Christmas Unhappiness

It's an "urban legend" that we have a nation-wide post-holiday depression. Whether it is true or not, in mental health centers all over the US there is a huge influx of new patients starting in December and continuing through February. Perhaps it's due to the winter season and spending more time indoors, but perhaps it's at least partially due to the Christmas gift-giving. We have a lot of pressure probably prompted by mercantile interests to buy "something nice" (i.e.expensive) to demonstrate to family members and friends that we love them. This is clearly not a function of the religion that gave birth to the custom.

It's also true that we are taught from childhood to expect happiness to come with the gifts. The build-up on tv and in legend is tremendous. Christmas morining is the most exciting morning of the year for most children. What presents could possibly match up with their expectations?

What we observe within a few hours is the inevitable let-down. Gifts may give us something to look at or to do, but they don't have the power to make us happy. Quite the contrary, in fact; the more things we own, the more the things own us, our time, our energy, our space. We have to take care of them, find a place for them, do something with them. After the first couple of ecstatic hours, we are already running down, losing our interest and beginning to wonder what to do next.

We expect too much. We are taught to expect too much, and the flood of advertising is designed to charge us up to the bursting point with lust for things. In the back of our minds we even equate getting gifts with being loved, and that there is a relationship between the cost of the gift and the amount of love.

In my opinion, Christmas is ultimately the unhappiest time of the year. But who wants to "spoil it" for others? Discouraging people in the traditional "bah, humbug" sort of way takes what pleasure they can find in it away from them. Christmas gift-giving and getting may be bad for them, but like chocolate pie, who wants to take their pie away, bad for them or not?

The Puritans Have Resurfaced

"My right to swing my fist ends at your nose", said, I think, by Mark Twain, is a good statement of the rights and responsibilies in a maximally free society. I should be able to do what I want, but with due regard to the rights of others. The First Amendment expresses the same idea in relationship to verbal utterances. I have the absolute right to say whatever I want to say, short of shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. These laws express the obvious truth that my rights are limited by my responsibility to others.

Two days ago the owners and employees of a locally owned heat-and-air business were arrested for selling oxycodone, an addictive and popular substance. In fact, 44 people were arrested, and presumably many of them will go to jail. They are accused of providing substances that the law prohibits. It's unlikely that anybody was forced to take the drugs. In fact, it seems pretty likely that the people who did the buying did so voluntarily.

So whose nose is hit? Who is harmed? At least, harmed to any degree at all greater than those who provide alcohol to voluntary buyers? Clearly we don't want people who are stoned on oxycodone driving our streets, but neither do we want drunks doing the same. Where did we get the idea that it was in our interest to prohibit voluntary actions that do not threaten us? Where did we get the idea that we even have a right to make such laws?

I don't take drugs, because I personally don't like them. I add this disclaimer to avoid sounding like an apologist for drug use. I do, however, feel strongly about the issues of governmental restrictions based primarily on a puritanical fear that somewhere, somehow, somebody is voluntarily impaired. We gave in to this idea during the era of Prohibition (of alcohol). This was an equally puritanical and stupid law that served only to fund criminal organizations and was ultimately abandoned because it was impractical. It was also out of place in a society that originally aimed at providing maximal individual freedom.

I would like to hear from anyone how I am being harmed by someone else's use of drugs in any way that does not apply to alcohol use. Clearly there are issues of lost work or harm to families, but these issues apply equally to alcohol. I would prefer that people don't use drugs or excessive alcohol, but that's a purely personal preference. I do NOT believe that there should be laws against it; I strongly favor the rights of individuals to go to hell in any way they choose that does not harm me. I think that the limiting of individual freedoms ought to have a consistent and compelling rationale.

An Inspector General

The problem with any government is that eventually it becomes more corrupt. There's too much money just lying around, too much power, too many debts and too many friendships, for supposedly impartial legislators to resist. And of course we have to consider why anyone would want to become a politician. You have to have enough money to pay for a campaign, and the amounts are such that for any national office the costs are impossible for all those not already rich. So you either have to buy the office yourself, in which case you are remarkably unselfish, or you have to buy it having the prospect in mind of return on investment. The other prospect is that of being "given" money by foundations and companies, who you then owe big-time.

When Harry Truman stepped down from the Presidency, he refused all offers to sit on high-dollar corporate boards or in any way to profit from his presidential office. That hasn't happened since.

I have proposed before that at intervals this country needs an Inspector General, with many of the powers of an emperor, whose job it will be to clean up the government. The death penalty could be used for egregious fraud and corruption. For a brief period, rights to privacy for government officials would be denied and the IG would have unlimited access to information about any public official, elected or appointed. The IG might be elected via internet nationally or appointed by the Supreme Court, kept in office for several years, but only given full powers for a few months. This would give the IG time to collect information prior to his/her period of power. Those in office would know that the IG was watching all the time.

It's important that the IG be limited, and perhaps that the Supreme Court reviewed sentences involving capital punishment, as any essentially unlimited use of power leads over time to corruption. But it's possible for someone to resist that sort of temptation for at least a brief period of time, knowing that they themselves are subject to review by the Courts and by the subsequent IG.

I'd even like to expand the IG's power to include evaluation of corporate presidents who sack retirement funds for the workers, grant themselves a huge retirement, then sell the corporation after it's been looted. Hanging in public might provide a useful and edifying example.

The Drug Trade

When a psychologist sees a repetitive pattern of behavior, one of the questions that should be asked is: "Is the behavior purposive? What does it actually accomplish?"

Many times the answer isn't an obvious one. A patient in a bad marriage who is "putting off" a divorce, may "accidentally" leave a opened condom packet in his truck where his wife can find it. When she does, the predictable happens, and the marriage comes to a hasty and messy end. Sometimes we refer to this as the "dynamite stick up the kazoo trick". The man professes shock and horror, and he is probably both shocked and horrified. But at the same time an important goal was attained and quickly at that. On some level the "accident" was purposive.

So with that prologue, we come to the drug trade. It is obvious that on the governmental level we want the drug trade to continue. As evidence, we protect the opium crop in Afghanistan. We could stop the importing of drugs in a variety of ways; the most obvious, of course, being to make recreational drugs legal and perhaps even free (or at least cheap). England has successfully accomplished this with heroin. We don't do those things. We are entitled to ask whether the behavior is purposive and what it accomplishes.

The most prominent feature is the flow of money out of the US and to some very poor countries. Historically, very poor countries have had very unstable governments, with an unruly populace prone to revolt. The flow of huge amounts of US dollars into those economies stabilizes them, raises their standard of living, and gives the poor something to lose. Here in the US the sale of drugs and their use functions as a political tranquilizer. Stoned people don't revolt and usually don't even vote.

Maybe it's simpler than that, and the motivation is just greed. Money travels a long way, and undoubtedly, as recent history has proven, some of it finds its way back into the pockets of the governing class. Whatever the real reason, we could stop it and we don't. We should keep asking why.

The dam broke and the money is flowing out

With the weakening of the boundaries limiting the flow of money and goods outside the US a lot of changes are occurring which are obvious, foreseeable and unavoidable. What they are not is "surprising". In a supra-national economy, goods, money and services flow to the "lowest points", just as water does when the dam fails. The poorer countries in the world are getting more of our money injected into their economy, and the poorer people are getting at least some of that money. At the same time, we have less money per capita. What's so surprising about that?

We raise cotton. We ship it by rail to the West Coast, by ship to China. Cheap labor in China turns the cotton into blue jeans (or whatever), and they ship it to us AND to other countries. We buy back the jeans and sell them at Walmart. The money that in the past was spent inside the US in jeans-producing factories is now in China, where the labor is cheap and the money gets spread around. The workers and business owners in China have and spend more money, and their economy improves. Overall, perhaps (and I don't believe this) our economy improves, or is supposed to, although now we can see that it isn't. The laboring class of worker in the US has less work and less money. In effect, the flow of money outside the US has resulted in redistributing the money among the working class.

While the union movement in the US was necessary, it has resulted in the working class here pricing themselves out of the world market. We no longer produce steel, because steel workers had such high salaries that the price of steel became unreasonable, and we lost our market to those who will work for less money. One of the choices our workers had was to work for less money; they elected (through their unions) to lose jobs and close shops.

Money flows where the free market directs it, and as it does, it equalizes itself all around the world. It will continue to do so until it reaches its level. During the initial period (i.e. NOW), the amount of change is very large, as when the dam initially breaks. Eventually, as it approaches a general level, small differences in costs and income will result in small and continuing readjustments in the production of goods and services.

Where we have forced a large disparity in costs through an artificial boundary, such as in the cocaine market, the money flows in exactly the same way. Our excess of money finds its way to poor countries where it becomes a major source of capital for other investments. Drug lords spend money, lots of it. That money is distributed, and at least some of it to the poor and laboring class. Even their luxury purchases like yachts and condos in Spain have to be built by workers, who ultimately get some of the money and in their turn redistribute it in their local economy. In its turn this increase in standard of living in Afghanistan or Columbia results in more stability in their government, which usually benefits us.

It's quite easy to predict how the economy is going to move over the next 50 years, always providing that the elements of the system remain about the same (e.g. no calamities, world-wide plagues, etc). The US will continue to get poorer as the money flows out. Eventually things will stabilize on a considerably lower level, but we will no longer be the "richest country in the world". In many ways this is the logical outcome of capitalism and free-market enterprise. The richer countries will be the ones who make and produce unique products and services for the rest of the world, not just for themselves. They will want more money coming in and more goods and services going out, and that will be the ONLY way a nation can enrich itself.