I was shaking out the bends after a ninety-or-so minute session with the Les Paul when I saw the guy on the teevee, standing in the beer factory with his hard-hat. The session wrapped with about ten minutes of “Can’t Find You” as I recall Kim Simmonds’ delightful eleven-bar shuffle (that’s right kids: eleven) arrangement. That’s the one with the two-bar 4-chord seventh-minor turnaround, and anybody who knows what I’m talking about can also understand why I was having the bends. The Paul is a necessary load: must carry — even when it’s physiologically nutty to go around another chorus before something in The Robot breaks — and those eleven pounds of maple and metal roll into the curves like a fine bike. “Take me now lord if you have to, but this just feels too good to stop,” so the chorus goes around again.

Go ten minutes of “Can’t Find You,” and you’ll see what I mean after you unsling the guitar and start looking for your neck and shoulder muscles.

And all that’s about prices. What it takes to get it.

I’m getting it with only fifteen watts out of this amazing Fender Blues Junior. There it sits on top of the Marshall 50-watt combo with blown tubes. All the way up, I have to stand at the length of the guitar cable in order to control it. It’s that loud. It’ll shake the room if I let it, and I don’t miss the extra thirty-five watts of the Marshall, but I would happily pay for them to sound this good in a sixteen-pound box. At any rate, I flip it on and raise local hell with the wah-wah pedal, whenever I want to, which is the way it’s supposed to be.

And, then, I’m seeing this guy with the hard-hat in the beer factory, on the viddie. He’s standing there in the stark industrial space under the orangey high-pressure sodium light, talking about how they just can’t make beer because the power keeps going out and they’re going to do something about it.

Talk about “the bends." This guy looked very serious. Because I won’t live in California, I get to just go light up my guitar anytime I feel like it, and go to the refrigerator for a beer, too, knowing that it’ll be loud and cold around here, on my command . That’s because electricity markets where I live are manageable. If I had the problem that beer guy is having, I too would have to drop what I was doing and see to the power difficulty myself. Fortunately, I can still pay people to do it for me. The beer guy can’t get reliable power at any price right now.

According to the CNN report, the Miller’s Brewing folx at Irwindale are evidently going to set up their own generation, which is only natural and logical, and it also points up exactly how to solve this problem in California: let people produce what they need in order to conduct their lives.

Ordinarily until now, nobody in their right mind would consider local power generation for an operation like Miller’s at Irwindale. But they’re in times that make a move like that sensible if not absolutely imperative. In fact, I was discussing the endarkenment a couple of weeks ago with an electricity distribution planner, and it became obvious to me when he started describing the loads associated with Web server farms. He was talking about forty to sixty megawatts per facility. That’s enough power for a small city.

I said, “Well, to me, that looks like a market for for custom generation capacity. In any rational political environment, enterprises like these would at least consider proprietary generation.” I had the subject on a roll, and began to imagine the technical ends of things; all that would be necessary to installing custom power generation for enterprises. I wasn’t talking about diesel generators on flat-bed trucks dispersed around the factory parking lots and snaking with #0000 cable and Cam-Lok connectors, but real dedicated power.

Why not? They require it for operations, so why shouldn’t they install it? Better yet, why shouldn’t someone crank up a business to serve this market? Working through it, I couldn’t imagine a better scene for driving technical innovation — necessity being the mother of invention, after all — and who knows where it could lead?

Well… actually, the next thing I imagined was hordes of bureaucrats crawling all over a gag like that, like starving insects drawn by the scent of money and bearing statute claws, stingers, and bites. The pall looms over the scene: want to attract all the wrong attention? Go try to do something productive. That’ll do it every time, and there is no corner of the action off their reserve. I thought about, for instance, a design office busy at drawing plans of hardware… as well as the accounting department devoted to managing The Bite of every employee in the place for The Mama State, and then figured the odds of getting the operation off the ground at significantly less than a first glance at the market would suggest.

Who knows what won’t be produced where it’s most necessary and in demand? There’s no telling… which, in a more philosophical vein, leads me to an interesting exercise in logic: proving a negative. Never before in history has it been so easy. Simply introduce the state to markets, and there you have it: the positive negative.

Operations like Miller’s Brewing Irwindale seem determined to solve their problems, though, and I wish ‘em luck. My technical curiosity over the details went unrequited by Miller’s Community Affairs Office, the designated catcher for these kinds of questions, but the nice lady in that office did let me know that they’re swamped with interest in the matter. Nonetheless, I can’t imagine much more than the best stop-gap measures. It simply is not an everyday thing to drop power service for an existing manufacturing plant, and nobody was ready for the scene they’re living out there right now. That necessarily means a fairly improvisational effort compared to what could be achieved if everybody was permitted to freely compete in electricity markets. In conditions like that, it wouldn’t be long before the current situation was alleviated by production guerrillas looking to make money at setting up high-dollar customers with dedicated power plants tailored specially to their exclusive requirements.

…sort of like what happens around my house when I want to light up a guitar. I’m still paying a rather mundane sort of supplier compared to the needs of someone like Miller’s Brewing, but the principle is the thing here, as usual. “Power on demand, for money.”

It really is not as difficult a problem to solve as some would have us believe.

"The saddest life is that of an aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious, and his success disgraceful.”
–(H.L. Mencken)

Two weeks ago, an article at Blackenterprise.com noted the death of Democratic Rep. Julian Dixon of California’s 32nd Congressional District, including Los Angeles and Culver City. In 350 words (”Does the CBC need Magic on Capitol Hill?”), Cliff Hocker highlighted “the untimely end of an effective, activist life," observed its impact on the “the finely drawn balance of power between Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill," and briefed the process for dealing with the empty office. That will be dealt with, one way or another, of course.

What attracted my hair-raising attention is the article’s implicit suggestion that the seat should be occupied by Earvin “Magic” Johnson.

I’m here to say that I can’t imagine wishing anything more horrible on Mr. Johnson.

Throughout his thirteen years in the National Basketball Association, even the merest baseball fan could understand that the nickname “Magic” was well-placed in this man. A white guy who got dribbled off the court every time he couldn’t dodge the drill in high school phys-ed would later look at him and figure, “Well, that’s what it means when some people have it and some people don’t.” In any case, he could watch the action, and he did, because it was that good, and he even found something in Los Angeles worth cheering: a very rare thing to him. This was commanding physical grace and power precisely angled through a team sport of apparently random dynamics — compared to an obvious head-game like baseball — all with cheerful cunning. Yup. That’s what it was.

Magic had his head in the game in what looked like a brand new way, to me, and he did it so that nobody couldn’t have a good time watching it. Even to me, that twenty-five million dollar contract in 1981 looked like a good deal for the Lakers.

The man’s HIV announcement ten years later was inestimably sad to me, but I never really had an impression that it would get him down. Ten years after that, it looks like I was correctly impressed. After an amazing string of professional sports history in the everlasting books, he’s bigger and better than ever, in my view, and that’s because he’s a capitalist.

Of course, there are a lot of people who would say that that’s an insult, or worse, but there are people in the world who still go around hating "niggers," too. I say, to hell with ‘em, instanter. What we have in those cases are bigots: people who pointedly refuse to think. None of them can be reached with reason, mainly for the reason that reason isn’t that sort of a deal: it doesn’t come around like that. It has to be actively grasped, and people who refuse to do that can’t be helped. Nobody can reach into their heads and crank the gears around for them.

Magic Johnson has eclipsed his own previous greatness with activity of profound moral significance: the guy has gone on to make money, and those two words are very carefully chosen.

The principle that I’m talking about is only completely valid in a culture of freedom, and it must be immediately stipulated here that such a condition is seriously circumscribed in America now, two hundred twenty-five years after bloody tyrants needed the big picture drawn for them with the big crayon. Anyone who doesn’t understand what I’m talking about should simply attempt to dispose of ten thousand or more dollars their own way without having to clear it with the feds. They’ll understand soon enough. We live in a time when dollars themselves can be arrested and held without bail, and if that fact doesn’t strike you with Escheroid absurdity, then you need to start cranking on the anti-bigot gears.

However, some people in the country are doing their best to keep up appearances in spite of the rife absurdities. To the extent that they’re able to do it without getting bitten by every random commissar, they demonstrate and illustrate that there is a categorical difference between getting money and making it.

Wealth must be created, you see.

Money, in itself, is not so very important. This fact is easily observable in the fact of barter: a direct exchange of goods without mediation and denomination. At the basest levels of trade, there is nothing necessary about money if items of trade can be managed in and of themselves. The more principle fact about action like that is that it — trade — never occurs unless the people involved want it to. Otherwise, it simply isn’t trade. Trade is something that free people do: when they look at each others’ goods, decide that they see greater value on the other side, and voluntarily act in order to gain the greater value. When that happens, the sum of values necessarily increases. And if anyone attempts to prevent or coerce it, then nothing about it is "free."

Something vitally important about money is the way it makes possible the exchange of more and more complex values. A horse traded for a cow is primordial in the way it was going on for thousands of years before anyone was able to trade for, say, a cancer therapy or the whole range of values that goes into production of a sports car. The difference here is between two models of trade, only the latter of which can make possible the production of a cancer therapy or sports car. Anyone who doesn’t understand this fact should go try to trade something like cattle for all the raw materials, conceptual effort, and labor necessary to end up with a sports car, from scratch. Good luck.

So, what’s going on with money is that it is a device by which to signal complex values. The values that it would signal, however, must be produced in order for them to be represented as money. That — the production — comes first, and that’s why the concept of “making money” is categorically different from simply getting it. And this is exactly why it should be appalling for anyone to suggest that someone like Magic Johnson should be sent to the legislature. He’s an innocent man, and there is no call for that. More seriously, he’s a productive man, which is something that cannot possibly be said about the activities of people who merely get money by force and then dispose of it by train-loads, generally on schemes to get more of it by force. That sort of thing is for Congress and other criminals. No honorable person will have anything to do with it.

By all available accounts, Magic Johnson brings the same sharpness of mind and gleaming personality to business that he exhibited in concert with his superb physical ability as a point guard. His various enterprise partners have spoken well of his understanding of the need to learn when his experience calls for it, as well as his ability with market subtleties. The latter is exemplified in how he peeped a lack of movie theaters in predominantly black neighborhoods. Together with Kenneth Lombard, executive partner at Johnson Development Corporation, Magic figured out the very positive prospects of locating movie theaters where nobody else had put them in the Los Angeles area, and dunked the open shot.

Five years later, the enterprise is definitely going, with urban neighborhood theaters across the country and a partnership with Loews Cineplex Entertainment, including a new nine-screen complex at Frederick Douglass Boulevard, between 124th & 125th streets in Harlem. Magic Johnson Enterprises has extended business connections throughout an integrated services market to include partner ventures with Starbucks coffee shops and T.G.I. Friday’s restaurants.

Now, my question is, why compromise any of this in order to go to Congress for the purpose of bolstering the Congressional Black Caucus? One single day devoted to something like that would be a robbery of effort that would be far better aimed at the actual production going on in these affairs. No matter their pretenses, not one person while sitting in Congress is actually doing anything at all to produce wealth. Nothing good can be said about what they do, because it all begins with stolen money, and that fact cannot be mitigated. Magic Johnson is out there working at generating values for which people are obviously willing to freely trade, to the benefit of all concerned.

Can there be the slightest doubt about which is honorable, and which is not?

I have seen heroes go down to ignominy in Congress. Randy Cunningham comes to mind: a man who carved his name forever in the annals of military aviation with his exploits of May 10, 1972, the day on which he and his back-seater Willie Driscoll rode their F-4 Phantom fighter jet to three air-to-air victories in less than twenty minutes over North Vietnam, a sensational feat of airmanship and spirit. Today, Cunningham has sunk to the level of a Republican representative from California.

And don’t even get me started on the former Sen. John Glenn.

Marion Carl, Chuck Yeager, and Bob Hoover, all gods in the aviation pantheon, also had better sense than to go to Washington.

It’s a terrible thing to watch formerly superb people go that low.

Magic Johnson is on a high-flying roll, making his way like a grown-up through one of the most honorable of occupations. He’s a businessman. He’s doing well at it, and there is no good reason in the world for him to give that up.

Here’s hoping he will carry on. As long as he’s making money, the rest of us are doing good, too, and I, for one, can’t afford to lose him.

I wonder if it would be terribly unseemly of me to just fall down laughing at the state that California is in. Honest to god…

Anybody who knows me could testify that I don’t have a malicious bone in my body, but another thing about me is that I have a seriously wicked taste for justice. I sure do love to see the whip crack on anyone who really deserves it. I guess the thing that gives me pause about shooting off rockets over what I’m seeing out there right now is the prospect of sorting out the individuals who deserve it — whether from their beliefs or actually involved responsibility — from those who wouldn’t have any part of it and who know when sausage-fingered mooks have gummed up the works.

Because of how I generally despise California culture, though, it’s really hard. On my worst days, I couldn’t care less if the whole loopy place just fell right off the edge of the continent with one giant splash, and some of my worst days have been in California. So, when I hear all this fretting over how the lights might start winking out, I tick-off a mental checklist of about a dozen people I know out there who I would hope could get through it, and I figure the rest of them should just light up their Rachel Carson Memorial votive candles and shiver while the rain drives ‘em nuts.

All that is easy enough to deal with. What’s a lot more menacing is how the awesome lie of blaming capitalism and “free markets” lumbers on, now, into its second century with this episode as a landmark. Television news anchors hawk the lie like parrots. For example, on January 11, Jennings opened his report with the rapier insight that “the deregulation of the electric power industry in California is causing one problem after another,” and Rather naturally howled about “mother nature contribut[ing] a storm to a man-made deregulation disaster." It’s not appalling enough that morons like these don’t know anything about markets in general or particular. No, they’re also ignorant of the facts, or of the meanings of words, or both, any of which is a remarkable state of affairs for people in their business.

One might begin analysis of the scene with the assumption that people like this object to “deregulation” — taking the word for what it would mean to people familiar with concepts rendered in plain English. The ways in which they throw words around might help one to conclude on when they mean to speak in general terms. If THAT was ever true, and taken together with objection to "deregulation," then one would naturally expect them to argue for complete state ownership and operation of things like power generation plants. On the other hand, and however, they never really argue for anything, do they? Not out loud, that is. The wink is as good as the nod to heads talking in thirty-second code, and so it’s a bit much to expect them to come right out for a Kaliphornia Elektrikwerke.

At the same time, it’s handy enough for them to refer to “deregulation” of electrical power when the cappuccino machines are in danger for a couple hours at a time. Someone who had just dropped in to notice all the noise could crank up a mental picture of a line of gray pinstriped suiters reaching to the horizon, and ready to disappear in a trampling cloud of dust headed for the golden shore at the drop of the “deregulation” handkerchief. I’m not one much for "subtexts," except when people like the heads are talking in their winking nodding style, and that’s when I know ‘em because I hear ‘em and see ‘em.

Of course, they — the subtexts – are everywhere around this flaming hematoma. Just today, those gray people uptown, who fit all the news to print, asked the first thing to flit into their ditzy minds: “Where’d all the money go?” What a story. It’s sternly pointed out that the wholesale energy unit of Houston-based Reliant Energy knocked off ninety million bucks in the third quarter of last year “in California alone." Jeez. One can almost see the poor little tykes breaking open piggy-banks to hand over nickels to the spats & vests robber barons at the door in order to keep the PlayStation 2’s going through the next highest round. One can almost see it, that is, until one takes a look at Reliant’s quarterly stockholder report and observes an increase of expenses in the wholesale energy unit from $2.9B to $6.7B in the third quarter of ‘00 over Q3 ‘99. I guess stuff like all those windmills out in West Texas — the largest single megawatt-installation in the world — soaks up a lot of nickels. I sure hope it pays off. I mean, it’s not where I would put my money, but I’m not the one gouging the poor little tykes of California, so I guess I get to shut up about it.

“Where did the money go?” indeed. What would it take to make clear to people who ask such questions in times like these that the money goes where it’s needed? To me, it’s unbelievable that over a century and a half of industrial life has not been able to render these lessons clearly to some goddamned dolts. It’s what money does. That’s in its nature. It simply is what it is. Like oil through the looking glass, so is the dough of our lives: going where the going’s good when human beings want it or need it that way, which is universally all the time. It’s unfortunate that Governor Gray Davis can suddenly feel the cold grip of commerce around his neck — in the form of the incipient personal disaster of eventually having to find a real job if he doesn’t get out there and do his best ordained savior act by screaming about “out-of-state profiteers” — but that doesn’t mean that he can do anything to alter the immutable ebb and flow of the grease of life.

Now, these matters really are not terribly difficult. In spite of how dismally the science of economics acquitted itself throughout nearly all the twentieth century, nothing about what causes these kinds of horrentia is essentially opaque to ordinary understanding. Henry Hazlitt – once hailed by H. L. Mencken as “one of the few economists in human history who could really write” — explained things tidily and amply with his “Economics In One Lesson” of 1946. Governor Davis could save himself a lot of anguish by sitting down to read ten pages on “Government Price Fixing," if he were really anguished about whether the cappuccino machines and PlayStations will keep going. The thing is: that’s not what he’s concerned with. Mel Brooks knew the score: “We must protect our phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen!”

See, Davis has got a seller’s market, too. In a world in which I’ve seen even “conservative” commentators remarking on “the failure of a state to provide energy for its citizens," it’s no great task to figure out that people like Davis only have to grab the nearest microphone or collar a stenographer…er, "reporter," and start hollering about “the citizens” and they’ll come running to join the hue & cry for whatever he can duct-tape together in the legislature. And, of course, it’s a safe bet that “deregulation” won’t be on "the agenda," to coin a term abominated to ghastly proportions in recent times.

“Deregulation” is now become the stake to be driven through the heart of the machine. The air is filled with all kinds of wailing over something gone terribly wrong, and has been for many months. In August of last year, Patrick Dorinson of the California Independent System Operators was already quoted by the Environmental News Network, moaning, “In 1991, how were we to know there would be such a surging economy in the year 2000?” I wonder if he meant that if anyone had known, then the “deregulation” scheme might have allowed buyers and sellers to negotiate their own contracts instead of forcing everyone to agree to the same price on any given day in the Power Exchange at Pasadena, or that utilities might have been permitted to set their own rates to consumers. I rather doubt all that, but I guess I’m doubting that anything was "deregulated," too.

It won’t do any good to point out that, for instance, the rise of digital technology should have been, uhm, "deregulated," in all the same sorts of ways as the electrical power industry. Taking someone like Dorinson at his miserable whining word, it’s easy for me to sit here after the turn of the century and point out to him that someone should have seen the day coming when all those nasty evil Web-server farms should have been “deregulated” before they sprang up to their present greedy bloated proportions of about fifteen times the square-foot power requirements of an average commercial office building. Of course, there were only about five hundred documents on the entire World Wide Web in the year he moaned about, but I have to say I find it just hilarious the way the grease of life wends its way into places where morons can’t see, and why it takes people of real vision to both make that happen and deal with it when it does.

Now, however, it’s happened, and the vampire hunters are out with the stakes in hand. Senator Diane Feinstein is working up legislation to cap wholesale electricity prices in eleven western states, and everybody should bet long on hearing her swearing righteous doom upon every variety of greed gouging the poor tykes crouching in the glow of the least humming radiance, anywhere. The “experiment” of California is a “colossal and dangerous failure” according to those in the know — like Governor Davis, for instance – and officials flock across the land to poke and study the twitching monster in its terrible throes.

In a way, it’s a damned good thing that authentic Americans are a species dwindling in numbers below those of panda bears and about fifty-six different kinds of bugs anymore. That’s because their embarrassment at the prospect of East European-styled blackouts anywhere in their homeland would have been simply mortifying to behold. Some would say that we can afford it now that the Soviet Union isn’t around to make political hay on such a scene – the Cold War is over, you see, and “globalization” means never having to say you live better than the furthest dirt-scratching savages.

But I can’t help it if I’m going to have to laugh my ass off when it gets down to some dirt-brain standing at a record store counter in the dark and asking, “How come I can’t see where to click on this to hear a sample?”