In any case, if there’s a new bubble we have to think of it as the bubble of government itself.

Not that I’ve got money to back it up, but my prediction is that this is a medium-term bottom and that people who buy stocks of good depressed companies at the current levels will be very happy in a couple of years.

I poked my head up from writing my book a couple of months ago to engage with Arthur readers about the subject I was working on: the credit crunch and what to do about it [see “Riding Out the Credit Crisis” in Arthur No. 29/May 2008]. I got more email about that piece than anything I have written since a column threatening to defect from the Mac community back in the Quadra days.

Many readers thought I was hinting at something under the surface—a conspiracy, of sorts, to take money from the poor and give it to the rich. It sounded to many like I was describing an economic system actually designed—planned—to redistribute income in the worst possible ways.

I guess I’d have to agree with that premise. Only it’s not a secret conspiracy. It’s an overt one, and playing out in full view of anyone who has time (time is money, after all) to observe it.

The mortgage and credit crisis wasn’t merely predictable; it was predicted. And not by a market bear or conspiracy theorist, but by the people and institutions responsible. The record number of foreclosures, credit defaults, and, now, institutional collapses is not the result of the churn of random market forces, but rather a series of highly lobbied changes to law, highly promoted ideologies of wealth and home ownership, and monetary policies highly biased toward corporate greed.

It all started to make sense to me when I attended Learning Annex’s Wealth Expo earlier this year—a seminar where teachers of The Secret, the hosts of Flip This House, George Foreman, Tony Robbins and former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan [pictured above in banner from Learning Annex website] purportedly taught the thousands in attendance how to take advantage of the current foreclosure boom.

Using language borrowed from today’s more money-centric New Age spiritualists, as well as the get-rich-quick books of the early 1900s “New Thought Movement” on which these pyramid schemes are based (such as Elizabeth Towne’s The Science of Getting Rich or Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich), they encouraged their mostly black audience to get on the ladder to success by purchasing educational DVDs and wealth-building “systems.”

These courses all promised to teach the properly motivated American how to find homeowners down on their luck and approaching foreclosure, as well as how to buy those homes from under them and resell them at a great profit. What made the spectacle doubly outrageous were not the dancing girls or indoor fireworks; it was the fact that most of the participants were themselves desperate former homeowners, whose illnesses, divorces, fires, and floods had put them in to foreclosure, too. Get it? They were paying to learn how to feed on people just like themselves.

While most of the speakers and seminar leaders might be expected to show up at a Learning Center pyramid scheme convention, what the hell was Alan Greenspan doing there? First off, he was trying to make some money. He had a new book out, and this was a good way to pitch it to a few thousand potential buyers at once. On a deeper level, though, we can only assume he was there to pump some much-needed air into the collapsing real estate balloon. These poor folks might just be dumb enough to try to borrow some money to purchase foreclosed properties from banks and other lenders that had themselves made disastrous investments during Greenspan’s tenure. His presence lent credibility to the current, lowbrow version of the same scam over which he presided as Fed Chair.

The whole show was a fitting metaphor for the credit crunch, a misnamed sabotage of the credit system by institutions with the problem of too much, not too little, money to put to work. As I explained in my last column, banks and credit institutions simply had more money on hand than they had people who were qualified to borrow it. So they changed the law to create more demand for the money they had in oversupply.

The banking industry lobbied to reduce the remaining regulations on its lending practices. They won a repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a law enacted just after the depression as a way to prevent regular savings banks from doing risky things with depositors’ money. A “Chinese Wall” was put in place between banks and investment brokerages, preventing conflicts of interest and limiting financial institutions’ power over both the lending and borrowing sides of the same transactions. With the repeal of the Act in 1999, banks were now free use their capital to lend money to unworthy borrowers, package those loans, and then underwrite the sale of those loans to other institutions—such as pension funds.

Meanwhile, the credit industry spent over $100 million lobbying to change bankruptcy laws. Although a corporation in bankruptcy still has its debts erased, the regulations surrounding personal bankruptcy were changed so that personal debts stay on the books forever. The logic they used to argue for the change was that debtors are smart, gaming the system to buy beyond their means and then declaring bankruptcy at the last minute.

But the very same creditors knew that just the opposite was true—as evidenced by their sales tactics and marketing campaigns. They turned to a social science known as behavioral finance—the study of the way people consistently act against their own best financial interests, as well as how to exploit these psychological weaknesses when peddling questionable securities and products.

These are proven behaviors with industry-accepted names like “money illusion bias,” “loss aversion theory,” “irrationality bias,” and “time discounting.” People do not borrow opportunistically, but irrationally. As if looking at objects in the distance, they see future payments as smaller than ones in the present—even if they are actually larger. They are more reluctant to lose a small amount of money than gain a larger one—no matter the probability of either in a particular transaction. They do not consider the possibility of any unexpected negative event occurring between the day they purchase something and the day they will ultimately have to pay for it.

Credit card and mortgage promotions are worded to take advantage of these inaccurate perceptions and irrational behaviors. “Zero percent” introductory fees effectively camouflage regular interest rates up to 20 or 30 percent. Lowering minimum payment requirements from the standard 5 percent to 2 or 3 percent of the outstanding balance looks attractive to borrowers. The corresponding increase in interest charges and additional years to pay off the debt will end up costing them more than triple the original balance. It is irrational for them to make purchases and borrow money under these terms, or to prefer them to the original ones. But they do. We do. This behavior is not limited to the trailer park renters of the rural south, but extends to the highly educated, highly leveraged co-op owners of the Northeast.

Combine this with George Bush’s campaign to convince Americans that home ownership is a virtue—itself a revival of a strategy intended to assuage the resentment of veterans returning from World War II—and you end up with a population willing to do almost anything to “get into” a house, and a mortgage lending industry ready to provide the instruments capable of doing it. Once the mortgage rates shifted and homeowners began to default, the people who created the mess were largely safe. Bankers and high-salaried directors received their bonuses for a job well done, and the only people who lost money were the hapless shareholders—people like you and me—who might own some supposedly low-risk bank stocks. And, of course, all the people who were holding mortgages bigger than the total value of their homes.

The fiction is that the money just “vanished.” Financial newspapers and cable TV business channels say that the value of holdings has been “erased” by market downturns, but it hasn’t been erased at all. It’s on the negative side of one balance sheet, and the positive side of someone else’s. While Goldman Sachs was underwriting mortgage-backed securities of dubious value, it was simultaneously selling them short. Take the example of John Paulson, a trader who earned himself $4 billion and his funds another $15 billion in one year by betting against the housing market. For help predicting the extent of the downturn, Paulson hired none other than Alan Greenspan as an advisor to his hedge fund. The Fed Chairman who encouraged the housing bubble even after it began to crash is now cashing in on the very devastation his policies created. The money did not disappear at all. It merely changed hands. People’s homes were just a medium for the redistribution of wealth.

That’s because the biggest industry in America—maybe the only real industry left—is credit itself: money is lent into existence by the central bank, and then lent again to regional banks, savings and loans, and eventually to you and me. Each bank along the way takes its cut; the final borrower is the only one who has to figure out how to pay it back, with interest, by the close of the contract.

The problem is, in order to pay back three or four dollars on every one dollar borrowed, someone else has to lose. Our monetary system is itself a shell game, with losers built into the very rules. The more the credit industry dominates our economy, the more losers there will inevitably be.

As anyone in any business at all well understands—even the editor of this magazine, I’m sure—one has to borrow money to do almost anything real in this society. Anything that requires a resource, a supply, an office, a piece of ground, transportation, also requires a bit of capital. That capital has to be borrowed. And if it’s not coming from a friend or from mom or dad, it’s being borrowed from an institution that borrowed from another institution that borrowed it, and so on, and so on.

Participation in business or, in most of our cases, land or home ownership, means helping put those wheels of the credit industry in motion. And the more we push, the more momentum they gain, and the more influence they have over an increasingly large portion of our experience. Reality becomes defined by credit sectors, and our time is consumed more each day with wondering how we’re going to pay back what we’ve borrowed.

Every once in a while, though, we break the rules and get to see the possibility for another kind of economy. Whether it’s an alternative currency, an open source software solution, or the simple good faith gifts we make to one another for creating value in each other’s lives. It’s the way Arthur readers bailed out the magazine a few months ago, within a few hours of when creditors would have turned off the lights in the editor’s apartment bedroom (which doubles as the Arthur office). Or the way Robert Anton Wilson’s fans came to his rescue via Paypal to let the ailing writer die at home in his bed rather than a free city hospital (thus saving the taxpayers a whole lot more money than we raised and spent).

Without getting spiritual or mushy, we can agree that there are self-perpetuating cycles of greed and generosity in which we can participate. The more we commit to one or the other, the more of the world conforms to its rules.

I’ll attempt to list the posts here as I post them.

Rushkoff Here: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/22/rushkoff-here.html
Open Source Democracy: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/22/open-source-democrac.html
Android: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/23/android.html
Print Your Own Money: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/23/what-went-wrong.html

I’ll leave investors to fend for themselves this week. I’ve given enough of that CNBC-style advice lately, contrarian though it may be. I’d rather spend these precious minutes explaining why the financial meltdown is not a bad thing for a lot of us.

In brief: there’s a real economy, and a speculative economy. While they are usually related to each other - even dependent on each other - that relationship changed over the past twenty years. Really since the Reagan era. Trickle-down or “voodoo” economics (as the the first G Bush called it) was based on the faulty notion that if we allow investment banks to extract money from the real, working economy through artificial, hidden, and untaxed interest, that wealth would eventually trickle down to the people who are creating real value for the economy through their labor.

Turns out, it didn’t work. Instead, we ended up with the largest and fastest redistribution of wealth from poor to rich in the known economic history of the planet. Worker productivity rises, investors’ incomes increase, but worker wealth decreases. The investors are (or were) shielded through successive tiers of lending and borrowing between themselves and real people or real businesses. (Business is not bad, remember. It’s a cool thing to make stuff and sell it to other people who also make stuff and sell it to others. The purpose of money is so that you don’t have to trade just for the thing the other person makes.)

There just isn’t enough economic activity left to support the rates of extraction. So the investors who borrowed on the presumption of extracting more value have been left with debts they owe. Since deregulation let banks spend 200 dollars for every dollar they actually had, these debts are very leveraged. Thus, banks are starting to fail.

The problem for us is that if the Fed doesn’t bail out banks and insurance companies, we all lose our money. But if they do bail out the banks and insurance companies, we all have to pay for it. If the Fed runs out of money to do this, they have to print more money. So the money they insure our bank accounts with ends up worth very little. That’s not good.

But the money is itself crap. It’s based on a centralized lending scheme and has no intrinsic value. The Fed no longer even releases the metric telling us how much money is out there.

All this means is that you can’t count on capitalism anymore. Your wealth is not how many paper assets you have. It’s not even how much land you have (or think you have). It’s what you can do. It’s your value to other people.

The real economy need not suffer in the downfall of the speculative economy. If anything, the real economy has been repressed by the speculative economy. Real farmers have been crushed by Big Agra, real druggists have been crushed by Wal-Mart and real transportation alternatives have been crushed by Big Oil and Big Auto.

The opportunity here, while the big boys are down, is to rebuild the genuine, local commercial infrastructure. To make shoes, clothes, food, education, healthcare and everything else we can in a bottom-up fashion. While speculators enjoy the economy of scale, we inhabit an ecology scaled to the human being that was lost in the corporatist equation.

The sooner you “drop out” of the speculative economy and its abstract concerns, the sooner you will be able to create and provide real value for the people all around you, and the better position you will be in to get what you need for yourself and your family.

This is not bad; it is good. The pain that people are about to go through now is not the product of the speculative economy’s failure, but its former and intentional unjust success.

Czym jest Cyberia? Cyfrową krainą, w której wszyscy chcąc nie chcąc żyjemy, czy światem wysokich technologii, dostępnym tylko nielicznym informatykom? Rzeczywistością wirtualną czy czymś całkowicie namacalnym, dostępnym naszym zmysłom? Co łączy ze sobą informatyków z Doliny Krzemowej, magów chaosu, konsumentów psychodelików, pisarzy cyberpunkowych, współczesnych psychologów i fizyków oraz twórców i odbiorców muzyki transowej? O tym dowiecie się z książki Douglasa Rushkoffa, pierwszej, błyskotliwej próby opisu cyberkultury, ukazującej jej niezwykły potencjał.

Cyberia to kompendium wiedzy o magicznych, psychodelicznych i anarchicznych korzeniach Internetu, stworzone przez jednego z najwybitniejszych specjalistów od kultury współczesnej, laureata prestiżowej Nagrody im. Neila Postmana. To wędrówka przez różne wymiary cyberkultury - rzeczywistość wirtualną, psychologię transpersonalną, gnozę psychodeliczną, fizykę kwantową, kulturę rave, muzykę ambientową, magię chaosu i hakerstwo - ku krainie, gdzie wszystko jest możliwe. Ku krainie, w której żyjemy.

And as Timothy Leary explained, “Cyberia to fascynująca podróż po obecnych granicach ludzkiego doświadczenia… opowiedziana w sposób, który umożliwia czytelnikowi przeżywanie zmieniającej się co chwila rzeczywistości cyberdelicznego XXI wieku.”

My next book,
Life Incorporated:
How we traded meaning for markets, society for self-interest, and citizenship for customer service,
will be published by Randomhouse in June 2009. We are assembling a reviewers’ copies list now. (Reviewers are journalists who write book reviews for publications.)

While I can’t promise anything, if you email me your name, address, and print/radio/web/tv/blog affiliation, I will put you on the list to get a galley. Press galleys cost a whole lot more than actual books, so if you are simply a reader who wants a copy but can’t afford it, email me and I’ll get something else to you - worst case, a PDF or something.

email your
NAME
AFFILIATION
SNAIL ADDRESS
to rushkoff at rushkoff.com

Really briefly, here’s what’s going on and what I think it means.

Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac are essentially mortgage financers. Banks sell mortgages, package them all together, and then sell them as debt to other investors - usually other banks, investment firms, mutual funds or pension funds. These are the famous “mortgage backed securities” everyone is talking about.

Freddie and Fannie buy lots of these mortgages and then resell them at a profit. The rate they receive from the debtors (the mortgage money they collect) is at a better rate of interest than what they pay out to the institutions buying their packages of mortgages. The weird part is that Freddie and Fannie aren’t just regular companies. The mortgages they resell are ultimately backed by government guarantee. That’s right: they are private companies, owned by shareholders, but the mortgage securities they sell are backed by the US Treasury.

This means that the value Freddie and Fannie really provide is to guarantee loans. Because of their government backing, they have the ability to clean up or add cred to everything they touch. Think of it like money laundering: all you have to do is pass some low quality mortgages through one of these companies - even for just a couple of hours - and they’re as good as new. It’s like touching the recharger in a video game - you get all your strength back.

Problem is, too many of Freddie and Fannie’s loans were no good. And the cash cushion they told everyone they had turned out to be a lot smaller than they were leading the world to believe. (Whether they intentionally overstated their cash cushion or just added the columns wrong has left to be seen.) But the long and short of it is that the company is in such bad shape that the government is stepping in and taking over the whole company.

Why? A few reasons. First off, Freddie and Fannie had to get their money from somewhere, right? How else could they buy all those mortgages? Well, they got a lot of that money by selling bonds - a lot of them to foreign investors. Now, they don’t really have the money to pay those bonds back. And that means they have even less money to buy all those mortgages from banks. Without a place to sell their mortgages - and “clean” them - banks can’t lend money to prospective home buyers. And without a good supply of mortgages, the housing crisis gets even worse.

So the Feds are coming in and taking over the two companies, kicking out management, and buying the mortgages themselves. They’re also going to back all the mortgage-backed investments that Freddie and Fannie have been selling. They’re even going to pay back all those bondholders, foreign and otherwise, who put up the money for the mortgage purchasing.

The only ones they’re not going to pay back are the shareholders. All the people who own Freddie and Fannie stock, like people with these once-safe stocks in their 401k plans and mutual funds, will be left with investments worth nothing.

The other people left holding the bag, as usual, will be the taxpayers. The billions of dollars these companies were about to lose on their bad mortgages will now be paid with our tax money. While it might be a necessary bail out of the housing market, this doesn’t stop anyone from foreclosing on their homes. All it means is that when we do foreclose, the investment firm that bought our Freddie-cleansed loan will still get paid.

In the bigger picture, I have to wonder what this will do to the stock market. This bailout pays back bondholders and “preferred” shareholders, but leaves regular old “retail” public shareholders losing all their money. If people begin to put two and two together, they will come to realize that owning publicly sold shares puts them at the very bottom of the totem pole as far as getting anything out of a dying company. Being “bailed out” may save those who hold bonds, but does nothing for those holding shares, who will likely be left with little or nothing.

Given that many corporate bonds are now selling “below par,” or below their original price, this presents an interesting set of scenarios. Will people start dumping overpriced stocks in favor of now discounted bonds, especially since discounted bonds pay very high interest rates and - and least in this case - don’t present the same risks as stocks? Will this week see investors encouraged by a government bail out and rushing into stocks or will stock investors instead see it as a sign that they will be last in line when the going gets rough?

I usually don’t feel uneasy when I put those filters on, but last night - during the Guiliani speech - I realized I was no longer filtering a speechwriter’s intentional manipulation; I was trying to look beyond real hate. These folks were gritting their teeth, shaking their fists, and smiling the way gladiators do when going into combat against barbarians. And this is the incumbent party. The ones currently in power.

What is it they hate? Guiliani and Palin both made it pretty clear: community organizing. Community organizing is energized from below. From the periphery. It is the direction and facilitation of mass energy towards productive and cooperative ends. It is about replacing conflict with collaboration. It is the opposite of war; it is peace.

Last night, the Republican Convention made it clear they prefer war. They see the world as a dangerous and terrible place. Like the fascist leaders satirized in Starship Troopers, they say they believe it is better to be on the offensive, taking the war to the people who might wish us harm than playing defense. It is better to be an international aggressor - a bulldog with lipstick - than led by the misguided notion that attacking people itself makes the world a more dangerous place.

In their attack on community organizing - a word combination they pretended they didn’t know what it meant - Giuliani and Palin revealed their refusal to acknowledge the kinds of bottom-up processes through which our society was built, and through which local communities can begin to assert some authority over their schools, environments, and economies. Without organized communities, you don’t get the reduction in centralized government the Republicans pretend to be arguing for. In their view, community organizing as, at best, equivalent to disruptive and unpredictable Al Qaeda activity.

But it actually goes deeper than this. Consider how Republicans have so far justified their choice of candidate: he is a “great man.” That America needs a “hero” in the White House to lead us in continued preemptive strikes against Bin Laden in Iraq (I know Bin Laden is not in Iraq, but Giuliani clearly implied he was). Only a leader with McCain’s war record and paternal qualifications can help Americans muster and maintain the tenacity necessary to “drill baby drill,” (even though this will have no influence on oil price or supply) and generate the requisite hate to “kill baby, kill.” As I explained in Coercion, having a parent figure on whom to transfer authority allows people to regress to a more childlike state. This not only allows them to feel safe; if gives them the freedom to express their rage. Make no mistake - that’s what we’re witnessing. And this rage - not America - is the greatest threat to humanity’s long-term chances for survival.

Republican party representatives are proud today that their convention has finally produced the “same level of energy and enthusiasm” as the DNC’s last week. And while it may have produced the same level of excitement, the excitement was of a very different character. It’s much easier to get people riled up but inviting them to hate a man - particularly one who they haven’t been allowed to hate for traditional reasons. Giuliani’s job - much like his job as mayor of NYC - was to give the Republicans in attendance permission to hate Obama and the potentially intelligent society he represents. It’s not about city vs. country or educated vs. military. It’s about thought vs. violence.

In the black and white world of those committed to war as an international relations strategy, voting “present” makes no sense - especially when the Illinois legislative process is willfully misrepresented. (Voting present is a way to preserve the bill without passing it in its current state. Far from an easy out, it is the hard path - requiring further negotiation to remove earmarks and other problems.) They would prefer the simple relief of a “yes or no” world, where the evil are punished and the good rewarded. For in such a world, we get to know who the enemy is and just hate them.

I don’t believe hate is the best way to motivate people to develop long-term solutions to problems. It is a tried and tested way to motivate them to short-term support of dangerous leaders. That much is certain. But if McCain and Palin are able to rouse the national hatred they will need to actually win this election, I fear they will have unleashed a force that they will be unable to control.

Here’s some of Legba’s report to us:

I have to first mention that I’m wasn’t at the DNC protests nor am I going to the RNC protests. I’m staying in DC doing media support and jail support from afar. I went to NYC for the 2004 RNC protests and I was, in the following order, beaten with a nightclub, wrapped in a giant orange net by the cops, set on fire (swear I’m not making that up), beaten again, arrested, put in a cage, hit by a cop car. So I’m taking it easy this time around.

The protests at the DNC are being organized under a couple of different umbrella groups. Broadly, it includes everything from progressives to anti-authoritarian radicals, with a lot of students
and youth under 30 and vets.

The conditions were pretty poor. The police had also erected a mini-Gitmo of free-speech zones–protest pens–into which to corral the bulk of demonstrators and any kind of activity was almost
immediately curbed. The other major problem was that there was effectively zero press coverage, even among liberal bloggers. I spent my week seeing liberal blogs excitedly gush about what was going on inside the convention and rail about Republican radicalism of the last eight years while I was cradling a phone in my hand listening to friends tell me stories of being beaten up a couple of blocks away.

That lack of coverage in a lot of respects really emboldens the police and allows them to get away with just about anything, aside from it absolutely impoverishing our ability to engage in a reasoned analysis of how power works and whether the Democrat vs. Republican frame actually depicts anything even close to reality.

And, speaking of police brutality, it’s pretty notable that they’ve been consistently targeting press. There was a documented incident where an ABC news producer was knocked down and arrested trying to get footage of delegates and donors. The police also detained and seized the equipment of the Glass Bead Collective (a well-known indymedia group). There was also the knocking down and detainment of a Code Pink member–probably the worst bit was seeing her get shoved down, the footage then cutting to her being interviewed by journalists, and then the cop walking up and grabbing her in the middle of the interview and dragging her off.

But that kind of one-time sensational pushing doesn’t really capture the full scale of what was going on. Marches were immediately surrounded by walls of police, people were told to leave, and then
they weren’t given any exit to leave and those who tried were arrested. There was a 100+ person mass arrest after the police simply decided that a large group of people milling about looked “suspicious” and were carrying rocks (which were never found, naturally), a convergence space was raided, and vehicles were simply stopped and searched and equipment was seized.

My connection to this is that I’m part of DC Students for a Democratic Society, which is part of the national Students for a Democratic Society organization. We’ve become known for an event called Funk theWar, which is a Reclaim the Streets style event–we like to call it a Militant Mobile Disco, and we’ve been called “suburban terrorists” by a couple of right-wing writers, which is offensive as we all live in DC. A good chunk of people in my chapter and a lot of people in SDS went to the DNC and are also going to the RNC protests.

I have to note though that this hasn’t stopped with the end of the DNC. In the Twin Cities, where the RNC is taking place, there was a massive raid on a convergence space with all inside (several hundred) detained in handcuffs (including a four-year-old) for hours simultaneous to a raid of three private homes around the area and then a raid on the base of I-Witness Video, a documentary outfit that specializes in recording incidents of police brutality and proved instrumental in getting people’s charges dropped after the 2004 RNC. The police called the whole thing a “criminal enterprise” and a
handful of individuals have been charged with “conspiracy to riot”, but no evidence has actually been found as far as anyone can tell.

I’m gonna cut this short because I’m going on a bit, but I think one really important thing comes out of this and this is really what I feel like you’d be interested in: What the police are doing here isn’t
stopping the demonstrations. They’re getting us to change the frame of discussion. Since these raids started, we’ve all switched from talking about the war, about capitalism, about the system, and about what we want in place of all this. We’re now talking about police brutality and we’re all getting a certain amount of titillation out of that. But it effectively completely sidelines why my friends are out there on the streets and why they’re willing to risk being beaten and arrested. Police action against doesn’t just shut down our march or cast a chill over organization activity–it helps us forget why we’re fighting and that scares me more than anything else. I saw the same thing happen to the anti-globalization movement after 9/11 hit and I hope we’re strong enough this time around to inoculate ourselves against this sort of attack.

Were you aware that all this had been going on during the DNC?

Here’s his main logical technique:

A tomato raised in a heated greenhouse next door can be more carbon-intensive than one shipped halfway across the globe.

Right. By the same logic, trees grown locally that are used to make clubs to kill children are worse for child welfare than ones grown by child slaves. Indeed, people can do terrible, environmentally irresponsible things locally that outweigh the benefits of having done them locally.

But: doing agriculture locally brings all those effects close to home. When agriculture is being done in your backyard, all of a sudden you notice the methane gas produced by feed lots, the erosion caused by poor soil use, and the run-off from poisonous fertilizers. It’s a lot harder to do bad agriculture locally than it is to do it somewhere far away, where it’s actually performed by little brown people whose cancers matter to us less than our own. In fact, the grow-local farmers I know are moving closer to biodynamic practices that only grow foods in the correct seasons, anyway. No heated tomatoes.

These seemingly sensical counter-intuitive arguments are a technique; they are not information. They are devised to reframe and trivialize the debate. You’ll find them created to argue against progressive taxation, against addressing climate change, and against almost anything that challenge the illogical logic of the market.

My point: When reading a counterintuitive argument, check the logic first.