社会、权力与经济

I. Two Ways to Answer the Same Hunger

In many cities, the same question is being asked in very different ways:

If a society is structured in a way that leaves people hungry while food is thrown away, what counts as a moral response?

One answer says: steal. If the system itself is based on exploitation, then taking from large corporations—especially when they discard surplus goods anyway—can be framed as a small act of justice. Under this view, shoplifting from big-box stores or supermarket chains becomes a kind of micro-reparation: a way of clawing back value from an economic order that was rigged from the start.

Another answer says: build parallel systems. Instead of sneaking goods past the scanner, ordinary workers and volunteers quietly organize an alternative supply chain: surplus food is reclaimed with permission, rerouted into a mutual-aid network, and distributed for free from a folding table in the middle of the city. No questions asked, one bag per person, no money accepted.

Both approaches are trying to address the same reality: people are hungry in a world of abundance, and much of that abundance is controlled by institutions whose priorities are profit, not care. But they make fundamentally different bets about how to change that reality, and at what cost.

This essay looks at those two paths side by side. It does not deny the anger that fuels the first. It simply asks a harder question: Which underground do we actually want to grow?

There is one part of libertarian thought that has always made intuitive sense to me.

Governments are powerful.

They can tax you. Regulate you. Fine you. Imprison you. Conscript you. Search your property. Decide what kinds of businesses may legally exist and under what conditions they may operate. Even a democratic government, constrained by constitutions and elections, possesses powers that an ordinary individual does not.

It therefore makes sense to be suspicious of allowing that power to grow without limit.

The part I have always found more difficult is what happens when power accumulates somewhere else.

A corporation cannot normally put me in prison. Walmart cannot draft me into the Army. Apple cannot make possession of an Android phone a criminal offense. If I dislike what a company offers, the traditional market answer is simple: I am free not to buy it.

That distinction is real.

But I am not sure it resolves the whole problem.

What happens when one company is the only realistic employer in a town? What happens when leaving a communications platform means leaving behind almost everyone you communicate with? What happens when an industry requires such enormous amounts of capital to enter that the theoretical possibility of competition exists much more readily than actual competitors do?

And what happens when a corporation becomes large enough to influence the government that was supposed to provide the counterweight?

In an earlier essay, I proposed a political bargain that I called Universal Security Capitalism: guarantee a basic floor beneath every person, while leaving the economic ceiling completely open. Nobody should be ruined by illness, hunger, homelessness, or temporary economic failure, but neither should extraordinary wealth be treated as intrinsically objectionable. A person who builds a company worth ten billion dollars and a person who earns very little while repairing old radios, writing novels, studying insects, or playing obscure music should both be permitted to pursue their own ideas of a worthwhile life.

I still find much of that argument compelling. What has become less clear to me is whether I properly understood the principle beneath it.

At first glance, guaranteeing healthcare, food, housing, and some basic level of income sounds like a proposal about economic equality. Yet equality was never really the part that interested me. I do not particularly care whether one person possesses a thousand times as much money as another, provided that wealth was acquired through legitimate exchange rather than fraud, monopoly, regulatory capture, or some other mechanism that prevents meaningful competition. Nor do I think a society becomes just merely because its citizens occupy narrower positions on an income distribution.

The concern that motivated the original proposal was different. I was interested in what people are actually free to do with their lives.

Political labels are supposed to simplify. They allow people to summarize complicated views, identify broad alliances, and describe conflicts without beginning every conversation from first principles. Yet the same labels can also conceal important distinctions. In contemporary American discourse, liberal, classical liberal, libertarian, progressive, and conservative are often spoken of as though they name five positions on a single line. They do not. Some name intellectual traditions, some describe attitudes toward political change, and some function mainly as shorthand for present-day electoral coalitions. Even when two terms overlap in practice, they may be answering different questions.

The resulting confusion is not merely a problem of careless usage. Political vocabulary accumulates meanings as societies change. An idea that begins as a challenge to an established order may later become part of the order that conservatives seek to preserve. A philosophy associated with limited government in one century may develop a branch that regards public action as necessary to secure meaningful liberty in another. A term may also retain one meaning in political philosophy while acquiring a narrower or more partisan meaning in everyday American speech.

The clearest way to approach these words, therefore, is not to search for one perfectly correct definition of each. It is to distinguish their historical and colloquial meanings, identify the political questions they emphasize, and treat their boundaries as permeable. Once that is done, the apparent contradictions begin to dissolve.

Drive across northern or western Iowa and one feature of the landscape becomes hard to miss.

There are cornfields, grain elevators, small towns, long straight roads, and, increasingly, enormous white wind turbines turning above all of it.

That would not be especially surprising in a state known for aggressive climate politics.

Iowa is not such a state.

Donald Trump won 55.7 percent of Iowa's presidential vote in 2024. Republicans currently hold large majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. Iowa has moved decisively toward the Republican Party over the past decade. (Iowa Secretary of State)

And yet, in 2024, 62.84 percent of all electricity generated in Iowa came from wind.

Coal supplied about 21 percent. Natural gas supplied about 14 percent.

Wind was not a boutique supplement to Iowa's electrical system. It was the system's dominant source of generation. (Iowa Utilities Commission)

At first glance, there seems to be a political contradiction here.

Renewable energy has become entangled with climate politics in the United States, and climate politics has become sharply partisan. One might therefore expect the country's most wind-dependent states to resemble the country's most environmentally progressive states.

But Iowa suggests that this is the wrong way to think about it.

The more interesting question is not why a Republican state somehow tolerates wind power.

It is how wind power became useful enough that tolerating it ceased to be the point.

I have been watching videos lately from a young woman who travels around Russia.

She goes to places I would like to see myself someday: Siberia, Lake Baikal, the Ural Mountains. Her videos are quiet and beautiful. There are trains, snowy roads, apartments, forests, meals, conversations, long stretches of landscape.

What struck me most recently, though, was something almost completely unrelated to the scenery.

She cannot monetize the videos.

Google deactivated Russia-based AdSense accounts in August 2024, and YouTube still says that creators with Russia-based AdSense accounts cannot monetize their channels. The restriction is one of a long series of measures connected to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

That makes sense at the level where we usually discuss international affairs.

Russia invaded Ukraine. Other countries and international companies responded. Sanctions and restrictions followed.

But then the abstraction travels downward.

Eventually it reaches somebody filming Lake Baikal.

That is where the situation starts to feel different.

A Country and the People Inside It

It is easy to talk about countries as though they were people.

Russia invaded.

America threatened.

China wants.

France objects.

Iran retaliates.

We do this because it is useful shorthand. Governments really do act on behalf of states, and those actions have consequences.

But nations contain millions of people who may have had almost nothing to do with those decisions.

Imagine two Americans.

One wants to build a company worth a billion dollars.

The other wants to paint landscapes, repair old radios, play in a band, raise children, study insects, or write novels that may never sell particularly well.

There is no obvious reason that a healthy society should require either person to adopt the other's definition of a successful life. Nor is there an obvious reason that the first person becoming extraordinarily wealthy requires the second person to face homelessness if things go badly.

That suggests a political bargain that does not fit especially neatly into the usual American argument between capitalism and the welfare state:

Guarantee the floor. Leave the ceiling open.

Under such a system, every citizen would have some basic assurance of healthcare, housing, food, and enough income to remain an active participant in society. Losing a job would still hurt. A failed business could still wipe out savings. Choosing an economically unproductive life would still mean having less money than someone who spent twenty years building a successful company.

But illness, unemployment, or failure would no longer carry the threat of material catastrophe.

At the other end of the distribution, there would be no predetermined maximum fortune. If somebody builds something that millions of people willingly pay for and becomes fantastically wealthy, good for them.

We could even admire them.

Americans spend a great deal of money on cars, but we have developed a convenient way of not thinking about the total.

The payment comes from one account. Insurance arrives on another date. Gas disappears twenty or fifty dollars at a time. Tires show up every few years with the impeccable timing of a dental emergency. Registration is somebody else's problem until suddenly it isn't. Then one morning the transmission starts making a sound ordinarily associated with farm machinery.

Each expense seems to be its own small incident.

Wealth, unfortunately for anyone trying to measure the damage, works in the opposite direction. Small amounts of money combine. Savings earn returns. Those returns can earn returns. Time takes a few hundred dollars a month and, given enough years, does something almost indecent with it.

Which raises a question worth asking:

What would Americans be worth if cars simply cost less?

Not if everybody gave up driving. Not if the suburbs were bulldozed tomorrow morning and replaced with bicycle paths and espresso bars. And not if Americans suddenly stopped liking cars.

Just: what would happen if getting around took a smaller bite out of the household budget?

The answer may be considerably larger than the monthly savings suggest.

The almost-$1,000-a-month machine

AAA has been trying to answer a deceptively simple question for more than 70 years: what does a new car actually cost to own?

Electric vehicles have a peculiar way of making gasoline cars feel complicated.

You plug the car in. Electricity flows into a battery. Later, that electricity turns a motor, and the motor turns the wheels. There is no gasoline to pump, no miniature sequence of explosions under the hood, and much less energy disappearing as waste heat. After spending some time with a good EV, it becomes surprisingly easy to look at the internal-combustion automobile and wonder whether we are seeing the mature form of transportation or an extraordinarily successful transitional technology.

That raises a much bigger question.

Suppose the United States eventually converted essentially its entire passenger-vehicle fleet to electricity. Where would all that electricity come from?

One intriguing answer begins in the enormous stretches of open land across the American interior. The Great Plains and neighboring regions contain abundant solar and wind resources, along with vast areas where large generating projects can be built. Could we simply build enough solar capacity there to provide the energy currently supplied by gasoline?

And if we could, could that electricity eventually appear wherever Americans currently expect to find fuel: interstate exits, highway service plazas, neighborhood filling stations and thousands of other places across the country?

It sounds like a project of almost cartoonish scale.

The surprising part is that the arithmetic itself does not rule it out.