This is recycled material from before I had a pretend audience, but I have an ongoing feud with a friend who thinks an economically-determined world is a right and just world. Here's an example of argument by induction as to why it isn't (and in support of the theory that all my thoughts are cued in transit):
It was New Year's Eve, and I was standing at a urinal in a Service Area on I-90 East — a routine bathroom break on the way home to Boston. Kicking around in my consciousness — amid visions of decomposing sugar plums — was a news report I had read, describing how the nation was woefully unprepared to detect the presence of rogue nuclear devices in urban areas. I stepped away from the urinal, and it flushed automatically.
At that very instant it occurred to me to question the distribution of intellectual resources in the American economy. Millions of us who live and work in cities do so labor under a significant and growing threat of immediate vaporization — or worse, long, slow death by radiation poisoning — and a not insignificant portion of the engineers whose combined acumen could save us are instead devoting their time, energies, and genius to ensuring that we don't have to touch any of the facilities in a public restroom.
I looked briefly on the Internet into the phenomenon of automatic flush valves ("AFVs"). AFVs are available in "exposed," "concealed," and "retro-fit" varieties. The valves average $280 a pop and offer only ho-hum features. Contrariwise, a company called
Sensor touts a "revolutionary" "motor-driven" EZ-Flush Kit — you can change the batteries without turning off the water! Posted on a message board at Dr. Spock's website under the subject line
"automatic-flush toilets scare my kids. but found a solution" is an enthusiastic endorsement of the "Flush Stopper" (available — where else? — at
www.flush-stopper.com), a device parents can carry into public restrooms with their small children. Once affixed to the wall behind the toilet, the Flush Stopper covers the sensor while the child does his business; no more will the shadow of a premature flushing darken your child's road-potty training. Indeed, the site's web header reads "Stop Public Restroom Fear BEFORE It Begins."
Would it be too much to ask the government to conscript the innovative minds and skilled craftsmen who conceived, developed, and marketed EZ-Flush and Flush-Stopper to serve their nation on a Save Manhattan Project? There has to be some carryover technology we can use to defeat the terror threat.
Of course, I'm oversimplifying things — any economist or well-indoctrinated investment banker could explain to me (in probably fewer than 100,000 words) how the existing allocation of engineering resources reflects with mechanical precision the relationship between supply and demand. But all of that is lost on me. The renowned "invisible hand" that distributes scarce resources according to demand is flushing toilets for day travelers in Oneida, New York. And I want to know why.
