Private government

In the first, fundamental sense of the term, private government describes the power of each individual to control the conduct of his or her life, whether right or wrong, in sickness and in health, for better or worse, courageously, cowardly, or cooperatively with others. In America, toleration of differences and separation of church and state were a precondition for national union, and it resulted in a widely understood right of individuation legally protected by the First Amendment. The state cannot compel a citizen to attend a church or be taxed to support a religious sect. Individual decisions concerning education, career, marriage, and finance are largely unregulated, despite a mountain of legislation and administrative rules imposed to limit individual choice. Liberty stubbornly persists as a matter of personal aspiration or folly, contrary to the best efforts of family, neighbors, and politicians to induce conformity.

That, however, is not the topic I wish to discuss. Private government has another meaning pertaining to constitutional law, not in the present, but the future. In tempestuous infancy and adolescence, the U.S. Constitution was a legalized tug of war with periodic explosions. Colonial frontier pioneers did not perceive an obligation to be stewards of the planet. The Federal Convention of 1787 did not debate LGBTQ or transgender privileges, and the Civil War was not fought to give birthright citizenship to foreign anchor babies.

American constitutional thumb wrestling was a brief struggle in the sweep of human history, even if we graft it to the dead root of English common law. Some historians point to ancient Rome as a source for concepts like contract, or Bible stories as the source of all law. Athenian aristocrats experimented with democracy and trial by jury. The Code of Hammurabi is taught in U.S. law schools as the ancient basis of equity and criminal law, improved incrementally by thousands of years of judicial and legislative thought.

Wait a minute. Spaceflight was derived from rock throwing?

Obviously not. The American Experiment was a clean break with all previous governments, and it was totally rewritten twice, by Civil War and by 20th Century Supreme Court decisions. If the Founding Fathers knew what we've done to their Constitution, they'd shout from their graves to damn us. Everything in law today is a radical break from its original intent, no better than juvenile delinquency, defying Madison and Franklin and Otis. You don't know who Otis was. Nor do you know why Franklin proposed that judges should be elected by lawyers, or why Madison opposed a Bill of Rights. Without Madison, Franklin, and Otis, there would be no Constitution to reinterpret and coin gay marriage rights.

Be that as it may, I'm not interested in political footstamping or current notions of political rights. What matters is the future, and I'd like to return to the idea of private government. Let's suppose that the public tussel of democracy is arbitrary and unpredictable. The United States is a bankrupt nonprofit corporation, a global welfare fountain that no one owns.

Private government is totally different. Instead of voting, free of charge, expecting the U.S. to hand you a pile of benefits, in a private government there are joint venturers (partners) who pony up "cash calls" to retain their right to elect a board of directors. There are no taxes, no regulation of commerce, no social benefits. The sole function of a private government is national defense, funded by insurance companies, banks, and wealthy individual citizens who can afford to buy a vote to determine the scale and scope of national defense. It's less nutty than it sounds. The American Revolution was funded entirely by private backers and fought by volunteer civilians.

I wrote a short story and recorded a lecture to explicate the idea.

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Videos

In case of national emergency, break glass and distribute.

https://vimeo.com/user66655576

The price of things

Shocking how much it cost. Forget the thousands and tens of thousands. Lots of things are expensive. But writing has mountains of constitutional and moral expense. Writers go naked in public, confess all, obvious in their ideas, in narrative, every word and glance exchanged by fictional characters. Writing careers are measured in long lonely decades of effort. I began to write over thirty years ago. It was never cheap or easy.

The fourth volume of Chris & Peachy was extremely costly in every respect. I sold my car to write The Tar Pit, destroyed my remaining credit to write Charity. But Finding Flopsie was worst of all. I gambled and lost. I liked the story well enough, but I failed to conceptually sew together a believable portrait of Peachy and her sister Kelly. Flopsie was a weepy soap opera, preposterous and overly ambitious. Chandler had similar trouble with Farewell My Lovely, one of his best, and Hammett choked with an unwieldly Dane Curse saga.

It happens. Writers reach too high. They get confused about how brilliant they are. I should not have tried to write from inside a female character's head. Men can always get away with depicting how women react and behave, but not their internal experience.

I can't say that I regret writing Flopsie, win lose or draw. Without Flopsie and everything that it cost financially and spiritually, there would have been no Kyle, no Karen, no Partners, and worse, no Executive Branch. As bizarre as it sounds, my entire life was lived to write a short story about Alaska. I'm famous in Fairbanks, and it finally sunk in that Alaska is an uniquely free and independent arctic continent, totally unlike the Lower 49. It wouldn't take much to push Alaska into secession when the Lower 49 go economically kablooey, which is already baked into the political mudpie, purely a matter of time, maybe sooner than we know.

A huge expenditure, when you think of it. 68 years of life, eight novels, an enormous trail of ambition and wreckage, high water marks and penury, all the fullness of life as a confused youngster, a charismatic playboy and a serious intellectual voice, every day of it a qualifying precondition to conceive a story about Alaskan independence, a future worth winning.

Fair price, I guess.

There's a terrible truth about entertainment. You're only as good as your last show. It's an impersonal fact of nature. Same thing is true of medical practice, engineering, government, and family life. Screw up once and your career is over. That never deterred me from going forward, endeavoring to get it right at least once. The Executive Branch was a final wager at the table of history. I bet my reputation as a soothsayer and storyteller, winner take all.

People don't do that for light and transient causes.

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Greed

Why do I get stuck explaining things? Jeez.

Michael Medved bungled again, couldn't explain capitalism. Pay attention, dipshit. Investors have to climb a wall of worry. Competition, hidden defects in the enterprise or management thereof, cost of money, foreign exchange rates, and two million other factors like deliberate market rigging by colocated robots and short sellers could wipe out investor gains in a blink. That why conservative investors strangle positions with puts, calls, and diversification.

Meanwhile, corporations are NOT eager to take on more debt, unless their market share is hopeless (like Sears). Bankruptcy and liquidation (Borders, Toys R Us) is better than sudden mark-down of asset value (Chesapeake). Investors in Venezuela were totally screwed. If a borrower can't pay and never made a profit, high yield lenders face financial disaster (Uber, Tesla). That's why retail investors prefer mutual funds and pension funds that spread bets across several asset classes: blue chip dividends, bonds, real estate, Treasurys, gold, and a dollop of high P/E multiple FANG stocks (Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google).

Profitable companies expand and produce new products (Google) with retained earnings after tax. R&D is a pre-tax deduction. They pay top wages to attract the best employees and put considerable effort into world class organizational development (Boeing, IBM).

"Greed" drives half of it. If they can't make a profit, publicly traded companies lose market value, pay higher interest rates, shrink and die (AT&T taken over by Southwest Bell for $1 and assumption of AT&T's debt, Enron liquidated without paying pensions). "Fear" is an equally harsh factor. Many companies are vulnerable to Chinese competitors and trade tariffs.

Households are no different. "Greed" encourages people to go to college, to butter up family and classmates. "Fear" makes them stick at a job they despise while they look for something better, and in the meantime smile at the boss, pretend to be a loyal servant. The ultimate greed is liberty, greatest fear a Blue Wave to impose higher taxes and job-killing regulation.

Pretty simple stuff. Liberty promotes greed, squashes risk. Capitalism is retained earnings, invested in new products, new hiring, better wages, business expansion -- and "creative destruction" of inefficient and unneeded stuff (steam locomotives, whale oil, telegraphy).

If you want to punish greed, engine of a wealthier society, enact laws limiting or abolishing civil liberty and private property -- multiplying fear and want (Venezeula, North Korea).

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