Ya Gotta Hand it to Ayn Rand

I'm having a conversation with a childhood friend with whom I recently reconnected.

Pretty awesome fellow. He's a successful artist with pronounced Objectivist (Any Rand) / Libertarian leanings. Not ideologies I care for, I admit.

I have no doubt as to his goodness as a person or his intelligence. Frankly, I've seen and participated in enough political demonization to last me the rest of my life. And seondly frankly, I'm done with that. Ick, blech, patoo. Yuck. How does a bloke get by thinking so many people around them are bad people? Ain't right, I say.

More interesting than the fellows goodness or badness was his framing of free market principles as an issue of moral imperative, rather than one strategy for distributing goods and services.

So far as I can tell, even when given examples of free market failings, the only moral choice is to stick to free market principles, regardless of how well or poorly goods and services may have been distributed.

One has to give mad props to Ayn Rand for successfully promoting Free Market As a Moral Imperative. It strips the actual distribution of goods and services from the economics model and makes economic decisions as binary in nature: on or off. Right or Wrong. Objective. Objectivist.

The success of an economic decision to benefit the consumer or efficiently distribute goods and services seems to become secondary to the assumed morality of free market principles.

It seems we're dealing less with an economic model and more with a ethical or moral code, which seems a bit on the odd side.

Physically Watching Our Worlds Crumble

Well, it's finally happened. Ol' besse is giving up the ghost. After emitting noxious fumes into the cabin for a week and sputtering like an animal after a massive stroke, the Ford Escort up and died. Sorta. I was able to nurse it on back home, but slowly and with the hazards on.

To make matters even more pathetic, it died while we were driving between thrift stores in search of a used washing machine because our washing machine also died. Last time it was the coupler, which we fixed. This time it seems to be the washing machine transmission which costs just about as much as a used washing machine just for the part.

On the bright side, we still have the toaster. The toaster is working fine. I just toasted a bagel, so I can vouch for the full functionality of the toaster.

I guess I'm more stressed about the car than the washing machine. The problem with being a single car family is, you don't have a back-up car. And the problem with cars is, they're very expensive. Even the cheap ones.

As I wallow in self pity for a moment, this gives me a good opportunity to segue into the notion of middle class momentum.

When somebody first enters into a lousy economic situation after having had a job for a while, they probably had a car and functional appliances and most were probably in halfway decent working order. Their glasses were probably of the correct prescription and clothes were probably new-ish and their socks and underwear probably had a decent hole to no-hole ratio, favoring No Holes. The living quarters were probably maintained well enough.

And for a while, sans job, folks are able to live, more or less, a standard middle class existence with most of the amenities: Microwave, Car, Television, Lawn Mower, Washer and Drier, maybe even a dish washer and some sort of Air Conditioning.

But as time wears on, and the economic situation doesn't change......these things start to decay. The eyes get worse and the prescription isn't quite exactly right. The washing machine dies. The car troubles are put off for another day...and put off, and put off, and put off. The machines in our lives that we generally associate with a middle class existence fall apart one after another...

...we watch, physically WATCH, the world crumble around us.

I've got one word for you. Aquaculture.

I've got one word for you. One word.

Aquaculture.

Not the marine type of aquaculture with floating cages that breed diseases for wild inhabitants. Rather, the land based fish farms that can help to meet the demand for fish, and the need for healthy food, while relieving pressure on wild fish populations.

Aquaculture.

I've recently been on a kick of finding the relatively small things that can have a big impact on social mobility, and agricultural policy is one of those things. If we're reinventing our economies and looking toward the core principles of Making Things...food production is a critical cornerstone. Why are regions in urban decline reaching toward urban farming? Because it's a fundamental building block of a healthy society and economy.

It also all fits into the whole eat local, buy local, produce local thing.

Now, back to aquaculture. The Michigan agricultural director has recently cited aquaculture as an important means to diversify the state's economy, and grow a little known but very important state industry: agriculture. In many states, including the state of Michigan, moving in to this industry takes only a few minor tweaks to the regulatory framework.

Say, did you know Michigan ranks 2nd in diversity of crops, and leads the nation in the production of all sorts of crops from black beans to tart cherries?

We do! We're an agricultural state. With lots of water. So of course there's a growing interest in farming fish and other marine foods here.


Let met talk a little bit about lake perch.

Lake perch is $14.99 a pound here in Muskegon if you buy it fresh at a store. That's a little strange since people fish for it here. Drop a line into the water for half a second, you'll catch a bluegill. Go ice fishing, you'll catch lake perch. Yet, it's crazy expensive stuff to buy, and the stuff they sell at the store is from Canada. Not because it's bad to eat here. To the contrary, some (not all) local restaurants sell locally caught lake perch.

See...the Canadian stuff is farmed, and can reliably meet demand...and folks here in Muskegon can't seem to get enough of it. Every local restaurant in town has its own fried lake perch sandwich. Whitlows has some of the best, but Handsome Henry's has a pretty fantastic one.

Now...one would think that a place so perch crazy would farm the stuff here. But we really don't. Instead a favorite local food is subject to a constant assault of competing invasive species, and the fish seem to get smaller every year. So to meet demand...we import some of it. It travels hundreds of miles to our plates. Something we could very well do right here

Aquaculture is the confluence of many things that strike my interest: a local food source that reduces the need for transportation, a new industry for a limping economic region, and a sustainable industry that conserves existing ecosystems.