Homeless “Campers” Starting Wildfires: Outside the Social Contract

Nederland, Colorado. A town in Boulder County that had embraced marijuana dispensaries for profit, found itself just outside a wildfire that burned 600 acres in July, 2016. Two homeless men were charged with fourth-degree arson for failing to put out their camp fire. The townsfolk reacted in anger, pointing to the increasing number of homeless people in the nearby national forest. Officials had been forced to deal with “more emergency calls, drug overdoses, illegal fires and trash piles deep in the woods.”[1] Some residents urged the U.S. Forest Service to crack down on the homeless by imposing tighter rules on camping, or banning it altogether in certain parts of the woods most popular with the homeless. An analysis drawing on the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth-century English philosopher can be employed to reveal a broader perspective on the problem.

In his masterpiece, Leviathan, Hobbes theorizes that people in the state of nature once made a social contract wherein they ceded their political freedom to a sovereign, who could forestall civil strife and war. Self-preservation is the dominate motive here. In agreeing to give up some freedom to a system of laws and police, agreeing to be bound by them, people believe themselves more likely to survive.

Social-contract theory more generally is not limited to the political dimension. In living in society, people agree to give up some of their economic self-sufficiency that comes from living off the land. Economic interdependence comes from specialization of labor, trade, and even the use of money. In an economy, people are interrelating parts rather than being wholly self-sufficient. As recessions and the loss of particular industries demonstrate, being a part in an economy is not necessarily best for a person’s self-preservation.

Therefore, it is hardly surprising that people for whom the socio-economy—a system of interdependence—does not make self-preservation more assured would head to a forest to live off the land. The homeless in the national forest near Nederland can hardly be blamed for doing what is necessary to survive. Hobbes maintained that people have the right (of self-preservation) to fight off execution even though the punishment is issued by a sovereign who rightly holds all political (and theological) power.

To be sure, a state of nature in a forest located next to a modern society may be inherently problematic. That one homeless man camping long-term in the national forest outside of Nederland asked a forest official when the trash would be picked up points to the problems entailed—problems that would not exist were we all in the state of nature. If modern society can no longer tolerate people living in the state of nature, then places must be found for the extricated humans within the socio-political economy consistent with their self-preservation.

In the E.U., the operative principle is solidarity. Social policy is the typical means by which governments implement the principle wherein self-preservation is taken to be a human right that a society is obligated to protect. In the U.S., the principle is scant—eclipsed perhaps by that of economic liberty within interdependence. Hence, the safety net within American society has gaps. It is only natural for people falling through them—for whatever reason—to seek self-preservation outside of society. It is also natural for people accustomed to the safety in society to fear the human landscape outside of society, where liberties given up in society are taken back up. These liberties are feared by the people in society as they have given them up in exchange for safety. Therefore, we can see, using Hobbes’ theory, that it is in the interest of the residents of Nederland to petition the government of Colorado to accommodate the forest people back in society rather than continue to fight their nearby presence by pushing them further away from society.

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1. Jack Healy, “As Homeless Find Refuge in Forests, ‘Anger is Palpable’ in Nearby Towns,” The New York Times, August 21, 2016.

Coal Industry Challenges Lower Carbon-Emission Targets: Human Nature on Full Display

With heat-waves underway and glaciers melting, climate-change was undeniable in the summer of 2015. Human nature itself was on full display. It was almost as if the human race could not summon itself into action even as the hardships of a warming world were a foregone conclusion.

"We're the first generation to feel the effects of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it," said Obama on August 3rd when he announced a new set of regulations for U.S. power plants that call for a 32 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, from 2005 levels, by 2030. The EPA also issued final rules for new power plants that call for phasing out new coal-fired units unless there is technology in place that can capture and store carbon emissions. Obama said the rules would reduce carbon dioxide pollution by 870 million tons, the equivalent of what is produced by 108 million homes or 166 million cars.[1] He acknowledged a battle lurked ahead, as industry groups were already gearing up to fight the rules in court.

                            Penguins face receding ice and rising waters. (Natacha Pisarenko of AP)

On the same day, the World Glacier Monitoring Service released a study providing new evidence that the world’s glaciers had melted to the lowest levels since the late nineteenth century, and the ice-melt in 2015 would likely be twice the rate in the 1990s and three times the rate the decade before that. "Globally, we lose about three times the ice volume stored in the entirety of the European Alps every year," Michael Zemp, director of the WGMS and lead author of the study said.[2]  On July 20^th, “James Hansen, the former NASA climateologist who brought climate change to the public’s attention in the summer of 1998, [had] issued a bombshell: He and a team of climate scientists had identified a newly important feedback mechanism off the coast of Antarctica that suggests mean sea levels could rise 10 times faster than previously predicted: 10 feet by 2065.”[3] Coastal Florida, including its vast commercial and residential real-estate, hang in the balance. Meanwhile, Californians, in the fourth year of the worst drought there in a millennium, witnessed a 50-acre brush fire swell seventyfold in just a few hours, with many other fires raging too.[4]

In spite of the clear indications that the Earth’s atmosphere was warming at an uncharacteristically high rate, the National Mining Association of coal-mining companies requested a stay in court on the EPA’s new rules while the courts have the opportunity to determine the lawfulness of the agency’s attempt to commandeer the nation’s electric grid."[5] Doubtless the focus on the EPA's power-grab did not include the fact that that July was the hottest globally since record-keeping began in 1880. The first seven months of the year were the hottest January-to-July span on record. In fact, from ice-cores scientists determined that the planet was its warmest in at least 4,000 years.[6]

Because coal-fueled power plants made up about 40 percent of the carbon emissions in the U.S. at the time, the companies were playing with fire in that their legal opposition to the rules could make an appreciable difference in how much climate change results from emissions. Put another way, a point of law could conceivably decide whether the lives of future generations of people are just uncomfortable or impossible.

"[T]he Rule . . .  aims at nothing less than the comprehensive 'transformation' of the American electric power grid," wrote Hal Quinn, the NMA's president and chief executive officer, in a letter to Environmental Protection Agency head Gina McCarthy. "Congress, however, did not give EPA the power to restructure how the nation produces and consumes electricity."[7] Even if reducing carbon emissions by a third from power plants constitutes a restructuring of the power grid, Obama’s point about his generation then in power being the first to perceive the impacts from global warming and the last to realistically keep the world’s ecosystem from getting away from us dwarfs the matter of a regulatory agency overreaching.

Of course, the matter may be as simple as that of a narrow private interest being indifferent to the general welfare. Implementing the rule, Quinn wrote, "will irreparably injure the coal mining industry, coal mining workers, and coal mining communities" and "has no purpose other than to reduce the use of coal for electric generation as a means of reducing power sector [carbon dioxide] emissions."[8] The harm to the coal-mining industry in terms of lost revenue was Quinn’s real concern. That the human race could stand in the balance in just a few generations makes the sordid nature of the industry’s self-interest transparent. In fact, the increased demand for electricity for air-conditioning could mean that the mining industry had a financial stake in global warming even though in just a few generations demand for electricity decreases due to more climate-related deaths. 

James Jansen and his colleagues warned that if carbon emissions were not cut soon, the social disruption and dire economic consequences of the sea-level rise along could be devastating. “It is not difficult to imagine,” the scientists wrote, “that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization.”[9] That such a prospect was rendered realistic given the clear signs of global warming already extant makes the narrow focus of the coal executives even more astonishing. To be sure, business and societal norms and perspectives can be expected to differ, and even clash, for business is but one component of society. For a part to seek to maximize its own gain at the expense of the continued viability of the whole in the foreseeable future renders the strategy highly unethical, not to mention problematic from the standpoint of society. The latter arguably has an ethical right—obligation even—to constrain the maximizing tendency of the hypertrophic part.

Beyond business and society, human nature itself, particularly in its preoccupation with instant gratification even at the risk of self-preservation in the long term, can explain why such a genetically-successful species could also be that species that alters its ecosystems to the extent that the species itself goes extinct. The force of reason pales in comparison with selfishness. On August 3, 2015, the generation that could grasp the actuality of climate change was both doing something about it and putting up obstacles. Human nature was on full display. The question is whether such nature is compatible with its own survival.

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[1] Kate Sheppard, “Obama On Climate Rules: ‘This Is Our Moment To Get This Right’,” The Huffington Post, August 3, 2015.

[2] Nick Visser, “World’s Glaciers Melting At Fastest Rate Since Record-Keeping Began,” The Worden Report, August 3, 2015.

[3] Eric Holthaus, “The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here,” Rolling Stones, August 5, 2015.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Kate Sheppard, “Coal Interests Prepare To Challenge Obama’s Power Plant Rules,” The Worde Report, August 3, 2015.
[6] Nick Visser, "It's Official, July Was Earth's Hottest Month on Record," The Huffington Post, August 20, 2015.

[7] Sheppard, "Coal Interests."

[8] Ibid.

[9] Holthaus, “The Point of No Return.”

Wall Street CEOs Suffering with Lower Pay: Self-Preservation or Greed?

As much as the titans on Wall Street pull in during a year, they still want more. It must be human nature. If so, nature may be at odds with narrowing economic inequality. Even as 2014's compensation figures show such a narrowing, I suspect that such a case is an exception rather than being indicative of a fundamental shift.

The CEOs of the five largest U.S. banks made on average 124 times the average worker at the banks in 2014. The corresponding figure for 2006 is 273 times. The CEOs were not hurting in 2014, however; collectively, they got $92.5 million ($18.5 million per CEO on average). The collective figure for 2006 is $173.6 million.[1] Meanwhile, the banks’ employees saw their compensation rise by 17% to $148,740 from $127,379. According to The Wall Street Journal, the increased reserve requirements under the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform law of 2010 made it costlier for the banks to increase profits by taking on more debt (i.e., leverage), and the CEO pay suffered accordingly.

Suffering may not be the best term to describe a CEO’s average pay of roughly $18 million per year. How much of that figure can even a person awash in luxury spend in a year? Doubtless, a significant amount is invested. Were I among that elite cadre, I would lean toward investing as much as I could so that one day I could live comfortably and with security of mind off the investment income. A job cannot be relied on in perpetuity. Even investing in just one company (e.g. Enron) or even one industry entails some risk. Moreover, I would diversify my portfolio internationally with security of mind foremost in mind.

I mention “security of mind” because the economizing instinct does not turn off after a certain level of income or wealth has been achieved because the future is almost by definition uncertain. Put another way, you never know for sure whether what you have stored away in a savings account will be enough even for survival needs. So the bank CEOs were probably scrambling in 2014 to come up with non-leveraged ways of increasing earnings per share as if $18 million were not enough. This is an instinctual rather than a rational dynamic although reason does confirm that nothing in the future is absolutely certain.

Profit-seeking activity and accumulated wealth do not necessarily indicate the presence of greed, or love of economic gain.[2] So it is possible to go on with the economizing instinct without necessarily being greedy. Where the instinct is exaggerated or multiplied into an obsession, however, love of gain is very likely in the mix. For the 5 CEOs, reaching the point of being able to live off very well diversified investment income is quite possible. At that point, whether or not the CEO continues on with the instinct may give us a sense of whether greed has taken over.

From my own experience, I have struggled with whether to stockpile too much food in case I ever need it. For instance, I spent Easter 2015 volunteering at a Christian church’s meal for the impoverished and food pantry. I was selected for heavy labor on the tables since I was the youngest among the volunteers (which really says something). Before the meal, I could go through the pantry myself to get some food supplies. Even though the volunteer taking me through the pantry would not have curtailed my appetite to stockpile, I kept well within the allotment that anyone would get.[3] The following day, however, I could have returned to the church and helped myself to still more, but I asked myself, How much is enough, really? Sure, I could have used the additional food, but I could not shake that question, so I did not avail myself of the church’s generously-stocked outdoor cabinet that was always open; I would not abuse the church’s openness, which I had seen so little of when I had volunteered at food pantries in my rather sordid hometown. My point here is that I felt the instinct to stockpile and I could see its relation to food-security, yet I could not cleft the presence of the economizing urge from what greed might have been in me at the time. At any rate, a normative constraint can indeed be efficacious against the instinct and/or greed, though I don’t think a society can rely on such a check.

That even a Wall Street CEO cannot be absolutely certain that he or she would not want for necessities ever again leaves open the possibility that the economizing instinct—being inherently without a limit (i.e., a maximizing variable)—could still be operating rather than or more so than love of gain. Distinguishing the motive of self-preservation, which Thomas Hobbes emphasizes in Leviathan, from loving economic gain (not to mention taking it as an end in itself) is difficult. Whether a person seems to be obsessing on getting as much money out of other people as possible, especially if coupled with a willful disregard for related harm, however, can be taken as a good indicator of greed.

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[1] Peter Rudegear, “Wall Street’s Pay Gap Slims,” The Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2015.

[2] Clement of Alexandria, a theologian in early Christianity, stressed that a person can be rich and yet cap his or her desire for more at the level of necessities. Augustine would disagree, and thus place limits on wealth before it can be taken as being indicative of underlying greed. See Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth,” ch.s 3 and 4.

[3] The ham supper was excellent, by the way. Just before the meal, people wanting food from the pantry were given tote bags with numbers attached, As they were called during the meal, the individuals would go to the pantry room and quickly return to their meal. I had the pleasure of sitting with a mix of low-income people and church members. I was impressed that everyone got into a discussion of the U.S. Civil War. We even had a confederate!  Our table was a microcosm of society re-integrated. In contrast, the Wall Street CEOs doubtless live in their own world, and sadly so do most poor people.

Federalism Facilitating Self-Preservation

The rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of property (Locke) or happiness (Jefferson) can all fit within a federal system that enables its two systems of government—that of the federation itself and the republics  or (member) states—to check and balance each other. The alternative, at least for a federal empire, may be a return to the state of nature.

The complete essay is at Essays on Two Federal Empires, available at Amazon.