Two Stories

Here are two brief stories I wrote this week for my "communicting economic ideas" class. Enjoy.

I walked away nearly twenty-five years ago. Walked away from Omelas.

Walked away from the pleasure, the ease. Walked away from the festivity of life in that desperate city. Only by walking away could I save that which makes a man human.

See, staying would have meant accepting my incapability of working for my own well-being. An acceptance that all I enjoyed in life was purchased by the unwilling suffering of a little child. I would have had to live with the knowledge that my life was based not on my actions, but on the bleak existence of someone who had no choice in the matter.

This I could not do.

Life has been hard these twenty-five years. I have discovered what a responsibility it is to rise or fall by my own actions. Though work is hard, my customers pay me a fair wage for my services. I don’t force them to buy anything. No one suffers against his or her will to benefit me, and I labor willingly for my own benefit.

See those two girls feeding the geese? Those are my daughters. Every day I give thanks that they will never know the seductive horror that is Omelas. They enjoy their play and free time all the more because they know work. Yesterday Claire, the oldest, was complaining about doing her chores. Dear thing, she probably thinks I’m crazy when I tell her, as I did yesterday, that working and benefiting from your own labor is one of life’s greatest blessings.

It’s true you know. Profiting from the suffering of another, especially if that person has no choice, reduces a man to a being dependent on the handouts of others, reliant on external sources for survival. Working and adding the results of that effort to your life, though much less enjoyable at the start, strengthens a man’s mind and body, spurs him to invent and create, and gives him a true appreciation for life and what he has.

And that really is the most priceless possession of all – to appreciate life, to enjoy your own and respect that of others around you.

I have never succeeded in freeing the child of Omelas, and life has not been without struggle. But every time I embrace my wife at the end of a day or run through the yard with my two girls, I give thanks that we live in a land where all work benefits the worker. Our futures here in Tsilatipac, our very lives, are our own.

The Second One.

“Grandpa, did you feel oppressed when you were young?”

The gray-haired gentleman seated by the window raised his eyes from his book; “No Peter, why do you ask?”

Sitting on the couch near his grandfather’s chair, Peter said, “Today my government teacher told us America’s prosperity was built on the suffering of workers, especially immigrants, and that capitalism has never succeeded without causing and profiting from the oppression of the lower classes. He also said that capitalism keeps workers in poverty to profit the businessmen who employ them. I know you came over from Germany with your parents when you were a kid, so I wanted to ask you; what happened when you came to America? Did you have to suffer so your dad’s boss could profit?”

“Peter,” replied the old man, “I think your teacher is misguided. My parents came to the United States because they heard it was a country where men could create a better life for themselves and their children through hard work. In the United States was this wondrous thing called ‘capitalism’; men could start out as a deliveryman or laborer – anything really – work hard, and someday own a big business or even be in politics. My father dreamed of owning his own business, he wanted to do something other than what his father and his father’s father had done, so we packed up our lives and moved to the States.

“Life was difficult. The home my father found was small, even smaller than the house we left in Germany. Father couldn’t find work doing what he had before, so after three weeks he took a job unloading ships. The work was hard – he would leave the house every day before the sun rose and return well after dark, hungry, sore and exhausted. He was paid little; often we had only two meals a day. After school I helped earn money for the family by standing on the corner and selling my mother’s bread.”

“Yes, life was hard for many years, but my father remained cheerful, often saying that things would get better. Sometimes he would point out a certain man when we went to mass, a man who was always dressed well and never arrived with mud on his boots. Father told me this man owned the company he worked for, that this fine and distinguished man was his boss’ boss. When I asked why this man kept my father working so hard for such long hours, my father would reply ‘It isn’t him who keeps me working, I choose to work the agreed amount to receive my pay. I work because working benefits me, not because he or any other man requires me to.’ I thought it was unfair that this man was so rich and we were so poor, but my father would answer ‘No son, that man earned what he has. Because of his business skill and hard work I, and many others, have jobs with his shipping company.’”

“Peter, even though we struggled back then, my father taught me that capitalism meant men earned their wealth through their own effort, not by exploiting the suffering of others. Yes, workers might experience hardship on the job, but they worked of their own free will – no one was forced into suffering for the benefit of their employers. Even the poorest of laborers was compensated for his work. And though some were rich and others poor, all alike were able to benefit from their own sweat. As you know, Peter, your great-grandfather didn’t work at the docks the rest of his life. He saved some money, opened his own store, and lived his dream.”

Unleash the economy!

So, about the President's State of the Union address last night. You should check the various news and pundits sites for what people are saying, but I have one comment.

Bush proposed a 22% increase in the budget of the United States Department of Energy. Supposedly this extra money will help develop nuclear, wind, and solar power to lessen our "addiction" (Bush's term) to foreign oil over the next nineteen years. First of all there are all the normal public choice economics type arguments to be made about this; such as I would expect that every actual attempt to follow this plan would be met with opposition by somebody, nineteen years is a long time for Americans to maintain a vision or plan, and the organizations using this money will be primarily focused on USING this money instead of providing results due to the distant time-horizon. I mean, in twenty years, who's going to remember that Bush proposed this initiative last night?

If the President really wants to lessen dependence on foreign oil, I say unleash the market. There is a vast amount of untapped information in existence, buried in the heads of a geologist here, a chemist there, or an engineer over the next mountain. This knowledge would never be fully utilized in a government program, but given the opportunity to make money from what they know...people with valuable information come out of the woodwork and the market gets to sort out whose ideas are really worthwhile.

How would the market be unleashed? Relaxing/removing various drilling and exploration restrictions. Reducing the time and money it takes to get a new petroleum refinery through inspections and regulatory red-tape (it's currently something like ten years and over two BILLION dollars). Make it more difficult for communities or states to block construction and operation of wind generating facilities and nuclear plants. Alternately, make it easier for the prospective owners to strike a deal with the affected landowners, and only with affected landowners. Not only should it be easier to get into or expand in the energy business, it should be brutally easy to get out of energy, ie go out of business without the government trying to prop you up.

If energy independence is truly top of the President's to-do list, I believe the market holds far more promise than does increasing government spending.