In late March, the U. S. Supreme Court held its hearings on the Affordable Care Act [ACA], otherwise known as Obamacare by its opponents.  At that time, polls were taken, and while a clear majority of Americans oppose the Act, a majority happens to like most of the major provisions of the law. Seventy percent of the respondents approved of the provision that forbids insurance companies from refusing to cover people with preexisting medical conditions.  A majority approves of expansion of certain Medicare coverages and the coverage of adult children of policyholders to age 26.  What a sizable majority opposes is the mandate for all Americans to obtain insurance coverage, one way or another, or to pay significant federal fines and penalties.

Exactly what will happen, however, if the Supreme Court strikes down the individual insurance mandate, but upholds the remainder of the Act?

If that occurs, and it is indeed possible, healthcare insurance costs will continue to rise, and to do so at rates as fast as regulatory authorities allow.  That won’t be because the insurance companies are greedy, but because they’ll need those increased premiums to pay the healthcare costs of their policyholders.

Why?  Because the cost-savings projected with the ACA were based on increasing the pool of those insured and because all the features everyone likes will increase costs in ways that the opponents of the Act aren’t facing.  The most notable problem that strikes me is what will happen if people who aren’t insured, and who won’t be required to purchase health insurance, come down with serious health care problems.  As the prohibition against not covering preexisting conditions kicks in, those with problems may very well be able to purchase insurance only after they get sick – and still get coverage.  Then, given the high cost of insurance, more people will opt out of health insurance, until or unless they need major medical treatment.  This could easily undermine the entire healthcare system. And most of those involved with the pending court decision have already noted that this would be a problem and that if the individual mandate is declared unconstitutional, the wider coverage and prohibition of denial of coverage for preexisting medical conditions would also have to be struck down or repealed.

As it is, there are more and more doctors who refuse to treat patients covered by Medicaid because they literally lose money on each patient, and some doctors every year who are caught “overbilling” Medicare insurance, many of whom claim to do so to cover costs. All insurance is based on spreading risk across the population and across a lifetime.  Wisely or unwisely, the ACA attempted to extend benefits by mandating extended coverage.  Without that mandate, regardless of all the rhetoric, the current economics of American medical care will require both higher insurance rates in some form and more denials of expensive medical procedures.

If the universal mandate is struck down, the only ways out of this mess, in general terms, are to:  (1) totally reform the entire health care system [which is impossible in the current climate]; (2) deny more and more care to a wider number of people [possible and likely, but politically unpalatable]; or (3) continue on the course of raising prices in some form or another [higher deductibles and co-payments, higher premiums, etc.].

Once again, we have the conflict between what the public demands and what that same public is unwilling to pay for… or wants someone else to fund.

The other day I came across a commentary in the Libertarian e-zine Prometheus Unbound, in which the commenter declared that while writers, maybe, should be paid for their work, they had no right to be paid, essentially because ideas should not be able to be copyrighted. After I got over my disbelief, and swallowed my anger, I got to thinking about the question… and decided that the commenter was not only misguided, but an idiot.

While I’d be the first to admit that ideas are central and crucial to my work, frankly, that’s not why most people buy books.  Nor are ideas the difficult part of writing, as most authors, if they’re honest, will admit.  What takes work is the process of creating a work of entertainment than embodies those ideas in a way that draws in readers.  Readers buy works of fiction to be entertained, and it takes me, and every author I know, months, if not longer, to create and provide that entertainment in novel form. By the fallacious logic suggested by this Libertarian idiot, no one in any field has the right to be paid for their work.

Why?  Because the vast majority of occupations in a modern society require the combination of ideas and knowledge with the physical effort required to put those ideas into practice, whether in providing a service or a physical product.  Just how long would any society last if doctors, dentists, teachers, plumbers, electricians, salespeople, and almost any occupation [except perhaps politicians] did not have to be paid, except at the whim of those who used their skills and services?  Not very long.

No one is forced to buy books, mine or anyone else’s, but if they do want to read something produced by an author, why shouldn’t they pay for it?  It’s one thing to question the marketing of books, and the prices that various publishers, distributors, and booksellers charge… or even to question how authors should be paid and how much.  But to claim that a creator doesn’t have a right to be paid if someone uses something that took months to produce, that’s not Libertarian, as I understood it.  Except… I looked into it and discovered that there are actually two forms of Libertarianism, one which recognizes private property of the individual as basis of societal order and one which believes in community property, i.e., socialist communalism. Obviously, the commentator belongs to the second group, because he is saying that a novel, which as a physical form of entertainment [not an idea], belongs without cost to the community. I may be a bit old-fashioned, but that doesn’t strike me as Libertarian, but as confiscatory socialism.

All professional authors know full well that there are no original plots and very few truly original ideas in fiction, but to say that authors have no right to be paid for what they produce out of those ideas because these plots and ideas aren’t original is about as valid as saying that a doctor shouldn’t be paid because all doctors know the same medical knowledge.

Knowledge without application is useless and worthless; it’s the application of knowledge that takes work, and for that work the worker has a right to compensation. One can argue and bargain about the amount and the method of payment, but the principle of pay for honest work is fundamental to any functional society.

As I’ve noted before, the idea that information wants to be free is little more than saying people want as much as they can get from other people without paying, and that’s being an intellectual freeloader, not a what I’d call a true Libertarian… but what do I know?

Most people know that the U.S. Department of Justice has sued Apple and five publishing companies for “price fixing.”  One of those companies is Macmillan, the parent company of Tor, which is my publisher.  The DOJ suit focuses on the use of the “agency model” as a way to keep e-book prices higher than the prices that Amazon was charging consumers for e-books. Obviously, the entire lawsuit bothers me, but one of the principal reasons why it why it bothers me is that the Department of Justice lawsuit is, in effect, a lawsuit in support of price fixing and predatory pricing by Amazon. I’ve seen comment after comment about how Apple and the publishers were ripping off readers.

And I’ll admit that, in the short run, allowing Amazon to continue to sell e-books at a price below their cost, which is what Amazon was doing, would have resulted in temporarily lower prices for e-books.  There’s absolutely no question about that.

But… doesn’t anyone think about the longer term?  At the time that Macmillan insisted on the “agency model,” Amazon was selling 91% of all e-books.  That’s a far, far, greater market share than Standard Oil had a century ago when the federal government insisted on breaking the Rockefeller Standard Oil trust as a monopoly.  In addition, Amazon was subsiding its losses on e-books not just from its book-selling business, but from its other more profitable online businesses.  None of the independent booksellers nor Barnes and Noble, nor Borders, nor Books-a-Million had such a source of cash. Amazon’s practices, which the DOJ lawsuit effectively supports, were the very definition of both monopoly and predatory pricing… and DOJ did nothing to stop Amazon.

Does anyone in his or her right mind really believe that once Amazon consolidated a true monopoly that Amazon would continue to lose millions of dollars on e-books?  No, two things would have happened.  First, Amazon would have pressed the publishers to lower prices for e-books… and once Amazon had control of the market most of them would have been hard-pressed to resist.  The publishers’ costs, like it or not, wouldn’t have gone down, and that would have pushed many more authors out of publication.  That would limit just how much prices could be reduced, and prices would have crept back up, but with Amazon having a larger share, and in the end, readers wouldn’t end up paying much less for e-books, and there would have been no competition at all… and fewer authors.

As for the DOJ claim of collusion, as far as I can see, Macmillan colluded with no one.  In fact, Macmillan insisted on the agency model alone for weeks.  I know, because Amazon retaliated by refusing to sell ANY Macmillan books for those weeks, not just e-books, but all titles, and I and all the other Macmillan authors took hits, as did Macmillan.  Now… the other publishers did finally join the push for the agency model, but they joined Macmillan. And I think it’s rather interesting that most of the other publishers immediately settled with DOJ.  To me, that suggests that, if there was any collusion, they were doing the colluding. So in the end, DOJ is prosecuting the one publisher, it seems to me, that was NOT colluding.  Now… I could be wrong, and if this goes to trial, we’ll see what actually happened.

What I do find interesting is that, now, something like two years later, Borders has gone bankrupt and vanished, but Amazon only sells a little over 60% of all e-books, rather than more than 90%… and DOJ is targeting the companies and the model that resulted in increased competition and more e-book outlets.

Could it just be that the administration is pandering to the “I want it cheap now” mentality in an election year?  I also find this deplorable in that publishing is a very low margin business, and the administration is taking on a struggling industry when DOJ has done very little in terms of dealing with extensive and real corruption in the investment banking and financial sector… which had a far more devastating impact on the economy and the consumer.

Politics and more hypocrisy, anyone?

Last week various news outlets ran a story on the “most religious” states.  I wasn’t exactly surprised by the rankings, but then I noticed that the two “most religious” states [Mississippi and Utah] are the two with the lowest per pupil spending on public primary and secondary education and that there appears to be a huge correlation between low spending on public education and a high degree of “religiosity” and a fairly strong correlation between more spending on education and less professed faith among the population.

In addition, states with populations that profess higher degrees of faith, in general, have state legislatures that tend to pass legislation imposing “faith-oriented” restrictions on school curricula.

While at least several science fiction authors, such as Rob Sawyer in Calculating God, have written books about cultures and civilizations based on faith that welcome education and knowledge, and strive to expand knowledge, it appears that, all too often here on earth, faith continues to be the opponent of greater knowledge and education, as witness Senator Santorum’s allegations that college education destroys faith, although that is but one example among many.

But does education destroy faith… or does it erode simplistic faiths and beliefs?  And who set up the structures of those simplistic beliefs?  Despite faith in such items as the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments or the golden plates of the “original” book of Mormon, there’s no real proof of their existence or of even of their original meaning, if they did in fact exist.  No… all faiths have been revealed by human beings, interpreted by human beings, and proselytized by human beings.  No deity has ever written across the sky – “I am God. Here are my tenets.”

So why do so many people cling to beliefs that have little root in proved reality or that have real world tenets that been proven to be false and/or unworkable?  Why can they not believe in a higher power that does not require simplistic faith? And most critically, why do they try to restrict the development of greater knowledge and the education of children in that knowledge?

Perhaps I’m missing something, but if there is a Deity, why on earth would that Deity want human beings to believe in what is not true?  Or to exalt ignorance above knowledge?

“Magic Thinking” is the idea that belief can change the physical world.  Now, I’d be the first to admit that someone’s beliefs can motivate them to accomplish great things, but in the end it is the accomplishments that can change the world, not the beliefs.  Belief is the first step, and at least in my experience, often the easiest.

Yet today, all over the United States, we’ve had a resurgence of “magic thinking” totally divorced from reality.

How can a culture that promotes Viagra, movies and television with intense sexual content, that supplies its young people with private transportation and funds, and that now has the largest gap between the age of physical maturity and financial and social maturity honestly believe that abstinence is going to be practiced for ten years or more by a significant fraction of the young population?  It isn’t; and the facts show it, but legislators across the country continue to push abstinence as the solution and to reject any form of realistic sex education.

Here in Utah, as well as in other states, legislators are busy passing laws that are clearly unconstitutional, laws that their own legal counsels have advised them against.  The latest here is a proposal to “reclaim” all federal lands and declare them state lands.  And at a time when state finances are is short supply, they’ve even declared themselves willing to spend $3 million on a futile lawsuit – while “boasting” the worst-funded primary and secondary education system in the state.  They’re going to send a message to Washington – and to anyone who doesn’t believe as they do – and they believe such messages will change things, even as they reject the messages of others who don’t share their beliefs.

We even see magic thinking in sports, with the recent episodes of Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos [although Tebow is now a New York Jet], the feeling that belief will overcome a less than stellar passing capability – and for a time, given the impact of belief on performance, it did, but belief has a tendency to fall short over time when confronted with superior abilities and equal determination.

When manifested in international relations, magic thinking can be deadly.  Too many American politicians have shown this over the past fifty years by actions supporting their belief that all that’s needed in the Middle East and elsewhere is “democratic government.”  But they tend to ignore the practical fact that democracy doesn’t work well in cultures that have enshrined bribery and corruption as social necessities, or that continue to regard women as property, or the possibility that people in other cultures, even with more representative and honest governments, may still oppose U.S. policies and aims both politically and militarily.

In the end, there’s a simple fact that all too many “magic thinkers” don’t understand:  The strength of one’s beliefs does not make something so. All the denying in the world isn’t going to stop global warming.  All the religion in the world isn’t going to overturn the fact of evolution, and all the belief in abstinence isn’t going to stop hot-blooded young people from having sex.  Nor is all the belief in the supremacy of American “ideals” unsupported by a massive commitment of physical power going to ensure that American policies and beliefs spread and triumph, although it’s likely to get thousands more American soldiers killed.

Recent news reports have noted that as gasoline prices have risen, the President’s popularity has declined commensurately. From a practical point of view this makes no sense, because the President has absolutely no control over energy prices.  He can’t even reduce or increase taxes on gasoline unless the Congress passes legislation, and he certainly can’t set gasoline prices.

In economic terms, crude oil and gasoline are what are known as fungible commodities, that is, there’s no price distinction between light crude from the United States, Saudi Arabia, or elsewhere.  The only price differential in the marketplace is the transport cost from the point of production, and since Middle East oil has a lower cost of production, in most cases, transportation costs don’t affect the price of crude, only the price of refined gasoline. What that means, among other things, is that “Drill, Baby, drill!” isn’t going to make a measurable difference in gasoline prices. In fact, as U.S. production of oil has increased over the last few years, it’s made no appreciable impact on gasoline prices because world-wide demand has increased and will continue to increase as countries such as India and China build and use more cars and trucks.

The only time in the last 60 years when a President attempted to control gasoline prices was during the Nixon administration when Nixon imposed price controls [through legislation he requested and Congress passed].  The result was a disaster.  Because oil companies could not pass on the costs of higher-priced crude oil, they stopped buying and producing it because to do so meant losing money on every barrel of higher-priced oil.  The result was gasoline lines blocks long all over the nation and fuel shortages.

On the other hand, North America is literally awash in natural gas at present.  Interestingly enough, even though natural gas prices are close to all-time lows, which means that most homes heated by natural gas have seen real heating costs decline, this doesn’t seem to translate into greater political approval for the President or anyone else.

What continues to be overlooked in the debate over Romneycare/Obamacare [The Affordable Health Care Act] is the issue of “transferred costs.”  Because hospitals are essentially required to provide health care for those who need it, the costs involved in providing such care to those unable to pay have to be “transferred” to someone else – or the hospitals would go broke. Because doctors can refuse to provide services to those who cannot pay, the uninsured overuse hospital health care, especially at hospital emergency rooms, and that drives up health care costs. Because they cannot pay, the hospitals transfer costs to other paying patients, or their insurance companies, or governments. There are two classes of uninsured – those who could afford insurance and choose not to pay for it and those who either cannot get it or cannot afford it.  The thought behind the Affordable Health Care Act was to provide insurance to those who could not afford it and require those who could to purchase insurance or pay penalties, thus addressing the cost issue and theoretically redistributing health care away from overuse of expensive hospital facilities.  Regardless of whether one agrees with the Act or not, the driving force was the accelerating cost of health care and the economics behind it – and, so far as I can see, none of the opponents of the Act have come up with a viable and workable way of addressing those economics.  They don’t want to require universal insurance; they don’t want a single payer system; they oppose any cost-cutting measures that will make a real difference; and they don’t want to deny health care to anyone. Under those parameters, health care costs in the U.S. will continue to rise, even though they’re the highest of any developed nation… and our health is below average.  The issue is economics, and no one wants to confront that reality.

Whether it’s gasoline or health care prices…it’s so much easier to cast stones… especially at politicians, and especially when they deserve blame for other things.  But right now, on too many economic issues, people are blaming politicians, and politicians are trying to blame anyone else… and none of them want to look at the economics.

The “Money Report” section of the April issue of The Atlantic Monthly contains a fascinating comparison between what Americans spent as a society in 1967 and what we spent in 2007.  The facts are sometimes in agreement with popular perception… and sometimes rather wildly at variance with them.

The area where spending has gone up the most is, unsurprisingly, that of health care, and few would dispute that.  In constant dollars, adjusted for inflation, health care costs have gone from 8.1% of spending to 18.0% – more than doubling.  Likewise, the percentage we spend on business services, things like advertising, accounting, legal services, insurance other than for health care, real estate fees, and consulting, has also more than doubled (this is also where those billions in financiers’ bonuses fit in, as well as the  additional costs of such services as tax preparation, various attorney’s fees, and all the money management fees).  Recreation and entertainment spending have also increased by 80%, so whether we want to admit it or not, we’re either pampering ourselves more than we did forty years ago or the entertainment and recreation moguls are charging more for the same things.

In some areas, such as education, housing, and transportation, there’s been little change in the proportion of income we spend.  With the high increase in the cost of higher education, that suggests that spending on primary and secondary education, in real dollar terms, has dropped, and from what I’ve seen in state and local education budgets that’s definitely been the case.

On the other hand, the percentage of our spending going to food and drink has dropped by 40%, even though proportion spent at restaurants has increased by 75%. And the percentage we spend on clothing has dropped by more than 35%, no surprise to me, given the way most people look in public.

But, most surprising to me were the numbers spent on government/taxes.  In 1967, over 18% of income went to government through fees and taxes.  By 2007, that had dropped to 13.2% – a decrease of over 25%.  So… in real dollar terms, government is costing us less of our income today than it did forty years ago.  Somehow… this message hasn’t gotten across to anyone.

Admittedly, most people just look at the dollars, and in nominal dollars, the figures show that government budgets increase every year, but over time, those budgets haven’t increased as much as inflation.  Of course, neither have the earnings of the middle class, but even their earnings have only declined, in real dollars, very slightly – not the 25% real decrease we’ve seen in government spending. Is it any wonder we’re facing a crumbling infrastructure in areas such as highways and bridges, especially when a larger fraction of declining real federal revenues has been devoted to fighting overseas wars?

Of course, I doubt that these numbers, or anything resembling them, will ever show up in the political arena. But I thought some of you ought to know.

A recent internet review of  Empress of Eternity claimed that it was “the least inspiring” of any of my recent books.  I cringed when I read those words, not because the reviewer didn’t like the book – Empress tends to polarize readers; they either like it or hate it, and I understand that – by what the “reviewer” wrote wasn’t what he meant to sat.  The book was inspired.  I had to be inspired to write such an intricate and involved weaving of timelines across millions of years and make it all come together. But what the reviewer meant was that he didn’t find it inspiring.  He wasn’t inspired.

In a nutshell, this is a small example of one problem with the whole gamut of internet publishing, reviewing, and commentary.  Too many people are using words and grammatical constructions, not to mention facts, that they don’t understand… and setting themselves up as authorities.  All it takes is some eye-catching graphics, a catchy and/or pretentious title and… voila!  Another sage is born.

And if no publisher will take on a book?  Then e-publish it!  List it for sale on Amazon, and Jeff Bezos will be happy to try to sell it and take his cut.  It costs him next to nothing.  List it for $1.99 or even $.99, and maybe it will become a Kindle bestseller.  But does that tell any reader whether it’s any good?  Over the years, I’ve had reader after reader tell me that they buy books from certain publishers because they know exactly what they’re getting and what the quality is.

Established publishing firms – and magazines – tend to have standards, although I will admit that sometimes those standards and procedures do keep a good book from being published, but after 40 years in the field I can say that, for every good work that didn’t get published by a major publisher, there were thousands they didn’t publish that never should have been published… not because of censorship or anything so sinister, but because those unpublished books were just plain bad.  Such standards don’t exist on the internet, and I have doubts that they ever will.

That is what publishing firms have been for – to find, refine, and publisher works of a minimum acceptable literary quality (and hopefully much better) that appeal to the tastes of readers.  Especially in today’s fast-paced world, very few people have the time or the inclination to sift through manuscript after manuscript (or self-published e-book after e-book) in hopes of finding passable, or quality or thought-provoking entertainment.  Yet the combination of e-publishing and Amazon may very well create a huge gulf in writing/literature, with, on the one hand, the mainstream publishers only able to publish “super-titles” and a handful of other “literature” titles, while leaving readers to struggle through a sprawling mish-mash of e-novels, ranging from a comparatively few well-edited and coherent works at the top down through a vast plethora of sub-mediocrity to an even vaster array of abysmal attempts at fiction.

Welcome to the post-literate e-world!

Over the past several months, I’ve had blog comments, emails, and questions at appearances about why my publisher insists on demanding a higher price for an ebook than a hardcover. The simple answer is that my publisher doesn’t, no matter what it may seem to readers, but… obviously some explanation is in order.

So… I’ll give some examples, but please note that the prices I’m giving are those in force as I’m writing this… and they could change.

My last two published books are currently Scholar and Lady-Protector.  The book immediately published before Lady-Protector was Empress of Eternity.  At present, the hardcover of Scholar on Amazon or Barnes and Noble costs more than the Kindle or Nook version.

The hardcover version of Lady-Protector sells for $.32 less on Amazon than does the Kindle, although the Kindle price will drop on March 27th, when the paperback is released.  The hardcover price of Lady-Protector at Barnes & Noble remains above the Nook price.

The hardcover version of Empress of Eternity currently sells on Amazon at something like $6.67, less than the Kindle version, as an irate reader noted.  Amazon purchased that book from Tor for around $12.00 and has chosen to sell it at the discounted price, in all probability, in order to unload it, because the hardcover was published roughly 16 months ago, and very few hardcovers of any book sell that long after publication. Barnes and Noble has kept the hardcover price at the original level.

The reason for these disparate prices is that hardcover books are sold at wholesale to Amazon and other retailers or distributors, usually at slightly more than 50% of the cover price, and retailers and/or distributors can sell them at any price they wish.  The prices on electronic books, on the other hand, are set by the publishers, as a result of the nasty fight between all the publishers and Amazon several years ago, when Amazon insisted on selling all ebooks at a loss, subsidized by its profits in other areas, thus attempting to fix prices at a lower level and gain control of the market.

Some readers have claimed that ebooks should be far cheaper than either hardcovers or paperbacks because the ebook does not require paper, ink, printing, and physical distribution.  That’s true, but an ebook does require all the other costs of production, and at present, the “difference in cost” between ebooks and hardcovers, on average, it runs from about $2.50 to $4.00 per hardcover, depending on the number of pages and the print run, which is roughly the price differential between the price Amazon or B&N initially charges for a hardcover and the initial Kindle/Nook price.

The bottom line is that, at present, subject to an on-going legal battle and a Department of Justice proceeding, the publishers have control over the retail ebook price, but not over the retail hardcover price, and Amazon has a practice of playing games with hardcover prices as part of their on-going fight with traditional publishing… and letting readers place the blame for the “high” ebook price on the publishers, which, in fact, is half-true.  The publishers do set those prices, but selective use of low hardcover prices is totally under the control of the retailer.  Macmillan, the parent company of Tor, has a policy of dropping the ebook price to match the paperback price on the day the paperback is released.  Amazon is usually reliable in doing so… but not always, but, again, failure to drop the ebook price is not necessarily the fault of the publisher and has to be assessed, unhappily, on a case by case basis.

As an author, fortunately or unfortunately, I have no control over any of the retail prices charged for my books that are published by Tor. Nor does any author whose books are issued by a major publisher.

The other day I was going over sales figures with my editor, and we got to talking about where the publishing market is going.  I knew that paperback sales had taken a huge hit, but just how huge I didn’t realize, although I was certainly aware that my own paperback sales had taken hits. According to my editor, on average, once you get below the huge best-sellers, like A Game of Thrones, Twilight, The Hunger Games, etc., on average paperback sales are now running at 20-30% of what they did fifteen years ago, if not lower in some cases. Authors who could count on selling 100,000 copies or more in paperback are now selling 20,000 -30,000, and the same is true of newer authors whose hardcover sales are at the low New York Times bestseller levels.  In more and more cases, publishers aren’t even issuing some books in paperback, but only in hardcover or trade paperback and then ebook format.  It’s not just a matter of price, either, no matter what readers claim, since, in real dollar terms paperbacks are either lower or only slightly higher in price [depending on which measure of inflation is used] than they were fifteen years ago.

What’s happened?

The immediate suspicion is that the “lost” paperback sales have been replaced by ebook sales, but the sales numbers don’t support that in the case of paperback books, although there’s a fairly good correlation in the sale of hardcovers, that is, for a number of authors, hardcover and initial ebook sales [at the higher price] are fairly close to former hardcover sales alone, although this results in lower author royalties.

There are a lot of other explanations for the paperback book sales decline out there.  Many cite piracy and ebooks as the reason, and just as many claim that “pirated” editions actually increase sales, although I’m skeptical of the latter argument on this. Here’s why. Over the past year or so, I’ve received more than a few emails and comments along the lines of “I first read one of your books as a pirated download.”  All of those who contacted me with that line went on to say that they now purchase my works, for which I’m grateful.

BUT… this raises several another questions.  Just how many readers out there are there who read one of those pirated editions and said, “Forget it!  This just isn’t for me.”?  And how many others read a few pages and turned away?  And how many people in that reading and interest bracket would have bought and tried a paperback twenty years ago?

These questions are very relevant, especially in the case of the decline of paperback sales.  Before the advent of ebooks and the subsequent widespread piracy – and it’s everywhere – a reader had to get a hold of a physical book, and that physical book had to be paid for, and that counted in sales. Even if the reader didn’t like it, and threw it in the trash or gave it to a friend, a copy of the book was sold, and someone had to make an effort to do something with the book.  In addition, after having invested in buying the book, a great percentage of readers would struggle through the book. In my case, this is particularly relevant, because many of my books are so complex that they develop slowly.  All you have to do is look at all the reviews to see that. In the “old” days, I suspect I hooked more readers because they didn’t want to “waste” their money.  Today, when readers scan a pirated ebook, they’ve invested nothing, and there’s no cost to them, and many, I believe, just turn away from something that doesn’t provide immediate gratification.

Add to this something I’ve also heard and read a lot about in the last year, and that is an attitude of entitlement – that readers “deserve” to know whether they’ll like a book before they pay for it.  What?  If you go to a movie, or rent one, or purchase a DVD, you don’t get to see it and make a decision to pay for it after the fact.  Even if you see in on cable or satellite, you’re essentially paying for it.  You can read up on restaurants, but you don’t get to eat the meal and then refuse to pay for it because you didn’t like it, at least not for long, and not without a great deal of unpleasantness.

Then… there’s simply the vast number of websites offering free downloads of books.  There are literally scores offering my books.  Would they all be doing this if there weren’t a demand?  I don’t think so.

I’ve been fortunate, in that, while I’ve taken some considerable hits in the pocketbook from this so-called market shift, I still sell enough that my publisher continues to publish my books in hardcover, mass market paperback, and ebook format. There are all too many good writers who have not been that fortunate and who are not good web-and-internet promoters… and their books no longer see print… or much in the way of new readers even when e-published.  In essence, they’ve been pushed out by cheap and usually inferior works by writers who aren’t as good in writing but who are far more effective at promotion… by a class of works that might be called “internet penny dreadfuls” [mixing anachronism and technology, so to speak].  That’s not to say that there are not some good authors who are e-publishing their own works, but they’re a very small minority among the flood of self-published ebooks.

Publishers can’t compete with this new class of “penny dreadfuls” – and they won’t.  To stay in business, they’ll have to chase the popular best-seller market, as is already happening with the proliferation of books about vampires, werewolves, zombies, or those which glorify violence of all kinds [yes, I do mean The Game of Thrones] while retaining those authors who have a dedicated following and discarding those whose sales drop off, while Amazon pushes for cheaper and cheaper ebooks [with the unwitting help of the U.S. Department of Justice].  The old model of publishers developing authors has almost vanished, and current trends will likely finish it off.

Technology changes things, including popular attitudes, and most of them won’t change back, and that means that the publishing field is changing and will continue to do so.  But…please don’t make the argument that pirated ebooks are good for authors, books, good writing, or literature.  They’re only good for the ultra-popular writers and the great self-promoters… and that narrows the range of available books in a very practical sense.

The commentator Bill O’Reilly weighed in on the Sandra Fluke/contraception controversy by saying that Fluke, while sincere, represented the growing “entitlement” culture in the United States, those people who believe that they should receive “free contraception” through their insurance. Like O’Reilly, I’ve expressed concern about the “entitlement generation,” but unlike him, I don’t see contraception as anywhere central to the issue, except as a way for O’Reilly to come out against it without directly taking on a lot of very angry women.

I’d be the first to admit that I’m concerned about a generation that feels “entitled,” but, unfortunately, entitlement feelings aren’t limited to one generation, although I’ve observed that  those feelings appear to be more widespread in younger generations.  I can still remember the anger of an older American some thirty years ago when I tried to point out that he received more in Social Security benefits in one year than he’d paid for in his entire working life [this was generally true of all recipients prior to the mid-1960s, and has become less and less so with each passing decade].  He was furious, because he’d paid Social Security taxes his entire working life and was “entitled” to those benefits. We see this today with Tea Partiers, who insist that Social Security and Medicare are not government programs or pay-as-we-go tax transfers only partly backed up by a “trust fund,” and who claim they’re entitled not to have their benefits reduced. And there are more than a few documented and recorded cases of food stamp recipients claiming food stamps as an entitlement.

But to claim that insisting that birth control medications [which are also used to treat a number of other health conditions having nothing to do with contraception] is an untoward manifestation of “entitlement” either goes too far or not far enough.  Viagra and Cialis and other erectile dysfunction drugs are covered.  Which is a greater manifestation of entitlement, birth control and prevention of unwanted pregnancies or male pleasure? [After all, most of the men who need those medications aren’t in the child-rearing age brackets, anyway]. And what about the “entitlement” of smokers to cancer, respiratory, and heart care treatments and surgeries?  These are people who have chosen to indulge in a habit that is proven to create huge long-range health care problems. Why are they, in O’Reilly’s calculus, any less members of the “entitlement” generation, claiming they’re entitled to insured health care when they’ve spent a lifetime knowingly destroying their health?  And what about extreme sports enthusiasts who knowingly endanger their lives every time they indulge their pastimes… and in several cases have caused the deaths of would-be rescuers?  Are they entitled to rescue that can endanger their rescuers?

All of this debate also obscures the entire basis of insurance, which is the pooling of risk by including a broad range of individuals and covering them over time. Some people have almost no claims, excepting routine check-ups or minimal procedures, over their entire lifetimes.  Others, with exactly the same backgrounds and habit patterns, may have huge ones.  The wife of a relative suffered a brutal and expensive and eventually fatal form of lung cancer, although she’d never smoked, never been exposed to second-hand smoke, was in perfect health, and a trained athlete. That’s one reason why we have insurance, to deal with the unexpected.  And there is a good reason why insurance covers check-ups and diagnostics – and that’s to prevent worse and more expensive treatments.  Unwanted children are a huge burden on society, and no matter what any of the pro-life people say, they and the private sector aren’t the ones picking up those very real costs, not only in terms of straight medical costs, but also in life-long social costs.  Government at all levels bears those costs, and isn’t that a form of “entitlement”?

What O’Reilly appears to be saying is that only some entitlements are justified, and in that case, I have a huge problem with his choice of what’s “entitled,” because it’s just another instance of declaring that government regulations should only support “my” beliefs under the guise of a semi-rational argument.

The comedian and social satirist Bill Maher devotes a section of his program to “Dispatches from the Bubble,” in which he attempts to show how right wing Republicans are living in a bubble that has little to do with reality in the rest of the United States.  But there are far more bubbles than just the one Maher points out, and some bubbles exist within other bubbles.

I live in Utah, a state that well might be termed the “semi-sovereign theocracy of Deseret,” where we have a state legislature that believes freedom of information requires giving schools the right not to teach sex education and has just passed a bill to that effect and that will forbid any mention of birth control except abstinence. It’s a state where legislators continue to demand and legislate ways to try to “reclaim” Utah lands from the federal government, but where one of the legislative leaders is pushing a bill to allow the condemnation of private lands to facilitate the development of oil wells and coal mines by industry.  It’s a state where every public high school in the state has an LDS Seminary of Religion across the street and where students are scheduled for “release time” during the date to attend seminary… and where the legislature balked at beefing up the high school curriculum because that would require cutting “release time,”  i.e., religious instruction, during the school day.

Wall Street financiers all live in a bubble.  They honestly think that “bonuses” aren’t the same as earned income and that paying only 15% income taxes on sums of money/securities received for services is eminently fair when middle class families pay far higher rates on infinitesimally smaller wages.

Then there’s the Congressional bubble, where no Representative or Senator can ever afford to change his position on anything, for fear that the media will discover that he or she actually thought and changed his or her mind – and that the voters would then throw them out of office – even if it happened to result in something getting done.

There’s the special bubble for climate change deniers… who somehow can’t see that the world is indeed warmer… or accept the fact that all the glaciers in the world have drastically diminished [except for three or so, which they use to refute the case], that the Arctic sea ice is vanishing, that the coral reefs are dying, that sea levels are rising…

Then there are the ultra-feminists, some of whom have declared that every act of heterosexual intercourse is an act of rape, and they won’t accept any other interpretation.

Or the black extremists, who lay every problem of U.S. black culture and subcultures on the “whites” because of slavery, conveniently forgetting that every single slave sold to the white slavers who took them from Africa had first been captured and enslaved by blacks first. That doesn’t excuse the inhumanity of slavery, but the blame for it covers all races and shades, because at one time or another, pretty much every culture has had a form of slavery, sometimes dressed up as penal servitude or indentured workers.

But the bubble problem isn’t just American.

The problem today is that, especially with globalization, we have different culture bubbles across the world.  Some of those “bubbles” coincide with national barriers, but many don’t. In a way, I’m reminded of the “Well of Souls” books by the late Jack Chalker, where there’s a massive “world” in which smaller worlds are separated by physical barriers, and the physical and cultural rules are different… except our bubbles aren’t protectively physically separated from each other.

India and Pakistan live in separate “bubbles”… and to make matters worse, each has nuclear capabilities.  Iran and Israel live in vastly different bubbles… and before long the Iranians likely will have nuclear weapons as well.

In much of the Middle East, women and children are still property (and yes, I know, that for all practical purposes, Rick Santorum and many Republicans believe the same thing, except they cloak it in terms of preserving traditional beliefs and personal freedoms – of men, of course), and people in those Middle Eastern cultures believe that Americans are infidels.  Do we live in a bubble… or do they?

The Japanese, those oh so polite folks, are one of the most xenophobic cultures around, at least if you’re Ainu or Chinese with roots in Japan for decades or centuries.

What bothers me is not that so many of us live in bubbles, but that so many of us are so absolutely convinced that the way of life in our bubble is the only way – and that laws should be enacted to force “our” way on others, whether those laws deal with abortion and restricting free speech in the United States or insisting on strict Sharia law in the Middle East or… [fill in the blank].  All too many nations, if not states and regions within those nations, seek to not only change their neighbors and their enemies, but also to restrict the rights of those within their own societies… and I’m not talking about civil order, but more basic rights, such as the rights to free speech, the rights to believe in whatever Deity the individual wishes (or not to believe), the right not only to own property, but the right to buy or sell it, regardless of faith or color…

Paraphrasing the Bard…

Double, double toil and trouble,
Fire, burn; and caldron bubble.
Legislate all into our bubble,
Turn the world to strife and rubble.

The big old idea behind much of the Republican Party today is the idea of states’ rights, that somehow devolution of federal “overcontrol” and federal powers to the states will not only solve our problems but give us greater freedoms.  It’s a lovely argument, but it doesn’t hold water if you look at the origin of so-called states’ rights and what they really mean.

The fundamental issue behind the vast majority of issues debated under the rubric of “states rights” is the issue of property rights, in particular property rights as they existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in English speaking lands, i.e., the property rights of landed white males.  At that time, not only were real estate and structures considered property, but so were wives and all unmarried females, as well as underage males [unless they were the sole surviving heir, requiring a guardian to protect that property], and, of course, slaves.  The initial impetus for the American Revolution was the infringement of property rights of white males in the colonies without their consent or participation.

After the revolution, among the first champions of states’ rights were the Federalists of the New England states, who proposed secession from the union at the Hartford Convention of 1814-15 over the War of 1812, which they opposed because the war effectively infringed on their trade with England and Europe… and their property rights.     In 1832, the state of South Carolina passed a Nullification Ordinance, declaring null and void the federal tariffs imposed in 1828, because those tariffs increased the costs of British and European manufactured goods being imported to the south and thus threatened the value of southern cotton prosperity. President Andrew Jackson sent a flotilla to blockade South Carolina ports, and threatened to send federal troops as well.  Following that, the next to raise the issue of states’ rights were the states of the confederacy, and they wanted those rights not only in order to continue the right to enslave others, but also to ban the dissemination of anti-slavery literature in the southern states, because both acts infringed on their rights to their property – slaves in particular.

After Reconstruction, the states’ rights position centered on the use, largely in the south, on ways to restrict voting rights of blacks, equal access to education and other facilities. In fact, in 1948, the so-called segregationist “Dixiecrat party” was officially called the “States’ Rights Party,” and the term “states’ rights” was an open “code” term for supporters of segregation.

Over the last fifty years, the usage of the term has broadened, but in general it’s been used to identify opposition to federal laws or regulations unpopular in specific states.

In 1964, the state of California enacted a Proposition 14, which nullified the federal Fair Housing Act, a proposition later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.  Again, the state was acting to allow discrimination in housing, by supporting the “right” of owners to refuse to sell or rent property on the basis of the buyer’s or renter’s religion, creed, or color.  What Proposition 14 attempted was to continue as a property right the absolute right of the seller to determine who could purchase property on the basis of the purchaser’s color, creed, or other factors not related to his or her financial ability to meet the sales price.  Proposition 14 would have established in law an inequality in freedom to purchase or rent property, arrogating the rights of the property owner over the rights of some groups of buyers, resulting in a diminution or restriction of freedom.

Another “leftover” issue from the white male property owner’s rights is that of reproductive freedom.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, as property, women had no such rights, even if their lives were threatened by childbearing. Both before and after the U.S. Supreme Court decision on abortion [Roe v. Wade] many opponents of abortion insisted, and still do, that whether abortion should be legal should be a matter of state law, effectively making the point that they want states to limit women’s freedom to determine what happens to their own body.  Regardless of the moral issues, in practical terms, the demand for states’ rights is a way to obtain restriction of personal freedom, in effect a carryover of male property rights, and in no way an expansion of freedom.  The ramifications of Roe v Wade do not require any woman to have an abortion, even in the cases of rape or incest.  They leave the decision to her.  To give that decision to anyone else is essentially re-affirming that child-bearing women are property.

The issues over the teaching of birth control, evolution, climate change are not about faith or states’ rights; they’re essentially about power over what children should be taught, and they’re also an extension of the “property mindset.”  Those who oppose such teaching are effectively stating that they do not believe that children should have the freedom to be exposed to such knowledge, and that parents regard their children as property and should control to what knowledge those children should be exposed.

Other “states’ rights” issues follow a similar pattern. Another “states’ rights” issue was raised with the Obama Affordable Healthcare Act.  A number of states have filed lawsuits over the provisions, but what tends to be overlooked is that close to 50 million Americans have no healthcare – and that’s the largest number and percentage of uninsured in any advanced western nation.  Furthermore, under the previous practices of the insurance industry, the majority of the uninsured not afford health care or could not obtain it at all.  The legislation effectively curtailed the “rights” of the insurance industry to refuse coverage, but expanded the rights of 50 million people to obtain it.  How does this restrict overall freedoms?

A great many of the federal regulations that states’ rights activists and others find excessive and burdensome, such as environmental regulations, financial regulations, and even regulations requiring access for the disabled, are about restricting property rights because the unrestricted exercise of those rights infringes the freedom of others.  The right to operate a factory or a power plant without regulation allows pollution or air and water and can impair the health of not only the environment, but of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of individuals.  The same is true of the Food and Drug acts. Do some regulations go too far?  Undoubtedly, but those regulations were enacted because the unrestrained exercise of property rights proved unhealthy to millions, and in a heavily populated world, everyone’s rights impinge on everyone else, a fact conveniently overlooked by those who champion “states’ rights.”

Here in Utah, virtually every piece of legislation bandied about on the states’ rights platform is not about more rights, but about restricting rights.  The legislature is now considering a bill to prohibit photographing of farms and agriculture, because animal rights groups might target abusive Utah farmers.  It has restricted the dissemination of information about birth control to students.  It is attempting to take over the administration of Medicare and Medicaid in order to limit services.  It is seriously considering a law to claim all federal lands as state lands, so that it can grant mineral leases to private industry, and it has already given the state the power to condemn private lands to allow access to all mineral and mining production areas.  Similar restrictive laws are being attempted and enacted in a number of other states as well.

I’m sorry… but the states’ rights argument is almost always used either to restrict the freedoms of large numbers of people or to maintain or enhance the rights of small numbers of people, if not both, and historically, that has almost always been its use, even as those people who champion the supremacy of truly old-fashioned private property rights claim to be for the rights of the people.

Just which rights for what people?

The other day my wife and I read an editorial which listed the unpleasant situation facing young people today, which cited the difficulties they faced, one of which was that more than half of the people aged 18-34 worked in a job to pay the bills, not because it was a career choice. Then we looked at each other and laughed.  We weren’t laughing to ridicule anyone, but because the entire idea of “career choices” is so American and so recent a phenomenon… and yet it’s almost a given today that it’s a hardship not to have a “career choice.”  Except for the upper class and upper middle class, which comprise perhaps ten percent of the population, there haven’t been many career choices for most people in the United States for most of its history. Throughout history, young people either followed in their parents’ craft or trade or in that of another crafter who needed a spare pair of hands.  People felt fortunate to be able to make ends meet, and many could not even do that.

For most of us who predate the Baby Boomers, even if we were able to find a job in a field of our choice, the positions open were usually limited and involved more than a few trade-offs, including moving all over the country.  There were usually many qualified applicants for each job, and in many fields this is still true.  There are usually several hundred applicants, if not more, for each opening in my wife’s profession, and in our entire working lives, neither of us ever has had the luxury of making a choice between two jobs, and more than once took jobs that were anything but ideal to “pay the bills.” This was true for most people of our not-quite-that-advanced age.

So… it’s no surprise that we laughed at the idea that “taking a job to pay the bills” was thought to be such a mighty hardship on younger workers. Jobs exist to fill the needs of those who offer them, not to meet the career aspirations of workers.  That’s frankly one reason why I wrote long hours after the day job for years… because it was the only way I could get to where I wanted to be, and I know I’m exceedingly fortunate to have been able to get where I am – and it’s also why I still work long hours… because I never want to be at the whim of an employer again.  But… to even hint that career choices are some sort of right or that today’s young workers are facing an unprecedented change in not having that many “career choices”… that is laughable.

What I find actually amazing is that we as a society have progressed over the past century or so to the point where half the young workers are actually working in a field of their choice. If that is indeed true, then it marks real progress… but it also wouldn’t hurt to remember that such is not the case in all too many countries across the globe… and it’s anything but a “right.”

According to a recent article in the Economist, the United States has become “America the Overregulated,” and that’s quite a claim, especially from a British publication. There’s been a great deal of rhetoric about the amount of “unnecessary” federal regulations, particularly from the far right, but also across the political spectrum.  Given the opposition to excessive regulation, why does it continue?

The simple, and largely accurate, answer is because there’s political pressure for more regulations to protect everything from workers to threatened and endangered species.  Personally, I believe the majority of that pressure comes because of real concerns, but that raises another question.  Why do we need regulations to deal with these concerns?

That’s where matters get interesting.  One reason often cited is that, in a world economy, goods are purchased largely on price, and companies will do anything they can to keep costs down – unless effective regulations preclude practices that are unsafe, unhealthy, polluting, or environmentally degrading.  Yet… over the past two years, U.S. corporate profits have soared, while wages have remained largely stagnant.  At the same time, more and more wealth and income have gone to the top 1/10^th of one percent of the U.S. population.  People – those who have jobs – are working harder and longer, and usually under more stress, just to keep what they have… but the rich get richer.

Maybe… just maybe, we’ve been looking at only part of the problem.  Would all of those regulations be necessary if there weren’t so much pressure to be more and more profitable?  And that such profitability depends on lower costs and greater productivity?  What if those at the top of the pyramid, and I’m talking about the 1/10^th of one percent, not the top one or two percent, didn’t get to keep over 85% of their income?

Would investment bankers and CEOs be quite so inclined to push everything and everyone to the wall to get their $100 million bonuses if the government took 90% of everything over, say, $10 million?

A study from the University of Southern California found that a high percentage of young investment bankers who worked 80-120 weeks developed a wide range of stress-related illnesses and conditions that would likely reduce their life expectancy and that such conditions contributed to the high rate of burn-out in the field. We’ve also seen a huge growth in the use of steroids and other substances that build muscles in young adulthood, especially for young men seeking a professional athletic career, but such artificially enhanced muscular abilities almost invariably result in early death among those who wish to be professional athletes.  Would the temptation be quite so great, if 90% of those $10-$100 million contracts went to the government? Would all the outsourcing take place if there weren’t so much pressure to be more and more profitable?

It seems to me that a great deal of the excesses in our society have been driven by greed… but if government were the beneficiary of the greatest excesses of that greed… would the pressures be so great to cut all the corners?  Would regulation after regulation be so necessary to curb the excesses of the financial sector?  Or to protect workers from greater and greater pressure to produce more and more with less and less?

Just a thought.

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently declared that President Obama’s acts as President were about “some phony theology… not a theology based on the Bible.” Frankly, I find an assertion such as this incredibly disturbing, because what Santorum is effectively saying is that public policy should be based on his reading of Christian theology.  As I’ve noted before, as have Constitutional scholars for more than a century, while the Founding Fathers did mention the Deity, they made it very clear that specific theologies – or theological belief systems – were not to be a part of government.  Yet Santorum is apparently attacking the president – and anyone else who doesn’t believe as Santorum does – for failing to base their policies and acts upon specific doctrinaire theological points.

Like it or not, the President of the United States and the Congress are responsible for the health and welfare of all the people of the United States and for allowing all of them the same freedoms, as set out in the Constitution and as interpreted, again, like it or not, by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now, according to the best figures I can find, 75% of Americans define themselves as members of faiths considered Christian by most theologians.  Fifteen percent are atheists, and the remaining ten percent belong to other faiths.  Of those considered Christian, 25% are Catholic, 15% Baptist, and 4% evangelical or Pentecostal Christians, meaning that, in rough terms, essentially half of the American people, assuming they follow the theological guidelines of their faiths, might agree with Senator Santorum’s theological beliefs. The problem with Santorum’s position is that as much as half the population might well not agree, and fully one quarter of all Americans are not believing Christians at all.

In addition, a study conducted by Baylor University, based on interviews with 35,000 people, definitely a healthy sample, showed that more than 40% of the people had changed their faith and belief at least once in their lifetime, which also suggests that “faith” is far less constant than the protections in the Constitution.

Even more to the point, Santorum is not talking about freedom of religion, but about imposing restrictions on all members of society, restrictions based on his theological biases, and restrictions with which tens of millions of Americans do not agree.  Those who agree with the senator are not precluded from following exactly, and with no persecution whatsoever, the dictates of their own conscience insofar as their own property and bodies are concerned.  Under the Constitution and current law, however, they are precluded from imposing those beliefs on others, and effectively limiting the rights of half the population [women]. The senator clearly wants to change this.

It’s taken a long time to reduce discrimination based on color, creed, or gender… and Santorum’s use of religion, whether intended or not, would essentially turn the clock back to a time of greater discrimination under the guise of “true religion.”

Putting power in the hands of religious true believers has been a disaster wherever it’s happened, whether in the time of the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, the ayatollahs in Iran, the Taliban in Afghanistan, or any other number of instances.  Doing so here wouldn’t be any different… and it would be a betrayal of the Founding Fathers that all so many of those of Santorum’s stripe quote so much when it suits their needs… and ignore when it doesn’t.

From the considerable amount I’ve read about the early history of the United States, one of the goals of the Founding Fathers was to protect the government – and the people – from the heavy hand of religion… and to keep organized religion from infringing the rights of the people.  So, it’s with a sense of irony that I find so many religious zealots of so many types complaining essentially about what the Constitution was designed to do – to stop government from being a tool of religion.

When the Supreme Court decided in Roe v. Wade that women had a right to abortion, the Court essentially came down on the side of individual freedom, asserting that the “right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the district court determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”

Under the Constitution, that sort of finding is the Court’s to make, and unless Congress and the states see fit to amend the Constitution, or the Court extends, modifies, or reverses its ruling, that ruling is the law of the land.  Period.

When a state legislator proposes laws to forbid schools from teaching about birth control unless it’s abstinence and only abstinence, that legislator is attempting to restrict the freedom of information, and to determine exactly what information is to be conveyed, for religious purposes. This is particularly heinous because it restricts an individual’s knowledge.  When legislators oppose civil unions for same-sex couples, they’re effectively declaring that the state sanction such a legal union only on the basis of religious traditions and practices.  When states or legislators require businesses to close on Sunday – as many did at one time – that is imposing the requirement of Christian religions on commerce.  Why not require closure for the Jewish Sabbath… or on Saturday for Seventh Day Adventists?

One of the founding principles underlying the Constitution of the United States was an understanding that there’s a significant difference between freedom of religion and state imposition of religious requirements on everyone. It’s one thing to allow someone to close their business on their holy days.  That’s allowing individual freedom.  Requiring everyone to close on Sunday is using government for religious purposes.  Several years ago, here in Utah, constituents pressured local lawmakers to forbid civic functions on Monday nights because that interfered with the LDS practice of Monday home evenings.  Thankfully, such prohibitions weren’t imposed.

Virtually all widely accepted ethical, moral, or religious beliefs agree that such acts as theft, assault, forgery, fraud, murder, rape should be prohibited, and their practice punished.  The obvious conflict between freedom and legal codes lies in the gray areas where various beliefs and religious codes disagree.  But under the U.S. Constitution, as articulated by the Founding Fathers, personal freedom of action or speech should not be restricted unless it poses a clear and present danger to others…. And all too many “religiously-associated” attempts to restrict freedom of action and of speech have little or nothing to do with preventing such clear and present dangers, and far more to do with imposing restrictions on others in furtherance of one religious doctrine over another.

It’s official, or at least semi-official:  the United States has the highest rate of incarceration of any industrialized nation in the world… and by a huge margin.

Why?  Obviously, there’s no one single cause, but the largest factor is our drug laws, which criminalize possession of small amounts of drugs and the use of marijuana.  One of the associated problems with criminalizing marijuana is that the drug is ubiquitous and widely used, and that means prosecution and incarceration for use, possession, or distribution is in most cases highly selective, and selective enforcement is anything but just.  On the other hand, busting everyone who uses marijuana is essentially physically impossible.

As a matter of practicality, it’s becoming clearer and clearer, not that it hasn’t been so for a long time, if anyone really cared to look, that the massive criminalization of drug use is anything but healthy for the United States.  Prisons now cost most U.S. states more than they spend on all forms of education, and those costs are rising.  The massive amounts of money and profit from illegal drugs are fueling gang violence in both the U.S. and Mexico, and, in general, police efforts have a modest effect, at best, on even holding that violence in check.

So what if we changed our approach to drugs?  What if we just legalized their use for adults over 21?

Immediately, the outcry is likely to rise – What about all those poor drug victims?

Well… what about them?  What about handling the issue the way we generally deal with alcohol?  We tried outlawing alcohol for everyone, and that was a disaster.  The compromise was to forbid its use and consumption by people under 21 [or sometimes 18], and to prosecute those who supplied it to underage drinkers.

The anti-drug legalization forces tend to focus, whether they realize it or not, on saving people from their own worst impulses. This is, unhappily, a selective approach, in our society, applied in some areas and not in others, and it’s an approach that works in some cases and not in others.  Seatbelt laws work as well as they do, I’m convinced, because in a very real sense, they’re really not more than a minor change in behavior.  As a matter of fact, in a car, in any car, you really can’t move around that much anyway.  A seat-belt law restricts that movement slightly… and saves tens of thousands of lives annually – and it doesn’t lead to the development of a trillion dollar underground economy in seat-belt cutters, or the like.  The same sort of argument can be made for many [but not all] health and safety regulations.

What we might better consider is legalizing drugs, requiring standards for them – and holding drug users totally responsible for their actions.  In other words, if someone chooses to use drugs and commits a crime either under the influence or to obtain funds for such drugs, the penalties should be even tougher… because they made the choice to use drugs, knowing the possible consequences.  Likewise, penalties for pushing drugs to those underage should be extraordinarily severe.

But, of course, none of this will happen, because no one really wants to hold people responsible for their actions, whether those people are students who want good grades without working hard and without studying, or politicians who haven’t the nerve to tell constituents that they can’t have more government services without more taxes, or Silicon Valley internet companies who want free content without paying for it, or Wall Street financiers who escape prosecution for what was essentially fraud and misrepresentation….

No… someone else is always to blame.

An earlier blog talked about “code” in political speak, and several incidents that have come to my attention recently caused me to think about one particular form of “code” that’s always been a part of American politics, but is now making a resurgence, particularly with the more right-wing elements – although it’s certainly not absent from the far left, either.

That’s the specter of “local control.”

For years, “local control” was used as both a justification and a means for maintaining segregation of elementary and secondary schools across the country.  Today, combined with “states’ rights,” it’s become a rallying cry for those who dislike federal laws and mandates that are contrary to local practices. Western states who would rather fund their governments through mineral severance taxes claim that federal environmental laws and land use regulations restrict the use of “their lands” and demand greater local control.  “No Child Left Behind” regulations are cited as an example of infringement on local rights. Religious organizations that wish to deny employees health insurance that covers birth control manifest another form of local control. The government or the state isn’t mandating birth control;  it’s mandating the opportunity, and it’s up to the individual as to whether that opportunity is used.

And all too often, the push for local control is both a hypocritical protest against federal actions, often those designed to increase personal freedoms, and an attempt to restrict those freedoms. For example, here in Utah, the governor and state legislators rail against federal control, but they attempt various ways to curtail the sale of liquor, to mandate the longest waiting periods for women to have abortions, to require mandatory marriage counseling before allowing divorce proceedings to be filed, to allow local school districts to opt out of providing sex education classes, and to restrict the distribution of federal funds for programs they dislike.  Right wing legislators demand that people have the right to bear arms, even though weapons kill tens of thousands of people, while railing against abortion and contraception on the grounds that life is sacred.  If life is that sacred, why don’t they try to ban weapons as well as birth control and contraception?

So-called “local control” also pops up in other ways.  Some thirty years ago, Brigham Young University, which is essentially owned and operated by the Mormon church, used to have faculty who were not of the LDS faith, and full-time faculty were either tenured or on tenure track, allowing them at least a modicum of protection if their public views were at variance with those of the church. In more recent years, BYU has abolished tenure, and, from what I can tell, all faculty must be members in good standing in the LDS faith.  The combination of lack of tenure and the need for standing in the Mormon Church allows the church total control over the faculty.

Interestingly enough, a Utah state legislator has proposed, in two sessions running, legislation to abolish tenure at most state colleges and universities, ostensibly to make it easier to get rid of “bad professors.”  What’s interesting about this is that the state’s Board of Regents implemented a post-tenure review system over five years ago, which has been tightened considerably in recent years… but that’s apparently not enough.  Given that the majority of faculty and administrators at the affected institutions are LDS, what would be the likely impact of this increased “local control”?  Might it just be a far greater reluctance of non-LDS faculty to even want to teach in Utah?  Might it just be, in effect, to turn state colleges and universities into institutions more “in line” with local, i.e., LDS, values?  Wouldn’t that possibly in practice effectively violate the idea of separation of church and state?  And wouldn’t that be essentially antithetical to one of the fundamental purposes of higher education – to broaden a student’s exposure to other values and cultures?

From what I can see, in most cases, people advocating more “local control” are really saying, “We want to do things our way, even if it tramples on the rights of others, because our way is right.”

This past Sunday a former Utah resident, Josh Powell, turned his Washington state residence into an inferno, killing himself and his two young sons, aged five and seven. While the exact reasons for his actions may never be fully known, what is known is that his wife, now presumed dead, vanished slightly more than two years ago under mysterious circumstances, leaving everything, including ID, car keys, and wallet, at home and that the now-deceased husband was a definite “person of interest.”  What is also known is that the courts awarded custody of the boys to the missing woman’s parents, and the husband had fought this tooth and nail, declaring that the courts had no right to take away his children.  Unhappily, this is certainly not the first time events such as this have occurred, but, to me, it’s symptomatic of a certain mindset, usually more prevalent in males, but certainly not limited to them, which regards far too many aspects of life as theirs exclusively.

Although English common law of two hundred years ago did in fact make women and children – and all they possessed – possessions of the husband, the law in both the United Kingdom and the United States has changed considerably, to the point that, at least legally, women are not the possessions of their husbands, and courts regard parents as guardians and custodians of children – and not owners.  And the U.S. Civil War resulted in the abolition of slavery, a practice that was a legally accepted way of allowing a slaveholder to declare that intelligent human beings were “Mine! Mine! Mine!”

In some countries, of course, men can still insist that women and children are their personal possessions, as witness the news story about the Afghan man who killed his wife because she had the effrontery to bear him a daughter rather than the son he had demanded.

Unfortunately, the “Mine! Mine! Mine!” mindset doesn’t limit itself to just spouses and children, but seems to be making a resurgence in other areas as well even in the United States. This is why we have, at least in Utah, state legislators breaking the law by riding ATVs across roadless areas and declaring that those federal lands don’t apply to them – because “it’s my right” to have access any way I want. It’s also “my right” to own and employ assault weapons and fifty caliber machine guns.  And “my right” to insist that the government force women to have children forced on them by rape or incest.

There is, of course, the other extreme – those who claim that essentially everything is “ours” and that government exists merely to decide how much of “our” stuff each of us gets to keep and use. Over forty years ago, in “The Tragedy of the Commons,” the ecologist Garrett Hardin pointed out how, when everything is held in common, almost never is it cared for, at least not without a great deal of social control and regulation.  In short, true “communism” or “communalism” has never proved to be workable.

The upshot of all this is that no rights can be absolute in any civilized society, especially the rights to insist that other people are “Mine!  Mine! Mine!”  or that everything belongs to everyone. And the first tragedy of the Powell case is that an ultra-possessive father and husband could not bring himself to understand that.  The second tragedy is that most politicians, especially those on the exteme fringes, don’t understand either… or choose not to in order to court political favor.