35 Years Later, I've Still Got It...

This weekend I was at a politically critical event down in Georgetown with Omaha, and while she had to be there for all sorts of reasons, I was just the ride. I mean, I knew some of the people there, but once I'd said my hellos I didn't have a role there.

I wandered out to get some air, and wondered if rather than booze, I could find a coffee or a Coke somewhere. I strolled up the street and passed by a coffeeshop (closed, of course), and a barcade, one of those bars full of nostalgia machines from the 80s. It was mostly pinball (which can't be easier to maintain than video games), but upstairs there were a few uprights. Turning the corner, I saw a Defender. Defender is my machine; I once played for over 30 hours in front of one on a single quarter; I've seen Mutant Wave 990,000 and Level Zero.

It was a bit like religion. I put my hands on the controls and my hands knew what to do. Every reflex built from literally hundreds of hours of playing was still there. Not as sharp as they used to be, of course, but still solidly and really there. The knowledge about how to handle mutants, bombers, and swarmers. The secret line. Baiter timing. The four-star Smart Bomb trick.

Normally, I play for an hour on one quarter. The game lasted only twelve minutes. That's four times longer than the developers of the game expected anyone to ever learn how to play, but for me, it was terrible. 165,000? I can do better than that.

And someone had. Someone had the legendary score, 999,975. I'll see you in Hell, Mr. C.

"Private Vices into Public Virtues"

Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is widely regarded as the first comprehensive and systematic treatise on how merchantilism and capitalism actually work.

Smith's observation is twofold: First, the nation-as-marketplace involves the interaction of all the people of the nation, and their interactions have emergent properties (desires either translated directly into products and services, or slaked by others in their desire for wealth) that aren't actually intended or planned by any one human being. Second, that these emergent properties turn private vices (greed, laziness, lust, gluttony, envy, even anger and pride) into public virtues.

Brad DeLong points out that there's an intermediary in all of these relationships: the state. The state enables and creates the market. And in those cases where it is impossible to turn private vice into public virtue, the state is not only morally obligated to step in, it must step in to ensure its survival, as well as the survival of all those whose private vices are not a threat to the long-term stability of the state.

Once you agree that state intervention in matters such as methamphetamine or fentanyl addiction is a must-have, because such addiciotn is so apparently compelling that it is destroying rural communities and their tax basins, you're at the point of haggling.

But this isn't just about poor drug addicts. It's also about money addicts. Oligarchal capture of the levers of power happens regularly in our culture. It's a generational thing; every three or four generations, the oligarchs make another play for rulership, only to collapse the whole thing as they suck all the energy out of the system; recovery is painful but involves a lot of genuine systemic reform, but distributive reform is never enacted, so the oligarchs keep proportionately most of their money; a chastened generation of oligarchs plays along, but the next generation starts the cycle all over again. The ultimate private vice is greed, and it's going to take a lot of political pressure for incremental reform to rein that in, even for one more generation.