Strange Dreams

Last night, I dreamed a dialogue between two characters in the Journal Entries. They were discussing Higher Order Theories of Consciousness. Not only that, but one of them was asserting that someone was responsible for the human capacity for higher order thought, and that someone was still imprisoned somewhere in our solar system in a hellish existence, and they had to go rescue him.

I also dreamed I was Jay Lake.

I missed his birthday party yesterday, so this was my brain's consolation prize. Except Jay/I was the proprietor of a sad convenience store, one of those drab places with dirty white walls and sparsely populated shelves. The power went out, and Jay/I had implants all over my chest cavity, like Tony Stark's only many of them. One had a flashlight, and I was using it to try to figure out how to get the power back on.

Very strange.

Michael Medved, Debauch

"I believe that the free market and religious belief are more important in shaping our country than anything the government does."

Medved said that on the radio yesterday, and it stayed in my mind because there's so much inanity and contradiction in it that I can't believe it came out of his mouth.

First off, the market isn't free. Never has been, never will be. Governments, even the simplest of them, must tax to survive, and since the founding of our country tax policy has been used to encourage some activities and discourage others, always within the limits of what the populace would accept. Thus, taxes on vice (drink, gambling, smoking, etc.) have usually been popular, and so have tax credits on virtue (education, home ownership, charity). Unless we want to eliminate all of that, we will never have a "free market."

What we have now is a myth, a myth than the American system rewards labor and ingenuity. In fact, the American market's tax system is tilted only toward having money, and reward having money, and consequently penalizes labor and ingenuity.

But I guarantee you that Medved does not want a free market. Because a truly free market sells people exactly what they want, and what most of them want is vice. Oh, not all the time, surely, but a truly free market would be one where not only can you buy and sell alcohol, drugs, and porn, but in order to be truly free there must be no criminal penalties for doing so: criminal penalties are just as much sand in the free market gears as economic penalties. If one person wants to sell cocaine, and another wants to buy it, and they come to a mutually agreed upon price, then why should the government have any say in this consensual capitalist intercourse?

So, Medved is either a complete moral debauch, or a ferociously self-contradictory fool. I'll vote for the former; the latter is unlikely to be entertaining.