Boston Apothecary

John Ralston Saul, in his 2005 Collapse of Globalism, keeps mentioning the evaporation of wealth. The concept is curious, elusive, and basically not talked about by anyone else because it challenges a lot of ideas in economics. We have to remember that money is not real and something that always sits a top the value of an asset is the concept of utility (which is hard to measure so economists hate it). We all know economics eventually have to go beyond a focus on GDP and switch to harder to quantify measures like happiness, but that is barely discussed. As JRS likes to remind us, if you ask around at economics schools if they’ve changed their curriculum since 2008, they will admit not by much.

There is a growing anxiety related to the not yet widely understood evaporation of wealth phenomena that is driving the democratic socialist movement which many elites like to ridicule. Our leadership and even our intellectuals are really weak on economics so they tend to grasp for or mock ideas like socialism. They cannot seem to see giant problems staring them in the face.

The easiest way to begin wrapping your head around the evaporation of wealth (exacerbated by globalism) is to consider decades ago what happened when women were added to the work force. If a family has two incomes, it should be wealthier, but that just hasn’t been the case. We once had a prosperous country where a family could support itself and achieve considerable happiness on a single income often working only 40 hours a week. Somehow we have evaporated that entire extra income as well as a hundred years of other accumulated assets. A lot of this has to do with how we allocate the tax burden and how we allow sanctioned corruption in the political process (lobbying).

A lot of people think of the evaporation of wealth only as inflation and deflation as well as speculation, but there is a lot more subtlety to it. Evaporation may also not be the best metaphor, but it is a good starting point. Evaporation also happens by degrees and is not an on or off phenomenon. Not all saving is evaporative, but some is significantly as the piles grow and the amounts in the billions lose productivity. When middle class people benefit from tax cuts and can save, their savings have normal utility, but when the 1% and .01% get a tax cut, the money has significantly different utility and is essentially evaporated or put into permanent storage where is does not contribute to the prosperity of the country. At the moment there is only one Elon Musk, but more on him later.

The main focus of this blog is the collecting and republishing of old beverage technology research papers and they are a great example of evaporation (my library card is my condenser!). These papers were publicly funded research that took place over large spans of the 20th century and they should be part of accumulated American wealth and resources with utility to draw from, but somehow they managed to become hidden.

This is just like money we stashed and forgot where we put it, but it also gets wrapped up in various infamous pay walls that privately tax you when you try to access your public wealth. We do not understand our miscellaneous public assets. We improperly archive them by under funding our libraries, allowing private gatekeepers that should not be there, and essentially evaporating vast utility. Americans have so thoroughly forgotten their public resources that they’ve allowed lobbyists to hijack our copyright system, robbing the public of wealth that is supposed to accumulate.

The new American distilling scene is approaching a billion dollars in market value and for some reason this rickety blog is the largest source of advanced educational material because I condensed a forgotten trove of public research returning our wealth. I’m currently holding multiple pieces of forgotten public research I haven’t shared that will dramatically advance every major distilled spirits category (I just leaked the most major piece to a spirits writer you all adore).

The biggest art museums which are quasi public-private (but essentially have public missions) are quick to tout statistics like only 3% of their collection is on view at any one time. This means they evaporated nearly 97% of a few millennia of art they rounded up and put in warehouses. Civilization should have accumulated so much fine art by now that it is coming out of our ears, but we put it in storage where it has near no utility. This art could adorn our public schools which look like prisons and countless other public spaces like post offices and public libraries. If the West is turning its back on Enlightenment values, spread that damn Enlightenment art!

Vladamir Putin is thought by many to be the richest man in the world, but all the wealth he robbed from the people of Russia has very little utility. It is all hidden and sheltered because he is not supposed to have it. Russia has vast natural resources and it has been extracting them for decades during their recent kleptocratic era, but all that wealth basically evaporates because they have no Elon Musk who can create new prosperity from so much accumulation. Kleptocratic wealth is not original prosperity, but merely a transfer from the public good. Much of it goes to countless 40 million dollar Manhattan apartments that no one lives in. Though many of these investments have a dollar value, they have no typical utility.

We drag along far more military these days than our grandfathers did who supported large families working one blue collar job which is a wide avenue of wealth evaporation. The world may have changed, but it takes us so much more military to get the same utility (hell, we may get less because we are in perpetual conflict). At forty hours, we used to drag along diplomacy and the draft, but now we drag along bloated pork project fighter jets and multi million dollar missiles that are useless (declining utility) against the increasing irregular warfare phenomenon.

Spending on police or the TSA is relatively less evaporative because it is labor intensive and employs the middle class, but that is starting to change as the police militarize and use expensive swat teams to serve simple warrants. We are also evaporating money into settlements for police misconduct that we likely aren’t even legally allowed to track and study. The expense of wrongful death after wrongful is a part of that albatross around the neck of every citizen keeping them from supporting a household on 40 hours a week.

Much global tension comes from the rapidly deflating value of fossil fuel assets. All parties know their fossil fuel wealth is slipping into relative uselessness and there is a race to unlock this wealth before it evaporates. As a non-OPEC member, the U.S. is currently winning big time and as demand slows, the U.S. keeps opening its faucet to keep the price down though many parties have innovated and automated to the point they can make money on $35 crude.

In the new era of fossil fuel divestment, there is actually multi tiered evaporation going on. First, oil wealth is evaporating like just housing wealth in a deflating real estate bubble. Then secondly, this wealth is distributed to where it’s utility is low so it does not create a diverse economy that can help the civilization it serves move on. Petrol-states rely on a template of transference prosperity, they have proven unable to create hard won original prosperity.

Many futurists are starting to discuss the parasitic city where housing crisis are developing. Housing speculation is transference prosperity and those that benefit from it fall into the petrol-state template and can likely never create original prosperity. Money is sucked up from would-be middle class innovators and perpetually put into storage. Vast wealth is sucked up by the land lords to create pretty mundane lives of no particularly amazing happiness (I know countless of these people personally via my restaurant). Ostentatious behavior would condense the wealth and we don’t even see that. The only place the money ever goes is to corrupting our political system.

Commodity speculation is a classic hated layer of evaporation. Imagine the supply and demand curve of the price of oil. Now add another elusive pulsating curve atop it and the space between is the meddling of the spectators. When you reach in, you cannot grab that efficient price, you can only grab something from that layer above belonging to spectators and pay their private tax. Speculation is a transference of wealth from those trying to create original prosperity with the commodity to the speculator who is often Goldman Sachs, Exxon, or actually myself.

I have had great success as a commodity speculator and have funded a lot of my art projects that way. The wealth I transfer (should be illegal) is not evaporated because I use it at normal utility. Putting the money to use, I am overall a prosperity originator. The first dollars Goldman Sachs makes are not exactly evaporative because staff eats, clothes themselves, drives to work, and participates in gross ostentatious behavior supporting original prosperity. The last dollars, the majority, are supremely evaporative.

Oil is a strange ethical case. If the price is high we will use less creating less environmental burden and alternatives may seem more viable. If the price is low, oil isn’t always worth taking out of the ground. Oil companies make significant money on speculation and at the moment it keeps the price up in a viable zone. Banning speculation by financial regulation is a choice we are allowed to make and could eventually propel oil out of it’s viable zone downward toward staying in the ground. This is complicated by the fact that a lot of speculation these days is betting against oil. It starts to melt your brain and I would rather make my money via my workshop.

I work in an odd neighborhood restaurant in a super zip where I’ve noticed hundreds of millions in pretty evenly distributed wealth sitting around on a Sunday night. The modesty is amazing and there are bank executives with Timex watches that drink $9 Montepulciano by the glass. Everybody knows our names and there is no hint of any gross culture associated with Wall Street (so I’ve set the scene with all the “elites” you hear about #banalityoffinancialevil). Second only to 45, everyone talks about Elon Musk. These bankers, real estate tycoons, heirs to fortunes and family businesses are all enamored with Musk’s massive scale original prosperity and intuit that his wealth draws from a more noble category than theirs (but sadly they leave it at that). Their money is in storage because they don’t know what to do with it besides protect it from taxation while Musk is commanding hundreds of billions and knows what to do with every dollar like someone on minimum wage.

Musk is what we thought trickle down economics was for. Reagan might have had the best intentions, but the country could not produce enough prosperity originators for all the evaporators. Those that didn’t spend their capital actually inventing stuff, the evaporators, they had plenty of money to influence government and here we are today.

There turned out to be no trickle down economics, but there certainly is the evaporation wealth.

If you are intrigued, I took a break from beverage technology blog work to write:
Optimism is your weapon!, Inherently Good, and the Public Good
What is water? Swimming in the Public Good
Our Social Contract, Taxes and Charity
Ideology and the Supernormal Stimuli
A New Institution of the Public Good: Mandatory Civil Service

You can check out my Victorian door hardware workshop on IG: @houghstfoundry

Our social contract is something that has seen a lot of straining lately with the change in presidential administrations. Not many people even realize the connection to what they are debating. Are we keeping the ACA or dumping it and is that a contract to pool risk with all of society? Is defunding public schools and restructuring education in America also a revision to our social contract?  It is an invisible thing, very much like the public good, and we interact with it very much like DFW’s famed fish; what the hell is water?

Society requires participation and a lot of unwritten stuff gets agreed upon and lived by. Sometimes it gets written down such as do unto others… and a lot of what is written is the philosophical arm of the public good. Membership to a democracy is a little more specific than merely society and citizens get perks while non citizens do not even when they sometimes fund the perks. The rules get spelled out and formalized a little more. Taxes get paid, charity is given out, and disputes get settled by rule of law. A well agreed upon social contract keeps us from descending into murderous anarchy. And when we do descend, it keeps us from engaging in barbarous irregular warfare. No one has been burning down the unoccupied summer homes of GOP politicians because our strong social contract says you should not, and yet they are trying to weaken it.

Higher quality more thoughtful social contracts can be designed to spur investment, produce culture, reduce inequality and basically be the high tide that lifts all boats. Single payer health care is freeing entrepreneurs to go off on their own and start new companies. Improving the social contract requires optimism. Pessimism is the erosion and slow opting out of the social contract into every man for himself. Pessimists just can’t see the value of living without need of a gate. They think backing off into armored cars and into a guarded compound is somehow saving them money and making them freer.

Lets wrap this up quickly. We could quote some Thomas Hobbes, John Locke or Rousseau, but the concept to be able to summon and hold on the tip of your tongue is that of taxes versus charity. “Betsy Devos is trying to take away free school lunches for needy kids.” That is what we hear and we are outraged (think of the children, we cry!), but that is not what is happening. Those kids will get their lunch, but who pays for it will change and that is where the outrage should be.

Currently those lunches are funded by taxes because enough of us believe they are necessary to have them legally embedded into our social contract. Devos change is to force charity to take over (and it will). The change is also the weakening of our social contract where some people are allowed to opt out and back away from their obligations as members of the same society.

The way the numbers historically add up, the burden will disproportionately move to the poor because the money is most likely to be raised locally where it is needed. Communities that need the most will pay the most even though it is hardest for them to do so.

We have this illusion taxes are going down, but only formally. The vast majority of people that do not want to break the social contract of feeding children in need will certainly pay up. The freedom sought by the pessimists is merely to avoid a commonly held sense of responsibility.

Tenets of the social contract, like feeding hungry poor kids, should be absolutely basic and fulfilled with disinterest as opposed to interest. Pessimists seeking freedom to optionally skirt the contract often participate in charity in very high numbers, but with interest. Large donations have names attached and come with leverage and egotistical satisfaction that does not belong there if the social contract holds that tenet as absolutely basic.

Sometimes contractual shifts are nefarious and sometimes they are not because few people can articulate these properties of the social contract (I learned it mostly from John Ralston Saul). There is often a gravity to these shifts, a path of least resistance, and a lot of it has to do with globalism and tax erosion.

We need new strategies for combating vindictive threats to cancel tax funded programs like the National Endowment for the Arts. We shouldn’t only be saying, but art is important!, but the amount is so small! We should be in command of the theory behind the policy change and its relationship to our social contract. Pessimists want to opt out and we either shouldn’t let them or need to convince them why it is so naive.

The right to health care is possibly the biggest renegotiation of our social contract we’ve seen since the civil rights movement. Burdens too often taken up by charity or failing to be met altogether were entering the tax code. The Affordable Care Act took us pretty far and now it is moving backwards, possibly because we did not invoke the language of social contracts. If enough participants in this democracy believe health care should be a right, we should all set a course to pool our risk together reducing the costs for as many individuals as possible.

As the wealthiest large nation, such an improvement to the benefits of being a member of society should not be out of the question. Actually, what are other benefits of being a member of society? There should be some easy to enumerate resources to pursue happiness. There is enough public land to traverse and escape to, to keep a well rounded mind. Somewhere formally it states that when we borrow water we return it clean so it can be re-used without fear (but some are trying to opt out of that responsibility). Our contract states that we are not allowed to be at the mercy of a monopoly and we are allowed to bust them up. Our contract goes on and on.

If an interest group messes with the countless tenets of our social contract they can unlock a lot of money and that is why there is large incentive to do so. The staggering breadth of the contract is why we must know its theory. If we go specific by specific we will become exhausted. We should also not be put in a position for experts on specifics to discredit our intuition, strong common sense should be enough to guide us (though that seems rare these days).

Money unlocked from weakening our social contract is not the creation of prosperity, but merely a transference of burden. It benefits the few at the expense of the vast majority. This is very much similar to how wealth can be robbed from the public good by privatization. GOP plans to lower taxes are often attempts to skirt responsibility veiled as freedom. Our ability to pursue happiness depends on the quality of our social contract. Tearing it up is pessimistic, selfish, and naive. As our nation grows wealthier, we should optimistically strive to strengthened our social contract and be ready to summon language to defend it against inevitable attack.

Ideology and the Supernormal Stimuli

What does ideology and supernormal stimuli have in common? The answer turns out to be everything. Ideology is an important concept to have a handle on as we all grapple with polarized politics, the rise of fake news, a generation succumbing to dangerous organized nihilism, and increasing authoritarianism. The supernormal stimuli, a near forgotten Nobel prize winning discovery, is a topic I’ve covered quite a bit in relation to creative linkage in the culinary arts and its particular application to the cocktail. Supernormal stimuli are commonly thought to be only sensory in nature, but with ideology we experience a purely symbolic version of the concept and it is no less dangerous.

To quote wikipedia, “A supernormal stimulus or superstimulus is an exaggerated version of a stimulus to which there is an existing response tendency, or any stimulus that elicits a response more strongly than the stimulus for which it evolved.” If you need more background, Stuart McMillen’s comic strip primer on the subject is absolutely brilliant. The seductive tug of breast implants comes to mind immediately or the Venus of Willendorf. In the classic studies, the robin sits on the bluer egg and lets it’s own go un-incubated while the Australian beetle tries to mate with the beer bottle because it is bigger, more orange, and more dimpled than its natural mate. Multiple male beetles have been known to stroke the dimples of the same beer bottle until they all ran out of energy and died right next to each other. This last example sounds very much like ideology, but lets try to build a stronger case.

From the Doubter’s Companion (A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense), John Ralston Saul defines ideology as:

Tendentious arguments which advance a world view as absolute truth in order to win and hold political power.

A God who intervenes in human affairs through spokesmen who generally call themselves priests; a king who implements instructions received from a God; a predestined class war which requires the representatives of a particular class to take power; a corporatist structure of experts who implement truth through fact-based conclusions; a racial unit which because of its blood-ties has a destiny as revealed by nationalist leaders; a world market which, whether anyone likes it or not, will determine the shape of every human life, as interpreted by corporate executives—all of these and many more are ideologies.

Followers are caught up in the naive obsessions of these movements. This combination ensures failure and is prone to violence. That’s why the decent intentions of the Communist Manifesto end up in gulags and murder. Or the market place’s promise of prosperity in the exploitation of cheap, often child, labour.

There are big ideologies and little ones. They come in international, national and local shapes. Some require skyscrapers, others circumcision. Like fiction they are dependent on the willing suspension of disbelief, because God only appears in private and before his official spokespeople, class leaders themselves decide the content and pecking order of classes, experts choose their facts judiciously, blood ties aren’t pure and the passive acceptance of a determinist market means denying 2,500 years of Western civilization from Athens and Rome through the Renaissance to the creation of middle-class democracies.

Which is ideology? Which not? You shall know them by their assertion of truth, their contempt for considered reflection and their fear of debate.

The first part of ideology we see from John Ralston Saul is that they are a manipulative tool, very much like breast implants. She knows they are fake, but presents them as the simple truth to hold power. And it works. Men are quick to suspend their disbelief. They are also often exaggerated to make up for deficiencies.

The nth degree is often invoked in ideology as with gods and kings. If law comes from a common man it is not as attentional as when it comes from a supreme figure. The modern day supreme figure in our corporatist world being the expert. The more supreme the figure invoked, the more likely the ideology is in violation of common sense. Pre-destiny or harnessing inevitability is a mode of simplification that ideology takes. We become more biased to accept.

Class and race are the intersection of the symbolic aspects of ideology as supernormal stimuli with sensation. Class categories often divide along sensory features. This starts with the color of skin and when that existing response tendency changes, the shape of our noses is always available to provoke an exaggerated response. I have done a lot of writing to explore the ordinary and extraordinary in sensation and have found that frequency of occurrence rules so much around us.

Obsession that consumes those introduced to ideology is very much the beetle stroking the beer bottle until it runs out of energy and dies, unsuccessfully mating. Failure is ensured because key details are missed and overshadowed by the blown out oversimplifications. In the movie, Her (2013), society quickly becomes obsessed with their seductive tongued personal assistants and messy human relationships get dropped. Matching with someone possessing the complete details to achieve a goal like reproduction also comes with confronting the grittier side of the human condition.

Detail is the enemy of ideology. That willing suspension of disbelief relates to lack of ability to categorize, parse, and build detachment. She is in the same room and you are allowed to touch them if you dare, you literally gravitate towards the breast implants. Those doomed beetles could not parse and categorize the beer bottle as not a useful mate.

Marshall McLuhan emphasized the difference between acting and reacting. Ideology is the guilty pleasure of reacting and being willfully illiterate so that a primal satisfaction does not go unindulged. Many very smart people succumb to ideology and various motivators perpetuate the ruse. The guilty pleasure of reacting (sometimes we say “overreacting”) without detachment transitions to the euphoria of obsession and that sometimes gives way to wielding ideology to win or hold political power.

For those that learn to wield them, ideologies start to get swapped like trading cards. When open racism is no longer a useful enough ideology to harness the votes of the ignorant masses, it is traded in for Islamophobia and/or transphobia. Most politicians personally do not care about about the ideology of the moment, they know the robin will jump to the bluer egg or that if they troll with a beer bottle, they will come up with a pile of beetles not afraid to die without successfully mating.

Polar politics is all about ideology and both camps are capable of generating them. The pessimistic right leans on prejudices and policies to undermine taxes while dismantling the public good whereas the left is capable of being overly optimistic and does not respect enough the importance of private industry and choice. One side needs to be there to check the other, but it becomes harder as a fear of nuance and debate sets in. It almost seems as if we are at a point where we cannot talk down the beetles, we simply have to wait for them to die to move on.

Fake news is a form of supernormal stimuli and a pizza shop where Hillary Clinton traffics children for many, believe it or not, is just a bluer egg. Response tendencies have changed due to the 24 hour news cycle, and to stand out, a story has to be more attentional. More attentional these days is often plain fake. You’d think the average person would dismiss so many of the stories, but then again how could the robin not know? We are back at John Ralston Saul’s willing suspension of disbelief (he likes to use that term a lot).

The rise of nihilist culture and its ideologies is greatly exacerbated by supernormal stimli. Much of it starts with sensory stimulation and it also straddles the line of supernormal stimuli as therapy versus a grave danger. To start framing things it must be realized that all art is an attempt to create a supernormal stimuli and art is not so completely innocent anymore now that it has been widely co-opted by propagandists and advertising agendas. Games, a big part of internet culture, are an extension of art and they create protected worlds where response tendencies can be abstracted and again manipulated. Gamification is a fairly new field of study worth following and is generating very interesting ideas.

Games are thought of as therapeutic in moderation, but when they take up enough time they can start to interfere with productive goals like mating or being an integrated member of society. Unemployment among the male internet addicted demographic is many multiples that of the national average. When you give up on inclusion or being included you join the nihilists and somehow they’ve decided to organize to increase the “lolz”.

Nihilist internet culture is pornography obsessed and dependent, creating a significant enough population for concepts like “invol cel” to become pop culture. Sex with a partner is important because it ends up teaching compromise. Many that remain involuntarily celibate develop dangerous misogynistic ideologies.

Taking gaming beyond a therapeutic distraction to an obsession creates isolation and stunts social skills. Due to its artificial protective shield, risk tolerance increases in a game and decreases out of it. When social skills are developed in many online games they have a way of collapsing outside so that the afflicted demographic becomes increasingly isolated from contribution to productive goals. The importance of inclusion in society is becoming increasingly relevant to this group that is part of the majority (white males) yet little of their own actions support inclusion. Society needs this demographic included to break the nihilist cycle, but their own actions lead to exclusionary viewpoints that are increasingly turning violent.

The internet seems like it would be a place for debate and nuance, but it becomes a breeding ground for ideology and communicating in all caps oversimplifications. This happens because it is saturated with supernormal stimuli. It is not called hyper-text for no reason. One has to dodge bluer eggs left and right to find nuance. The nature of reward makes us prefer short pieces with abstracted “click-bait” titles over detailed long form journalism. In McLuhan-esque ways, in what we could even start calling media disease, shortened attention spans gravitate towards ideology. In a strange twist, these ideologies are not championed by priests invoking gods, kings or experts, they are championed by a collective being called anonymous who ascends as they are shared.

The world some no longer want to be included in requires authoritarianism. Many want a figure who can single handedly solve their problems short cutting nuanced affairs while they stroke the dimpled bottle. For others, the chaos is just a hysterical vindictive prank. Those used to the game world become increasingly detached from real world consequences. Regret does not set in fast.

Precocious figures start to navigate among this vast demographic that has risen, it seems, out of nowhere and manipulate them as seen with the growth of alt-right commentators. This finicky group seems like it could turn on a dime, but doesn’t because the externalities generated from their pursuit of lolz is typically outside of their isolation. On the verge of violent radicalization, this large population of men is an unprecedented problem we do not at the moment have strategies to tackle. We need to transition from making fun of them to incentives and policy.

Ideology’s link to the supernormal stimuli phenomena could continue to be elaborated into a full fledged book, but hopefully enough of a picture has been painted to jump start critical thought. Supernormal stimuli is a near forgotten concept and it has been hard enough to draw interest to studying it in relationship to the culinary arts. Just like in culinary, there is possibility for supernormal stimuli as productive therapy, but a line can easily get crossed and they can become detrimental to health as seen in the classic animal examples.

McLuhan prophetically warned us about the consequences of introducing new media. The internet, catalyzed by economics, has created a population dangerously susceptible to destabilizing ideologies. Home grown extremism is growing rapidly in the U.S. and we are seeing a large population of white males fail to become productive members of society. Hopefully new ideas to help us frame these challenging problems will also help us generate solutions.

In my last short political thought piece about the public good as a support system for immigrants, I highlighted some great language by John Ralston Saul about public schools. Saul explains public school as a vital inclusive equalizing institution that is more relevant than ever due to modern life. If we needed a new institution to carry out those same vital roles and possibly solve a host of other hard to reach problems, what would it be? I wager it would look like mandatory civil service.

Today we have a largely urban population. Our cities are filled with a highly mobile population, two job families, high divorce levels, single parent families, the return of long hours of work, the loss of community identification, high immigration levels, a new rise in the division between rich and poor and so on and so on. All of these factors mean that the one—if not the only—public structure we have which is capable of reaching out to all citizens in all parts of the country and making them feel part of the extended family of citizenship is the public education system. In the classic sense of the inclusive democracy, those simple bricks and mortar buildings, which we call the public schools, are in fact the one remaining open club house of citizenship. Not only is the public education system and its fundamental structure not old fashioned, it has found a new form of modernity. I would argue that we are more reliant on it today than we were through most of the 20th century. -John Ralston Saul, Address to the Canadian Teacher’s Federation (2001)

To combat the formation of class divisions and to promote the idea of inclusive democracy we likely need to create a mandatory civil service as an extension of our public school system (which is in danger of going private). U.S. politics have become extremely polarized, almost as if we are living in bubbles, so we may benefit from the forced mixing of young people. Conservatives would rub off on liberals and liberals on conservatives. We would have the opportunity to create a new center before we spread too far.

I never thought I’d be outlining this and I’ve encouraged a discussion group of women I know to pursue it, but the ideas have to become more common place. Whether we adopt one or not, thinking about a civil service and outlining one reinforces that we rely upon, and need to firm up, our equalizing institutions.

A mandatory civil service may also positively impact three of the most pressing and hard to solve problems within our society. The first is the heroin epidemic that gets many people at the critical age range of a civil service program. Young, impoverished Americans succumbing to hard drug addiction are often thought to be in cages and need geographic change to escape. Programming could be designed to give maximum positive impact to the nation’s growing heroin and meth problems.

Secondly, is the gang problem which is something I do not know of firsthand, being from Boston, but no doubt geographic change and forced mixing of young people at a critical age will make a positive impact where other strategies have failed.

Lastly, is making a dent in America’s startling leadership gap. The recent election season has shown that we are critically short of viable leaders. Programming within a civil service can highlight individuals who show strong leadership abilities and opportunities can be provided so they can advance as public servants. The equalizing nature of a program may fill our leadership gap with much needed diversity.

Civil Service programs previously have been associated with the military and were used as methods to build large trained forces in times of war, but this does not need to be the case. The U.S. is a startlingly large country and currently has a vast network of neglected and crumbling infrastructure that could be the target of civil service. Much of the infrastructure work is labor intensive and cannot be automated. The U.S. is also in need of transformative change to its energy infrastructure to combat climate change. All of these needs could be met and channeled in a way that provides equalizing opportunity for America’s young.

The major classic pro of a mandatory civil service is the promotion of national unity through shared experience and training together. Where in the past, programs have rallied around a threat from another nation, America could rally around the threats of climate change and extreme partisanship. A lot of the labor required to mend American infrastructure will be physical. Military programs create an appreciation for sacrifices, and no doubt young Americans would learn to appreciate the physical sacrifices of hard labor.

A new civil service deal will not be military oriented, but the American military will benefit from an increase in organized and trained individuals. Catching young Americans before they fall at ages where they are far more likely to commit crimes will increase military eligibility because countless young Americans cannot benefit from the positive life transforming effects of military service due to prior offenses.

High levels of government participation come from civil service programs generated by heightened awareness of issues. Classically, this watches politicians and puts the breaks on military intervention because anyone’s immediate family could be impacted. An infrastructure orientated program would increase participation by tying more Americans to smaller national decisions that have typically attracted less scrutiny. Knowledge of local politics would increase as more communities worked with the civil service department.

Many neglected skills will be taught offering significant equalizing opportunity. Infrastructure work would require vocational technical skills and fill large voids in the American work force. Due to national mixing, young Americans will also migrate to fill these voids in ways that previously saw too much friction and expense. A young person from North Dakota with no local opportunity could find their calling and become a machinist in Georgia. There will be gains to character related skills such as teamwork, responsibility, stress management, initiative and diversity tolerance which are all increasingly deficient in young Americans. Anyone that goes on to college after their civil service will likely be more successful.

Civil Service is equalizing because it exempts no one. The wealthiest and the poorest Americans will have to work side by side and come to understand each other. Urban Americans and rural will have the opportunity to see more of the country and learn each others concerns first hand. The opportunity for all walks of American life to rub off on each other will hopefully generate bi partisan interest in developing a program.

There are classic cons to a mandatory civil service and the number one is the violation of free will. This is true, but few young Americans have enough opportunity to make it worth their while to skip out. Many rebels may find some adventure in it (though I’ve seen some Israeli movies that make it out to be horribly boring and bureaucratic). Wealthy Americans who want their children to work for the family business would likely be happy to have their children cut their teeth elsewhere (at civil service), shedding entitlement, and developing a work ethic before they return. A non military focus with the promotion of inclusion will reduce concerns for violating free will.

Interference with higher education is a concern, but statistics are showing that we are sending young people to college unprepared for what they are committing to. Too many are also unable to afford higher education while most jobs require education beyond a high school degree. State sponsored education within a civil service program may help everyone.

Safety, which is a concern of military oriented programs, will be less of a concern for a climate change and infrastructure orientated program. The military may also benefit with higher quality recruits that have graduated the civil service program. The American military is in transition to more specialist personnel and capital intensive warfare. Civil service may be a catalyst for significant military transformation while maintaining a pool of organized and trained young Americans to draw from in an emergency.

Not everyone will fit in, even while not being military orientated, but a big percentage require a kick in the pants. Americans are riddled with physical ailments, emotional problems like anxiety and depression, as well as unstable political ideology. It is time to take stock. Many young Americans will rise to the occasion and mandatory civil service could be the cure to numerous ailments. Bi partisan support should not be hard. What heartland American does not want to see a rich kid from Connecticut forced into some manual labor? What coastal progressive does not want to see a rural kid meet their first Muslim, work side by side, and learn they are not too different.

The aim of this article is simply to get you to ponder the idea and hopefully take up a pen and outline it for yourself. What did I overestimate or what did I miss all together? Is civil service more pragmatic than making college free where students exercise their miss guided free will and study for unmarketable degrees? When I discussed this with the group of women I referenced in the beginning, I assumed their children would not benefit but wondered if they would anti them up to help others by rubbing off. The unanimous reply was that all their children would benefit immensely. Straight from their mothers lips, they all need to shed entitlement and gain focus before college. Near no kid out there is on a straight path out of high school through college and straight to a high paying job at Google. Any premier high tech company, no doubt, would to want hire the identified leaders of a few years of mandatory civil service.

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?” -DFW at Kenyon

My last political thought piece included an introduction to the public good which was a new concept for a lot of people even though we swim in it. Institutions like public schools or documents like the Bill of Rights are not often explicitly categorized and taught as the public good so few of us can easily outline it. We commune with, and draw from this resource constantly but probably end up just like the David Foster Wallace’s fish, “What the hell is water?”

Last week I watched the video monologue of Marine Steve Gern in Iraq who is a very impressive guy and I admire the calming way he speaks about a very charged topic. Gern’s (over)simplified conclusion did not take into account that back in the states we are swimming in this public good that other countries simply do not have to our degree. The Marine notes that an American cannot go and walk the streets of Iraq alone because they’d probably get kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. That being the case, he concludes that no Iraqi should be allowed to come to the U.S. because they’d likely carry out the same behavior. Gern seems like an exemplary soldier, and no doubt has made many friends in hostile territory, but Iraqis to Gern are regarded as inherently bad until they are vetted.

Countless immigrants come to the U.S. from dangerous places around the world and this peculiar thing keeps happening, near all of them become productive members of society. But what makes that possible?

A fish needs water. Out of water a fish thrashes around dangerously gasping and embracing primal instincts. A fish in merely stagnant water languishes. The public good is the set of resources and rights that supports our inherent goodness and lets each of us participate in the American optimism that creates prosperity. The public good works when it is around. It stops working when it is privatized by kleptocrats.

A reason for the failure of the democracies we’ve tried to create around the world is that they were built with no strong institutions of the public good, no rights actually held firmly by checks and balances. They were set up by American politicians and consultants who cannot recognize the properties of the water they are swimming in.

There is a human gravity towards being lazy and corner cutting to make a job easier, especially when we stop exercising foresight, so there will always be a push towards ideologies like immigration restrictions that we need to resist. What we need to realize is that immigration, with its inherent risks, is integral to expanding prosperity. There will be a few bad eggs and even those that want revenge after seeing their entire families murdered in front of them at the hands of the West, but that may be laissez faire no matter how hard that is to swallow.

In parts of the world we’ve meddled, there is even a large shell shocked generation with hidden physical scars very much like our own soldiers who come back and succumb to erratic behavior and often suicide. We are in denial of their condition, often inflicted by us, just like we are in denial of our own veteran’s state. This kind of risk complicates freedom of movement yet we must allow it. We need to restrict the obvious, but never fully exclude. Anyone left behind will become increasingly dangerous. The ability to leave a hostile land with the choice to join the West reduces radicalization in areas we destabilize. Crossing our border and joining us, anyone foreign should realize they are entering water and can become their good self. It works, we’ve done this for years.

The relationship between immigration and prosperity is something we need to thoroughly debate more often so we can resist ideology. Many think immigrants are taking the jobs of American born citizens, but they are often taking jobs Americans will not do and at the other end they are truly innovating and creating new jobs for Americans as seen by looking at the figures in Silicon valley. Countless doctors who are the best and brightest of their countries come to America to supply our growing demand for healthcare. The closer you look, the more clear it is that we are nowhere near a point where immigration is damaging American prosperity.

What we also need to debate is whether fear of immigrants particularly Muslims is invented to accumulate the easy votes of the ignorant. Racism worn on the sleeve against African Americans has mostly subsided into covert systemic racism so that it can no longer be easily used as an electioneering tool. The hate vacuum has been filled by plainly spoken prejudice against Muslims. Many politicians, personally, barely care, but for the GOP party of pessimism, any category to hate openly is a tool to enter or maintain power.

Today we have a largely urban population. Our cities are filled with a highly mobile population, two job families, high divorce levels, single parent families, the return of long hours of work, the loss of community identification, high immigration levels, a new rise in the division between rich and poor and so on and so on. All of these factors mean that the one—if not the only—public structure we have which is capable of reaching out to all citizens in all parts of the country and making them feel part of the extended family of citizenship is the public education system. In the classic sense of the inclusive democracy, those simple bricks and mortar buildings, which we call the public schools, are in fact the one remaining open club house of citizenship. Not only is the public education system and its fundamental structure not old fashioned, it has found a new form of modernity. I would argue that we are more reliant on it today than we were through most of the 20th century. -John Ralston Saul, Address to the Canadian Teacher’s Federation (2001)

As explained by John Ralston Saul, the public good reaches out to people and makes them feel included and connected to others through citizenship. The outstretched arms of the public good, in forms so easy to take for granted as public lands, is an equalizer that prevents class formation and increases economic mobility which is important because most immigrants come here so poor.

When defending immigrants, asylum seekers, and refuges to those that are fearful or ignorant, it is important to mention the outstretched arms of the public good. For generations we have absorbed those that came from hostile lands and a positive force not readily apparent has been there to guide them in participating in the creation of American prosperity. For those of us that have never stepped outside of this force, we are doomed to say “What the hell is water?”