This page gives my two cents on political and economic topics. I barely scratch the surface of what I would really like to say. And somehow it is always pretentious to think that what one has to say would merit publication. But this is the internet. I'm my own editor. Take it or leave it. If you have a bent for things political, you might find something of interest in what follows.

Bicycling, Politics, and Zen

It's a meditation. I'm on from the moment I leave on a bike ride to the moment I return. Beats drugs. I don't use drugs but I am for legalizing them. More on that later.

My church, my meditation ground, my sanctuary is the Santa Monica Mountains in the Northwest outskirts of Los Angeles. I ride there, on mountain roads. One of my favorite workouts is to ride North on the Los Angeles Beach Bike Path from Santa Monica up to Temescal Canyon where it ends and the ride begins. North on PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) for another twelve miles to the base of Latigo Canyon where begins a ten mile climb which takes me about 50 minutes to negotiate, including two descents and two summits at about 2000 feet. It's a combination of awesome beauty looking back over the alluvial descension across the wide deep blue Pacific. It's not always deep blue. Sometimes its grey, sometimes it lighter. It seems every time I ride that the sky, the sea, the mountains are different never the same. Part of the wonder and serenity of my ride. Each ride is like a life - a beginning, a middle, highs and lows, and then winding down to the end - an adventure. Upon reaching the first summit, I have climbed 2000 vertical feet. There is one brief descent then another small climb before the final descent. Latigo Canyon meets Kanan Dune road. Sometimes I turn around and go back down the way I came up, sometimes I just bomb down Kanan Dune, a very fast straight steep descent down to PCH. When no headwind is present, it's not uncommon to hit 50 miles per hour on the descent. Rejoining PCH it is time to hammer the 20 miles back to town, every inch of which I enjoy. Ocean side country conditions quickly turn to Malibu roadside homes brushing by. The sea air is something I will never tire of.

Once I rode 400 miles in 24 hours, but that's another story.

Computers

I am a computer programmer and love programming. I dislike that our popular computer culture is dominated by the work of two good but not great programmers (Bill Gates and Paul Allen). Gates made the right moves at the right time and got lucky and had an uninformed public (the same public who votes against national health care and who almost thinks it's a good idea to privatize social security). With that kind of turf going for him, Bill became a modern day King and was able to impose mediocre software on the planet. In my opinion, the amount of economic damage caused by DOS and Windows dominating the world's computers far exceeds Gate's own personnel wealth he has acquired by virtue of owning something like one third of Microsoft stock. Fortunately, a better computing culture is now coming to the forefront thanks to Linux culture and good software design by companies such as Google (which is implemented on Linux).

About Mankind

The average human life spans an amazing one per cent of the history of mankind. In other words, you can string the lives of 100 of our ancestors together and get back to to 7000 years ago after the end of the last ice age. The ice age had ended a few thousand years prior but it took a while for the ice to melt. The parting of the ice and the stabilization of sea level made it possible for Homo Sapiens to invent agriculture and the settle the first towns such as Jericho.

Since you can string 100 of our lives end to end and get back that far, that means we haven't been around all that long. In generational terms, assuming that we breed a generation on the average of once every twenty years, we are 500 generations (ten thousand years) old. 50 generations go back a thousand years, to the middle ages. 100 generations go back to Jesus Christ. 200 generations go back to the height of the Egyptians, and 300 generations go back to the first use of Bronze and the invention of the plow.

The fact that we haven't been around for very long helps explain how little progress we have made in knowing how to organize ourselves peacefully and distribute our wealth in an equitable and ecological manner. I suspect that one person can only learn so much during their lifetime. Particularly in the area of wisdom. You get wisdom from your parents and your fellow creatures. You apply what wisdom you have and then you die. We have only had 500 or so generations of wisdom so far.

A common belief is that we are now over-populated. In historical terms, nearly half of all human beings to have ever been born are alive right now. That is to say, of all human beings who live to adulthood, dating back to the last ice age, about half were born before 1900 and half since. In some circles, this population explosion reputedly accounts for much of our misery. I don't believe that. The population of our species is determined by technological conditions which enable populations of a given size to exist. Once the population exceeds that size, people die or have less offspring and the population stabilizes. So it has been and so it shall continue to be. Our problems come not from a population explosion but rather from a power and wealth misdistribution. That has always been our problem. It is what we need to solve. We haven't yet and capitalism doesn't. Look around you and take account of the countries in the world. The so-called socialist ones and the so-called capitalist ones. They are all doing about equally poorly at solving the real problems. I don't have a solution to propose, if you are wondering. I just wanted to share my opinion about what the problem consists of. It isn't over-population. I think capitalism is an inevitable period for humans to pass through for a few hundred year (several generations) and then they will come up with a good system of organizing their power structures.

A positive thing about the number of people now living is that the number of clever ideas being generated is higher than ever before. If half of all people ever to live are now alive, we should be able to generate as many new ideas in our lifetime as all of mankind generated prior to our lifetime. This is not entirely true since ideas do not occur in a vacuum. Ideas build upon one another. Before this lifetime, we were bandwidth-limited in number of educated well-fed people and in communication channels. Today we have plenty of people with time to think about new ways to do things and much better communication, though far from perfect.

The Internet is a new medium which increases our communication bandwidth and prevents autocratic control of communication channels. It will soon provide high-bandwidth for many more people to be active contributors to the information flow rather than mere passive spectators. That is good. One example of what the internet will eventually do is enable anyone to put on their own radio show over the internet at little or no cost. That will be good. Later, as bandwidth increases, anyone with the proper tools will be able to distribute their own 'television' show (although it will no longer be called television), local news, educational material, pornography, or anything else they want to put out. All of this will empower the masses, changing consumers of information into producers of information for very low cost. The information revolution will truly come of age. All we need is bandwidth.

My Political Beliefs

The world is really a wonderful place and life is a good thing to experience, if you have good food and shelter and friends. But in modern life today, one major item which interferes with peoples ability to be happy is that they are not satisfied with their work or with what goes on at work. Often, people are not paid well enough or see that they do not share in the benefits of their work as much as do those 'above' them. And, equally importantly, it is quite common to experience a feeling of powerlessness at the workplace, as if most or all of the important decisions about what you do are ultimately made by your superior without much input from you. A simple example of this is that in many modern buildings, most workers are either in cubicles or in a small office with no windows or both. This is no place to ask a human being to spend the most important eight hours of each day. But what say do the workers have in such matters? Little or none. There are other examples, having to do with how money is spent and how ones salary is determined, how much time off a parent can take for their children, whether a company should or should not hire non-union workers, etc., all of which are decisions made not by the people doing the actual work but by 'upper level management', with little or no need for approval from the masses.

It is the feeling of uselessness or lack of empowerment which bothers me the most about what so many people have to put up with in their daily lives. I think we as a society we will find ways to make things better for everyone, but it will take time and effort. And we must try to understand why things are the way they are if we are to change them for the better.

Capitalism is a temporary flawed phase which humanity is passing through. I believe that we can and will improve our society in the long run by restructuring society in a way that everyone has a more equal share of the wealth. In particular, I believe that it is important and possible for every person to have worthwhile well-paying work. However, that is not possible in our current society due to how we have arranged things so that a few people at the top have most of the wealth. The latest estimate I heard (on C-SPAN, yesterday, October 19, 1995, during a Senate hearing) was that the wealthiest 1% of Americans own 40% of the wealth. Such an accumulation of wealth by a few is a necessary property of capitalism. It follows from the rules of the free market that a few people will end up with more than a fair share of the wealth. It took me awhile to be convinced of that but I'm pretty sure it's true. It has to do with the fact that to produce a lot of stuff under capitalism, a small number of people own the tools and property needed to create the stuff and hire a lot of workers to actually create it. They, the owners, get a bigger share of the pie because of the power they have by virtue of being in control. It is hard to imagine a system under capitalism in which income and wealth would be spread more evenly.

There is a myth that everyone can work their way to the top or improve their situation. That is a myth because most of the jobs in our society are not at the top. Only some people can get to top, obviously. But there is a further myth. That is the myth that education is the answer and that everyone can improve their lot by getting educated and getting a better paying job. If you do your arithmetic, you can see that it is impossible for everyone to do that. Most of the jobs in our society simply do not require a high degree of education. And no matter how educated people become those jobs will not go away. How would we eliminate those jobs? Who would sweep the floors, drive the buses, teach the children, answer the phones, make the airline reservations, and change the light bulbs? The problem is that we do not value work. And, we have not set things up so that everyone can have work, even if merely menial work. There is an incredible bias against raising the minimum wage, against job creation programs, and against reducing the highest wages in society. That is our problem much more that the educational level of people. Increasing everyones knowledge is, of course, a laudable goal. But is has little to do with how much money people earn.

It is harmful to our culture and economic system that the highest paid executives earn hundreds and sometimes thousands of times what the workers of their companies earn. As long as we live in a society where the well-to-do and even most of the middle class continues to believe the myth everything is OK under this present distribution of incomes and jobs, we will continue to have poverty, crime, and malaise.

Another myth very prevalent these days in the United States is that government is bad. This myth astounds me. In principle at least, our government is democratic. You can't say that of corporations, where most of us spend most of our waking hours. Also, government does good work. Our roads, our parks, and the internet are all productions of our government. The U.S. Mail system has come under particular criticism for reasons I do not fathom. They do a great job! Stop hassling them unless you can show me how you would organize a logistical operation to get billions of pieces of mail delivered as fast and as cheaply as they. My only complaints viz a viz the post office are two. First, we should pay postal workers more. I blame you, the voter, not the post office, for the fact that we don't. Second, we should ban junk mail. Do you realize how much airplane fuel and work of postal delivery personnel is wasted every day to place garbage into your mail box? That is not the fault of the post office. It is the fault of capitalism.

Another thing people seem to fear is a government operated health insurance system. Why? The private health insurance systems are not any better. In fact, the overhead in the private sector is greater than the overhead of Medicare, for example. I believe the numbers are something like 30% overhead in the private sector verses 10% overhead in Medicare. Doctors should make good salaries but they shouldn't be millionaires. There are plenty of dedicated intelligent people who would be great doctors and be happy with a high salary without being filthy rich. Let's pay for all of the costs of a doctors education but take doctors out of the health care industry. It shouldn't even be an industry. Health care should be a right for all people in our society and not done for profit of any industry. We should train more paramedics, for one thing, and pay them well too.

A Political Platform for California and U.S. Society.

• Raise the minimum wage to $10/hour (1995 dollars) for anyone over 21 years old and adjust it annually for inflation.
• Implement Make-work jobs programs. Everyone should have a job and if the private sector is too stupid to figure out how to make that happen, then we should do it through government. The Army is a government operation. We could have a peace-time army which does stuff all over the place to help people. If they don't do a good job, we should fire the managers or generals and put in new ones until we get a corps which operates well.
• Socialize health care. Eliminate health insurance companies and health insurance forms. All HMOs and private doctors would continue to function but they would be paid based on how many people choose to use their services and paid based on a government regulated rate for those services. There would be no paper work to fill out other than the medical record of what was done for each patient. These records exist anyway. A computer system would then compute how much the service provider would receive. Rich people who want more insurance could of course obtain it. But even those rich people would have to pay taxes to support the national health care system. Note, even foreign travelers visiting the United States would be entitled to health care. When you walked in the door of a clinic or hospital, your only credentials for receiving service would be that you are a person.
• Implement pay-at-the-pump auto insurance in California. This idea was proposed by Art Torres in the early 1990s and voted down by the State Legislature. The idea is to pay for insurance via a tax on gasoline. In this way, everyone pays for insurance since you have to buy gas to operate a car. Art Torres showed that overall the cost of insurance to almost everyone would have been lower under this scheme. The reason the scheme was not implemented was because the insurance companies would have made less money.
• Implement light-rail trains on the surface streets of Los Angeles. We already have the right-of-way for the rails -- the existing streets in the city. 25% of Los Angeles is covered by asphalt. That is our right-of-way for the trains we should install. In addition, we should provide elevated bicycle pathways which provide nonstop routes across the entire city. A car spends 80% of its fuel pushing air out of the way as it moves or in starting and stopping in slow traffic. So does a train, but the train carries many more people. It is for this reason that trains can be much more energy efficient, consuming much less fuel per person carried. The less fuel per person a vehicle burns, the less pollution we generate.
• Require every citizen to enlist in the armed forces or a social services alternative for one year. Convert the armed forces into a defensive guerilla fighting force. Work towards eliminating nuclear weapons in all countries. Withdraw the U.S. extended fleets which exist solely to extend the American Empire to the far reaches of the globe. Do not require a soldier to fight in a place where they have not volunteered to fight. If you can't assemble a volunteer force to fight for your cause, then it's your cause alone, so don't expect others to fight for you.
• A component of the armed forces will be local citizen militia which operates at the neighborhood level. This citizen militia will be elected by popular vote from the citizenry who have already been trained by the armed forces. Require that all police personnel live in the neighborhoods in which they work. Recruit police from the local communities. Let the police work with the citizen militia (see above) volunteers to constantly keep a good mix of police and citizenry interacting and patrolling the streets. Have locally elected police review boards to constantly monitor police performance and remove from duty any officer found to be negligent or undesired by the community.
• Legalize all drugs. Use tax revenues from the sale of drugs to set up community-based drug counseling centers.

I own and operate my own business and try to apply my beliefs there to the extent that is possible in a capitalist framework. For example, I would like to pay all my employees high wages. But if doing so means that I cannot sell my products at a competitive price, then I would be forced to lower wages. For the moment that is not an issue since all of my work is with partners who make as much or more than I do. But if the business grows, I will have to confront these issues. I try to apply the adage of the Green Party. Think globally. Act locally.

© Dennis G. Allard