Deregulation

One of the hot-button topics for the Republican/Tea Party candidates is deregulation. Government is too big, they say. There are too many regulations keeping business handcuffed. If government would get out of the way, businesses would be more profitable, hire more people, and the economy would flourish. If it’s good for business, it’s good for the country. And if a company is too greedy or provides bad service or causes harm, free and open competition will drive them out of business. The market is self-regulating – dwindling sales will eliminate crooks and swindlers. At first hearing it makes sense. Who wants to be regulated? Who wants the government telling them what they can and can’t do?



Well, the experiment has been tried. In 1978, the airline industry was deregulated. Prices and routes would no longer be set by the government. The FCC still enforces air safety, but the industry itself is free to act as it pleases. What was the result? First, most long distance flights were eliminated. They are the most costly to run, so most airlines went to a hub and spoke arrangement. If you want to fly from San Francisco to New York on Delta, you fly to their hub in Atlanta and connect from there to New York. Yes, it takes longer, uses more fuel, and requires long layovers in airport terminals, forcing you to buy expensive food. Many smaller third-tier cities simply lost their air service entirely. Second, services were curtailed – no more cooked meals delivered to your seat, more crowded seating, longer layovers, more lost baggage. Most airline employees – everyone from mechanics to pilots - suffered longer hours, fewer benefits, and large pay cuts. The employees had little recourse. Their unions were severely weakened. When the air traffic controllers went on strike, President Reagan simply fired them all and hired “replacement officials.” Third, with few bureaucratic hoops to jump through, scores of new start-up airlines popped up, offering cheap fares and no-frills service. There was huge turmoil throughout the industry. Many of the dominant players, some of whom had founded the industry – Eastern, Pan Am, TWA, Continental – went bankrupt, along with more than a hundred of the newer airlines like Braniff and Midway and America West, putting tens of thousands out of work.



Another example of deregulation is the thrift industry. Thrifts, or Savings and Loans, were created in the 19th century, first in Britain and then in the US. The idea was to encourage people to save by paying them interest on their savings deposits, and then using the money to fund loans for buying homes. It allowed people to grow their savings, get some income, and buy their own homes. Most S&L’s were originally non-profit organizations, similar to credit unions, set up to benefit their members by pooling their resources. Because of the number of people who lost all their savings in bank failures during the depression, federal regulations were set up to keep the thrift industry separate from the banks. They allowed the S&L’s to pay interest on deposits, which banks could not, but not to offer checking accounts. S&L’s could offer only savings accounts and home loans. But with the rise of new products services such as certificates of deposit, electronic funds transfers, IRA’s, and ATM’s – together with skyrocketing interest rates (some CD’s in the 70’s were paying more than 20% APR) – both industries were under enormous competitive pressure and urged deregulation. In two acts in 1980 and 1982, the government deregulated both industries, essentially eliminating any distinctions. S&L’s could offer NOW accounts, from which a consumer could write a Negotiable Order for Withdrawal and give it to another person to allow them to withdraw the money from their account – identical to a check. Banks could pay interest, sell insurance, offer brokerage services and investment products. As with airlines, hundreds of new start-up financial institutions popped up. But without government oversight and auditing, many were soon on the ropes. Most turned to offering investment products that were little more than Ponzi schemes. As long as more customers kept opening more accounts, the company could pay the interest. But as with all Ponzi schemes, the number of gullible victims dried up, and institutions began to fail in record numbers. In only a few years, 747 thrifts – 25% of the industry – went bankrupt. To avoid having hundreds of thousands lose their savings and/or homes, the government stood by its deposit insurance, costing the taxpayers $88 billion dollars, one of the major causes of the soaring national deficit of the early nineties. Hundreds of thousands lost their jobs.

Then there was a second deregulation of the financial industry in the 1990’s. For the first time banks were allowed to operate across state lines, driving out of business hundreds of small-town community banks and forcing consumers to deal with far-off industrial giants. The agencies that monitored investment banking products were eliminated, in spite of strident objections from economic analysts and consumer advocates, leading to under-collateralized mortgage-based securities, derivatives products, hedge funds, and automated trading. Mortgage brokers and lenders were allowed and encouraged to write loans for people who could not reasonably expect to repay them. Homeowners’ mortgages were sold, repackaged, and sold again, to the point that foreclosures become a game of trying to find who actually holds the mortgage in a screen of false companies, fake boards, and non-existent holding companies. Again, with no one to stop them, greed drove the giant investment banks to offer products and services they knew were unsafe, and the Great Recession is the direct result. To date, more than three million American families have lost their homes and five million more are underwater and behind on their payments. Six and a half million have lost their jobs.

So the evidence is that Adam Smith was dead wrong.  Left to their own devices, the market does not self-monitor or self-regulate.  The free market does not eliminate ruthless and unethical practices, it fosters them - until the industry’s greed drives it over a cliff. And it does nothing to protect the consumer. The common and beloved image of free enterprise is of the bold entrepreneur, the determined inventor, the business that a couple of guys start in their garage, the family farmer, the hopeful young couple who open a restaurant, the older folks who run a neighborhood grocery store. But all these are a disappearing breed. As with gambling, advocates can always point to the tiny majority who strike it rich. But the vast majority fail – crushed by unregulated competition from big agro, big oil, big pharma, big box stores. Without a disinterested party to look over its shoulder, to curtail dishonest practices and unfair competition, to ensure a level playing field - someone whose only interest is protecting the consumer or the environment or the employee, unregulated business will work to grow its bottom line at the expense of its employees, its customers, the environment, the planet's health, and anything else that stands in its way.

And speaking of the environment (without which we will all die), who else but government will protect it? Industry had no incentive to protect it – there’s no profit in it and it can be more expensive to operate in a sustainable way. There didn't use to be environmental regulations – and the air became unhealthy to breathe, the waterways were poisonous, rivers caught fire, the ozone layer was punctured, fisheries collapsed, people in Los Angeles couldn't see across the street, topsoil eroded, toxic and radioactive waste was dumped in poor neighborhoods, asthma skyrocketed, and forests were destroyed. Even when it was clear to everyone that we were being poisoned, industry did nothing to change its practices. Then in 1970, over fierce Republican and industry opposition, the EPA was formed. The Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972 established standards and gave the government the power to enforce them. The effects are remarkable and immediately obvious to anyone who lived in America before and after the passage of these acts. An independent study of the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act alone estimated that during the year 2010 the law cost $27 billion to enforce but saved $110 billion in health care costs, avoided 23,000 premature deaths, 1.8 million illnesses, four million lost work days, and 31 million restricted activity days due to air pollution. So it saves us almost one hundred billion dollars a year, saves tens of thousands of lives, and makes us more productive and healthier. That’s one amendment to one environmental law, which like all environmental regulations, was bitterly opposed by the affected industries.

Which brings us to climate change. Anyone who tells you that human-caused climate change is not a proven fact is either misinformed or lying. There is no debate on the subject among the people who have spent years studying the issues and gathering data. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a non-partisan multinational panel made up of the leading scientists and advisors from one hundred and twenty countries, determined that climate change is real, is happening already, is accelerating, and is caused by human activities such as deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels. Five years ago, more than 1,500 of the most senior scientists from sixty-three countries, including more than half of all living Nobel Laureates, signed an unequivocal statement that said “Let there be no doubt about the conclusions of the scientific community: the threat of global warming is very real and action is needed immediately. It is a grave error to believe that we can continue to procrastinate. Scientists do not believe this and no one else should either.” Yet industry and its apologists, primarily Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, continue to assert that the issue is controversial, not proven, and a subject of debate in the scientific community. These are lies. These are the same companies that polluted whole countries and decimated fisheries and forests and bitterly fought government “interference.” Now they would rather have the ecosystem collapse, rising sea levels inundate whole countries, and disrupt weather patterns, rather than allow government (which is after all, us) to regulate their harmful activities. This, to put it mildly, is criminal madness.

Heaven

According to Gallup, more than 80% of Americans believe in heaven.  To me, that's about the same as believing there are monsters under your bed.  I mean, do they think about what it could be like?  It's usually pictured with a bunch of folks in white robes sitting on clouds playing harps.  Who wants to play a harp all the time?  How many of those 257 million people have ever played a harp, or ever wanted to?  And not just for a couple of hours, but all the time, every minute, for the rest of time.  It's stupid.  Who could possibly want that, much less believe such an obviously My Little Pony kind of dream world?  Do grown-up, intelligent people really think that's where they want to be?

Okay, so that's the cartoonists' view of heaven, but it's absolutely the only one you ever see pictured - I know of no other image.  For a place that's the ultimate goal, the entire reason to be religious, it's funny no one even talks about what it looks like.  If you ask a believer, they get all funny and defensive.  It's a question you're not supposed to ask, and for a very good reason - all the answers are silly.

I can hear believers say, no, that's the simple view for the simple people - heaven is just the place where all good souls go after death.  Your spirit hangs out with your friends and ancestors and departed family members.  But that's not what the Bible says; it says you will be resurrected in the flesh.  Which flesh?  The cells in your body are replaced every seven to ten years, so no matter how long you've lived, most of you is less than ten years old.  Are you raised from the dead as you are on judgment day, a rotting corpse, a few atoms scattered over the countryside, or in some animal's spoor?  That can't be right.  Do you come back as you were just before you died - blown apart, say, or wracked with disease - perhaps in flames?  Surely not.  Maybe you'll be as you were just before whatever killed you happened.  So all the people who died of old age get to be in their nineties forever?  What an inducement to off yourself when you're young and healthy.  What about all the dead children, infants, and the stillborn? They go to heaven too, do they not?  Do they get to spend eternity as half-formed beings, incapable of communication, frozen forever in that helpless and dependent state, never to grow up, never to love?  And what about the people who have always been deformed or ugly? They never had a satisfactory body they'd want to spend eternity in.  


How else could it work?  Maybe the all-merciful god allows you to choose what version of your body you will be in forever.  That would be fair and democratic, though religion is the least fair and democratic of all human pursuits.  What would you choose - that innocent child you were when you were ten, before puberty turned you into a carnal beast?  In early middle age, when you're at the apex of your maturity and mental powers?  How about in your twenties, when you're at the height of your physical attractiveness?  Do you get to choose any appearance you want?  Will there be billions of people who all look just like Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz?  That would be confusing - "Martha, is that you?" But it could also be pretty hot with all those beautiful bodies everywhere.  Oh wait - there's no sex in heaven is there?  I think most Judeo-Christians would agree on that.  No sweaty angels banging each other.  So we can all be young and beautiful, but we can't be attracted to one another or have sex.  All those genitalia, just like God's own (He made us in his image, remember) waving around in the celestial breeze but never to be used or even touched.  Sorry, I just don't see how resurrection in the flesh can possibly work.


Maybe this is another case where the Bible can't be taken literally.  Like most things in the Bible (such as the Ten Commandments), most believers today say that we are free to interpret the Bible; it's a guide, not a rigid law.  As a non-believer, I can't understand this.  It's either the absolute word of God or it isn't.  If it is God's law, how the hell do you have the nerve to say you can interpret it as you wish, even disregard vast portions of its strictures and commandments - who made you God's editor?  The Bible says we should kill our children if they disobey us, we should kill or enslave anyone of different religions, and hundreds of other examples of horrific behavior even devout Christians no longer obey.  (And if it isn't God's word, then all scripture is a bunch of wishful superstitious fantasy, so that obviously can't be it.)  It strikes me odd that each generation of true believers interprets the word of God as they see fit, eliminating commandments they see as outdated or inconvenient.  Leaving that aside, let's say this new liberal reading is acceptable.  It's okay to make graven images (Catholics especially are big on statues); it's okay to kill if the other guy is black or gay or an atheist, etc.  If you think you can toss out some selected commandments, that's fine with me. I certainly don't want Christian sharia law.  If every person who committed adultery were stoned to death, there would be damned few folks to read my screeds - or write them.

Okay, so in spite of what the Bible says, we don't resurrect in the flesh.  We're some kind of bodiless spirits that float around in the ether.  That certainly eliminates a whole lot of awkward questions about eating, grocery stores, and celestial Port-a-cans. Personally, I find it hard to imagine my mind (okay, soul if you insist - same thing) existing without a body.  To me, my body is not a container for me - it is me.  Who I am is so inextricably interwoven with my body, its experiences and travels and sensations and injuries and tastes and desires, that I can't think of what I would be like without it.  I suppose I can imagine my mind being somehow extracted from my body, like uploading it onto a cloud server somewhere - a common science fiction trope.  I can even imagine it being downloaded into another body, or a cybernetic body, or even a mechanical body, and my existence continuing.  But to be incorporeal forever, with no physical location, no center, no sense organs, no residence, seems inconceivable - and very unappealing.

But I'm not a believer.  If I were, apparently this would be the desired state I worked and prayed all my life to attain: having no physical form, unchanging forever, unable to do any of the physical things that make life worthwhile - eating, traveling, going for a swim or a hike, petting a dog, making love.  We will be in the presence of God, and that will be enough.  I am content.

One thing we know for sure - we'll be surrounded by our loved ones - everybody we cared about in our lives will be there.  That's the whole point of heaven.  Our deceased parents will be together forever, whether they got along or not, and no matter how shabbily they may have treated each other in life.  For better or for worse, whatever parents we got in life, they'll be with us every day forever.  Our deceased spouses will be right there, too - all of them.  I hope they learn to share and don't mind being your third husband.  There are some people I really don't like in this life - I hope they don't end up being my neighbors in Heaven.  My idea of heaven might be to spend eternity with my wife, but hers might be to spend it with her first husband, or that cute quarterback from high school. One of us has to be in hell, I guess.

All our ancestors will be there too - every great-great-grandfather and -mother, going all the way back to - what?  Our Neanderthal ancestors, Homo erectus?  How about the first protozoa?  Sure will be crowded.  Oh, that's right, all that history and fossil stuff, physics and chemistry and astronomy and that other claptrap - that's just God's little practical joke, piling up overwhelming evidence in every place we look that there is an ancient history, when actually time started six thousand years ago, just a few hundred years after the first ziggurats were built in Mesopotamia.  He must have a very good reason to have every shred of evidence point unerringly to the exact same incorrect age of the universe.  But that's another rant.

No matter how long ago time started, there are billions of our ancestors up there with us.  I certainly hope we all get along, even though their lives and beliefs were so radically different from those of us newcomers.  Will they sneer at how easy we had it when we were alive?  What will we have in common with our Egyptian or Celtic or African ancestors?  We won't even speak the same language.  We better not talk politics or religion, and current events would be a bit strange as well.  I'd imagine we'd spend the first few millennia just getting the old ones caught up with the news.  "Did you say the Goths sacked Rome, young feller?"

But let's put aside all these difficulties and questions - just ignore them like believers do - what would it be like to be in heaven?  We won't have any of the things we like to do now - no football on TV, no rock'n'roll, no movies or books, no long walks on the beach, no great dinners with friends, no meeting new people.  So what will we do?  We'll all be as the angels - perfect beings.  We will be perfectly static.  Since we're perfect, there will be no need to strive, to travel, to grow, to learn, to improve ourselves.  There will be no crime, no accidents, no stress, no disease, no worries - indeed, no news, no events, no change, forever.  Not just for hundreds of years or billions of years, but forever and ever, amen.  Sounds boring and pointless to me, but I'm only an unbeliever.  I guess that sounds good to believers.  There are those cool harps, though.  Everybody likes listening to harp music.

When you look at it in any detail, any attempt to really grasp it, the whole concept of heaven doesn't work, no matter how ethereal and non-corporeal you try to make it.  It can't be imagined.  It only works as a concept if it's completely vague.  Don't ask all those questions, just believe.  It will be wonderful; everyone will be perfectly happy all the time.  But that's not the kind of beings we are.  I can't imagine a human being who is happy all the time; I can't imagine a large number of people in all the vast variety of humanity all getting along without any conflict.

To me, it's exactly like all the rest of religion.  There is not one atom of evidence for any of it.  And no, waving around an old book that says it's true is not evidence.  There are thousands of mutually contradictory holy scriptures, with different creation myths, rules and regulations, and descriptions of paradise.  Because they all say different things, they can't all be right.  But they could all be wrong.

Why then do so many people believe in it so strongly?  There is only one perfectly obvious answer: because they wish it were so.  They see people doing evil and going unpunished, so they want to believe that they will be punished with eternal torment.  They see good people suffering and being oppressed, and they want to believe that there is a perfect place where they can live in bliss.  They see their loved ones dying, and they want to believe they will be reunited.  They see wars and plagues and famines and natural disasters, a vast complicated uncaring universe with no purpose and no justice, and they want to believe in a loving father who loves us and watches over us and has a plan to protect us.  And above everything else, they see death riding headlong toward them and they cannot bear the thought that they will soon cease to exist.  So they imagine a perfect world in the sky where they will live forever.  It is a perfectly reasonable fear and an understandable desire.  Who would not want it to be so?  Alas, wishing does not make it true.  As Mark Twain famously remarked, "Faith is believing what you know ain't true."