Picking Lockes

    

  
                                The Ideas of John Locke in the Twenty-first Century

            As I concluded my comments on Iceland, its history, and its politics, I considered the following question:  Every society must find a balance between individual liberties and the rights of the state; between the right of private property, and the security of that part of the natural environment still held in common; and between personal responsibility and social responsibility.  It seems that Iceland has struck a balance that not only differs from the U.S., but also differs slightly from the rest of Western Europe.  Yet Iceland also differs from other Western democracies in one other way: they did not rely on the philosophy of John Locke as a founding principle.   Their democracy was founded in 930 AD, centuries before Locke was born.  While Iceland is the world’s oldest democracy, the second oldest is surely the federation of Six Iroquois Nations, whose parliament began about 1150, and still functions today.  (Originally, it was just the five nations—the Tuscarora did not join until 1742.)   The Iroquois took nothing from Locke, yet Locke, quite knowingly, took a great deal from the Iroquois.   And the Iroquois also took a different view of these issues, being different from the heirs of Locke in some of the same ways that Iceland is different.  Could there be a connection?

            I declined to write about this until I had the opportunity to think it through, and until I could re-read Locke’s Second Treatise of Government.  Having now done this, I can assure you that there is a connection.  If you have not yet read the series of posts on Iceland, it might be useful to do so before beginning this opus.  To read them in order, they are entitled: “Iceland, Day one”;  “Iceland, Day 2&3”;  “Iceland, Day four”;  “Iceland, Day 5&6”;  “A view of Iceland”; “Iceland, Early History”; and “Iceland, Recent History.”   You must page back into “older posts,” to find the first.

            First, let me explain that this is in no way an attack on John Locke. Locke is called the father of Liberalism, and as a lifelong Liberal, I would no more wish to attack Locke than the Delhi Lama would wish to attack the Buddha.  Locke was the first to articulate the universal right to self determination, self government, and individual freedom.   The basic ideas found in our own Declaration of Independence:  “….that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that it is to secure these rights that governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…...” are a summary of Locke’s most central ideas.  (Except that Locke speaks of the pursuit of property, not happiness.)

            Locke not only provided a theoretical framework for self government based on consent of the governed, he also provided a theory for the origins of government, of private property, and of basic human rights.   He theorized that when man was in “a natural state,” he was utterly free and independent, and that all were equal, and that no man had the right to give orders to another.  What evidence did he offer?  He had carefully studied all information available to him about American Indians, especially the Iroquois.   He knew that the Iroquois claimed such rights, and he assumed that these people were “man in the natural state.”

            Locke says that while all men were originally free, they weren’t very secure, since if someone were to violate their freedom or seize their property, there might not be anyone to defend them.  They had a natural right to defend themselves, but that might not be effective. So in practice, men in the natural state might enjoy few rights at all, if their rights were routinely trampled by whichever bully wished to do so.  Locke felt that most men in the natural state would respect each other’s rights, but there would always be a few who did not. So men might bind together in groups and defend their rights collectively, and form some sort of government, with each man transferring to the government some of his right to use force in his own defense.  But, Locke emphasized, this transfer of rights to some state entity could be revoked if abused. People have the right to form governments—and the right to change them.

            Charles C. Mann, in his book, 1491—America before Columbus, reminds us how much Locke took from the Iroquois.  My own review of this book is in the archives of this blog.  Let me quote from it:

            The political institutions of the Indians were often as sophisticated as their agriculture. The Six Iroquois Nations had an elected parliament which dates back to about 1150 AD and which still functions today.  It is the second oldest representative democratic body on the planet, second only to Iceland.   The pre-Columbian Indians did not practice slavery, and their women enjoyed a status much closer to gender equality than European women at the time.  When English and French settlers first encountered the Iroquois, they were dumbfounded by their “outrageous” ideas, such as the belief that all men were by nature free—that no man could be owned by another—and that every man had an equal right to a voice in the governing of his country.  

            Europeans saw these “naïve and silly” ideas as proof that the Indians would always be “ungovernable savages.”  They also found such ideas so amusing that they were quickly reported back to Europe.  But not all Europeans were amused.  The philosophers of the Enlightenment took these ideas seriously and argued about them for the next hundred years. John Locke was particularly impressed.  He saw the Indians as “man in the natural state.”  So he assumed that Iroquois concepts of individual freedom and equality must be the natural rights of man.  Jefferson and the other framers of the American constitution were familiar with the writings of Locke.  They also had direct personal knowledge of Iroquois democracy, and knew that it actually worked.  Democracy is not an invention that can be patented, but if it were, the Iroquois may have the prior claim.  In any case, Western democratic institutions and ideas of freedom and equality probably owe more to the Iroquois than to the Magna Charta.

            Locke builds on this individual freedom to create a right of private property.  He asserts that before civil government, all property was held in common, but that individuals could appropriate to themselves a portion of the common store of resources to the extent that they required these things to live.  And they did not need the advance consent of the other stakeholders to do this, because they needed these things to live, and everyone has a basic right to life. The way in which common resources can become individual property is as follows:  all persons already have personal property in the form of their own bodies and the labor of their own bodies.  Every man owns his own labor. If, in extracting nature’s bounty, I have invested some of my own labor, then the useful outcome becomes mine alone.  Apples growing in the wilderness belong to everyone.  But if I invest labor into finding them, picking them, and carrying them back to the village, then they are not the apples of all mankind—they’re mine.  The apples represent the bounty of nature, and nature belongs to everyone.  But by the time they sit in a basket in front of my hut, they also represent an amount of labor—my labor.  And since the two values, natural value and labor value, are by then inseparably co-mingled, I may claim exclusive ownership, since if anyone else claimed a share of it, they would be confiscating some of my labor.  That’s where private property comes from—the mingling of one person’s labor with goods previously held in common.   The fish in the ocean belong to everyone—until some individual goes to the trouble of catching some of them.  The same applies to land.  If I find a piece of wilderness land that no one is using, it’s mine to use if I wish to use it.  And if I make “improvements,” such as clearing off trees,   ploughing and planting, and building fences,  then not only does the produce become mine, but the land itself,  since by then the overwhelming majority of its value owes to improvements wrought by my labor—not to the original value of some worthless piece of wilderness land.  The land, according to Locke, was in and of itself nearly worthless. Only my labor made it worth something, because only since my investment does it produce anything useful to humans.  He believed that God gave the planet to humans, and only to humans, and He intended that humans use it for their needs.  So for Locke, the only measure of the worth of anything is what it produces that is useful to humans.  (I should point out that in 1689, there were few in Europe who would have disputed this point.  The wilderness which we today define as priceless was in Locke’s time deemed worthless.  And the Bible, which Locke quotes and which Europeans did not then doubt, clearly says that God gave man total dominion over the earth and all its creatures.)  Locke gave two reasons why undeveloped land was nearly worthless:  Firstly, it produced nearly nothing, and secondly, there was a limitless supply of it.  He conceded that in some areas, such as most of Europe, most of the arable land was taken.  But he claimed that worldwide, even considering the whole earth’s population, if one were to consider the Americas, there was at least twice as much land as the human race could ever use.

            Did Europeans have the right to take American land?  Locke claimed that they did.  Why?  Because the Indians were not really using it.  Locke totally misunderstood how the Indians used the land.   He assumed since the Indians did not enclose or plough the land, or build permanent structures, they were just occupying the land, not actively using it. As Dan McGovern points out in his excellent book, The Campo Indian Landfill War, prior to the coming of the white man, Indians used fire to actively manage their environment, and did so more effectively than it has ever been managed since.  Charles C. Mann makes the same point in 1491—America before Columbus (Reviewed in these pages—see archive.)   But Locke argued that since the Indians were not “using” the land, any European farmer could rightly seize and use as much as he could personally farm, and by “improving it,” the land became his own. Thomas Jefferson understood how the Indians used land, but felt that they did not use it very efficiently. He argued that any European farmer could feed thirty times as many people on the same quantity of land, so in a world of hungry people, long term survival of the “savage” way of life was difficult to justify.  All throughout the colonization of America, the Locke principle of taking from nature as much land as you could personally use, and making it your own by improving it was the operating principle. Even the Homestead Act would give anyone 160 acres, but only if he lived on the land, worked the land, and “improved” the land.

             So Locke’s first major flaw is that his theory, by misunderstanding how Indians used the land, allowed us to appropriate Indian land with an easy conscience. But with Europe bursting at the seams, we surely would have taken this land anyway, and somehow justified this taking.  Any society that can justify slavery can justify anything.  And even John Locke could justify slavery.  He said that although all men were born free, it was possible for a person to act so as to lose that freedom; (e.g. if a person did something to deserve a death penalty, and his judges were merciful and sentenced him to a life of slavery instead, he should have no complaint, because if he thought slavery was worse than death, he could always provoke his master to kill him.)  Well, in practice, it doesn’t work out that way.  What percentage of slaves shipped out of west Africa were convicted murderers?  And what about those born into slavery, a situation which had already become legal in the colonies at the time he was writing?

            While Locke only briefly mentions slavery, (3 paragraphs) he devotes a full 26 paragraphs to defending private property, including the acquisition and hoarding of unlimited amounts of private wealth.  He says that originally, when man was in the natural state, everyone was allowed to take from nature as much as he could use. If a man took a dozen fish from the lake and he and his family ate them all before any of them spoiled, that was fair.  But if he caught more than he could use and some of them spoiled, this was a crime against all others who might have wanted those fish.  This limitation of not taking more than you could use kept everyone fairly equal.

            But, says Locke, all that changes with the invention of money.  Gold is not actually useful.  You can’t eat it, burn it, or ride it. But at some point, civilized men, by common assent, agreed to accept gold and silver in exchange for things that are useful—for food, fuel, and fiber, etc.  And with the rise of commerce, it happened that some men accumulated more gold and silver than others.  But this is no crime, since gold does not spoil and nothing is wasted.  If I catch twice as many fish as I can eat and trade the excess for shiny metal, all of the fish are still eaten and nothing spoils.  So by hoarding gold, I am keeping gold out of circulation and depriving others from having it, but gold is not useful.  And nothing that is useful is withheld from anyone.

            Why would Locke take such pains to construct such an ingenious defense of unlimited private wealth?  He was not a disinterested party.  By 1689, he had become extremely wealthy, and so were most of his friends. And why would an essay which is mainly about freedom use such convoluted logic attempting to defend slavery?  Locke had made his money from stock in many British companies, and they all in some way profited from slavery.

            Locke was personally conflicted, but no more so than any other affluent Englishman of his age.  Yet he established the right to self government, to personal freedom, and to private property.  These are of great value. He built a great house, and we all live in it.  I have no desire to burn it down.  The trouble is that some of the foundation blocks he used in building this house were badly cracked and have now begun to crumple.  Our task should be to carefully remove and replace these flawed blocks, while preserving the house.

            So, which of Locke’s foundation blocks would I replace? Three mainly—and I’ll list them in ascending order of importance:  That the only measure of value of anything is in the goods it can provide for humans; that wilderness land, (“unimproved” land) is nearly worthless; and that these undeveloped lands are available in unlimited abundance.

            Locke may be forgiven for his first error.  In thinking that the only measure of value was what could be directly used by humans, he failed to understand that almost every species on the planet indirectly affects humans.  We breathe oxygen from leaves in the upper Amazon, wild insects pollinate our crops, phytoplankton sustains our fisheries etc.  We can forgive him for not knowing this, because until after WWII, few people anywhere knew it.  In fact, we are only now beginning to understand the complex ways in which all life is intertwined.

            For his second error, he should have known better.  If you think an acre of untilled land has no value, let me ask you this:  Have you ever tried to make an acre of dirt?  One of the first official government actions in the United States to recognize the importance of unexploited land was probably the creation of Adirondack State Park in NY in 1892. Larger than all U.S. national parks combined, this area was set aside by New Yorkers--who had already seen what “development” had done to the Hudson Valley, some parts of which were by then an open sewer. Though it had once been the most beautiful river in the East, by the mid nineteenth century, much of the Hudson was ruined.  They feared that if the same logging were done in the Adirondacks, it would destroy needed watershed, silt up the Erie Canal and the Hudson, and leave an area so eroded as to look like the surface of the moon. In 1894, a constitutional change provided that Adirondack Park must never be developed—must remain “forever wild.”

            But for Locke’s last error--his claim that unused land would always be available in limitless abundance-- it is difficult to see how such a logical man could say something that outrageous.  The only explanation may be that Locke and his contemporaries, amazed by the vastness of the New World, were in the same position as a pack of feral Chihuahuas who stumble onto the carcass of a beached whale.  While a feral Chihuahua might understand intellectually that a very large whale is not at all the same as a “limitless” whale, from his standpoint it might as well be.   So when was it first appreciated that the New World lands were not unlimited?  Probably by 1798, the year Thomas Malthus published; and certainly by 1823, the year of the Monroe Doctrine.  The next milestone was 1890, when the Superintendant of the Census announced the closing of the American frontier. Many at the time worried that this closing would profoundly alter American society. They felt that the frontier had been central to the development of the American character, and without it, things would be radically different.  And they were right, though the expected change was not immediate, but slow and gradual.  The frontier had always been a social safety valve.  If wages in your eastern factory job were appallingly low, your boss could always say, “So, if you’re not happy, go west, get some free land, and make your own deal.”  If rent for a tenant farmer in the east was too high, the remedy was the same--- “Go get your own land.”  At least for free men, there was no problem that 160 acres of free or cheap land could not address. But with the frontier closed, then all of the old problems would have to be re-examined, and eventually fixed.  The widespread belief that there will always be enough resources for everyone allows a society to defer necessary social investments; and this is true whether this belief is grounded in actual historical experience of resource abundance or simply in a blind faith in John Locke’s promise. Yet once you admit that the things that sustain life are limited, and that everyone has a right to live, then a winner-take-all society can’t work.   Germany may have been the first to see this, as they established an old age pension plan in 1870. 

            Locke claimed that for one man to have vastly more than an average store of goods did not make his neighbors poorer.  This was true, he said, because the rich man was richer only because he worked harder, not because he controlled more resources. Undeveloped resources were in limitless abundance; hard work was the only missing ingredient.  Of course, if he was wrong about the unlimited resources, then he would be wrong about whether one man having more goods condemned another to have less.  And this would explain why free market conservatives have hung on so tenaciously to the idea of limitless resources, even if it’s a mathematical impossibility.

            We should expect that the degree to which a society demands and accepts redistributive economic policies should vary inversely with the persistence of the myth of a limitless resource base.  The United States has both a direct connection to Locke, and actual historical experience with free land, and therefore the strongest acceptance of this myth.  England has a direct connection to Locke, but no free land experience.  Continental Europe has only an indirect connection with Locke, and no free land experience, and Iceland has none of the above.  Iceland was founded in 930 AD, centuries before Locke; and even at that time, most of the usable land had been claimed.

            At this point, you may expect that I will launch into a detailed analysis of Icelandic law and social programs. No, that would take five years of research and produce a 900 page tome that I do not propose to write and that you would not care to read. Suffice it to say that modern Icelanders are more willing than most to admit that there are hard limits to what can be produced, and also more willing to submit to redistribution of that which is produced.  And the two go together.  If you’ve read my post on Iceland, then you are aware that their entire food and fiber base rests on a fishery and a narrow strip of coastal land. Imagine trying to convince an Icelander that good farm land is infinitely abundant.    Imagine trying to convince the Iroquois, who had fought many bloody wars over land, that land is infinitely abundant. They would see the falsity immediately. Though our situation is more complex, the falsity can be seen here as well, unless we try very hard not to see it.

Iceland, Recent History

Reykjavik Harbor, taken from the belfry of the tallest church.

            The collapse of Iceland’s environment and its democracy in its early years forged cultural traits that persist even today, particularly a deep suspicion of allowing any one group to have too much wealth or too much power.   And Iceland’s later history only reinforced these traits.  During the seven hundred years when Iceland was ruled by foreigners, there were no rich people in Iceland—except the foreigners who had been sent there to rule them. The Icelanders themselves were all poor, and uniformly poor. If there was any one thing that could have increased the suspicion of wealth which Icelanders already held, it would have been such a situation.  And throughout most of that period, Denmark held a monopoly on Icelandic trade, which impoverished the country further.  By the twentieth century, resentment of “foreign exploiters” and resentment of “the wealthy” had become synonymous.

            Another factor which I believe contributed to Icelanders’ willingness to accept redistributive policies was that during the “glory days” of the fishing industry, that industry in itself provided an opportunity for large numbers of blue collar workers to earn high incomes, and this evens out the wealth.  At least, that certainly happened in my home town of Waterloo, Iowa.  In the post war years, John Deere and Rath Pack both paid high wages, and this lifted the wage level of all other workers in the area.  Not that everyone made as high a wage as Deere workers.  The work in the Deere plant, especially the foundry, was strenuous, hot, dangerous work in foul air, and no one in his right mind would do it if he wasn’t paid significantly more than he could make elsewhere.  Many quit the plant to take easier jobs—always at lower wages--but not radically lower wages.  If you worked for a small local non-union business, every time you and your boss talked about wages, you knew, and your boss knew that you could always go back to Deere’s.   So this situation had the effect of pulling up the bottom of the wage structure.  But it also pulled down the top, since Waterloo’s only wealthy class then was comprised of the small business owners, who all made less income because they had to pay wages competing with Deere and Rath.   In the 1960s, visitors to Waterloo often observed that Waterloo had no upper class—or lower class.  Not everyone earned exactly the same wage, but they were nearly all in about the same class, or so it seemed to outsiders.

            I suspect that fishing boat work was also horrible, strenuous, dangerous work, and people were paid high wages to do it.  And this lifted the wages of shore-bound occupations as well.  A political order that aims to even out opportunities and incomes would seem more reasonable to those who grew up in a place where fairly equal opportunities and incomes had been the norm.

            Another factor that allowed Iceland’s bold social initiatives was its homogeneous population.   In the United States and in England, conservatives in the twentieth century often won elections, not because the working people who voted for them had been persuaded that the conservative parties would advance their own economic interests, but rather, they voted their fears—fears created by “wedge politicians” who pandered to them.  For a hundred years, conservative wedge politicians have divided White against Black, Protestant against Catholic, and so forth.  I know several conservatives who are decent people, and who would be appalled at these tactics.  But in the U.S., no conservative since Eisenhower has been elected to national office without at least some component of the vote owing to wedge politics—usually race baiting wedge politics.  And in every case, the size of that component was greater than his margin of victory.  I clearly remember blue collar Democrats who said they were voting for Reagan in 1980.  They had been persuaded that a significant part of their tax money was supporting “black welfare queens.”  It was utter nonsense.   The entire Health and Human Services budget was a couple percent of the federal budget, and the majority of it went to run the prison system--and most recipients of any kind of welfare payments were white.  I explained that in a whole year, the amount of their tax money actually spent on “black welfare queens” could not exceed ten bucks.  Is it reasonable to elect a man who will bust every union he can and undermine your own wage scale to save ten bucks?

             But elect him they did; and his first official act was to bust the Air Traffic Controllers’ union.  He then appointed a bunch of anti-union zealots to the NLRB who ruled against every union petition without even reading it.  And then he gave Volker the green light to throw the country into a depression.  Within two years, our union voluntarily agreed to a 40% wage cut, (not that it mattered, since only 5 out of 300 of us still had jobs.)  All this for ten bucks?  It wasn’t the money; it was race—and Reagan and his handlers fully understood this.  And when Thatcher was elected in England, part of the strategy involved a whispering campaign to convince working people that “If you vote for labor, you’ll have a person of colour for a neighbor.”  (Only they phrased it less politely.)  As I said, I know many conservatives, or at least moderates who often support conservatives, who would be appalled at this kind of tactic. But if you’ve ever given a dollar to any conservative running for national office, some of that dollar was used for this kind of strategy.  And if it wasn’t, then they lost.

            The problem for liberals is that any time we suggest even the simplest of government programs that would give any benefit to anyone, a conservative campaign, sometimes shouted, and sometimes whispered, spreads the message that:  “If we have this program, then some of your tax money will be going to “them,” and we all know what treacherous, no good bastards “they” are.”   Now, if you were Karl Rove and someone in Iceland hired you to devise a wedge campaign to split the working class vote there, who is the “them?”  If you were trying to incite irrational fear of the “other,” who would that be?    They all have the same race, nationality, language, history, and religion, ---and mostly the same genes.  So who is “they?”

            And finally, Iceland, like all European countries, has a constitution which provides a true democracy, with “one man, one vote.”   We do not.  Have you ever noticed that in the U.S. Senate, South Dakota gets as many senate seats as New York?  If you don’t understand how this makes a difference, simply look at all liberal programs since the beginning of the republic which passed the U.S. House-- but not the Senate.  To sum up, Iceland has a unique geology, ecology, economy, and history.  They have a homogeneous population.  And they have a democracy.

Iceland, Early History

Culture House--One  of the many keepers of Iceland's 1000 years of  History.

               According to the Icelandic Forestry Association, at the time of settlement, over 25% of Iceland was covered with birch woodland.  But this resource was over exploited.  It was cut for timber, for firewood, or just burned off to clear land for grazing.  With no trees, the land quickly eroded. They say Iceland today is “without a doubt the most eroded country in Europe, if not the world.”  But starting about 1930, conservation and tree planting efforts have been underway, and are yielding results. But the environmental degradation, which is now so difficult to reverse, began quite early.

            According to ResearchPennState, Iceland was settled between 870 and 930 by Viking chieftains trying to escape rule of the king of Norway.  They divided the country into 36 chieftaincies which jointly ruled for 300 years. Then civil war broke out and when it was over, Iceland had lost its independence and become a part of Norway. Icelandic society changed from a relatively egalitarian society where each chieftain fed and housed his followers to a state hierarchy where each family was on its own and little concern was shown for the poor.

            Penn State anthropologist Paul Durrenberger claims that the societal changes were not the result of the war but the cause, having begun 200 years earlier.  He says overpopulation, overgrazing, and erosion had reduced Icelanders’ ability to feed themselves, and chieftains learned that a man ate more than his labor was worth.  John Steinberg of UCLA, Durrenberger’s collaborator, says the chieftains “squeezed the followers out of the longhouses,” which is a sign of a developing country trying to get more production out of its people.  But in Iceland’s fragile landscape, it didn’t work.  And the result was chaos, war, and disaster.

            During the “Free Commonwealth Period” (930-1262) authority was in the hands of the chieftains, who represented their constituents for a fee. But constituents could change their allegiance at any time without changing residence.  So there was a lively competition among chieftains to attract more followers.  And a chieftaincy was property—it could be bought and sold.  You could purchase a chieftaincy as an investment, hoping that by being an effective chieftain, you could attract more followers, and earn a profit in fees.   It was government by free market capitalism, and it worked fairly well as long as there were 36 chieftains.  But the end result of competition is monopoly.  By 1230, six families controlled all the original chieftaincies.  Having acquired more wealth and power than they could hold onto, their rule collapsed in chaos and civil war.  Someone appealed to the king of Norway for help, and when it was all over, Iceland was a province of Norway, which was later conquered by Denmark.

            Even if, as Durrenberger argues, the breakdown of a functioning democratic order was the result of the impoverishment of the Icelanders and not the cause, there are still some lessons here.  One is that when the environment imposes hard limits to what can be sustainably produced, that imposes limits on the kinds of government that can be used.  We often hear the slogan, “Let the winners win and the losers lose.”   No polity ever followed that doctrine more assiduously than the Icelandic settlers.   And the winners did indeed win and the losers lost. And the biggest loser was the environment. But the Icelanders also lost their prosperity, their democracy, and eventually their sovereignty.   Considering the fragile environment, they would have had serious difficulties no matter what their social system. But to most Icelanders, allowing too much wealth and power to be controlled by too few people is what turned a difficulty into a disaster. You may ask, “How could people’s political views today be influenced by events of a thousand years ago?”  In most places, they wouldn’t be.  But Icelanders actually read their history.  As my daughter puts it, by the time they regained their independence in 1944, “They not only knew how they had lost their sovereignty-- they’d had 700 years to brood about it.”

A View of Iceland

Above is a view of the rift valley at Thingveller, taken from atop the LawRock, where in 930 AD the world's oldest democracy was founded.

            Before considering the various geopolitical factors that made Iceland what it is today, let’s take a look at what it is today.  As an American liberal, born in the Roosevelt years and raised in the Truman years, I began life with the reasonable expectation that I would live to see a day when my country could provide its citizens with at least a minimum guarantee of economic stability; the kind of guarantee Roosevelt outlined in his Economic Bill of Rights, nearly 70 years ago.  I assumed that my country could eventually provide all Americans a job that pays a living wage, basic health care, and an education appropriate to today’s world.  And I assumed that I would live to see these things—but I no longer believe so.   It’s not that these initiatives are not regularly introduced in Congress; they are and always have been.  Yet with every proposal, we’ve heard a chorus of conservatives lamenting, “Gosh, we can’t really do that.  That would be socialism, and socialism doesn’t work.  If you knew anything about economics, then you’d understand that socialism doesn’t really work.”

            Well, I’ve just returned from Iceland, and I’m here to tell you:  Socialism is alive and well—and it works slicker than snot on a glass doorknob.  And everyone is happy with it, there are no problems, and no one is planning to get rid of it anytime soon.  Iceland provides its citizens a social net that goes light years beyond anything American liberals have ever proposed, and it works just fine.  With the present difficulties caused by the collapse of the Icelandic investment banking industry, (a collapse which American banks caused) a few programs may face a few cuts.  But they have no intension of seriously scaling back social wages in Iceland. The basic welfare state is simply not on the table.  No doubt, there will be a lively debate, and there will be sacrifices--things are tough everywhere.  But these will be shared sacrifices.  Iceland's national identity is a history of shared sacrifice, and no one is going to take that from them. 

            So I put it to you:  Why can a chunk of volcanic rock provide all this for its people, whilst America, supposedly the richest superpower on earth claims it cannot?  The answer is that they have the political will to do it. But how did they come to have such a will?  That is what I will attempt to examine.

            First, let’s look at the Geology.  If you have any interest in geology at all, then a visit to Iceland should be the top item on your “bucket list.” Iceland is a “one stop shopping center” for geology.  It’s got it all—volcanoes, glaciers, earthquakes, geysers, rift valleys, plate tectonics, uplift, subsidence; you name it—they’ve got it.   And if you are a guy who likes his geology the way he likes his women—young and beautiful—then come to Iceland.  So how young is it?  The first volcano poked above the surface of the Atlantic only 20 million years ago.  And with an eruption every four years on average, in most places the surface you are walking on was laid down in historic times---and they have a record of it.  In many places, there are 5 or 6 volcanic debris layers laid down since settlement, and they have records for each.  Pick a layer and they can tell you which volcano did it, when it erupted, how many people were killed—and what their names were.  And in Iceland, the rock cycle is in “fast forward.”  What arrives quickly sometimes leaves quickly?  When I was approaching a glacier near Eyjafjallajokull, I was walking up a stream bed filled with till deposited by the ice as it receded.  It was stuff ranging from football sized rocks, (all basalt) to cobble sized, and gravel and sand. But in one area there was a fresh, two inch deposit of volcanic ash, which had started to wash away, as the stream meandered through the nearly level bed. Our bus driver and tour guide said, “This wasn’t here last month—and if we get a good rain, it won’t be here next month.  It will all be washed to the sea.”

            So how has this affected the economics of the island?  Well, on the one hand, without the volcanoes, Iceland wouldn’t be there, and the ash is their main source of fertilizer. But with such frequent eruptions, there is never time to develop thick, tillable topsoil, but just a thin layer that supports grass.  And also, several times since settlement, there have been disastrous

eruptions that have nearly wiped out all human life on the island, usually by depositing such a thick layer of ash that it destroyed the grass. This killed off the animals, leaving the humans to die of famine.  In one eruption, a discharge of fluorine gas killed thousands of people and animals.  And even when the volcanoes are quiet, there is little usable land. The island is so far north that it would be far too cold to support much food production, except for the Gulf Stream.  But this oceanic climate does not extend to the interior, which is uninhabitable. So to feed people, we have a fishery and a narrow strip of land along the coast, especially the south coast.    Still, these are rich resources which could probably support all Icelanders —if there aren’t too many of them and if everything is divided fairly evenly.   But the resource base is fixed and small, and always will be.    No application of human sweat or ingenuity will produce significantly more food.  Raising more animals will just result in overgrazing and erosion, fishing more aggressively will just hasten the decline of the fishery, which already suffers from overfishing.  There is what there is.  

Iceland, Day 5 & 6

            On Thursday we took a bus tour along the south coast to the village of Vik. (A “vik” is where a small river flows into the sea. In old Scandinavia, people who lived along the viks were called Vikings.)   Vik has a beach of jet black sand, up against a cliff where a rapidly cooling basalt flow has produced spectacular pentagonal shaped vertical columns.  Just before we got to Vik, we drove right past Eyjafjallajokull, the volcano, which was quiet the week we were there.  But the peak was shrouded in mist that day, so we could not actually see it. (Eyjafjallajokull is pronounced:  Aya-fyaht-la-yoe-kut-la, usually shortened to Aya-fyaht-la-yok’t.  Remember, in Icelandic, “J” is pronounced like “Y” and a double “L” is sometimes  “L-T” or “T-L,” depending on context.  Here, it is pronounced as “T-L,”   but in Gullfoss, it is pronounced   “L-T,” which is why Gullfoss comes out “Goolt-foss.”)  

            On the way back from Vik, we drove through some of Iceland’s best grazing land, with sheep, cattle, and horses (hross), grazing on both sides of the road.  A narrow coastal plain, nearly at sea level, starts out flat and then, as it nears the mountain, has its incline steepen in a hyperbolic curve till it’s nearly vertical at 6 or 7 hundred feet.  The sheep graze as far up the slope as they are comfortable, which is nearly vertical.  I’ve always thought that these little beasts must have shorter legs on one side.  We stopped along the road to get pictures of some horses.  As soon as we stopped, the horses came right up to the fence and waited to have their picture taken.  And then the horses on the other side of the road got jealous and crowded up to the fence too.

            The Icelandic horse is extremely friendly.  They don’t bite you or kick you, they are strong, and are comfortable to ride on rough terrain, since they have an extra gate not found in any other horse.  Iceland has been exporting live horses for many years now, and this trade is an important part of the economy.  There are now more Icelandic horses outside of Iceland than inside, and there are over 90,000 inside.  For a country of 300,000 people, that’s a lot of horses.  Some horses are owned by townsfolk who board them in the countryside and drive up on weekends to ride them. Some are rented to tourists. And some are raised for export. But as the world economy has collapsed and fewer people can afford to spend money on imported horses, more will have to be culled out for slaughter.  Remember, Iceland is an island and it isn’t getting any bigger. Almost none of the land is tillable, and of the small portion that can be grazed, all of it is in use—and has been in use for a thousand years.   There is only so much pasture, and there will never be any more.

            This fixed constraint affects not only livestock production, but all aspects of life, and all Icelanders understand this.  At no time since the original settlement have they encouraged immigration.  While they encourage tourism, as this has become a significant part of the economy, even marrying an Icelander does not automatically guarantee you a permit to live there.  

            On Friday morning we walked up to Hallgrimskirkja, a beautiful fairly new church on a hilltop in Reykjavik, and an object of great civic pride. Like all other buildings, it is made of reinforced concrete. This town has almost continuous small earthquakes, and occasionally fairly large ones, so no other kind of construction is practical. Yet the church is tall, thin, and has a light, airy feel to it. Typical structures here are made of poured concrete, and then either stucco covered, or sheeted in corrugated steel, which is often painted bright colors.  All buildings are well built, well maintained, and the whole town is immaculately clean. There are no slums or blighted areas.

            The Icelanders, besides being tall, healthy, and friendly, are the most educated on earth. Education from age 6 to 16 is provided by the local community.   Upon graduation, every Islander who cannot find a job is given a stipend.  And all are entitled to attend Iceland University, or study abroad---all at government expense.  Thirty percent of all Icelanders have college degrees.  In the age group from 25 to 45, nearly 100 % have at least a BA.  Most Icelanders in this age group speak fluent English as well as Icelandic, and many also speak an additional language, such as German, Danish, or French.  And Icelanders write, publish, purchase, and read more books per capita than any people anywhere.  And these friendly, independent, egalitarian, and freedom-loving people also have the oldest democracy on Earth.

            This is the last regular post that attempts to detail my day to day adventures in Iceland, but I will soon begin to post a few comments about this country’s geology, economics, history, and current political culture.  Being an economic determinist, I believe that economics determines history, and history determines politics.  But I also believe that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the ecology, which is constrained by the geology. So I will begin, in a day or two, discussing Iceland’s unique geology, and discuss how this has constrained its economy and thereby determined its history and the political and social system which comes out of the history.  I don’t actually know that much about geology, but the island’s most striking geological features are not especially subtle.  A retarded gerbil could see that there’s no damn place like Iceland.

Iceland Diary, Day 4

            On Wednesday, what I would like to have done is get a better picture of the Russian  sailing vessel that was moored in the harbor when we arrived.  But alas, it had already gone back to Russia. In fact, it was already gone Monday morning. Darn! I really wanted a closer look at that ship.  So we just stayed in Reykjavik to visit museums and soak up local culture, including the food culture.   Food is expensive—about twice the price paid in Iowa.  And that is true of both prepared food and food sold in supermarkets.  (I saw a package of lunch meat, probably bologna, in a supermarket priced at about $8.00 per pound.)  But in Iceland, much of the food must be imported, so food has always been expensive.  And before the exchange rate of the Krona crashed last year, the prices, in U.S. dollars, would have been much higher.  This is actually a very good time to visit Iceland.

            The favorite national food of Icelanders is lamb soup.  It’s a thick soup made of lamb, cabbage, potatoes, and carrots, and it’s very tasty.  It is served everywhere from elite restaurants to truck stop lunch counters.  It varies in quality, but the worst it ever gets is wonderful.  The most popular restaurant in Reykjavik is a hot dog stand. When I first heard this I was quite puzzled. But it turns out that what they call a hot dog is different from anything served in the U.S.  It’s a spicy, coarse ground sausage, probably mutton, and it’s cheap and delicious. The only hot dogs I ever ate in the U.S. that resemble an Iceland dog are those I ate at Coney Island in the 1960s.   So basically, an Iceland hot dog is an original Coney Island hot dog.

            While all food in Iceland is pricey, some is delicious—and some isn’t!  And it’s all equally pricey.  How do you find the good food?  By accident!  Some of the places recommended by the tourest guides were excellent, and some were lousy.  Going to a place frequented by the natives was not a reliable guide either.  A place might be popular with the locals because they have the best rock band.  But if you stay there a few days, you find the good places.  And when Reykjavik food is good, it’s very, very good.  There is a huge dairy industry in Iceland, and all dairy goods are excellent and cheap.  They have the best butter on earth, and use it lavishly.

            Many restaurants offer minke whale steak, and even puffin.  But typical restaurant fare is lamb, codfish, and horsemeat.  (They do not raise horses specifically for slaughter.  But in a country that imports a lot of its food, nothing is wasted.  I’ll say more about this later.)  You’d think codfish would be dogmeat cheap, since Iceland still exports codfish. But it’s quite expensive in Rejkavik.  What little codfish the Icelanders still take from the sea, they sell mostly to rich Europeans to pay for the many foodstuffs which they must  import.  They also export a lot of mutton, and very small amounts of horsemeat, mostly to France and Japan, where it is considered a delicacy.

            We visited a museum where they have preserved a recently discovered a 9^th century Viking longhouse, right in downtown Reykjavik.  We also visited the National Museum.  They have exhibits showing reproductions of the ancient documents, and also archaeological artifacts dating back to the earliest settlements.  One thing about the Icelanders’ history is that they have so much of it.  The earliest settlers were not literate, and records for the first two hundred years were passed down orally before they were written down.  But soon after they accepted Christianity in 1000 AD, they became nearly 100% literate, and have remained so ever since.   In the middle ages, when in most of Europe only a privileged few could read, Iceland was almost 100% literate.  So when the sagas were written, all Icelanders could read them—and they all did--and every generation since has read them.  This is possible because the language has hardly changed over the last thousand years.  And the connection to the sagas is one factor that has helped prevent it from changing.  It is said that those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. Icelanders fully understand this; they have studied their mistakes carefully, and have no intention of repeating them.  More on this later.

            

Iceland Diary, day 2 & 3

            When we arrived Sunday morning, as our bus came into Reykjavik harbor, there was a huge sailing ship moored there.  I got a few pictures from the bus.  Monday morning I walked down to the harbor to get a better shot, but the ship was already gone.  It was a Russian ship, the second largest sailing ship in the world—and it looked to be 400’ long.  It had been at the Sail Amsterdam fest, and was stopping at Reykjavik on the way home.

            Sunday evening, my wife became ill with a sinus infection.  She had been treated for a sinus infection the week before and had completed a course of antibiotics and thought she was cured. But it was starting to come back.  So Monday she went to a special clinic set up to handle sick tourists and saw a doctor immediately, who wrote a prescription---all for $40.00.  The next day she felt fine.  While my wife was at the clinic, my daughter and I did a walking tour of Reykjavik harbor and went to an art museum.  Featured that month were works by Erro, the Icelandic painter who does accurate portraiture with a political motive.  (Think Coit Tower paintings.)  One huge canvas showed the traditional monkey see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil pose.   But all of the monkeys had Richard Nixon’s face, and the third monkey was shouting.  The caption said, “Well, two out of three ain’t bad.”   Since Erro dislikes the same people I dislike, I’m sure we’d get along fine.  We also walked over to the parliament building, the Allthing.  A modest stone building, it’s smaller than any rural Iowa county court house.

             On Tuesday, we took a bus tour called the Golden Circle Tour.   This takes you into the interior, to Gullfoss, pronounced goolt-fose,  (shown above) which means gold falls.  (In Icelandic, a double “L” can sound like “LT” or “TL,” depending on context.)  It’s the most beautiful falls in Iceland, and perhaps the world.   A rather large river plunges over a cliff and falls a hundred feet, and then turns a 45 degree corner and does it again.  From there we went to Geysir and saw the original geyser and several hot springs--so hot the water was actually boiling.   And from there we went to Thingveller  (pronounced thing-vet-la.)  This is a beautiful rift valley where the North American plate and the Eurasian Plates are pulling apart.   People like to get their picture taken with “one foot in America and one foot in Europe,” but this is self deception. There is not one fissure, but several parallel fissures.  If you were standing on a ridge that was the furthest east point of what was unambiguously American, and your friend was on the ridge on the furthest west point that was unambiguously Eurasian, there would be a 17 kilometer rift valley between you.  Slightly above the valley is a place called the Law Rock.  This place, a small natural amphitheater, is the site where in the year 930 AD, Viking settlers convened the first Allthing, the first island-wide attempt at popular self-government.  The Allthing today is the world’s oldest democratic forum.  Both the history and the geology are fascinating.  But the photo-opps never stop.

            We also stopped at a geothermal powerhouse about 27 miles from Reykjavik, which supplies hot water heat to all Reykjavik and hundreds of hydroponic greenhouses, and also produces 200 Mw of electricity.   This is 10% of Iceland’s electricity.  Most of the rest comes from hydro-electric dams in the interior.  All inhabited parts of the island are now served by the grid, and power is cheap.  At the geothermal sites, 10,000 ft bore holes tap steam under pressure and superheated water. The steam and the water are separated and the steam drives turbines; the superheated water is allowed to boil and this steam drives more turbines.  Fresh water cools the condenser, which preheats this water, to be heated more by additional waste heat, and then pumped by gravity to Reykjavik.