Convert

Consider the following claims:

1. Members of the Church of Latter Day Saints (aka Mormons) are (a) more wealthy (b) more conscientious (c) more future-oriented and (d) more personally and socially stable than comparable members of the general public.
2. Differences in traits and outcomes between Mormons and the general public remain both large and statistically significant even after controlling for confounding variables such as IQ, race, and gender.
3. These differences cannot be explained by selection effects. Twin and adoption studies show that church membership is a genuine treatment effect: being in the church improves not only members' productive capacity, but their personal traits as well.

If all of these are true, it follows that an all-Mormon society would be happier and more prosperous. 

If I could empirically establish that conditions 1-3 are true, would it justify mandatory conversion? Assume that conversion by the sword would produce no erosion of the institutions that give rise to the enhanced performance of the faithful.

I've posted here before that I tend to reject a strict consequentialist/deontological split. I find the moral sentiment that a consideration of outcomes is one consideration among many to be convincing. I also find dominion distasteful. But I'll put up with dominion if the price is right. I'll give the keys to the prison to a jailer who'll lock me up for murder. 

How about here? How much better than the BATNA would membership have to be to tolerate forcible conversion? Not that there are any plans, of course, but would we be willing to allow Church leadership to, say, organize mass adoptions from abroad? Or to collect sex workers in an effort to save their souls? How about to baptize dead infants in the name of Jesus and the Church? 

What's acceptable here? Why? Is a euvoluntary covenant with the Lord important enough to disregard the gains from membership?

Inspired by a tweet by Tyler Cowen.

Hijab

Laws and customs vary by country, but in some places, Islamic head or face covering is either mandatory or outright prohibited. Here in the sunny US, the land of the irredeemable infidel, it is neither. We enjoy fairly robust First Amendment protections for most sartorial choices (with clearly-defined exceptions for obscenity and some school-related restrictions [no bong hits 4 Jesus]), and if you've lived abroad it's hard to escape the conclusion that Americans tend to enjoy more diversity of dress than many other countries. In my experience, I was struck by a certain uniformity in the year I lived in Lithuania, but tooling around the rest of Europe, I can recall seeing neither a single muu-muu nor a pit-stained wife-beater.

Clothes are one part functional to three parts social. Apart from protecting you from the elements of nature (including Uranium-238! Ask me how!), they're laden with oodles of status and loyalty signalling, with just enough wiggle room for individuality (37 pieces of flair). For most of the West though, specific religious signalling is either job-specific (cassocks, habits, stoles & al.) or ritual-specific (Sunday best, wedding gowns, funeral veils). The idea of devotion being reflected in everyday garb is alien to many Westerners. But to a great many faithful, the veil isn't oppression, it's piety.

I'd venture a guess that many Americans would agree that a Muslim woman's decision to wear a headscarf or a veil is more or less euvoluntary (depending on whether or not she was under duress at home) in jurisdictions that lack statutes governing what women may or may not wear. I think many Americans would also agree that in jurisdictions with legislation on the books (whether for or against), coerced clothing choices are, well, coerced.

Consider Helen (no relation). Helen lives in Birjand. She is a devout Muslim, and she wears the hijab as evidence of her piety. She then moves to Austin and continues to wear the hijab, having left none of her devotion to Allah behind. Since her proximity to Mecca has no bearing on her relationship with God, how has her private moral calculus changed? How can the decision be euvoluntary in one place and not in another? If anything, wearing hijab in the US is a stronger signal in the secular wilds of the West because it's euvoluntary. Right?

It seems to me that campaigns against Islamic modesty rules run the risk of cargo cultishness when they focus on symbols rather than on the pernicious problems of coercion and social control. A headscarf is not a truncheon. Conversely, piety shines the brightest when it arises from a euvoluntary covenant with the Almighty. Obliging women to cover themselves upon penalty of imprisonment robs them of the opportunity to honor Allah with the fullness of their heart. That is a terrible injustice to both women and to The Lord.

Hoc est Corpus Juris

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

So far I've proposed the following as an analytical adjunct to standard relative price economics:

1. Part of the rental value of certain spaces arises from a single-use characteristic. If it would be odd or off-putting to conduct the activities reserved for a particular location elsewhere, then such a space can command a higher rent than a general-use space. (lemma) Negotiation over these rents is not a priori obvious, and will tend to be historically and culturally contingent.
2. Single-use rents require that users observe the restrictions on the use of the space. Maintaining observation among users is a standard collective action problem in economics, and real-world solutions to these collective action problems is a task for post hoc investigation and analysis. 

So far, we have a church (RNC HQ | Apple store | strip club), we have parishioners (partisans | customers | clients), but I've not mentioned the clerisy. Nor have I explicitly mentioned what role the rise of the sharing economy might have on the generation and capture of sacred rents. This is relevant to EE because it is precisely the transitional gains trap that often gooses incumbents into obstructing innovations that benefit citizens. Moreover, if incumbents hold their privileged positions with the blessings of (constituents | clients | parishioners), dislodging them or buying them off will be exceptionally challenging. 

In this taxonomy, a priest is the residual claimant of a sacred rent. So is Tim Cook, so is Debbie Wasserman Schultz, so is Satoru Iwata. So also divine-right kings of yore (perhaps the King of Thailand today), so also a few Soviet premieres (Lenin for sure, probably Stalin too), so also Ieyasu Tokugawa. The faithful, the partisans, the devoted customers, the loyal subjects are tenants if you will: beneficiaries of the rental value of the sacred space. Threats to this rental value are treated accordingly.

This is one of the reasons I think the Team Red/Team Blue analytical framework could use a little scaffolding. Team members are opposed to each other, but in much the same way as the Knicks might be opposed to the Lakers: they're rivals, but at least they're both playing basketball. Team Gray (or is it 'grey'?) is a pack of apostates: they're playing intramural Frisbee golf. Apostates are generally ignored, unless they start actually threatening the institutions of the organization itself. Libertarians were a bunch of fringe kooks until 2008, when they sort of amorphously began to gnaw at the bunting around the debate stage. That happened, and hey-presto, both Team Blue and Team Red partisans began hauling out rhetorical cannon against all the astroturfing. Or you see zealots on Twitter castigating a Reason reporter who spills all her ink on topics like sexual liberation and reproductive rights as being a shill for oligarchs:

.@ckilpatrick @enbrown Whenever Ames' reporting fucks with oligarchs, the baggerbot smear machine starts wailing. Like an air raid siren.
— Yasha Levine (@yashalevine) November 7, 2014

 Gimme gimme that old-time religion.

In political space, at least in the US, Duverger's Law locks in the party monopoly. Even if you don't like the Knicks, you're still going to watch the basketball game regardless. But note very closely reactions to even modest threats to the overall institutional integrity of the system. Homeschooling is the Uber of the indoctrination of the young. If successful, it strips the secular priesthood of the devoted. Right now, Team Red isn't raising too much of a stink because it sort of looks like homeschooling is handing them the ball. But if it turns out that homeschooled kids grow up as political apostates, expect both teams to mount up and ride out against homeschooling in full force.

As a general-purpose apostate myself, I feel obliged to share my biases with you, my fine audience. I am of the opinion that sacred rents are a fine thing, an excellent thing. Such rents enrich the human existence. It is a wondrous delight to abandon yourself to those sublime moments when you connect yourself to a larger, mysterious other. A sense of belonging is simply critical to social animals enjoying the fullness this existence has to offer us. However, this does not imply that elevating a distinct class of elites to wield dominion over these rents is either wise or just. In this sense, I'm a thoroughgoing anabaptist: the clerisy exists to serve the parish, the statesman to serve the constituency, the retailer to serve the customer. Any time any residual claimant of a scared rent begins to extract unjust rents or to exert excessive dominion, the covenant is ruptured. Courageous parishioners, courageous citizens, courageous consumers of ethical game journalism are obliged to pick up their hammer and nail their Ninety-Five Theses to the doors of the Church | Legislature | Gamestop. Reclaim your sacred rents. Your heart is your own. Treasure it. If not for yourself, then for your children.

Apple Piety

On Monday, I advanced the proposition that gentlemen's clubs are a sort of "sacred space," that is, there's something special about the site and its purpose that renders it unfit for alternative purposes. Yesterday, at ST, I expanded on this idea a little bit: sacred spaces (under my ad hoc definition, anyway) are all around us—folks seem fond of fitting some places to a single purpose. Moreover, we're fond of training children in the rules of the sacred space. As the father of a toddler, I can assure you that teaching my kid to refrain from taking snacks into the bathroom is a lot closer to a catechism than it is to teaching her how to count to twenty.

And that catechism is the other side of the sacred space. After all, without the devoted, a church is naught but stone and mortar. If you'll indulge me a bit of an Augustinian digression, piety is the compound virtue that allows a sacred space to generate its rents. It's the demand side of the exchange, if you will. And recall that piety arises from the mixture of faith, hope, love, and temperance. Absent an Aristotelian mean, absent phronesis, piety slips into religiosity, fanaticism, or delirium. Since it is such a corruptible virtue, it is unlikely to arise naturally in any but the saintliest or most enlightened people. Luckily for the civilizations of the earth, there are thorough canonical works dedicated to cultivating virtuous piety, ranging from the Rig Veda to the Tao Te Ching to the notes of Maimonides to Aquinas's commentary on the New Testament. Or heck, even Paul's letters for that matter. Praying in the direction of Mecca five times a day instills piety via repetition, much the same way as memorizing passages from the Gospels, much the same way as spinning prayer wheels.

Much the same way as reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning.

It occurred to me over dinner with Mrs. Spivonomist last night that the political elite has as much interest in generating secular piety for ordinary Humean reasons (i.e. to encrease the dominion of the sovereign). Witness the wailing and gnashing of teeth after the results of an especially decisive election outcome. Witness the style of language used in election season. Witness the devotion a committed partisan has towards her party. Such devotion is not the rational thinking of finding a first derivative; it is the glamour of the pulpit. And inculcating this sentiment is a lifelong affair, beginning with a daily prayer offered to the symbols of the state, its colors and its seals. And this bond of piety is cured in the sunlight of peer approval. When a muddy apostate dissolves this bond, he is shunned in polite society as surely as might be an atheist. What, after all, is the most common epithet against the anarchist? "Bomb-throwing" surely comes to mind. Does this accurately describe Lysander Spooner? G.K. Chesterton? Me?

Dear Apple, if you really want to generate expropriable sacred rents, you need to take a cue from the Roman Catholic Church or the "two"-party system: get 'em young, and cultivate their brand loyalty over a lifetime. use universal symbols, get them to repeat key phrases over and over again so that their piety comes as naturally as genuflection before the font. How else do you expect to generate an insurmountable BATNA disparity among your partisans?

Exegesis in the Springtime

I often hear this or that thing being called "Straussian", but I never [hear] if people think Strauss was right in his main claims.
— robinhanson (@robinhanson) October 21, 2014

 There's good discussion appended, so I encourage you to click through for more.

For my readers unfamiliar with Leo Strauss, his main claims were that philosophers, poets, scribes, translators, and playwrights encode hidden messages and secret knowledge in their writing. Naive readers can enjoy the surface meaning of books, plays, poems, whatever and walk away content. But for the initiated, the hidden wisdom is what matters. Finding the hidden meaning of coded text is called "exegesis." The discipline of finding the hidden meaning in any work, written or otherwise is called "hermeneutics." As you might imagine, it's a tough claim to test empirically, though there are good game theoretical reasons to believe that writers with little direct political clout might wish to hide heretical ideas inside coded text.

The question then is: why should anyone bother to look for Straussian encoding in more modern works? There is no longer an Inquisition interested in strapping heretics to a dunking stool. Anyone in the secular west can write as they wish, without fear of state reprisal.

Answer (1): Straussian writing is a skill, and like any skill, it needs to be practiced lest it atrophy. Sure, there's little political suppression of disfavored speech these days, but forward induction urges risk-averse writers to keep their nibs sharp in case a totalitarian regime takes over, burns the books, and marches the heretics up the gallows scaffolding.

Answer (2): Straussian writing is a defense against the soft coercion of tribal exclusion. Are you a Team Blue partisan wishing to criticize the Chief Executive ca. 2009? Are you a Team Red partisan wishing to criticize the Chief Executive ca. 2002? Maybe you'll be gently dis-invited to write for DailyKos/NRO if you make your criticism plain. Even if the BATNA is not dire, it still remains unattractive.

Answer (3): Straussian writing is fun. Contrast a Straussian message with outright satire. Satire is an outrageous caricature of a position, with a very obvious exegesis; no special training is required to understand the "hidden" message. You simply have to be not-stupid. Straussian exegesis, to the contrary (when done properly) needs a key to unlock the mysteries held within. For example, if I'm guilty of Strausianism from time to time, the key is a passing familiarity with public choice economics. For the Tao Te Ching, the key is obtained after solving a series of koans. For Seussian Straussians, you need merely eat it in a box with a fox.

Answer (4): Straussian writing is accidental. Exegesis is prone to Type I errors, especially if the reader is actively on the hunt. Joe McCarthy was a hermeneutical Communist hunter. If you have the stomach for it, perform a search for "Illuminati" and browse what you find.

Answer (5): Straussian writing keeps out the riff-raff. If you want to go Full Nietzsche (never go Full Nietzsche), hidden knowledge should be reserved only for the eyes of those courageous few who have the fortitude to pass through the crucible of enlightenment. This is perhaps reasonable for some select religious texts. Recall that much of the Gospels are parables.

Get lost, Richard O'Brien

The risk of censure, be it political, religious, or secular, means that writing that could be salient to elites is not euvoluntary: writing plainly could result in outcomes unfavorable to the author. Straussian encoding is a partial defense against that. Hermeneutics makes writing more euvoluntary.

#GamerGate

The Greatest Trick Ever Pulled

"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Mark 8:36 (KJV)

God Himself sits in judgement over the souls of men But His patience is eternal... not so the IRS. To the tax collector, the letter of the law is the Final Arbiter what Sits o'er All. And into yon letter the American constituency and its elected elite have carved, jointly and severally, an exception from taxation so deeply etched that only the most hard-bitten secularist would creak her jaw to call it a "loophole": churches shall pay no taxes.

Of course, Old Scratch hangs his hat in the details, so they say. Church organizations aren't on the hook to the Treasury, but that doesn't necessarily extend to preachers' spouses or their kids. So as Kenneth Copeland can attest, if you find yourself getting a little too cozy with political aspirants, expect the State's Infernal Revenue Service mephits to hound you till the rivers run red with the blood of the innocent (or from 2007-2011, whichever comes first). Similarly, if you minister to a huge congregation and if they tithe, and if you turn that lucre into comfortable mansions, plush lifesytles, and dalliances with aristocratic and oligarchic elites, you probably shouldn't be too agog when (not if) you run afoul of ordinary folks' ordinary moral sentiments.

In Aristotelian terms, it ain't proportionate for a loquacious preacher to amass wealth that would make Solomon blush and to then be given special dispense from the state, most especially when the underlying religious tradition has strong overtones of modesty, service, and charity.

One of the best lessons I ever learned from a Munger lecture is that accumulated wealth is a byproduct of exchange. It's effluvium, waste, all those ledgers cramped with artifacts of past exchanges. What we should care about, what produces satisfaction is the exchange itself that gave rise to plump capital holdings. When we focus on the hoard alone, we commit the nasty analytical error of judging outcomes rather than processes, dead artifacts instead of living rules. Anyone drenched in the economic way of thinking (and boy howdy, if you ever need a good example of a natural economist, you could do a hell of a lot worse than bending your gaze towards Mungo) should kick and scream any time there's talk of just or unjust outcomes. Wealth concentration itself is too dumb a bunny to estimate the justice lurking in pairwise exchange. If I drop a dollar in the collection plate, that transaction is part of the covenant I have with God, with my religious community, and with my pastor. That moment of choice (and the moment I initially chose to stand as part of the flock) is where the careful analyst can raise hue and cry should injustice lurk.

Of course, economists will be perhaps more prone than others to punt on any justice that dwells in the collection plate exchange. The epistemological problem of cracking someone's skull open to see if they truly are better off or not making the trade is pretty dang tough. How many people end up regretting religious faith? In which direction do deathbed conversions typically go? But even if we conclude that flim-flam multi-millionaire bs artistes like Benny Hinn provide valuable spiritual services to their congregations, how do we square that with proportional Aristotelian justice? What is the common-sense moral justification for the asymmetrical tax treatment of religious organizations? Do they consume fewer public goods? Perhaps there's a case that churches actually produce public goods on net, beyond the private joys of salvation and community membership mentioned above, beyond the club goods shared by flock members. If that's the case though, wouldn't it be prudent to compare spillover benefits from religious organizations to spillover benefits from other organizations, including for-profit firms? There's a Whole Foods down the street from where I work, and I assure you that the sense of satisfaction I detect in many of the shoppers is almost impossible to distinguish from the spiritual rapture that clings to the faithful I run across on Sunday mornings.

Revisit your null hypothesis. Wealthy preachers might be a symptom that something has gone wrong, but don't let the Devil convince you he doesn't exist: problems happen when we treat a metric as a goal, when we confuse outcomes with intent, when we indulge analytical laziness. Consider whether or not congregants retain the wherewithal to revoke their patronage. Consider if they think themselves exploited. Talk to them if you must. And do please consider that the 16th amendment was a mistake. Perhaps the problem isn't that churches don't pay income tax, but that the rest of us do.

Episode 4: Anthony Gill

Welcome to a very special episode of the Euvoluntary Exchange podcast. Joining me today is Anthony Gill of the University of Washington's Political Science department, and host of his own podcast, Research on Religion. Tony was recently in the DC area, and since we share research interests, we thought it would be enlightening to discuss the relationship of euvoluntary exchange and religion. Here are our thoughts.


download

This episode will be simulcast this Sunday on Research on Religion. Well, I suppose that's not exactly a simulcast, but I guess it's probably close enough that I needn't bother coining a new word for the occasion.

Anthony Gill on Religion (Econtalk)

As a reminder, if you would like to suggest a topic (or if you'd like to appear as a guest), please feel free to contact me at spivonomist@gmail.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

Behavioral Economics and Voluntary Cocercion

Dan Ariely on discipline:


Good timing. Adam's piece this week is on prudence.

If you want a mechanism that discourages you from overeating, or from indulging in risky sexual activity, or from you-name-it, why not consider religion?

Libertarians may chafe a little at the suggestion that a church hierarchy imposes "voluntary" coercion, since church membership is quasi-coercive (with possible exceptions for anabaptist sects). And there are, of course, still selection effects for adherence: it still takes diligence to exercise virtuous behavior. Still, on the margin, organized religion seems like a fine, time-tested organization to help folks overcome their little daily irrationalities.

The two examples Ariely used are even classic examples straight out of the Middle Ages: gluttony and lust. Dear temperance, dear prudence,

Won't you come out and play?

A Game of Institutions Book 4: Let Us Prey

This week, friend of EE Anthony Gill muscles in on the Roberts/Munger hit parade and talks Holy Turkey on Econtalk. It's one of the better episodes of all time, but that might be my biases talking, interested as I am in the public choice analysis of collusion between the estates and of using economics to talk about stuff not ordinarily associated with the miraculous world of simple commerce. And narrowly, Tony's chat with Russ is timely for your humble blogviator (@Spivonomist has as of this moment 74 followers and 1276 tweets for an index quotient of 0.05799373), since I've been sort of struggling with how to motivate the next chapter in the S&T saga.

Recall from last time, one institutional arrangement that's at least theoretically possible is characterized by a cooperative game with asymmetrical payoffs. That's a jargon-laden way of saying that everyone's better off under the arrangement, but some are better off than others. But it's not coercive. Imagine a Manor Farm where Snowball can actually leave without being turned into delicious rashers of crispy bacon. Well, where can we find examples of this out there in the real, wide world?

It strikes me having listened to Tony disserting at length that the rich history of orthodoxy and apostasy in Western religions has an awful lot to offer in this node. Consider that on its own, the Church can't be coercive. It takes collusion with the state to transform The Cross into a truncheon. Can you even imagine the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition happening without at least the tacit approval of the sovereign? It's worth noting that one of the few Continental refuges for the most unexpected of all inquisitions was Lithuania, the last European nation to be converted to Christianity (and even then only tepidly), a place where the Body of Christ walks with wooden legs and sits in pensive repose on waterlogged stumps. Seriously, you guys: Kryžių kalnas is something else, and the crosses there survived numerous attempts by Soviet authorities to remove them. It is one of the most bizarre oddities of Europe, if not the whole wide world. I have to avoid thinking about it too carefully or my head goes all swimmy.

But think about the rise of New World religions. Exit options provided just enough Tiebout competition to allow for some serious apostasy. That big "clunk" you heard in the early 16th century was a double-clutch gear shift as the First Estate flopped from predatory monopolistic coercion to something more closely approximating a modern corporate interest.

But here's the interesting thing about the kayfabe of religion: part of the aesthetic is asceticism. Men of the Cloth (and nuns in particular) were, but for the rarefied Vatican elite, generally of modest means. Of course, rent need not be material to be valuable. Risk pooling and reduction is mighty valuable under Mathusian conditions. As is positional station cachet. Respect of the community is tough to measure in bars of gold. At any rate, the appearance of the poor pastor suggests to me to be a nod to the apostasy threat when congregants observe the clergy accumulating treasure. "Why should I keep sending my silver to Italy when this Calvin guy is bidding lower?" The Mennonite sects here in the States seem to have this bit figured out exceptionally well. But it strikes me that the transition from total Catholic hegemony to perfect Quaker equality is the cooperative-asymmetric game rather than the coercive-symmetrical game. And the existence of the mega-church and the television evangelist suggests to me that it can be a durable game. If congregants believe they're getting something out of the deal (eternal salvation), they should be willing to put up with some wealth inequality. It's not all that different than buying tickets for a basketball game or a personal computer.

Right?

Anyway, let's get back to Lithuania. Just a quick visit, I promise. Even before Soviet times, Catholicism was heavily flavored. These days, there's a short list of state-sanctioned churches, mostly as a reaction to some of the more aggressive proselytizing in the wake of 13 January, 1991. The quick and dirty story is that missionaries descended on the newly liberated republic, tracts in hands and sermons on lips with the goal of obtaining all those sweet, sweet new converts. Missionaries weren't banned in the sense that they couldn't set up shop, but neither were they afforded special tax and property rights status like the established religions. My personal brush with this was a spot of trouble with getting married. I wasn't baptized in an officially-recognized sect, so the officious local priest gave us some (easily overcome, thankfully) grief about it. At any rate, it's too easy to reason from an outcome and say that Lithuania is trying to protect incumbent sects, to provide rents for the Catholic Church. Not in this case. Even at the height of its influence (not necessarily counting the Livonian occupation), the Vatican didn't have the same grip on Vilnius that it did on Paris. Instead, consider the possibility that the median Lithuanian voter is looking to cut hysteresis loss, to quell a nuisance. Ordinary practical secularism has been their daily BATNA since they first set up shop in the Land of Rain (the Lithuanian word for "Lithuania" is Lietuva, and the word for "rain" is lietus. Also, it rains for like half the year, so even if it's not good etymology, it's good enough for me). So if our doughty pikesmen of the Baltic find the asymmetries of religious institutions offensive, it's never bothered them before to shrug it off. Why should now be any different?

Fracking Cylons

Power outages thanks to severe weather here in the Greater DC area have me thinking about energy markets. Before I tried my hand at economics, I was a Navy Nuclear Propulsion Technician. I did 4 years on the USS Ohio as a Reactor Operator. Transforming U-235 dug out of the dry Arizona ground into light, heat and motion in the deep depths of the Pacific is a marvel few have the opportunity to ponder at close range.

It occurs to me that an even grander marvel stands athwart the past hundred-or-so years of civilization. Foul ichor pumped from tarry slumber beneath barren sands or the deep heart of the oceans drive the pistons of industry. Energy is The Force: it surrounds us, penetrates us, it binds the economy together. Quite unlike almost any other commodity, the removal of well-functioning energy markets would annihilate production. Folks grasp this quite easily and therefore favor diversification, often invoking the metaphors of substance abuse (if you've never heard the term "addicted to oil", please tell me your secret, as I'm immensely jealous). People understand that OPEC has the whole world over a barrel ($84.57 for WTI Crude at the time of print), making for a very uneuvoluntary birthday for Alice.

But what of hydro-fracking? Noise and inflammable tap water seem to be the proximate complaints, though there may be reason to suspect that there's more to it than that. Extractive energy sources like coal, natural gas, oil and uranium have overtones of parasitism: Mother Earth suffers the human lamprey as she's sucked dry for the sake of air conditioning and sodium-arc lighting. Don't wind and solar seem more like a gift from nature? We don't even have to work for them? Just sit back passively and let the warm, life-giving rays of the sun nourish us as the brisk, friendly breeze charges a battery-powered transvelocipede (patent not yet pending). So-called sustainable energy sure feels like it should be more euvoluntary than big power conglomerates and their plans to set your drinking water ablaze.

Is it though? There's a sense that ownership of the means of production is more local. This, I am to assume, means more friendly, less prone to exploitation and non-anonymous. BATNA disparity improves too, though more by reducing the market cap of the production side than by increasing the sovereignty of the consumer.

I'm not entirely convinced that the drive for (the term "Green" bugs me because I can remember it from Alan Moore's turn on Swamp Thing in the late 80s. As far as I can tell, it's a term ripped off from a crazy genius comic book wizard who is venomously anti-mass market sloganeering, which is exactly what the modern environmental movement has morphed into) environmentally friendlier energy is wrapped up in a euvoluntary argument. I think it might be a sliver of it, but most of that enchilada is served on the arroz of Puritanical asceticism. Conspicuous consumption is unseemly, be it quail livers or kilowatts. This sentiment is present as the first tone of the recycling OM: reduce.

If that's true though, and if Earth Day is the modern High Holy Day, can any energy generation and transmission ever be euvoluntary? If sustainable energy is closer to religion than to rational economic consumption, is it possible to elicit moral sentiments on the topic without including aesthetics? Is it sacrilegious to mention the role of prices in determining the allocation of resources in such a context? Moreover, what does this imply for marginal energy consumers? Political elites able to put very heavy fingers on the scale have a loud voice (and an awkwardly mixed metaphor) when it comes to telling the poor what price they pay to fill their automobile or heat their homes. In an effort to appease Gaia, the powerful can easily demand obeisance from the meek. If public school indoctrination has any bite, it will be with their full acquiescence.

Perhaps it's hand-wringing over nothing, but I worry that in this circumstance, praying and preying are handmaidens of the same mistress.

Metta World Euvoluntary Exchange

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

 The First Amendment to the US Constitution provides incremental euvoluntarism over existing contemporary European institutions. In much of Europe, even today, the set of state-sanctioned religions tends to contain few enough elements that you can count them on your fingers and toes (apologies to our readers with phalangeal fusion, amputations, et al).