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If you don’t correctly identify the problem, you don’t stand much of a chance of solving it.

The problem of “sexual immorality” among teenagers is almost universally misdiagnosed, and the vast majority of solutions proposed for problems such as high rates of illegitimacy and STD’s miss the point entirely. While so-called “liberals” (who also tend to misdiagnose the problem and propose band-aids like handing out free condoms) stand accused of plotting to overturn thousands of years of tradition and unleash a Pandora’s box full of unintended consequences, conservatives tend not to recognize that an ideal of universal celibacy throughout the first half-dozen or more of our prime childbearing years is itself a radical innovation.

To get a better look at the problem, let’s review some numbers (from Table PF 1.5.b)

Fertility rates ages 15-19, all races, 1960: 89.1
Fertility rates ages 15-19, all races, 1990: 59.9
Fertility rates ages 15-19, all races, 1999: 49.6

Yes, that’s right, over a period of 40 years, we have managed to cut the so-called “teen birth rate” nearly in half.

Unfortunately, the rate of marriage among these people has fallen even faster, and the out-of-wedlock birth rate has risen substantially. Which suggests that the problem isn’t that our kids are having sex “too early” (at least by any reasonable historical standard), but that they’re getting married too late.

Which means that the ultimate source of our problem isn’t a corrupt popular culture, oversexualized entertainment, or anything along those lines. Nor is it insufficient sex education or inaccessibility of contraceptives, or anything along those lines. The ultimate source of our problem is that our children are growing up and getting educated too slowly. Three months out of every year of their childhoods is utterly wasted from an academic standpoint (for a grand total of three years – a 15 year old, instead of facing three more years of childhood, could already be in college, if not for that!), and they get a watered-down curriculum when their classes actually do meet – and the high school diploma that takes their entire childhood (and then some, by any reasonable standard) to get qualifies them for nothing that allows them to support middle-class families.

Now why is it that a nine year curriculum stretched out over 12 years and culminating in a nearly worthless diploma is seen as a fixed law of nature, while the reproductive drive is not? Why is an extra-long childhood non-negotiable, while we must adjust everything else in our society and our kids must put their lives on hold to accomodate it? In short, why should our teenagers be children rather than adults, and why do we think that children can ever safely be left in posession of working reproductive organs?

Those who worried that the Terri Schiavo case presaged a growing euthanasia, and even forced-euthenasia, movement in this country are starting to sound all too reasonable these days.

While Terri’s guardian argued, persuasively it seems, that Terri herself didn’t want to live in the condition that she was living in, we’re seeing cases where caregivers are pressing to withdraw life support over the objections of patients and their guardians.

Am I about to blast Bush for signing a law allowing hospitals to deny “futile care” to patients? Not really, although (yet again) I sincerely wish that those who excoriate him for doing so, and call the entire Republican party a bunch of hypocrites over the issue, were right about his actions and their purpose and effect. It makes perfect sense to me for someone to favor a stricter standard for deciding that someone wants to be left to die on the one hand and favor more limited provision of medical care at taxpayer expense on the other hand.

But the really frightening thing is that, under this law, it appears that the hospitals taking advantage of this law so far aren’t doing so for financial reasons. Now while everyone seems to think that money and health care being in any way related is the work of the Devil, I say that the only reason that a hospital should ever overrule a patient and deny him treatment is because they aren’t being paid for it.

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The so-called “natural world” is characterized, from a civilized person’s point of view, by a distressing lack of metal and energy, and by an abundance of lifeforms that like to gobble up everything we find useful apart from metal and high-octane fuel.

This means, among other things, that modern civilization, which features lots of metal and really potent fuel and no microbes that like to have either of them for breakfast, looks really weird to creatures evolved in the environment we like to call “nature”. Some such creatures, while giving the appearance of being intelligent, conclude from this that modern civilization is a desecration of nature and that nature is a more desirable environment for human beings.

But the “natural world” is lacking in metal and high-octane fuel not because that’s the way God or Gaia or Whoever intended, but because these things were buried deep underground and out of reach while the denizens of the natural world were evolving. The real starting point of civilizational advance wasn’t the invention of the wheel, or of fire, or even agriculture. Civilization couldn’t really take off until our ancestors learned how to dig really deep holes and find all that buried treasure.

If lots of metal and lots of energy had been available at the surface for the last five billion years, not only would people think of them as “natural”, but all life on Earth would be adapted to use them “naturally”. Every animal would have a metal skeleton and a metal shell. Horses would be able to run at a hundred miles per hour or more, and birds would rival our jet planes in performance. Burning wood would yield as much power as burning oil – in fact, plants would synthesize petroleum or coal or something similarly potent rather than starches and sugars, and animals (including ourselves) and microbes would metabolize this high-octane fuel. Leave a lump of coal laying around, and it would rot like a corpse as microbes gobbled it up, and a cup of oil (which would be nice and tasty to us) would spoil like milk.

Nervous systems would tend to use wires, lending all animals (including ourselves) lightning-fast reflexes. Animals would tend to use some of that abundant energy and metal for offense and defense – projectile weapons and explosives might be seen in place of horns and teeth, and a nature hike might look like what we think of as a war zone.

Savages would have many of the resources we do. They’d have fast horses, metal homes and metal tools; they’d probably have explosives and other nasty weapons, and so on. Unfortunately, they’d also have far more powerful predators than we do, they’d have microbes, worms, and insects eating up whatever fuel they tried to stash along with the walls of their homes, and they’d be constantly at war with other savages using similarly potent weapons. A “classical” civilization might be much like ours, with lots of energy and lots of metal and lots of interesting gizmos that are relatively easy to make (particularly with “manual laborers” doing work and building things at speeds rivaling our factories – of course that includes slaves, which would still be profitable to keep and feed at this point) and not nearly as much war. They wouldn’t bother with steam engines or internal combustion engines – they’d keep using animal power (those hundred-mile-per-hour horses, for instance) until they figured out how to dig up uranium and make nuclear reactors, at which point they’d build a “modern” civilization with homes of depleted uranium, supersonic jet planes in everyone’s garage, tools and fuel that didn’t rot, predators and most other animals no longer even a minor nuisance to most people, animals in general only kept around if they can be eaten or be accepted as companions/surrogate children/etc., and plenty of spacecraft, factories and machines far more productive than anything we have now and easily driving slaveowners into bankruptcy and eliminating that peculiar institution, and some apparently intelligent members of the species would complain about what a “desecration” all this was and how the race was sadly no longer in harmony with Nature.

What’s the point of all this speculation? First, to poke some holes in the theory that “nature” as we know it is something sacred, rather than a collection of lifeforms that happened to evolve in a low energy and low metal environment. Second, to point out that any kind of modern civilization must use a much better energy source than is available on the surface in order to live significantly better than animals or savages, who would have been using any good local source of energy they didn’t have to dig for since prehistoric times. If Mr. Kunstler is right about the global oil supply, we’ll have to switch to something else that is equally out of harmony with nature, or else return to a more primitive (i.e., nasty, brutish, and short) mode of existence. Adapting to a low-energy existence, like Mr. Kunstler suggests we do, means given up the noble dreams of rising from the jungle to the stars, and makes a mockery of all the sacrifices our ancestors made to further the realization of those dreams and to protect the laws, institutions, and societies that made it possible. Nuclear power may be scary, but so is coal mining, and doubly so is a world where most people rarely venture more than a few dozen miles from home (and have no means of escape from the place they were born), slavery is profitable, and a farmer working a low-productivity, labor intensive farm can only feed a handful of people instead of fifty or more (which means lots more farmers doing lots more manual labor). That’s the kind of world that needs to be desecrated as thoroughly as possible.

In the 3/3/2005 edition of USA Today (sorry, no link), we see an interesting statement: “For the past quarter-century, the American Medical Association and other industry groups have predicted a glut of doctors and worked to limit the number of new physicians.” Further down, the story notes “Congress controls the supply of physicians by how much federal funding it provides for medical residencies – the graduate training required of all doctors”.

The story goes on to deliver the shocking news that the prediction of a doctor glut wasn’t quite accurate, and that thanks to that work to limit the number of new physicians, we’ve got a shortage now.

Jesus, didn’t these guys learn anything from the failure of the Soviet Union? Those Five Year Plans didn’t work. You can’t predict with any accuracy the total amount of anything that the whole country’s going to need.

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone said that health care was too important to leave up to the free market. That makes about as much sense as saying that passenger airline flights are too important to leave up to Bernoulli’s Principle. The alleged importance of health care isn’t going to make bureaucratic controls on the supply of doctors work any better than bureaucratic controls on the supply of steel, nor is it going to magically endow Congressmen or bureaucrats with the superhuman intelligence needed to get a better answer than millions of people acting on undistorted price signals would arrive at.

And remember when you find your medical bills going up, and your wait to see a doctor gets longer, that your government took deliberate action to reduce the number of doctors as part of its ongoing effort to protect you from the cruel free market. Be sure to show your appreciation next election day.

I’ve been an amateur student of history over the last few years, and most of my historical reading has been an effort to find the answer to one question:

How in the Hell did we get into this mess?

It’s tempting to look for a powerful villain, such as Roosevelt, Wilson, or TR, and lay the blame on him, and indeed these men were the immediate cause of a lot of damage. But that’s not the whole story. They were as much a symptom as a cause – millions of people voted for them, knowing a great deal about what they were up to. Did one person, or a small group of people, manipulate them into doing that, and continuing to do that for a hundred years straight? Doesn’t seem likely to me.

How about the establishment of the FCC, nationalizing the airwaves and enabling the government to weasel its way out of the First Amendment, pick and choose the stations allowed on the air, and impose content restrictions on them? Much of the damage was already done by this point, although it may have helped perpetuate attitudes hostile to individual liberty to the present day.

If you argue for individual economic liberty long enough, you’ll find an interesting general pattern. Once you establish that liberty works, and refute all of the opposition’s arguments in favor of socialism, the opposition will fall back on the same argument – violence. They’ll tell you that letting some people get too wealthy will cause “social unrest”; i.e., the “masses” will become enraged and kill people and destroy property. They’ll tell you that you’ll live with socialism or the “masses” will string you and your plutocrat friends up from the nearest lamppost. They’ll even threaten you with the prospect that those “masses” will overthrow the government and completely destroy society rather than let people get too wealthy.

(And all the while, they’ll insist that these “masses” are the good guys!)

The sad fact is that, for the last century or so, the opponents of economic liberty have been willing to use or threaten violence to get their way, and we generally haven’t. We’ve been trying to use appeasement instead. When labor unions used threats, assault, and vandalism to scare off competitors and extort money from their customers, government (with our acquiescence) generally responded by giving them most of what they want. To this day, even those who deplore FDR’s economic policies will insist that he needed to give the socialists practically everything they were demanding lest those socialists stage a revolution.

So far, our only answer to these thugs has been along the lines of “we’re feeding you, you idiots! What the Hell are you doing?”. And, indeed, the opposition does generally limit its appetite for loot and power sufficiently to keep Atlas at his post, at least so far. But there’s an awful lot they can take from us without bringing civilization crashing down on their heads, and pointing out that they’ll starve right along with us if they don’t let us do any work and profit from it isn’t sufficient to neutralize their threats to riot if we don’t play ball. We give into their demands again and again, and they slow down enough to let society keep running and even advancing here and there, but our dreams of colonizing the Solar System and producing, buying, and selling miracle after miracle in every industry the way everyone once thought we’d be doing just fade away, and as long as the refrigerator is full, the TV keeps working, and us plutocrats are put in our place, they don’t care. The best of us go on producing miracles when we can, and we all quietly accept the time we had to waste in their schools, the time we go on wasting complying with their pointless rules and regulations, and the money that they tax away from us for all sorts of useless purposes, and they rest secure in the knowledge that we value our property and our civilization enough that we won’t quit, disappear, or stage our own revolution as long as they stick with the gradual approach. They’re willing to play chicken, because they’ve been winning for more than a century, and our appeasements have only whetted their appetites for more concessions.

And, spooked by the “social unrest” boogeyman, we keep voting for the sacrifices that they claim will appease the “masses.”

So what do we do now? I think we should call their bluff. If those murderous “masses” ever existed, I’m willing to bet that they’re long gone. Our friends on the left have started noticing this – they’re claiming that we’re tricking the masses into abandoning the righteous retribution that they ought to be plotting against us by feeding them false hopes that they, too, can one day become plutocrats. (And never mind that we’ve been delivering on those “false hopes” for centuries – they’re more than willing to steal the credit for that.) They’re screaming as loud as they can about the most trivial cuts and modifications to their beloved laws and programs in the hopes that Bush and the rest of us will be scared away and they won’t have to reveal their paltry hand. I only wish that our Republican leadership was 1/10 as “arch-conservative” as they’ve been hysterically screeching about, because I think now’s the best opportunity we’ve had in ages to repeal their laws and dare them to put up or shut up.