Machan's Archives: Instead of Zoning…What?

Tibor R. Machan

I have argued before why zoning laws are inconsistent with a free society’s principles, in particular with the principle of private property rights. Basically they amount to impositions by some people on others of conditions for using property that are the owner is authorized to determine. No one else has that right, however tempting and desirable it may appear to imagine otherwise.

But what about the perfectly honorable wish to have a nice neighborhood in which to live, work and play? How, besides by means of zoning ordinances, could people protect their neighborhoods?



Before answering this question it must be noted, quite emphatically, that zoning ordinances by no means achieve what their advocates claim justifies their use. Indeed, in many communities that have stringent zoning ordinances there are neighborhoods that are a mess, to put it mildly. Especially right where the zoning provisions change, say from commercial to residential use, the areas are usually in a deteriorating condition. That is where buildings are usually dilapidated, shabby. And it is usually those who lack political clout who must live there.



In more general terms, by no means is the institution of zoning laws a panacea. Just as with the welfare state in general, which simply shoves around the misery it aims to eliminate, zoning laws, too, are mostly an expression of special interest clout. A drive through any of the heavily zoned communities will demonstrate this right away.

In fact, the record of the institution of zoning as far as making areas of residential, commercial and recreational living orderly and pleasant for all is by no means a good one. Let us look at this briefly, without entering the ample scholarship that exists on that topic. (But anyone wishing to check for detailed studies can examine William A. Fishel’s works, The Economics of Zoning Laws : A Property Rights Approach to American Land Use Controls, Regulatory Takings : Law, Economics, and Politics, Do Growth Controls Matter? : A Review of Empirical Evidence on the Effectiveness and Efficiency of Local Government Land Use Regulation, The Economics of Zoning Laws : A Property Rights Approach to American Land Use Controls, and Land Economics : Private Markets Public Decisions, as well as Bernard H. Siegan’s seminal book, Land Use Without Zoning.)

For one, there is a city in the USA that has enjoyed zoning freedom and has worked pretty well while it lasted. It is Houston, Texas. No disaster, no catastrophe, no mess, no property devaluation, nada. Just a city where what zoning was supposed to achieve had been achieved without it, more peacefully, more though cooperation than through coercion.

Second, a little imagination and history should suffice to teach us all that it is better all around to strive to achieve goals without forcing people to accept what they would freely reject. And this applies as much to education or military service as it does not keeping their neighborhoods in good shape. Free men and women simply do better, on the whole, than do those who are regimented by their fellows, made to act as they do not choose to.

Third, what zoning aims for can easily be achieved through voluntary agreements among members of neighborhoods. Restrictive covenants work to this end wonderfully, provided those concerned make the effort to establish them. As with all things, the free approach always appears at first cumbersome – talking someone into a course of conduct takes more time than doing this by beating up the person. But in the end the result is much more rewarding – all kinds of political hostilities, vested interest battles, and politicking in the worst sense of that term can be avoided if agreements are reached peacefully, through mutual effort.

Of course, in most communities this is at best an ideal, but more likely a political fantasy, along lines that abolishing prohibition had been at one time and substituting a private for a public education system is now. But that does not make it any less feasible and right! So in the current dispute about whether this or that kind of zoning ordinance is needed for a community, it is vital that some voices keep announcing what is the truly best solution, after all.

What is needed, once all the infighting has shown itself the fruitless effort it really is, is the abolition of zoning and the institution of market based, voluntary agreements among members of neighborhoods, commercial establishments and so forth to achieve what these members want to achieve. There will, of course, be limits to what is possible – one cannot live in Shangri-La if one isn’t financially equipped to do so; one cannot live far in the woods if one’s budget provides for only an apartment in the middle of town. But within the limits that one must live with in all realms of ordinary life, the solutions reached via voluntary negotiations and bargaining are far superior to those acrimonious ones that are reached via the political process.

Will this be done tomorrow morning at 9 AM? No. But should we stress its desirability and real availability for any community? Yes.

How Not to Treat Ideas

Tibor R. Machan

The philosophical school I consider most sensible sees ideas as the means by which human beings gain understanding of reality. Ideas are what helps us navigate reality so we can live successfully. Which is why so much effort has been spent on developing, criticizing and analyzing ideas throughout human history, especially in the academy, not just in the sciences but in matters of public concern.

But in the modern age a good many thinkers have come to believe that ideas are actually expressions of passions or interests, brought about so as to promote the satisfaction of desires. Or, in other words, that they are simply ideology.

This attitude appeared to be what lay behind a question some journalists on TV were asking about Ron Paul. On a round table television program I was watching recently, several of journalists were discussing results from the various primaries and caucuses, and some of them asked, “What is Ron Paul after? What does he want? What is driving him?” This in part because, well, he isn’t very likely to win. And the answer that Ron Paul is actually interested in figuring things out and then teaching people something--for example about the US Constitution, about the Federal Reserve system, about the nature of money--just kept being overlooked. No, Paul has to have an agenda of some sort, like wanting to be a vice-presidential candidate, like getting appointed to some federal department, etc. Just advancing and defending certain ideas so as to promote understanding on the part of the electorate seems to be unfathomable to these journalists. There has to be an angle!

Here is one main source of the widespread cynicism about American politics. People look at candidates and office holders as always being out for something--power, wealth, fame, and the like. Wanting to be correct about political matters seems not to matter. Getting it right about the Fed or the US Constitution--that is, truth--is passe. Why?

There is also that related way of dealing with people’s opinions and ideas, namely, by explaining them away as having been caused by one’s upbringing. The often heard question, “Where is he or she coming from?” indicates this approach. When you hold that economic stimulus is folly or helpful, it doesn’t matter whether the idea is true; just explain it either linking it to the person’s special interest or background. Concern yourself with what put the idea in the mind. (Which implies, of course, that the answer to that question will also be treated as having been caused by someone’s background, history, or upbringing, ad infinitum!)

All of this may indicate why so many people in public life don’t really argue about the merits of ideas or positions on various issues but focus, instead, on the motivations and character of those advancing the ideas. And to undermine those ideas, then, will not require better ideas, sound criticism and so forth but, instead, the calling into question of the motivations and character of whoever defends them. Never mind if an idea has merit, ask, instead, what explains that someone holds it and is the motivation benign. Besmirching the thinker is what works, not criticizing what he or she thinks! So as to impugn Ron Paul’s or Mitt Romney’s or Newt Gingrich’s position, link it to some kind of questionable motive. He holds his foreign policy views because he has loyalties to certain foreign countries since his parents or associates were born there! He opposes the Federal Reserve Bank because he hates bankers who help his adversaries, not because the ideas are right and those who oppose them are, well, wrong.

I received an unsolicited email the other day that questioned President Obama’s loyalty to the United States of America, claiming, instead, that he is working for Kenya! I couldn’t resist replying that it doesn’t matter to me if he came from the moon or Mars, what matters is whether he has good ideas on public affairs. Immediately I got a reply saying well it should matter to me if I care about where this country is going.

This kind of reasoning bothers me not only because it commits the informal genetic fallacy, which questions ideas not because of their flaws but because of their origins, but also because I have been subject to similar dismissal of my own thinking: “You come from Communist Hungary, right? So obviously you would think this or that.”

Wrong.

Prudence versus Greed

Tibor R. Machan

Most people mean by greed an “excessive or rapacious desire, especially for wealth or possessions.” As to prudence, it is the quality of being cautious with regard to practical matters and especially in regard for one's own economic interests, being careful in the management of resources, heeding economy and being frugal.

Why is this of any interest? Because the sense of “prudent” as used to mean being economical, frugal is now being distorted by confusing it with being greedy. When Gordon Gekko declares greed to be good in Oliver Stone’s notorious movie, Wall Street--notorious since it managed to exacerbate the already hostile attitude toward business that sadly prevails in much of the world--he doesn’t differentiate between excessive or rapacious desire for stuff and the prudent management of one’s resources. They are lumped together.

And sadly some professional economists tend to agree. When I took my first economics course in the mid-60s at Claremont Men’s (now McKenna) College, my econ prof was University of Chicago PhD Procter Thomson who did use to tell his classes that “greed is good.” But it was said with a mischievous look in his eyes--he didn’t really mean to say that greed as understood as a vice or sin is good, only that the pursuit of one’s self interest, as argued by Adam Smith the father of modern economic science, is useful, enhances economic productivity.

Critics of the free market system have been capitalizing on the casual identification of prudence and greed, the sort that Professor Thomson and quite a few other economists continue to indulge in. That identification has a complex history. In a nutshell, there was a time when prudence counted as one of the most important human virtues, even a moral principle, meaning living carefully, attending to one’s life in a way that will be of benefit to oneself, enhance one’s human excellence. When some girls used to be named “Prudence,” they certainly weren’t meant to be declared greedy. Even the name of that major financial company The Prudential, isn’t meant to convey that those working there are rapaciously bent on acquiring riches. No, the idea is that original one, namely, that being prudent is taking good, proper care of oneself and of one’s clients’ funds.

But then in the 16th century, mostly at the hands of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, prudence was used not to much as a term for being careful but for being ambitious, even power hungry. The drive to gain power, wealth and such was taken by Hobbes and his followers to be innate in us, the engine that moved us forward, no different from how other biological imperatives push us to behave as we do. Prudence was thus changed from a virtue to a drive or motive, from a character trait and virtue to an inborn psychological disposition.

This is where we get the idea so many of my students repeat, “Everyone is selfish.” They just cannot help it! And thus there can be no credit or blame ascribed for being prudent--it is how we simply must be, how we are, as it were, hard wired.

But the evolution of ideas is rarely smooth and seamless, so a mixture emerged in time where many, especially in the social sciences, saw prudence as both a drive and an attitude, except it stopped being a praiseworthy one. Being selfish as a prudent person would be got replaced with being selfish as an avaricious or greedy person would be. Since the latter is, of course, widely taken to be a bad trait, its association with economic ambition served the critics of the free market system very nicely: they could now link plain old, innocent economic prudence with a vice! But since the term “prudence” didn’t easily fit this idea, given its honorable original meaning--”greed” became the term which then was used to smear economic self-interest.

So nowadays even those on Wall Street and elsewhere who are trying conscientiously to increase their and their clients’ wealth are dubbed greedy, even as it’s becoming evident to most folks that without their good works the economic system is going to tank.

Just imagine all the brokers, money managers, company presidents and chief financial officers resigning their posts and joining a monastery. That would really boost employment, wouldn’t it?

Machan's Archives: Genuine Military Defense Anyone? (updated)

Tibor R. Machan

As much as one may object to Iran's government’s efforts to build atomic weapons, the American government isn’t supposed to be some kind of meta-police that embarks upon restraining such governments! Certainly spending American taxpayers’ funds on conducting military actions against Iran would be going way beyond the proper military role of the American government, which is to protect its citizen’s freedom from domestic and foreign criminals.

It bears remembering here that however off course the American government has gone in its role in the country, the real role it has is to be a government strictly limited to the functions laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, which is to stand ready to defend the country when it is attacked or when there is a demonstrably clear and present danger that it will be--not might be--attacked. So the criteria by which one must judge its conduct, both domestic and international, is whether it amounts to such defense.

Sadly, of course, most politicians and bureaucrats, as well as their cheerleaders in the academy and media, don’t give a hoot about restraining the power of government. After all, the same rationale that serves to justify its relentless intervention in our lives at home is what is used to rationalize it abroad. (Does it occur to folks that despite some of the rhetoric of restraint associated with the political thought of President Obama, it is modern liberalism’s interventionism that removes all principled restraint and leads to the imperialist policies of which this Libyan expedition is a case in point? Obama is, after all, a self-professed pragmatist and that means rejecting all principles as mere ideology!)

I am talking, of course, from the position of someone who has always agreed with President George Washington’s warnings about foreign entanglements, made in his farewell address and one implicit in the basic thrust of the American political tradition of limited government. The limitation is not all that tough to grasp: it is self-defense, just as in the case of when people are justified to use force against each other, namely, when they have been attacked, when they encounter an aggressor. This does not include being deprived of someone else’s productive work or resources, including Iran’s oil. If my neighbor refuses to sell me his produce or labor, I have no right to attack him and try to force him to hand these to me because I want them very badly, even need them desperately. And if he arms himself and his family to the teeth in anticipation, justified or not, of being attacked by local gangs, that too is not cause for me to attack him.

Such is the proper standard of international military policy for a bona fide free society and whether that goes contrary to domestics intellectuals, the community of nations, the UN or whoever else sounds off about it, it makes no difference. None of that is going to make it right and, furthermore, one rotten consequence of it is that all the rhetorical opposition to international banditry is certainly going to sound mighty hallow!

Once a country’s government abandons the stance by which its use of force is kept to national defense and nothing else (however tempting it is to breach it), it has lost its moral authority as it criticizes other aggressors around the globe, including that of the Iranian or Syrian government against “its own people”. Rogue regimes everywhere, with their rulers aspiring to impose their will upon everyone, will be able to point to the USA and declare, correctly: “Look at the leaders of the free world, see how they butt into all manner of misconduct by their fellow governments, so clearly it must be permissible for us to act likewise when we disapprove of what others do!”

Just as the philosophy that demands restraining government domestically is the most radical and sound political idea--just compare it to all the imperialism throughout human history embarked upon by hundreds of regimes--so this insistence that governments keep to their oath of protecting the rights of their citizens is radical, sound and sadly neglected.

Having to Fund Immoral Policies

Tibor R. Machan

At the outset I am talking about what someone considers immoral, not what is objectively immoral. Nonetheless, millions are coerced by governments, backed by other millions, to work and pay for what they consider morally wrong. Is that right? Is it avoidable in a democracy?

Back during the Vietnam war a great many opponents of that disastrous policy wanted to withhold their taxes, or the portion of it that went to fund the war. They were mostly from the Left but that doesn’t matter. The point is that such people argued that it is unjust to make them do this. And there is something to this: why would it be OK to require something to contribute resources he or she has produced and owns to a policy deemed to be morally wrong?

Granted requiring someone to make contributions to anything is objectionable but isn’t it more so if the policy is objected to by the victim of such coercion on moral grounds? Suppose the sources of the moral objection is one’s religion. Wouldn’t that contradict the idea of freedom of religion? You are supposed to be free to choose what faith you accept and practice but then you are forced to give up portions of your life for some other faith! Isn’t that inconsistent? You are both free to choose as well as not free to choose!

Doesn’t democracy amount to such this kind of confusion? Well, not if it’s property limited, as limited government champions have insisted it should be. All this stuff about funding or not funding contraceptives would be off the table, not up for the vote.

Today we have President Obama and his minions insisting that forcing Catholics, their churches and such, provide contraceptives and the like to people who want it from them is just fine. But Roman Catholics consider contraceptives an instrument for evil, like pacifists might guns. Would it be OK to demand that pacifists hand out lethal weapons to people who want it from them?

I proposed that this is no different from forcing people to fund a war in which they do not believe, which they regard unjust. I wrote this in a comment at The New York Times on line where one can contribute comments to columnists’ views and where these comments can be further commented on by others. Well, my comment received a bunch of bizarre follow-up comments claiming that there is a world of difference between wanting to withhold support for a war and wanting to do the same for government distributing contraceptives, a policy some consider unjust. But, in fact, the former is simply a different instance of the latter but it’s exactly the same kind of thing.

It reminds me of when people who often embrace democracy whole hog but then when the vote goes against them, cry foul! But if the democratic method is accepted as a valid approach to settling disputed issue, one has no business protesting the outcome. It is rank duplicity, even hypocrisy.

But here is the rub: Mr. Obama and his ideological cohorts are pragmatists and what is so convenient about pragmatism is that you can insist on some policy here, but reject it there, embrace it one hour and then denounce it the next. Because, you see, at least the type of pragmatism that Mr. Obama has often stated is his philosophy rejects principles from the git go. Yes, there are sophisticated pragmatists who defend their unprincipled viewpoint on grounds that principles are really impossible! Principled thinking is mere ideology, not based on reality, so they hold, since reality is too chaotic, too illogical to yield sound principles that can be used in guiding conduct and criticism. But Mr. Obama hasn’t bothered to provide a defense of his unprincipled stand on a great variety of issues, like undeclared wars, deficit spending, abortion, etc.

But then what is there if reason is passe? What would political campaigns be if candidates could not look for inconsistencies in their opponents? Well, then they would be what they have become, shouting matches, throwing dirt at one another, name calling, besmirching and such, that’s what. Because once logic is abandoned, once consistency is ruled out as a criterion of admissible thought and discourse as proposed by pragmatists, we are back just a step away from the jungle where reason has no place and force rules. As that famous painting of Goya says, “the sleep of reason brings forth monsters.”

Machan’s Archives: Democracy versus Liberty

Tibor R. Machan

Over the last several decades of American political life the idea of liberty has taken a back seat to that of democracy. Liberty involves human beings governing themselves, being sovereign citizens, while democracy is a method by which decisions are reached within groups. In a just society it is liberty that’s primary; the entire point of law is to secure liberty for everyone, to make sure that the rights of individuals, to their lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness, are protected from any human agent bent on violating them.

Democracy at its best is but a byproduct of liberty. Because we are all supposed to be free to govern ourselves, whenever some issue of public policy faces the citizenry, all entitled to take part. Democratic government rests, in a free society, on the right of every individual to take whatever actions are needed to influence public policy. Because freedom or liberty is primary, the scope of public policy and, thus, democracy in a just society is strictly limited. The reason is that free men and women may not be intruded on even if a majority of their fellows would decide to do so. If someone is a free, which means a self-governing, person, then even the majority of one's fellows lack the authority to take over one's governance without one's consent. I cannot be otherwise unless there is prior agreement by all to accept such a process. The consent of the governed amounts to this and that is what the US Declaration of Independence means when it mentions that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.

In a just society no one loses his or her authority for self-government without giving it up as a matter of choice. No one gets to perform an operation on you, no matter how wise and competent, without your giving your consent, and the same is true, in a just system, about imposing duties and obligations on people. They must agree to this. If they do not, they aren't to be ordered about at all. That would be involuntary servitude!

The only apparent exception is when it comes to laws that protect everyone’s rights. One may indeed be ordered not to kill, rob, rape, burglarize, or assault another person, even if one fails to consent to this. And when government does the job of protecting individual rights, government may order one to abstain from all such aggressive actions. But that doesn't actually involve intruding on people, only protecting everyone from intrusions.

It is along these lines that the idea of limited government arises: government may only act to protect rights, to impose the laws that achieve that goal, nothing more. Again, as the Declaration of Independence notes, it is to secure our rights that governments are instituted, not for any other purpose. Of course, this idea of limited government hardly figures into considerations of public policy in the USA or elsewhere.

We have never actually confined government to this clearly limited, just purpose. It has always gone beyond that and today its scope is nearly totalitarian, the very opposite of being limited. But there is no doubt that even though liberty has been nearly forgotten as an ideal of just government in America as well as elsewhere, democracy does remain something of an operational ideal. In this way liberty has been curtailed tremendously, mainly to the minor sphere of everyone having a right to take part in public decision-making.

Whereas the original idea was that we are free in all realms and democracy concerns mainly who will administer a system of laws that are required to protect our liberty, now the idea is that democracy addresses everything in our lives and the only liberty we have left is to take part in the decision-making about whatever is taken to be a so called “public” matter. One way this is clearly evident is how many of the top universities in the USA construe public administration to be a topic having to do primarily with the way democracy works. Indeed, after the demise of the Soviet Union, even though the major issue should have been the salvation of individual liberty, the experts in academe who write and teach the rest of the world about public administration are nearly all focused on democracy, not on liberty.

For example, the courses at America’s premier public administration graduate school, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, are mainly focused on problems of democracy. At this institution nearly 40 percent of the students attending come from 75 foreign countries, many of them from those that used to be under Soviet rule, and what they focus on in nearly all their courses is democracy, not liberty. Assignments in these courses tend all to raise problems about implementing democratic governance and leave the issue of how individual liberty should be secured as practically irrelevant. Or, to put it more precisely, the liberty or human right that is of interest in most of these courses is the liberty to take part in democratic decision-making. (“Human rights” has come to refer in most of these course and their texts mainly to the right to vote and to take part in the political process!) Yes, of course, that is a bit of genuine liberty that many of the people of the world have never enjoyed, so for them it is a significant matter, to be sure. But it is clearly not the liberty that the Declaration of Independence mentions when it affirms that all of us are equal in having unalienable rights to our lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

The Declaration speaks of a very wide scope of individual liberty, while the premier public administration school of America teaches, at least by implication, that the only liberty of any importance is the liberty to take part in public policy determination. This, I submit, is a travesty. Once democracy is treated as the premier public value, with individual liberty cast to the side except as far as taking part in democratic decision-making, the scope of government is no longer limited in principle or practice.

Nearly anything can become a public policy issue, so long as some measure of democracy is involved in reaching decisions about it.

And that, in fact, turns out to be a serious threat to democracy itself. Because when democracy trumps liberty, democracy can destroy itself--the law could permit the democratically reached destruction of democracy itself! That is just what happened in the Weimar Republic, where a democratic election put Hitler in power and destroyed democracy. And check developments in our time in the Middle East!

If you ever wonder why it is that public forums, including the Sunday TV magazine programs, the Op Ed pages of most newspapers, the feature articles of most magazines do not discuss human liberty but fret mostly about democracy, this is the reason: the major educational institutions tend not to care about liberty at all and have substituted a very limited version of it, namely, democracy as their primary concern. Once that is accomplished, individual liberty becomes defenseless.

Indeed, democracy is just as capable of being totalitarian as is a dictatorship, only with democracy it seems less clearly unjust, given that this little bit of liberty is still in tact, namely, to take part in the vote.

Machan’s Archives: Thanks for the technology (updated)!

Tibor R. Machan

In 1972 I bought a Volvo P1800 off the Chevy used car lot in Santa Barbara, California. I owned that car for 20 years and am still sad to have had to sell it in 1992, after putting 250,000 miles on it and driving it back and forth over the USA about 17 times.

I recall this now because with all the praise heaped upon “green,” it is largely those in the field of practical science, technology, who have to endure a great deal of finger wagging. Yet, we should often extend warm thanks to the engineers who designed and produced our various technologies? I certainly did, silently but often, extend thanks to the engineers who designed my wonderful car and all sorts of gadgets that have made my life better since.

Today, instead of dissing scientists and technologists, I would like to thank the designers, engineers, and doctors. The latter, for example, have helped me regain the use of my eyes. And some are working hard to improve my back which has been operated on a few times but is still functioning pretty well, thanks to science and technology.

I often think about those people who invent the various useful gadgets we nearly take for granted these days – like the central air conditioning system in my house that makes it less of a chore for me to work at my computer, take good care of my house, and read the fine novels I love so much during the hot spells of our summers in Southern California. Or the central heat – which I rarely use because after all, I can put clothes on nearly endlessly, whereas even going about buck naked is no relief when the heat gets very high up there. I think, also, of the people who made the pain-relievers I and millions of others take when we have serious aches and pains, or those who make the supplementary vitamins or... well, you name it. Few among the elite commentators around the country appear to pay them heed other than to lament all the technology they have produced.

All you need to call up feelings of gratitude is to notice how one’s ordinary life is improved when one has the great variety of products available from the market place. Yes, sometimes I am overcome with a powerful feeling of gratitude and wish I actually knew more of those who make such things so I could thank them personally.

Moreover, I feel very protective of these folks when I hear various critics of modern technology. Today nearly all efforts to make things better for us – be it based in biology, chemistry, physics, electronics or what have you – tend to be lambasted by some high and mighty sounding Luddite. Indeed, I have resolved never to be complacent about such attacks, to rise to the defense of these folks who often simply go about the work diligently and competently but do not prepare well enough for being chided by the Luddites of the world.

Greens, in the main, and their kin across the globe tend to be thoughtlessly hostile to those who are devoted to improving our lives. Such critics give voice to an asceticism that no one who has ever had the benefit of microsurgery or ambulance transport could consider warranted.

Take as an example the folks at Oregon State University, who follow the ideas of "Simply Beautiful," a program developed by Sam Quick and Robert Flashman, whose motto is "To be content with what we have at this moment, to bloom where we are planted – this is the wisdom of gratitude, this is the very foundation of a simply beautiful life." They want everything to be simple again (as if things ever were simple). They need not preach to me their reactionary notions. This is like that time when a device was invited that restored hearing to some of those who are deaf and some outfit threw a fit about this, claiming that such an invention implies that there is something wrong with being deaf. What perversity!

Of course, we pay for these inventions and creations and those who design them mostly make a pretty decent living, so they do not go unrewarded. But few are actually thanked much. Nor are the middlemen who invest in their work and take financial risks with these designers, engineers, and inventors. They tend to be overlooked, yet they ought to be honored more often. (Now and then I think the Nobel Prize is misdirected to the pure scientists, who are having so much fun already, leaving the practical implementers less prominently acknowledged.)

There’s of course the great benefit produced by all those implements that enable us to keep in touch with parents, children, friends, colleagues and others by electronic means, by email, texting, cell phones (hands free and not), and the rest. (I personally manage to contact my new grandson via Skype and instant message with my three grown children on Google! Then there are my family members who live abroad and whom I used to have to wait for months to be in touch with, via a regular mail and an occasional very expensive phone call!)

Anyway, here is a toast to those who try to figure out ways to make our lives better for us in those more or less small ways by which someone like me, for example, can continue to read and write and drive about safely. Thank you all! The fact that everything can be abused or corrupted, isn’t their fault!