A Manifesto Manifests Today

So now we switch to figuring out how to rationally argue that the well-being of an entity like a country is best served by a mixed economy.  To state the problem in a negative form, how to refute a market fundamentalist approach to public policy.

Both individuals and collectives face issues too complex to be rationally analyzed in a complete manner.  Natural fluctuations like weather, earthquakes etc have unpredictability, and in a complex world the actions of other countries can have important implications beyond our control. This argues for the necessity of the decentralized decision-making role of markets, the unconsciously-determined equilibrium of aggregate needs and wants.  But the facilitation of these markets occurs in other contexts, a combination of conscious collective efforts to structure institutions and other foundations and institutions that are unconscious.  Maybe unconscious it not the best term, and the point is that they are non-economic or have an existence independent of what we will call a sphere or realm of economic interaction.

Some of these non-economic structures are comparatively ephemeral, such as the government of a society by a group with a particular ideology, and others are perhaps best described as structural, such as the social nature that humans have evolved or the importance people place on fairness and the undeniable prevalence of selfishness as well as altruism.  Others are intermediate between the two, such as long-evolved social structures such as shared languages and legal frameworks. When it comes to discussion of current economic issues, the discussion likely revolves around the particulars of specific economic institutions and frameworks, and the question here is the embeddedness of these external frameworks in the workings of institutions and policies directly affecting specifically-economic activity.

To frame the goals of this investigation and discourse in economic terms, we seek to discern the framework that maximizes the productivity-consumption-enjoyment mix, and in particular how this can be maximized for the United States.  Universal truths are important in their own right and important to the goal as described, and the United States is a large country, so its efforts to maximize this mix will have to account for feed-back as the rest of the world adjusts and responds to events in the United States.  But, since the world is significantly bigger than the United States and to a non-trivial extent evolving outside of its direct control, and since the author of this text does not expect to ever reside elsewhere in any meaningful sense, or have his descendants do so, that country will be the locus of our concern.

Someday my prints will come

Oh order, where art thou?

sunset

So much beauty.....

Jumey, Juney, Juney, Juney....

June has just begun

Hope, you are well

Lazy sunday

More

Early Harvest

Barking up the wrong tree

The definition of wilderness has long puzzled me. It's relative, you may be surprised to learn. I say it's relative because I have spent so long developing an absolute view. For me, absolute wilderness is incompatible with human civilization. Wilderness must be endless. Maybe one planet isn't even enough. I want trees and wild animals without limit.

But there are limits. Today I was in a square in Arlington that everyone calls the circle (oh paradox, wouldst thou me?), and a row of trees was gently waving in the sunny breeze. They were lovely, but beyond them were apartments, and they would be so much lovelier if they concealed still more trees, and bigger trees, and prettier trees and more aweful great trees. But why? Is the beauty of one tree determined by the promise it offers of still more beautiful trees? There should be streams and rocks, and vistas of hills clad in still more trees and showing cliffs offering vistas in return.

Last fall I was on a pasture ridge looking across a valley, and closer at hand was a line of trees across a pasture, a road, and a corn field. One tree stood out for its fall foliage, bright among its neighbors. Again, undulating in the wind, colors shifting slightly, but always bounded by its limbs. The afternoon sun caught it just right.

In Yosemite, I was once hiking in the early snow. Picking my way through some unknown persons footsteps, because I was in sneakers, and on a ridge was a great pine, alone, with a bright reddish trunk. It was huge. I forget the species, but it was extraordinarilly beautiful, and so just right there by itself.

Great oaks more ancient than their neighbors living at the edge of abandoned roads and mid-forest rock ledges; glistening seaside balsam fir cones in the early summer; groves and groves of white pines I have loved; the biggest shadbush I've ever seen hanging blossomed over a stream-fed pond; the hillside beech I climbed on winter nights until I could see the stop lights on the highway miles away; and these are not even wilderness.

Let it be May. Wouldst thou me?

April is the cruelest month

what's up you may ask. Pictures. A sample from a sample from the universe. the set of all pictures (which includes the null picture).

April 2

April 1

March