The Crowhill Journal

Pigweed and Crowhill drink and review Pigweed’s Imperial Amber Ale while they listen to a new performance by the Ben Franklin Players. Then they discuss Earth Day and environmentalism.

People today believe the world is bad and getting worse. But if you measure the planet by its ability to promote human flourishing, Earth is getting better all the time. We should be very happy about that! But instead, people think there’s some awful crisis going on.

The engine for all this prosperity is energy, and practically speaking, that means fossil fuels. Or, to put it simply, more fossil fuel use means more human flourishing. It means fewer people in grinding poverty.

Humans should care for the environment so they can promote a better life for humans. That should be the focus of our environmentalism.

I recently recorded an interview with the Close-Minded Podcast about my book, Eggs are Expensive, Sperm is Cheap.

The interview should be available on iTunes shortly, if it isn’t already. It’s available here now.

I also recently recorded the book for audio, and it’s available on Amazon and Audible. Here’s a link.

Thank God this isn’t the problem we had feared it was going to be, but let’s pretend that we were faced with a situation where hospitals had to ration ventilators. How would you have them do it?

I read an opinion piece this morning about how horrible it would be for a government agency to take a ventilator from an old person and give it to a young person.

My reaction was … what do you want them to do? Take it from a poor person and give it to a rich person? That’s the free-market approach.

It’s true that health care is a limited resource that has to be rationed, and as a general rule, the best way to ration a limited resource is through a free market.

That being said, there are some commodities that we don’t want to be rationed entirely by the market. Food, water, shelter, and healthcare are usually among them. For those commodities, we want a mostly free market.

There are many problems with the idea of a government committee creating rules to ration health care. One of the most obvious is that they will inevitably have a political and/or ideological agenda. Another, less obvious problem is that many people won’t agree with the rules the “experts” come up with.

Another big problem with government-run healthcare is that it will hide behind this idea that they’re acting for the common good, but you know perfectly well that the politically connected will still get preferential treatment. Stalin’s mother is not going to be on a waiting list for a ventilator.

Yet another problem is that central control stifles innovation. We want people to have the freedom to try new ideas.

This is part of the reason the healthcare debate is so difficult. We have to navigate a messy collection of values. We want free-market principles to drive innovation and to allocate scarce resources, but we don’t want the poor guy’s ventilator given to the rich guy’s kid. We don’t want to kill grandma to save the young person, but … well, in a way we do. And honestly, so does grandma. And we want to be able to provide some level of care to even the poorest person.

I don’t know enough to navigate between all these choices, but we shouldn’t cheapen the argument with simplistic slogans.

We all know that Uncle Joe is a handsy, sniffy, weird dude. But has he assaulted women?

I don’t know.

What I do know is that the allegations against Sleepy Joe are far more serious (in the sense of being substantiated by corroborating testimony) than anything brought against Kavanaugh. So this, as we’ve all heard, is a test for #metoo. Will they stick to their principles, or will they stick to their politics? (A couple prominent people in the #metoo crowd have come out in support of Biden’s accuser.)

But then again, is this really the right test?

A proper test would be when they’re faced with a candidate they like, who has a chance of winning, but is credibly accused. Then they’d have to decide whether losing the election is worth sticking up for the accuser, “believing all women,” and so on.

Is that a fair description of the current situation? Probably not.

Biden doesn’t seem to generate much enthusiasm. People support him because they see him as the best shot to beat Trump, but not because they particularly like him.

That in itself is not remarkable. We often vote for candidates because we dislike them less than we hate or fear the opponent. In fact, most of the votes in my life have been that way.

Still, I sense a strong lukewarmness about Biden. Despite the fact that I live in a blue state, I have not seen a single Biden bumper sticker. It’s also weird that Obama was so slow to endorse him. There seems to be a reluctance among the Democrats to come out with a full-throated endorsement of Creepy Joe.

Why?

It may be because he’s not far enough to the left. There is an alleged pattern in politics: when a party is out of power, they go extreme in the next election, then swing back to the middle four years later. Or so say some of the talking heads.

That may be an explanation for why Bernie did so well, and it provides some small hope that the Democrats will come back towards sanity in 2024.

Those explanations don’t cut it for me. I think the lukewarm attitude towards Uncle Joe is because we all know he’s suffering from dementia, and we can’t imagine him making it through the campaign, let alone four years in the White House.

There are other calculations going on among the Democrats. I suspect it’s something like this. Joe is a lousy candidate, so how can we replace him (with whom?) and still save face? We can’t go with Bernie, because he’s not even a Democrat. So how do we slide somebody else onto the top of the ticket?

#Metoo might be a convenient excuse to force Joe out, force a brokered convention, and find somebody who has a chance against Trump.

Given all that, I say that Biden is not a fair test of #metoo. Even if they use #metoo to dump the guy, it won’t be clear that they put principles above politics.

(P.S. — Yes, I’m aware of the polls that show Biden beating Trump. I’m also aware that polls this far out don’t mean a thing.)

People sometimes speak of the 50 United States as “laboratories of democracy.” The idea is that different states can do things their own way, and the other states can watch and see what works the best.

I like the concept, but I haven’t seen a lot of evidence that actually happens. States do different things, but I’m not sure they learn from one another. (People rarely learn from somebody else’s example, unfortunately.)

Something similar is going on right now with coronavirus response. Different countries are responding differently, sometimes because of a strategic decision, sometimes because of circumstances beyond their control.

Belarus is apparently doing nothing.

Sweden has taken a different course, sheltering those at high risk, but allowing most of life to continue normally.

Some U.S. states are starting to open back up. (Here’s a list.) The cretins in the media are caricaturing this in all kinds of horrible ways, but especially when the state has a Republican governor. And, of course, the Swedes don’t get the same treatment, because they’re “democratic socialists” or … something. (It doesn’t matter. Idiotic American reporters can’t be expected to know the details. They just know, deep down, that Europeans are more enlightened than we are, while Republican governors are evil monsters.)

What continues to get lost in all these discussions is the goal of the shut down.

It was not to stop total infections, or even total deaths.

The intent was to “flatten the curve.” The area under the curve — that is, the number of people infected, hospitalized, and killed — might be the same in either case. The point was to keep us from overwhelming the health care system. Which was a perfectly reasonable goal.

Somehow we’ve lost sight of that.

The people who have especially lost site of that are the little Napoleons who are issuing idiotic orders. It does almost nothing to flatten the curve if you prevent people from buying spinach seeds, or if you send cops to round up people who are jogging on the beach, or playing at a park, or sitting in their cars in a church parking lot. These idiots prove the old rule that power corrupts.

This paranoid and over-bearing response treats the virus like some sort of zombie apocalypse germ, where one more infection might be the tipping point to total annihilation.

It seems that the public perception has changed from “slow the burn” to “I want to stay safe in my bunker until the Evil Thing is over and I can come out again.”

It’s not like that. At all. What we’re trying to do is slow things down. That’s it.

The response is getting a little too close to madness, in my opinion. We can’t all stay locked in our houses until it’s safe, because it’s never going to be safe. At best it’s going to be many months before we have a vaccine, and we may never have one.

But … that’s a tangent. My real point is that different countries (and states), taking their own approach to this mess, will give us the data we need to move forward.

How much worse will Sweden be than Norway? How about Belarus vs. Poland? Or Colorado vs. Kansas.

Wouldn’t it be nice if people were paying attention to that, rather than whether the president really said to inject bleach?