2004 – Jonathan Rowe

Fair Game

Whose woods they are you might not know. So can you hunt in them? The question has new significance in the wake of the recent shooting of six hunters in Wisconsin in a dispute over hunting turf. Encounters like that are likely to increase as sprawl continues and land available for hunting shrinks. Hunters, like the prey they stalk, face the threat of habitat decline.

And that raises an age-old legal issue regarding hunting rights on private land. There’s a general belief that a man’s forest is his castle, to the same extent his house is. “We need to create some incentives and programs” for private owners to permit hunting, Mike Bartz, a Wisconsin game warden told the Associated Press. “But then again, our country was founded on private property rights, so it’s not easy.”

Sidewalks of the Mind

Sidewalks are one of the greatest human inventions, and one of the most unappreciated as well. They provide a means of walking, meeting, transporting, vending, and disseminating information in the way that is probably is closest to what the framers of the First Amendment actually had in mind. Just about the entire life of a city takes place on or through sidewalks. At any given hour, people are using them to go to shop, gawk, play ball, mail a letter, meet the object of their affections. All this and more for a minimal amount of upkeep and expense.

It would have been possible, I suppose, for the designers of our cities and towns to deem sidewalks a form of socialism, and the first domino in the row. First the sidewalks, then the homes and businesses to which they lead. It would have been possible to privatize the sidewalks, erect toll booths at every block, build walls so people couldn’t sneak on and off through someone’s yard.

Faith Based Initiatives

With a President who touts “faith-based initiatives” as the answer to the nation’s problems, it is instructive to revisit the time when people conceived their entire communities in just those terms.

One example is Dedham, Massachusetts, which was settled by Puritans in 1636. As Kenneth A. Lockridge detailed in his graceful little book “A New England Town: The First Hundred Years” (Norton 1970) the early Dedhamites were not compartmentalizers, the way boisterous religionists today tend to be. They didn’t separate their economic strivings from the moral force field of their faith. To the contrary they deemed pecuniary lust as evil as the more strictly physical kinds, and made their economic arrangements accordingly.

Takings and Givings

For years, property rights fundamentalists have yearned for a world in which they get compensation for just about every restriction on the use of their property. It’s fine for the community to pump up the value of their property, through such things as highways, schools, proximity to other developments, and the like. But when they have to give something back — well, that’s a “taking.”

In Oregon they have gotten their wish. On election day, voters there passed Measure 37, which exempts landowners from any zoning laws enacted since they bought their property, unless they get full monetary compensation. Until now, Oregon has had the most thorough and effective approach to land use in the entire country. Cities have thrived, forests and farmland have been preserved, kids have enjoyed the same kind of open space that their parents did.

The Blessings of Freedom

For those who questioned the sincerity of the Bush Administration in its professed desire to bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people, the administration offers more proof: Order 81. This order, one of a 100 left behind by Paul Bremer, former head of the occupation authority in Iraq, practically requires small farmers in Iraq to buy seeds from multinational corporations such as Monsanto.

Under the former tyranny, farmers were free to save seeds from each crop to plant the next. This has been the traditional practice for farmers throughout the world, from time immemorial. The Iraqi constitution actually prohibited the ownership of life forms — ie the genetic commons — much as US law used to do. Order 81 changes all that. Corporations will get monopoly rights over seeds that they develop. Farmers no longer will be able to save that seed from one year to the next. The way the law is written, moreover, their own indigenous varieties won’t qualify for this protection.

Is Happiness a Commons?

Gunnar Myrdal, the late Swedish economist, once noted the strange tendency of his profession to barricade itself against human reality. In true sciences, such as biochemistry and physics, hypotheses are tested and disproven all the time. In the pseudo-science of economics, by contrast, “all doctrines persist.”

None persists more stubbornly than the belief that an increase in monetary transactions — that is, “growth” — means a corresponding increase in human well-being. This belief is enshrined in the conventional measure of progress, the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. The more money we spend the better we are doing, the cult of GDP proclaims, regardless what we spend that money on and the effects. People have been pointing out the absurdity of this belief for decades.

The Freedom Tax

Let’s say you are an excitable partisan of the right, the kind for whom a small tax increase foretells a Stalinist ascent. You have just learned of a government levy that has gone up by over 50 percent inthe past four years. This levy hits people at the very start of their entrepreneurial journey. It comes along with a bureaucracy so labyrinthine and inept that those subject to it pay thousands of additional dollars in lawyer fees and other expenses just trying to meet its demands.

Taxes, lawyers, bureaucrats–it is acetylene to your ideological passions. Your outrage is in a white heat. Instinctively your mind sets to work on a polemical weapon with which to hack this beast to bits. The phrases start coming. The federal government is determined to crush the dreams of the honest and hard-working people. The liberals and their bureaucrat buddies want to drown aspiration and kill hope. While brave Americans fight to extend freedom abroad, the liberal taxers want to quash it here at home. They want to impose a Freedom Tax. Quick, get Grover Norquist.

The Demand for the Commons

Since the first steam engine roared into action, people have worried about where the massive new machinery of the market was headed. In the wake of the Second World War, these questions took a new form: what is prosperity for? For the first time in human history, there was enough to go around, and more. So what would come next? Simply more TVs and cars, and their successor items? Or something different?

Probably the most eloquent statement of the question came in John Kenneth Galbraith’s book The Affluent Society, a best-seller for which Galbraith’s colleagues in the economics profession never forgave him. Galbraith observed that the reigning economic orthodoxy was formulated in an age of scarcity. All the gears were arranged to increase output, and this was assumed to promote the greatest good. But after two centuries of output frenzy, the problem no longer was scarcity. Rather it was glut. The challenge no longer was to produce enough stuff for the people; it was to get the people to buy the stuff produced.

Our Dangerous Distance Between the Private and the Commons

My wife’s village in the Philippines consists mostly of bamboo houses perched on hills that rise gently from the rice fields. The hills are lush, the fields neat and well-tended; one almost forgets how poor these people are, in Western terms at least. My wife’s father gets about $ 750 a year for his crop – a lot compared with sharecroppers who have little besides the rice they eat and clothes they wear.

Life is not easy. Yet there is a sense of sufficiency and contentment that is not much found in the US. There is time; daily life is not a grim march to the metronome of clocks. There is also the abundance of nature – coconut, banana, and mango trees, sweet potatoes and swamp cabbage, the chickens and goats that fill the yards. None of these appear in the stern accountings of Western economists who pronounce upon the poverty of such people.

Don’t Talk Like a Twit

I was hitchhiking around England in the Spring of 1983. It happened to be the middle of an election campaign: Margaret Thatcher was running for re-election against a professor named Michael Foot, who represented what was called, with wonderful British aplomb, Labour’s “Radical Tendency.”

Somewhere north of London I got a ride from a lorry driver. The man looked as though he had stepped out of a Labour Party poster from the 1930s: gaunt frame, missing teeth, and wool snap-brim cap pulled down to the eyes. I expected a Labour speech, but got something different.