The rat race

This has been a hectic month for me. Between my main job, my secondary job, doing taxes, having a friend over for spring break, and going to gun shows and the rifle range, I feel really spent. Now, I am not a lazy person. But I also don't believe in work for work's sake. If your toil gets you nowhere, there's nothing wrong with pursuing a different course of action.

But the question is, for how long will all this work go on? When will there be a long break? Looking at people's lives, I think the answer is never. We only get 20-25 vacation days a year. Between going on microvacations and visiting family, it seems impossible to gather a big chunk of time (at least a month) of doing nothing, unless we're talking a sabbatical. And people in school might have more free time but they'll probably have to enter the working life eventually.

It also doesn't matter whether you are a lowly laborer or a white collar professional. Even the best-paid white-collar professionals work their asses off. They accumulate all that wealth but never have a chance to really stop and enjoy it. Hence, when talking to a fellow backpacker last summer, he told me that all his professional friends could not take an extended trip around the world as he was doing.

Part of it is the lifestyle trap, I think. Once you get settled into a working lifestyle, and you collect debts and obligations, it becomes harder to break out of it. Just look at the poor suckers in Silicon Valley with $3000-a-month mortgages. What about those who have kids? Is their settling into a working lifestyle excusable because of their obligations as parents? There's more to raising kids than buying a house in a nice neighborhood and sending them to good schools. Eventually they'll get bored to death and go crazy from being part of that suffocating lifestyle.

I am ahead of the game compared to most people. I have asked the question "Why?" and found the answer, "There is no good reason." I have various possible escape routes from the rat race, but I don't have a concrete plan. That's fine. Nothing ever goes according to plan anyway. And if I fail, so what? I'll just be back at where everyone else is, but I'll have lived a dream that many people will not experience. Even if I had to wake up in the end.

Free states and not-so-free states

A new study ranks the 50 states based on how free one is in those states. Unlike many previous studies, it does not stick to economic freedom, but also includes measures of personal freedom such as when it comes to alcohol laws, gun laws, environmental laws, gambling laws, and other victimless crime laws. It follows the definition of freedom that a libertarian would give, rather than what a conservative Republican might give. In that sense, it is the first of its kind.

Here are the top five and bottom five:

Rank	State	Rank	State
1	New Hampshire	50	New York
2	Colorado	49	New Jersey
3	South Dakota	48	Rhode Island
4	Idaho	47	California
5	Texas	46	Maryland

Not surprisingly, the usual suspects are at the bottom of the list, places like CA, NJ, and NY, whose state governments are notorious for their hatred of individual liberty. And I am proud to say that my new home Texas is in the Top 5.

However, the study report also notes that the people in the free states do not necessarily have a libertarian streak. Instead, the freeness is due to the conservative-liberal culture war. The conservative position in the culture war requires less government intrusion overall, they claim.

They could be right; I don't know for sure. But I do think that if several generations live in an unfree state, the people become accustomed to having government boss them around in every aspect of their lives, and become more compliant with additional future infringements on their liberty.

"Western values"

I read a lot of blogs, forums, and commentary. I pick up a lot of taglines and phrases from my reading. One such line is "western values." In this case, it is in the context of "capitalism, materialism, consumerism, rat race, etc..."

People play fast and loose with this word, and throw it around carelessly. The problem I have with it is that it treats the values embodied by western culture as it stands today as if it were monolithic. This is not the case. Would you consider classical liberalism and Marxism to be two peas in the pod of "western values"? I would hope not. The truth is that western (or at least American) society is the product of centuries of values and ideas, many of which are in conflict. Look at the pervasiveness of government in the economy, even in "capitalist" societies.

I think a lot of this obfuscation comes from a lack of clear or widely accepted definitions of words. The average American mind equates "capitalist" with "materialist." Yet in my mind, they are opposite, if anything. I equate "capitalist" with individual liberty, independence, and the like. The modern materialistic mindset, fed by too many hours in front of the TV, is anything but individualistic and independent. My way of thinking equates "materialist" with "conformist" and thus it is the antithesis of "capitalist." The modern excuse of an economy that is supposedly fueled by mass consumption is really a Keynesian monstrosity masquerading as the ideal for capitalism.

I think if more people realized this and had the courage to reevaluate their lifestyles and perceptions, society would be better off. We'd be freer, more individualistic (in the sense that is in line with wisdom and good values), and I daresay more prosperous -- in the form of savings and wealth-producing assets, not material junk that you use to keep up with the Joneses. However, I am doubtful that anything like that will happen without some major calamity, even worse than the current recession.