Maverick Philosopher

Similarly with budgeting. To budget is to approach your personal finances negatively when a positive approach is superior. Instead of setting limits to spending in various categories, specify target savings and investing amounts, and aim high. The Wealthy Barber has a chapter entitled "The Ten Percent Solution." As I recall, the author recommends investing 10% of gross income for long-term growth. That's chickenfeed to my conservative mind. We save and invest far more than this, in some months as much as 50% of gross. The best way to do this, of course, is by automatic payroll deduction. You arrange for your employer to direct depost some percentage of your income into the account of your choice. You then live on what is left over.

Why do you need a budget? If you are self-disciplined you will naturally watch your spending, and of course you will never ever use a credit card for its credit feature. You will use it only for its float, record-keeping, rebate, and convenience features. Allow me to brag so as to make a point that is very important for everyone. I have never paid a cent of credit card interest in my life, and in the last several years, each year I have received $300 dollars cash in rebates for the use of a certain card which charges me no fee for its use. The credit line is huge but I go nowhere near it, and the interest rate I could not care less about. Not only that, but the 'float' makes me even more money. Let's say I have the use of $2,000 for six weeks. During that period the goods are in my possession but the money is in a cash reserve account earning 5%. This comes to $11.53 in interest that is being paid to me on money I have already spent. What a deal!

Suppose you are a leftie who hates 'corporate America.' What better way to stick it to the credit card companies than by becoming a free-rider?

So I ask again, why do you need a budget? If you are self-disciplined you will naturally watch your spending, and if you are not self-disciplined then you will lack the discipline to adhere to your budget.

When I was a graduate student, 'back in the day,' I lived on 2-3 K per annum. And then I got a job whch paid for starters the princely sum of 12 K per annum. I said to myself: "Surely, I can save and invest half of that!" But attitude is everthing. Attitude and will and good judgment. For example, if you are inclined to become financially independent, then you would be a fool to marry someone whose idea of Nirvana is a wallet full of charge cards with unlimited credit lines.

The moral side of the economic problem is paramount to a conservative like me. Those who can deny themselves and defer gratification can become financially well-off in a stable political and economic environment such as we enjoy in these United States. But of course people will not deny themselves and defer gratification. So they must suffer the consequences. The problem is akrasia, weakness of the will. The fundamental problem is not predatory credit card companies, subprime mortgage scammers, and the payday loan sharks. For if you are self-disciplined, cautious, and diligent, they will not be able to get a handle on you.

Scottsdale Phil, a fellow denizen of the Valle del Sol, brought my attention to the first of the Horace quotations, and I know for a fact that he has meditated hard and long on it, and in a thoroughly 'existential' way. The second, which may 'contradict' the first, I found on my own.

Quaerenda pecunia primum est; virtus post nummos. (Horace, Epistles I, 1, 53) Money is to be sought first of all; virtue after wealth. Or, loosely translated, cash before conscience.

Vilius argentum est auro virtutibus aurum. (Horace, Epistles I, 1, 52). Silver is less valuable than gold, gold less valuable than virtue.

The next morning, Tom put on his best suit, a freshly cleaned and pressed gray flannel. On his way to work he stopped in Grand Central Station to buy a clean white handkerchief and to have his shoes shined. During his luncheon hour he set out to visit the United Broadcasting Corporation. As he walked across Rockefeller Plaza, he thought wryly of the days when he and Betsy had assured each other that money didn't matter. They had told each other that when they were married, before the war, and during the war they had repeated it in long letters. "The important thing is to find a kind of work you really like, and something that is useful," Betsy had written him. "The money doesn't matter."

The hell with that, he thought. The real trouble is that up to now we've been kidding ourselves. We might as well admit that what we want is a big house and a new car and trips to Florida in the winter, and plenty of life insurance. When you come right down to it, a man with three children has no damn right to say that money doesn't matter. (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Simon and Shuster, 1955, pp. 9-10)

2. Tip on the nominal amount of the bill, not the amount less a discount. You got the discount, skinflint coupon-clipper, don't be so cheap as to demand a discount on the tip as well.

3. Tip no less than 15%. But when in Rome, do as the Romans do. In Turkey, 5% suffices and more might be perceived as ostentatious. And in some places, a tip is an insult.

4. Do not hesitate to leave no tip or a measly tip to punish poor service. The whole point of tipping is to reward good service and to encourage good service in the future. If I have to beg for a second cup of coffee at a breakfast joint, or am reduced to swiping silverware from adjoining tables, then I am not inclined to leave much of a tip.

5. Tip on the entire bill, including alcoholic beverages, unlike a cheapskate I once knew who tipped only on prandials but never on potables.

6. At buffets, smorgasbords, and other self-service establishments, one should also leave a tip depending on the services rendered. In such places I tip less than 15%.

7. What about tipping on a take-out order in a sit-down restaurant? My inclination is not to tip there any more than I would tip in a fast food joint.

8. Tip the bartender, but if he complains about the size of the tip, tell him to go to hell.

9. I always travel light and carry my own luggage. This obviates the tipping of bellboys and other baggage schleppers. But a hard-working maid who has just done up my room may garner a few bucks.

10. Tip the barber whose floor is now littered with your long hair. My barber charges $12 just recently up from $10. I give him $2 or $3 tip. I exercise my frugality by having my hair cut only three or four times per year. I've been known to go to barber colleges for cheap haircuts. There I can play the bigshot and leave a 100% tip. If you are ever in Mesa, Arizona, check out Earl's Academy of Beauty. You can get a shampoo and a decent cut for $8, less if you are a senior.

11. Suppose you have just dropped $6 for some frou-frou coffee drink at Starbuck's, a Frappacino Mocha Venti, say. Do you leave a tip? I probably should, but I usually don't.

12. Having driven cab, on the mean streets of Boston no less, I always tip taxi drivers unless they are surly pricks in which case they get zilch. I once tipped a taciturn Jamaican two bucks on a twenty dollar fare and the guy had the chutzpah to complain. I told him to shove it. The most I ever tipped a cabbie was 20 semolians on a short airport run to McCarran in Lost Wages. He was an interesting character and his conversation was scintillating. I asked him to name his tip. He said 'twenty' so I gave it to him. It is worth remembering that there are people out there who actually work for a living.

Willie Hurt of Lansing, Mich., won $3.1 million in 1989. Two years later, he was broke and charged with murder. His lawyer says Hurt spent his fortune on a divorce and crack cocaine.

But even if the windfall does not lead to death or divorce or bankruptcy or prison, it will not make one happy or give one's life meaning. Happiness simply cannot be bought. At most, one buys the absence of misery. But for that a modicum suffices. For example, it is difficult to be happy in a bad neighborhood in which crackheads roam the streets and gunfire interrupts one's sleep. But to have the wherewithal to move from such a neighborhood one doesn't need to win the lottery. One needs to finish high school, get a job, keep one's nose clean, save and invest, and give oneself a course in personal finance.

The lottery player, therefore, overvalues money in that he thinks it will provide things it cannot possibly provide: happiness, satisfaction, meaning, love. But he also undervalues it in that he wastes it on lottery tickets! He doesn't understand the value of a buck and the additivity of small amounts of money.

Suppose you blow $5 per diem on lottery tickets. That comes to over $150 per month. If you apply that amount to your mortgage payment you may reduce your 30 year mortgage to a 20 year mortgage thereby saving thousands upon thousands of dollars in interest. If the interest rate is X%, the return is an immediate certain return of X%. An investment with no risk! So what does our innumerate fool do with his $150 per month? He throws it away on astronomically small chances of winning some huge amount, which, if he won it would make his disordered life even more disorderly.

And note that the very fact that the innumerate fellow is so foolish as to gamble away money in the first place in a game in which the odds are the worst possible shows that he is completely unequipped to deal with any money he wins.

There are many arguments against playing lotteries, and against state sponsorship of lotteries. More later. But for now, read this.

What is the underlying principle in play here? Perhaps something like the following:

Whenever market conditions favor any entity's making an 'inordinate' profit, the government has the right to take some of it.

If this is indeed the principle, would a reasonable person subscribe to it? Many of us have watched the values of our houses -- I don't say homes since only a realtor confuses a house with a home -- appreciate dramatically in value recently. My modest pad, for example, has doubled in value in a few years' time. So I've enjoyed a windfall, at least on paper. (Don't forget, what goes up can go down again, and in my conservative view of things, only a fool taps into his house equity except in dire circumstances.)

Should the government get a piece of my 'excess' profits were I to sell my house? If you say no, then how does the real estate example differ from the case of Big Oil?

The topic was debated on C-Span this morning, and the man who took the socialist side spoke of unfairness and gouging and ripoff, etc. in the oil case but not in the real estate case. But isn't it also unfair that a young person just starting out in the wonderful world of real estate must pay twice what I paid for my house? Why am I not a gouger and ripper-offer if I sell it at market value?

If it is acceptable for the government to take 'excess' profits from huge corporations, what principled reason could one have for saying that it is unacceptable for the government to take 'excess' profits from your average owner of the house he lives in?

A man stands on a street corner, Bible in hand, and preaches the gospel of Jesus Christ. Passersby regard him as of no account, as a loser, a bum, a fanatic. They give him a wide berth and would be embarrassed to be seen associating with him. But let the fellow clean himself up, get himself admitted to a divinity school, earn a degree and become an assistant pastor somewhere, and suddenly he has social status. For now his preaching is a livelihood, a means of attaining a comfortable living standard, and he is now a serious and productive member of society. He is now of account and is known to be such at the local bank. He amounts to something in the economic and social currency of the realm. As the Danish Socrates mnight have said, he has learned how to make a living from the fact that another man was crucified.

A novelist sits in her garret and scribbles away day by day. Her relatives and acquaintances think her a failure despite two published novels. You see, they fell stillborn from the press and she barely covered the costs of writing them. When she explains that she lives for her art, some smile indulgently, others display demeanors that run from quizzical to scornful, but all mock her behind her back. For it is clear that she is wasting her time on a lot of nonsense. But let the novelist hit paydirt, and all changes. Now she is of account. Scorn turns to envy. She is on her way to becoming a person of substance in one of the more crass senses of this irridescent word. For now she has found a way to turn a buck from her writing, and that confers value upon it.

Suppose there were no way to make a living from philosophy, or that one’s chances of making a living from it were about as good as a chess player’s from chess. Suppose, in other words, that philosophy had no place in university curricula and that there were no teaching jobs. How much philosophy would be published? How many journals and presses would go under? How many introductory texts would see the light of day? What would become of the professional organizations, the conferences and congresses and the rest of all that philosophically marginal busy-ness? How many ‘philosophers’ would abandon philosophy and end up in real estate?

Would it be a bad thing if there were no way to live from philosophy? The answer is not obvious and indeed depends on one’s conception of philosophy. Consider a related question: Would it be a bad thing if no one were able to make living from religion? In thinking about these questions, you may want to consider the examples of Paul the tentmaker, Spinoza the lensegrinder, and Thoreau the surveyor.

What they lived for, and what they lived from, were kept distinct.

Consider this quartet of claims:

1. Money is the root of all evil.
2. Love of money is the root of all evil.
3. Inordinate love of money is the root of all evil.
4. Inordinate love of money is the root of some evil.

It is easy to see that each of (1)-(3) is false, and that (4) alone is true. Money is an abstract form of wealth and wealth is obviously good. How can something good be the root of all evil? It is not even the the root of some evil. It makes more sense to say that the love of money is the root of all evil. But this too is plainly mistaken. Since money is good, a certain ‘love’ or desire of it is both wise and morally legitimate. It is the inordinate love of money that bears some connection to evil. But to all evil? Surely some of the evil in the world derives from such other sources as the inordinate love of power, sex, and fame. Therefore, the most we can say with a show of plausibility is that the inordinate love of money is at the root of some evil.

An inordinate love is an excessive love, a love unhinged and unbalanced. One form of excess consists in taking for an end in itself what can only be viewed as a means. Thus the miser’s mistake is in taking money to be an end in itself when it can only be a means.

Generalizing the opening quartet yields:

A. X is the root of all evil.
B. Love of X is the root of all evil.
C. Inordinate love of X is the root of all evil.
D. Inordinate love of X is the root of some evil.

I claim that whatever one plugs in for ‘X’ – whether it be money, property, progeny, power, influence, sex, fame, knowledge – results in a pattern of three falsefoods and one truth. You may verify this for yourself.

One conclusion I draw is that evil has no one root. It has many roots corresponding to our many inordinate loves. Since there is no one root of all evil, the eradication of evil is no simple matter. Or if there is a single root, it lies in the disordered human heart. But I will leave the development of this thought to another post.

For some, alcohol is the devil in liquid form. They should avoid the stuff, and it is certainly within their power to do so. For most of us, however, alcohol is a delightful adjunct to a civilized life. What good is a hard run on a hot day that doesn’t eventuate in the downing of a couple of cold beers? To what end a plate of Mama Gucci’s rigatoni, if not accompanied by a glass of Dago Red? I am exaggerating of course, but to make a serious point: alcohol for most us is harmless. Indeed, it is positively good for healthy humans when taken in small doses (1-2 oz. per diem) as numerous studies have been showing for the last twenty years or so.

The fact that many abuse alcohol is quite irrelevant. That is their free choice. Is it Sam Adam’s fault that you tank up on too much of his brew? No, it is your fault. This is such a simple point that I am almost embarrassed to make it; but I have to make it because so many liberals fail to grasp it. So read your prospectuses and be not troubled when you come across names like Seagrams.

I would also point out to the ‘socially conscious’ that if they enjoy an occasional drink, then they cannot, consistently with this fact, be opposed to the production of alcoholic beverages. You cannot drink alcohol unless alcohol is there to be drunk. Consistency demands of them complete abstention.

As for tobacco, suppose we begin by reflecting on this truth: Cigarettes don’t kill people, people kill people by smoking cigarettes, or, to be precise, they increase the probability of their contracting nasty diseases (lung cancer, emphysema, heart disease), diseases which are often but not always terminal, by smoking sufficiently many cigarettes over a sufficiently long period of time. If X raises the probability of Y to a degree <1, I don’t call that causation; I call that probability-raising. It should also be obvious that correlation does not prove causation. So I don’t want to hear about causation in this context. Nor do I want to hear about addiction.

To confuse psychological habituation with addiction is quite foolish. Addiction, if it means anything, has to involve (i) a physiological dependence (ii) on something harmful to the body (iii) removal of which would induce serious withdrawal symptoms. One cannot be addicted to nose-picking, to running, to breathing, or to caffeine. Furthermore, (iv) it is a misuse of language to call a substance addictive when only a relatively small number of its users develop — over a sufficient period of time with sufficient frequency of use — a physical craving for it that cannot be broken without severe withdrawal symptoms. Heroin is addictive; nicotine is not. To think otherwise is to use ‘addiction’ in an unconscionably loose way.

Liberals and leftists engage in this loose talk for at least two reasons. First, it aids them in their denial of individual responsibility. They would divest individuals of responsibility for their actions, displacing it onto factors, such as ‘addictive’ substances, external to the agent. Their motive is to grab more power for themselves by increasing the size and scope of government: the
less self-reliant and responsible individuals are, the more they need the nanny state and people like Hillary, who gives some evidence of aspiring to be Nanny-in-Chief. Second, loose talk of ‘addiction’ fits in nicely with what I call their misplaced moral enthusiasm. Incapable of appreciating a genuine issue such as partial-birth abortion, they invest their moral energy in pseudo-issues.

The main point is that tobacco products can be enjoyed in relatively harmless ways, just as alcoholic beverages can be enjoyed in relatively harmless ways. I have never met a cigarette yet that killed anybody. One has to smoke them, one has to smoke a lot of them over many years, and each time you light up it is a free decision.

Some people feel that smokers are irrational. This too is nonsense. Someone who smokes a pack of cigarettes per day is assuming a serious health risk. But it may well be that the pleasure and alertness the person receives from smoking is worth the risk within the person’s value scheme. Different people evaluate the present in its relation to the future in different ways. I tend to sacrifice the present for the future, thereby deferring gratification. Hence my enjoyment of the noble weed is abstemious indeed, consisting of an occasional load of pipe tobacco, or an occasional fine cigar. (I recommend the Arturo Fuente ‘Curly Head’ Maduro: cheap, but good.) But I would not think to impose my abstemiousness, or time-preference, on anyone else.

As for firearms, one can with a clear conscience invest in the stock of companies that manufacture them. One thereby supports companies that make it possible for the police and military to be armed. Think about it: without gun manufacturers, there would be no guns, and hence no effective police and military forces. And without gun manufacturers, decent citizens would be unable to defend themselves, their families, and their communities against the criminal element. The ‘socially conscious’ or ‘socially responsible’ want the protection afforded by the armed, but without getting their hands dirty. To be wholly consistent, they should go live somewhere where there is no police or military protection.

If the price of 'social consciousness' is logical unconsciousness, then I prefer to be socially unconscious.