Only after we come to see that additional goods add precious little to our happiness;
Nonsense and hypocrisy. Computers aren’t basic needs. E-mail isn’t a basic need. Who says so? Me. So this person’s life cannot possibly be happier by the addition of a device that lets him peruse the words and deeds of the world. As for me, base shallow grasping materialist that I am, let me spell it out:
My computers bring me happiness, for they are instruments of knowledge and art. My cameras bring me joy, yea, for they allow me to capture the fleeting shadows of the day or the laughter of my child or the happy romps of my old dog in the new snow, and fix them forever in a form whose quality exceeds the fond dreams of D. W. Griffith. My car gives me pleasure, for it gives me freedom and ease of movement, allows me to meet friends, gather food for the family, and drive to work with the glories of Beethoven crashing from the speakers. Or AC/DC, depending on the mood. For that matter the morning drive is made pleasurable by possessions like the coffee maker, which serves up a hot delicious beverage the moment I wake from a comfortable bed – and the waking, I should add, was gently occasioned by a machine that cost a bit more than one of those $19.99 alarms that sounds like someone tripped the perimeter alarm at Los Alamos.
Since I seem to be seeing possessions in terms of the flow of the day, let me go on: my computer, which is hardly a basic need, gives me freedom at work unchained to a veal-pen desk; my cellphone lets me write messages to a network of beloved strangers or listen to music from around the world – and take a picture of something, if I choose. Photography is art, right? Art is good, right? Yes, I know – if it serves the general weal in a spiritual burning-issue sense. If I use the camera to snap a picture of the Catholic-run men’s shelter down the street, do I get a pass if I buy a new camera this year?
Or would that be overshadowed by the bilious negativity that rolls in dark waves from my large TV? It’s not a basic need, I admit – can I still have one? Yes, if it’s not LARGE. People who grudgingly admit the usefulness of a TV for pedagogical purposes reserve the right to frown on your TV if it’s larger than it need be, for several reasons: 1) you probably went into debt to get it; 2) it uses energy that makes the planet die; 3) you watch the wrong kind of programs; 4) the size of the screen is regarded as a direct reflection of the stupidity of the viewer.
Unless we’re talking about careful, pained, exquisitely sensitive motion pictures about the horrors of life in the suburbs in the Fifties.
They really should have called the fight after the first round.
Amitai Etzione calls himself a “communitarian.” But there is nothing new about his beliefs. There’s an older, shorter word for them. It starts with “f.”
Of course Lilek’s arguments refuting Etzione seem rational, familiar and right. I’m also quite sure Etzione has heard them many times before and has answered them, likely with something along the lines of “Greed kills”.
The debate ended a long time ago, which is why most political discourse has degenerated into sloganeering, smears, namecalling and detectives digging in people’s backgrounds for dirt.
One needs to determine when “More is Better” and
when More is ridiculous or harmful.
A refrigerator is a highly useful good, it keeps food
fresh and gives me a source of snacks at 2 AM.
2 Fridges can be useful, i used to keep a fridge on
the patio with beer and soda in it, many a person has
a little bar fridge, or a freezer in the basement, again,
providing some increased utility.
But 5 Fridges? What’s the point of that, it’s a weekend
to clean them all which most fridges need.
so even if i can get a third fridge from walmart for 50
bucks, i have no use in that. Far easier to keep a
cooler around, and when we have the annual barbecue
get some ice and use that, or throw a garbage can liner
into the recycling bin and get some ice and water
and make a second cooler.
Kids toys, are a fine example of more isnt’ better.
Most people with kids notice the kid plays with a
few toys all the time, and all those other pieces
of plastic crap? They clutter closets and need to
get hauled to goodwill or the Dump.
High Fructose Corn Syrup? Certainly More
hasn’t been better there. All those fat people
in the midwest? well that’s the end result of
those twinkies with HFCS instead of sugar in them.
Does a family need 1000 SF of housing absolutely.
2000 SF Sure. 3000? could be.
4000? if you have 4 or 5 kids? i guess.
But for people with 1 kid, a 5000 Square foot house
is a “Negative Value”, the heating bills are high, the
cleaning effort is brutal, the maintenance gets
expensive, keeping track of where the kid is
becomes a chore, Sure it’s nice to have a music
room and a home gym and a sewing room, and a
library and a den, but is that something the
taxpayers should support through FHA financing
or tax deductions? Tax Deductions to help
poor people gives the working poor a stake
in the system and turns democrats into republicans.
but a tax deduction for a million dollar house,
doesn’t serve a social good.
Cars are also the Declining marginal utility
issue. If you don’t live in manhattan or
a major urban city, there is real value to having
a car. If you don’t commute via rail or bus there
is probably value to each adult having a car.
if you live in the suburbs the teenagers probably
need a car. There can be great joy in having the
weekend convertible or the Woods jeep or the
boat hauling truck. But at what point does
extra cars become a hassle? My Dad used to
keep a car at each of his offices, and a car
at his house in the country and his downtown
apartment, and one at his brothers place
for when he’d go there on business trips and
after a while he added up what the insurance, tax,
tags, and maintenance hassles were and he
sold them all but one and took to renting
when he needed one.
Beanie Babies. one or two can be great fun for
a kid, but what’s the point in getting the whole
set?
Cable TV Channels? There used to be 4-7 channels
in a good sized city, and most of what was on was crap.
Now you can get 500 channels on Cable and it’s still
crap.
My Computer, that’s been a vital enabling tool,
although had i had Linux, i probably could have
stayed with much older hardware for a much longer
time.
My Cellphone a real productivity enhancer, but
i could do the same things with my old Motorola
Flip Phone from 1997 as i could with my RAZR.
I’ve found the Declinging Marginal Utility for new things
to be fairly low if the old thing is working. Yeah, I
broke down this year and got a HDTV LCD, but,
that was driven as much by digital transition as
anything else. But the stove? It’s awfully old
but it still works, so why replace it?
I find the utilty of the first thing i get to be high
but the second is usually lower, and it heads down
fast later except for eras of rapid technology change.
Well, technology — “material possessions” — has historically been a strong force for individual liberty.
With a computer, you can work at home, and maybe even for yourself, instead of going to the Big Office and doing what the Big Boss wants. With a car, you can live where you please, maybe where the property is cheap enough for you to own some, instead of renting in the big city and becoming dependent on city machine politics. Et cetera.
Not surprisingly, these things are looked upon with contempt by Our Intellectual Betters, the collectivists, who stand to lose some of the power and respect they otherwise have as Minitrue bureaucrats.
Jamess Lileks wrote: Well. We are dealing with a youngun here, I think.
No, a very old one. Etzioni fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, only to later realize that European fascism’s flaw had been that the Good People hadn’t been in charge.
Have you ever noticed that the folks who want to remake the world with the Good People in charge always know that they will be among the Elect? After all, if everything is a moral issue, and they are morally superior to the common herd by virtue of the fact that they can see the problems and the solutions, so it all follows, doesn’t it?
BTW, back in 1964 Etzioni wrote The Moon-Doggle, a book that criticized the space program on (surprise!) moral grounds.
Etzione strikes me as the sort of person who believes that it is morally wrong for some people to drive expensive cars while other people have to hitchhike. When the Communitarians are in charge, everyone will hitchhike.
Carl Pham wrote, “Not surprisingly, these things are looked upon with contempt by Our Intellectual Betters”
For some odd reason, people like Etzione are in no hurry to abandon the things they condemn for others.
I’ll be convinced when they behave like they’re convinced.
“But 5 Fridges? What’s the point of that, it’s a weekend
to clean them all which most fridges need.”
One fridge is useful. Two fridges are even more useful, especially if you have a body to stash. But five? Five fridges are art. Do you hate art, jack lee?
Seriously, it shouldn’t take a weekend to clean five fridges. I’ve cleaned fridges (though I’ve never owned more than one; that’s because I hate art). It takes at most a half an hour to clean up one fridge. Therefore five fridges would take two and a half hours. If you arrange the times right you should still have most of your weekend left.
Was it said of Neil Armstrong that he kept a stable of old cars and in the days he was with the X-15 program, lived up on a hill?
As Milt Thompson tells the story, Neil would head out for work in the morning down the hill. If he couldn’t get the car going, we would coast down the hill to a repair garage, leave the car with the mechanic, and walk back up the hill, to try again with another car.
I’ve been trying to get off of Etzioni’s mailing list for a couple of years now. Nice to know that at least I’m in good company.
Unlike Lileks, though, I don’t think I’ve ever read past the word “communitarian” in the From: line. Why bother with fascist spam when pr()n spam is so much more interesting?
Carl Pham Writes :
“Well, technology — “material possessions” — has historically been a strong force for individual liberty.
With a computer, you can work at home, and maybe even for yourself, instead of going to the Big Office and doing what the Big Boss wants. With a car, you can live where you please, maybe where the property is cheap enough for you to own some, instead of renting in the big city and becoming dependent on city machine politics. Et cetera.
Not surprisingly, these things are looked upon with contempt by Our Intellectual Betters, the collectivists, who stand to lose some of the power and respect they otherwise have as Minitrue bureaucrats.”
I don’t know what country you grew up in Carl,
but the Linux movement and the Internet world
was pushed by small people mostly techno-hippies
who wanted to end IBM’s dominance over the
industry. The idea was that the Large Corporatists
were controlling computing and communication
and that the techno-hippies were going
to establish routed networks that didn’t need
giant phone companies and mainframe
computers.
and at least when i was growing up,
city housing was incredibly cheap, it
was why the poor were living in the inner
city because the rents were cheaper and
houses were cheaper. South Side Chicago was
way cheaper then the outer suburbs.
Jack,
I have a word for you:
FORMATTING
Someone might read a bit more of your crap is you actually used some.
You can argue that some people have too much stuff. So tell me, what’s your argument for taking it away from them? Isn’t that called theft?
In fact – it’s even called theft when the majority decides to take it.
Why doesn’t the constitution protect us from this unlawful seizure?
And BTW Jack Lee, at least back when I was writing satellite communication protocols for Darpanet the internet was not created by a bunch of hippies. The word you are looking for is “military scientists”.
Jack, I disagree. I was a early user and close watcher of this scene. I first used the Internet to make a host-to-host connection in 1982, first managed Unix systems in 1988, fired up my first Web browser in 1994, and compiled my first Linux kernel (0.89 I think?) in 1995. I went to MIT with these people in the early 80s.
The only close similarity the early hackers (that was not a pejorative in those days) had to commune-dwelling flower-power hippies was long hair. But they were abusers of caffeine rather than dope, worked very long hours for, generally, medium (DEC, PR1ME) to large (IBM, Bell) corporations, were fiercely competitive and independent, and had extreme contempt for almost all forms of heirarchy and authority, particularly the government. There were about the closest you can come in this world to primal libertarians, fairly similar I would say to Rand’s normal salon group. If, in general, you had spoken of the need to “give back” or “think globally, act locally” or other such crap, they would have thrown up.
I think you are mistaking the young modern Linux groupie for the architects of Multics, Unix, TCP/IP, and ARPAnet. That’s akin to mistaking a modern frequent-flyer air-travel enthusiast for one of the Wright brothers, or a World War II buff for a veteran of Iwo Jima. They’re not the same crowd, and they don’t have the same value systems.
Multics was a collaboration of large corporations (Honeywell, Ford) and clever CS academics and the DoD, which was interested in a very secure computing environment. Unix was its bastard child, developed at Bell in part as an intellectual challenge — Multics was notoriously difficult to run on anything but the highest-end hardware, and the challenge was to cram it into a PDP mini. In neither case was anyone thinking of busting IBM’s lock on big iron, and, of course, the IBM personal computer didn’t even exist yet. As for anathema to big corporations — the only place you could work as a computer scientist in the 70s and 80s was in a big corporation. Those are the only people who needed computers. Small businesses used typewriters and filing clerks.
I appreciate that the Linux geek/open software community now is different. But they’re not the ones who put this stuff together. Indeed, my impression, after 15 years of watching this spectacle, is that the modern open-software community is fairly useless, and even perhaps moribund. About all they create is skins for MP3 players and package managers. There’s been no serious innovation — nothing not a port of older inventions — in a very long time. Contrary to Eric Raymond, I think the “bazaar” is not an effective model for serious invention and development.
jack lee, you wrote:
One needs to determine when “More is Better” and
when More is ridiculous or harmful.
One doesn’t need to do this. Flawed premises, flawed conclusions.
And just because you can’t find a use for five refrigerators doesn’t mean that no one else can either. Are we going to say that restaurants are incredibly wasteful for having huge walk-in refrigerators even though you don’t see a need for any more refrigerators than two?
Restaurants are wasteful. We should all eat at home, preferably of food we’ve grown ourselves. Yes, even if we live in a city in a highrise apartment. Just take that wasteful guest room or living room or office and fill it with dirt and plant seeds!
…for oneself — and let other people make their own determination and live with it. And if they inist on continuihng to buy more stuff, not only let them, but see if you can be the one selling it to them.
FTFY.
“…for oneself — and let other people make their own determination and live with it. And if they inist on continuihng to buy more stuff, not only let them, but see if you can be the one selling it to them.
FTFY.”
And you can be the one buying it used in excellent condition for a song when their fickle asses dispose of it for the next new thing.
This is how I collect high-end audio equipment that I otherwise could not afford.
One needs to determine when “More is Better” and
when More is ridiculous or harmful.
And certain people see themselves as the One, for all other people. No thanks.
Jack Lee, what would you do about all the people who indulge in excess orgasms, when only one is required to make a baby?
I’m becoming more and more enamored of a progressive sales tax. (The ‘Fair Tax’, for instance.)
As a national tax, I can see all sorts of issues. But when you start from the bottom up, the issues are actually advantages. The size wouldn’t be as boggling as an income-tax-replacement would be, for starters.
For those that don’t know, picture a regular sales tax, but once a year you get a check for however much a person sending the value of the “Poverty Line” income paid in sales tax.
Anyone making below the poverty line is clearly receiving welfare. Being at the poverty line is exactly zero taxes. (For that locality.) And the tax rate just keeps climbing asymptotically from there to whatever the assessed sales tax is.
This punishes the Paris Hiltons (where I’m using her as an example of a profligate spender), while not similarly punishing people who are doing something nominally more useful with their money. (AKA saving and investing it.)
If your hobby is buying refrigerators and keeping them running as a museum, you can expect to pay a higher total tax rate than someone identical to you who only buys one. Not just “more taxes”, but “a higher tax -rate-” than the one fridge fellow.
Or if you’re buying Lamboughini’s, you’re paying a lot more taxes in the first place… but you’re also going to be paying a higher tax rate.
How about we stop using the tax code as the new 1600s Salem Council of Elders, to enforce our collective moral judgment on every citizen?
Instead, we can just use it to, say, raise money for the government to operate, and design it to have as little other effect on what people choose to do as possible.
Just a thought.
jack lee said:
“I don’t know what country you grew up in Carl,
but the Linux movement and the Internet world
was pushed by small people mostly techno-hippies
who wanted to end IBM’s dominance over the
industry.”
And in the ultimate irony, the biggest player in the Linux space today is
…
…
…
IBM.
Al Says:
March 15th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
I’m becoming more and more enamored of a progressive sales tax. (The ‘Fair Tax’, for instance.)
As a national tax, I can see all sorts of issues. But when you start from the bottom up, the issues are actually advantages. The size wouldn’t be as boggling as an income-tax-replacement would be, for starters.
For those that don’t know, picture a regular sales tax, but once a year you get a check for however much a person sending the value of the “Poverty Line” income paid in sales tax.
Anyone making below the poverty line is clearly receiving welfare. Being at the poverty line is exactly zero taxes. (For that locality.) And the tax rate just keeps climbing asymptotically from there to whatever the assessed sales tax is.
This punishes the Paris Hiltons (where I’m using her as an example of a profligate spender), while not similarly punishing people who are doing something nominally more useful with their money. (AKA saving and investing it.)
If your hobby is buying refrigerators and keeping them running as a museum, you can expect to pay a higher total tax rate than someone identical to you who only buys one. Not just “more taxes”, but “a higher tax -rate-” than the one fridge fellow.
Or if you’re buying Lamboughini’s, you’re paying a lot more taxes in the first place… but you’re also going to be paying a higher tax rate.
You know, I’ve worked as a refrigertor repairman, and a Lambo mech, and even worked on bizjets.
In other words, other people’s excesses pay my bills. Including my tax bills.
WHERE THE F**K IS MY INCOME SUPPOSED TO COME FROM WHEN YOU’RE PRACTICING ALL THIS G**D**NED SOCIAL JUSTICE!!!!