That's me, 43. Today. I left work early yesterday to celebrate my birthday eve . . . and insisted everyone else celebrate as well. My daughter Meg (Octavia, who received a four-day birthday celebration and three parties) objected that there is no such thing as "birthday eve," but the rest of the family complied. After leaving work early, I napped, exercised, ate a good meal, played games with the kids, drank three Leinenkugels while talking with my wife and listening to the Lifetime of Romance (yeah, I'm a fag, but that CD collection has a lot of nice stuff on it that you never hear any more (Kenny Rogers, "She Believes In Me"; Warwick, "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?")), watched "The Office," then crashed. I have a small headache this morning (headache after three beers, but who said life is fair?). This morning, I plan to surprise the kids with donuts, go to Mass at my kids' parochial school, work out of my home office, nap, read, and drink beer: a full day.
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Beer, Hayek, Wikipedia, Economics, Politics. A hazy (in more ways than one) vision is beginning to emerge. Beer with me as I try to sort this out through my mild hangover.
Wikipedia is a bottom-up movement of knowledge: taking millions of different knowledge carriers (a/k/a "people") and creating a knowledge machine (one estimate says Wikipedia is currently the product of over 100 million man hours) for everyone's benefit. It's a Hayekian vision: "[P]ractically every individual," Hayek said, "has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made." Wikipedia is the antithesis of, say, national or even state-level educational initiatives, and Wikipedia works.
Beer: Prohibition wiped out small breweries. When it was repealed, only the big boys emerged, and America quickly became the home of watery bad beer. When I was just starting my drinking days, Foster Lager was a big deal. It was an import with some bite. You grabbed one of those oil cans, and you knew the night would be special. In 1979, however, the law was changed to allow home brewing. It took a few years, but home brewing had officially exploded by, say, 2004, along with professional micro-brewing. The result: an amazing variety. Some quality sucks (three years ago, I drank four ounces of a guy's prized home brew that was so bad that I went home ill, no joking), but a lot of it is amazing. With a little experimentation, you can develop a basket of high-quality beers that appeal to your taste buds. This wasn't possible until grassroots brewing started to take hold. Before the explosion of micro-breweries, you argued "Budweiser" or "Pabst" (I still like Pabst), and that was pretty much it.
Top-down brewing: Miller and Anheuser telling the rest of us what to drink, put in power by national legislation that killed off their little competitors. Sucks. Top-down knowledge: National educational initiatives. Sucks. Top-down politics: The USSR. Sucks. Top-down economics: The stimulus bill (and plenty of legislative spending initiatives during Bush's term; this ain't a party rant) that allows a handful of technocrats to determine how billions of the knowledge carriers' money will be spent, instead of allowing the knowledge carriers to spend the money how they want. Sucks.
That's the best I can do for now. I have to go get some donuts.
