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In the precincts of Rightward opinion, they dismiss concerns about the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else as the effluvium of envy and other base motives. But the problems are real, as a visit to most Third World countries would attest. One of the biggest, and least discussed, is the way vast wealth insulates people in high places from the impacts of their own decisions and behavior, and from the problems the rest of us confront every day.

People who fly in executive jets never experience the travail that air travel today has become. People with staffs to pay their bills miss the joy of dealing with credit card companies, with their multitude of tricky ways to extract more money from us. Dick Cheney and George W. Bush never will have to worry about medical insurance; and it shows in the ideological and cavalier way in which they purport to deal with the problem for everyone else. (I suspect neither has to wait in telephone help line queues either.)

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This thing we call, with exquisite euphemism, “the economy”, has gotten itself into a real fix, and it goes much deeper than the interest rates and productivity numbers that the Greenspans obsess over. The machinery solved long ago the problem it was supposed to meet, which is human scarcity. When people lack today, it’s because of a rotten system of distribution, not because there’s not enough to go around.

The problem today is desire for the stuff produced, not the capacity to produce it. We are, as John McKnight of Northwestern University has observed, a society “in need of need.” The machinery can’t stop. For the individual corporation as for the system as a whole, there is — and can be — no concept of “enough”. There always must be more, and then more compounded onto that. Most of the depredations of the commons – the air and water, knowledge, the shared spaces we inhabit, the whole list – result from this unrelenting, built-in need of the system to keep itself going at an ever-accelerating pace.

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If you want to kill a railroad, one of the first things you’ll do is split the tracks from the operating line and put them into a separate corporate entity.  Riders on Amtrak’s Coastal Starlight between Los Angeles and Seattle know this.  Trains on this otherwise scenic route are chronically late – often by hours – because they operate on tracks owned by the Union Pacific.  Amtrak trains must stop at sidings to let the UP freight trains pass.

David Gunn, until recently the president of Amtrak, knows it too.  Gunn has run the transit systems in New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C.  He resuscitated the New York City subways to great acclaim back in the 1980’s. When the Bush appointees to the Amtrak board moved to split off the maintenance of the tracks and stations on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor into a separate entity – which could be a first step towards privatizing them – Gunn resisted. The Bush board fired him partly as a result.

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It seems to me that the most casual survey of the current White House, or of commercial television, or of development patterns around, say, Houston, Texas, would cast doubt upon the theory of intelligent design.  But then, the smug certitude of the evolutionists is off-putting as well.  Creationism, which is intelligent design without the secular costuming, may be literal-minded – and not, I would argue, what the Judeo-Christian Scripture actually means.

But at least, in its own ignorant way, it broaches a kind of question that many of us brooded over as children but then buried in what we euphemistically call our “adult minds.”  Where does it all come from?  How could something come from nothing? How could time have a beginning?  If something came before time, then wouldn’t that be time too?  Beneath the pseudo-science is an inkling of things beyond ordinary cognition that even Einstein took seriously.

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There was a lot of eye-rolling during the week, and cracks about a media hoard that was rumored to exceed 400. Still, on Saturday, people came out anyway, lined up along Main Street two hours before Charles and Camilla were due. Charles was here at the invitation of local organic farmers. The couple would visit the farmer’s market at Toby’s Feed Barn, and then go to an organic farm. But why were we there, lined up behind the barriers, waiting for a glimpse?

This part of Northern California is not given to celebrity worship. Sure, it’s hard not to be curious when the Prince comes to town But there was more to it than that. My sense was – and others agreed – that the excitement was less about seeing Charles and Camilla, than about being part of the seeing of them. It was a community occasion, a chance to share an experience that soon would become part of something that still exists out here – local memory.

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This is a story about a coach, and also about the market, and the tragedy it can work on the moral influences in the lives of kids.

Partisans of the market applaud the way it turns us into consumers. This for them is the preferred social role in pretty much all our life dealings. As consumers we know our self-interest. As consumers we choose wisely; and the aggregate of our individual choices therefore is the greatest possible common good. But we sagacious consumers suddenly turn stupid when we become voters and citizens. We make bad choices, or are easily duped. So it is better to keep that role to a minimum – to ratifying the market, sort of the way shareholders ratify management.

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In the psychodrama of market theory, capital is the Promethean force. Its capacity to produce human betterment is without limit. It can surmount any obstacle, extricate humanity from any woe, so long as government does not dispirit it with taxes or bind it with regulations. Mere work is a piker in comparison.

What then about flips? Flipping is the practice of buying real estate in an up market, and then unloading it a few weeks or months later at a big gain. In some jurisdictions the flipper doesn’t even take legal title to the property; he or she deals in contracts to buy, so as to avoid recording and transfer taxes. Apologists invoke “market liquidity” and the like in an attempt to include such scheming in the heroic drama of capital.

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I don’t go along with the view that the devastation of New Orleans was God’s punishment for the moral failings of some of the people there. I say that not because I don’t take scripture seriously but because I do. Jesus tried over and over to shake his disciples from the Old Testament belief that misfortunes in the external world betoken the hand of a wrathful God. The disciples wanted to know for example whether a particular man was blind because of his own sins or those of his parents.

But Jesus wasn’t into blame. He said, in effect, “That’s irrelevant. Shut up and heal him.” Another time, and more to the present point, he asked them whether they thought the people who died when a tower fell in Siloam “were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem.” Jesus answered his own question. “Nay,” he said. “But, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.”

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I doubt Garrett Hardin ever met William H. Whyte but he should have. Hardin of course was the academic who, in abstract and theoretical terms, declared the commons inherently “tragic, “ He backtracked later but it was too late. The tag stuck.

Whyte was the writer who spent years observing how people actually act and interact in public spaces. He walked the streets, sat with notebook in plazas and parks, set up cameras in unobtrusive places and spent endless hours studying the results. He could have told Mr. Hardin a thing or two.

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She said something about Josh, who was asleep on my shoulder. Such a sweet boy. Those eyes. I thanked her, asked if she had kids. A daughter, she said, eighteen. Was it hard, her daughter leaving home? Yes. When she looked at her did she still see the three year old the daughter used to be? Yes again.

I think about that a lot, I said, how one day I’ll look at Josh and wonder what happened to the little guy who called me Dadda and fell asleep on my shoulder. She could get choked up over this, she said. Our eyes retreated into our own thoughts.

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