Muddy the water enough, and collectivists will try to walk on it.

Everyone is familiar with collective nouns such as a pride of lions, an exultation of larks, a concern of social workers, a waffle of senators, and the occasional fraction, such as a Fifth of defense attorneys. There are other, more subtle examples, almost subliminal. Collective measures need not be nouns; they can also be adjectives, even lowly articles. No matter what the form, they can serve to imply system, consistency, and generality where none exist, to muddy the water enough that collectivists can walk on it.

Case in point: the economy. There are myriad economies and even more ways of gauging their prosperity. Thomas Tusser had it right four centuries ago when he wrote, “It is an ill wind that turns none to good.” Or blows no economy into the black. A blatant example: high unemployment in an area leads to high employment among its welfare workers and credit counselors. Similarly, the so-called global economy is nothing new: movement of goods across thousands of miles antedated the Bronze Age, all without help from the UN and its proposed tax on financial transactions. For example, such trade by American Indians moved flint hundreds of miles away from where it was mined. The global economy differs in, of course, volume and pace, but the biggest difference is merely that we have been made aware of it: flint did not carry “Made in Ohio” labels. Believing there is only the economy blinds one to risk in apparently good times and to opportunity in bad. Worse, it encourages the dangerous conceit that the economy is a single entity readily susceptible to government or other outside manipulation and control. This brings us to a crucial point: at the deepest level, each of these economies is someone’s livelihood. Looked at that way, each of these someones might wish to think twice before turning his livelihood over to manipulation and control by the same people who confiscate nail clippers at airports and punish Kofi Annan for heading the UN’s debacle in Rwanda by electing him as its Secretary-General.

“These are the times that try men’s souls.” Even when we are not quoting Thomas Paine, we misuse the times (as perhaps I did above), usually to explain and more often to excuse all manner of behavior. (By times I do not mean the Sulzberger family’s print blog of the same name, though it too explains and excuses all manner of behavior. That would be NYT-picking.) I mean the thought and feelings of an historical period, its time spirit: the zeitgeist. Since that word is German, let us recall that it was a well-known German who wrote, “…history itself is nothing but the activity of men pursuing their purposes.” Fear not: the tenor of the times is no more or less than those purposes the popular media claims everyone else is pursuing. (You know you have better sense than to follow the crowd.) Someone who disagrees with the zeitgeist retains the right and the ability to act on his disagreement, to break his silence. Rage against the machine; write a letter to the editor; turn off the television; take the zeit to show some geist. That well-known German quoted earlier, Karl Marx, did all of the preceding except turn off the television, and his ideas have gone to achieve unparalleled success, if only among university faculties.

A very old story has it that a reporter and his editor disagreed because the editor insisted the word news required a plural verb. When he asked his reporter, “Are there any news to report,” the latter replied, “Not a new.” Of course, nowadays the usage requires singular verbs with news. In one way, this is unfortunate, because it helps reinforce the idea that there is a single collection of news to be reported: the news, and all that is fit to print is printed. What the media feeds us is, and must be, limited; that not all new data can be known, reported, or absorbed should be obvious. (Like many things obvious this is first overlooked and then forgotten.) Therefore, the news is only some news or our selection of news. Now, we soon enough learn to reverse the spin given the news by our ideological foes, if only because in the popular media they are numerous. But it takes time and access to broaden the selection and to put it in perspective by, for example, reading history.  As a fallback, I for one must remind myself: this is only a selection of news, I am not well-informed, and probably neither is the reporter.

The international community and its mouthpiece, world opinion, do not exist. They are concepts without manifestations, phrases used in lieu of logic, evidence, and law by people who in real life have no idea how their next-door neighbors voted in the last election, yet will confidently summarize the opinions and desires of the other three billion on the planet. Community, if the word is to have any meaning in this context, should imply some commonality across borders of interests, values, and culture. These we cannot assume, given the differences in national histories and outward culture. As examples, for the past century most of those nations now touted as our traditional allies have instead been at best our dependents and at worst millstones around the American neck. Of course, such commonalities may still exist elsewhere than among our allies, but at present we have no way of knowing, only of hoping: the international community is no more than a jumble of other countries, nearly all without polls, let alone free speech, press, or elections. Many a so-called nation is really just the private holding of some gang or family, and in the UN’s General Assembly, it is one-thug, one-vote. 

Consumers is a word used carelessly, as if they were a collection of people set aside to consume what another collection produces, like so many aphids and ants. In fact, while the word products are associated with consumers of them, the word producers is not, almost as if the products somehow just appear, manna from Wal-Mart, untouched by human hands. There are those who are pure consumers, but most people are both consumers and producers, often of the very same product. So consumer protection, for example, can impact adversely on other citizens -- the producers -- who themselves are also consumers. Consumers of a product should pay its cost, including the protection -- if not they, then who? Sooner or later, one way or another, they do pay. Too often, though, consumer advocates act as if their charges should not and do not. This is not to attack, or defend, consumer protection per se; it is to remind that it carries a cost, and the cost is borne by the consumers as well as the producers, who are the one and the same.

A phrase to be greeted with skepticism is national followed by just about anything. For example, national resources often refer to things, such as oil deposits, that are privately owned but happen to be located in the United States. The same cautions apply to public, whether preceding property, interest, accommodations, or safety. It is seldom easy to ascertain an intangible like the national security or public interest; both invite controversy, and there are those who doubt that they should ever be legitimate goals. For example, presume that any claim to represent the public interest or accusation of special interest is from an opposing special interest. Nearly all interests are special, to one degree or another, and the rare exceptions are of the order, that all life on Earth not be wiped out is in the public interest. (Except for would-be suicides.)  Even something like clean air, as a public interest, is not so straightforward. How clean? Who pays for the cleanliness, and how much? Someone always pays. However, it is easy to tell whether national or public is correctly used when it refers to something tangible like real estate: who gets sued if someone slips and falls on it? If it is not a government, then the property is not national or public.

Speaking of pratfalls, the American healthcare system is often derided for being irrational, inequitable, unplanned, and capricious -- in short, unsystematic. Passing over that bastard compound, healthcare, itself an attempt to bond one’s health to something provided from outside, care, we note that health care in this country was not intended to be or designed as a system or any other collective. Instead, health care has been countless meetings in the marketplace of sick people and those people and places who purport to heal them. Of course American health care is not a system; it was not supposed to be, and accusing it of being unsystematic is like faulting a pear because it is not round and orange. Those who despise a free market in general also despise it in this specific instance. 

This imputation of a system, a collective, where none is intended deserves some amplification. The process goes like this: if some range of activities does not behave like a system, call it a problem or even a crisis. If the supposed disarray stretches across state lines, then it is a national crisis, requiring a national (Federal) solution. If on the other hand, the manufactured crisis exists in only a few places, then the governments of these places are negligent and hopelessly behind the rest of the nation and require Federal help (and intervention). Ironically, this process has helped destroy the federal, little-f, system we once had, and replaced it by a Federal, with a really big-F, of a central government.

We have all heard loose talk about our health, usually in the context that our health requires you do something unpleasant such as eat tofu. There is no such thing as our health; there is instead my health, your health, his health, and her health, and each of us will have quite different notions of what it means to be healthy and of how to attain it. Furthermore, my health, your health, and so on, are not the same as healthcare, and none of these are necessarily related to the topic into which the debate has imploded: health insurance, specifically, one that is universal and “free.” Before we view something as such a right, it should have proved itself as a basic human necessity, one worth striving, sacrificing, dying, and, yes, even paying for. (And why is health care the only thing that Americans do not expect to buy on credit?) Viewed that way, health insurance ranks well behind cigarettes, cable TV, video slots, and high school sports, and barely ahead of voting.

Medicare has just decided that obesity is a disease, one that (and this is the whole point of the exercise) will lead to taxpayers having to pay for about anything that can pass as treatment. This is akin to Medicare’s hiring a burly security guard to stop you from hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. Soon enough, it will be paying for diet pills, liposuction, price supports for fat farms, and Dr. Phil’s books, though as a cost-cutting measure, Amazon.com must fill that last prescription with only paperback editions, unless the treating physician certifies that the hardbound is medically necessary.

The costs of health care are not objective forces of nature, imposed on us by God, no more than is the price of bread. Health care costs rise or fall with the demand of consumers for good health, the providers for wealth and for protection from litigation, and most of all to keep pace with the amount of money available to pay those costs. Parkinson’s first two laws are that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion and expenditures rise to meet income. A corollary is that costs rise to exceed available funding. No matter how many blank checks the central government doles out for healthcare, it will get them all back, crammed with zeroes at the end of the check amounts. Insurance fuels the demand.

Now, because there is no healthcare system or our health, public health is something that is rather less general than the Surgeon General would have us believe. For example, a typhoid bacillus in the drinking water is a public health matter, while gun ownership is not and attempts to make it so are instead efforts of a bureaucracy to expand its budget. And a lawsuit about a Big Mac on the menu or in my stomach is a matter of a tort lawyer wanting a down payment on an oceanfront home.

Last, there is no such thing as the environment to be protected or raped. For each species, there are good environments and bad, and a change in a “good” environment for one species will assuredly result in an advantage for another. What is bad for the spotted owl could be good for the pinstriped banker or free-range Methodist. Global warming, anyone? It has already lengthened the growing season in the mid- and high-latitude seasons, hardly a bad thing for all those starving Third World billions. Thousands of species will flourish in the new sets of environments, while others will dwindle or (horrors!) change, just as they have been doing for billions of years. For an environmentalist to fret about whether humans have a future seems, well, jingoistic, bigoted, and discriminatory. Specist, even. To be consistent, they should not worry about the future of anything organic: after all, as Goethe put it, “Life is a disease of matter.” 

Environmentalists believe in evolution but do not approve of it, not really, as many conservatives do not believe in evolution but approve of it, really. So much do some self-appointed protectors of the environment believe that it is universal and eternal, that they almost seem to pine for the Pleistocene, an Eden with retreating glaciers -- a nostalgia they prudently do not act on because they want to retain convenience, security, and that bastard compound. But like the rest of us, those who call themselves environmentalists have no choice in the matter. The bumper stickers should read “EVOLUTION HAPPENS,” and humans are winning. Get over it.
More precisely, only for the time being are humans winning. Get over that, too. But look on the bright side: if grilling my Big Mac causes the ice caps to melt, then that tort lawyer’s oceanfront home will be under twenty fathoms of water.

Terry Graves is a novelist and freelance essayist living near Steubenville, Ohio. His novel, Rain in Hell, concerns original sin without, he hopes, being yet another fruit of it.

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