A recipe for insomnia

I've lately embarked on a disquieting intellectual journey. I'm in a musical that tries to drive home the point "It can happen here!", reading a book describing how it might happen here, and watching a process that looks distressingly like it is happening here.

The musical is Cabaret. I play a customs agent who is basically all that is wrong with Wiemar Republic and a chorus member gleefully oblivious to the horrors endemic in the absolute control required by the Nazis (no, I didn't sing, dance, act or speak German a month ago). If you're in or near South Bend, definitely come see the show. If you have to come from out of town, I'll bake a pie for you.

The book is F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. As one of the founders of the Austrian School of economics, he warns in great detail that totalitarian regimes arise not because people like giving up freedoms or any particular flaw among the societies which elevate them. Rather, the rise totalitarianism is an incremental process that begins with an earnest and honest desire for a less chaotic, more secure form of prosperity that does not have the apparent waste generated by free markets.

Finally, the big national debate is over how to best employ the government's power to convince people that banks are sound, they will be employed and a disliked minority will be punished. Replace "plan" with "stimulus" in this illustrated version of Hayek's book, and you see why there is cause for concern. The Treasury Department is not, yet, our answer to Gosplan, but today the survival of any particular business depends not on its ability to serve customers, but on its ability to pressure appointed officials into giving it money. Whatever the final form of the government aid to banks, the price of houses in your neighborhood will be an important national security issue, since government revenue will depend on their sale.

When one throws in GM, the relationship between this bank bailout and the future of the economy has potential to get darker. Today, if the Bank of America sends me a letter offering a car loan, I toss it out because I won't borrow money on a depreciating asset. But how should one handle a nationalized bank sending a loan offer to "Buy American!", with an advertisement for the latest "Politcally Popular Car"? Does it now become, in Frauline Kost's words, "my patriotic duty"?

To get really personal here, should I, as a scientist, expect to see my federal grants handled differently if I buy into this part of the recovery effort? Since the NSF draws from the Treasury pool that grows with the value of nationalized assets, funding people who will in turn give their money to those assets is the rational choice. The effect this would have on funding research suggesting the PPC isn't so hot is obvious.

This is what keeps me up at nights, well that and anxiety about research, the dog howling at sirens and waiting for the latest pie to finish baking. The solution, to the extent there is one, has to involve convincing ourselves that an industrial society will always supply more than it can sustainably demand. In the new global village, we're all having to learn that lesson together. So, instead of trying to convince people to live beyond their means, let's try and work out a process that lets everyone's means include food, shelter and the wherewithal to make a pie a week.