GEORGE TEMPLETON
COMMENTARY
By George Templeton
Gazette Columnist
Transactional Times
Friends
When
the gas pump at the self-service filling station told me it wanted to
be my friend, I remembered the way things were, when filling stations
were not self-service, before markets had changed our lives.
A
filling station attendant taught me how to service my first car. It
had a stick shift, arm-strong steering, foot-strong brakes, and was air
conditioned by rolling the windows down. The radio used vacuum tubes
and had a vibrator. Things could be fixed instead of replaced. It was a
less complicated world.
I
worked at a filling station while going through college. We had no
cash register. All the transactions were done in our head using cash in
our pockets. There was no such thing as credit cards. We kept a
record of those who owed us for gas that they could not pay for, but we
did not consider these connections as friendship. That required sharing
at a more intimate personal level.
The Day the Earth Stood Still
James
Burke argued that we are what we know. A few simple natural laws,
having broad consequences, create a web of truth. But we don’t see
things as what they are. We see them from what we are.
The
Bible writers thought that the sun circled the earth. When this silly
thinking was pointed out to the philosopher Wittgensten, he replied, “I
wonder what it would look like if the sun did circle the earth.” Silly
did not become until Galileo looked through his telescope.
But
the world is not just out there. It grows inside us by experience.
Our consciousness has a broad awareness. We are separate, yet together,
sharing the same reality. We are all connected. Fragmentation divides
us, but our future depends on the patterns of nature and humanity. We
are our greatest threat and biggest hope. How will we make the
decisions needed to help people to connect? Our investments are not
just in stocks and bonds, they are in others.
America Growing Up
A
big tree grows from a tiny seed. It contains only its unseen plan for
the future. It has none of the things needed to realize that. It needs
nourishment from the soil, water, sunshine, and appropriate
temperatures. To flourish, the seed needs to coexist within its
environment. So it is with us.
The
American way did not come from a retreat to yesterday. It came from
ingenuity and the belief that we could help all humanity. It is much
easier to destroy than to create and to be capricious instead of
mindful. A single individual can throw a wrench into the clockwork. It
takes many people to create the clock. Simplicity is not a solution
for complex challenges. Our problems are more with unquestioned answers
than with unanswered questions.
The Field of the Future
The
field of the future does not come from anger or getting even. It
cannot be commanded. It is not a rerun of yesterday’s success or a copy
of what others have done. Diffuse and tenuous, it has an inexact value
at every place and time, but it knows what we want before we do. It
has a purpose that is greater than self-interest. All of us can feel
it, though we often ignore it. It can be tapped into by having an open
mind. It lacks security, but its authenticity is obvious.
The
TV preacher explained that the Holy Spirit was a real supernatural
person, who would protect you from heretical thinking. The field of the
future is human and creative. It frees us from our prison of habitual
thinking. It comes not only from how things are, but why. Reality is
always growing, spreading like a wave, focusing to a particle, and never
complete. We can never fully comprehend it, but we know how to learn
about it. That comes from the scientific method and our experiences.
Scientifically Speaking
Economics
is a science. Some people think that it is all that matters and that,
one way or another, it can explain everything. Science likes to take
things apart, to get to the building blocks. But particles and waves
are mutually exclusive explanations for relationships. Relationships
are more fundamental than the things used to model them.
The
waves we see and hear are disturbances in a medium, like a violin
string or clap of thunder, but light requires no medium, no ether to
propagate in. The field of the future is like the light at the end of
the tunnel. It is the unexpected consequence of interacting
relationships. Its medium is reality.
I’ve
engineered in places where there was no electricity at night, street
lights, signs, home lamps, or paved roads. Cows freely roamed midst
clouds of dust thrown up by big trucks. It was dark and hard to see.
The Bible writers told of Jesus as the light of the world. They knew
that it would create history. They expected more than short-term goals.
The
past changes the future. That is why it never repeats. The future
depends on multi-disciplinary education, not just the math and science
that is so essential for manufacturing. We are never objective passive
observers, seeing things from the outside. We are always implicated in
the process of becoming by our human subjectivity, but that should be
tempered by a liberal education.
Free Markets
Economics
is for everyone. That makes it human, but it becomes difficult when it
concerns life and death. The market creates moral relativity. When
people make price the measure of value, they can be bought and sold.
Sometimes we make money just for the sake of making money. The market
seems to be changing us more than we influence it.
We
lose value when everything has a price. We should be concerned about
the seeds that we are planting. It is freedom and choice when we choose
what we will buy and sell. It makes jobs and grows the economy.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But free enterprise does not work in
uniquely personal situations that are secret or too complicated to
understand.
Consider
the prostitute who sells her body. The man who buys can afford it.
The woman makes a living and does not have to be on welfare. It is a
win – win proposition, free market determined, economically efficient,
and behind closed doors. But something seems wrong with this.
Their
lives may not be so free depending on the situation they find
themselves in. It can include poverty, drug addiction, and violent
coercion. They create inequality in the power of the participants. The
market may not be so fair. We know that selling sex dehumanizes,
devalues, and demeans women. Both parties in the deal incur guilt by
corrupting life itself.
Is
a person formed at the instant when the egg and sperm meet? That makes
a lawyer necessary for criminal defense of the woman who experiences a
miscarriage. Religion would have the state intervene in difficult,
complex, personal situations that cannot be encompassed by any
uninformed law. They want everything to have a compact explanation
that is palatable to a little child.
It
is a fact that the crime rate dropped precipitately following the Roe
vs. Wade abortion legalization. Society benefited, yet this is not the
whole story. Birth control reduces abortion, but religious freedom
would restrict its availability to you even though you would never be
required to use it.
How
do you feel about strangers gambling on your life expectancy? You
bought a life insurance policy because you were concerned about the
welfare of loved ones that depended on you. The TV advertised that you
can sell your policy if you need cash now. That market is betting that
you will die sooner instead of later. They will collect the proceeds of
your policy. It is profitable to both parties in the deal, but the
security of those left behind suffers. When you hear about hackers
stealing personal information, you might have reason for concern about
someone who has no interest in you profiting from your death.
Healthy Markets
How
will the Republicans deal with mental illness, the demented, and long
term care? What if you discover that you have an incurable disease that
renders you unable to work and perform the activities of daily living
for fifty years? Once that fact is known, you won’t be able to afford
long-term care insurance. There are people like that who are alone in
the world. What happens to them?
We
hear a lot about market oriented health insurance, but is it really
customer driven? The government does not provide custodial care, but
isn’t its purpose to help the least and most needy of us? What is the
relationship between life, health, and the market?
High-risk
insurance pools lower costs for the typical well person. The elderly,
sick, people with pre-existing conditions, and those who let their
insurance lapse will pay more. If you don’t need insurance, the market
will make it easier to buy. If you are sick, it could be your own
fault, caused by diet, obesity, lack of exercise, drugs, and smoking.
Why should others pay for your irresponsibility?
The
funding of the insurance pools will be a state’s right subject to
miserliness. It drags down a state’s competitiveness when it has to
help those who are chronically ill. Don’t you think that something as
universal and important as health care legislation should describe what
happens to Medicaid? It doesn’t seem right for Congress to leave the
dirty work to the states. Insurance companies can waive requirements
and regulations if it is beneficial to their market. The market is more
important than life!
Incentives
There
are more than 70,000 medical codes that classify procedures and
billing, but there is only you! Between you, the insurance company,
Medicare, and Medicaid the billing takes months, the charges are
obscure, and the procedure is full of errors. The desire for more
efficient and effective health care motivates the idea of payment
incentives for results. But profit is higher when you don’t get well
and where there are no concrete results.
The
monetization of conscience has many subtle effects on motives,
attitudes, and relationships. Payment discourages turn-out. The gift
of obligation goes away. Incentives work backwards from what is
expected when they counter conscience. They fail when they do not
consider values that come from the heart instead of the wallet. They
fail to reconnect us.
Deep inside, all of us know what we long for. The philosopher, Thoreau, understood this and wrote about it in the 19th
century. Thoreau went to the woods to live modestly and deliberately,
connected to nature and acting within it instead of upon it. He did not
want to die, discovering that he had not lived. He could see that we
are God’s gift to nature and that nature is not there for us to do with
as we please.
The
artist, Thomas Kinkade, tried to communicate this in his paintings. He
wrote, “Picture a place you’re yearning to be. A place where work,
home, and play are properly balanced, where people exist peaceably,
where relationships flourish, where there’s time for what’s really
important. Picture life the way you’re hungry to live it, in your
deepest heart of hearts. There you will find happiness.”
orgive
me if I don’t think the removal of Confederate statuary is an issue. I
call it decluttering, which is an ongoing project at my house and I hope
at yours too. When those crews are done down South, put them to work in
Washington. The Frenchman L’Enfant (the name means “immature”) who laid
out the streets in this swamp had grandiose ideas, as anyone knows who
has attempted to navigate in the capital, diagonal boulevards laid
against a grid, which created numerous odd squares and irrelevant
circles which, of course, required large equestrian statues to ennoble
them, and so you have Thomas Circle at 14th Street and Massachusetts
Avenue NW named for Gen. George Thomas, who fought at the Battle of
Chickamauga in 1863. But does this give him a permanent right to loom
over us in 2017 and obstruct traffic and cause honking and obscene
gesturing? A whole circle devoted to this small historical footnote and
how many thousands of children have pointed to him and asked, “Who is
he?” and their parents were clueless and thus authority is undermined,
trust is eroded, the family is weakened, our children grow up rootless
and liable to fall for crackpots and demagogues.
group of 22 Republican senators signed a letter urging President Trump
to make a “clean break” from the Paris Agreement on climate change.
