individual liberty, claiming instead that we ought to be as free as technocrats like himself feel we ought to be; in other words, free up the point where he and his pals decide we’re “free enough.” For that farce we don’t even need a caricature.

I don’t understand why religious conservatives continue to insist on a future that will never come. The days of the “Christian Coalition” and tent revivals and social issues are gone. The society at large is now socially liberal on many flagship issues and, far from showing signs of a return, there is only exponential growth in a liberal direction. CNN/USA Today/Gallup polls from 1996 showed a 27-68 disapproval of gay marriage; by 2009 ABC News/Washington Post polls were showing a 49-46 approval ratio. There are variations between polls, but even the most optimistic during this period (old Gallup vs. new Gallup) demonstrate a 40% dropoff in opposition. I am entirely sympathetic to their distress, but not sympathetic at all to their way of coping with it, which is to dig their heels in and wait for Christ to run for President. It’s over. It’s time to pack up your social issues and go home. Even politicians who pandered to you with social issues six and a half years ago in the 2004 election won’t go near them anymore. The best thing we can do at this point is blow the bridge on government recognition of marriage, and devolve that authority to the religious institutions that give it meaning. At that point there is no complaining about government sponsorship of debauchery: if your church declines to recognize it as a legitimate union, good on your church; if the Methodist church corrupts itself and recognizes the union as an expression of its insecure, malleable, fleeting sensibilities, then you can dismiss that church. This is a working libertarian solution to your problem with gay marriage, and it’s one of many solutions to many government problems. Sadly, religious conservatives are waiting at the bus stop for the Billy Sunday Express Bus that will never come. In the meantime, their would-be honorable attempts at being principled ensure that moral and economic decline occurs even more quickly, as they resist helping to support newly palatable alternatives in favor of the 1950s dream on which the sun has already set.

In one of our last (market research) interviews a Polish immigrant yearns for the simplicity of making butter by hand in Poland, and how much more “natural” this was. Unironically, she goes on to describe the butter making process as one that took several hours, while it is common knowledge that buying a few sticks at the store can take as little as 5 minutes. This is what division of labor is in an economy: we could all raise and grow our own chickens, cattle, dairy cows, corn and beets, wrench on our own cars, and cook every one of our meals, but we’ve said: you know what? That would take every waking second of our day. We would have no time left over for leisure, and we would all be primitivists and survivalists. But if we create a currency, and then Roger raises enough chickens for everybody, Heidi milks the cows, Susan cooks some of our meals, Chuck fixes our cars and so on, we can have an economy. We’ll get paid for working in whichever niche we choose, we’ll have much more selection, it’ll be more convenient for all, we’ll all be wealthier, it will produce technological and civilizational advancement, and we’ll have more time left in the day to spend time with our families and indulging in leisure activities. This is a functional economy. Of course, to raise enough cattle for everybody, Mark is going to have find a way to reduce cow attrition due to sickness (via hormones) and increase meat production (via pens, auto feeders). It is reasonable to observe with vigilance any research coming out about the health and safety of Mark’s practices, but the underground hysteria (which has since gone mainstream) about these basic facts of economics cannot be explained in sound rational terms.

In this context, the complaints that are levied against “agribusiness” and “corporate farming” etc. (the cynicism and exploitation focuses inherent to this view are also suspiciously Marxist) comprise a perfect framework for anticapitalism. The almost axiomatic hysteria about pesticides and inorganic produce, for example, has more basis in conspiracy than fact, yet it serves the purpose of obstructing the absolutely necessary process of mass production (such as Mark’s above) with eerie effectiveness. Is that an accident, that organic growing methods throw sand in the gears of capitalism? Not when you consider how many other newfangled social fads do exactly the same, with premeditatedly diabolical effectiveness.

Elsewhere there is “fair trade,” an utter contrivance if there ever was one, which has the effect of needlessly increasing the prices of goods by mandating transfers of wealth (i.e., rent) from a consumer to a producer for reasons other than the consumer’s interest in the product itself. In the process capitalism has been disrupted, as the consumer is no longer paying only what he thinks the product is worth: he is paying more as a sort of alms to the producer for the noble deed of insisting on practicing in fields in which he has a comparative disadvantage. It is in essence a voluntary subsidy; a handout, and if we have learned anything from aid to Africa it is that handouts discourage, rather than encourage, economic development. If you’re truly interested in economic development, fair trade is an IV drip of atrophy that prevents economies from ever benefiting from the processes of capitalism. That it continues undeterred suggests this is not an undesirable outcome for those who promote fair trade.

Another fad is buying local, whose popularity is mystifying given both the arbitrary nature of the term and the obviousness of its absurdity: competition invariably promotes the lowering of prices and the improvement of products, so artificially limiting competition to a local area ensures that price drops and product improvements take longer to occur, if at all. Buying local benefits some producers at the expense of all consumers, and it completely cuts off a local economy from the benefits of trade. Which cars would the people of Seattle drive if they were prevented from importing the metals, electronics, and minerals necessary to build one? Sorry folks, but your Subarus and Priuses are out—those are Japanese and non-local. Which buildings would they live in if they could only draw materials from quarries and forests within city or county limits? Europhilic Seattleites will be stricken with woe when they discover they can’t fly to Europe on planes or travel there on non-local boats, and they won’t be able to import avant-garde art or architecture or furniture. They wouldn’t have the Internet, they wouldn’t have cars, they wouldn’t have TV, they wouldn’t have 21st-century restaurants or bars, they’d have 7th-century health care, they wouldn’t have computers, and they’d live in squalid little shanties. Yet paying homage to “buying local” gets you a biscuit and a pat on the head. It also conspicuously obstructs the processes and benefits of capitalism.

And of course modern environmentalism and its now-relentless attempts to encumber, restrict, or outright eliminate capitalism is nothing if not suspect. As Michael Medved brilliantly pointed out early in his radio show from 12.8.2009,

Part of what [modern environmentalism] is, is a way of striking back at a capitalist system that, despite the downturn today, has been utterly triumphant. And this is, to a great extent, what my book is about. What my book is about is the fact that capitalism in the last 50 years; the free market system, has changed humanity; has changed the facts about human beings in such a fundamental way. It used to be, all around the world, that the overwhelming majority of people were poor, and they led lives that were miserable, with no choices and short life-spans, and no chance at good health or productivity. That is changing all over: it’s changing in Brazil, it’s changing in Mexico, it’s changing in China, it’s changing in India, it’s changing everywhere, and it’s because of the market system. It is triumphant. Socialism lies discredited everywhere. So what do they do? They try to say, “well the problem with capitalism is, you’re producing too much, you’re making too much, you’re creating too many greenhouse gases, you’re breathing too much, getting too much CO2 out there, and you’re going to create the kind of nightmare dramatized in the opening film they showed at Copenhagen.

As it is with environmentalism, so it is with many of today’s other fads: organic, grass-fed, free-range, cage-free, fair trade, and local, many of which could be described as economic superstition. It is not an accident that they all serve to disrupt capitalism with seemingly premeditated success. If they could not be more effective at this if designed for that purpose, then it is because they were designed for that purpose, whether the armies of this twisted new worldview realize it or not.

I’m watching Drew Carey’s “Reason Saves Cleveland,” which highlights how Cleveland has gone from economic powerhouse to Rust Belt backwater, most or all of which can be traced back to policymaking. The second installment was about public education, which is abjectly failing Cleveland. Reason profiles successful charter and semi-private schools around the country and investigates their formula for success. The formulas offered were pretty lame: “teach them ‘values’” like “respect,” “honor,” and “courage.” I’m going to be honest: I don’t think the key to success is in emphasizing bullshit words with no universal meaning–that’s another fatuous public school prescription. My view, from watching the show, is that it’s as much about what private schools don’t do as about what they do.

Teachers should be held accountable for their students’ test scores, for one. Public school teachers resist this like heroin addicts resist sobriety, and for all their highminded objections, it really boils down to teachers wanting all the rewards with none of the accountability. It’s a pretty sweet arrangement, if you think about it. And yet it is an unmitigated travesty that this mindset of complete atrophy is allowed to prevail in the education system everyone seems to believe is so crucial to achievement later in life. It reminds me of many characters in Atlas Shrugged who, whether or not they were bureaucrats, were driven first by the desire not to be blamed and only second by the desire to actually achieve something. The former is exactly where our public school failure academies are, intellectually.

And for the people who think the problem is that we need to throw more taxpayer money at it (i.e., liberals), Reason pointed out that Cleveland spends $14,000 per student per year. Clearly that’ s not working, although many entrenched in the bureaucracy, or just enslaved to liberal ideology, will insist that the problem is anything so long as its solution involves preserving or increasing spending. It’s just that the money’s not being spent on “the right things!” Of course it is.

Another thing is that schools need to get rid of seniority-based hiring and promotion. As Drew Carey pointed out, the fact that you’ve managed to “hang around” for a long time doesn’t t mean you’re doing anything productive. But that is exactly the mindset that non-merit based promotion has foisted upon people. Get rid of that useless arrangement and replace it with something where people get rewarded for what they do, not how long they’ve been doing it unsuccessfully. Again, here is a case of government rewarding failure.

Reason went on to mention that the public school bureaucracy; i.e., the unions and their lobbyists, were hostile to charter and semi-private schools, viewing them as “competition.” One semi-private school principal said, “good.” Good for him. No good for the union kleptocracy, which tries to pitch its refusal to compete, its ineffectuality, its ruinous cost, its hostility to outsiders, its monopolistic behavior, its lobbying efforts, and its total lack of concern for the people who pay their salaries as high virtue.

Education aside, the broader point is that, for all their self-congratulation, the job of government agencies has increasingly been to steal wealth from the private sector and reward themselves with it, and then to have ribbon-cuttings and press conferences to announce how lucky you are that they perform this service. It’s for you! That seven-figure lifetime pension for each of their bureaucrats? That wasn’t about them; come on! That was about you! But why is this so much more pronounced in urban areas? It could be that they’ve had more time than their suburbs to decline, but I think it’s as least as much the type of people they attract. Something about urban areas is inviting to world-destroyers, who are like sand in the gears of a city. All they know is how to get themselves where they want to be, everyone else (like those who pay their salaries, or who pay for the programs they vote in) be damned. Whatever it is, something about the city acts as an accelerant in the wildfire of government destruction.

This is evident in migration trends in cities across America, every single one of which has lost the battle to its own suburbs. At least in 2008, it looked as if the world-destroyers had begun to make inroads to the suburbs as well; we will see in 2010 and 2012 just how effective they have been at closing off every escape route in America. And the states of California, New York and New Jersey might as well be state-sized cities. Los Angeles’, New York’s, and Newark’s policies have been stretched over their entire states and produced ruin, for which the world-destroyers are unapologetic.

Frankly, it’s not hard to steal the money of your constituents if you’re a legislative puppetmaster. And, in the period before they wise up and move out, you’ll be able to erect some pretty impressive monuments to yourself: government supermarkets, elaborate European-style rail networks, sophisticated transit infrastructure, generous (not really) welfare programs, six-figure salaries and gold-plated benefits packages. This is what people in Seattle today are calling a “first-world city.” But there’s actually very little impressive about this: it’s obvious that you could expropriate grandiose sums from people with the force of law. What would be truly impressive, since it is certifiably impossible, is to keep this extortion racket going for more than a couple of generations. The problem is that people figure it out sooner or later and they leave, and the kleptocrats are left behind with unused infrastructure, top-heavy bureaus, and bureaucrat compensation the city can no longer afford.

Here’s what I’m disappointed by so far in Tom Vanderbilt’s book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do:

The Physical and Moral Hierarchy: Motorists vs. Cyclists vs. Pedestrians

It seems clear that Vanderbilt isn’t particularly fond of cars, which, by extension, means he will be heaping some praise on himself for any number of qualities which the liberal set has deemed to be morally superior. In fact, the self-aggrandizement starts on the first page. Here’s what he says right after the introduction (pp. 19-20):

When I walk, which as a New Yorker I often do, I view cars as loud, polluting annoyances driven by out-of-town drunks distracted by their cell phones. When I drive, I find that pedestrians are suddenly the menace, whacked-out iPod drones blithely meandering across the street without looking. When I ride a bike, I get the worst of both worlds, buffeted by speeding cars whose drivers resent my superior health and fuel economy, and hounded by oblivious pedestrians who seem to think it’s safe to cross against the light if ‘only a bike’ is coming but then are startled and indignant as I whisk past at twenty-five miles per hour.

Notice that motorists are maligned by pedestrians, and pedestrians are maligned by motorists, but that (a) both are maligned by cyclists, and (b) none malign cyclists. So the cumulative composition of motorists includes words like: loud, polluting, annoyances, out-of-town, drunks, speeding, resentful, and distracted; and the composition of pedestrians includes words like: menace, whacked-out, iPod drones, oblivious, hounding, indignant, and blithely meandering…without looking. Meanwhile, the composition of cyclists includes words like: superior health and superior fuel economy. In other words, motorists are canceled out by their flaws, pedestrians are canceled out by their flaws, and only cyclists emerge with their superiority. Joel Kotkin pointed out this sort of presumptuous body fascism in an article “Welcome to Ecotopia”:

After George W. Bush’s victory the 2004 presidential election, the Seattle weekly The Stranger published an angry editorial about how coastal urbanites needed to reject “heartland values like xenophobia, sexism, racism and homophobia” and places where “people are fatter and dumber and slower.” Such a narrow, cynical view of the rest of the country is in line with Callenbach’s Ecotopia novels, in which the bad guys–representatives of American government and corporations–are almost always male, overweight and clueless about everything from technology to tending to the earth.

In one of my tedious transportation debates on the web, I was accused by a cyclist of the same; of envying his ostensibly superior health. I pointed out that I was an Abrams tank crewman in the US Marine Corps until 2008, and that, to this day, I run up to 30 miles a week and spend 3 days a week strength training. If he wanted to get in a pissing match about health and fitness, he was going to need about six months of hard training. Yet for this cyclist—and apparently to Tom Vanderbilt—actual fitness matters less than the signals of fitness themselves. By riding a bike, you can be fitter than anyone who likes or uses an automobile.

Ignorance to our Dependence on Automobility for our Quality of Life

Fitness aside, I wonder how aware Mr. Vanderbilt is of just how critical automobiles are to his own wealth. He’s a freelance writer and bestselling author who owes his career, his wealth and his lifestyle to the mobility provided by the auto. Does he think bicycles ship his books from his predictably insular NYC enclave to the Borders in St. Louis? Does he think it’s pedestrians that walk them there? Do airplanes fly them into a private Barnes & Noble airport in Coeur d’Alene? Do trains stop on their tracks alongside the independent bookstore in Seattle? While delivery is often intermodal, it would not be possible without an automobile—truck or otherwise—to complete the first and last steps. I’m convinced that, without the automobile, none of us would have ever heard of Borders, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or frankly, the Internet. How much does his research, his Internet journalism, his distribution, and his lifestyle owe to the automobile? Virtually all of it. Tom Vanderbilt would be nothing without it. I know Vanderbilt is supposed to be writing from the perspective of an experienced insider, but right out of the gates he comes across as a hostile, self-aggrandizing outsider.

The Political Hierarchy & Liberal Clichés

Then, when describing the errors a woman driving an SUV with a Marine Corps sticker on it is making when she assumes the person who honked at her did so out of political spite (and I’m already raising my eyebrows that he has chosen this woman; an apparent conservative, to dissect), he comes up with different reasons the other motorist may have been upset with her (pp. 25-26):

…could it have been the fact that this single driver was tooling around in a large SUV, inordinately harming the environment, putting pedestrians and drivers of cars at greater risk, and increasing the country’s dependence on foreign oil?

Spare me! Here, in an effort to dispel this woman’s stereotypes, he trots out all the flaky liberal stereotypes about SUVs. She was “tooling around”? I know that just means driving, but I have never heard it used positively; it is typically used in derisive fashion to describe a frivolous trip. Then, she’s “inordinately harming the environment”? Here, to dispel one assumption, he makes another: that it’s non-hybrid, or otherwise that he knows by default its emissions relative the emissions of other vehicles. Putting pedestrians and drivers at greater risk? Again, any numbers here? And if the numbers do add up, what should she do: stay home because Tom Vanderbilt thinks she’s putting them at risk? Buy a different car that is less-suited for her purposes? As for “increasing the country’s dependence on foreign oil”, how many times have you heard this from the same Green crowd that refuses to consider nuclear energy? And as Washington Post columnist Robert Bryce points out, the idea that it’s even possible to “break our dependence on foreign oil” while preserving our quality of life is mythology:

“Energy independence”? This is pure hokum. Never gonna happen. The US is the world’s single biggest energy producer, and biggest energy consumer. The idea that we should be independent of the world’s single biggest market—the global oil and energy market—this is ludicrous on its face. … Look, whenever you hear anybody talk about the evils of foreign oil, grab your wallet. They want your money.

Feeble Attempts to Redefine Words

There are other, less charged things about the book that bother me, like on pp. 55-56 when he tries to change the definition of “accident” such that anybody involved in a preventable car accident could not reasonably call that an accident. Cursory research suggests this quest for redefinition of the word “accident” is a growing movement. Yes, there is negligent driving and many accidents could be prevented, but the essence of an accident is an incident having unintended outcomes. Would we refuse to call it an accident when a child is struck by lightning, simply because he shouldn’t have been outside in a storm? No matter how obsessed one gets with negligence or prevention, the definition remains. I think the movement stems from a frustration that, say, an incident occurring while driving erratically receives the same designation as one caused by a traffic signal malfunction; that highly preventable and unpreventable accidents are lumped together under the same umbrella.

Appeals to Pseudoscience

I also strongly dislike the repeated references to evolutionary psychology and biology to explain the way we think and act on the road. These are are fields of expressly pseudoscientific conjecture, particularly the former. As an incomplete list, Vanderbilt appeals to them to explain:

• why we don’t like to be behind other vehicles (p. 22);
• why we behave altruistically in traffic (p. 28); and
• which behaviors warm our hearts or anger us on the road (p. 28).

These are scientifically useless contrivances. I like what David Berlinski wrote about these areas of “research” in The Devil’s Delusion (pp. 166-168):

Commenting on the negative advertising in political campaigns, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, remarked that “there appears to be something hardwired into humans that gives special attention to negative information.” There followed what is by now a characteristic note: “I think it’s evolutionary biology.” The fact that there is nothing hardwired about human beings, because they are not wired at all, is passed over as incidental. The metaphor has taken on a life all its own and now that it is living, it has grown great. Having provided an explanation of negative campaign advertisements, evolutionary biology also explains war and male aggression, the human sensitivity to beauty, gossip, a preference for suburban landscapes, love, altruism, marriage jealousy, adultery, road rage, religious belief, fear of snakes, disgust, night sweats, infanticide, and the fact that parents are often fond of their children. The idea that human behavior is “the product of evolution,” as the Washington Post puts the matter, is now more than a theory: it is a popular conviction. The conviction is so popular that it may even be impudently opposed to the regnant conventions of political correctness. The result is an inspiring clash of clichés.

…

Unneeded as an irrelevance, these ideas are implausible as an explanation. If sexual preferences are rooted in the late Paleolithic era, men worldwide should now be looking for stout muscular women with broad backs, sturdy legs, a high threshold to pain, and a welcome eagerness to resume foraging directly after parturition. It has not been widely documented that they do. Our ancestors are in any case unavailable. Claims made on their behalf are unverifiable. The underlying tissue that connects the late Paleolithic and the modern era is the gene pool. Changes to that pool reflect a dynamic process in which genes undergo change, duplicate themselves, surge into the future or shuffle off, and by means of all the contingencies of life serve in each generation the purpose of creating yet another generation. It is precisely these initial conditions that popular accounts of human evolution cannot supply. We can say of those hunters and gatherers only that they hunted and they gathered, and we can say this only because it seems obvious that there was nothing else for them to do. The gene pool that they embodied cannot be recovered. The largest story told by evolutionary psychology is therefore anecdotal. It has no scientific value. We might as well be honest with one another. It has no value whatsoever.

Vanderbilt’s many references to anthropology, and evolutionary psychology and biology, to explain traffic phenomena fall apart under the microscope for the pop-scientific nonsense that they are.

Philosophical Laziness

There also seem to be things that are philosophically lazy, like citing people who suggest that near-misses on the road are better evidence of your mistakes than of your driving ability (p. 62). In fact, it is easy to come up with a hundred examples where this is not the case. As one of many, how about when someone swerves into your lane and you quickly apply the brakes and avoid imminent collision? No credit for that; that was your mistake that got you into the close call? Of course not, and because these hypotheticals are so numerous, I am far from convinced that his citation can even be used as a general rule. Then why say it? It just seems lazy.

Induced Demand

I also read Randal O’Toole’s review, which criticized the book for its proliferation of the induced-demand myth, so I’m looking forward to that.

Conclusion

I have found some things interesting (e.g., who gets honked at the most, we chalk up speeding tickets to “quotas”; etc.). And that’s all for now, perhaps forever, since the path of this book seems clear by now. Thus far, for all its faults, it’s worth a read to those interested in mobility and planning.