I knew I'd forget something...

...on my "where to find me post." I also have a formspring account, which is a great place to put the random questions I otherwise get as Facebook wall comments or "off topic, but...?" comments here. (Not that I mind those, as long as they're not on Serious Business type posts.)

Can't sleep, ducks will eat me.

I've been having a spate of not being able to sleep for more than four hours at a time. A little melatonin ought to take care of that, but I've misplaced my bottle in shuffling stuff around. Oh, well... it'll turn up. In the meantime, I'm getting my ducks in a row for the coming week.

My main goals for the week include:

1. Not forgetting to ingest fluids.
2. Sleeping.
3. Blogging more often - I'm more apt to take stock of how I'm feeling/doing if I take the time to articulate it.
4. Making a tasks post every day.

Those aren't the only things I'm doing, of course... but they're going to be the foundation of getting anything else done. I think until I'm settled into my new place, with my office set up and room to have things organized and move around, I'm going to have to make a much more conscious effort to take care of myself. (Not that I'll stop taking care of myself after that... it'll just be easier.) Being shameless and fearless and bold is a good start, but the truth is the spirit can only be so willing when the flesh is weak.

One thing I'm going to on tomorrow's task list is announcing a Moving Sale. I'll have the details in the actual announcement post, but basically it's going to consist of:

• Get caught up on my bookkeeping for the incentive stories and get those going again.
  
• Auction off a few unique things.
  
• Sell a limited number of reduced-price diplomas.
  

I'd planned on waiting until I'm settled down in the new place to do diplomas again, but the fact is there are going to be a few expenses in getting everything set up and I could us a bit of a cushion. The quantity's going to be limited so I don't get buried again.

My original plan was to buy the things I need gradually, but the more I think about it the more sense it makes to get my home office set up right away and reap the benefits of a comfortable and organized workspace right away. Nothing too fancy... I've got my eye on a folding table I can use for laying out mailed materials and doing crafty things. I need a new computer desk. The one I have now is a ten year old kit from a discount retailer; it barely survived being moved across my bedroom a year ago. I don't need to get a printer or shredder or anything right away, as my housemate has those, but I will need to get a wireless networking card for my desktop.

I suspect as I divide up ten years of intermingled and shared possessions, I'll find other things that need replacing. The fact that I'm moving into a well-stocked and furnished house mitigates that slightly, though.

Anyway, like I said, full details will follow. I'll be making the announcement post in the ae_stories feed after finishing my other tasks on Monday.

It Pays To Improve Your Word Power: Good Governance Edition

Two of my favorite words are republic and weal.

"Republic" is from the Latin res publica, "the public matter" or "the public thing"... it could mean anything that belonged to the public or was of general rather than private concern.

Civic matters. Public property. Public good.

"Weal" means well-being and prosperity. It's the root of two modern words that have very different meanings: wealth (someone with great weal has wealth, in the same way that someone who's high up has great height) and commonwealth. The "wealth" in "commonwealth" is closer to the full meaning of the root word than it is in "wealth" by itself... again, it's rooted in the idea of public welfare, of a people's interest as an aggregate rather than a person's interest as an individual.

These are important concepts. They're strongly rooted in the foundations of the United States of America. As popular as it is to appeal to our idealized history as rugged individualists, we are a Republic. Our Founding Fathers talked about unity as much as they did liberty.

E pluribus unum - from many, one.

That's not to say that they didn't write and speak of individual liberty. Our Founders believed that the greatest threat to the individual was the overwhelming influence of majority factions... what would later be called "the tyranny of the majority". Accordingly, we have our systems of checks and balances. We have our Constitutional guarantees of specific rights. We have our weighted representation in the lower house and uniform representation in the upper house, to make sure that the less populous states cannot be completely subservient to the interests of the larger ones.

A lynch mob is a direct democracy in action: a noisy majority decides that some other person doesn't have any rights. This is why we don't do direct democracy. It's antithetical to the very concept of "individual liberty".

Today's Republican party... or at least the noise-making division of its national presence... has turned the idea of res publica on its head. Any time the majority is not allowed to work its will on a minority, they decry this as the death of individual liberty. Any time the government prevents a private business from holding the position of standing on someone's neck and crushing their trachea under a booted foot, the right-wing calls this "fascism".

Why corporate boots on our throats should be more tolerable than government ones has always been a mystery to me.

They ignore the supreme importance of collective action for common good in the founding, defense, and growth of our country... they make "collective" a dirty word... and pretend that our nation was built solely through the efforts of rugged pioneers, every one of them a Randian Man-God who personally built or earned every thing they ever had, including the bootstraps they used to pull themselves across the great rolling prairies, which were empty at the time because of course brown-skinned people who talk different didn't start showing up until a hundred years later when we accidentally invented food stamps and our once great civilization teetered on the brink of collapse.

...

But I digress.

When we talk about something like healthcare reform... affordable access for all, however it's accomplished... our rugged individualists say, "The government can't turn a profit with Amtrak or the USPS. Why should we trust them to manage this?" That presupposes that profit in the capitalist sense should be the goal of everything the government does.

But look at our Declaration of Independence. Look at the preamble of our Constitution. Look at the Federalist papers.

Where in the words of our country's founders does it mention profit as a goal or function of government? "In order to form a more Profitable Union?" No. "In order to provide for the common bank account?" Not in there. The purpose of our government is to serve the public good... to create weal, not wealth.

We don't need a post office or a passenger rail system that turns a profit for the American people... if they did I wouldn't be complaining, but that's secondary to the purpose of such things, which is serving we the people... all of us, including those who live in places where no commercial company could hope to turn a profit serving. Both the former Department of the Post Office (now USPS) and the National Rail Passenger Corporation (the entity behind Amtrak) have been the victims of pushes to "privatize" and "commercialize" them. The budget-slashing consequences of these actions could fill a number of blog posts all by themselves, but the reason I'm bringing them up here is because they're examples of just how badly the point of a government service can be missed.

Amtrak was created because passenger rail travel--while necessary in many parts of the country--was not profitable. What does the "free market" do in situations like this? Well, when I say "necessary"... the world wouldn't end without government subsidized rail travel... but a lot of economic activity that is itself profitable but is dependent on commuter rail corridors would cease.

That's jobs lost, businesses closed, the common weal suffering. The government is Constitutionally directed "to provide for the general welfare" (oh, there's another dirty word!), not to make a buck.

The people who like to position themselves as self-made captains of industry (or as people who would be self-made captains of industry, if the darn government didn't keep getting in the way!) would no doubt say that if there are business that depend on the benefits of passenger rail, then they should pool their resources and come together to provide it for themselves instead of relying on the government.

But this is exactly what the government is: a pool of resources to do what none of us alone can do. Res publica in action. The fact that we're all having our resources dumped into the same pool means that, on some level, I'm maybe paying for your stuff that I'll never need and you're maybe paying for my stuff that you'll never need, but it all comes out in the wash anyway. Larger pools mean we're more protected from things like unexpected shocks.

And of course, this all comes to bear on the health care debate. Before we go any further, I'm going to say one thing: I just checked, and France is still a country. Their government has not collapsed into anarchy from a total lack of funds, and their population has not succumbed to plagues that would be easily treatable by modern medicine if only they hadn't driven their doctors into bankruptcy and rationed care away to nothing. Cutting-edge medicine is practiced in France and the life expectancy at birth is 81 years. There is nary a commission de la mort in sight. So...

As long as France (along with every other modern nation that manages to care for its population) is still a country, "how adopting a similar health care system will destroy America" is a conversation that won't be had here. Okay? Okay.

I've written on this before, but it still amuses me that people who claim loudly and often that what the rest of the world has managed to do is beyond the limits of America's ingenuity and can-do spirit call themselves "patriots"...

Anyway, health care. If ever there was an "industry" where the clear focus should be on weal rather than wealth, it's health care. The insurance industry and the health management industry are excellent examples of what happens when Republican (in the res publica sense) impulses--collectivization of interests for the public good... shared risk, shared responsibility--collide with the profit motive. Through insurance and HMOs, we pool our resources, but we do so in the hands of businessmen, private citizens like ourselves who under the "Every Man Is An Island" version of the American Dream being peddled across the country owe nothing more to the world but to look out for themselves.

By pooling our resources through the government, we're keeping them in our hands. We The People. I'm not saying there aren't corrupt and greedy politicians, but there's a reason we call them "public servants". Unlike big business, they have to at least pretend to look out for our interests. Whatever the motives of the individuals who work in and oversee it, an entity like the USPS or Amtrak or a notional national health care institution doesn't care about profit. They care about controlling expenses to the extent that if they don't then somebody will score political points off them by talking about "trimming the fat", but they ideally don't have to worry about being in the black, much less having huge profits for executive salaries and dividends for shareholders.

Now, the bill that's going before Congress today isn't perfect. It's pretty far from perfect, in fact. Its flaws and the blame for those flaws would be a whole 'nother blog post. But my opinion on it is that it's a start that can be built on. If it passes, the situation will start to improve and its flaws can (and will) be corrected by future reformers. If it fails, that's likely to be all she wrote for another decade or more... the right's base will be pleased and energized that their representatives delivered what they wanted, whereas the progressive base will be completely disillusioned. Trying to reform the health care system will be seen as a total non-starter, political poison.

But whether it passes or fails, for things to go much further we need a change in national consciousness. We need people to realize they aren't islands, they aren't self-made men, they didn't earn everything they ever got.... not individually, anyway. Not on their own. The power lines and phone lines and plumbing (and increasingly, high speed data cables) that they depend on were very likely government-subsidized. Depending on where they live, it might only be through government "make-work" programs that they got power and plumbing in the first place, because otherwise it never would have been profitable enough for a utility company to come in. Roads are maintained through public money. Airlines... the airlines got more federal money in their post-9/11-slump bailout than "publicly funded" Amtrak has received in the past ten years.

And more, we need people to realize that this isn't a bad thing. It doesn't reflect poorly on them or on their country. It's why we have a country instead of just a bunch of little independent feudal holdings.

Of course, if we did have a bunch of little independent feudal holdings, the smarter landholders would quickly realize the benefits of working together, and would pool their strength, and absorb or annex or otherwise acquire their neighbors, and then if we were very lucky the result would be more like a republic than a dictatorship.