I possess a neat antique brass spyglass of some sort, and I've always wondered about its origins. It's a collapsable (telescoping) spyglass like you'd see a 19th century ship's captain using to scout the horizon. It is 48" long when fully extended. Engraved on the section near the eye piece is:



Docteur Arthur Chevalier
158 Palais Royal
Paris

I looked the dude up and found that Chevalier's company mostly made microscopes and other scientific instruments back in the second half of the 19th century. I couldn't find any real references to telescopes of this nature, so I contacted the Oris group, a trio of scientific instrument enthusiasts in Italy who specialize in the research and identification of antiques such as mine. They can be found at http://www.bononiaemicroscope.it/

They’ve been very helpful to me so far, expressing interest in my spyglass turning me on to this Chevalier catalog from the mid 1800s.

http://www.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections/trade-literature/scientific-instruments/files/51671/

I've sent the Oris Group some pics of my telescope and hope to hear back from them soon. I'll keep y'all posted on what (if anything) I find out.

Reality Check

My apologies for the caesura in my blog postings. Work and school conspired to wear me out there for a while, and I reverted to bad habits, namely emailing about blog-ish stuff to a core group of friends instead of blogging about those things here.

I hope to be back on track now, for better or for worse.

The Affluent Society

As the government announces today that special tax rebate checks will be delivered early this year, I can’t help worrying about what a fiasco the whole thing is shaping up to be. I understand the intention behind the policy. But given where we are with the economy, where Americans are with debt, where industry is with regard to decreasing productivity, etc. . . I just can't see how the Fed thinks these rebates will do anything but make things worse.

I'm certain that the economists the Bush administration is listening to HAD to have read John Galbraith back in their graduate school days. As Galbraith said over 40 years ago:

• Economy is production-driven. Production drives consumption; not the other way around as we're told to believe.
• Industry has manufactured artificial demand for products we don't really need (therefore possessing zero marginal utility). Reference my quest for a Wii as an example. Or tennis shoes that cost $12 to manufacture and ship and sell for $200. Manufactured demand for goods with zero marginal utility.
• This artificial demand for valueless items is what has sustained production (and the economy) in the 20th century.
• Industry and the country have cashed in on the economic benefits of heightened production by driving that production past all points of reason.
• American consumers have supported this production via over consumption, and they have over consumed by saving zero and leveraging credit.
• Collectively, Americans have maxed out their credit and can no longer support the given levels of production.
• They can definitely NOT support the ever increasing levels of production needed to continue economic growth.
• Consumption has flattened and will begin falling.
• Industry will back off production, staunching the flow of money that the production pumps into the economy.
• Private incomes will fall further, making even less money available for consumption.
  

We know we’re in for a hurting with the whole economy thing, right? It might be just a short slow down. Might be a small recession with a quick recovery. Might be a long recession with a slow recovery. But it'll be something.

Americans can no longer turn to credit expansion as a way to support their consumption and the economy as a whole. So what does the Fed do? They hand maxed-out Americans some money. . . money that Americans are borrowing from their own future selves. . . so that Americans can spend that borrowed money now and continue to artificially support production by increasing debt.

But instead of Americans spending their own credit dollars gotten from unsecured credit card debt, Americans will now be spending borrowed money secured by U.S. Treasury bills. It’s a debt that can’t be wiped out with Chapter 11 bankruptcy or a windfall from an insurance settlement. It’s debt (along with a few trillion other dollars) that our kids and grandkids WILL HAVE TO ACCOUNT FOR.

Don't get me wrong. I'll cash the check when it arrives. But I'm not chipper about it.

What do you mean, “No?”

I wanted a Wii game console for my daughter. I wanted one for Christmas ’07, but none could be found easily. So I waited. In April 2008, I started checking again, and I STILL couldn’t get one. Retailers all told the same story. Each store receives a shipment of 10 units on a random basis, every few weeks. No telling when they’ll be in. No way to reserve them. You just have to be lucky.

Most retail stores had taken to putting Wii status messages on their automated phone recordings. “If you are calling about a Wii, please press 1 and then go away, because we don’t have any.”

Not being able to get a Wii really started to bother me. . . so much so that I started wondering about why it bothered me so much. And I came to realize that we really are spoiled, folks.

We live in such an affluent society that the idea of scarcity is foreign to us. Anything we want is readily available; the only reason we don’t have everything we want is because we don’t have the money. You want a bushel of pomegranates? Those are exotic fruits and only avaialbe in the fall here in the US, right? Nope. Go on-line and buy a bushel now. You want a hundred pairs of designer jeans? Go get ‘em. No sweat. You want designer Indian tea for breakfast? Go to the store and get some.

It seems almost un-American for me not to be able to go out right now and buy a Wii (or ten Wiis) if I want to.

Survival of the Fittest?

Hard core conservatives and virtually all Libertarians lament the existence of most social programs. Leg-up programs like Head Start and Affirmative Action are bad enough in their view, and full-blown entitlement programs like Welfare are wholly unacceptable.

On a good day, those on the far right put on their “compassionate conservative” hats and cite the ways that entitlements and even leg-up programs countermand the American dream, robbing the poor of the personal victory that can only be won when they pull themselves out of poverty or disadvantage without outside help.

On a bad day, though, the most blunt and least delicate of conservatives reveal their real philosophy. Survival of the fittest, baby! SOTF. It’s a hard, hard world, and not everyone can be rich. Heck, it’s not even possible for everyone to be middle income. Some folks will be always be poor. That's just the way it is. Life is tough.

At least subconsciously, these conservatives and Libertarians recognize what economists of the central tradition have known since the time of Adam Smith; inequity and misery are inevitable in our economic system. The system on which our economy is based allows for-- and in fact encourages-- great disparities in personal wealth amongst its populace, and the very design of this market-based economy ensures that all individuals will not start life with equal advantages of birth, family wealth, intelligence, culture and opportunity. Even Smith understood that true equity could only be achieved by artificially leveling the playing field.

Recoiling reflexively away from all things redistributive, fearful laissez-fair conservatives shun the idea that an un-level playing field might be unfair in some way. They cling desperately to the immutable law of natural scarcity like a philosophical life raft, and they regress to a bastardized version of Social Darwinism as a way to cleanse their collective conscience. Survival of the Fittest. It's the only solution. What else can be done without us all becoming socialists?

Such Social Darwinists see life as a kind of sporting event, in a way. It's a game, folks. Play like winning is the only thing. If you lose (i.e., failing to excel in life, remaining poor or homeless or without health care or an education), it is because you were weak and ill-prepared. Tough break.

And if you win (i.e. succeed in life, earning well, having health insurance, owning a home, having your kids in decent schools, taking vacations and sending those kids to college). . . well, you worked hard, by God. Unlike those who failed, you did what you had to do, and you deserve your success.

Survival of the Fittest is comfortable enough to most of us when we're watching documentaries on television about life and death on the Serengeti. But the moral rub comes when the lions and zebras in the equation are human beings. The Survival of the Fittest concept brings with it two suppositions that are problematic in my view. First, it assumes that those who don’t survive weren’t fit to begin with. And more troublingly, it assumes that those who aren’t fit do not deserve to survive.

That should be troubling to anyone. Anyone who might just find himself unfit some day, at least.

Those who rail against redistributive social programs as being anti-American or worse would surely denounce my claim that they do not care for the poor and disadvantaged. They'd point to charities or private enterprise as ways that the poor can be cared for without using the strength of the federal government to involuntarily redistribute wealth.

I argue that such "solutions" are empty of any applicability to life here in 2008. And I contend that those decrying social programs and touting the private sector as the solution don't really even believe that the solutions really lie there. I believe these are just vacuous responses to difficult questions, meant to ease the conscience of the Survival of the Fittest crowd while providing no real answers for those who, often through no fault of their own, come up short in life's fitness test.

Post Script: Charles Darwin didn't coin the phrase "survival of the fittest" as part of his evolutionary theory. It was a political theorist who formed that little gem, which seems about right. Look it up if you don't believe me.

Do We Need a Third Party?

Expressions of dissatisfaction with the federal government are common. Many believe that it has overreached its rightful boundaries and become corpulent by feeding on the American public. Individuals expressing such thoughts often see the modern political process in the US as a cause. They see politics as dominated by two political parties that no longer adequately represent the varied preferences of the American people.

The conclusion typically reached in such arguments is that increasing the number of viable parties in the political process would be a step in the right direction. If there were three or four parties, people would have a better chance of finding a candidate that adequately represents their own wants and desires for the country, and the excesses of government could finally be reigned in.

More would be better.

Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, who is widely considered the most influential economist of the twentieth century, spent a career expressing similar dismay at the ways in which the federal government has been allowed to expand. Friedman saw the proper role of the federal government in a free society as being something that could be comfortably summarized on a cocktail napkin. The government should serve as umpire and rule-maker where necessary and look after “madmen and children.” Everything else, in Friedman's view, should be left to the care of market dynamics.

Friedman rejected as inappropriate nearly all allocation functions of government; social security, welfare and cash payments, federal subsidies and tax breaks. . . all were anathema to true freedom in Friedman’s view.

Most of the individuals demanding smaller government and more party options in the political process would likely agree with Friedman, I think.

Yet interestingly, the political process itself was something under which Friedman chaffed. Noting that all governments are inherently coercive by nature, Friedman lamented that “the use of political channels [for any purpose], while inevitable, tends to strain the social cohesion essential for a stable society.” The political process, he posited, always results in wide-spread dissatisfaction for those on the losing side of each and every vote.

So let us look at presidential politics and consider what Friedman might think about our two-party system. With our recent tendency toward very close elections, it is likley that the vote will be roughly evenly split in the 2008 presidential election. About half the country will be happy with the outcome and the other half will be dissatisfied. If the election bucks this trend and shows a wide margin of victory for one candidate, then we might expect 58 to 60 percent of the population to be on the winning side, with 40 percent or more dissatisfied.

Some argue that adding more parties to the mix would help increase overall satisfaction with the process and the popularity of the eventual president. But I (and perhaps Friedman) would argue just the opposite.

Introduce a third party into the mix, and instead of an election win requiring a majority of electoral college votes, such a win might require only a simple plurality (34 percent of the electoral college vote). That could leave roughly two thirds of the country dissatisfied with the election results. Introduce a fourth party into the equation, and our next president could be elected with 26 percent of the electoral vote, leaving three quarters of the country opposed to their new leader.

I honestly do not know how our electoral process would handle three or four or five parties. There may be rules in place that would prevent a candidate from winning with just 24 percent of electoral college votes in a four-party race.

But from just a logical perspective, is more better in this case? If the political process is coercive and leaves the losers of each exchange dissatisfied, then adding parties to the process would necessarily leave more voters on the losing side of the election. More parties means more losers.

We only have to look to other countries and their parliamentary processes to see what elections look like with three or four or five (or ten) parties in contention. It could be argued that few people win in such cases.

More is better? I’m thinking not.

Should They Vote Their Race or Their Gender?

CNN.com headline from Monday, January 21 showed side-by-side pictures of Obama and Clinton.

Beneath the picture, the article talked about the significant role that black women will play in deciding the Democratic winner in the South Carolina primary. “These women face a unique dilemma: Should they vote their race, or should they vote their gender?” That line was followed by a link to the “full story.”

Should they vote their race (Obama)? Or should they vote their gender (Clinton)? Those are the two key questions?

I find the entire article insulting. Why aren’t black women given the credit that the other demographic groups (black men, white men, white women, working-class voters, rural voters, etc.) are given? Why would black women be less concerned about the actual issues than everyone else? Why would black women NOT be considering what the rest of us are considering. . . namely who they think might actually do the best job as president?

Maybe the link at the end of that paragraph should point to “Less than the Full Story.”