I can’t believe it!

What?

We had it locked up. Mitch did his number on Merrick Garland, Grassley was right there doing his “quick hearing” bit, the Boss was keeping his nose clean, and everything was set for you to be confirmed. I even had your wife find an “old family bible” in the bookcase. Then this bitch suddenly shows up from nowhere. After 36 years. Says you tried to rape her at a drinking party in high school. 36 years ago! Can you believe to what depths Democrats will sink to try to deny the Boss his nominees? It boggles the mind.

What can I say? Only that I’m not the same person I was 36 years ago.

Don’t ever say that! That’s tantamount to admitting you did it.

Well, I very possibly did/ We were a pretty rowdy bunch in those days. There were many evenings I no longer recall. A lot of that time is lost in an alcoholic haze.

I’m telling you to never say that! What do you mean, “possibly”?

Well, I don’t remember this lady in particular, but I do remember that I was pretty randy in my student days. And pretty soused a lot of the time. We concentrated on staying soused those years, all of us. Something like she describes might very well have happened. All I can do at this point is apologize and hope she can forgive.

Are you completely nuts? You think that will fly in these days of MeToo? There’s no way. These hyperventilating crones want blood. They want sacrificial victims. They want trophies — severed heads on pikes. You see what they’re doing to the Cosbys and Moonves. Those guys were big. I mean BIG! And they’re getting clobbered in spite of their power. The witches will have no problem with you. You don’t even have a Neilsen rating — no name recognition outside your little legal world — essentially no allies. You’re a sitting duck.

Well, what do you suggest I do?

I’m not suggesting, my friend. I am dictating. This is serious business. If you want the job you play it my way, word for word, exactly as I say :

1) You didn’t do it.

2) You have no recollection of any drinking parties, you were in your room praying and doing your homework.

3) This woman is a publicity hound. She is angling for her own reality show on TV. She’s going to write a book. She is being financed by political troublemakers. Secret Deep Staters.

4) There are no witnesses. It’s “she said, he said” all the way, and he will always win those because most judges are men.

But what about the lady herself? What if she’s telling the truth? What if I really tried to rape her and scarred her for life?

Believe me, she’s no lady. She’s a plant dragged out by Schumer and Pelosi to gum up the works.

How do you know that? I read that she’s a respected university teacher with a PhD and an impressive résumé and a nice family.

Of course you did. That’s the standard tactic of the fake media. They love to create a fight. If everything is going like clockwork you don’t hear a peep from them. The minute there’s the slightest hitch they’re all over you, like leeches. Enemies of the people.

Enemies of which people? The women who say they were wronged? The grown-up little boys and girls who were once the playthings of priests and the moguls?

What are you, some kind of socialist? You and I know they don’t matter a shit. What matters is that we Republicans stay in office forever so nobody finds out what else we are doing. Hasn’t the Boss’s success made that clear to your picky little legal mind?

No. It hasn’t. I am more concerned with my conscience. I believe I am a nice person today, but I admit that I may not always have been. I will be dead some day, and I will be dead a long time. I want my children and my wife to able to say I played it straight. I also want to sleep nights for the rest of my allotted life.

You’ll sleep nights, alright. Back in the second tier, where the goody-goody guys go. And to think of the opportunity you had — to wear the black robe for the rest of your life and have everyone look up to you …

Like they do to Clarence Thomas?

He’s in, isn’t he? And you’re out. And he’ll stay in, liar that he was. And we’re in. And if you stick to your stupid Boy Scout act, you’re out. You’ll never get in.

Then so be it. I have to live with me.

It was Sol Wachtler, Chief Judge of New York State, reflecting on the power of impersonal bureaucracy over the individual, who said that “district attorneys could get grand juries to indict a ham sandwich”.

You, sir, are the spiritual leader of an evangelical church whose members I understand number in the millions?

I am.

May I ask its name?

You may ask, but I’m not going to answer you on TV. We’re a religious organization, and the IRS has rules about advertising. We can’t afford to lose our tax-free status.

But I would recognize the name?

For sure.

And you are here to discuss with me the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to be a justice of the Supreme Court?

It’s my pleasure.

What, then, briefly, is your position on this nominee?

I have none.

What do you mean? I have read that your church is mounting a campaign to push his appointment through as quickly as possible. And you just said …

I just said I have no position on the gentleman himself. We are determined to get him approved, but that doesn’t mean we have any opinion about him as a person. We have essentially no information about him. What he represents to us is a vote to repeal Roe v. Wade, and that’s our only goal.

You mean that literally? If it should turn out that he did what Dr. Blasey Ford accuses him of, that he had so little consideration for another person’s well-being or pleading for mercy, that would have no effect on your position?

Correct. This is not about Dr. Ford, or about Judge Kavanaugh; it’s about the babies. Those poor helpless victims of a misbegotten law passed by Godless Democrats when they were in the majority.

And the Republicans who voted with them out of conviction, or for whatever other reasons.

Outnumbered and forced to surrender, after a valiant fight.

May I ask whether these are the same babies for whose welfare you will instantly wash your hands of responsibility once they have emerged from the womb by denying support to single mothers unable to find a job or hold one in the face of nagging requirements that they present themselves at various enforcement agencies at times when their employers need them? Are they the same babies who will then grow up in dangerous poverty-stricken neighborhoods where they will learn to be crooks and worse in order to survive?

That will be their choice, not ours. Every soul is responsible for its own conduct. The rules are the same for everyone, rich or poor. We have only to follow them to be accepted by Jesus.

And do you think Jesus is happy to see you working with a protégé of a man who is busy piling up government debt in order to give his buddies larger mansions and longer yachts — debt that these same children will eventually have to find a way to pay if they don’t get blown up first?

I think that’s a contentious statement, not a question. I would have to attribute your attitude to the Deep State conspiracy that has been resisting this presidency since its inception. What has Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination got to do with tax cuts? We have no idea what his opinions are about tax cuts. Nobody has asked him.

Oh, yes, they have. But his handlers have refused to make the answers public. They have chosen to keep a seal on thousands, maybe millions of pages of opinions and speeches that are supposed to be on the public record, having been commissioned and paid for by taxpayers. You don’t seem to be concerned about that.

I told you, it’s simple. It’s entirely about the babies. The fetuses, to be more precise. A guaranteed vote against Roe v. Wade on the court, to be exactly precise.

You mean that Judge Kavanaugh could be Jack the Ripper himself and that would make no difference? And Dr. Blasey Ford’s years of suffering count for nothing in the final accounting?

Correct. You have finally understood.

They met in college in 1942 — the second year of WW2 for America — where they were taking a course in celestial navigation as a hedge against being drafted into the army. That turned out to be a bummer when radar made sextants and Bowditch tables obsolete. They were drafted. Into the Army, despite their special skills. They served as grunts. They watched in horror as the world tore itself apart leading up to D-Day, but they hoped for better days to come. They watched in 1945 as the West managed to get its act together with the Marshall Plan and afterwards tore itself apart again in the Cold War. Thanks to the GI Bill, they went back and finished up their degrees, as Astronomy majors. They became post-docs, then associate professors, and finally got their PhDs and got steady jobs at the same mountain top observatory, supported by the same government grant. They watched as Russia went down the tubes, and they hoped that a less ideologically motivated and more realistic Russia would be better off once and less difficult once Gorbachev pulled the plug. They were, of course, disappointed

“Apparently we humans don’t think straight with no enemy to unite us,” concluded Professor Rashid.

“Seems so,” replied Professor Doberstein.

“What if we,” said Professor Rashid, “given the prestige conferred by our PhDs, were able to create one?”

“Create one? We two? Are you crazy?” said Professor Doberstein. “How would we do that?”

“Well, nobody off-campus thinks about astronomy any more. They think it’s about horoscopes. The real thing — all that endless vastness, our total insignificance — is too scary. Mind-boggling. There are no prizes or 20% returns on your money. You don’t get to sign autographs or create sneakers for million-dollar contracts. There are no stars with cleavages getting pulsars named after them. That means that any cockamamie story we could come up with will be swallowed whole provided we keep our beards and our job titles and our dignity.”

“Distinguished scientists? That has a nice ring to it. We could try”

*

Which is how the Great Terrestrial Union got off the ground. Using their observatory positions and their lack of any known political connections, reputations as credentials they called a press conference and announced that they had lately detected signs of alien activity in our solar system. In fact, very close to our orbit. Mysterious radia2tion that was apparently being modulated by something or someone to send some sort of messages. This much they had established by the presence of non-random patterns. Definitely beyond the possibility of accidental occurrence, but offering no clue as to what the messages might be. Their best efforts had so far failed to decode them, but anyone could tune in on TV and listen to the beeps and hear the patterns for themselves. (The two investigators said they had found that the mysterious strangers were using as carriers gravity waves, whose origins were poorly understood.)

The initial public reaction was disbelief, followed in due course by the usual cycle of denial, followed by worry, followed by fear, followed by panic, followed by extravagant muscle flexing. Evangelicals saw the first signs of Armageddon. Politicians feared the disruption of their hard-won seniorities and connections and threats to their post retirement corporate board directorships. Generals and admirals saw both their pride and their pensions deflated, their influence weakened, and their medals devalued. Jihadists saw Allah’s glorious revenge in the offing in a fiery cataclysm that would soon consume both non-believers and believers alike and transport the Chosen directly to Paradise. Jews knew that it would somehow soon be discovered that it was all their fault. Dealmakers of all kinds tried desperately to find a way to make first contact to gain an advantage and get exclusive rights before anyone else could horn in.

But, surprisingly quickly, rationality asserted itself.

If there really were outsiders observing us and discussing their observations among themselves, certain things were indisputable:

1. They were obviously intelligent and technically advanced to have been able to travel into our corner of space in the first place.

2. Having come so far they must have some sort of plan for whether they intended to approach us as colonists, marauders, or potential friends.

3. They would have to make the first move, since they presumably knew how and we hadn’t figured out how to talk to them.

These considerations led to

4. We had better get prepared.

There was obviously no way to know whether the aliens’ intentions were friendly or warlike, so we needed to be prepared either way. If we guessed wrong, the consequences would be irreversible. If we spread a welcome mat and it turned out we had surrendered to alien predators without a fight, that would be one kind of disaster. If we attempted to mount a defense, and refused a hand of friendship that was possibly being offered, that would be another, but equal disaster.

One things was clear : walls, missile shields, suicide vests, jacked-up border patrols, tightened immigration laws and indeed national borders themselves, were not likely to be of any use. What was needed was international consultation on a coordinated worldwide strategy. That would require rounding up people capable of the best thinking we could muster.

So we identified and enlisted our best and brightest brains in devising a response, from whatever country or race or skin-color they might come. In a truly united UN this time, not an over-hyped overstuffed and overpaid debating society, but a true assembly of top minds and skills with a definite goal and a deadline (a short one, since no one knew how quickly the showdown might come).

To everyone’s amazement, after a brief period of wheel spinning and xenophobic bloviation, serious negotiations actually began. With a series of well timed nudges from the two astronomers to a suddenly fawning audience, as they became gurus, the pace quickened. There was no other place for the conferees to turn for information. As gurus they issued their bulletins in parsimonious dribbles calculated to keep cooperation at a maximum and controversy at a minimum. The world painfully raised itself by its bootstraps and finally modernized the single functional body that had half-heartedly kept everyone’s eye on the ball on 45th Street for seven decades. There was no further clarification of the threat, but neither was there any bickering over who understood the threat better. The one big thing drew them all together in the fox’s den and left the nitpicking hedgehogs outside.

A quick-response council was established, with a small rotating executive membership, with authority to react immediately without further consultation. Orbital surveillance was instituted so that every inch of our globe’s surface was soon being watched 24/7. Missiles were made omni-directional so that nuclear warheads could be launched at any target anywhere, either terrestrial or in space. Logistic plans were put in place so that emergency supplies could be distributed anywhere they were needed on a moment’s notice. Democrats and Republicans, Sunnis and Shi’ias, Buddhists and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians, Han and Uigurs put their differences aside. Everyone was taught to recognize supposed danger signs. People were well fed and had their physical and mental weaknesses attended to so as to ensure their ability to resist when they should be called upon. They were educated and encouraged to feel self-sufficient and self-confident in case they had to become resistance guerillas overnight. Everything took second place to the defense of our little blue planet, whose essential frailty we suddenly realized. And all this was accomplished without the usual bickering over whose country or whose district would get the plum installations, or whose politicians or insiders would get how much of a cut of every expenditure. It was amazing how effective the organizing was when everybody’s shoulder was put to the same wheel.

*

Now, it was twenty years on, and still no sign of aliens, and here sat the two astronomers in the chill night air inside their open dome, letting the flickering computers do the job of keeping the mirror fixed on its pointer star, and debated.

“We can’t keep this up indefinitely, you know.”

“True. Eventually the truth will out.”

“Question is, do we do the right thing by letting it happen without explaining ourselves — do we just die without further comment — or do we reveal the truth, and hope humanity has learned a lesson from its enforced unity?”

“Either way, we’ll be villains.”

“Which doesn’t matter. We’ll be dead.”

“Well, I admit to a twinge of pride. It would make me feel better to know we got some credit.”

“We could leave a message in a bottle.”

“Very funny. But if we could, what would the message be? See how easy it was, once you thought you had a common enemy, or Now that you have the GTU in place, don’t be stupid and lose it? Wouldn’t everybody just be furious at having been duped?

“And if we simply die without telling our story, and little by little the world discovers it has been tricked? Would that be any better?”

“Can’t we somehow leave things a permanent mystery — so no one will never be sure about these ‘aliens’?”

“Doubtful. The gravity wave shtick is too simple. Some smart grad student will figure it out eventually.”

“So which way has a better chance of making the GTU — and the Earth
— permanent?”

“You tell me.”

“I think it’s better that we simply die and leave the problem for someone else. I am nervous about this playing God bit, anyway. Too much responsibility.”

“But if we have played it this far, we should do whatever we can to make it stick.”

“How?”

“I say send a message. We have now deciphered the code. The word is that ‘they’ have perceived no evil intent from us, and they will therefore go back home and leave us alone, and maybe come back in a few centuries to see how we’re doing. If we’ve been good, they’ll leave us alone for another while.”

“Like the Twelfth Imam, or Jesus?”

“Right. It’s worked for their believers.”

*

At that moment, there was a whirring sound outside the dome An odd-shaped vehicle appeared. Two post docs in the lab next door couldn’t agree later what it looked like, except that it didn’t look like anything they had ever seen before. The night porter said that Rashid and Doberstein simply walked out of the dome on their own, as if in a trance, their arms stretched out in front of them like sleepwalkers, a door in the bottom of the vehicle opened showing a gleam of blue-green light inside, the door closed again, and the craft simply disappeared. Just vanished. The whirring sound stopped.

We haven’t blown ourselves up yet, and no other alien sightings have yet been reported, so there’s hope.

Class, we are here to discuss two specialized subfields of what has been called the dismal science. They are called What the Traffic Will Bear and The Invisible Hand. They are the two main pillars of capitalist markets. Both have to do with the art of pricing. Prices are matters of intense focus for both the winners and losers in a capitalist system. The winners (the sellers) fight to set them as high as possible without provoking purchaser rebellion. The losers (the buyers) struggle to find weapons to resist the predatory instincts of the winners. Economics textbook writers and media pundits make a satisfying living arguing the merits and demerits of each approach. Since no method of reconciling their diametrically opposed aims seems so far have been uncovered, I will feel free to here throw in my two cents. If you would rather be reading the sports pages, I bear you no ill will. See you again another time. Ave!

Now that we are alone together, dear reader, I ask you whether you really believe in the Invisible Hand? Adam Smith maintained that a free market would always ultimately arrive at fair prices by threatening an over-pricer with undercutting by a competitor. This assumed that the consumer had freedom to choose among the market’s offerings, and that he would choose rationally, based on a balance between a good’s value to him and his ability to pay.

Neat idea, except where the buyer has no choice because of unavoidable need and monopoly control of supply — utility companies, transportation and communication networks, health care for just three examples. If my local gas and electric company doubles its rates I have no power to resist (pun intended). There is not a competing electric company with a Hoover Dam around the corner ready to offer me a better deal. So, unless my political representatives want to be tossed out on their ears by irate consumers, they will have to see to it that government steps in and controls electricity prices. Cries of “socialism!” will not be heard when it comes to guaranteeing light, heat, and refrigeration for everyone. (Why does this not seem to be true of health care? I guess when the lights go out, we all know we are in the dark, but when the doctor says “We’re not sure, but let’s try…” we tend to hope we may be the exceptional case that cures itself. But that’s a subject for another time. Back to more tractable areas of investigation.)

“What the traffic will bear” then is seen, in the context of what we call utilities, as an unworkable proposition when it comes to “essential” goods and services. Few pundits have any problem with that. The problems come when we start trying to figure out which segments of the market are entitled to the label essential. Education? Railroads? Telephone companies? Gasoline? Is there a moral component? Where does homelessness come in, for instance?

Then the step after that — honesty in advertising? Big Tobacco? Big Pharma? Big Soft Drink? Big Agriculture masquerading as clusters of Little Houses on the Prairie? If, despite the NIH’s warnings that sugar is rotting my teeth and giving me “feel-good” calories without any nutrition benefit and will eventually cost me and my fellow taxpayers a fortune for my dental and diabetes care, I persist in saying that my satisfaction at this moment over this cone of pink cotton candy is more precious to me than protecting against all these future probabilities, what should my government’s response be? I have made my personal judgment on “what the traffic will bear”. I have made my choice. I have declared myself willing to put up with all the duplicity and hypocrisy in return for a good taste in my mouth right now. As a good citizen have I a moral right to do that?

So the invisible hand has aces up its sleeve, put there by crooks; and lobbyists and “compassionate conservatives”. Which is where we are now. The debates, the lobbying, and the shameless lying continue, providing a good living for amoral lawyers but poor prospects for reform.

But there’s a deeper level, at which “what the traffic will bear” becomes a clear and immediate danger, requiring intervention. We have been treated recently to one example in the form of a would-be Big Pharma mogul who discovered a loophole through which he was able to worm his way by buying a company that made a valuable generic drug at $13 a pill. He then arbitrarily raised the price to $750. The patients who relied on this drug found no “invisible hand” competitors at hand (pun again intended), since they (the chronically sick patients) were few in number and unattractive as a market to anyone who might consider stepping in. Here we encounter the moral component. Should government regulators intervene based on humanitarian considerations? And if so, how?

I don’t know how we should be dealing with these questions. What I know is that we shouldn’t be denying them. They will no more solve themselves than global warming will suddenly reverse itself. Adam Smith was wrong. Once the market develops beyond the local flea market on Saturday afternoons the equation changes. When the market is no longer local, Amazon cannot be left to call the shots. We need to turn to that arch-villain, Regulation. Even the word is ugly. The reality is uglier still because — at least in the ostensibly democratic countries of the West — it requires that most difficult of all political actions : compromise. (The Russians and the Chinese, who believe that the solution is a central authority operating as a benevolent patriarchy, and who have converted the invisible hand into the pickpocket hand — distributing taxpayer money to private entrepreneurs — are finding that it doesn’t work any better than it did in some of its previous incarnations such as the Soviets’ NEP and successive Five-Year Plans and the Chinese Great Leap Forward.)

As much as the Koch Brothers might believe in reliance on American paternalism, we — except for Ted Cruz and Donald Trumpf — don’t yet seem to be so sanguine. The difficulty is that we have forgotten that compromise is a necessity for a functioning government.

Government is regulation, whether you find the word ugly or not, or choose to call it by some other name. Lack of regulation is anarchy. Eliminating regulation is just giving yourself (and your competitors) a free hand to cheat.

The only real questions are two : (1) what prices require regulation and to what degree, and (2) to which official authorities do we entrust the job? Just as we are reluctant to admit that “tax and spend” is no more than a simple description of government itself, we have a collective aversion to admitting that “regulation” is also an essential function of effective government.

The argument that weakening government regulation “gives free reign to innovators” is sophistry. It is like seeking Wall Street’s praises by firing half your workers. You will have just doubled your numbers for productivity and made your stockholders temporarily happy, but you will have also just destroyed your company’s future. Reducing taxes or cutting government spending is the same Potemkin pothole. It means weakening an organization already too broke to meet its existing commitments, which, not incidentally, include providing your “private” business with its supporting infrastructure, such as roads and a communication network, reliable legal protection, and a secure safety net for your workers. We Americans are rich. Especially the lucky few at the top. There is no excuse for our one percenters to be unwilling to reach out a hand to the ninety-nine percent that could use varying degrees of help. Or to the “wretched refuse” of the refugee world.

If we believe that this nation was truly founded “under God”, as we say we do, we should accept that we have an obligation to at least try to uphold His major principles. His hand may be invisible, and His motives may not always be entirely clear, but His motto is surely not “what the traffic will bear.”