Bastiat On The Bay

Where are the libertarians among the high and mighty, the Francisco d'Anconias of the world?

Warren Buffet opposes lower taxes on dividends and supports collectivist politicians. George Soros espouses all kinds of statist nonsense. Alan Greenspan, until retirement touted as the most powerful libertarian in government, now seems to think that insufficient regulation was responsible for the current Great Recession. Hasn't anyone who matters noticed that the industries suffering spectacular collapses because of bad risk management are two of the most heavily regulated industries in the country -- banking and insurance? Think that's a coincidence?

Today the rich and powerful take communism with their caviar and liberalism (the modern, debased kind) with their limousines. This is depressing. Shouldn't productive, successful people be natural libertarians, or at least small-government Republicans?

I recently witnessed some encouraging evidence that many of them are. These natural lovers of freedom, personal responsibility, deregulation, and low taxes were to be seen at a regular, though informal and slightly drunken, meeting of a book club in, of all places, San Francisco. All but one of them were strangers to me, and meeting them was a bit of an adventure. By the way, if they aren't already public figures, I expect some of them will be, and since I was dropping in on their private get-together, I will use their initials rather than their names.

We were to rendezvous at the downtown residence of one of the clubmen. Most of us arrived at the lobby of the St. Regis at about the same time. The doorman recognized the regulars and eased our way across the marble floor. I jumped into the elevator with this clutch of likely looking young men, wondering when I would start to feel as if I were wallowing in pretentious middlebrow mud. The first thing I learned was that I am older, déclassé, and unfashionable -- in fact, ignorant of fashion.

I learned this by looking down at our feet. Half of the guys were wearing outlandishly long, pointed shoes. Some of them were wingtips and some of them were loafers, but the style, I must assume, was de rigueur. I almost laughed out loud, because, well, to this provincial bumpkin they looked like dressed-up, filed-down clown shoes. But the laugh was on me: fashion is mostly arbitrary, and I was out of it. Everyone except C., the ostentatious original in the group who arrived late in retro sneakers, had a very expensive-looking way of dressing down. When I dress down, which is always, I'm a half step from Goodwill. It isn't reverse snobbery; it's a sad symptom of being lazy and cheap.

To prep for the meeting of the book club, they had to choose a book. This they did by a lively exchange of email that went on for a week or so before the appointed meeting date. I got into the discussion halfway through. They thought about reading Orwell's "1984" but didn't want to break their no-fiction rule. Someone made the following proposal, which seems to have been ironical:

"While I'm sure many of you wanted to read the Communist Manifesto for our next book club, I figured we get enough of that in the typical Obama press conference."

They decided that Stephen Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought" was too much work and not enough fun. But when they finally made their choice, it was a work of the year 1850, Frédéric Bastiat's "La Loi" ["The Law"], a classic proto-libertarian text.

Ever the snob, I read it in the original French; but the guys politely overlooked my Euro-geekery, and from the elevated perspective of the huge suite atop the St. Regis, I was easy enough to overlook. Lush Persian carpets muffled the pointed feet, and additional comfort was provided by a collectible $200.00 magnum of Sea Smoke pinot noir, which had been "lying about collecting dust for a few years." They were venture capitalists, merchant bankers, management consultants, entrepreneurs, and mostly Stanford graduates. Late twenties to mid-thirties. All single. Two engaged to be married and one who should be. I put the participants' average annual income in the small millions, even with me there to drag it down.

They were practical men, not the niggling ideologues who too often exemplify the curious subspecies that we call "libertarians." Still, their words evinced a thirst for freedom that put them way outside the political norm. In the email string, one of them had written this about a conversation with an industry expert:

"With no provocation from me, he digressed from a discussion of the current health-care reform proposals to lamenting what is happening in terms of regulation, taxation, inability to accumulate wealth during his prime earning years, etc. He concluded his digression (mostly in jest) by saying he is contemplating moving his family to Switzerland. I thus find a bit of optimism with the new day. Perhaps Atlas will shrug and there is hope…."

J., who wrote that, expressed all of his views with a passion that, I think, spilled over from a large pot of anger (anger that was perhaps not always inspired by the subject at hand, but that's the sort of thing that makes the world go 'round).

As I might have predicted, Bastiat inspired J. to fire off some powerful tirades. C. looked for radical implications, as in "what should we do?" Could we move to a tax haven? Start a new country? Go underground? M. drew scorn by hinting at the merest compromises to principles of liberty. But, as S. softly guided the debate back to Bastiat, I thought that these were men who could make smart compromises in the interest of liberty, especially economic liberty.

It was my own first reading of "La Loi," and I did my homework before attending the meeting. Bastiat, I knew, was the author of the famous "petition on behalf of candlestick makers," a masterpiece of irony that condemns the sun for unfairly competing with candlestick makers and other purveyors of light, and pleads for government assistance and regulation. "La Loi," I found, was an interesting mix of original and unoriginal ideas.

It starts with a natural rights argument that was well known in America long before 1776. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Sound familiar? It's a fair summary of the first few paragraphs of "La Loi," written about 75 years after the Declaration of Independence.

So Bastiat's first proposition about his subject, the nature of law, is radically different from Rousseau's ideas about a "social contract," because it places individual rights above all other considerations. There is no compromise; the law should only protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It must never "plunder" or "despoil." (Here I'm translating Bastiat's French word "spoliation," a word he uses often throughout this long essay. The law must never take from one person to give to another. And it must never forbid the individual's protection of himself.

I, my 45 Colt, Sig 380, and S&W 357 magnum appreciate Bastiat's complaint against the laws that have turned self-defense into a crime ("légitime défense en crime"). But there's ample evidence that Bastiat is wrong when he turns from natural rights to a cost-benefit analysis of crime suppression. He supports basic criminal law with the assertion that the collective must see to it that crime doesn't pay. "When does all this plunder [of man against his neighbor] end? Only when it becomes more painful and dangerous than work." ("Quand donc s'arrête la spoliation? Quand elle devient plus onéreuse, plus dangereuse que le travail.") In fact, many people refuse to commit crimes that they could easily get away with, while others go ahead and commit crimes that are very likely to be punished severely. The typical bank robber, for example, can expect infrequent success, small rewards, and harsh punishment. But I guess that Bastiat can't go as far as David Friedman. Bastiat needs criminal law and cops and robbers.

His notion of why crime should not pay resembles Justice Holmes's "bad man" theory of law, also known as the prediction theory of law. Holmes abandoned natural-rights theories on the basis of an idea that bad men didn't give a hoot about natural rights and had to be shown that the law would make being bad a poor gamble. In other words, the law should be a prediction of consequences, and the consequences should discourage bad behavior. This unfortunate theory eventually led to the proudly named Legal Realism movement, which devolved, in time, into such post-modern perversions as Critical Legal Studies or “CLS”. The proponents of CLS, Critters, will "prove" to you that the law is entirely indeterminate. But they won't stop there. Liberated from the notion that law should be based on principles and applied without prejudice, they urge their students and colleagues to remake the world in the interest of an egalitarian goal--an end that can be sought without compunctions about the means. In other words, they would legitimize legal spoliation even when it isn't authorized by specific laws as long as it obtains for someone something that the enlightened Critters thought he deserved.

Bastiat does much better when he is considering the practical benefits of limiting the government. Here, his arguments are charming and true: there will be less strife, less corruption, less of all the civic horrors, if the role of government is minimized, because the spoils to be derived from managing or manipulating the government will be less. The procedures of a severely limited government would not be as interesting, in certain ways, as the freak-show cage fight that government now resembles, and people with less than titanic rectitude would no longer be as likely to be fascinated and corrupted by it.

Related to these thoughts is a sort of conundrum I have noticed: as the role of the state gets bigger and the fruits of political victory get juicier, the quality of politicians and statesmen (a big word for these operators) declines. When our government was a part-time job for farmers and printers, it drew some great men to the task. Now the smartest and most productive people tend to shun government, even though that's increasingly where power is to be found. Bastiat offers no clues to why this is.

As far as I can tell, Bastiat was the first to describe collectivist government as the public tit ("mamelle"), an image that has persisted ever since. He extends the conceit nicely, more nicely than anyone else. He makes sure we don't end by thinking, "Hey, what's wrong with a public tit? Sounds yummy." He reminds us that the Great Mammary does not fill itself with milk--we are at both ends of the tit, and for most productive people, a lot goes into the ducts ("les veines lactifères) but only a little comes out of the nipple. It's an easy lesson, and the fact that most of us haven't learned it can only indicate that more of us should read Bastiat.

Well, the book club read him, and although its deliberations ended in frustration, it was not with the author but with his subject--the mammillary state. The discussants were discouraged by reckless government bailouts and exuberant calls for more regulation of commerce and industry. I, on the other hand, felt encouraged to have met such vigorous and well-placed natural libertarians.

There is something in French called "l'esprit d'escalier," which can be crudely translated as "the wit of the staircase." The phrase evokes an image, and a little story. One imagines an intellectual salon, convened in the luxurious upper-floor apartments of a Parisian hotel particulier. Eventually the party breaks up and the participants start to descend the stairs. Just then, in the stairwell, one of them pauses and discovers, too late, all the clever things he should have said. That is the wit of the staircase. It is my usual unfortunate form of wit, and when the book club, which was the nearest thing to an intellectual salon that I had ever seen, concluded its meeting, I exhibited symptoms.

For I had failed to say what I should have said. I should have reminded these likeable, influential people that they could at least do as Bastiat had done. Their choices weren't restricted to being oppressed or hiding from oppression; they could also take it as their task to advocate liberty, clearly and persistently, to other people. More than 150 years after Bastiat wrote, his words are still inspiring and thought-provoking. I'm confident that the members of a certain elite book club in San Francisco will follow his example. There are worse ways to live your life, C. And J., I can't think of a better way to exorcise your angst.

Boom and Bust

My good friend John Wander and I debated the causes of the current mess among financial institutions. He kicked it off by sending me a link to an editorial that contrasted bubbles past (railroads, internet) with today's credit crunch. You will notice my snotty tone in the correspondence. Maybe that had something to do with the half million dollars I lost in the markets (and by the way, the fact that I outperformed the markets was skinny solace). Anyway, I was grumpy.

Me: He's a ninny in this article. The contrast is very weak. The parallel is very strong. The burstings of the railroad and internet bubbles were associated with excess capacity in railroads and bandwidth. The bursting of the housing bubble is associated with excess capacity in housing. Exactly the same. He tosses off the parallel offhandedly by suggesting that the excess in housing is condos in Florida that "should never have been built". He implies that the current bust is different, worse, more evil, because it did not relate to the creation of useful assets. But a condo in Florida can be quite useful. In their day, you could find a lot of railroads and optical fiber networks that "should never have been built" too. So, in conclusion, stupid. Journalism is in a pitiful state.

He: Do think that housing's not the problem, nor subprime, nor greed? We need to take the inflation out of many markets and I'm not sure how easy that is. If an $8 loan on a $10 house generates $40 in credits through structured products and a $10 or 11 loan on the same house does the same the rising tide will lift all boats until at one point no one's afloat.

Me: The problem is the proliferation of mortgage loans that were undersecured and made to borrowers who could not afford them. Freddy and Fannie made many of these loans and encouraged the making of many more. You can call much of this phenomenon "subprime." Why do you think that happened? I know why. Do you?

Greed is not a "problem" in the financial markets or in any business. Greed is a very common vice. Any system that does not function well in the presence of much greed is perverse. For greed, the cobbler wants to raise his prices. For greed, the banker wants to raise interest rates. Most businesses make exactly as much as they can. Most businesses are not subsidized by Freddie or Fannie. Most businesses do not enjoy federal guaranties of their debtors' debts. By the way, your hypothetical "an $8 loan on a $10 house generates $40 in credits..." never happened, and nothing like it ever happened in the US mortgage market.

He: I don't think it was those loans alone, and I thought a lot of them were written to enable mortgage brokers to get paid up-front origination fees with little concern as to whether they'd be paid, and bankers to insure them with derivative products. I'd be interested to know why you think it happened. I've seen figures suggesting the sub-prime tranche of bank portfolios insufficient to bring them to their knees, though the derivative backwash gamed their asset ratios. Of course greed (a vice) is not a problem but it's a word bandied about by candidates and congressmen, incorrectly attributing the blame, which ensures the solution will be wrong. The way the political decision to encourage home ownership gamed the market. What I meant by the $10 to $40 figure, based on interviewing bankers who dealt in swaps, cdo's, cmo's, cds's is that an initial fixed-rate loan could be swapped with a variable one, packaged before or after into a CMO, that was then protected by a CDS. This enabled banks to maintain 'assets' that weren't assets, all based on a shaky initial instrument, whose failure multiplied its way through the system.

Me: Ultimately the bad assets currently coming home to roost are indeed the mortgage loans. (Credit card debt and car loans, also securitized, may be next; because much consumer debt was supported by cash from second mortgages and refinancings of home loans.) Banks and non-bank mortgage companies typically get origination fees. Nothing wrong with that. But why did they have little concern as to whether they would be paid? -Because they sold the loans to other institutions who had little concern or who could get them guarantied by other institutions who had little concern.

By dollar volume, by far, the biggest buyers and guarantors of bad mortgage loans were Fannie and Freddie. That outlet for risk (that vast moral hazard) quite simply caused the current problems. Full stop. It provided a large, strong incentive to gin-up liquidity for these loans. The liquidity came in part from securitization. In other words, selling securities that were backed by mortgage obligations. Some of these securities were also guarantied by Fannie and Freddie. Some were guarantied by AIG. But importantly, securitization is just a way to raise more cash to make more loans that could then be sold on to Fannie or Freddie or guarantied by Fannie or Freddie.

Meanwhile, there was of course an asset price bubble in real estate. That bubble helped banks and other mortgage lenders make loans that appeared to be sufficiently secured but weren't. It also promoted expansive consumer debt in the form of second mortgages, mortgage-backed credit cards, and mortgage-backed lines of credit.

The unwashed masses were parading around saying things like, "ya gotta unlock the equity in your home." In my neighborhood, these stupid jerks were zipping by me in their new BMWs. Little education and lousy jobs. In fact, a lot of them were manning the phones in boiler rooms dedicated to selling second mortgages to other jerks who couldn't afford their debts or their expenses. Now the Republican president and Democratic congress want me to bail those guys out.

Let 'em shine my goddamned shoes.

The rest of what I said was unprintable, so I'll stop there. My main point is that, despite the apparent complexity of securitization, credit swaps, options, and other derivative securities, the root of the problem is clear--lenders did exactly what the U.S. government and its monstrous public-private chartered bastards (Freddy and Fannie) asked them to do and encouraged them to do and payed them to do. I don't much blame them. I blame both the government and the borrowers who took out unaffordable loans just because they could.

Living In The Age of Porcelain and Skateboarding

"No grown-up hierarchy." "No ambition." "No responsibility." "The new super-prosperity." "Forty-something is the new eight." For a couple of years these words and ideas have been tugging at a loose thread in the fabric of my mind. They are part of a phenomenon that I'm trying to identify.

I and most of my friends don't feel like real adults. In our forties now, we still feel like impostors, children in adult bodies. Indeed, even some of the adult bodies are looking pretty youthful, having avoided hardships and physical labor. Our age is supposed to slow us down. It hasn't happened yet. I'm cycling 200 miles per week, often with state champion bike racers. One of my friends is an amateur bullfighter and a good one. My friend from junior high school, now pushing 50, recently ran the Boston marathon, nearly beating his 25-year-old personal record. But it's our lack of responsibility, not our fitness, that most makes us childlike.

No grown-up hierarchy

Where Los Angeles goes, other cities follow. When I moved to Los Angeles in the mid-80s, I had just spent three years in Boston, a city that I found to be socially regimented. It had college kids and townies and bankers and Brahmins. The hierarchies seemed to have been reliably defined for a long time. It had grown-up industries, like insurance and banking. It was a grown-up town.

Los Angeles was different. I worked downtown in a big law firm. I lived downtown. My law firm had plenty of serious business to work on -- billion-dollar deals. And yet it had nothing at all to do with what many Angelinos think their town is all about: "the industry." You had to go to the west side for that. Many people living on the west side of Los Angeles never went downtown, ever. They didn't even know what happened downtown. From the Hollywood perspective, I didn't really live in L.A. Plenty of other industries had nothing to do with "the industry" -- computer businesses, small manufacturing, the garment district, Korea town. Even on the fringes of the movie industry, many of the participants didn't give a fig for the industry hierarchy.

Think about the hierarchies of earlier generations. When I was a child in age, not just in mind and spirit, a successful adult man was probably a "company man." I never saw any of those in Los Angeles.

In L.A., nobody rules the roost. I like that. There are so many hierarchies running in parallel that there may as well be no hierarchy at all. Los Angeles is a city that heeds the hippie directive: do your own thing! Of course most people end up doing things that the hippies would not have approved of.

No ambition

One of my law firm's clients was a very young business man, a boy really. A few years before I met this fellow, his father was at wit's end. The boy had no ambition and no job. To inspire the boy, his father bought a little bottling plant. I think it was somewhere in or near New York. The boy began to bottle and brand alternatives to popular sugary, sweet, carbonated beverages. His beverages too were sugary, sweet, and carbonated, and they were called, "Original New York Seltzer." Dad, who used to be in the beer business, helped with distribution. The brand took off. After capturing close to five percent of the soda pop market nationwide, father and son sold the business for several tens of millions of dollars. The boy threw a huge party with his pet mountain lion on display along with a busload of breast-enhanced female humans.

But the phenomenon that I'm trying to identify goes well beyond what I saw in Los Angeles in the late eighties. It involves dropping out more convincingly. I believe that a certain meaningful minority of the U.S. population has realized, consciously or not, that work (at least serious, staid, consistent work) is no longer necessary. I myself became one of those people in the most cowardly and backward way: I worked diligently until I had enough to retire early. I still get honors for being a half-assed slacker, because I was never a careerist or company man, and when I thought I had enough to retire, I retired. Without some slacker bones in your body, you would just keep working and spending more or saving more.

Along the way, before retiring, I took baby steps towards this new slacker attitude. After law school, I dramatically and irresponsibly changed jobs two or three times, badly injuring my career. The wounds to my career were real enough. Unlike so many of my classmates, I did not become a partner in a big law firm. I expected the wounds to affect my prosperity too, but they never did. I prospered. In the short run, I prospered more than they. And then I just stopped. I cashed in my chips. I had enough prosperity to try something else.

No Responsibility

My generation takes comfort for granted. We didn't get drafted. We didn't go to war. We didn't have an economic depression. We didn't have civil war. We didn't have a revolution or a plague. Many of us didn't get married or have children. I don't even have a mortgage or a dog. This lack of responsibility combined with prosperity leaves us free to ponder deeper things such as what movie to rent tonight.

Forty-something is the new eight

Here's an idea: given the opportunity to persist in childhood, most folks will do just that. More and more people are living in a perpetual childhood. They don't knuckle down. They goof off. They develop deep hobbies. My and my wife's closest friends are: an under-employed actress, an unemployed former schoolteacher, a bullfighting instructor, and a law professor -- all middle-aged, all goofing off (no, "law professor" is not a real job). That's why I say, "forty-something is the new eight."

Youth need not be wasted on the young. As a boy I spent my time reading, dreaming, riding my bicycle, and playing with my chemistry set. Now, at forty-six, I spend my time reading, writing, dreaming, riding my bicycle, and fermenting wine in my garage.

The new, super-prosperity

In the eighteenth century, John Adams prophesied, "I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." We live in the age of porcelain and skateboarding.

There is a lot of prosperity going around. And you don't have to be prosperous to benefit from it. Fool.com says, "Certainly, we have more money to spend. From 1970 to 2000, real household income rose by more than 50%, according to the authors of Trading Up: The New American Luxury. Today, there are 15 million households that take in more than $100,000 a year. Our paychecks and portfolios are fatter than ever, and thanks to mass-manufacturing and merchandising (think Wal-Mart, Kohl's, Circuit City), our everyday necessities can be had at a fraction of what our parents and grandparents paid." http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2006/commentary06071003.htm.

In simple, material terms, being poor today can include having a car, three televisions, a refrigerator, a DVD player, stereo, and computer. I think that's a symptom of a super-affluent society. As far as I can tell, the trickle-down theory proved out. Our economic freedoms and the energy and innovations that they release have produced so much material wealth that it doesn't just trickle down; it spills over.

If the poor live rich, what does it mean to be rich? Past generations would have accumulated wealth for security, power, and status. Whereas a growing, childish minority of my generation doesn't seek power or status in a conventional hierarchy. And this group of people seems not to worry about security, never having suffered privations.

My brother-in-law has a very young client with a problem. The client is a skate punk. All he ever did was ride his skateboard. Most of the guys in my brother-in-law's firm have a hard time communicating with the skate punk. They are too buttoned-down. They make him nervous. My brother-in-law's profession? Money manager. The skate punk's problem? What to do with the great wealth that he earned by riding his skateboard. To help solve this problem, my brother-in-law has to remove his tie and say "dude" a lot.

My nephew is a good student and a fine young man. Rock and roll is his thing. At 14, he is already making money playing in a band. His parents don't mind. They aren't pushing him to be a doctor or a lawyer. My sister manages his band. I'm convinced he will make a fortune in music. He'll be like the skate punk, just doing what feels good, and the wealth will pour in.

However, you don't have to make any money at all to enjoy the new super-prosperity. My unemployed friend is impecunious and has been for more than a decade. He lives among millionaires in a beautiful cottage a block from the beach in La Jolla, California. There he spends his time wondering where he went wrong and what it's all about and which diet is right for the human organism (macrobiotic? vegetarian? sugar-free? low glycemic index?) and whether his upbringing is the cause of his frequent physical malaises and what to do next, if anything.

I know that some of this high living involves other people's money and resources -- friends and relatives. But the friends and relatives are volunteers. These aren't forced redistributions.

Look at the trends and follow my speculations. How far can this go? In material terms, our poor are richer than everyone in earlier generations except for a wealthy minority. Productivity continues to rise. It takes less and less to earn more and more. Sure a lot of people work long, hard hours, but their motive is more likely to be power and wealth rather than food and shelter.

Does the average, middle-class worker like work that much? What will he do if ten hours of work a week will earn a comfortable living? Will he still work 40 hours? If we get prosperous enough, will many more people drop out? Will they conclude that working hard at jobs they don't like is a bad bargain when the consequences of quitting are so comfortable? Will they work only jobs they like or none at all? Will they take long, frequent sabbaticals?

Prosperity took me too much work and time. I got to be 44 years old. That's 25 years of hard work without goofing off! Well, okay, I did take more than a year off, twice, before retiring. Was I a fool to prosper at all before walking away from the table and cashing in my chips? Perhaps the ambient prosperity is enough. I'm not talking about being on the dole; I'm talking about being a slacker, a layabout, navel-gazing, perpetual student (without, of course, taking any courses).

Classes turned upside down

Is this in fact new? In 1906, William Jennings Bryan complained: "The theory that idleness is more honorable than toil -- that it is more respectable to consume what others have produced than to be a producer of wealth -- has not only robbed society of an enormous sum, but it has created an almost impassable gulf between the leisure classes and those who support them." But then and before, the leisure classes were always the rich and privileged classes. Now most of the rich are the working rich. They have, or give themselves, less leisure than almost anybody else. They work all the time -- in their cars, at their offices, in airports, at home. From them the spill-over economy flows.

These are the new serfs. Our economy feeds on their labor and creativity and risk-taking and taxes. I have seen it close up. The new serfs are the company executives who work longer and harder than their own employees. Thirty years ago, that was not typical. Today, it is the rule in new businesses. In every high-technology company that I know, the bosses are the slaves. And when the labor market is tight, they must coddle their employees just to keep them working 9:00-5:00.

So, many of the exploited masses have become the new leisure class. I admit that most of the new leisure class have some advantages (my description of the world will seem all wrong to some working-class people), but they are not just the wealthy or even mostly the wealthy. That's what's new. It's a middle-class revolt against middle-class values, and it has never happened before. Aristocrats, artists, and intellectuals have done it, but now the successors of the company man are doing it.

The Wikipedia entry for the word, "slacker" includes this: "...but philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle made it clear that the purpose for which the majority of men labored was 'in order that the minority, the elite, might engage in pure exercises of the mind -- art, philosophy, and politics.'" In our upside-down world, the apparent elite work miserably hard so that the enlightened bums of my generation and the next can engage in pure exercises of the mind and body -- writing screenplays, skateboarding, playing guitar, aimless speculation (like this essay), and bicycle races.

Or perhaps these childlike, unambitious people are simply petty and blind to the challenges that could make them more worthy. Perhaps the very opportunity to be a slacker is an illusion, a brief calm before a storm. Maybe war and pandemic and depression loom just over our close horizons.

Or, even if our prosperity and stability continue, maybe man is not made for the age of porcelain and skateboarding. I'm already seeing symptoms of a revolt against slackerdom among the slackers themselves. I feel it in my own heart. Something in me needs an existential challenge. I have apocalyptic dreams, dreams of war and violence. They are euphoric. I feel a sort of allergic reaction to the obvious question: "Is this all there is?" The more I ask myself that question, the more I tend to break out in a rash of crazy ideas -- I'll walk across the entire Indian sub-continent or move to Spain or climb Everest or take LSD or join the CIA or get a job. It's the urge to awaken the inner zombie. It's the next step in societal evolution. And it's the topic of my next essay.